The dream-maker man

CHAPTER II

Anna brought sherry in a beautiful old decanter, through whose faceted roses and vine leaves, the clear brown wine glinted richly ... biscuits, she produced upon an almost translucent platter adorned with the Napoleonic N ... two slim glasses, obvious offspring of the decanter, and two lace-bordered, delicate napkins, yellowed with time....

“Why—” insisted the Marchesa, between avid, bird-like sips and fierce small crunchings ... “should any woman wish to be seventy? Why—for that matter, should any woman wish to be seven? Terrible ages ... both of them! Twenty-five, now ... you’ve got the world in your fingers!”

“If what I’ve got in my fingers is the world ...” said Miss Wayne, sullen and disdainful ... “I’d give it away for a penny with a hole in it.”

She drank her sherry and set the glass back on the table. “Thank you,” she said—“no more.” She also refused a second biscuit.

The Marchesa continued her bacchanalian feastings alone.

“You’ve got magnificent health,” she suggested calmly. “I can see that for myself. You’re not bad-looking ... though by using a little female cunning you could be better. You make a decent living—don’t you?”

“What would you call a decent living?” inquired Miss Wayne coldly. “Why—ah—” The Marchesa looked vaguely about her ... at the darkly gleaming piano in the farther corner, with a faded Spanish shawl thrown across it ... at the tea-table, loaded with heavy repoussé silver and fragile Dresden cups ... at the French prints, ornately framed, adorning the walls ... at the heart-shaped and circular cushions of Normandy lace crowding the brocaded chaise longue....

“Why—ah—that depends,” said the Marchesa.

Miss Wayne laughed—a chilly and scornful sound.

“The room I live in,” she explained with elaborate courtesy, “is about one-half as large as this. It has a bed, a table, a bureau, a clothes-closet and two chairs. It looks across a grimy brownstone street.... I’m lucky it doesn’t look into an air-shaft. It’s clean and entirely respectable. And if there were a gas-jet in it instead of an electric bulb—I’d go home to-night and shut all the doors and windows and turn it on.... Does that amuse you, too?”

“Perhaps amuse is scarcely the word—it interests me immensely,” said the Marchesa, helping herself to yet another biscuit and brushing a crumb from her bosom with great care. “Why ... if you don’t mind telling me more, dear Miss Wayne—why would you turn on the gas? Isn’t that—usually—fatal?”

“I should do it—in that hope,” said Miss Wayne.

“Dear—dear!” said the Marchesa, looking thoughtfully over the rim of her glass. “I suppose—you owe somebody—money?”

“I don’t owe a cent—to a soul.”

“Well—” said the Marchesa, wiping her lips and leaning back with a sigh of repletion—“So far as I can see—there’s nothing wrong, then.”

“That isn’t the point,” said Miss Wayne doggedly.... “The point is ... there’s nothing right!”

She flung out the words like a flag of defiance. She leaned forward in her chair and locked her hands together between her knees. In spite of her blue serge frock and her small black hat, her smooth brown hair and her neat brown oxfords she was all at once a flaming figure of rebellion—clear as a scarlet maple-branch against a pale autumnal sky.

“I’m twenty-five,” she said—“and there isn’t a thing in my life that I really want. I’ve worked like a galley-slave since the time I left school ... and I’m no nearer—happiness now—than I was then. That’s too much for any one to bear—quietly. My life’s stupid—and ugly—and dull. It’ll never be anything else. It’ll only get stupider and uglier and duller—as I get older. Twenty-five is a sort of half-way place. That’s why I see it all to-day—spread out—and it’s too much. It isn’t like a birthday—it’s like a door—closing. I hate ugliness.... It isn’t what I want ... and I’m being shut in with it—gradually.... No matter how much I struggle and quarrel and dream—I’m being shut in—with the things I don’t want. Away—from the things I’d give my soul for....”

“Ha!—” said the Marchesa with unexpected sharpness—“And what are those?—if I may ask.... Diamond bracelets and chinchilla coats? Little brown dogs and expensive French cars for them to ride in?”

“Beauty!” said the girl savagely. “I want beauty in my life—and for myself. I want the right background—to be—what I could be—against it. So that when some one comes—for whom I—could care ... who could give me my world ... he’ll be able to recognize me!”

“I said it was a man!” cried the Marchesa, and chuckled deeply.

“A man I’ve never seen, then,” said Miss Wayne. “A man I have no earthly hope of seeing ... while I live as I live, and where I live....”

“Of course,” the Marchesa told her calmly, settling the black velvet band about her throat with a preening turn of the head and a fastidious thrust of the fingers. “... Of course, the man one’s never seen is the perfect lover—you know that, my dear!”

Miss Wayne said clearly with no false modesty over the words: “I know nothing at all about lovers. I never had one.”

“With your eyes?” objected the Marchesa politely. She added with critical frankness: “Your eyes are unusually good. So is your hair. There’s too much control about your mouth, however. It wants a touch of—well, say, emotional uncertainty.”

“I’ve had a good deal more need for control than—whatever it is you mean,” said Miss Wayne and smiled faintly.

“Now there!” said the Marchesa with a touch of pleasurable excitement ... “—why don’t you do that oftener? You have a really delicious smile.”

“I know it,” said Miss Wayne.

“What?—You shameless creature!”

The slim, blue-serge shoulders lifted in a shrug.

“I know more about myself than you could ever tell me. I know what possibilities I’ve got—and what I could do with them. I could be—rather nice—in soft clinging frocks—with a good deal of fur and lace. I ought never to wear a small hat, because I could be exceedingly effective in a wide one. I have good hands—if I could keep them properly ... the typewriter ruins my nails. I have good ankles ... and very pretty feet ... thin stockings and narrow shoes with buckles would make them quite lovely. I am slender—but I’m not thin.” She finished with a strange and disarming candor—“I could be almost beautiful.”

“Eh, mon Dieu—I believe you could!” said the Marchesa. “Not that I ever heard a woman discuss herself so coldly before.”

“What difference does it make?” inquired Miss Wayne with immense weariness. “The sort of thing I always have worn and always shall wear is the sort of thing I am wearing right now. It hides the person I really am as completely as fog hides the sea. But I’ll never get out of it—I’ll die in it sooner or later.... There are ships that go down in the fog, you know. And I shan’t leave a trace ... because ... no man has ever known me.”

The Marchesa stared at her curiously. She said with a dry, small cackle ... “Your parents and guardians, I take it, don’t count.”

“Both my parents died,” said Miss Wayne without apparent regret—“when I was a child. I’ve been on my own for years. There’s no one—to whom I really matter. No one who knows anything about me, beyond the fact that I am a fairly good office woman and pay my bills regularly.”

“Do you go to church?” asked the Marchesa.

“Why should I?” said Miss Wayne. “It’s no good praying for the things I want. And I’m not sufficiently thankful for the things I’ve got.”

“You—ah—might meet people.”

“I’m not quite lonely enough to go with that in view.”

“Well, dear me—” said the Marchesa rather crossly, “I don’t see what you can do about it. It must be a dreadful sort of life.... I understand you absolutely. You feel that within your nice tidy respectable working-girl shell—there’s a—siren, asleep, as it were....”

“Something like that—if you will have it!” said Miss Wayne doggedly.

“H’m’m ... and you think if you could let her out ... as one may say ... she’d find the foot of the rainbow for you ... or at least the pot of gold.”

“Yes,” said Miss Wayne—“I do.” She added, rising abruptly—“But she’ll never be let out—she’ll probably die—in her sleep. And nobody’ll know—or care. It’s very good of you to have—”

“Nonsense!” said the Marchesa, interrupting with the most engaging rudeness whatever thanks her guest was about to offer.... “As I said before—this amuses me. And I’m not so well amused as I once was.” The film on the eagle eyes grew thicker while they blinked and scowled at shadows gathering in the farther corner of the room.

“It isn’t very comfortable,” mused the Marchesa, “keeping a siren in any sort of shell ... even the shell of—supposed senility.”

Miss Wayne made a courteous sound of dissent.

“Don’t contradict me!” snapped the Marchesa. “This is a moment of rare frankness on my part. Do you suppose I don’t know I’m no longer beautiful? Do you suppose I don’t know that my voice is cracked and my face looks like the corner of an old silk shawl? Bah! I used to have a skin like a tea-rose. I used to have a voice like a wood-dove. I used to have a figure like ... well, not in the least like these languishing lead-pencils one sees at the Opera or slinking up and down Fifth Avenue nowadays! It makes me laugh!” She gave a mournful little sniff in proof thereof. “My dear, I’ve had men at my feet since”—she stopped discreetly and finished with the wisp of lawn covering a slight cough—“since about a year after my husband’s death. I understand you—absolutely. You want a beautiful setting against which to draw the eye of critical observers.”

“You’ve been very sympathetic,” said Miss Wayne. She drew on her prim brown gloves once more.

“I know how necessary background is,” said the Marchesa pensively.

“Even Cleopatra—in a room with brown wall-paper—dear me, what a ghastly thought! Must you go?—Next Saturday, then, at the same hour—good evening, Miss Wayne.”

“Good evening,” said Miss Wayne quietly and went out, closing the door behind her with taper fingers.

The Marchesa sat in the dusk for some time without stirring. Once she nodded her careful gray curls. Once she laughed to herself, like a ruminant witch in a chimney corner. Eventually she rang sharply for Anna and issued a reproof.

“I want a fire,” said the Marchesa—“and all the lamps lit. The days are getting horribly short. Anybody but a fool would have noticed it!”

CHAPTER III

Melissa Wayne went home in the subway. The Marchesa had her being in the Eighties ... just off Riverside ... and the room which had, unfortunately, as its owner described it, no gas-jet, occupied a small and none too airy part of the fifth floor front of a grimy brownstone house on Sixty-third ... near Columbus.

It was, take it by and large, or any way you like, exactly like an enormous number of other houses, whose dingy curtains hang limp forever behind bleared, deep windows; whose steps lead up to dark distasteful doorways; and whose halls reek unceasingly of the less inviting sorts of food. Melissa lived there because her room was cheap and most of her life was spent, after all, in an office; but she ate, when she could, in tea-rooms, so as to obtain a certain amount of variety, and upon such occasions as she couldn’t eat in tea-rooms, she used the thrifty hospitality of her boarding-place with her eyes upon her plate and a forbidding expression about her mouth.

“High-hat stuff,” her fellow-diners considered it and let her be, accordingly with of course an occasional exception.

There was, for example, a pleasant enough young salesman, expert in gentlemen’s toggery, who would gladly in the beginning have favored Melissa with graceful attentions. His place was next hers at the table—when she sat there. But she disposed of him summarily.

“Ah,” said he, upon their initial encounter, his name was Curtis ... not that it matters ... Arthur Curtis, originally of some sweet Auburn in southern Iowa.... “Ah—I see we are to be neighbors—too bad we haven’t been introduced!”

“Is it necessary?” asked Melissa with frosty significance.

The unhappy young man, accustomed to eventual if not earlier capitulation on the part of the selected fair, rather rushed upon his fate.

“I don’t need it if you don’t,” he assured her blithely.

“I fancy no one is going to need it,” returned Melissa, unsmiling, and continued her dinner in silence.

When Mr. Curtis some moments later arrived at her meaning, he was silent as well and flushed darkly above his rice pudding with currants. He thought of withering Melissa with a few trenchant words. He couldn’t however think of the words. So their acquaintance began and ended just there. Melissa’s fault entirely. He was a harmless and not unpleasing person, if one hadn’t a prejudice against perfumed brilliantine and stubby fingers. Melissa, of course had. Which settled the whole thing out of court.

He would have taken her to the movies—and to dance ... perhaps even to an occasional show. He wasn’t in the smartest shop in town but he had ideas—and prospects.

However, after Melissa’s unpardonable rudeness, he passed her on the stairs with a justifiably clipped G’morning—and G’d evening—and that was that!

Other dwellers in the brownstone place passed her frequently with no salutation at all. Perhaps, one reason Melissa stayed there. If she couldn’t have the things she wanted ... as she had said to the Marchesa—she wasn’t in any case going to want the things she could get. That meant deterioration. And Melissa preferred loneliness, isolation, even absolute ostracism, to that.

Upon the evening of her twenty-fifth birthday, therefore, she stopped at a tea-room, a block or so away from her fifth floor front, and did herself sensibly, if not too luxuriously, with soup, a veal cutlet, potatoes and tapioca.

She didn’t enjoy it. What she really wanted was a shrimp cocktail, guinea-hen en casserole, an artichoke, perhaps—perhaps not—in any case some very delicate ice, and black coffee in a tiny, fragile cup ... “with one lump, if you please!” ... to a bowing waiter.

The girl who served Melissa’s soup and tapioca had a spot on her apron and talked through her nose—also too much.

She said—“It’s a grand night if you don’t care what you say ...” and, slopping a glass of water as she set it down, she observed airily—“Butter-fingers!”

She was the friendliest creature imaginable but what is so superfluous as an undesired friend?

Melissa made no answer beyond paying her check and leaving a ten-cent tip, whereupon the butter-fingered one uttered a maidenly oath and went on to the next prospect.

It wasn’t the sort of tip Melissa would have preferred to give, but it was the sort she had learned to. Tips mount up—when one hasn’t Golconda in one’s pocket. A quarter takes on, at times, noticeably nearing the end of each month, the roundness and general aspect of the moon. A dime is smaller—not to say thinner.

Quarters, dimes and nickels! Melissa would have liked never to have to count her change again ... to say merely, of anything less than a dollar—“You may keep it!” to the world of service at large.

However—it wasn’t what she would have liked that set her fashions.

She passed her landlady in the hallway, having come at last to the roof she called home and the landlady, a gray-haired, rather tired-faced person forever hurrying after something and not finding it, stopped for a gentle reminder.

“I left your bill in your box, Miss Wayne.”

Melissa took out her purse and paid.

“I have it just here, Mrs. Robinson.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Robinson—“if everybody was as prompt as you!”

But it left Melissa’s purse distinctly flat—not that it had been rotund, before.

In her own room, with the door shut, she stood before the bureau, taking off her hat and calculated unwillingly.... “That’s the rent paid up for next week. If I go to the Symphony, Thursday night ... and to see Simone ... I can’t have new gloves—and I should. Wednesday night is cheaper ... but Thursday they’re playing Ravel—and Tschaikowsky—Thursday it is! White hyacinths, again!”

She put her hat away in the closet which was narrow and dark and for all her best efforts smelt of mice. She took off her shoes and put them on trees; put on a pair of soft slippers and getting out of her frock put that away in the closet too; carefully, upon a hanger, between a warm but uninteresting gray coat and a serviceable but quite uninspired black taffeta.

Then she sat down in the rocking-chair at the foot of the bed and put her hands over her face and cried. Very softly—and very unwisely—since crying gets one nowhere. Cried because the room she sat in and the life she was living were neither the room nor the life of her dreams. Yet the dreams persisted—cruelly.

“Oh, Lord!” she said to herself at last, with a long shaky sigh—“what’s the use!”

She washed out a pair of black silk stockings and hung them across a chair-back. She loathed washing out stockings, but she did it every night. Otherwise they couldn’t have been silk. She looked after her nails and her hair and her face. She was in her nightgown at last, a sensible affair of Philippine embroidery on white muslin, with a corduroy dressing-gown over it.

She looked, even in that unimaginative attire, rather well. Her dark soft hair hung in waves about her shoulders—real waves—she couldn’t have afforded so perfect a marcel ... and her eyes, in the mirror, were wistful and shadowy.

“You poor little fool!” she said to her frowning image—by way of good night—“Spilling your soul to the Marchesa—just because she asked you. Won’t you ever learn—to keep yourself—inside yourself? Won’t you ever learn—that nobody cares? She’s probably chuckling over you, now—the poor working-girl—with a siren-complex!... Oh, Lissa—if only you didn’t know what you wanted! Or could be happy without it....”

She opened the window and stood there, looking out across the street. It was as she had said—nothing but dingy brown houses, as like the one she lived in as one ant-hill is like another.

The sky above the houses hung misty and far—no stars showing. A mere sliver of sky with a cold wind in abeyance.

“Somewhere,” thought Melissa, clenching her fingers in the curtain, lifting her rebellious eyes to that inverted abyss—“there’s a window I could stand in and look—clean across heaven. I’ll never see it, of course! I’ll never love anything but Beauty—my whole life long ... and that I’ll never have.... Oh, God,—wherever you are—what pleasure do you get out of such a world?”

She added, because with even a sliver of sky He might after all overhear.... “It’s all right—I suppose You know what it’s about—I don’t!”

Then she went to bed and after a long, dragging hour, to sleep ... the drab-walled room cradled her as a tree cradles a dryad.

CHAPTER IV

Waking, Melissa always wondered just what repaid one for the repetitional effort involved in beginning a new day. Days, after all, were so hopelessly alike ... one opened one’s eyes on the same unlovely prospect on which one had aloofly closed them, the night before ... dull walls, dull ceiling, sunless, grayish window ... one’s clothes in a neat, limp heap on a straight-backed chair ... one’s shoes straightly placed on the floor. One yawned—and stretched—and felt one’s courage fainting within one.

After which, one got out of bed and did all the usual things in the usual way. Because that was life.

Melissa used to say over to herself, sometimes, between putting on the stockings she had washed out the night before, and brushing her blue serge frock and inspecting her gloves for wear and tear, a quaint dispassionate bit of verse she had found in a volume of Housman’s. It made her feel no happier but she inferred from it that somewhere her misery had company—that certain others no less than she failed of achieving a morning face.... She cared deeply for Mr. Housman, she went about her room with almost a tenderness in her heart for him while she murmured sardonically:

Melissa didn’t know why. But she made haste just the same. Out of bed morning after morning at seven. Into her clothes, groomed to a hair, by eight.... Why? To what end? Like a squirrel on a wheel—or a donkey on a treadmill! Mr. Housman said it neatly:

Coffee and a roll at eight-fifteen, in the alien precincts of the dining-room downstairs—that long, narrow, cheerless dining-room where if a stain appeared on the cloth on Monday, it abode ruthlessly till Wednesday ... where the ghosts of legs of lamb wrestled waveringly but undyingly with the ghosts of Hamburger steak and pork chops, from one week-end to another.... Melissa loathed that dining-room. And ate her breakfast in it every morning.

On the Monday after her astounding outburst before the Marchesa, she was out of the place and down the brownstone steps by twenty-five minutes of nine—which gave her an easy margin. At nine precisely she removed the cover from her machine, laid a newly sharpened pencil on the table within reach, ran her fingers through her hair with a small, swift desperate gesture and dove into the day’s work ... a mute, inglorious rebel, with a speed of many words a minute.

Not that she disliked her work particularly ... only she felt in more definitely bitter moments, as if she fed herself daily into a hopper ... cut herself daily into neat small pieces for the purposes of feeding ... and saw nothing come out, ever—except a weekly pay-envelope, none too full, at that.

There were letters to be taken that morning, a dull, uninteresting sheaf of them, beginning largely, “Re yours of the seventeenth instant—” and ending for the most part ... “We would appreciate the courtesy of an early reply”—or something as dramatic.

Melissa was good at letters. The junior member of the firm for which she worked—(it was a prosperous book-shop, with a publishing business of its own, on the side) always insisted upon having her and if she stayed away a day or so in case of colds or other ailments, was flatteringly inclined to be aggrieved about it. However, his grievance was of the most impersonal and unalluring sort—concerned chiefly with the fact that Melissa could both spell and punctuate, unassisted ... and as he himself was blond, stout and perceptibly bald, with a wife and three children somewhere in Yonkers, Melissa took small comfort from his attachment.

He was to her, to be quite frank about it, a commercial primrose upon the brim of the river of finance—nothing more. Not even conspicuously yellow.

She took his letters, therefore, with one ear, as it were. Efficiently enough at that. But scarcely conscious of his plump, ruddy, English-tailored person. As he, she felt, was scarcely conscious of her.

“That will do, thank you, Miss Wayne,” he said, when the clock showed noon.

Melissa rose, notebook and pencil in hand.

“Can you have those ready for me by three o’clock?”

“Yes, Mr. Bennett.”

“Good! Are you going out to lunch, now?”

“If you don’t mind—it’s my regular time.”

“H’m’m!” said Mr. Bennett—“very well.”

He wasn’t going to ask her to lunch with him—not being a tired business man out of one of his own books. He merely asked for the sake of knowing her approximate working-time between then and three o’clock. As Melissa very well knew.

Putting on her hat in the outer office, dusting a bit of powder over her straight well-bred nose, she wondered vaguely why men in stories always endeavored to turn their unsuspecting typists from the path of virtue—why men in offices so seldom did.

Not that she wanted to be turned—or would remotely have considered such a man—but the question presented itself.

Beside her at the next desk, a brown-haired young woman with more opulence of outline than the present-day fashion demands, inquired amiably: “Going out to lunch, Miss Wayne?”

“Yes,” said Melissa.

“Wait half a second and I’ll go with you.”

Melissa waited half a second, five minutes, to be exact, and the brown-haired one eventually went with her, to a little place around the corner.... “Luncheon, Tea and Dinner.... Southern Cooking.”

It wasn’t in the least Southern Cooking, as Melissa, who had been born in Alabama and lived there till she was twelve, very well knew—but it sufficed.

Pea soup, fricasseed chicken, an apple dumpling, a cup of tea.

“I’m putting on pounds,” said Melissa’s companion mournfully—“yes—cream—no lemon for me!”

To Melissa she added with obvious respect—“Don’t have to diet—do you, Miss Wayne?”

Melissa said briefly that she didn’t.

Miss Martin sighed unaffectedly.

“I bet you can go into a store, put on a sixteen-year-old model and walk out in it—without an alteration.”

“When I can find a sixteen-year-old model worth putting on,” said Melissa.

The other stared—“Aren’t the flappers snappy enough for you?”

“Oh, quite!” said Melissa—disdaining to elucidate.

“Well—I’ve always worn a thirty-eight,” said Miss Martin frankly, “but it’s got to be a forty, pretty soon.” She added with a look in which coyness and modest pride were inextinguishably blent—“Lucky my best young man is from the country....”

“Why?” asked Melissa politely.

“Oh,” said Miss Martin, “country boys always like a girl to be—well,—you know! ... kind of fine-looking.”

“Of course,” said Melissa. She ate her luncheon doggedly.

“That darned office!” said Miss Martin. “I get so hungry working all morning, I eat too much every day of my life—and that’s a fact.”

It was a fact—obviously.

“You don’t care much for men, do you, Miss Wayne?” asked Miss Martin suddenly.

“Why?” fenced Melissa, curiously startled.

“Oh—you know—you can kind of feel when a girl does—or doesn’t. You have that sort of indifferent, up-stage look, when a man’s around.”

“Do you mean—I look like—an old maid?” asked Melissa directly.

“Oh, no—nothing like that, I’m sure!” Miss Martin denied with earnestness a trifle overdone.

Conversation during the rest of the luncheon sagged unhappily but irretrievably.

Melissa was painfully certain, although she insisted to herself it made no difference one way or the other, that Miss Martin had meant just that. Coming on top of a twenty-fifth birthday like the one of the day before, such comment was fairly disconcerting.

Indifferent ... upstage ... Melissa! With the heart in her breast one dully thudding ache for beauty and romance she wanted, and was apparently never to attain.

She went back to the office outwardly cold and quiet—inwardly fevered with an unbearable discontent. She finished Mr. Bennett’s letters and took them in to him. She worked till six over other letters, unexpectedly thrust upon her. She finished the day with her head tired and her hands shaking. And as a crowning ignominy, Miss Martin apologized.

“Of course—anybody can see you’re young enough,” said Miss Martin—(she was thirty, herself). “I expect you’re just what they call a woman’s woman.”

“It doesn’t matter in the least,” said Melissa. She could have slain the stylish stout girl by slow torture, the most approved methods—involving thumbscrews if necessary.

All the way back to her room, through the chilly gathering dusk she was thinking in a kind of tired fury—“I’m a fool to go on with it.... I’m a fool to let life choke me, this way....”

She shut her door at last, took off her hat and flung it on the bed, dropped in a chair and pressed the tips of her fingers hard upon her aching eyes.... There was a letter for her. It lay in her lap unopened till the tide of her wretchedness ebbed a little. It appeared eventually to be a crested letter, written in a fine thin spidery hand—across two pages of bluish note-paper.

“My dear Miss Wayne”—it said—“Won’t you come in and see me, Wednesday afternoon, about five o’clock. I have something I should like to discuss with you. If this is not convenient you might suggest a time which will be. Cordially ...” of all people in the world ... the Marchesa di Ricci.

“You see—” said Melissa to herself unhappily—“you shouldn’t have talked...! She wants to do something for you now—get you into a working-girls’ club—or something of the sort ... give you good advice. This is terrible! And it’s all my own fault.... I’m going to be patronized ... she wants to cheer me....”

Melissa hadn’t, of course, the least idea what form the cheering might take. She shrank from it—purely on instinct.

Nevertheless she wrote the Marchesa a note in reply, in which she said—“I shall be very glad to come Wednesday” ... and groaned as she mailed the thing.

Between Monday and Wednesday she visualized every kind of philanthropic ghastliness without, however, acquiring courage to say she wouldn’t go. Wednesday or another day ... why not Wednesday?

“I can always refuse—whatever it is,” thought Melissa grimly—and went forward in her most forbidding manner to meet it.

CHAPTER V

“The Marchesa,” said Anna, “is having a manicure ... please sit down, Miss Wayne—she’ll be out in a moment.”

Melissa sat down. It was just after five of the cryptic Wednesday and she had worked abominably hard in order to clear up her desk and leave the office thus early. She thought the Marchesa’s manicure might have been earlier concluded—or postponed.

The room was, as usual, slightly disordered. A scarf of delicate blonde lace lay across the silly little cushions of the chaise longue ... and there were fallen petals on a table beside a jar of yellow roses. It was, however, in spite of its just perceptible stuffiness and overcrowdedness, a very charming and unusual room. The room of a wayfarer whose feet had touched more shores than one, whose hands had been gracefully acquisitive. Even the plethora of photographs had its distinctive touch. There wasn’t a woman’s face on the walls. Melissa noticed this for the first time and vaguely wondered why. She was standing before the picture of a dark young man in quaintly demoded evening clothes with several orders on his coat and the words—“Toute a vous, Amalie” scrawled boldly across his trouser-leg, when she heard the sound of the Marchesa’s absurd little heels and felt that lady’s hand upon her arm.

“Ah,” said the Marchesa—“good afternoon, Miss Wayne! I see you are admiring one of the most fascinating men I ever knew ... poor dear Paolo!... aide to the King of Italy. Wonderful eyes—as you see. He was quite, quite mad about me—for years ... after my husband’s death, of course. Used to cry like a child—every time I refused him. Tried to elope with me once—against my will—but he’d no executive ability—poor darling! I kept him for tea—and talked him out of it. Have you had your tea—by the way?”

Melissa said thank you, she didn’t care for any.

“Just as well,” said the Marchesa pleasantly, “—Anna hasn’t been very nice to-day and I’d rather not give her anything else to do—at the moment. Do sit down, Miss Wayne ... take that chair over there. Should you mind handing me my scarf—a bit chilly, isn’t it! I suppose you came up in the subway?”

She settled herself in the winged chair, drew the lace scarf which Melissa gave her about her shoulders, looked at her polished nails, incongruously rosy at the ends of those small shriveled fingers, and drew a long, satisfied sigh.

“I always come in the subway,” said Melissa briefly.

“H’m’m!” said the Marchesa and flung her a curiously bright-eyed glance—“not because you prefer it, I fancy.”

“I dislike it very much,” said Melissa.

“Of course,” said her hostess. “Nasty smelly place—full of people with no manners. I was in it once myself. My nephew took me over to Brooklyn—just for the experience.”

Melissa said nothing at all. She was interested in neither the Marchesa’s experiences nor her nephew. And the subway as a unique experiment appealed to her but slightly.

Across her moody silence the old lady’s voice came briskly.

“You’ve no idea, of course, why I sent for you, to-day?”

“Not the least,” said Melissa.

“No faintest shred of an idea?”

“I thought,” said Melissa, fastening the button of her left-hand glove which had somehow come undone, “that you might wish to discontinue my reading.”

“I do,” said the Marchesa crisply.

“I—see,” said Melissa. Not too wildly remunerative, the Saturday readings—still something. She added as coolly as she might—“I fancied that was it.”

“You don’t ask the reason—” said the Marchesa.

“Why should I?” said Melissa. “Reasons so seldom matter.”

“Well—well!” said the Marchesa, looked down at her nails once more and indulged in a chuckle. “You are an extraordinary person. I like you, Miss Wayne—and I don’t like most women—I think I may say that I have never sincerely liked any woman. Except, of course, my mother. I might have liked my daughter—if I had had one. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is—you interest me—and I dare say, for all that unshakable poise of yours, I shall interest you, when I tell you that I have been thinking over our conversation—of last Saturday, you know—and I have conceived the most charming idea—oh, extremely charming!”

“Really?” said Melissa.

“Really!” mocked the Marchesa with a touch of falsetto. “At least have the goodness to look attentive.”

“I am,” said Melissa—and she was. Something in her had leaped to attention—and defense—more swiftly than the Marchesa dreamed. If this were the preface to a working-girl’s club, or a scholarship in a business college, Melissa was ready to decline it—rather definitely.

“I am going,” said the Marchesa, “to be a fairy god-mother to you.”

“Yes?” observed dispassionate Melissa.

“The girl’s made of wood,” said the Marchesa irritably. “Don’t forget, dear Miss Wayne, that I’ve seen you in reverse, so to speak. Aren’t you curious—in the least?”

“I’m sorry,” said Melissa—as well, she thought stubbornly, to have the thing out and get it over with—“but it doesn’t seem to me that there is anything to which our conversation of last Saturday could lead....”

“Oh, isn’t there!” cried the Marchesa.

“Not—that I can see,” said Melissa firmly.

“Oh, very well!” said the Marchesa. She leaned back in her chair and assumed an expression of delighted malice.... “You don’t then care—to hear what I’d thought of?”

To her own distinct surprise, Melissa retorted—“I didn’t say that.”

“Ah-ha!” said the Marchesa in triumph—“then you do care to hear it?”

“Cat-and-mouse,” thought Melissa bitterly. Aloud she said without a smile—“I shall be glad to listen, of course.”

“Royalty, itself!” commented her hostess—“Well, my princess in disguise—”

“Please!” said Melissa proudly.

The Marchesa waved her to silence and continued: “Fetch me four white rats and a pumpkin!”

Melissa looked as if she thought the Marchesa had gone suddenly out of her head. That small, coquettish gray-curled head on its once-lovely neck.

“The Cinderella motive, of course,” explained that lady delightedly. “Perhaps the most hackneyed in existence—but who cares? We shall give it a new and amusing twist—we shall play it with a kind of romantic absurdity....”

Melissa objected justifiably—“I don’t understand.”

“Of course not,” said the Marchesa—“I haven’t yet explained. Never mind—here it is—to go back to the beginning—I have decided, dear Miss Wayne—to make you a gift.”

“Thank you,” said Melissa—with her mind full of philanthropies and uplifts she added clearly—“I’m afraid I can’t accept it.”

“You don’t even know what it is!”

“Nevertheless,” said Melissa firmly....

“A gift,” said the Marchesa, interrupting her without compunction—“of a year....”

“I have already twenty-five,” said Melissa, with an unexpected glimmer ... sardonic but still a glimmer.

“Of a year, I said—in your own world—to use your own phrase.”

Then suddenly Melissa’s heart began to stumble. Her tongue as well.

“My own world—how can you—possibly?”

“I am a very clever woman,” said the Marchesa modestly. “I have thought it all out.”

“But—my own....”

“I am going,” explained the Marchesa, “to present you with a background.”

“I don’t see....”

“Don’t talk so much,” said the Marchesa—“and you will very likely see more. Listen to me—and don’t sit with your mouth open, child—it’s not your type. I hate women whose teeth show—like guinea-pigs or rabbits. Where was I?—oh, yes—I’m going to give you a year—in an apartment which you will select—with a dress allowance which will enable you to be at home in it—”

“Why?” asked Melissa—strangely breathless.

“Because,” said the Marchesa, licking her lips daintily and settling the black velvet neck-band with her most characteristic gesture—“it amuses me. All my life—I have asked merely to be amused. I am finding it, for some reason or other ...” (she looked at Melissa sharply as if daring her to suspect the reason)—“a trifle difficult ... of late. Life doesn’t seem so—subtle—as it used. It seems, somehow ... not quite so—intriguante....”

“Yes,” said Melissa—no more. She was afraid to show the warmth of understanding she felt for the small defiant figure in the winged chair. Understanding was not the thing the Marchesa had demanded ... of life. It was written on none of those romantic and ardent specimens of photography scattered over the tables and walls of that memory-ridden room.

“You amuse me,” continued the Marchesa with a wave of one heavily-ringed hand.

“I’m very glad,” said Melissa.

“You’re such an absurd rebel,” said the Marchesa—“back of that cool immobile face of yours. I am determined to see—if you’re really the creature you think you are ... inside.”

“You talk,” said Melissa, a trifle resentfully—“as if I were a doll you could take to pieces.”

The Marchesa laughed abruptly. She flicked the lace at her wrist into prettier folds and arched a still-shapely ankle, crossing her feet on the Aubusson carpet.

“A doll,” she corrected—“which I am going to put together! If my ... offer, shall I call it? ... doesn’t interest you,—if your pride can’t bear it ... you have only to say so ... and I won’t detain you any further.”

Melissa sat a long moment in silence, staring down at her tight-clenched hands, quiet in her lap. The room wavered mistily about her. The Marchesa’s wise small smile, a faintly malicious thinning of the lips and creasing of the eyelids, grew and diminished—grew again as Melissa lifted her head.

“I haven’t any pride—” she said huskily.... “I’m starving.”

“For what I propose to give you,” suggested the Marchesa blandly.

“Exactly,” said Melissa—“It’s wonderful. I don’t know—if you want me to thank you or not.”

“Wait till the year’s up,” the Marchesa suggested with a slightly sinister gurgle. “Thank me, then—if you still care to. Now, dear Miss Wayne ... to go into details.... How soon could you leave your present position? Are you—indispensable—to your employer?”

“Not that I know of,” said Melissa—“I could resign at once—leave at the end of the week.”

“When could you be ready to move—into your new apartment?”

“Any apartment—would be new to me,” Melissa controlled a nervous tremor of laughter—“Why—I could move—at any time.”

“Say the first of next week,” said the Marchesa with business-like clarity.

“Say the first of next week,” echoed Melissa, trembling in every limb.

The Marchesa rang for Anna and ordered lights and a fire, as was her custom with the coming of dusk.

To Melissa, it was exactly as if upon some strip of stage footlights suddenly flared. Unreal—the whole of it ... but having bruised herself against reality for twenty-five slow prisoned years, she was ready—more than ready, she was passionately eager—to grapple unreality and see what might come of it.

“I’ll have my agent begin at once to look for ... your air-castle,” observed the Marchesa, spreading both hands to the newly-flaming fire. “As for clothes—you have taste. I think—I think one might trust you—not to break out in imitation ermine and cheap lace.”

“Clothes!” said Melissa, with a flutter in her smooth white throat and a ripple in her low voice—“Yes—you might trust me—with clothes. I love them too much—to make mistakes.”

“H’m’m!... Loving too much is an unusual safeguard—against mistakes—I should say,” mused the Marchesa pleasantly.... “However ... I’ll open an account for you—at my own bank. You may begin to—dress the part—at once. From the skin out, my good girl!”

“Naturally,” said Melissa. A slow smile of ineffable anticipation tipped the corners of her mouth.

“Swallow the canary feathers!” the Marchesa advised her impishly. “Your air of disdain is half your charm. Of course I shall want to advise you—about—everything.... I shall want to know everything that happens to you ... as soon as it happens....”

Melissa murmured that she would be only too happy.

“And at the end of a year,” said the Marchesa, leaning back with a gesture of finality.... “I’m not adopting you, you understand—at the end of a year, back you go!—To the old room—and the old work—and the old life....”

“It doesn’t matter—” said Melissa desperately—“a year’s a year!”

“Back you go—” continued the Marchesa, as if Melissa had not spoken, “unless ...” she chuckled like Mephisto in black taffeta and pointe de Venise ... “unless, in the meantime....”

“Yes—” said Melissa, her reckless soul in her eyes.

“Unless you’ve caught your man,” affirmed the Marchesa—“delicately speaking. Of course, that’s what I’m really giving you—a chance to acquire the kind of thing you want—with benefit of clergy. Horrid idea, h’m’m? Want to withdraw your acceptance?”

“No,” said Melissa hardily. “I hadn’t quite thought it out—I’ve been so taken off my feet, you see ... still ... no—I don’t withdraw!”

“Good!” said the Marchesa with a slight yawn patted out of sight.

“I’m afraid I’ve stayed frightfully long,” said Melissa, rising hurriedly.

“You have, as a matter of fact,” returned her hostess—“but I rather led you on. Go home and dream about me—riding a broomstick in a pointed black bonnet.... I shan’t be insulted. To-morrow—I’ll call for you at noon and take you to my bank....”

“But my work—” began Melissa uncertainly. “I suppose I could tell them....”

“Tell them nothing at all,” said the Marchesa with immense indifference—“they’d never believe the truth—and a lie is such a bore.”

As Melissa said good-by, the telephone on a little table in the corner of the room trilled wildly.

“Anna!” cried the Marchesa and struck her bell into startling discord. “Anna ... I expect that’s my nephew! Have him come up at once!” To Melissa, she added, with a nervous wave of dismissal.... “He’s leaving for Japan, to-night ... good-by, my dear—don’t let me keep you any longer!”

CHAPTER VI — PART II

Melissa went home, from her session with the Marchesa, walking on air, as the saying goes. She might have been suspicious of that elderly marplot’s motives; she chose not, she chose with her eyes shut and her hands out to take what the fates were apparently ready to offer. It couldn’t be worse than the stagnation of her present existence. Anything was better than living in a void.

If living on the Marchesa’s inscrutable bounty involved a certain gulping down of Melissa’s pride, a certain stifling of her feeling for independence ... pride and independence have gone into the discard before this when a woman’s hunger for beauty was concerned.

“If she wants to experiment—why shouldn’t I?” ... thus Melissa, climbing the steps of her brownstone horror with a wild high song in her heart.

At the thought of deliberate man-hunting, she naturally and with womanly reticence rather paused—on one toe as it were, with the other pointed for flight. But after all—wasn’t that what she had cried for? A place in which to be her actual inner self, her loveliest self, ... so that when the man came along whom her soul desired, he should see her—and know her.

Didn’t one, after all, have always, gently, to focus the masculine attention, when it came to a matter of seeing and knowing?

“Give me a year—” thought shameless Melissa ... she added in unconscious imitation of a certain northern constabulary—“and I’ll get my man!”

The Marchesa, of course, had corrupted her. The Marchesa would have shrieked with wicked laughter, to see Melissa, locked in her room that night, after an uncommonly distasteful dinner (corned beef and cabbage, no less!) ... trying a gray chiffon veil about her slim bare shoulders ... trying her hair, demurely parted, drawn low over her ears, with an artificial camellia set just where a young man’s heart might look—before it leaped.

Strange Melissa! Already in process of transmogrification. Already feeling her eyelids grow heavier, her smile slower, her voice deeper, ... her hands more subtly tensed.

She slept and dreamed of—the office—which hardened her determination to get away from it ... and from everything else that was hers. At noon, the next day, incredibly but punctually, the Marchesa called in a large gray limousine and took Melissa to the bank she commonly designated as her own. There, formalities were engaged in involving the opening of an account in Melissa’s name, the preparation and presentation of a check-book ... other inoffensive red tape.

“Now—” said the Marchesa, once again within her equipage—“you may do yourself nicely on that.”

“Oh, quite!” said Melissa, languid as a water-lily.

At which the Marchesa dissolved into ribald cackles of appreciation. “Even with me—” she gasped—“Even with me ... already! You’re to the manner born, my dear! ... now nothing remains but to set the jewel.”

She drove Melissa home and left her, with a reassuring hint of speedy action.

“To-morrow, perhaps—we’ll look at one or two places my agent has in view. You might see about street things, at once—I’d like you to be well turned out when I take you castle-hunting.”

“I shall be ready,” Melissa assured her.

She was. She was a downright picture in smoky grays, with a wide simple gray hat and slim simple gray shoes—the costliest kind of simplicity—when just before dusk of the third day thereafter, she once more entered that large purring car, sat down at the side of a sweetly leering Marchesa, and was mysteriously snatched through ambient, if soot-laden airs, along the city streets.

“There are one or two places—” explained the Marchesa, “which my agent thought might interest us.” She had given the chauffeur an address on Central Park West. “Let me look at you—turn your head this way!” She might have been speaking to a mannequin. A slow flush spread to the silken dark wave above Melissa’s ears.

The Marchesa continued unmoved. “Not bad—a little more rouge, perhaps.... Gray would take the color from a Venus.... What are you blushing about?”

“I’m not—a Venus,” said Melissa—“and I prefer very little rouge.”

“For moral reasons—or artistic?” inquired the Marchesa with interest.

“Artistic, of course,” said Melissa coolly. “What have morals to do with it?”

“My own point of view exactly,” sighed the Marchesa. She patted Melissa’s arm—then pinched it.... “Just on the right side of thinness!” she concluded with curious satisfaction.

Melissa gently withdrew from that prodding touch. She had a fleeting unpleasant recollection of a man in a butcher’s apron, poking and prodding a denuded fowl....

The place on Central Park West was interestingly indistinguishable from a number of other places, except by two moon-globed lamps standing either side of the entrance. Melissa followed the Marchesa up the steps and over to the desk, in the wide cool lobby, with a slight catch in her breathing, a mad question singing through her head—“Is it here?... Is it here?”

She scarcely listened to the Marchesa, suavely demanding a key. They rose in the elevator, past one blackly numbered floor after another ... eight, nine, ten....

“It’s at the top of the world, you see,” said the Marchesa ... “however—there are two others—somewhere across the Park—if we don’t care for this.”

The clerk who went up with them, opened a door, at the end of a long, quiet passage, beyond the dignified and mirror-lightened stillness of a small square entresol.

“It’s a very attractive apartment,” he volunteered politely.

The Marchesa entered it with business-like brusqueness. Melissa, following more slowly, stood in the doorway, a double French doorway closely curtained in dull creamy silk—and felt her hand go, groping to her heart.

It was—so inevitably—in that first moment of seeing, that first vague silent, twilit moment, before even the lights were on, or the windows opened ... Melissa’s room!

She knew it, as she might have known with almost a pang of recognition, after weary years of separation, the face of a friend ... more than that—the face of a lover.

Very quietly, without a word, she followed the Marchesa; stood in the center of the floor and looked about her critically.

“H’m’m!” said the Marchesa—“Not bad! ... good high ceiling ... open fireplace ... what do you think of it, Miss Wayne?”

Good high ceiling! It rose to a gracious and lofty height, a fair half-story above the ordinary room. An open fire-place!... An utter dream of a fireplace, wide and dark and deep with logs, beautiful rough scaly-barked logs, on shining brass andirons ... with a mantel-shelf of dimly-gleaming marble ... with a rug of wonderful faded blues and purples and scarlets ... with a deep delicious couch beyond the rug, cushioned not like a couch in a harem—but adequately! ... with two slim, curving lilac-and-amber-shaded lamps above the couch ... with a long narrow table just behind it....

“Well!” said the Marchesa a trifle impatiently—“what’s wrong?”

Melissa, with a gasp, came back to reality. She had been strewing books upon that table ... though with no visible hands ... setting black-red roses in a crystal bowl beneath the farther lamp ... touching a match to those logs ... watching the golden sparks stream up the chimney....

She said simply—“It’s a dream!” And spoke the truth.

The Marchesa looked pleased. “I’d like a little light!” she told the clerk, imperative as a minor deity.

He pressed a button near the door. Candles bloomed softly around the walls. Their light disclosed rich mellow tapestries, tall chairs with carven backs, a big inviting desk set crosswise in a corner and bearing yet another lamp ... a small round table before a window ... those windows—four of them in a row—almost as high as the room itself! Melissa went toward them like some one enchanted. She heard herself say—“This looks across the Park—doesn’t it?” Then she stood with both hands gripping the cold rough stone of the balustrade outside and stared—wordless.

Here was the place which looked clean across Heaven.

A sweep of sky from north to south, from the east to the wall at one’s back. A sweep of trees in the Park below, gray-green and misty and vague. Stretches of turf laced by ribbony winding roads ... where motors forever swirled in a fluctuant tide.

Around the horizon in a vast irregular fretted arc, the tall towers of Manhattan, pierced by a firefly legion of blinking yellow lights. Over all, the dusk, dropping, grayly ... over a magic city.

Said the Marchesa, appearing suddenly at Melissa’s elbow, the silver flowers on her hat quivering alertly—“I once had an apartment in Paris, looking down on Montmartre ... this reminds me of it.... I was madly in love with an artist—well! There’s a bedroom,—not bad—and a passable bath. Shall we look any farther?”

“Oh, this!” said Melissa—“—this!” Her hands actually trembled. The Marchesa with a knowing snicker turned back into the room.

Melissa lingered, watched those far-flung incredible lights, and while she stood there, somewhere, a caressing baritone began—softly, yet with a kind of hardy gayety ... “Somebody loves me.... Who can it be?”

A silly little song—with a recurrent minor that was like a small, slim, shining knife-blade in one’s heart ... a song from some gaudy revue ... hardly a song at all, just a catch-penny tune ... unbearably sweet!

Melissa felt that the man who sang it was probably at the moment tying his tie before a mirror.

Making ready to go out and see—who loved him.

Also, she guessed that he couldn’t be more than a wall or so away.

He would be dark—with a voice like that—smooth, shining dark hair ... cool, laughing dark eyes....

She went back into the wonderful room. The Marchesa was concluding arrangements with the clerk.

“As your nephew said—” the clerk was observing garrulously.

“Yes—yes! Of course—Oh, very well!” cried the Marchesa and waved him brutally into silence. “This will do. No need for any further discussion. Miss Wayne would like to move in to-morrow.” She turned to Melissa—the merest formality.... “You’d like to move in to-morrow, my dear?”

Swift steps went down the hall outside—a lilting whistle. “There’s some one in the next apartment,” explained the clerk. “A gentleman from the Hawaiian Islands—a sugar planter, I believe.”

The whistle rose and fell, impudently clear, while the gentleman from Hawaii waited for the elevator.

“Somebody loves me ... who can it be? ... may-be it’s—you!”

“I wish I could move in to-night!” said Melissa.

The Marchesa broke into cracked and tinkling laughter. She put up two white-gloved fingers and nipped Melissa’s hot cheek.

“Now, now!” said the Marchesa—“where’s Lady Disdain? You’ll need a cool head—if you’re to sit by that fire!”

CHAPTER VII

Melissa’s matins!

The little song she used to say to herself, arising at grayish seven, to be dressed by a still grayish eight, breakfasting at a cheerless eight-fifteen, office-bound at the stroke of nine....

She said it again on the first morning of her awakening within the air-castle ... began to say it, rather, and broke off with a smile and a sigh of sybaritic ecstasy, curling the tips of her cool white fingers against the linen sheets, digging her doubting toes yet deeper beneath a drift of fleecy blanket.

A flood of sunlight came in at three eastern windows—clear thin gold, a riotous wash of it.

Sunlight—in a bedroom—in the city!

Windows—looking across a park!

Sky—all one wanted of it—to be had, merely by turning on one’s side, opening one’s drowsy eyes, and staring—across a room.

Melissa hardly believed in the thing which had happened to her.

“You’d like to move in to-morrow, my dear?” the Marchesa had asked. And upon that to-morrow, Melissa had moved in. It was simple as that. Although in the matter of whys and wherefores it wasn’t simple at all.

Melissa didn’t yet know, was (she sometimes felt) never to know, just what the Marchesa was getting out of the whole affair. Of course money was—as the phrase goes—no object to the Marchesa. She might, if she’d cared for that especial sort of exercise, have rolled in it. Her wealth had outlasted her opportunities of enjoying it ... but even so ... rich old ladies didn’t commonly select worthy young women ... Melissa was beyond doubt a worthy young woman ... to help them dissipate their unearned increment. Much more often, rich old ladies selected more—or less—worthy young men. Married them, even. The Sunday papers gave frequent space, colorfully embellished to just such May-and-December unions. Withered hands snatching at youth. Futilely snatching.

Not that the Marchesa was given to futilities of any sort. And, except for the frequently-mentioned and not always flatteringly-referred-to nephew—not that the Marchesa was given to young men.

Much too clever, the Marchesa, to tolerate fortune-hunters. On the other hand—much too scornful of women, the Marchesa, to be doing a thing like this out of sweet-lavenderish altruism.

Whatever Melissa was receiving would some way, sooner or later, have to be given back.

As a pound of flesh ... or a gill of heart’s blood ... or what-not.

“Who cares!” thought Melissa, stretched white arms above her head, linked smooth hands at the back of her neck and stared at the ceiling rapturously. She was living in the moment—nothing more ... trusting not even her own senses.

She rather expected to have those wide clear windows shrink, as one looked at them, into the dim-paned, narrow-silled apertures of the room on Sixty-third Street. To have the beautiful simple mahogany bed in which she lay, resolve itself suddenly into the white-painted thin-mattressed couch that had cradled her insurgent dreams this last half-dozen years.

If there had come a knock at the door and Mrs. Robinson’s voice had said plaintively—“I left your bill in the box, Miss Wayne ...” Melissa would have gotten up quite unsurprised and fetched her pocketbook. However no knock came, and from moment to moment, it appeared more incredibly plausible that the thing was real.

Utterly real, the walls of that quiet, delightful bedroom. Cream walls, and cream silk at the windows, beneath a valance and side-curtains of some velvety, wine-colored fabric. Mahogany dressing-table and chest of drawers. One or two prints about the room, neutral and pleasant. Landscapes—but without nymphs. Nothing more human than a sheep or so.

All at once, Melissa knew the reason of that ordered simplicity, the reason of those fine open spaces ... it was undeniably a masculine apartment—sub-let by the Marchesa’s efficient and intuitive agent!

Through Melissa’s blood, a tiny ripple widened at thought of the man in whose room she lay, thus innocently. At whose pictures she gazed thus appreciatively. Had he kept his ties in the topmost drawer of that highboy? Or were ties kept in any drawer at all? Melissa didn’t know. She had never had a brother. Her father had died when she was still a little girl. Men were to Melissa, at once, the romance and the commonplace of existence.

The romance—because she knew nothing about them.

The commonplace—because for a number of years, from nine of a morning to six of an evening, she had known all too much.

At that, her experience wasn’t unique.

Too little and too much is all that most women know of men.

Anyhow—if he hadn’t kept his ties in that top drawer, he had kept something else there. Some other article of masculine apparel. Which rendered subtly more interesting in the course of Melissa’s lazy musings, the fact that her own stockings and handkerchiefs now resided—as it were—at the same address.

“Absurd!” she felt. But the fact remained. Facts do.

She couldn’t rid herself of a certain misty consciousness of broad shoulders against the light; of a strong hand drawing those Burgundian curtains; of keen eyes scowling at the traditional run-away stud. But when it came to the lift of a shadowy chin before the bathroom mirror, a foamy shaving-brush following the line of a clean-cut lower lip ... Melissa’s sense of humor lifted a derisive head.

“He’s most likely some smug old thing in spats,” she decided coldly, “who goes south for the winter, and that’s why....”

But what smug old thing would have known just how to lay that mellow rug before the fireplace—that day-dream couch beyond the rug—that long, book-hungry table behind the couch—those fairy lamps at either end?

“Any clever decorator might have done it,” argued Melissa, while subtly knowing no decorator had.

The room bore the imprint of somebody’s fingers.

Some one had set that scene for love—not pay.

Upon Melissa’s consciousness took shape like shadows falling across a wall the picture of another room, a cluttered, scented, dimly-lighted one ... with by-gone adorers in tarnished silver frames standing faithfully about ... watching lace cushions turn yellow, and rose-leaves fall, a fire, lit at dusk, sink to ashes....

The Marchesa, of course, was clever enough for anything. Between delicious hazardings and wonderings, Melissa experienced a small, cold tremor of distrust.

Hadn’t the Marchesa happened upon this perfect place a little too quickly for absolute chance? Hadn’t she—although the thought disturbed and vaguely alarmed one—hadn’t she perhaps had it in mind from the first? Even while convincingly observing that if this didn’t serve there were one or two others just across the Park ... hadn’t she all the time been holding in her delicate ivory claw the key to that silk-hung door?

What—in plain words—was the Marchesa’s object?

But if it came to that—what was Melissa’s own?

“Not much to choose between us!” thought Melissa, wryly smiling, and slipped out of bed and turned on a hissing hot bath.

She breakfasted at the small table before the sitting-room windows; in a welter of autumn sunlight; on coffee and rolls set forth in the most satisfying fashion by a black-browed French boy from the restaurant downstairs. And she wore, for that breakfasting, alone though she was, a charmingly impractical rag of bluish lilac chiffon, with a dragging hem of silver lace, with a twisted string of silver about the slender hips....

Like a creature out of a poem, Melissa looked that morning—with no one there to see.

“And it wants—some one to see!” she murmured, smiling faintly—then had the grace to blush.

The grace and good luck. For no art is more quickly forgotten nor more impossible of recapture than the simple and effective sending of blood to the female face.

While she blushed, therefore, distinctly enjoying the sensation, the telephone, which stood on a little table near the door, rang crisply, and she answered it at her leisure in a cool slow voice ... a little cooler and a little slower, no doubt, than it might have been, a day or so before.

“Yes?”

Across the wire, reply sputtered briskly, just touched with an indefinable suggestion of subservience: “Miss Wayne—may I speak to Miss Wayne?”

“This,” said Melissa, “is Miss Wayne.”

“Oh—Miss Wayne, this is Anna speaking....”

“Yes—” quite kindly, “Anna?”

“The Marchesa di Ricci wishes to know if you will be at home this afternoon?”

“I think so.”

“The Marchesa would like to come in, about tea-time.”

“Say I shall be very happy to see her.”

“Thank you,” said Anna.

“At tea-time,” said Melissa and stood frowning for a long indeterminate moment after she had broken the connection.

So the hand of steel was at once to inhabit the velvet glove! And the air-castle to be open without delay, to the step and the stare of a landlady.

“What did you expect, my dear?” muttered Melissa, shrugging, “she’s bought you—for a year. She’s within her rights ... after all, what difference does it make? When you had freedom—you had nothing else.”

Like lightning scribbling a quiet sky, a wild thought crossed her: “If only I had some one—a man—to tea with me—at the very start ... what a shock for the lady! If he were here—before her ... some one very cool and charming. I can’t bear that cracked little laugh of hers—those wise, cruel eyes—as if she watched me wriggling on a pin!... If there were some one—at once ... I could do a bit of laughing, myself....”

Some one—all very well—but who?

Young men to be had to tea didn’t grow on bushes. Unless one had previously cultivated just such quaint shrubbery.

Melissa thought of the junior partner. Too fat, too pale, too blond, too dull ... besides, having left her position abruptly, without explanation of any sort other than that she was leaving, her ex-employer would scarcely care to share a cup that cheered with his ex-employee.

Remained the gent’s-furnisher, Mr. Arthur Curtis of southern Iowa and West Sixty-third Street. On every count, impossible.

What Melissa needed was some one very perfectly accoutered, very casually impeccable, as to look and manner and garment—heart no object, mind no object—just a hand accustomed to juggle a plate and cup, a foot accustomed to cross from rug to rug without skidding.

“It isn’t much to ask!” sighed Melissa.

Came (as the more colorful stylists have it) a knock at the door.

More fairy-tale stuff! If Prince Charming had entered in person, glass slipper and all ... the moment might almost have been termed psychological.

It was, however, merely the maid. A fresh-faced, brown-haired, blue-eyed Irish woman, in a starchy white apron over a blue cotton frock—with a smile, to disarm Medusa.

“Good mornin’,” offered this pleasant creature, in the softest Celtic croon, “—if I’m not early to do the rooms....”

“No—no ... come in!” said Melissa.

She stood at the window, looking out across the Park while in bathroom and bedroom like a new Sinfonia Domestica, the gentle swishing clatter of mop and broom began.

CHAPTER VIII

“Tea for two—lemon and cream—and cinnamon toast—if you please!” said Melissa.

Shading three o’clock of that first afternoon,—preparations for the Marchesa’s advent going forward.

Downstairs in the restaurant a dark gentleman with pointed mustachios swept a bow and laid one hand upon his heart—such at least was the impression conveyed through the telephone.

“At half-past four, madame?”

“At half-past four.”

“Tea for two—madame?”

In some dim convolution of Melissa’s brain a fiber stirred.

She corrected, utterly without intention.... “Tea for three!”

“Tea for three,” repeated the one below-stairs ... and Melissa’s bridges burst into flame behind her.

There is neither excuse, explanation nor apology for what followed. Merely it seemed to Melissa, in some odd way, inevitable, that having said tea for three she was thereafter bound to produce three for tea ... so set at once about it.

She left the telephone, went into the bedroom and put on a misleading black hat ... misleading, because it looked ingenuous and wasn’t. She wore already a slim black frock to which she added gloves and all the rest of it. For signature to the portrait—like Whistler’s immortal butterfly—a pale camellia, subtly disposed between turn of the shoulder and prideful lift of the chin.

“I am going out into the highways and byways—” said Melissa to herself, locking the door of the apartment with slim chilly fingers. She added to cover a certain amateurish uneasiness.... “It’s been done before!”

And so it had—beginning with a person in the Bible who once gave a party and thus recruited his guests. Not ending there, of course.

Her impetus flagged when she came to the street.

“After all—I can’t just pick up somebody—girls do ... but it’s too horrid—too dreadfully cheap. Let the Marchesa eat it all!”

(Thinking, in that moment, of course—of the cinnamon toast.)

“It isn’t humanly possible that I don’t know a man I could ask....”

Possible or not—there it was!

“Even a cousin—” She had never had one.

“Or the husband of a friend—” She who had evaded friends, now pitifully wishing for them, with husbands appended!

Absurd as it may sound—fantastic, even—Melissa plumbed, while she walked from Sixty-seventh to Sixty-eighth Street and across into the Park, the wretchedest, grayest depths. Because to be a woman, to be young, to be reasonably fair and quite unreasonably romantic, with no one of the opposite sex for friend ... that is isolation in its essence.

Siberia, compared to that, would be as Broadway on New Year’s Eve.

Melissa could have cried—except for a certain distaste for publicity.

She thought: “I ought to be back in the office—it’s where I belong....”

But even to visualize the office chilled her to the marrow. That at least she had escaped from—temporarily. Remembering which, her courage flared and having come to a bench upon which a young man was sitting, reading a book, Melissa, abhorrent as the thing may seem, sat down beside him.

If he had looked up with a leer and addressed her in a hoarse, amorous voice she would no doubt have sprung to her feet and gone on again—hurriedly—safe for all time from the lighter forms of impulse.

He didn’t, however, do anything of the sort. He didn’t look up at all. So Melissa, with surprising technique, while appearing to consider a squat green bush across the path, regarded him closely and was presently convinced of his birth and breeding, therefore of her ability to handle the situation, unscarred.

He was tall and dark, slim and smooth-shaven—well-shod, yet hatted not too slavishly like the Prince of Wales; and his clothes, though good, were as a gentleman’s should be—not absolutely new.

Moreover, the book he was reading, bore in gold letters, upon its dusky back, Something Something by Michael Arlen—which between members of the authentic upper class is as good as an introduction any day.

Observing all of which....

“Jerry!” said Melissa suddenly—soft as Jeritza, sighing out Vissi del’Arte from the floor of Scotti’s dining-room.... “Aren’t you going to speak to me? Or shall I slip away and let you go back to China for another seven years—without seeing—?”

“Pardon?” said the reader of Arlen, with an upward inflection, and lifted exceedingly pleasant brown eyes from the page which had been holding his attention.

Directly those eyes met Melissa’s, she saw at once and of course, that she had made a most embarrassing mistake.

“Oh, do forgive me!” she stammered, “I am so sorry....”

And she half rose from her seat but sank back again before the fact that the young man had at once removed his hat and was now looking at her with the most respectful interest.

“You thought I was some one you knew,” he suggested with reassuring calm.

“I thought,” said Melissa with delightful aloofness yet a touch of apology, “that you were some one I hadn’t seen in a fearfully long time ... a man named Jerry Tarleton. I looked at you several times before I spoke—I—I thought I was quite sure....”

“That’s odd—that’s very odd, indeed,” he told her, (his smile was engaging)—“because I’ve often been taken for Tarleton, before this.”

“Oh ... have you?” asked Melissa, slightly breathless.

“Yes—isn’t it strange!” said her companion.

He went on looking at her in the friendliest way, yet not without a deferential tinge of appreciation.

“In China, wasn’t he?”

“Why—yes,” said Melissa. “He—went out there, seven years ago.”

“Peking,—or Shanghai? I’ve often wondered. You see, I’ve been a good bit in Shanghai, myself—and it was there I ran across one or two people who mistook me for him....”

“He—I heard from him once or twice from Peking,” said Melissa.

“That would have been it,” said her companion easily. “Well—please don’t be distressed about this, because as I say, it’s happened before ... and with friends of his who’d seen him much more recently than you have. Matter of fact—I’m always rather flattered by it. From all I can gather he’s no end of a decent sort—one of the best.”

“He was always that,” said Melissa briefly yet, she couldn’t help feeling, with considerable poise.

“Did you know him very well?—Never mind—of course that’s rather an impertinent question!... I was only wondering if you’d heard.... I dare say you have ... about his wife....”

“His wife?” said Melissa—“Please tell me....”

“I don’t want to shock you....”

“Is she dead?” asked Melissa gently—and added, with subtle caution—“I never knew her.”

“Divorced,” said the young man regretfully. “Very unhappy business all ’round. I heard it on the boat coming over—these T.K.K. boats, you know—can hear almost anything ... all the gossip of the Orient—well, she left him. Left him flat, poor chap! Ran off with an English novelist.... Pretty rough on Tarleton, they said. He wasn’t looking for it, d’y’ see! Probably hadn’t supposed that any one could run off with an English novelist.”

“Except—” said Melissa, “the one you’re reading!”

They exchanged glances. The stranger blinked and smiled.

“Like him?”

“Un-con-trollably!” said Melissa.

“Lineal descendant of Ouida ... isn’t he? With a draft from Lady Windermere’s fan. Odd stuff to come out of England—to-day! Your friend Jerry Tarleton, now—might have walked out of one of his stories.”

“Mightn’t he just!” said Melissa. She rose with languid grace. “Some day when you’re back—in Shanghai—if you meet Jerry, himself—you might tell him ... about this ... about seeing me....”

He rose as well, stood there smiling down at her, the low sun glinting darkly on his uncovered head. “And whom shall I tell him I saw?”

“Just say—Lissa ... he’ll know!”

“L-i-s-s-a?”

Melissa nodded.

“No other message?”

“None—and I shall be late for tea if I stop any longer. You do forgive me, don’t you—for my silly mistake?”

“Not if you’re going to leave it at that.”

“What else can one do?”

“One might let Jerry Tarleton’s double see one to one’s doorstep. Isn’t he any sort of credential at all?”

Melissa murmured moving off—“My doorstep’s only a bit away.”

He walked beside her swinging an idle stick. “Sorry—but half a loaf, you remember—great deal better than dieting.”

“I really shouldn’t do this—as you know,” said Melissa.

“And I feel very strongly,” he asserted, “that I should. So there’s a deadlock.” He added hopefully, “Why don’t you ask me to tea? There’s a lot about Tarleton I haven’t told you....”

“Are you quite mad?” asked Melissa sweetly.

“Not quite, but I’m off to a flying start ... and I wish you were!”

“That’s very nice and unselfish of you....”

“Not unselfish at all—it was your speaking of tea that did it. I can smell the buttered toast....”

“Cinnamon toast. This is where I turn.”

“Central Park West? Oh—cinnamon toast!” he accepted cheerfully. “That’s better, if anything. Honestly—you’ve no idea how hungry I am—”

“But I don’t know you,” said Melissa in delicately amused protest.

“You know Jerry Tarleton—don’t you?”

“I do ... but you don’t! So there isn’t even that.”

Momentarily it floored him. He recovered amazingly.

“If I promise to look him up the instant I get back to China ... won’t that do?”

“Beautifully—for next time. You may bring me a letter.”

“You look like Shelmerdene or Virginia,” he told her, “but you’re behaving like Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage-Patch. Is it possible that just because we haven’t said How-do-you-do before witnesses ... you’re going to pretend that we’re strangers....”

“Here is where I live,” said Melissa, inclining a gracious head,—“and thanks, so much, for seeing me home.”

She stood between the two moon-globed lamps and smiled a little—just enough.

“Here?” said the young man incredulously. “Here!—Why—what a little way!”

“Good-by,” insisted Melissa, suddenly panicky. Adventure in the Park was one thing—adventure on the hearth, quite another. She might really have succeeded in sending him off, but for the Marchesa, who mounting the steps behind them, at that moment, in an aura of Peau d’Espagne, put a hand on Melissa’s arm and demanded introduction.

“So glad I’m not late,” purred the Marchesa ... “now we can all go up together. I’d no idea you’d another guest, Melissa....”

“I do so wish he could come in,” said Melissa and looked the other guest squarely in the eye.

“Thanks—I think, after all, I will,” decided the recipient of that mute refusal, pleasantly.

“Delightful!” said the Marchesa, leading the way to the elevators. “Do tell me his name again, Melissa—I didn’t quite get it.”

Which was in no way remarkable because Melissa, while achieving an introduction of sorts, yet hadn’t quite said it.

She felt herself chilling, she felt herself flaming, while across her shrinking shoulder the other guest’s voice broke in with casual amusement: “It isn’t surprising ... most people don’t. Always having to spell it. K-e-n-e-a-l-y.... Luke. Luke Kenealy.”

“How odd!” said the Marchesa.... “I once knew a man of that name—in Venice, I think it was ... who had the most heavenly tenor voice....”

“My uncle,” said Mr. Kenealy suavely—“He sang at Covent Garden.”

“Why—so he did!” said the Marchesa. “Melissa—this is too amusing! Fancy—on the first afternoon I have tea with you—you produce the nephew of a man who was once madly in love with me!”

Melissa disclaimed the credit of that production with a polite word or so and little smiling shrug. Catching the nephew’s eye as she turned the key in her silk-hung door, she murmured poignantly—“If Jerry Tarleton were only here, too—it would be quite perfect—wouldn’t it!”

CHAPTER IX

After a certain famous Tea-Party at which a March Hare and a Mad Hatter assisted, Melissa felt fairly sure hers led the rest—in bland absurdity.

Entrenched behind a battery of cups and plates and saucers—hospitably engrossed with matters of lemon or cream—she managed to be in the party but not of it, for a saving quarter of an hour, in which time she rallied her startled forces and was able to present to any possible inquisition, the unfearing front of innocence.

She listened, still as Mona Lisa, while the Marchesa inquired vivaciously of the young man beside her if his uncle had ever married....

“Well, yes—and no!” replied Mr. Kenealy thoughtfully.

The Marchesa gave vent to a thin arpeggio of laughter, very like a cynical spinet touched by ghostly fingers. “You mean, more than once?”

“And less! He—well, frankly—” said the young man, helping himself with a sigh to a second piece of toast, “it was rather a grief to the family that he seemed to lose in Europe his—ah—sense of continuity, if you see what I mean? It was at times very difficult to know if my Uncle Luke were married—or not.”

“Nonsense!” said the Marchesa irritably. “He was an artist.”

“You put it much better than I do,” said Mr. Kenealy, bowing.

“I have never forgotten his voice! Melissa—”

“Yes?” said Melissa, coming sweetly back from illimitable musings.

“You may have noticed the photograph of a very handsome man in the costume of Rodolpho, standing on the little table beside the Sèvres bowl?”

“Yes,” said Melissa again.

“That—was Mr. Kenealy’s uncle,” said the Marchesa graciously.

“I should like very much to see it,” said Mr. Kenealy.

“Melissa,” conceded the Marchesa, “may bring you—some afternoon.”

“Please!” said Mr. Kenealy.

“Of course,” said Melissa.

She wouldn’t meet his look, but she smiled. It was a smile that flickered out when the Marchesa demanded abruptly:

“How long have you two known each other?”

And cocked a curious eye above the rim of her tea-cup.

“Not fearfully long,” said Melissa slowly.

She felt her heart stumble and scorned herself with a savage intensity. Afraid—of that small, malicious creature in the deep chair across the tea-table? Afraid of those shrewd, burnt-out eyes, that withered mouth? Of course, she was! Subtly and humiliatingly afraid. What chance had a dreamer like Melissa before the garnered disillusion of the Marchesa’s glance? No chance whatever, save to be seen through and stared at—and mocked....

Mr. Kenealy was saying, while he presented his cup to his hostess with an imploring look: “We met through a chap named Tarleton—Jerry Tarleton—whom I had known in China, and Lissa ... sorry—let me!...” for at this casual introduction of her most intimate name Melissa dropped a teaspoon with a small, incriminating crash. “As I was saying—thanks, two lumps!—Lissa had known him—”

“In Alabama—when I was a child,” said Melissa gravely, not to be too inadequate.

She rather liked the look he gave her then—keen with mischief, warm with approval. It spurred her to further daring.

“So, when—Luke—came into the office, the day before I left, with a letter from Jerry—”

“We hadn’t far to go, to be friends,” finished Mr. Kenealy.

“So I should say,” accepted the Marchesa. “That’s very good toast. I’ll have another piece.” Crunching it with the unashamed appetite which her meager frame made almost grotesque, she inquired amiably, “What do you think of Melissa’s windfall?”

“Pardon!” said Mr. Kenealy. His quick sidelong glance warned Melissa to keep silent and wait the cat’s jumping. An odd moment! A moment full of prettily covered pitfalls and dimly gleaming traps.

“Her legacy!” explained the Marchesa impatiently. “Hasn’t she told you about it? You said you saw her at the office—didn’t you? Why did you suppose she was leaving there? Retiring, on a stenographer’s salary?”

Color surged across Melissa’s face. She set her teeth in a rigor of wounded pride.

“I didn’t inquire,” said Mr. Kenealy gently. Upon an even note he continued—“I didn’t feel it concerned me.”

“Very pretty!” said the Marchesa, set down her cup and wiped her lips with an air of finality. “However—you must have wondered ... being Luke Kenealy’s nephew....”

“Oh, I say, now!”

Chuckling outrageously, the Marchesa waved his protest down. “Never mind ... I knew him rather well, remember! And I say you must have wondered just where all this ...” she swept Melissa’s darling room with a gesture ... “was coming from. Stupid of the girl not to tell you!”

“I had so much rather,” said Melissa at this juncture in a voice of exquisite coolness and detachment—“that you told him.”

But the blood ran fast in her veins. Like cobwebs she felt the straining of multiple unseen webs against her flesh. If she had known—if she had guessed, what vistas of intrigue ... intrigue was in the Marchesa’s blood ... of course!... Wasn’t that, in itself, the thing she wanted of Melissa? Puppet-play—for her sensation-starved old age—“a doll I am going to put together.”... Whatever she wanted, she had paid to have it. Remembering which debt, Melissa held herself steady and said again: “Do tell him, Marchesa!”

Thus urged.... “Her grandfather,” said the Marchesa dryly, “died in—Alabama, was it?—a little while ago. Left her something. Not very much. She’s taking this way to get rid of it.”

“She’s wise,” said Mr. Kenealy. He smiled at Melissa and, sweetly reckless, she smiled at him.

“Money,” said Mr. Kenealy, “is worth only what it’ll buy.”

“Did Luke Kenealy leave you anything?” asked the Marchesa sharply.

“Not even a high note,” averred the regretful heir.

“Ha!” said the Marchesa—“I’m not surprised. Well ... you must come and see his picture....”

“If I may,” said Mr. Kenealy.

The Marchesa rose with amazing agility. Melissa and Mr. Kenealy rose too. Twilight was gathering in the long, high-ceilinged room. Beyond the four tall windows, lights were blossoming along a cloudy sky. Melissa twitched tasseled strings and lit the two lovely lamps beside the couch.

“Lord—what a set!” said Mr. Kenealy, then bit his lip and grinned. He begged of the Marchesa—“Let me see you to your car!”

She gave him her hand and a grimace of complete understanding. “Thoughtful of old ladies—of course—you didn’t inherit that! He couldn’t bear ’em!”

To Melissa a stroke of the velvet paw—“Not bad for a first at-home, my dear.... I congratulate you!”

“Oh—I hope to do it rather better!” said Melissa.... She yielded her fingers to Mr. Kenealy’s close hold.... “Good-by,” she told him—“nice to have seen you ... my love to Jerry—when you write.”

“I’ll see you again before that!” said Mr. Kenealy.

Melissa closed the door, softly but very definitely upon his parting smile. Too full of understanding, entirely! What did he think her?—An adventuress? For all the Marchesa’s spurious grandfather, dying in—Alabama, was it?—and providing for purposes of respectability, a legacy! What could any man think Melissa but an adventuress? Sitting down beside a stranger in the Park—speaking to him, as if he were some one she thought she knew. That hadn’t fooled any one a moment.

Witness the staggering reply—“I’ve often been taken for Tarleton before this....”

When he knew and Melissa knew—and each knew quite well that the other knew—there wasn’t any Tarleton!

Was there actually a Luke Kenealy? How could one tell? And even if there had been such a man—in the Marchesa’s amazing and man-spangled past—was this one really his nephew? Or merely the quickest-witted, most convincing liar in the world?

The Marchesa believed him—or did she? Impossible to predict the Marchesa. Melissa felt the invisible threads draw tight. Fear touched her for a moment....

Then, because at the very most she had nothing to lose, she shrugged the whole involved question away from her.

“I’m not backing down, now,” thought Melissa. “Hardly!”

She went over to the desk at the farther end of the room and lit the lamp, gold-shaded and mellow, which stood there. A letter lay waiting, sealed and stamped, addressed to Sixty-third Street ... something about handkerchiefs, forgotten in a drawer.... Melissa had intended that afternoon to mail it.

She thought: “There’s a mail chute out by the elevators—” and turned her step that way.

It was perhaps the most startling, the least expected, the maddest of all that mad day’s happenings, that just beyond her door, letter in hand, a whisper of song on her lips, she should come face to face with Mr. Kenealy, advancing quietly.

“You!” cried Melissa in a horrified undertone.... “You!—Why on earth...?”

And stood with her back to the wall and stared at him, frozen.

He put out a reassuring hand. He smiled his engaging smile.

“This—” said Melissa and could not for all her most gallant effort control a betraying tremor—“This—is taking an outrageous advantage....” She really was shaking with apprehension.

“Of what?” inquired Mr. Kenealy very reasonably.

“Don’t pretend not to know!—You are—a gentleman—aren’t you?”

“Why—I don’t as a rule make a song about it....”

“Then—I don’t have to tell you how horrid this is of you!”

“But you do have to tell me—that is, if I’m going to know.”

Melissa moved back along the wall with a kind of sliding swiftness till she stood just at her door and drew it to behind her.

“Please go away, at once!” she said with all the dignity of which she was capable. “I admit it is partly my fault—for speaking to you as I did. You had every reason to suppose that I wasn’t—quite nice—”

“Good Lord!” said Mr. Kenealy with a groan.

“But I assure you I am ... and you need not expect me—to ask you in—now....”

“I’m not suggesting it, am I?” he protested with a touch of annoyance.

“Then what are you doing here?” insisted Melissa coldly. “What possible excuse could you have...?”

“Well—if it comes to that—” said Mr. Kenealy ... his brown eyes narrowed with sudden and uncontrollable amusement ... “—I—ah—I live in the next apartment—d’y’see? And the only way I can get to it is through this little hall—I’m sorry ... the whole thing’s a bit unusual—I can see that myself!”

Melissa’s hands dropped limp at her sides—she stared—she caught her breath in a long, staggered silence. At last:

“You—” she stammered—“you ... you....”

“In the next apartment, yes,” repeated Mr. Kenealy patiently.

“Did you know....”

He disclaimed that hurriedly.... “Give you my word, I nearly dropped in my tracks, when you brought me here....”

“I—brought you! I deserve that, of course,” said Melissa proudly.

“Oh, please—don’t be so unkind! Mere figure of speech. Let’s say we brought each other ... shall we? Anyhow—isn’t it, honestly, the darnedest thing that ever happened—outside a Vajda comedy?”

Wave after wave of poignant recollection broke over Melissa’s head.... “You were singing—‘Somebody Loves Me’—”

He admitted modestly. “I do—a little. When was this?”

“The evening I came here first—why—it was only two days ago! You whistled it—waiting for the elevator.”

“One’s got to do something at such a time,” said Mr. Kenealy.

“Oh—!” said Melissa—“I remember! You are the sugar planter—from Hawaii.”

“Anybody, from Hawaii, is a sugar planter—the minute he sets foot on the mainland. Who gave you my dossier?”

“The clerk from downstairs.”

“Sounds like it. I wonder who gave it to him? Just as a matter of public interest—my people are ranchers.”

“But you are from Hawaii?”

“Born and raised there—as you say in—Alabama, was it?”

“One thing more,” insisted Melissa desperately, ignoring the matter of her natal state—“Was he really your uncle—the tenor?”

“Of course,” said Mr. Kenealy. “Why not?”

“I don’t know—the whole thing—it’s so like a movie scenario!”

“Don’t sneer at the movies—I write for ’em.”

“Stories?” gasped Melissa.

“No. Cut-ins. You know the kind of things ...” he quoted with expression—“And as the dawn broke, a woman’s soul was born....”

“I know!” said Melissa hurriedly.

“Some better than that,” said Mr. Kenealy judicially—“some—not so good.”

He put out his hand once more and this time Melissa gave him hers.

He said with charming sincerity—“You will let me come again?”

“I’m sorry,” said Melissa—“I mean I’m sorry I was so atrociously rude to you ... and of course you may come again ... soon!”

She continued upon her way to the mail-chute and watched her letter flash down with a queer little smile on her lips.

“Ranchers—” she was thinking—“and sugar planters—it’s much the same thing.” It isn’t, at all, of course, except from a financial standpoint—which, regrettably enough, was the one Melissa momentarily considered.

Slipping off to sleep that night, she muttered drowsily—“Not a bad beginning, for a man-hunter!”

The Marchesa herself might have said it.

CHAPTER X

Woman, more than any known creature except the chameleon, reacts to her environment. Except for a sensitive little lizard going gray upon a rock and green upon a bush, there is nothing in nature more delicately responsive to background than the female soul. It is interesting to consider in Mr. Strachey’s wake, that Queen Victoria sans Windsor and Balmoral might have been any pleasant old person in a rocking-chair, with a bit of knitting between her fingers. That du Barry if born again into Hollywood might very well turn her temperament upon the silver screen and excite the easy emotions of a nation, while remaining as spotless, personally, as a hound’s tooth. What one means to say is—the difference between a desirable feminine citizen and a doubtful one, is sometimes merely the difference in their respective addresses ... the denizen of an exclusive dwelling on Park Avenue having no incentive to become a bobbed-hair bandit, and the inhabitant of a Harlem flat having neither inspiration nor opportunity to lead the social world around by the nose.

That isn’t socialism—it’s what every woman understands.

Melissa knew she wasn’t herself, on Sixty-third Street—she hadn’t guessed how quickly and in what vastly different ways, herself would develop once beauty and ease were round her.

She hadn’t, for instance, guessed, how idleness would grow upon her. Lying in bed of a morning, watching the sun stream through those eastern windows—that was, in no time at all, part of the daily ritual. Breakfast at ten, after a leisurely bathing and dressing—that didn’t leave much of the morning ... not that it mattered ... when, even supposing a morning were saved—what was one to do with it?

The old years when nine saw her typewriter unhooded, for work—and five, sometimes six, saw it still in action, receded in no time almost past remembering. Melissa didn’t seem to herself, at all the same creature who had drudged through dull days, and slept through tired nights—in a room on a grimy brownstone street....

She forgot—wonderfully—what she had come from. She lived—beautifully—in the moment. She wouldn’t ask herself where she was going, because she meant in any case to go—and the answer mightn’t have been too edifying.

“Here I am—” that was all she admitted ... “where I never hoped to be. It’s my chance. It will be my own fault if I fumble it.”

So she hardened herself, deliberately and coolly. She made herself a shell of deliberate and considered allure. She bought her clothes and arranged her rooms, even set the flowers in her gleaming crystal bowls, with an unswerving consideration of the appeal to be conveyed.

To masculine eyes.

It isn’t, after all, so far-fetched a picture, even in this day of economic independence for the ladies. At least half the female world still goes husband-hunting, between the ages of eighteen and ... well, shall we say between the ages? Also, the paraphernalia of the chase, while deriving more, perhaps from sport-shops and tobacco-shops and so on than it formerly did, is still—the paraphernalia of the chase. He who denies it deludes himself—and is thus merely twice doomed.

Melissa denied not even to herself the elemental starkness of her motives. Everything she did, looked one way, had one sole end in view. Of course the extenuating fact in her man-hunting was, that it wasn’t so much the man she wanted as beauty which he was to be able to give her. Beauty which all her life she had wanted and never until now come near. At that, when she allowed herself to realize how coolly, how almost dispassionately she was conducting her search for a husband—she had her moments of revulsion ... deep-seated.

“You’re an odd creature,” the Marchesa told her crossly about a week after the amazing episode of Luke Kenealy.... “—I have to remind myself, from time to time that I have seen you distressed—that I have heard you talk of killing yourself—except of course that there wasn’t any gas-jet in your room.... It’s hard to realize you ever wore plain little hats and blue serge frocks ... and read aloud to me by the hour.”

“I still wear fairly plain hats,” said Melissa calmly—“and I shall be very happy to read aloud to you again—at any time you like.”

“H’mph!” said the ungracious Marchesa. “I wouldn’t have it! It affects even me—that Vere de Vere manner of yours. I’d be uneasy, all the time, wondering if perhaps you weren’t bored,—”

“Sorry!” murmured Melissa, dropping white eyelids.

“There!” cried the Marchesa in a species of irritable triumph—“You might be Lady-What’s-Her-Name herself! As for your hats—you’ve got an absolute genius for clothes and you know it. I was nervous at first—I’ll admit. It isn’t every woman you could turn loose in the shops with a sizable allowance—for the first time in her life—and have her come out looking presentable. You’re more than presentable—nom d’un pipe!—you’re seductive—in a perfectly well-bred way!”

“I have no intention of being seductive,” said Melissa.

“Yes, you have! Or if you haven’t you’re a bigger fool than I take you to be—” the Marchesa emitted a disconcerting little whinny of laughter. “You know your type, my dear—you knew it before you were able to dress it—a siren in a working-girl shell—that’s what you were.... When I look at you I feel as if I’d cracked a chrysalis—or however you open ’em—and let out a Great Peacock Moth.”

“Thanks,” said Melissa, smiling faintly.

“Upon my word,” said the Marchesa, “you amuse me so, I feel twenty years younger.”

They were driving along Riverside, in the Marchesa’s palatial gray limousine, and against the windless shadows of that swiftly moving interior, Melissa’s flush showed clear.

“Hate to amuse anybody, don’t you!” continued the inquisitor placidly. “Proud as the devil—well, I don’t know that pride’s a bad thing for a woman. Helps to keep her mouth shut when she’s hurt—and she’s bound to be hurt sooner or later,—looking for a lover.”

“I am not looking for a lover,” said Melissa.

“Aren’t you?” replied the Marchesa blandly. “Well—well! Tell me more about this Mr. Kenealy of yours. Have you seen him since your very charming little tea-party the other afternoon?”

“I see him almost every day,” said Melissa languidly and watched curiosity quicken in those old-eagle eyes with a wicked satisfaction.

“Every day—? Not very discreet of you, my dear. The man will be fed up in no time.”

“It really isn’t my fault. There’s no way to avoid it.”

“Fiddlesticks—you can always say you’ve another engagement.”

“Not very well—you see, we go up and down, quite a bit, together.”

“My good girl—what are you talking about—? Up and down what? A stick?”

Melissa answered sweetly as if unaware of anything startling in her statement: “He lives in the apartment next mine.”

“Ciel!” said the Marchesa.

She added, feeling the need perhaps of a rounder oath—-“Mon Dieu—it can’t be true!”

“I assure you,” said Melissa.

The Marchesa inquired sharply—“Did you know it when he brought you the letter—from your friend in—India?”

“China, it was,” said Melissa, and finished casually—“You forget—he brought me the letter two days before I left the office. I wasn’t at that time living in the place myself.”

“Of course—of course,” said the Marchesa. Upon the heels of a vibrant silence, she suddenly snapped—“Did he bring you a letter at all?”

“No,” said Melissa and looked out of the window—because it took all her courage to bring out that one flat word, without parrying the Marchesa’s glance.

“Ha!” said the Marchesa. “I thought not!” She bristled with intentness like a terrier at a rat-hole. “Where did you really meet him?”

So Melissa disdaining to withhold, when payment was requested of her, related very briefly, with no attempt at extenuation, the happening in the Park and the later happening at her door. Between these two scenes, the listener might make her own liaison—from memory.

At the end of the story, the Marchesa burst into a sequence of ribald chucklings.

“You have the soul of an adventurer!” she said at length.

“I think I have the soul of a hussy,” returned Melissa somberly.

“Nonsense! Don’t spoil the whole thing with a conscience. You are delicious. You are better than Scheherazade. I thought there was something tricky in that little affair of yours.... I caught a look or so ... something in the air.... I have a very keen nose,” said the Marchesa modestly. “Well—I can’t tell you how intrigued I am—you have seen him again? Oh—not only in the elevator—if you please! Tête-à-tête, of course!”

“I have been to dinner and to a theater with him,” said Melissa ... “and last night to a party—in his apartment.”

“A party! You have been to a party? What gown did you wear?”

“I wore the almond green georgette.”

“With pearls?”

“Earrings and the long string.”

“Good! Exactly the thing I should have selected. What sort of people did you meet?” The filmed gleam of the Marchesa’s eyes, the excited quiver about that rouged old mouth! Melissa felt herself shrinking and so put on a yet more indifferent front.

“One or two rather nice men.”

“No women?—Do you mean to say there were no women there?”

“There were women, of course—I didn’t notice them.”

The Marchesa caught up the speaking-tube and instructed the startled chauffeur shrilly—she turned back to Melissa with a positive warmth on her wrinkled cheeks, the purplish flush of a dying rose.

“I am taking you home to dinner with me,” she announced and settled her velvet neck-band and tossed her curled gray head in its invincibly smart bonnet.

“One or two rather nice men—I want to hear all about it, my dear! And you didn’t notice the women? This is too delicious! You are without a doubt—the most amusing creature I have ever met!”

CHAPTER XI

When Melissa admitted to the Marchesa that she had met one or two rather nice men at the party in Kenealy’s apartment, she confined herself meticulously to the truth. And although the Marchesa’s hunger for details was insatiable, yet at dinner (even in the midst of all those uniformed and tail-coated photographs, with autographed emotion striking the eye from every side, with the very cupids on the Dresden urn on the dinner-table, gesturing rosy indiscretion) Melissa held herself down to the simplest facts and said nothing at all of her own personal reactions ... which would, beyond doubt have interested the Marchesa immensely ... but Melissa felt she needn’t quite strip her soul, to appease that aged gourmande.

“There was a man who wrote plays,” said Melissa—“Not bad-looking. A little heavy....”

“Successful?” probed the Marchesa.

“They said so,” said Melissa. “He has a place at Mamaroneck and a house on Washington Square.”

“Then he must write those silly bedroom things,” the Marchesa decided—“or perhaps what my nephew calls small-town stuff. This country has no drama, in-between.”

Melissa forbore to break a lance for American playwrights. “There was a blond artist,” she continued dispassionately ... “and toward the end of the evening a man dropped in, from another party....”

“That,” interrupted the Marchesa taking a sizable mouthful of Broccoli Hollandaise and assuming immediately afterward an expression of beatific satisfaction—“that is usually the man who sees one home.”

“He did,” said Melissa, playing with her fork.

“Do you remember his name—by any chance?”

“Why shouldn’t I?—Murdock Fleming.”

“Thousand thunders!” cried the Marchesa, with a look of the liveliest horror.... “What does one call him—in tender moments?”

“I can’t tell you—yet,” said Melissa.

“Murdock!—it sounds like a granite tombstone.”

“He was rather nice. Big and clean-looking. A polo-player, I think ... and a stock-broker.”

“You’re as good as Bradstreet, my dear,” approved the Marchesa mockingly. “Do you see him again—?”

“Mr. Fleming?”

“Obviously! since he appears to have been the one eligible of your evening.”

Melissa smoothed an already exquisite eyebrow with the tip of an indolent finger. “He asked me to dine with him—some night this week.”

“You accepted?”

“For some night, next.”

“Ah—you have it in you!” sighed the Marchesa blissfully. “I knew it!”

“I told him I was fearfully crowded—over the week-end.”

“Exactly the phrase! And the excuse! How do you do it?”

Melissa explained gently—“There are one or two magazines one can find that sort of thing in.... I am reading them very carefully. And Milne is rather a help ... and Lonsdale. What they call drawing-room comedy, I think.”

“Of course,” said the Marchesa delightedly—“that’s not what it’s called in the drawing-room. But you couldn’t do better, for text books. Really—it’s amazing ... you seem to have such an instinct ... were your people—ah—well-born?”

The blood swept over Melissa’s face, and her head went up. She said, returning the Marchesa’s stare with a look of furious resentment:

“Yes. Were not yours?”

At which the Marchesa laughed herself very nearly into hysterics, choked over her thimbleful of black coffee, had to be patted upon the back by the grimly immobile Anna, and continued for half an hour after to snicker feebly.

“Dear Lady Disdain!” said the Marchesa. “Or should one call you Frankensteina?”

Whatever one called her, Melissa’s life was now sufficiently released from dullness, sufficiently full of suave excitement, to satisfy even her exacting temperament. Her days in the sunny bedroom, in the other room with the deep fireplace and the lamps and the dolce-far-niente couch, passed in a pageant of colorful ease. Daily she settled deeper into luxury, like an orchid rooting itself in the mossy bark of a tree. Daily it became more impossible to consider that she should ever give this up—not these especial walls, but the world they stood for. Daily she laid her plans and devised her silken stratagems for keeping her place in the sun.

Murdock Fleming was, as the Marchesa had suggested, obviously the chief eligible of Kenealy’s presenting, so quite coolly and without any sort of scruple Melissa went about attaching him.

He asked her to dine, and she put him off for days—then wore her loveliest frock, smiled her most languid and caressing smile—and he asked her to dine again. At the most exclusive place in town. With an anxious head-waiter in attendance. Flowers at Melissa’s plate. A Hispano-Suiza waiting.

It was significant of Melissa’s acutely sympathetic mentality, that in no time at all, she understood what a Hispano-Suiza stood for—was able to refer to its finer points, intelligently. She, who a month or so before had made her wildest flights on the top of a bus....

“I like a woman to know a good car when she sees it,” Murdock Fleming had mentioned.

So Melissa spent hours poring over motor advertisements. She pretended to be about to buy one and had eager young salesmen instruct her, whole weary afternoons, in the essentials of a machine.

It bored her—beyond description—but the result brought her quarry to her feet.

“I like a woman to be a good sport,” said Murdock Fleming.

He soon perceived Melissa to be one of the best. His flowers crowded Melissa’s bowls and jars. He kept her telephone humming. His clean, straight-featured, sunburned face beamed in her doorway at the most unexpected hours.

“You’ve got the lad going,” said Luke Kenealy pleasantly—“in exactly no time at all from the day you met him. Quick work, Lissa! My white plume is off to you! How did you do it? He’s had the pack at his heels for years. I thought he was a fox....”

“Aren’t you being rather—vulgar?” asked Melissa and shuddered slightly.

“If I am ...” said Kenealy without apology ... “let’s stick to the subject. I ask—how do you do it? Why do you do it? And what will you do with it, when you’ve got it? Because,” he added, taking out his cigarette-case, selecting one and lighting it with some care—“after all—you don’t really like him—now, do you?”

“I shouldn’t say that,” said Melissa.

“If you did, I’d have hope for you,” said Kenealy.

She smiled into his scowling eyes—“Luke—don’t you like me any more?”

At which he got up—they were sitting together on the couch after some play to which he had taken her, and mended the fire noisily.

“Like you?—what’s that?” he demanded, slouching with his back to the resultant blaze in the time-honored masculine attitude. “I never liked a woman in my life—always either loved or loathed ’em. You pays your money and you takes your choice.”

“Is that an offer?” inquired Melissa in a hesitant murmur.

“Would it interest you if it were?”

“I—don’t—know.”

“Then it wouldn’t! I’m not to be haggled over. I may as well tell you frankly—Fleming could buy and sell me—before breakfast.”

“That’s brutal,” said Melissa rather low.

“Not unless the inference is true.”

“That I’m gold-digging?”

“That you’re out to marry money. Don’t look so maidenly. It’s been done before, Melissa of the White Hands!”

Melissa said nothing for a comparatively long time. She sat looking into the fire and Kenealy stood looking down at her. His eyes were too keen for her to meet. Her mouth was too sweet for him to scorn.

He offered presently: “Got any confessions to make?”

“No,” said Melissa slowly. Her face grew a little hard. “Why—Luke?”

“Nothing ... just wondered.”

“You don’t really know me very well—do you?”

“I couldn’t know you better in a million years. Been hearing about you, all my life.... ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?...’”

“Don’t make fun of me!”

“I’m not!... Want to hear more?

“Please, Luke!—I can’t bear to be laughed at.”

“I’m not laughing,” he told her—and it appeared, strangely enough, that he wasn’t. Presently he added, sheering off from deep waters—“I wouldn’t mind knowing what hold the aged playmate of my late uncle has over you? That bothers me—somewhat.”

“What makes you think....”

“My head makes me think, Melissa—and my heart makes me hurt. How about you? Isn’t that the way your wheels go round? Well ... it’s getting late ... and I’m working to-morrow....”

Melissa asked with a long glance from under lowered lashes—-“Do you really work, Luke?”

He told her quizzically. “Save the Lorelei look for young men with waxed ears, Melissa—! Yes—I really do.”

“But I thought you said—that first day....”

“Ah—the ranching stayed in your mind! Well—I may ranch in my old age—not now, thank you!”

Melissa explained, stripping the petals from a rose she held and crushing them in the palm of one hand, sniffing them delicately and crushing them again.... “I mean—you don’t really need to work ... unless you like.”

“Any one needs to work,” said Kenealy. The laugh left his voice and his eyes. He added grimly: “You women make me sick!”

Melissa looked at him dumbfounded. She had no words to answer the startling bitterness of his change of mood. He said after a moment, still rather sullenly: “Work’s the only thing that keeps your soul alive ... and it’s got to be work that you choose ... not that somebody else chooses for you.”

“Did they want you to stay on the ranch?” asked Melissa softly. She thought she understood, now.

“They did. They don’t see yet why I’m not satisfied to be out in the great open spaces—with my own blooded cattle around me. They can’t understand what I want of a city—while there’s a horse to ride or a trail to follow....”

“Who are They, Luke?”

Kenealy answered that sympathetic murmur slowly, his eyes on Melissa’s face: “They—is my wife.”

“Oh,—I see,” said Melissa. And she spoke slowly, in her turn, stifling a curious qualm of disappointment.

“Make any difference?” he asked her.

“What difference should it make?”

“None—with Fleming coming up. That’s why I hadn’t mentioned it before. My domestic—blunders are—of no particular interest to any one else.”

“Luke—is it just that she wants to be there—and you want to be here?”

“That’s all,” said Kenealy. “And we about to die assure you—it’s enough! We’ve been married six years. The Great Mistake became apparent in six months.... She’s an Island girl, you see—she was born with a passion for the place. I wasn’t. But she’s a Catholic—and I am a strict respecter of other men’s faiths ... so....”

“You mean there’ll never be a divorce?”

“Not unless she turns Mormon—which I think most unlikely. She runs the ranch herself, you see—gives her plenty to do. I keep the Pierian spring flowing in various critical periodicals ... and there you are! I go back from time to time ... à la Ulysses ... a mere formality. We’re both relieved when it’s over. But it pacifies the neighbors.”

“I didn’t guess,” said Melissa, throwing her rose-leaves into the fire—“that you were unhappy.”

“I’m not,” said Luke Kenealy, gathering up his hat and stick and putting out a hand for good-by—“but I could be ... if I had the time.”

CHAPTER XII — PART III

Melissa rather wondered, thinking it over from day to day, just how much intention lay behind the mingled grimness and nonsense of Kenealy’s avowal. Did he mean it to warn her away from any but the lightest sort of relationship? That hurt her pride unspeakably.

Or would have, if she hadn’t felt fairly certain that he had spoken on impulse and from the man’s inescapable desire to lay his sorest trouble in a woman’s lap.

Because for all his flippancy, the kind of airy smartness which was second nature to him (and to most others of his craft at that moment), Melissa sensed an unhealed wound. Kenealy seemed to her like one of those Pierrots, made in Paris and treasured in the photographed bedrooms of cinema stars ... a gay yet wistful creature, with knowledgeable eyes, a smiling mouth, and a tear painted on one cheek.

As for her own secret feeling toward him—whatever it may have been to begin with—a married man had little place, more frankly none at all, in the collection of possible futures which Melissa was making.

A friend—perhaps.

Nothing more!

And that from the most utilitarian standpoint.

Melissa felt rather proud of her cool head and her manageable heart. She moved Kenealy back upon the board to a position of comparative unimportance. She brought Murdock Fleming well forward—ignoring the fact that Kenealy drew her a dozen different ways, while Fleming for all his niceness, his devotion, his eminent eligibility, was never other than a cold contact.

The playwright whom the Marchesa had sapiently suspected of bedroom farce (his name, blackly set forth upon one program and another of consecutive seasons, was Austin Beall) took second place, shortly; perhaps, even before he knew it.

“A creditable field,” was the Marchesa’s satisfied comment. “You will enlarge it, I expect.”

“One meets new people all the time,” said Melissa, with just the right note of indifference. “Mr. Beall—I forgot if I told you—is having a little party for me next week.”

“More drawing-room comedy?” inquired the Marchesa and sniggered in a filmy handkerchief. “Don’t be too amiable, my dear—till you make sure that new play of his attracts more than the critics!”

Melissa said she understood the new play was an established success. But when she went home a little later, she sat down before her fire and hid her face in her hands because that last little bit made her feel indescribably tawdry....

And Melissa didn’t enjoy feeling tawdry. She who had been even in the old drab days, so royally fastidious. Had she no longer any right to resent what affronted and repelled her in the Marchesa’s tutoring?

Was she buying her mess of pottage just a trifle too dear? Late in the day to ask? And nothing to be gained by asking but a bad quarter of an hour for one’s self.

That was the day, on which, with fate smirking over her shoulder, Melissa found the picture in the drawer of the desk.

She considered afterward, looking back along the sort of road she traveled, that for her soul’s need and her heart’s contenting the thing happened none too soon.

It wasn’t, at that,—as a portrait—impressive, in proportion nor artistry.

She was looking for stamps when she found it ... jerking open with reckless fingers, one drawer after another, feeling in shadowy pigeon-holes.... Out of the last and farthest drawer which stuck and gave with disconcerting suddenness, the picture slipped, in a clutter of dusty receipts and lay there ... looking up at her.

A snapshot slightly faded, of a man, down on one knee, with a cigarette between his fingers, looking straight into the eye of the beholder.

In which eye, by platitudinous testimony, was always beauty’s home.

Melissa sat, and stared down at it for a long time without moving.

It gave her back—equally without moving—the quietest straight-shooting regard in the world. Out of level eyes, coolly amused, under level brows. His mouth firmly unsmiling had yet some way a lovable twist ... his chin the arrogant contour which bespeaks a lordly will.... Not, by common standards a pretty man—nor yet a homely one. Something beyond either good looks or the lack of them. Something which called for a wrist with a ruffle and a flickering rapier ... a gray uniform, gold-buttoned, and the crimson of a silken sash—-not that his look was war-like ... only ... gallant, amazingly! Like Cyrano—with a straight nose. Tom Sawyer come to manhood....

Melissa, sitting in that dusky corner by the desk felt the blood sting her cheeks ... just to conjecture the sort of man he would be.

She went back to the couch taking the picture with her.

She studied it at her ease, curled up against the cushions with little-girl abandon. Melissa—whose every pose had come to be considered and contrived. She was sitting there when the door clicked open gently and Kathleen, the friendly Irish maid came in with an armful of fresh towels, for the bathroom.

Melissa had grown rather fond of Kathleen. That soft husky voice, those beaming blue eyes always made the apartment seem pleasantly homelike ... a housekeeper in black silk and hair-wreath brooch could have done no more ... and been no more motherly in doing it.

“Oh, ye’re home, Miss Wayne!” said Kathleen. “I hope I don’t disturb ye. I’m late gettin’ off to-day....”

“Kathleen,” said Melissa abruptly—“I was looking for stamps in the desk and I ran across a handful of old receipts....”

“I’ll just burn ’em,” said Kathleen comfortably. “Things gets left, like that, sometimes....” She patted the topmost towel and smiled at Melissa warmly.

Melissa smiled back in a sweet abstraction—what became of old receipts concerned her at that moment but vaguely. “This—” she held out the snapshot for Kathleen to see ... “this was with them ... some man’s picture. Who is it, Kathleen—do you know?” (An off chance but worth taking.)

Kathleen shifted her towels from one arm to the other and squinted, pleasantly.

“Sure!...” said Kathleen.... “That’s Mister Roderick! Him that’s in Japan, now ... the old lady’s nevvew. He’s a fine man, too—as ever was. When he left the apar-r-tment....”

Melissa caught her breath and leaned to look again.

“He leased this apartment—before I did?” (The Marchesa—with her talk of agents—the sly, secret Marchesa!)

“Leased it!—He owned it. He owns the whole buildin’,” said Kathleen, then added doubtfully—“Ye didn’t know? Maybe I’m talkin’ too much. The old lady was here, the day before Mr. Roderick left—I thought sure ye knew....”

“It doesn’t matter—perhaps, in a way, I did,” Melissa assured her.

“Have ye wood enough fer yer fire?” asked Kathleen.

“Yes, quite,” said Melissa. “Quite—thank you, Kathleen!”

Her fire ... Mr. Roderick’s fire! Mr. Roderick who was not only the Dream Lover come true on a bit of cardboard ... but—here spoke the Marchesa’s voice—an eligible as well, a more than eligible—a desirable—from every standpoint. With a whole gray-stone building of his own ... an air castle on the topmost floor! A man to let oneself go about, indeed!

They were his ties then which had lain in Melissa’s top drawer. Somewhere at least, in that sun-smitten room.

She curled closer among the cushions, smiling down into those pictured eyes, that looked back at her steadily ... compellingly....

“Your desk—” she mused and sighed deliciously, without just knowing why. “Your table ... your lamps ... your couch ... your windows ... your windows!... You used to stand there, didn’t you?—looking across the Park, at dusk, as the lights came on ... all that sky!”

She got up and went to the window—dusk coming on, now—lights, already, in the Plaza’s stately mass, more lights scattered, east, north, south....

“Good night, Miss Wayne,” said Kathleen, coming out of the bedroom.

“Good night, Kathleen,” said Melissa softly. She stood with her hand upon her breast, not turning. She had slipped the picture inside her frock.

An incurable romanticist, Melissa!

CHAPTER XIII

Following the finding of Mister Roderick’s picture in the drawer of Mister Roderick’s desk, Melissa spent an afternoon with the Marchesa.

She had her qualms, did Melissa, before she set sail. Avowedly, the visit possessed one object—pure sociability. Indirectly, of course, one purposed to obtain whatever information concerning nephews in general—Mister Roderick in particular—the Marchesa might be jockeyed into imparting.

And, of course, as Melissa very well knew, the Marchesa couldn’t be jockeyed into anything. She was all too apt to discern at a glance whatever ulterior motive a guest might have about her person and proceed from discernment to dissection and downright destruction of that same.

Sniggling meantime cruelly but enjoyably behind a lacy shred of handkerchief, a little painted fan, or some other entirely feminine and so incontestable weapon.

Melissa, setting forth, with Mister Roderick’s picture, a small faded square of paper crisp above her heart (her sense of humor had declined so far) was careful to wear her thickest frock ... a dark one, buttoning smartly at the base of her lovely throat.

Through any less careful covering, the Marchesa’s keen eye might readily observe....

It simply didn’t bear thinking about—the form the Marchesa’s observation would take!

That thin contemptuous mirth ... the lift of those scant penciled eyebrows! Melissa loathed herself for being afraid, and loathing lessened fear not at all.

She went, nevertheless; stopped at a florist’s on the way and presented violets, dewily fragrant, by way of an opening wedge.

“Violets!” commented the Marchesa doubtfully. “Very sweet!... Anna, put these in the Venetian glass before that picture of Leftenant Carmichael ...” she added when Anna had departed for water to fill the Venetian glass before depositing the offering therein ... “—one of the most charming men I ever knew—poor Hubert! Killed in the Hazara expedition. They sent me back a miniature he was wearing at the time—”

“Of you?” asked Melissa, unexpectedly encouraged. She fingered the button nearest her heart.

“Who else?” inquired the Marchesa, with a flicker of annoyance. “Set in seed pearls. Not bad. One of those rose-in-the-hair-and-tulle-around-the-shoulder things ... impossible to date, if the hair’s just simply done.” She emerged from a moment of revery to comment abruptly: “Flowers, from one woman to another, always a sign of chicanery. Greeks bearing gifts. What is your object, Melissa?”

“I—I saw them in a window,” said Melissa, unpleasantly startled.

“I have no doubt you did,” returned the Marchesa, regarding her closely and effecting a slight grimace. “I didn’t ask you where you got them ... they seem to be fairly fresh.... I asked you why you gave them to me. However—we won’t go into that. You’d hardly tell and I’m not feeling well enough to get it out of you.”

Melissa murmured, filled with a mute chill rage, that she was sorry the Marchesa should be indisposed.

“A touch of indigestion,” explained the Marchesa crabbedly. “My fool of a doctor has put me on a diet ... soft eggs and milk toast ... bah! I’m no octogenarian!”

When Melissa only looked her sympathy....

“Well—” said the Marchesa and kicked away the footstool, covered in petit point to match her winged chair,—“I said—I’m no octogenarian...! Don’t sit there like a mummy—without agreeing with me—!”

“It seemed so obvious,” offered Melissa, stiffly.

“That I am—or I’m not?” snapped the Marchesa.

At her darkest, she veered like a weather-cock—broke into a cracked cadence of laughter.

“Never mind! I feel better—for having annoyed you. It worries me ... that swanlike poise of yours. I want to throw things at you—just to see if you’d scuttle ... like all the rest of ’em....”

“I have no doubt I could—scuttle—” said Melissa ... “if that seemed necessary.”

She rose to go, filled with a cold distaste for the overcrowded room, the mincing French prints on the walls, the small, rouged, perfumed withered creature before her....

“Sit down!” said the Marchesa crossly. “You haven’t been here ten minutes. I don’t mind your bringing me violets—if you’d just say what it’s about....”

“I have a fitting—” lied Melissa.

“Oh, sit down, do! I’m so bored I could scream!” said the Marchesa—and Melissa sat down.

She had, after all, to render unto Cæsar value received.

“Now,” said the Marchesa ... “Anna—put another log on the fire—I haven’t been warm to-day!... Now ... how about Kenealy? And the person with the rock-bound name?—Has the impresario given his party—and....”

“Not an impresario—if you mean Austin Beall, he is a playwright,” corrected Melissa coolly. She sat back in her chair and felt a faint influx of confidence. In the rôle of Scheherazade she was at least accustomed. “Luke Kenealy,” she said, “has a wife.”

The Marchesa did not gasp. She merely gave vent to an odd shrill sound of amusement and touched a silvered curl above one ear.

“I’m not surprised,” she said. “How did you find it out—so soon?”

“He told me,” said Melissa. “I thought perhaps I’d mentioned it before.”

“You knew quite well you had done nothing of the sort,” said the terrible Marchesa suavely—“no matter! ... it doesn’t surprise me. And I’m not disappointed. He’s not what you’re looking for—Kenealy isn’t. Very good material for an affair ... but nothing to tie to. His sort of man makes a charming lover but a frightfully unsatisfactory husband.”

“He’s married,” repeated Melissa stubbornly.

“He’s not living with his wife, is he?” pointed out the Marchesa and gave a little snort of triumph.

“I wonder,” said Melissa with an effective touch of wistfulness, “just what sort of man does make a—satisfactory—husband?”

“My dear,” said the Marchesa blithely—“No man does ... because there is no such thing. However—like alchemists, trying to make gold from baser metals, we poor women continue our hopeless research....” she spoiled her own eloquence with a snicker and concluded suddenly ... “Personally I have always preferred research to discovery ... it lasts longer.”

“But there must be men who—last,” insisted Melissa. She could feel the picture smooth against her flesh. Without shutting her eyes she could see those other eyes, clear and clean and straightforward—smiling a little, disconcertingly cool.

“Oh, I dare say!” conceded the Marchesa, frankly swallowing a yawn,—“men like your Murdock what’s-his-name ... men like my nephew....”

Melissa’s heart plunged out of time. She said, acutely conscious of a racing pulse ... “Is your nephew—married?”

The Marchesa looked at her sharply, sniffed and applied her handkerchief.

“That’s the first time you’ve ever shown the remotest interest in Roderick ... what’s happened, now?”

No good bandying words with the Marchesa! Truth might as well climb out of her well first as last.

“Why, Kathleen—” said Melissa languidly, to cover a vast uneasiness—“Kathleen—the maid who....”

“I know all about Kathleen,” interrupted the Marchesa with a touch of pleasurable anticipation ... “don’t tell me Roderick’s been making love to her!”

“Oh, no—no!” cried Melissa.

“Well—well!” said the Marchesa, sitting forward in her chair and peering closely into Melissa’s face, “and suppose he had! Would that keep you awake at night? You’ve never seen him—have you?”

Melissa sat silent, panic in her breast. If the Marchesa knew of the picture ... but what could she know of a faded old snapshot, forgotten in a drawer of her nephew’s desk? Somehow—Melissa couldn’t quite bring herself to speak ... it seemed so secret a thing ... so sweetly her own, in a world of sordid reasonings and disillusionments. So long as no one knew ... sanctuary was somehow in that picture—for Melissa....

“I say you’ve never seen him, have you?” insisted the Marchesa rudely. “My good girl—don’t sit there mooning over nothing! You can’t have seen him—he left for Japan a week before you....”

Melissa caught her cue: “Oh, no—” she said quickly. “I’ve never met him, of course ... but Kathleen happened to speak, a day or so ago, of his owning the apartment....”

“Very discursive ... I suppose she added that he owned the entire building?”

“Yes—she did,” said Melissa.

“And occupied the apartment before you.”

“Yes,” said Melissa. “I—gathered that.”

“Ruth,” commented the Marchesa, “among the alien corn! Gathered is just the word. So we add Roderick to your list of possible sheaves, now—do we?”

Melissa retorted coldly—and listened breathless for the answer. “He is in Japan—is he not?”

“Yes,” said the Marchesa, “—oh, yes! But he wasn’t born there—and wouldn’t deliberately die there, I think. He’ll be coming back—in about a year.”

“I see,” said Melissa.

“We both see,” chuckled the Marchesa. “Eye to eye, Melissa!—Well—that’s enough about Roderick ... what about the Murdock man? I fancied you were making some headway there. Flowers twice a week, you said? What kind of flowers?”

Melissa wrinkled her smooth white forehead: “Chrysanthemums ... autumn leaves ... and the last time orchids.”

“Wait for roses,” counseled the Marchesa with business-like brevity. “When a man’s in love he sends smelly flowers—not showy ones. Never take orchids seriously—except from a poor man. What does he say on the card?”

“Usually the same thing,” Melissa admitted—she quoted, flushing, in spite of herself ... “‘Thinking of you’ ... ‘Hello, Melissa’ ... ‘see you soon’ ... something like that.”

The Marchesa adjusted the black velvet band about her neck with coquettish finger-tips. “What my nephew calls stalling,” she observed dispassionately. “You haven’t quite got him yet, I should say ... don’t take him for granted!... At his stage that would be fatal.”

“I never take any man for granted,” returned Melissa haughtily.

“No?” said the Marchesa with thoughtful interest—“Then, my dear, you should be stuffed and put in a Museum of Natural History with a card to that effect on one ankle—it’s so unusual, you know.”

For the second time within the hour, Melissa rose to go. She could not endure the Marchesa’s baiting. It left her cold with fury—and quite defenseless. Until the shank of the following night when she was apt to wake and evolve, lying in the darkness, endless conversation in which she bore the brighter part. Long cut-and-thrust dialogues in which the Marchesa wilted and sank into silence before Melissa’s incredible repartee.

That sort of thing, however, although vastly consoling, later on, did one little good at the moment of contact. Flight and flight alone, sufficed.

“Must you go?” asked the Marchesa with an air. And added in disgust—“You’re so ridiculously sensitive!”

“I shall be late—I’m dining out,” said Melissa, with an air of her own—charmingly distant.

“Dining out?... With whom? You hadn’t told me.”

Again the terrier at the rat-hole ... the setter, pointing a bird!

“With Murdock,” said Melissa and set her teeth till she should be well away from further questioning.

“Ah-ha!” said the Marchesa slowly, nodding like a mandarin on a mantelshelf. “I wish I could go with you! Do you let him do the ordering, Melissa? Always let them order for you. Men hate a woman who knows just what she wants for dinner. It destroys their manhood at the roots. And if he mixes the salad, watch him as if he were Chopin creating a nocturne....”

She seemed to forget Melissa completely. She sat with her too-pointed chin in her shriveled pink palm and stared across the room at the violets in the Venetian glass before Leftenant Carmichael’s faded splendor. “The night he left London,” said the Marchesa, a little crooked smile playing about her mouth, “—we dined at his rooms. It was most indiscreet. There were roses in all the vases. He was up to his ears in debt.... I wore a gown he adored—Chantilly flounces over ivory satin. He put a rose in my hair ... and I gave him the miniature.... We had grouse from his father’s estate in Scotland ... claret and strawberries, an old French recipe....”

All at once the crooked smile vanished. A spark leaped in the faded eyes. “I’m having a poached egg, to-night—” the Marchesa said bitterly ... “a poached egg and boiled custard ... that’s life!”

She swore—but always in the purest French, as was her custom.

Melissa slipped away. The air outside was dank and biting. Twilight coming on. Mists rising from the river.

It was heaven to know that high place waiting—the couch before the fire, shadows drowsing on the walls.

Melissa signaled a prowling taxi. It bore her home all too slowly. She thought as she went: “If he were there ... it’s his, too, isn’t it?—after all!”

CHAPTER XIV

Luke Kenealy took Melissa to Austin Beall’s party—under protest.

“I know,” he said—in the car, on the way to Beall’s house—“you met him in my apartment. I know he’s interesting—he’s got a good line and a better cellar—but I don’t like him—for you—and that’s that!”

“Which shall I avoid—his line or his cellar?” asked Melissa in a docile voice with an impertinent whiplash of laughter.

“No fooling,” said Luke Kenealy, “he’s not your kind, my dear! As for the cellar ... if I thought you needed supervision on that score—I wouldn’t be taking you out. I may not be clever but I know what I like—and I don’t like bacchanalian females. Vine-leaves on the hat if you will—but not in the hair. It isn’t pretty. It blurs the complexion and the morale. Both of which are most important in a lady....”

“Don’t be silly,” said Melissa with languid sweetness. “You know I never drink anything at all. I don’t like it.”

“Your control sometimes terrifies me,” he told her gravely.

“Then it is his line you’re afraid of—for me?”

Kenealy laughed. He took Melissa’s slim-fingered cool white hand, lying idle on her silver lap and kissed it lightly. When they had passed beneath a streetlamp and into comparative obscurity, he kissed it once more and gave it back to her.

“Beall’s old at the game,” he said pleasantly. “You’re not. I think if you’ll forgive my mentioning it, you’re about to burn your fingers. He collects burnt fingers, so I’ve been told. Has whole rows of ’em hanging up in his work-shop. Some with rings and some without. New kind of Bluebeard—d’y’see?”

“Luke—are you jealous?” asked Melissa gently.

“Perhaps,” said Kenealy, “but it doesn’t affect my eyesight. Nor my memory. I’ve known Austin a long time. I knew his first wife—and his second—if that doesn’t constitute auld acquaintance—what does?”

“Two wives!” cried Melissa, forgetting to be a woman of the world who accepted such things as she found them.

“Two wives. Count them! One dead—one divorced....”

“I hadn’t known—not that it matters.”

“Stay with that point of view and see where it gets you,” Kenealy advised her.

The taxi slid down Fifth Avenue with interminable waits for cross-town traffic, sharp bursts of speed in between.

“Are we late?” murmured Melissa.

“Not late enough,” said Kenealy. With, for him, incredible earnestness, he added—“I’m trying to tell you—this’ll be a wild party—and you’ve got no business on it ... you’d be a good bit better off at home, with a bound volume of—something safe and improving. Le Rire—for example.”

“Why, Luke—the party is being given for me!”

“I know,” said Kenealy stubbornly ... “—and you put cheese in a trap when you entertain a mouse ... very well! I’ll be around some fine morning in less than a month to say What Did I Tell You?”

“How absurd—what could he possibly....”

“You’re under the microscope—at the very least—if you enjoy that.”

“You mean—his plays? But, Luke, he’s never done anything about my kind of woman.”

“Stick around next winter. See him try something new!” said Kenealy, and rode the rest of the way in silence.

Beall met them at the door, put a hand on Luke’s shoulder and caught Melissa’s fingers close. He had a charming grin, frank as a schoolboy’s but his eyes were too light and exceedingly wary. Also, his silver-gray hair, brushed back from a splendid forehead in a stubbornly rippling, close-cut cap gave him an odd suggestion of classic immobility—which the full, smooth lips, deep-dented at the corners, were far from bearing out.

“Thought you’d thrown me over!” he said warmly. Somehow, in a moment he had gotten Luke out of the way and was taking Lissa up the stairs to the dressing-room, with a hand on her arm, an approving whisper at her ear.

“Look like a million, Lissa!”

“I’m so glad,” said Melissa coolly. She faintly smiled, in a way she had found appealed to him. It inferred deeper sophistication than she possessed but she hoped he hadn’t guessed it and for the matter of that she rather hoped in time to acquire such sophistication as she needed.

She told him softly—“You said you liked this frock.”

“I adore it!” said Beall. “Don’t be long, will you?—the party’s no good without you.”

The feel of his fingers closing on her arm, lingered while she sat before the mirror, running a comb through the soft dark wave of her hair, retouching cheeks and lips. She looked rather lovely and recognized the fact with a physical tremor of exultation. A long way to come, from the Melissa of Sixty-third Street and the office ... from the Melissa of a haberdashery salesman’s abortive attentions ... the Melissa of hole-and-corner tea-rooms—of stockings washed out at night and hung over chair-backs to dry ... from all that fell into the shadows out of which this Melissa emerged, radiant, luminous, poised....

The other women chattered in high, affected voices, laying aside their gorgeous furs and brocades, smoking feverishly while they waited their turns at the mirror. Melissa took her time, stood up at last, quite satisfied, picked up handkerchief and bag—

“Never smoke, do you?” suggested a slender blonde person in vivid scarlet with hair cut close to a round young head, and a matadorish curl at each ear. Her name was Em’ly Armistead—at least that was what Melissa had heard her called, one place and another—and she cherished openly an inordinate affection for Luke Kenealy, which was why she always singled out Melissa to talk to in dressing-rooms and on stairways.

“Luke adores you,” she frequently said.

And Melissa usually replied: “Oh, do you think so?—We’re fearfully good friends.” Which seemed in a way to alleviate Em’ly’s uneasiness where Luke was concerned.

She offered to-night, going down the wide shallow stairs with her hand through Melissa’s arm: “You came with Luke, didn’t you? He looks black as your hat. Whatever have you done to him? Did you quarrel—coming up?”

“I never quarrel,” said Melissa coolly.

Em’ly Armistead bored her. Most women bored her. She remembered just at that moment a saying of the Marchesa’s ... “I have never sincerely liked any woman—except my mother.”

Melissa had never sincerely liked any woman—yet. She barely remembered her mother.

“You’re so cold!” objected Em’ly and gave Melissa’s arm a little squeeze.

Melissa withdrew it gently but definitely.

“To-night’s going to be good,” went on Em’ly, quite unrebuffed.

“So Luke says,” murmured Melissa.

“Prob’ly why he’s so black. He hates a wild party—and yet—he’d be marvelous,” sighed Em’ly wistfully—“if he’d once let himself go. Is it because he doesn’t want to—or doesn’t dare?”

“How should I know?”

“He’s sweeter to you than I’ve ever seen him. He’s been running around with this crowd for a couple of years, and you’re the first woman he’s ever seemed really to care about. You know, Melissa—he’s one of the biggest men in town—at his kind of thing. None of the others come near him. He’s had marvelous offers from syndicates.”

“He doesn’t do—anything for the movies?” asked Melissa with careful indifference.

“Luke!—For the movies? Somebody’s been spoofing you!” cried Em’ly. She added, pausing at the foot of the stairway and putting out a hand to Beall who turned to meet them, “If it were Austin—Austin would be marvelous in Hollywood ... he’s just the type!”

“Let my past alone!” retorted Beall good-humoredly. “I’m hitching my wagon to a star, now—” he drew Melissa down with a smile and a touch.

“—Then all I say is—the star had better hitch itself in heaven!” said Em’ly with a burst of derisive laughter and took her scarlet gown and her fair head and her long amber cigaret-holder off into the heart of the party.

CHAPTER XV

It wasn’t, at that, and on the surface, the orgy Luke had seemed to apprehend. A very average sort of party, Melissa thought, dropping down on a cushioned window-seat somewhere about one or two o’clock, with her eyes faintly heavy, her feet beginning to long for a pair of mules instead of their shining silver slippers.

Since dinner the rooms had been crowded with ardent dancers. People dropping in all evening. People coming, people going. Music never stopping. A babel of laughter and shrill voices over deep. A riot of color and sound and scent. But all parties were that—as Melissa had come to believe. Just foam on the crest of the wave. One said and did and allowed a great deal one wouldn’t ordinarily have considered saying and doing and allowing. There was something in that muted jazz—something infinitely insidious ... indubitably also there were other things....

Melissa hated a silly laugh. And Em’ly’s laugh—for one—was apt to be recklessly silly—after midnight.

Luke had been rather out of sight most of the time—not dancing much. Murdock had dogged Melissa’s footsteps. He was coming toward her, now, his face a trifle flushed, his eyes a burning blue in that clean weather-beaten face.

“Oh, here you are,” he cried fatuously. “Been looking all over the shop for you. Care to dance?”

“I’m so tired,” said Melissa in a plaintive drawl. “I want to go home.”

“Let me take you!” he suggested instantly.

“Sorry—I came with Luke.”

“Let me find him for you.”

“If you only would!”

But he didn’t. He sat down beside her instead and played with a spray of green buds on her gown. “Been a good party—hasn’t it?”

Did all the world say the same stupid thing over and over in the same stupid words?

“A wonderful party,” agreed Melissa.

“I hate parties,” he told her unexpectedly ... “never see anything of you. Always a lot of other birds around. Why can’t we have a party of our own sometime?”

“I shouldn’t mind,” said Melissa and smiled—the least slow flicker on lips and eyes.

It spurred him as she meant it should.

“Tell you what,” he leaned forward and put an arm along the window-sill behind her. “Tell you what—let’s have a house-party—not too big—next week—no, next week’s pretty well dated up—week after next, say—I’ve got a place just outside of Baltimore ... nice old farm ... we could drive down, you and I....”

“Nice!” said Melissa indolently. “Only—week after next’s no good for me. I’m fearfully busy. Until ...” she sighed—“let me see!—Really, Murdock—I couldn’t make it before the first of next month.”

“Couldn’t you?” asked Murdock, frankly disappointed. “Well—save that, then. Is it a promise?”

“Why—yes—I think so,” said Melissa. “Now—do find Luke for me—there’s a dear boy! I want to go home!”

“You’re the only woman I know that ever does,” said Murdock reverently. He departed beaming.

Beall happened along, however, before Murdock’s big shoulders were out of the doorway.

“What’s this?” he inquired with deep concern. “The Lady of the Evening, all by herself? How come?”

“I’m going home,” said Melissa—“in just a moment—Murdock’s gone to find Luke. I’m getting sleepy.” She lowered drowsy eyelids.

“Murdock,” said Beall very gently, “can take Luke and keep him amused till I’ve had one more dance....”

“I’m tired,” said Melissa sweetly. “I don’t want to dance any more.”

“A last cigaret, then....”

“You forget—I don’t smoke.”

“Nor drink. Strange woman you are, Melissa—to be running around the world, to-day. What’s your outlet? Have you got a big sin? You’re so scornful of all the little ones.”

“I’m not scornful—they just don’t amuse me,” said Melissa and hid a yawn—not quite.

“That’s what makes you so dangerous.”

“Am I?”

“Aren’t you?”

“No-o ...” said Melissa.... “I wish—I were!”

“Well—all that you wish comes true,” said Beall with a short laugh. “Ever read a book, called ‘The High Place’?”

“I—don’t think so. Who wrote it?”

“Mr. Cabell of Virginia. I’ll give it to you. It’s all about a man who got his heart’s desire ... and learned better.”

“It must be rather depressing.”

“On the contrary—it’s very encouraging. Showing how silly it is to dream dreams—when the real thing’s all around you—waiting....”

“Oh!” said Melissa rather doubtfully.

“Come along—I’ll get it for you,” said Beall. “Take it home with you—read yourself to sleep.” He drew Melissa to her feet. They made a devious way between dancers to the library at the farther end of the house. “This is my work-shop. You’ve never been in this room before,” said Beall.

There were books all around the walls, a fire in a deep fireplace; above the mantelshelf a glowing yet somber Zuloaga of a black-haired woman in a full-skirted black gown, with pearls in her ears, a sweetly treacherous smile on her mouth, a little dog under one arm....

“That’s not bad,” said Melissa, tilting her head to look at it.

“No, my dear,” said Beall with an irrepressible touch of amusement—“that’s not half bad! I’m glad you like it. Sit down—” He put one hand on the back of a deep chair and shoved it nearer the fire.

“Thanks,” said Melissa—“I think not. Just give me the book and I’ll go. I’m really determined.”

“In that case—” said Beall with a shrug. He prowled along his shelves, one hand in his pocket, the other touching and shifting odd volumes as he came to them. Melissa stood before the fire and looked up at the woman with the dog. She had said what seemed to her the properly casual thing to say. But she had never seen a Zuloaga before. She didn’t as a matter of fact know that it was a Zuloaga and the rich darkness of it, its almost sinister beauty, moved her like music.

Not the sort of music that came dulled by intervening walls from the other part of the house ... not that throbbing, wooing, insensate clamor ... but music of woods and brasses subtly commingled; of stateliness and struggle and heartbreak, divinely blent ... she stood and gazed, rapt in a delicious wonder.

“Here you are!” said Beall, returning, with the object of his search in hand.

“Thank you so much,” said Melissa. Her eyes coming back to him, were starry.

“You lovely thing!” said Beall huskily, caught her close, and kissed her on the mouth—again and again.

As if an animal had broken covert, green sunlit quiet covert, and leaped at one ... suddenly.

Melissa stood unresponsive as a woman made of clay—so that after a moment he released her, stared at her and laughed, abruptly.

“Sorry!” he muttered—but it took very little acuteness to see that he was nothing of the sort, only puzzled—and rather curious.

Shaken with disgust, cold with anger she took the book from the table where he had dropped it, and turned away.

“Please never do that again,” she said icily. “I loathe being kissed.”

Beall moved a chair from her path with courtesy a trifle mocking. “Forgive me,” he pleaded—“but I wonder, Melissa—if that isn’t merely protective coloration?”

(“You’re under the microscope,” Luke had warned her ... and Luke had known!)

Nothing in Melissa’s experience helped her to answer Beall’s eyes and his skeptical smile. Her extraordinarily self-cloistered existence before the Marchesa’s experimenting had not included young men who kissed one—that way.

From current fiction and drama she knew that outcries of righteous indignation on the part of young women thus affronted had gone, so to speak, out of style.

Yet she couldn’t, for the sake of her own lacerated pride, allow him so to close the episode—allow him so sharp a last word.

She thought of the Marchesa—she thought of what the Marchesa would say—pausing in the doorway, with her head back, her eyelids scornfully lowered it came to Melissa—as if the Marchesa had whispered in her ear—the way to wound her man deepest, to make him smart the cruelest. She launched her shaft with a steady hand.

“I can’t forgive you,” she drawled ... “for being so clumsy.”

And seeing him redden in surprise, she knew herself a marksman.

CHAPTER XVI

Luke, saying good night at Melissa’s threshold, looked at her hard, shook his head and sighed deeply.

“Fresh as the mythical daisy,” he commented. “Don’t look as if you’d ever had a jolt in your life. I take it I did Cassandra for nothing. Austin was the Perfect Playmate and no more. Well ... I stick to my story—nevertheless!”

“Good night, Luke,” said Melissa softly.

He kissed the tips of her outstretched fingers: “Good night, Lissa! You may keep your thoughts but I’d give a penny or so to know your dreams....”

“Wouldn’t you!” said Melissa ... and closed the door on him very gently.

She was telling no one either thoughts or dreams ... no one, that is, in the flesh.

All the way home from Beall’s house—where the party still raged, with unabated enthusiasm—Melissa had sat in a kind of tense abstraction, going over and over, the things Beall had said, the things he had looked and the last thing of all which he had startlingly and disconcertingly done before the Zuloaga lady in his library.

“If only I had some one to talk to about it!” fretted Melissa in silence. “Some one who could help....”

Not Luke—after his justifiable and disregarded advice.

Not the Marchesa—Melissa shuddered to fancy the Marchesa’s malicious amusement over Melissa’s discomfiture.

There wasn’t anywhere in the world any one who really cared—what happened to Melissa—nor how she came out of her maze.

Nobody in the world. Loneliness unbelievable!

She flung her cloak on a chair and lit the lamp at the farther end of the couch beside a bowl of Murdock’s roses. He had gotten to roses, eventually—deep heavy-headed red ones, which was more than one might have expected, from him, florally speaking.

Three o’clock! The world was still as death. Hardly a sound came up from the street below. The lamp made a shallow golden circle—on the couch, on a bit of the rug.

Melissa touched a match to the fire laid waiting on the hearth and curled herself up against cushions, bare arms hugging her silver knees, dark eyes fixed on the flames.

She was hurt—she was sore—she was shamed, in some fair inner place of her soul, by Beall’s embrace—that fierce and undesired contact, which had nothing to do with love—or affection—or even friendship—

“I’m not even sure I should want that sort of thing from a man I—cared for ...” she mused unhappily—“Only—perhaps—from a man I cared for—it wouldn’t seem—that sort of thing....”

For the first time she began to doubt her ability to go through with the venture she had undertaken. “There isn’t a chance in a thousand that the man who can give me the—material—stuff I want ... can give me ... love ... as well. That’s too much of a fairy-tale! And I don’t know if I can pay—for the rest.”

She didn’t know when the eyes of the man in the picture came between her and the fire. She seemed presently to have been looking into those eyes for a long time and not at the singing blaze at all.

She seemed to be talking to him—and not to herself—his voice was not strange ... she might have been hearing it for years.

She had of course been wearing the picture about, in the craziest way, over her heart—looking at it long moments and dreaming over it—the room held echoes of him perhaps....

Kathleen had said, “Mister Roderick’s been living here, now—oh, eight or nine years ... ever since he finished college. He’s that fond of the place and no wonder.”

And no wonder! Melissa’s beloved room. Her air-castle.

Silent in that enchanted lamplight she knew what he would be saying; with a slight quizzical smile, with a faint indulgent scowl: “My good child, you’re playing with fire. What did you expect? He’s a man who knows—as much as any man knows—about women. You know nothing at all about men—except from books. Inside that pretty shell of yours....”

Melissa fancied herself crying—a small breathless interruption—“You do think it’s a pretty shell?”

And Mister Roderick replying—casually, with a teasing smile—“Oh, it will pass ... I’d have let you know if I hadn’t liked it. Well—as I was saying, from a worldly standpoint, you’re ridiculously—innocent.”

Melissa retorted—always good at a verbal thrust in imaginary conversation—“You like me to be innocent—don’t you?”

“There’s always one man who likes a woman to be innocent. But even he knows she’s safer with a little wisdom in her pocket.”

“I didn’t know he was going to kiss me.”

“You might have known it—going off into his work-shop with him—away from the rest of the crowd. You knew what he was like. Luke Kenealy had told you. You knew he was attracted by you. You could feel it. Women can. No, no, Melissa—I’m not at all sorry for you! You asked for trouble—and you got it. One good thing—you’ll know better next time. You know now, he isn’t a prospect—only a prospector.”

“Please!—that’s horrible!”

“Spades, with no bows on the handles! You were gunning for him. He was gunning for you. He drew first—that’s all. Serves you darned well right for not selecting your opponents with a little more intelligence.”

“That’s—sordid.”

“So is what you’re doing. And that outrageous old woman, my aunt, is making it worse all the time. What’s the good of lying to yourself? It’s a soft berth you want....”

“It isn’t—that isn’t the thing I want most!”

“You don’t want a thing most—when you’re willing to sell it to buy something else.”

“I want beauty—I’d walk through fire to get it.”

“You’re fooling yourself, Melissa—there isn’t any beauty without love. Look at a sunset, the day you’ve lost your lover—you won’t see the rose and gold any more than a blind man. The world you walk in will have beauty washed out of it by the tears you’ve shed. That’s not a phrase—that’s the truth. Your eyes will be out of focus. Let alone your eyes! You won’t be keyed to beauty—and for you it won’t be there!”

The fire, a matter of green wood, doubtless, began to smoke. Flame sank to ember and smudge. All in a moment a thing of life became a thing of dissolution and dark unloveliness. Melissa, warm among her cushions, shivered as if a twitch-nosed rabbit had gone over her grave.

“What about the broken-hearted poets who’ve made the sweetest songs?”

“They were painting from memory, old dear! It’s lovely to look at—but painful to do. Now run along to bed—and forget about Beall! You scored at the last....”

“I shan’t tell Luke, and have him crowing.”

“You needn’t tell any one but me.”

“If the Marchesa asks—I promised. That’s really all she gets for what she’s spending on me.”

“Looking back into life—over your shoulder! Tell her, then. It doesn’t matter.”

Melissa was asleep before the fire died.

She had no need to dream—asleep.

CHAPTER XVII

Eliminating Beall, then, as seemed necessary, or at least advisable after that much-revealing moment in the company of Messrs. Cabell and Zuloaga, Melissa centered her attention closely and with considerable result on Fleming, who, the Marchesa insisted, was in any case by far the most desirable young man on Melissa’s horizon.

“Artists—and poets and playwrights—all that tricky lot—” this was the Marchesa’s pronouncement, “make very fine suitors but doubtful providers ... of anything but excitement.” She added that she had loved more than one such in her time and was speaking not without notes. She said she had had poems written to her and pictures painted of her ... and all it ever procured her was a little unpleasant notoriety.

“One may love a stockbroker in comparative privacy,” concluded the Marchesa, not without reason—“but women who bestow their affections upon Genius have usually found themselves before the thing was over—fairly conspicuous.”

Melissa said merely that she hadn’t found Beall as interesting as she expected.

To which the Marchesa replied that in that case it might be well to expunge him and go on to the next.

“No good wasting time,” said the Marchesa, “on a man who can’t keep one amused before marriage.... It’s asking too much of oneself to take on such a handicap. I think you had better—yes—I think you had better bring this Fleming to see me....”

Melissa writhed but agreed.

“I shall be able to tell everything—the moment I look at him,” the Marchesa assured her.

Melissa mentioned the projected house-party. It might be rather nice she said.

Instantly the Marchesa became avid for detail.

“Where is the place—would you go by train—or by motor? There would be how many others? You must have an especial wardrobe ... these country-house parties ... I have been on many a one in England ... unlimited opportunity ... the most delightful intimacy, under the safest circumstances. Melissa—I have an inspiration—une idée lumineuse!”

“Yes?” said Melissa politely.

She was by no means enamored of the Marchesa’s inspirations. In fact she rather shrank from the crooked miles they might wander.

“You shall bring him to see me—and I shall be asked to go with you!”

Worse than Melissa had dreamed! She barely controlled her features.

“Of course—if he did—that would be charming.”

“If he did!” said the Marchesa and laughed like an aged imp, toying with the pitchfork of its betters. “—But he will! Do you suppose I cannot arrange a thing as simple as that? I have been the Egeria of more than one statesman, Melissa—(not Americans, I may add!) I was born with a flair for diplomacy.”

Melissa, finding herself up a blind alley said that she would be very happy to bring Murdock to call ... and did, some four days later.

He went, like a lamb to the slaughter, being distinctly flattered at Melissa’s suggesting the expedition, and only requesting certain necessary information before starting forth.

“Is she an aunt of yours, Melissa? Some sort of relation or other?”

“No, Murdock—she’s nothing to me at all. Except”—said Melissa, swallowing a slight obstruction in her conscience—“a very dear old friend.”

“Oh—I see! Just wanted to know so as not to pull any boners. If she’s a very dear old friend we’ll have to be pretty nice to her—eh?”

“I wish you would!”

“I like old ladies,” said Murdock warmly. “Something sort of sweet about ’em. I like those kinds of cap-things they wear—mostly on the stage, of course. And I like to see ’em knit. This home-and-mother stuff gets me every time.”

Melissa thought of the Marchesa’s invincible gray curls, thought of her rouged and polished finger-nails (clutching a bit of knitting!)—of the unbending Cupid’s bow of her skillfully painted mouth ... and knew a moment’s wild despair.

“The Marchesa’s a trifle—foreign—she lived so long abroad, you know,” she offered, without much hope, however, of suggesting the surprise in store for him.

As a final attempt at sparing the young man’s filial illusions, she told the Marchesa on the day before the call:

“Murdock is rather a—conventional person. I’m afraid he expects you to—wear a lace cap ... and all that.”

“Indeed!” said the Marchesa snippily—“You must have given him a pretty notion of my age!”

Melissa looked—and felt—exceedingly unhappy.

“Does he also expect me to totter around with a stick and wear a cameo cart-wheel under my chin?” inquired the Marchesa acidly.

Melissa knowing that such was very likely Murdock’s friendly expectation, shut her lips tight and said no more on the subject.

When the day arrived, she rang the bell of the Marchesa’s apartment with a finger, icy in its glove, and turned to Murdock’s ardent murmur of “Gosh—you look beautiful, this afternoon!”—the vaguest nervous tremor of a smile.

“Now, do be nice, Murdock!” she implored him.

“I tell you I like ’em,” said Murdock soothingly.

Then the door opened, under Anna’s fingers, upon a new heaven, so to speak, and a new earth—striking Melissa speechless.

Not a picture on the walls, except for a print of Reynolds’ Innocence, all white muslin and blue ribbon, above the mantelshelf. Gone all the faded French naughtinesses in their faded gilt frames. Gone all the autographed and whiskered young men. Remained the Sèvres bowl—filled with violets—it is true—but set chastely in the middle of a little table. Remained the chaise longue piled with cushions; the piano, Spanish-shawled; the tea-table, Dresden-cupped and silver-laden ... but lacking the pageant of nineteenth century manhood which had formerly ambuscaded mantelshelf and wall, the place seemed now merely a calm and gracious interior, the retreat of an elderly gentlewoman....

Casting about in search of whom, Melissa’s incredulous eyes came to rest upon the Marchesa.

Such a Marchesa! It took two looks, and then two more, to be at all sure of her, who sat before them smiling gently, holding out a fragile, ringless hand in token of welcome.

The lace cap was there—on hair parted in the middle, brushed smooth, and silverly shining. The cameo brooch was there, fastening a fichu of exquisite yellowed lace, upon a passionless dove-gray breast ... the black velvet neckband was there, too ... imperishable, apparently ... but it, like the Spanish shawl and the violets, now took character from its surroundings, suggesting only delicate feminine vanity, pleasantly surviving the years.

“Ah, Melissa,” said the Marchesa—actually the note of a grandmother—“I am so glad to see you, dear. It’s very sweet of you to find time for an old woman like me ... and this is Mr. Fleming of whom I have heard so much?”

Melissa said it was. She found herself incapable of adding anything to the presentation.

She watched while Murdock, bending reverently over the Marchesa’s fingers, sat himself almost at once, figuratively speaking, at the Marchesa’s old-lady slippered feet.

“This is a great privilege,” said Murdock, with endearing simplicity.

“I do so like to have young people around me,” the Marchesa assured him. “Melissa, my dear, will you ring for tea?”

And at tea she completed an easy conquest. Such a Marchesa—and such a tea! Plum-cake ... out of an English novel. Half a dozen sorts of sandwich. Cream to be cut with a knife—very nearly....

Murdock ate enormously. The Marchesa served him like a mother.

“Ah—do let me give you some of this—it’s my own recipe!”

“I know you’re a wonderful housekeeper,” cried Murdock, his soul in his eyes—and in his mouth.

“I love my home,” said the Marchesa modestly.

Melissa dared not lift her glance. Hysteric laughter seethed within her.

The Marchesa continued with the softest of uncomplaining sighs: “It’s a little difficult sometimes—living in an apartment—to do as much about the place, myself, as I’d like. Nothing makes me happier—nothing—let me give you just a tiny bit of plum-cake....”

“It’s great!” said Murdock and accepted a second slice without question.

“Nothing,” said the Marchesa, “makes me happier than to put a big white apron over my gown, and go out in the kitchen and beat up a cake ... like this one.”

“Did you make this?” asked Murdock respectfully. “Best thing I ever ate!”

“It’s very simple—” said the Marchesa, smiling and patting his hand. “It’s all a matter of knowing how. I was taught as a girl that these things were a woman’s dearest province. That was a long time ago, you see.... I’m afraid the girls of to-day would find that rather laughable....” She looked at Murdock almost imploringly.

“They’d make a darned sight better wives and mothers if they’d had your training,” said Murdock warmly.

“After all,” pursued the Marchesa, “isn’t that what women were sent into the world for? That and nothing else—just to be good wives and mothers.” She lowered her eyelids and patted back a little cough with the tips of her fingers ... from the nails of which rouge and polish had chastely departed.

“That’s exactly what I feel about it,” Murdock hastened to assure her.... “I’ve got no time for professional women ... can’t stand ’em in an office. It takes the bloom off ... if you see what I mean.”

“I do, indeed,” said the Marchesa. “Let me ring for fresh tea!”

“No, thank you—not for me! I’ll take one more shot at that cake—if I may.”

The Marchesa said he might. She cut him a whopping slice with the purest maternal enthusiasm, then she laid her fingers on Melissa’s arm and drew her into the conversation sweetly.

“This dear girl,” said the Marchesa.... “I’m so glad she isn’t one of those terribly brainy creatures ... just a simple, sincere affectionate little woman!”

Murdock being for the moment submerged in plum-cake, Melissa flung her hostess a glacial and murderous look.

“Did you make the gown you have on, dear?” inquired the Marchesa, fingering the sleeve of Melissa’s smart black satin with loving interest. She added to her other guest: “You never saw such a child with her needle!”

Murdock fairly radiated honest satisfaction.

“Why hasn’t Melissa brought me to see you before?” he demanded. “This has been wonderful.”

“She must bring you again—very soon,” said the Marchesa. “I’m a lonely old woman and an afternoon like this makes me happy for days.”

“I’ll tell you what—” said Murdock suddenly. The Marchesa waited, smiling, all home-and-mother in her look. Melissa set her teeth and drew on her glove with a jerk.

“I’m having a little house-party,” said Murdock eagerly, “first part of next month ... on an old farm of mine, just outside of Baltimore. The party’s for Melissa. It would be great if you could come, too....” He looked from the Marchesa to Melissa and back to the Marchesa again. “Do come!” he begged, with increasing ardor. “Everybody’d love to have you ... and I’ve got a wonderful old kitchen down there ... big as a house ... you could put on your big white apron and beat up a cake to your heart’s content. Is that a date? Do say you’ll do it!”

“My dear, dear boy!” said the Marchesa, obviously touched to the heart. She put her handkerchief to her nose—to one eye—and allowed an April smile to waver out above it. April, no longer new—but authentic. “Shouldn’t I be in the way?—a tiresome old woman?”

“It would be like having Whistler’s Mother around,” said Murdock nicely sentimental and unexpectedly cultural. “Wouldn’t it, Melissa?”

“Exactly,” said Melissa. She jerked on the other glove in sequence and forced herself to smile.

“We-e-l-ll ... if you really want me so much....” said the Marchesa.

“We absolutely do,” insisted Murdock.

“Of course we do,” said Melissa, politely.

“Dear me!” said the Marchesa, “of all the unexpected and delightful things! I’ll do it. I’m a silly old creature—but I can’t resist. There’s just one ... drawback....”

“Now—now—no drawbacks allowed!” objected Murdock.

“If—” said the Marchesa timidly—“I might bring my maid ... she’s been with me for years ... and I’m so absurdly helpless....”

“Of course bring your maid,” said Murdock at once. “All the room in the world.”

“Then I shall begin right now to anticipate,” said the Marchesa. “You don’t know what pleasure you’ve given me.” As Murdock took her wrinkled little hand in his big brown one, she murmured with subtle pathos—“I never had a son!...”

“Gosh!” observed Murdock, waiting for the elevator.—“Isn’t she a wonder! She’s like an old lady out of a book.”

“You noticed that?” said Melissa.

Doubt stirred faintly in Murdock’s breast at the inexplicable aloofness of his companion’s reply. Had he been too hasty? Was the very dear old friend not unanimously desired on his house-party?

“You’ll be glad to have her—won’t you?” he inquired with a slight touch of uneasiness. “I thought of course....”

“Oh, yes—oh, yes, indeed!” said Melissa, pulling herself together, and smiling reassuringly.

Anna came out of the Marchesa’s apartment.

“Miss Wayne—if you could step back—just a moment. The Marchesa wishes to speak to you.”

“Sorry!” said Melissa, brushed Murdock’s sleeve with a consoling hand, and went back into the room of Reynolds’ Innocence.

The Marchesa was sitting very straight in the winged chair, a faint flush of excitement staining her otherwise guiltless cheeks. She put out an imperious hand; she drew Melissa down—and although the door was closed between her and that stalwart figure waiting at the elevator-shaft—she whispered in Melissa’s ear.

“I’m taking Anna along,” said the Marchesa sibilantly, “in case that cake should have to be beaten up ... it was hers!”

“I see,” said Melissa. She did.

It was undeniably as simple as that.

CHAPTER XVIII

So the Marchesa went to Four Oaks Farm, which was the unique name of Murdock’s little place near Baltimore. And Anna went, too, in the grimmest of tempers.

“She hates the country,” said the Marchesa to Melissa, as the train drew out of the Pennsylvania station—“but it will do her good—to see how the other half lives. Do you like my bonnet?”

Melissa replied that it was very sweet—as undoubtedly it was, erring a little, if anything, on the side of too much sweetness. Pansies—for thoughts (not itemized)—wreathing a simple black straw, draped with a black lace veil.

“I feel positively naked—with nothing but rice-powder on my face,” grumbled the Marchesa. “However—the effect is good—isn’t it?”

Melissa admitted that the effect was excellent.

A black silk gown with a bit of lace at the throat—a convincingly roomy black coat. Spectacles—in a case. A drop of lavender on a square of hemstitched linen, four times the size of the Marchesa’s usual handkerchief.

“I had Anna make me a dozen of these,” said the Marchesa thoughtfully, “and start a little pink sock....”

“For whom?” asked Melissa in horror.

“What does it matter?” returned the Marchesa pleasantly. She conceded however—“an afghan might be better—more impersonal.”

“I should think so!” said Melissa.

“Now—” said the Marchesa, “tell me again who these people are. Kenealy, of course, I know—but the rest....”

She and Melissa were secluded in a Pullman drawing-room with the reluctant Anna in attendance. It had seemed best at the last moment not to drive down; spring rains and unalluring roads. Murdock therefore had gone ahead by a day, to be sure of everything, and Luke Kenealy, Em’ly Armistead, Beall and a girl called Nelly Rivers were at the moment playing bridge in a car to the rear.

Melissa named and explained them as best she could.

“Austin Beall is going because Murdock was keen on having him and I hadn’t any reason I could offer....”

“Why should you? It will amuse me to meet him. I know his kind like a book. What does the Armistead girl do?”

“Nothing, I think. She would try to marry Luke ... if he were free.”

“Doesn’t speak well for her intelligence. And the other one?”

“Nelly Rivers is a singer. She has a very beautiful voice. She is studying for grand opera.”

“Ha!” said the Marchesa. “More people have studied for grand opera than ever got into the chorus. Is she pretty?”

“In a way,” said Melissa.

“Then you have a clear field—with Murdock?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Melissa stiff with distaste.

“Oh, yes, you do! The other two women are negligible; you’ll have only yourself to thank if he isn’t yours before you leave here. I’ll help you, my dear—all I know how—you may count on me!”

When Melissa looked out of the window without replying, the Marchesa adjusted her black lace and pansies, preened herself before a little mirror which she took from a motherly black silk bag, and hummed an old song—doubtless by way of rehearsal.

“I shall let him call me Granny,” she mused softly.

Life, for the Marchesa, was unquestionably assuming a livelier iris. She would thereafter extend an even readier helping hand to worthy young women. Her thoughts ran pleasantly among such possibilities while the train hurtled on through a spring-touched landscape.

Presently she fell asleep and thus off-guard, her mouth took on a tiredness, a drooping and a pallor infinitely pathetic. Like the mouth of an outworn Columbine, flung down by Some One tired of the toy.

CHAPTER XIX

Murdock met them at Baltimore and drove them out to Four Oaks. Melissa and the Marchesa he took in his own car, leaving the others to follow, in a roomier vehicle. It was four o’clock of a heavenly afternoon when they left the station and in less than an hour they were standing before the fire in a quaintly delightful old living-room with dark hand-hewn beams across the ceiling, wide windows, looking onto a stone paved terrace and thence into a garden ... bowls of lilac and plum-blossom everywhere ... on the mantelshelf, a model of a four-masted bark in full sail.

“I hadn’t realized that it was spring—already,” said Melissa to Luke Kenealy standing at her shoulder.

He replied in an equally lowered voice: “I’m afraid those lilacs grew aforetime ... for gold and not for love.”

Murdock caught the last smiling word or so. He cut in proudly—“Oh, lilacs won’t be blooming round here for another six weeks yet.”

“So I was saying,” Luke assured him.

The Marchesa, squired by Murdock into a great arm-chair and relieved of bonnet, coat and bag, beamed upon the company gently.

Her silvery banded hair, her wrinkled ringless little hands, the decorous glint of her black silk gown, the brooch in the lace at her throat, fitted that setting as a canvas fits a frame.

“No one is to bother about me in the least,” she assured them placidly. “I shall be here by the fire in case of broken heads—or cut fingers—that’s all!”

“Isn’t she the sweetest old thing!” murmured Em’ly quite audibly and Nelly Rivers knelt to remove the Marchesa’s goloshes with deferential fingers. Even Austin Beall, leaning an elbow on the mantelshelf, looked on with less than the usual skeptic gleam in his eyes ... and Murdock ... might have been at the very least, the Marchesa’s favorite son.

Only Luke and Melissa, drifting toward a window looking out into the bare, shadowy garden, held themselves callously apart, talked in muted, distrustful murmurs.

“What’s she done to herself?” said Luke. “The Aged Playmate, I mean. Seems to me she had curls, when I saw her at your place ... and a variety of rings on the fingers. Also a goodish bit of frescoing. Where are the lilies and roses of yester year? ... if it’s a fair question?”

Melissa shrugged. “See for yourself.”

“I see that she looks like Whistler’s Mother.”

“That’s her intention. Murdock likes mothers.”

Luke whistled softly. “The little old minx! One more game, eh? And the only make-up in which she could play it.”

“It’s making me utterly wretched,” said Melissa suddenly.

“Why? I should think it would amuse you enormously.”

“Oh, Luke ... to see her, sitting there—so exquisitely saintly—Murdock and the rest standing about adoring her!”

“I dare say she’s had a good deal of adoration in her life—by and large. Why grudge her one more lick at the spoon?”

“She isn’t real!” said Melissa.

“Are you?” asked Luke quietly.

Melissa had no answer for him. Because she knew she wasn’t. She knew that the clothes she wore and the place she slept in, the food she ate, the beauty and ease she hugged about her like a garment, were all magic of the Marchesa’s invocation. Impermanent as sunlight on a wall—or moonlight on a wave. Frail as cobwebs on the grass of a summer morning.

“No—I’m not real,” said Melissa. “But I wish to God I were!”

“We’re none of us real,” said Luke—“so why worry? All you’ve got is the world you’re in—and it isn’t my world, nor Beall’s nor the Marchesa’s. Even the chicken that crosses the road in the grip of a primal urge, has a world of her own ... and it isn’t the world of the dog that chases her. You’re inside a bubble of your own blowing, my dear—so are we all, all honorable men! Just sit tight and pray it doesn’t burst with you.”

“How unbearably lonely that sounds,” said Melissa slowly.

“Unbearably lonely it is!” Luke told her, taking out his cigarette-case. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I suppose,” said Melissa, “there isn’t anything—”

“Matter of fact—there isn’t,” said Luke. “Or it would have been done before this—by some bright lad or other. It’s only fools like lovers ...” he laid his fingers over hers for a moment to take the sting out of that.... “It’s only fools like lovers that try to come too near each other ... and find it all ends in a wet soapy smear on the floor of the universe.”

He blew a smoke ring with great care and some success. It dissolved against the pane.

“Do I see a fountain in the garden?” he inquired interestedly.

“Go look for yourself,” said Melissa. “You’ve made me exceedingly low in my mind.”

She went back to the group at the fireplace. Murdock was saying cheerfully: “—so I thought we’d just have a little bridge to-night ... maybe to-morrow I can turn up enough people for a dance. Cars in the garage if anybody wants to explore the country ... and horses, if you’d rather ride ... the Marchesa....”

“Do call me Granny!” suggested the Marchesa, prettily appealing.

“I’d love to,” accepted Nelly Rivers.

“I saw her first!” said Murdock jealously. There was a shout of easy laughter.

Beall put in, playing with the sails of the four-masted bark.... “Granny—what bright eyes you’ve got!”

And Melissa looked up at him quickly. But if the words held anything but jest, his manner failed to show it.

“The better to see you, my dear,” returned the Marchesa sedately—and every one laughed again.

They separated presently to go to their rooms, and Murdock waylaid Melissa on the staircase.

“I haven’t had a minute alone with you,” he grumbled. “Don’t bother about changing yet ... get your coat and slip down again ... let’s go for a ride before dinner!”

“What about the rest?” demurred Melissa.

She smiled into his upturned face and saw his blue eyes darken. “They can take care of themselves. I only asked ’em to get you here.”

“Including Granny?”

“Isn’t she a peach!” said Murdock warmly. “She’s going to make us one of those plum-cake things to-morrow.”

“Did she say she would?”

“If we’d let her have the kitchen all to herself for a couple of hours.”

“She should have Anna to help her,” said Melissa, despising herself for playing into the Marchesa’s hand. “She oughtn’t to do too much....”

“Oh, Anna always chops the citron,” Murdock explained at once. “Granny can’t bear the smell of citron. Run along and get your coat—won’t you! We’ll be too late for that drive if you don’t.”

Melissa fetched her coat.

They drove madly—at first, later dawdling like a country boy and girl in a buggy—along the pleasantly meandering road between Baltimore and Annapolis. An early twilight webbed the countryside with shadow, through which faint earthy scents drifted sweet.

“Trees beginning to come out,” said Murdock. “Kind of a spring smell, isn’t it?” He displayed a surprising knowledge of the bucolic existence. His grandfather, he said, had owned Four Oaks—and his father. “Might settle down on it myself, some day. Breed cattle. I like a farm.”

It was all a thousand miles away from the sort of thing Melissa had hitherto seen in him. She sensed a big, good-humored, ingenuous boy back of that young-man-about-town exterior. Clean as his own fields. The feel of his tweed-coated shoulder against hers repelled her not at all. Vaguely she liked it. She tried to fancy a headier reaction ... if he turned ... if the touch were closer ... she couldn’t feel that it would hurt or frighten her. At the same time, she couldn’t altogether make herself feel that she wanted it....

“Do you—like the country?” asked Murdock in the midst of her intent self-questioning. “I mean really like it ... not just over a week-end, the way most women do.”

“I think,” said Melissa hesitantly, “that with some one you cared for ... it might be ... rather wonderful.”

“Wouldn’t it!” said Murdock happily. He laughed, sending the car ahead with an accession of speed that obviously furnished him a momentary outlet. “Granny said that was the way you’d feel about it!”

“Oh, did she!” said Melissa.

Granny’s amazing perspicacity rather spoiled the homeward ride for her in spite of earthy fragrance in the nostrils—rush of frosty air against the upturned face.

To be so anticipated in one’s every move ... humiliating!

Even a lace cap and spectacles couldn’t quite disguise the Marchesan malice of that.

CHAPTER XX — PART IV

The house-party at Four Oaks was not—for all its carefree nature—a success. Almost from the first, something went wrong. Some rift in the lute proclaimed itself by way of an increasing number of flat notes. As if the thing had not been properly orchestrated; as if an instrument somewhere in the ensemble were playing more or less than its necessary part.

At the bridge-table, dancing, riding, sitting around the fire at tea-time—no matter where Murdock’s house-guests foregathered, nor for how harmless a purpose, something jarred and something failed to fuse.

“It’s that Armistead girl,” the Marchesa told Melissa in a bed-time moment so to speak, when Granny’s cap and brooch having been laid upon the dressing-table for the night, safe in the seclusion of a rose-curtained bedroom with a stately four-poster awaiting her slumbers, the oracle resumed her avocation.

“That Armistead girl’s dangerous ... because she’s a fool and in love. I think I’ll tell her, she might as well let Kenealy alone. He doesn’t give her a thought....”

“Please—” cried Melissa in sincere distress—“I hope you won’t do anything of the sort!”

“Why not? She’s spoiling the whole thing. She’s like salt in ice-cream,” said the Marchesa thoughtfully, making a comparison, which by the homely nature of it could have derived only from that period of her existence before she encountered the Italian nobility. “She won’t let the rest of you settle to anything. She’s forever maneuvering....”

“And what am I doing?” asked Melissa bitterly.

“Not so much as you might,” the Marchesa assured her. “I must admit you irritate me, at times. You don’t seem to recognize an opportunity when you meet it.”

Melissa was sitting before the Marchesa’s fire, in a soft mouse-colored velvet robe, with her dark hair loose on her shoulders.

“For instance you look extremely well in that thing,” went on the Marchesa with scientific frankness ... “and a long-haired woman these days has the lure of the unusual ... but do you take advantage of either fact? You might slip back to the library for a book some night—just as you are, now ... but does it occur to you to do so?”

“Don’t you think that’s been fairly well covered in a good many third acts?” inquired Melissa, restraining a smile.

“If it has—there’s nothing in third acts that hasn’t been done in real life,” said the Marchesa snappishly. She mused a little, sniffing her salts and blinking at the burning logs. “Of course—you’d have to be sure Murdock had stayed up to read.”

“It might be simpler,” offered Melissa demurely—“just to ask him to wait.”

“Oh, very well, Miss Impertinence!” rejoined the Marchesa—“Anna—what day is this?”

Anna, busy in another part of the room, with unfolding and refolding of the Marchesa’s countless garments, replied briefly—“Sunday the seventh.”

“Seventh,” echoed Anna’s mistress abstractedly. “We’ve been here, two whole days—with absolutely nothing to show for it.” She turned sharply on Melissa. “You were in the garden for more than an hour this afternoon—whom were you with?”

Sooner or later all Melissa’s doings had thus to be accounted for.

“I was with Luke. Nelly Rivers and Austin were with us for a while. They went walking after that. We sat on a bench and talked.”

“Why do you waste time on Kenealy?”

“Is friendship a waste of time?”

“Don’t fool yourself, Melissa—there’s no such thing as friendship between a man and a woman free to try anything else.”

“But he isn’t free,” said Melissa. “And his friendship’s all I want.”

She remembered for long after the thing she said then, because in the moment of her saying it, softly yet with a startling suggestion of destiny, somebody knocked at the door.

“Give me my cap!” whispered the Marchesa shrilly ... never one to forget her properties in any scene ... “give me those spectacles—and a handkerchief....” Melissa having put these things upon the lady’s head and in her hands, the knock came again, more insistently, and this time, the Marchesa lifting a gentle voice said, “Anna, open the door!”

It was Murdock. He stood for a second, looking at Melissa, at her loose dark hair and the whiteness of her slim arms against the smoky shadows of the things she wore before he brushed a hand across his eyes and came slowly into the room.

“Sorry—” he said ... his voice betrayed the shock of one sort or another and his pleasant, high-colored face was very grave.... “I just took a chance on your still being up ... hoped you hadn’t gone to bed.... I’ve got—bad news, y’see—Kenealy....”

“Sit down, Melissa!” said the Marchesa crisply, for at Luke’s name, Melissa had gotten to her feet and stood there, suddenly colorless, clinging to the back of her chair.

“What’s this about Kenealy?” the Marchesa demanded of Murdock. “You know how tender-hearted the child is—can’t you see you’re frightening her outrageously? Tell us at once ... don’t bother about breaking it gently. Has he been hurt?”

“He isn’t—dead?” said Melissa almost in a whisper.

Something in her cried wildly that she couldn’t bear Luke to be dead. With his quiet voice—and his laughing moody eyes—his sweet rare trick of understanding the thing you hadn’t told him....

“Not—dead, Murdock?” said Melissa imploringly.

“Good Lord, no!” said Murdock ... “not Luke—his wife!... He’s had a cable from Hawaii. His wife’s dead. Drowned on some beach or other. He can get a boat out of San Francisco on the twelfth—if he can make it. I drove him into Baltimore to catch that one o’clock train. Hadn’t time to do anything but throw some things into a bag ... he asked me to say good-by to you all....”

“His wife,” echoed the Marchesa softly—“dear, dear, Melissa!—isn’t that too dreadful?”

Melissa did not answer. Murdock put out his hand, a big, warm, steady hand and she took it and clung to it. It sickened her to read the Marchesa’s thought. Luke, too, now—among the “possible sheaves.”

Could one ever feel clean again, after moments like this?

“He—and his wife owned a ranch—did they not?—in Hawaii?” inquired the Marchesa, feeling for her handkerchief. “I think Melissa once told me....”

“A whole flock of ranch-lands—” said Murdock, holding Melissa’s hand hard. “There’ll be all of hers now—on top of his own. He’ll have a big estate to settle before he can come back.”

“Poor boy—poor dear!” sighed the Marchesa. She added, having found her handkerchief and used it with unostentatious effect. “Murdock—I think Melissa and I had better go in to New York in the morning. It would seem too heartless—staying on—after this....”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Murdock simply. “Poor old boy—it knocked him off his feet rather ... coming so rotten sudden....”

“Ah, well,” the Marchesa reminded him gently—“Time softens all things—except perhaps arteries.”

Realizing at once that the mot was a bit out of character, she took off her glasses, wiped them and put them on again, sighing.

Mist on the lenses, obviously.

“I hate her!” said Melissa, deep in her revolted soul.

Clear as if he stood in the room, Mister Roderick, keen-eyed and contemptuous, answered that muted cry.

“If you hate her, why do you go on with this disgusting business?... Tell her you’re through, Melissa!”

But Melissa said nothing at all.

CHAPTER XXI

So Melissa went back from Four Oaks Farm to the apartment on Central Park West, and the Marchesa went with her. As far as the Park, that is. From the Park, the Marchesa and Anna continued upward along Riverside and were thereafter, from Melissa’s standpoint, mercifully lost to view. For a time at least. She had had, she considered, at the moment, about as much as she could stand, of Granny and her gentle maunderings.

Murdock’s complete acceptance of the Marchesa’s saintly old-ladyhood, his ingenuous response to that black-silk-lavender-water-cameo-brooch travesty filled Melissa with vicarious shame and an entirely personal remorse.

Murdock was too good to be made a fool of. Too good but not too clever. Melissa tried to even things by not encouraging him in his approaches and succeeded only in driving him into Granny’s arms. For counsel.

Granny told him not to worry Melissa. To be patient ... that all things came to him who waited. Omitting this time any mention of arteriosclerosis. “Poor child!” said Granny, “she’s so tender-hearted ... downright miserable over Mr. Kenealy and his dreadful news. She’s very loyal—dear little girl!” Loyalty was one of the virtues Murdock most admired in a woman—after Granny had done with him.

He told Melissa, parting from her on her own threshold, “I’m sorry our week-end had to be broken up like this. But of course it’s worse for poor old Luke than any one else. Do you think you’d like to go somewhere for dinner to-night—or shall you be too tired?”

Melissa said she was afraid she wasn’t quite up to going out—that she thought she’d have dinner alone and go to bed early.

“I’ll call you in the morning then,” said Murdock hopefully—“maybe to-morrow night—”

Melissa said she wasn’t promising anything.

It added nothing to her comfort to realize that all her evasions and withdrawals but whetted Murdock’s interest. Deliberate allurement of him, on her part, would have required much the same weapons as she was now using, in a sincere attempt to put him off.

It might have seemed funny if it hadn’t seemed ignoble.

Melissa, opening the door into that wide, still, lovely room, drew a long breath and put all questioning away from her.

There were her books, there were her pictures, there was her fire, there was her heart’s home.

She stood at the windows and looked out over the twilit Park for a long time—coat and hat in a heap on a chair behind her, linked hands, palm down, over her heart. She was trying to call Mister Roderick, out of the shadows, to stand at her shoulder and look with her, across the city. She shut her eyes and saw the turn of his head, the humorous twist of his smile. His rooms, his fire, his couch, his walls ... after a strange taut space, when every breath and every heartbeat of her strained to realize him, to compel him into being, beside her ... she felt—it was feeling more than hearing—his quiet comment....

“Well, old dear—the tangled web is widening—isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you mean....”

“Oh, yes, you do! You went down to that place to get Murdock. You dropped him and came back to town the minute Kenealy became a possibility.”

“That wasn’t I—that was that beast of a Marchesa!”

“You’re the Marchesa’s puppet—what’s the odds? She pulls the strings and you jump. It’s no good your vilifying her and then accepting the loot when the game’s over.”

“How rotten that sounds!”

“Sounds what it is, Lissa—you’re not the same girl that walked into my room that first evening....”

“Then I was starving....”

“And now you’re eating husks....”

“Don’t—!”

“Why not? Might as well be honest with yourself—since you aren’t going to be honest with any one else....”

“You’re cruel, Mister Roderick!”

“Oh, no, I’m not!—it’s just that I don’t like to see you making such a shameless little gold-digger of yourself. You’d be a darned sight better off back at your desk in the office....”

“Hush! I couldn’t go back to it, now! Not after this!”

“You couldn’t because you’ve gotten soft. All women get soft—and flabby—and dull ... that live by what they can make men give them.”

“You’re talking about the bad ones ... that’s too ridiculous—to me!”

“Think so? A woman doesn’t have to be technically bad to get her living the easiest way. A lot of marriages come under that heading. I tell you now—when I make a woman my wife, it’s not going to be because she’s looking for a safe investment and happens to wander my way....”

“What makes you think you’d be a safe investment?”

His shadowy smile at that! The glint of a schoolboy grin was in it.

“I wouldn’t be safe for you. You think I would—don’t you?”

“No—I don’t think you would! I think you’re too cold—and self-satisfied and—unbelieving.”

“If you’d be you ... you’d see! I’m not like that. If you’d be you—I’d be—me. And what we couldn’t do with life—together!”

Melissa’s hand shut hard over the heavy throbbing in her breast. She shut her eyes to hold the look in Mister Roderick’s eyes, the ineffable threat and the age-old promise.

She couldn’t hold it—it evaded her—like echo, dying.

She turned from the windows and back into the room, curiously tired—as if she had been clinging to something which slipped endlessly away from her.

On the threshold of the bedroom, the thin sharp trill of the telephone stopped her. She answered with a sigh of annoyance. Dinner alone before the fire, a book and a pile of cushions, thereafter—paradise enow—if one could only be left to the enjoyment of it!

“Miss Rivers calling....”

“Ask her to come up,” said Melissa tiredly.

What Nelly Rivers wanted of her she couldn’t quite fathom. They had parted at the station without having in the several days and nights of Murdock’s unlucky party achieved any especial contact. Melissa, occupied with her own hazards and uncertainties, had been amiably aware of Nelly’s existence—that was all.

Why Nelly should wish to extend that awareness—

Nelly, knocking brusquely, answered for herself.

“Are you doing anything? Were you going out?—Be perfectly frank.”

As if one were ever entirely frank, about anything ... aloud!

“Do sit down,” said Melissa.... “I’m quite free.”

To her unspoken horror, Nelly sat down. In a corner of the deep couch. Took off her black hat and dropped it on the floor—loosened her furs and dropped them on top of the hat. Put fingertips to her eyes and said thus entrenched, “This is simply rotten of me. I haven’t any excuse for barging in on you like this.... I only thought ... truth is—I’m ghastly low, to-night ... and I thought we might eat together. Sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of dead kings ... if it wouldn’t bore you too much.”

Melissa saw her wonderful lonely evening fading away from her—unlived.

She said politely: “I’d love to have you. I’m at a loose end myself—suppose we have dinner sent up and light the fire....”

“Heaven!” said Nelly Rivers. “Though before a fire I have no decent reticences. It seems to draw confidences from me like rosin out of wood. You may regret your hospitality.”

“I’m sure I shan’t,” said Melissa, still frosted with courtesy.

“You’re a liar!” said Nelly Rivers sweetly, stretched herself like a lazy cat and laughed. “Do you know, Melissa—I’ve never seen any one so masked and gloved and hooded—as you. You interest me more than any woman I ever met. You’re as unreal as a lady on a fan—and yet one has moments of wondering....”

“Would you care for soup?” asked Melissa gently.

“I should—and I am put in my place,” said Nelly Rivers. “Funny—most women adore being psyched—you’re shy of it—aren’t you? Soup—yes—and quantities of bread and butter—a large cup of black coffee—that’s all I ask.”

“I’ll put my things away,” said Melissa, “if you don’t mind—there are books on that table behind you—”

She put her things away, called a waiter and ordered dinner for two in a chill fury of annoyance no less real for the detached and punctilious manner which covered it. Nelly Rivers had done her out of an hour or so alone. It didn’t occur to her that all her hours had been lonely—not very long ago—and that she had, at that time—badly wanted company.

She was not, as Mister Roderick had assured her, the same girl....

Dinner gone, Nelly Rivers sat smoking and staring at the fire. Her rough black hair, her velvety black eyes were really rather beautiful in a careless gypsyish way. Melissa, to whom all beauty was enchantment, thawed unwillingly. Found herself relaxing ... off guard.

“I like you,” said Nelly Rivers—“I’ve been meaning for a long time to do something like this. Just crowd in on you and make you look at me.”

“Don’t I—look—as a rule?” said Melissa.

She sat at one end of the couch, Nelly Rivers at the other, feet up—knees hugged, like creatures on a frieze. A lordly fire roared up the chimney. Some scent that Nelly used hung in the air, piquant as fresh sandalwood—which of course it could not have been.

“Oh, you look—at men!” said Nelly bluntly. “You don’t like women—do you?”

“No,” said Melissa.

“’Fraid of ’em—or just disinterested?”

“Both.”

“H’m’m! Of course men are your game.” She glanced at Melissa keenly. “You give it another name, I dare say.”

“Aren’t they yours?” asked Melissa resentfully. “Aren’t they any woman’s?”

“Not by a darn sight,” said Nelly Rivers, ground out the stub of her cigarette upon an ash-tray on the table behind her and laughed. “They’re not mine—in an economic sense. I could do a good deal better without ’em. They ... distract me. Of course a certain amount of losing one’s head is all to the good—for a singer. But one’s got to get off at the proper moment, to arrive at the best effect—and I was born with an inaccurate speedometer. I don’t always know how fast I’m going—till I’m gone.”

“That’s pretty cold-blooded, isn’t it?” asked Melissa curiously. She didn’t know a woman could be so impersonal.

“Maybe it is. Everybody’s got one true love. Mine’s my voice. Men may come and men may go. I’d feed ’em all to the fire—except in moments of acute aberration—for one perfect swooping note. Ever hear Alvarez sing ‘Homing’?”

Melissa shook her head.

Nelly said musing—a long way off—“She’s got a cry at the end of it that’s like a star falling across the sky ... when I can do that!—I won’t ask any quarter—no odds—nothing!”

“You work very hard—don’t you?” said Melissa. “Luke told me once....”

“I’ve been working very hard since I was fifteen,” said Nelly Rivers. “Lord—when I think how I’ve stayed with it!... Singing in small-town choirs. Slogging away at lessons and languages and what-not.... I rate success—if I ever get it. Believe me—I do! If ever I get my chance—I’ll have earned it!”

“And yet—” Melissa ventured hesitantly—“it hasn’t made you bitter....”

“Why should it?” asked Nelly contemptuously. “Work’s real. There’s not much else that is. I’m darned grateful I’ve got the tools ... time to be bitter is when you’re out of work—not in it! Melissa—did you never work—at anything?”

Melissa let a cautious moment go by in silence. She said at last—“I’m afraid I’m rather a useless person....”

“You’re a canny one,” said Nelly Rivers, smiling to herself. “Not that I thought you’d tell. Of course you know—there’s a certain amount of conversation—in Austin’s crowd ... about you ... and your invisible means of support. Don’t freeze over again, now—It’s Granny, of course—but—? What’s the relationship?”

“Really—” said Melissa, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you. Why don’t you ask her?”

“Took all my nerve to ask you!” said Nelly Rivers cheerfully. “And now that I have done so—without any conspicuous success—shall I sing for my supper—before I go? I’d like to sing you just one small song, Melissa—a thing called ‘The Dream-Maker Man’—that might have been made for you. Stay where you are....”

She went over to the piano in the farthest corner of the room. It rippled under her fingers into a plaintive and simple tune, full of shy minors and wistful repetitions ... she played it through before she began to sing, very softly, in a voice like water falling in the dark....

Melissa sat listening, curled close against her cushions, hands tight-locked about her knees.

“Like it, Lissa?—That’s your song, my child—you’ve got one foot on a magic carpet—haven’t you?”

“Isn’t there any more?” asked Melissa hungrily—and Nelly Rivers sang again.

Softer, Nelly’s voice than her eyes—and her eyes were soft as black pansies. Sweeter than her ardent mouth—and that was quite sweet enough.

She left the piano laughing: “There you are, old thing! That’s for you. A bit on the soft side—but rather precious, anyway. Now let’s have my hat and I’ll go!”

“I wish you wouldn’t!” said Melissa—“Stay—stay and sing some more!”

“Not to-night,” said Nelly, snatching up furs and bag.... “Not to-night ... and perhaps not any other night! Depends on whether my song got over....”

“It did—you know it did!”

“Then call me up and ask me to dinner again.”

“I will, Nelly—you’ll see! Very soon....”

Melissa had never liked any one so suddenly and absurdly as she liked Nelly Rivers. It was odd, liking another woman like that—odd but comforting.

Not quite so comforting was the memory of the other woman’s scornful frankness: “Work’s real—there’s not much else that is!... Melissa—did you never work at anything?”

Melissa wished—after Nelly had gone, and wishes made no difference one way or the other—that she had told about the office and the hundreds of letters beginning ... “In reply to yours of the thus and so....”

She might then have had Nelly’s respect ... of which, as things now stood, considering the certain amount of conversation in Austin ... and Nelly’s ... crowd, one was none too sure. A disconcerting suggestion.

CHAPTER XXII

Melissa had one letter from Luke, on his way across the continent. He wrote briefly, with what was either an utter absence of emotion or incredible control of it:

Dear Melissa—

I was sorry not to have seen you to say good-by before I left Four Oaks Farm. Murdock said he would explain for me. I am catching the Los Angeles in two days now—with any luck—and should be in Hawaii in another week. The cable I received said merely that Iwalani had been drowned at Nanakuli, which is a beach near Honolulu—she must have been down there visiting some one ... and she was a very strong swimmer, so I still can’t see how the thing could have happened. Except for some extraordinary circumstance—I will write you again when I know. This is always an unpleasant trip and just now, very nearly unbearable. I hope things are well with you—I don’t retract any recent advice—neither do I expect you to follow it. You have a right to your own mistakes. At the moment, I am not too proud of mine.

Yours,

Luke.

A most un-Kenealian document, written in a rangy scrawl which might be due either to acute spiritual disturbance on Luke’s part or to the perennially rugged condition of western roadbeds.

Melissa put the letter away in her desk and missed Luke exceedingly. She had been sure, in him, of an unfailing understanding and sure—with him—of herself. Which was more than could be said—for understanding—of Murdock ... and for safety—of Beall, the inscrutable.

Missing Luke, she endeavored to steer a middle course, aware, back of every other consideration that the year was wearing on, that her chance for escape from a lifetime of mediocrity would expire in the early autumn ... she had days of trying to convince herself that to go back to the office (to an office, rather, for her old place was of course long ago filled) would be the best and decentest thing which could happen to her. Those days, however, came sparsely among a stream of others in which it seemed to Melissa almost physically impossible that she should ever return to the old hopeless round, to work without aim and rest, if one cared to call it such, in the illimitable side-streets of penurious respectability.

She never discussed, with the Marchesa, the eventual ending of their agreement. The Marchesa, to her own infinite amusement, doubtless, preserved always the attitude, where Melissa was concerned, of one well-dowered lady to another. She criticized Melissa’s clothes, her manners, her management of the apartment, with the utmost, at times the most caustic freedom ... but the source of clothes, apartment and so on, was never in question. For which a certain amount of credit is due the relict of the Marchese di Ricci.

No one more deftly than she could have kept the wound open, inserted salt at appropriate intervals.

“Granny’s pretty sweet to you, isn’t she?” Beall suggested, loitering with Melissa through the Park on a late afternoon in May.

It was significant of an intensified relation between them, that he walked in the Park at all: having, in general no time for such gently sentimental practices and preferring, commonly, his newest thing in cars to personal exertion of any sort.

Melissa cherished a feeling for forsythia and syringa—so Melissa walked in the Park and Beall, however incongruously, walked with her.

“Granny—” he continued, musing critically, “is by way of being the approximate ideal in aged parents,—I should say. Where did you know her first, Melissa? Old friend of the family—and so on?”

“It’s odd!” said Melissa, smiling faintly, “—She knew Luke’s uncle, ages ago, in Venice ... did he ever tell you that?”

“Luke is a good bit like you,” Beall returned, eyes on an averted cheek, “he tells me nothing he doesn’t intend to.”

“Perhaps—like me—” said Melissa, delicately dégagé, “he has really nothing to tell. Of interest, that is, to outsiders.”

“Between the eyes—no less!” said her companion and bowed to a lady passing in a purple sedan with deference not untouched by appraisal.

“That,” he explained, “is Laure duBois ... have you seen her in my new show?”

Melissa said she hadn’t.

“Should you care to?” asked Beall.

Melissa said sorry—that she didn’t think she should.

“Aren’t you crowding your luck a bit?” she inquired. “The newspapers say such unpleasant things of it.”

Beall looked annoyed—then amused. He laughed.

“Little prig! Don’t play jeune fille, Melissa. It isn’t smart any more.”

“Neither is smut,” said Melissa. “So one’s told, by the critics.”

“I’d give a good deal to know,” said Beall suddenly—“how much of that is real with you ... and just how much is pose. I’ll admit it’s effective—but how deep does it go?”

Melissa bowed in her turn to a young man passing on horseback.

“That,” she said, “is a friend of Murdock’s. Nice-looking, isn’t he?”

“If you like ’em open-faced and dumb!” Beall retorted. He had the grace the second after to look ashamed. “Melissa—you’re on my nerves.... I don’t get you. I can’t be sure you’re what you seem....”

“I should think,” said Melissa, “that ought to endear—”

“It does,” said Beall grimly—“a good part of the time. When it doesn’t infuriate. When I don’t want to kiss you—I want to wring your pretty neck. It’s unsettling. Until I get you card-indexed and filed, I’m no good at anything else....”

He was abruptly and unquestionably in earnest. Fear stirred in Melissa and outrageous satisfaction.

“Is it so impossible to understand?” she inquired remotely. “One’s a bit fastidious—that’s all.”

“Yes—and that’s enough—quite!” he assured her. “I thought I knew women—roughly speaking....”

Melissa echoed—“Roughly speaking!... I’d say that was just your handicap.”

“I can speak your language, my dear,” said Beall—“if I cared to.” He added with extraordinary frankness. “I’m afraid I’m going to care. That’s the devil of it!”

“You’re still quite safe,” said Melissa. “Aren’t you? Unless I should care—too. And that—I don’t mean to be rude—is most unlikely.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t!” said Beall. “There’s a creature behind those eyes of yours could tell a tale worth two of that. Wait till she hears her master’s voice—you won’t always be able to turn the key on her....”

Melodramatic nonsense—for the most part. But Beall’s nonsense had the tang of sincerity and his melodrama was usually plausible.

Melissa saw him fairly often and each time with a vivider sense of approaching the edge.

She began to feel that in the long run, if she wanted to marry him, she could do it. As to taking third place in a sequence of wives ... there, romance would undoubtedly go out of the window. But life with Beall would have a background of color and movement, in which romance if not actually present might yet have acceptable substitutes. One might be repelled—or angered—or hurt—one would never be bored by him.

Melissa had lied to the Marchesa when she said she had lost interest ... and the Marchesa, after Four Oaks, Melissa rather suspected had reëxamined that lie.

“That man Beall,” said the Marchesa—“amuses me enormously. Bluebeard, with a typewriter under one arm! We shall hear more of him, Melissa.”

Melissa felt, as usual, that the Marchesa was not deceived.

CHAPTER XXIII

If this modest chronicle appears to dwell over long and over fondly upon Melissa’s masculine acquaintance, her relation to certain young men, her reactions to them—their reactions to her ... the results of her emotional experimenting, and the deductions to be drawn therefrom ... we offer in extenuation the incontrovertible if regrettable fact that such experiments and such reactions, such relations and such deductions, still make up (if truth were more often told) the larger part of any unemployed young woman’s existence. Before Matrimony.

Note that qualifying word—unemployed.

Even your expert stenographer, your librarian, your teacher, your saleswoman, manages to bestow a certain amount of time upon the business of selecting and running down a mate ... how much more concentrated, how infinitely more elaborate the maneuvers of a woman who has nothing to do but get herself married. She may not admit it to her dearest friend—she may not admit it on her knees, in the dark—she may, at the moment of consummation droop helplessly into the chosen one’s arms murmuring—“When did you first begin—to care?” Quite sincerely murmuring. The fact remains that he was chosen—nine times out of ten—before his caring began. And, really, when you take the thing to pieces, it’s exactly as it should be. Men mostly marry on impulse. If there weren’t some one ready to give that impulse a lead ... muddles, too many to contemplate!

Muddles enough as it is—with the gentler sex constantly expending a large part of its time, energy and attention upon the matter.

Marriage unstudied would be cataclysmic. Any woman knows that. In Melissa’s especial case she had deliberately selected marriage as a means of escape from an environment which was essentially distasteful to her.

In which she was within her rights. Choice of a profession is any one’s right. Marriage may be the noblest of professions, though the poorest of trades—if one allow a fine distinction.

And Melissa honestly intended to make a good wife—when the time came. Merely she hadn’t yet decided for whom. And how, most advantageously. Murdock would have decided for her in no time.

Melissa’s love of the country, prettily set forth by Granny, her fondness for children (same source of information), her exquisite domesticity, her gentleness, her home-loving heart ... really, Granny had quite outdone herself in the Portrait of a Lady to which she appended Melissa’s name! ... and when Murdock’s own senses told him that the cloudy dark hair, the wistful eyes, the soft sweet mouth were what he sought....

Melissa might—if something had not drawn back reluctant within her, when Murdock came too near—have ended her quest with the year still a bit to go. Ended it in Murdock’s willing arms. Only that wasn’t—something told her—where she wanted to be. So she kept Murdock dangling and continued her search.

With the Marchesa’s expert assistance.

Very much occupied, the Marchesa, with having a finger in Melissa’s every pie! More blissfully occupied than she had ever hoped to be again.

She descended upon Melissa, morning, noon and night—with and without warning ... with and without reason ... but never without acute scintillant enjoyment of the whole theatric situation.

There were of course times when romance came perilously near being farce—the Marchesa handled either, adroitly—as on the afternoon of Murdock’s narrowest escape from disillusionment.

That, Melissa felt, was something she would not willingly go through, twice.

The Marchesa had been having tea with Melissa—a function chiefly comparable to the dining out of Royalty.

Anna telephoned, on such occasions to ask if Miss Wayne were going to be at home—the merest formality. Miss Wayne was expected to be at home and so understood the message.

At half after four the Marchesa arrived, always—groomed to a hair (curled to a hair, more accurately speaking), with the bloom of youth indelibly fixed upon her withered cheeks; the bow of Cupid artistically limned upon her faded mouth; a black velvet band about her shriveled neck; the most recent thing in hats and gowns clothing her, however startlingly ... and Melissa, knowing what was expected of her, ordered beforehand a lavish tea. Always. The Marchesa had taught her that.

Upon this one afternoon, the Marchesa had condescended to teach her various other things.

Poising a brioche in one tiny claw, glittering with diamonds, pink-nailed and heavy-veined, the Marchesa expounded her philosophy of life. “You were right,” she admitted grandly, to begin with, “as to what you could do with yourself, in the proper setting. Each time I see you I find you improved. Upon my word, Melissa—I believe you could marry almost anybody.”

Melissa said something about praise from Sir Hubert.

“Nonsense!” said the Marchesa rudely—“Praise from one woman to another is a good deal rarer and more valuable. If you appear desirable to me—who being another woman have every reason to regard you with a critical eye and deny you the benefit of any possible doubt—it stands to reason that to a man whose mind is usually incapable of functioning at the same time as his emotions—you must seem simply ravissante! Do I make myself clear?”

Melissa said she did.

The Marchesa took another cup of tea. She said as she stirred and sipped it: “My nephew sent me some last week—from Japan—in an enameled caddy. Dear boy! I wish he had sent me a kimono instead. I do loathe having to thank people for something I don’t want.”

“He’s very thoughtful, isn’t he?” asked Melissa languidly. Very thoughtful—Mister Roderick! The adorable unappreciated thoughtfulness of him—sending tea in an enameled caddy to that greedy old harpy, who sat there dear-boying and belittling him, while she talked of it. Melissa was poignantly jealous for Mister Roderick ... she could see him in some dark, wonderful shop in, say, Kobe—buying the tea, selecting the enameled caddy—(his would be perfect taste—witness the room his ungrateful aunt sat in!) later, taking it with his own hands to the postoffice—writing a charming bit of greeting on his card—mailing the thing—turning away, swinging his stick, a panama hat on his gallant head—whistling to a rickshaw man ... did one whistle—to a rickshaw man? Whistle—or shout? In any case surely the rickshaw man didn’t live who wouldn’t come trotting at Mister Roderick’s lightest note....

“What in the world are you sitting there smirking about?” demanded the Marchesa, and brought Melissa back from Kobe to Central Park West with sickening abruptness.

Melissa said she hadn’t intended to smirk.

Upon which the Marchesa obliged with a horrible reproduction of Melissa’s expression and added, to give point to the moment—“I’ve noticed you looking like that before when I mentioned Roderick ... don’t tell me you’re waiting for him to come back....”

“Please!” said Melissa, furiously ashamed.

She was passionately grateful for a knock which came at that moment on her silk-curtained door. She was not so grateful, when upon her opening the door, in walked Murdock, fresh as the west wind, beaming with pleasure, appallingly innocent of any revelations awaiting him.

CHAPTER XXIV

“Oh—Murdock—how do you do?” said Melissa wretchedly. He had never before come up unannounced. Obviously the work of a ribald fate that he should do so now. If one could have turned him about with a hand on each of his gray tweed shoulders—thrust him forth ... locked him out ... ordered him away.... To have him see the Marchesa—who had hitherto only seen Granny!...

Melissa’s voice very nearly failed in her throat.

“Come in!” she muttered doggedly and Murdock followed her cheerfully over to the tea-table.

Over to the Marchesa, as well. Before whom, staring frankly, he stopped in his tracks. A hideous moment for Melissa. A moment of inarticulate torture. She had, however, as usual underestimated the Marchesa’s control of reserves.

“How do you do,” said the Marchesa graciously, putting out one heavily-ringed little hand ... “if Melissa isn’t going to present you—I shall speak for myself? I am Amalie Delano ... and who are you, young man?”

Unpredictable woman! Surely the mingled souls of Machiavelli and Ninon de l’Enclos returned in that frail frame. Very nearly, Melissa’s mouth fell open. She clenched her teeth just in time. Murdock was answering dazedly—without however any apparent question of that amazing introduction.

“Fleming’s my name ... sorry to look such an ass....”

“The noblest work of God—” murmured the Marchesa sweetly.

“I thought—for just a moment,” went on Murdock, conversationally floundering in the wake of a shock ... “you look such a lot like some one else ... Melissa knows ...” he cast an imploring glance at Melissa.

“Melissa!” said the Marchesa quickly—“this is too amusing! I see it all. Mr. Fleming has met Granny!”

Her air of triumph precluded any contradiction. She looked from Murdock to Melissa, took another brioche, regarded it sybaritically and bit into it with a good deal the zest of a royal Bengal biting into the jugular of a plump brown native.

“How utterly delicious!” continued the Marchesa, though whether she thus referred to situation or bun remained in doubt. She added calmly, looking Murdock full in the eyes and allowing a smile to widen the careful corners of the Cupid’s bow.... “Granny is my twin—you won’t believe it—of course!”

“Good Lord!” said Murdock simply. “No wonder!”

“Sit down, do!” said the Marchesa kindly. “Mayn’t he stay, Melissa?”

Melissa herself still standing, strangled helpless resentment and motioned Murdock to a chair. After which she sat down, facing the Marchesa upon the couch and busied among the tea-things hands that longed to shake that hyacinthine gray head from its shoulders.

“People never believe me when I tell them that Granny and I are twins,” the Marchesa, settling her neck-band and twitching out a curl above one ear, observed brightly—“because, in the first place it seems so absolutely incredible for me to be the twin of any one who is called Granny by half her acquaintances—and in the second place—really—she looks so much older than I do! I think I’m a saint to admit the relationship.”

“Granny’s a saint!” said Murdock warmly.

“Lack of opportunity will make a saint of any woman,” returned the imperturbable Marchesa. “I don’t mean to reflect upon Mathilda—that’s her name, you know—but, nom d’un nom! She married—at nineteen—a man who should never have married at all—a congenital anchorite—he died a year later. A woman of any esprit would have married again—that is, unless, of course, she was a woman of too much esprit—well ... my poor Mathilda! She has spent her life in the service of others....”

“It’s written on her face,” said Murdock reverently.

“Yes—isn’t it!” cooed the Marchesa ... “those nasty little lines around the eyes and mouth! There’s simply nothing one can do about them without proper massage ... and Mathilda is too pure for massage—so there you are! I tell her she might have some consideration for me if not for herself—since we had the misfortune to come into the world together and it’s no good my looking less than my age—if she’s going to look more than hers ... it’s so easy to strike an average ... if you know anything at all about figures—or even if you don’t, and have a suspicious nature!”

She paused for breath and to ask for more tea.

Melissa sat dumbly raging. Any word of hers, beside being in the Marchesa’s present state, superfluous, might all too easily shatter the entire structure which that lady was so delicately uprearing. Granny must be drawn by the Marchesa’s hand—or none. No composite portrait would suffice. Beside which, Melissa saw to her incredulous disgust—could not help seeing—that Murdock was imperceptibly coming under the spell of that invincible small withered siren before him. He broke into a schoolboy chuckle as he handed her replenished cup.

“I’d certainly never take you for sisters!” he admitted.

“’Cre misere—I hope not!” cried the Marchesa airily. “As a man of the world, Mr. Fleming—as a man of the great world outside this very charming town of yours ...” (thus, at one stroke making Murdock a citizen of the universe and presenting him with the keys of New York) ... “I ask you—frankly—could two women be more unlike?”

“Ab-solutely!” said Murdock.

“It is not my fault—” said the Marchesa plaintively. “That my sister sees angels in men—where I pray only to see men among the angels.”

There was an eery and faintly unpleasant moment in which, blinking into nothingness across the rim of her tea-cup, she added, “One hasn’t much longer—to pray—perhaps.”

“Don’t say that!” offered Murdock clumsily.

The Marchesa set down her tea-cup—having drained it—and blew him a kiss. She reared a gallant and coquettish head. “I shall be seeing Mathilda in a day or so. Shall I tell her she has made a conquest? Poor soul—she doesn’t know the word!”

“Give her my love—if you please,” said Murdock boyishly. “And keep the—conquest—for yourself. I’ll bet you’d know what to do with it!”

“Melissa!” cried the Marchesa, and all her rings flashed in a fluttering gesture of both little hands, tremulous as ragged-winged butterflies in a garden at sunset ... “this is by all odds the most charming young man that I have met since—Leftenant Carmichael! Remember?”

“I remember,” said Melissa.

“He has the art of compliment,” said the Marchesa. She inquired of the pleased and flattered Murdock with caressing interest. “You were born in France—no?”

Murdock, who had been born in no stranger a place than Maryland, disclaimed France with natural reluctance.

“At least—” begged the Marchesa—“You were educated abroad?”

Murdock mentioned Harvard—without boasting.

“It is incredible!” sighed the Marchesa. “You have so much the manner ... that wonderful finesse....”

Maddening to see a man so buttered—and liking it—loving it—vulgarly speaking, lapping it up! Melissa, helpless as a painting on a wall, looked on in smiling silence—and longed to box Murdock’s ears. To scream in the Marchesa’s face.

No saint, Melissa—when it came to being crowded from the center of the stage by another woman—and that woman more than thirty years her senior!

“Come and see me!” said the Marchesa to Murdock upon leaving. She didn’t even ask Melissa to bring him. That word conquest had set every flower on her hat quivering. “I can give you tea from Japan—with a dash of—well, something Japan never knew....”

Mister Roderick’s tea!

Melissa would have drunk it on her knees. So far was hero worship bearing her. She wasn’t asked.

“You shall come another time, dear—I know how you hate these parties à trois!” said the Marchesa, smiling like all the felines in Cheshire.

When she had gone, Melissa sent Murdock away—without ceremony. She said she had a headache—if violent emotion react unfavorably upon one’s physical well-being—and the doctors tell us it does—perhaps she had.

CHAPTER XXV

Melissa’s headache, however, had other and, as speedily developed, less spiritual reason, than concern for Murdock’s clearness of vision. It was a dull, persistent heavy headache and had endured two days, coiled sluggishly within her eye-sockets before apprehension touched her and she looked about for cure other than copious doses of aspirin and a cool wet cloth across the forehead. Recurrent slight shivers of a peculiar and inner chill reinforced the headache ... equally recurrent waves of an unreasonable and flickering heat. Melissa’s back ached steadily and abominably. Every muscle in her body ached as if she had been stretched upon a rack. Depression enveloped her like a fog. She had a great fire built and sat before it wrapped in a woolly bathrobe, wondering pitifully if she were sickening for mortal illness.

Kathleen upon the third day of these fairly obvious symptoms, took command and called in a doctor, from an office a block away.

“Ye’ll be havin’ flu—or I’m much mistaken!” said Kathleen.

She was not much mistaken—Doctor Wolfe, a Teutonic blond, rough-mannered, said the same, with a trifle more circumlocution, perhaps. Making play with the usual tubes and earpieces. Listening at Melissa’s chest—peering down her throat—taking her pulse—frowning sharply at her tongue.

“You should have been in bed,” said Doctor Wolfe—“a week ago!”

Melissa lifted blood-shot eyes and managed a frightened smile.

“I’ve never been ill in my life.”

“You’re ill now,” he assured her brusquely.

“Am I—going—to die?” asked Melissa.

“Not if you do as I tell you,” said Doctor Wolfe. He added, writing busily upon a little pad after the fashion of doctors the world over ... “I’ll send you in a nurse.”

“Oh—” moaned poor Melissa—“am I as sick as that?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Doctor Wolfe, a little more kindly—he was not after all impervious to the pathetic charm of Melissa’s slim, wilted person, huddled among cushions on the couch, hot-cheeked, heavy-eyed, rumple-headed.

“You don’t want to be sick up here in this apartment all by yourself—do you? I’ll get you some one I know. Some one who’ll take good care of you.”

“Is it flu?” asked Melissa faintly.

“You’ve got a bad throat—and one or two other things,” evaded the doctor. With Kathleen out, in the hallway, he was brutally frank.

“She’ll be lucky if it isn’t pneumonia. Get her to bed at once—give her the first dose of that prescription I gave you, as soon as the drugstore can fix it up. See that she’s kept covered. Are you her maid?”

“I’m a maid in the house here,” said Kathleen simply. “I go off at three but I’ll stay till the trained nurse comes. The poor lamb! ... Some wan ought to be told—but she ain’t got kith nor kin that ever I see!”

“No relations nor friends?” inquired Doctor Wolfe, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “No one at all? That’s odd!”

“There’s the Marchesa, of course,” offered Kathleen. “Had I better let the Marchesa know?”

“Who’s the Marchesa?”

“The Marchesa di Ricci,” said Kathleen, cocking her head and tilting her round pink chin with a touch of pleasurable snobbery. “She’s the old lady whose nevvew owns this apar-r-tment. He owns the house, Mister Roderick does—only he’s away in Japan, now ... and Miss Wayne sub-let ...”

“I see—I see!” said Doctor Wolfe. Indubitably before a Marchesa and a Mister Roderick he took on a touch of deeper interest in the case. “Miss Wayne any relation to the old lady?”

“Not that I know of,” said Kathleen doubtfully. “But g-r-reat friends!”

“Better tell her, then,” said Doctor Wolfe. “I’ll send a nurse over at once and look in again myself this evening.”

He went away, swinging a little black bag and whistling under his breath “Du bist wie eine Blume” ... an unconscious tribute perhaps even at such an unpropitious time.

Kathleen put Melissa to bed none too soon, piled blankets to her chin and administered directly it arrived, the Doctor’s medicine.

After which—for Melissa herself—arrived very shortly oblivion of an unreal and pain-shot sort. Fathoms deep she sank, shivering and burning, into an abyss of turgid slumber. Her limbs were clogged. She dreamed of weights, of chains, at wrist and ankle. She dreamed of a dead thing bound upon her breast—a dead thing that yet cruelly, violently ached. She dreamed of flames licking her face, threatening her eyes. She opened those eyes beneath the clammy contours of an ice-cap and heard an unfamiliar voice say quietly—“It’s all right—don’t throw your covers off now ...”

“Yours of the seventeenth instant received,” replied Melissa, speaking rapidly—“and in reply should like to say ... tomato soup, a lamb chop and apple tapioca—no cream, please! Country boys like them fine looking....”

She said a good deal more—along the same rather tangled lines—muttering other things quite as indistinguishable and sometimes just plaintively groaning. From somewhere a long way off, she heard her own groans and they vaguely terrified her. By that time daylight had gone and the bedroom was shadowy and still.

There was a personage with a white cap who came and went after a while beside the bed. Melissa, not entirely unaware of this newcomer, addressed her sometimes as Mrs. Robinson—sometimes as Granny....

“Granny—you liar!” said Melissa once—and added a string of gutter-snipe profanity. “You white-headed, black-hearted liar!” ...

“There, there!” soothed the white-capped one undisturbed. Adding, to Kathleen standing frightened in the doorway—“The nicest of them do that. Funny! Might have heard it sometime in the street—no telling. Who’s Granny?”

“God knows!” said Kathleen, crossing herself. “Not a relative has ever come near her.” ...

Then, there was sun once more, streaming in at the eastern windows, only sun was as good as a sword-thrust through Melissa’s poor eyes, so she lay with a cold compress across them and the person in the white cap kept the shades drawn low.

Kathleen came and went very softly. No swishing of mop, no cheerful bustle of broom and dust-pan for Kathleen now.

“The poor lamb!” was Kathleen’s cry. “And her all soul alone!—The poor sick lamb!”

On the second day appeared the Marchesa, plumes nodding on a smart new bonnet, her mouth more brightly rouged than ever.

Miss Kenning, the day-nurse met her in the living-room, invited her to sit down, and regarded her primly. Against Miss Kenning’s starched white immobility, crisp brown hair and smooth pink cheeks, the Marchesa assumed the aspect of something of Hogarth’s which had been left out in a variety of weathers and only inadequately retouched.

“How is Miss Wayne this morning?” inquired the Marchesa. She reared a lorgnon set in brilliants and stared at Miss Kenning regally.

“She has still a good deal of temperature,” admitted Miss Kenning.

“Flu, I suppose?” said the Marchesa.

Miss Kenning began the customary polite evasion.

“Yes—or no!” snapped the visitor.

“Er—yes,” said Miss Kenning considerably startled.

“Kathleen tells me she’s been out of her head.”

“A little—most of the time.”

“Has she—spoken of any one in particular?” inquired the Marchesa sharply.

“Why—there’s some one she calls Granny....”

“That’s me!” said the Marchesa, feminine reticence weaker than curiosity.

“Oh—” said Miss Kenning.

“What are you oh-ing about?” demanded the Marchesa grimly.

Miss Kenning with her mind full of white-headed, black-hearted liars and other less mentionable fauna merely opened her mouth and shut it again.

“I’m going in to see her,” said the Marchesa rising.

“I’m sorry,” Miss Kenning began....

“Open that door!” said the Marchesa, and Miss Kenning opened the door.

She said to Kathleen later—“I thought if Miss Wayne called her Granny—I didn’t quite feel I could keep her out.”

Which was no more than true. She hadn’t quite felt she could keep the Marchesa out—but that, as a feeling, had less to do with Melissa’s calling the Marchesa Granny, than Miss Kenning implied.

As for the Marchesa herself, she went into Melissa’s room very softly—more softly than might have been expected of those ridiculous little French heels, drew a chair to the bedside and sat down.

Melissa, lying slim and straight and still, with one white arm outside the covers, an ice-cap pressed down upon her brows, her dark hair streaming out across the pillow, looked pitifully young—and defenseless.

“Well, my dear!” said the Marchesa, with, for her, unbelievable gentleness.

Melissa opened her big dark eyes, bigger and darker than ever in the shadow of the ice-cap and groaned—no other comments.

“I’m sorry to see you so ill,” said the Marchesa—“you are not to worry about—anything—understand? You must have a night nurse, too—and as many doctors as you like.”

“I loathe doctors,” said Melissa feebly but viciously. “Don’t bring any damned doctor in here—I won’t see him!”

Miss Kenning had come into the room. Standing at the foot of the bed she put a finger to her lip, looked at the Marchesa and frowned. The Marchesa sat silent. Melissa lay silent. The room was full of silence of a distinctly uneasy sort. Out of which Melissa presently began again—without opening her eyes this time, and rubbing one hand restlessly back and forth across the coverlet.

“You will come back—in a little while—won’t you? ... it’s so hot in this room! ... you haven’t any coat on—that’s why? Get up—get up and come here! I want to look at you close—you’re all blurred. Please—please get up and come here.... Oh, I’m so hot! I want you to hold my hand....”

Miss Kenning stirred but the Marchesa shot her an imperious look, put her own hand over Melissa’s and held it tight. Then she leaned forward, listening intently. Melissa, with her hand in the Marchesa’s was still for a little. Only a little....

“I want you—” muttered Melissa—“to stay—I don’t want you to go away at all. I can’t see you—when you’re gone. I can’t hear you.... I want you to talk to me. I want to look at the back of your head—I’ve never seen the back of your head—and it makes such a difference....”

Across the bed the Marchesa uncannily bright-eyed cocked an inquisitive glance at Miss Kenning. Her painted lips shaped—“Who?”

“Old vulture!” thought Miss Kenning and merely shrugged.

Clinging to the Marchesa’s hand, Melissa murmured huskily—“If you’d be you—I’d be me—and what we couldn’t do!... I’m going to wait.... It’s no good my trying—I’ve got to wait....”

“Ah-ha!” said the Marchesa to herself and leaned a bit nearer.

“I’ll wait—” said Melissa unsteadily—“you will come back—won’t you? ... call that rickshaw man—he has the tea!”

Having thus laid her secret treasure in the Marchesa’s greedy palm, Melissa drifted off into a troubled sleep and the Marchesa, slipping her fingers free and rising, followed Miss Kenning once more into the outer room.

“Does she ask for some one called Roderick?” inquired the Marchesa curtly.

Her masterful inflection procured her an answer—“Mister Roderick,” corrected Miss Kenning stiffly.

“H’mph!” said the Marchesa. “Much?”

“Pretty often,” admitted Miss Kenning, who possessed a certain amount of curiosity upon her own side. “Is it some one she knows?”

“Would she be talking about him if it weren’t?”

“Talking to him,” corrected Miss Kenning. “She talks to him for hours. She usually thinks he has his coat off—and she seems to connect him in some way with the furnishing of this apartment. Could he be the decorator?”

“He might—but I doubt it,” said the Marchesa.

“Well—whoever he is—she seems to be crazy about him,” Miss Kenning offered bluntly. “She’ll be quiet, any time she thinks he’s sitting there holding her hand. I’ve had to do it a good deal.”

“Upon my word!” said the Marchesa. She glanced about Mister Roderick’s sitting-room, sniffed and—suddenly—sighed. “Of all the incredible things—I might have known ... well ... poor child!” Which was for the Marchesa sentiment unheard-of. She added almost at once—“What’s your honest opinion—is she dangerously ill?”

“Why—the doctor doesn’t think so, to-day,” said Miss Kenning cautiously. “He thinks in some ways—she’s better. You see—as I told you—some people run a high temperature more easily than others—and go out of their heads with a fairly slight temperature—so there you are! Has Miss Wayne any—ah—worries—that might aggravate things for her, do you know?”

“Quite possibly she has,” said the Marchesa—herself not too reckless with information. In the doorway, however, she turned, an odd look of decision upon her face.... “Next time she asks for Mister Roderick ... tell her he’s coming back ... very soon.”

“I see,” said Miss Kenning with professional calm.

“I shall cable for him to-day,” continued the Marchesa loftily. She was riding the crest of a great moment, playing a beautiful scene up to the hilt. She might have preferred a more extensive and less antagonistic audience but the white-capped, white-uniformed, young woman before her was better than nothing, beside being from moment to moment more visibly impressed.

“Miss Wayne is to have everything she needs,” decreed the Marchesa, Royalty itself in her voice and air. Thus might great Catherine have stooped to ensure the happiness of a faithful female retainer. Catherine was in the Marchesa’s mind—doubtless—Marie Antoinette—Mary Stuart—one or two other notable women.

“I shall come in again—some time to-morrow....”

Miss Kenning replied that that would be nice.

“Roderick will be simply dumbfounded!” observed the Marchesa, and went away full of little flickering smiles. Like fire in dry grass. The dumbfounding of Roderick in itself offered to her agile intelligence, no unworthy project.

Upon her limousined way to the cable office the Marchesa composed a masterpiece. “Return earliest possible date proposition awaiting you.” Which proposition of course was Melissa—lying fever-dazed beneath her blankets and ice-caps.

If Melissa could have seen the Marchesa sending that cable! Licking her lips over it. Purring with satisfaction. Being a great lady, and a dea ex machina, and a Delphic oracle all rolled into one.

Melissa at the time saw nothing very clearly, beyond a quiet young man, with a cigarette between his fingers, a slight smile upon his mouth, standing now at the window, looking out across the Park ... now before the fire with one hand upon the mantelshelf ... now beside the bed, looking down, laying his strong cool fingers over her tired and burning ones.

“Don’t go away ... please, Mister Roderick—don’t go away!” begged Melissa, and Miss Kenning sighed and settled closer in her chair, shifted a cramped wrist and murmured something soothing.

Vicarious emotion was not Miss Kenning’s forte. She considered that she would be glad when Melissa’s fever dropped and this sob-stuff was over.

CHAPTER XXVI

Melissa’s fever, however, ran a stubborn course. It sank for a deceptive while very nearly to normal and the night nurse was dismissed, Miss Kenning began to talk of leaving ... then, apparently without explanation, a relapse ... and all to do over again.

The Marchesa, in this trying time, became as a rock in a weary land, a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, if that be not too exuberant a description of her unfaltering attendance at Melissa’s bedside. Only the most skeptic of observers could have had the heart to suggest that Melissa’s illness was climactic, so to speak, and afforded to a romantic comedy of the Marchesa’s staging and directing, the most poignant of all possible third acts.

In the Marchesa’s pocket, while she sat holding Melissa’s hand and listening to those husky and one-sided conversations which took up so much of Melissa’s time, reposed a cable ... signed Roderick.

It had arrived in very nearly instant response to the one the Marchesa had sent and it said without agitation—“Sailing next month in any case.”

How like Roderick the Marchesa thought, to put in those last three words—as if cable tolls had no terrors for him—as if, frankly, he had quite overlooked them. He was in a position to do so, of course.

The Marchesa had tried to tell Melissa that her nephew was returning.

But, in her hazier moments, Melissa didn’t understand—and in her lucid ones, didn’t seem to want to talk about him.

The Marchesa decided then that his arrival might just as well come in the form of a surprise—surprises being always interesting to observers, innocent and otherwise, whether or no the victim shares the pleasure.

“I had rather,” said the Marchesa to Miss Kenning, with whom by that time, she was on the friendliest footing, Miss Kenning being a facile narrator of the human comedy, in terms chiefly physiological and obstetric ... being, as a matter of fact an absolute gold-mine of professional experience, readily shared.... “I had rather we said nothing more to Miss Wayne about—Mister Roderick.”

“I think you are quite right,” said Miss Kenning. “She’s got an obsession on the subject already—and a complex, besides.”

“After all,” said the Marchesa, polishing her sharp rosy nails with her wisp of a handkerchief—“What is love but an obsession—and a complex?”

“It’s a flop, if you want my opinion,” replied Miss Kenning frankly.

Her last young man had engendered that belief in her, having failed at the crucial moment to make anything like proportionate return for the time and encouragement she had lavished upon him.

“It may be, as you say, a flop,” returned the Marchesa amiably, “but I fancy it will always be the most amusing feature of a badly arranged universe. Have you saved the cards from those flowers for Miss Wayne?”

“There’s a flock of cards on the desk,” said Miss Kenning. “That Mr. Fleming has kept the place looking like a flower-shop.”

“Poor boy!” sighed the Marchesa tenderly. She had by that time definitely decided that Murdock would have to go overboard.

Melissa came slowly back to herself from a region of dolor and doubt. A month from the day she went to bed, she arose again weakly, feeling as if her bones had melted and her sinews frayed within her, pitifully shaky about the knees, heavy-headed, hollow-eyed. Weighed to earth moreover by that indescribable sense of depression which influenza leaves behind it. Twice in her first day she shed hopeless, ineffectual tears. Once because the waiter forgot the salt upon her breakfast tray and again because Kathleen in dusting the desk in the living-room had somehow swept out of sight the snap-shot of Mister Roderick, safely hidden—as Melissa supposed—in the drawer it had primarily occupied.

Melissa could not or would not ask about the picture in any but the most roundabout way ... and Kathleen, sympathetic as she was, seemed yet stupidly unable to understand for what Miss Wayne was searching.

“I gave the desk a good clanein’—last week,” insisted Kathleen anxiously. “Was it letters you left there?”

“Not letters, Kathleen—a—clipping—that is—some old kodaks and things....”

Melissa’s pride would allow her no nearer the truth than that.

“I threw out some torn-up theayter programs,” admitted Kathleen humbly. “Cud it have been among ’em?”

Melissa didn’t think so. She realized the impossibility, however, without absolute frankness and a detailed description of the object of her search of any help from Kathleen.

So Melissa merely cried, weakly, her head on a green brocade cushion on the couch. Cried for a long time—till Miss Kenning came back from her walk, in fact, and put her patient to bed with a hearty scolding.

“It’s nothing,” said Miss Kenning in conclusion—“but nerves. You’ll be like this for some time, I dare say—and you must not give way to it! If you want to get well in a hurry.”

Without Mister Roderick’s picture, Melissa didn’t know that she cared—one way or the other. Nothing to hold to, now. No raft—-on a sailless sea. She had been happier in her fever-distorted dreams. Then, for days, and nights unnumbered, Mister Roderick had moved through his rooms at her call. Had stood in the doorway, smiling at her, had sat on the side of her bed and talked to her ... endlessly. She hadn’t had to conjure him up—he had been there. As real as the pillow under her head. Realler than the Doctor or the nurse. Realler than life. Real ... between Melissa and death! But as Melissa came out into daylight—Mister Roderick receded into the shadows. And Melissa was too tired to hold him. Too tired to call him back. With the little picture to touch and to look at, for proof of his existence—somewhere—Melissa must have tried.... Without the picture it began to seem as if in her fever she had dreamed it all. As if with the going of the fever the whole dear delusion sank away from her.

No wonder Melissa cried. The bottom had fallen out of her world ... and the sky had fallen in ... or was that too merely the aftermath of sickness? She lay on her couch long hours, staring into the fire—for which by this time it was almost too warm, with late spring whistling outside the windows—but a fire Melissa would have. She didn’t want food, though she took it rather than be argued with.... She didn’t want sleep—especially—she would have read all night rather than not ... but she did want a fire.

So Kathleen kept the windows open and humored “the poor lamb” no matter how radiant the day.

“Ye’ll be feelin’ better once ye see yer friends again,” was Kathleen’s comfortable prophecy—but Melissa, tired to the center of her soul, twice-tired with the thought of having to speak and smile and pretend that all was once more well with her ... wanted that least of all.

She wouldn’t see Murdock—though his flowers blossomed in every corner of her sitting-room. She sent him word that she loved them—but that he must wait till she could thank him properly.

She wouldn’t see Beall, who tried once or twice then drifted on, as might have been expected, after another flame. Beall had never really mattered and Melissa neither knew nor cared that he was drifting. She might have had him ... but she let him go without further effort. She couldn’t, in any case, have appealed to him, in a state of convalescence. Beall hated sick people. He was at once impatient—and secretly terrified of—disease.

Nelly Rivers telephoned and telephoned again. Even that friendly contact, Melissa refused. Nelly’s eyes were too keen—her speech too trenchant. “Tell her as soon as I’m seeing any one—I’ll let her know,” said Melissa and burrowed deeper among her cushions—alone.

Alone—except for the Marchesa. The Marchesa came and went, as usual, like a shower of sparks, like a witch popping out of a chimney. She took Melissa to drive—in spite of herself—upon a heavenly afternoon toward the end of May when the skies were translucent azure, the wind a mocking caress.

“It may or may not do you good,” said the Marchesa. “In any case—you’ve mooned long enough. Make an effort, my good girl! You’ll never get your looks back at this rate. It’s all very well to be pale—sallow’s another story.”

Pale, Melissa had been—up to that moment.

“Good—you can still blush!” exclaimed the Marchesa shrilly and pinched Melissa’s arm. “How much have you lost?”

“I don’t know,” said Melissa wearily.

“Your bones will be showing if you lose another ounce,” the Marchesa assured her—“your face looks a trifle drawn as it is. Do you put sour cream on it before going to bed—as I told you?”

“No,” said Melissa and shuddered uncontrollably.

The Marchesa was annoyed. “Very well!” she retorted. “Just look in the glass when you get home. You’ve got to do something—and that’s all there is to it!” Something further she said—having the grace to mumble—about a sick cat. She was captious and more than a little cruel to Melissa that day. But after all there was Mister Roderick on his way back from Japan with the Marchesa’s cable somewhere about him ... and there was the Marchesa with her Proposition going limp on her hands. Losing its looks and whatnot. “I shall send you my own masseuse, to-morrow,” said the Marchesa crisply in parting. “You will please do exactly as she tells you—if you’re not a complete fool! You haven’t got all the time in the world, you know.”

Melissa was still rather weak. She set her teeth and shut her eyes for a moment going up in the elevator, to keep back the tears.

Lonelier than the loneliest soul in hell—that was Melissa.

“It’s been a nice afternoon,” said Henry, the boy who took her up.

“Has it?—Yes, it has, of course,” said Melissa.

She let herself into the apartment with shaking hands. Dusk was coming on. The lights beside her couch were lit. Some one got up from the farthest corner of that couch and came toward her quietly. A man—tall and slim and dark-haired. He put out both hands.... “Lissa—I waited for you ... you don’t mind?”

It was Luke.

Melissa said his name with almost a sob in her voice.

Luke—his smile and his eyes and his warm quick comforting hands! Luke—who cared what became of one!

“Child!” he said very gently—“how white you are!” and drew her over to the couch and put her down with a hand on each slender shoulder, among the cushions. “You want,” he said—“a fire and something else. Sit still and let me take care of you.”

Melissa sat still while he lit the fire—while he brought her something in a glass and made her drink it. While he sat down at length beside her and took both her chilly hands in his and looked into her eyes.

“I didn’t know you’d been ill,” he said, “till I walked in here this afternoon—and Kathleen told me about it. She said you weren’t seeing any one—so I stayed. Aren’t you going to smile—for me?”

“I’m too tired,” said Melissa unsteadily.

“Then don’t!” said Luke and put her fingers to his lips. He might never have been away. Warmth came back about Melissa’s heart like buds to a cold black bough. She tightened her hands in his. She asked almost shyly:

“Luke—when did you get back? And—have things been—very hard—? I’ve only been ill. Tell me—about you!”

Luke told her, sitting there beside her, uncommonly quiet, his eyes on their gently linked hands, his voice curiously even.

“Well,” he said, “it’s a bit unusual—don’t be startled—or shocked—will you? God knows I’d no right to be! I wrote you Iwalani was in Honolulu when it happened—not on the ranch, at all.”

“Yes—” said Melissa, “why was that, Luke?”

“She’d gone down there,” said Luke, “to visit some people she knew. But the evening she was drowned—at Nanakuli it was; that’s rather a lonely beach about an hour or so out of town—well—the evening she was drowned—she wasn’t with those people. She was with a man who’d been staying up at the ranch on a house-party a week or so before ... and nobody knows how it happened or why because....”

“Oh, Luke,” said Melissa faintly.

“Because he was drowned with her—d’y’ see?” said Luke. “And that’s all there was to it. The bodies were recovered. She may have called for help—a cramp or something—she was a strong swimmer—but there’s a terribly heavy surf on that beach.... I don’t know—when he tried to help her she may have lost her head and pulled him under—struggling. That’s been done, of course. As I say—nobody knows. Although everybody obviously conjectured—one thing and another. I had to wait—till things were settled up. I got away from there as soon as I could. I have a blind persistent feeling that she didn’t mind going like that—I told you, once—our marriage was a mistake—and I have a feeling she cared for this man. I found a picture of him—he must have been rather a decent sort—and a package of letters—one of his initialed handkerchiefs—among her things.”

“You didn’t read the letters, Luke?”

“No—” said Luke, “they were hers—not mine. I told you, too, if you remember, that she was very religious. She wouldn’t have listened to divorce. Yet she was a queer passionate soul—I’m not so sure she wouldn’t rather have had—some one she wanted—like that—in death—than not at all. I’m not so sure ... she minded going ... poor old Iwalani!”

“Did people—say unpleasant things?” Melissa asked him, hesitant.

“They did,” Luke told her grimly. “Both definite and inferential. The consensus of opinion, I fancy, was that if I had stayed in the islands, where I belonged—if I had been taking care of my wife, instead of writing silly rot for New York magazines ... the thing wouldn’t have happened. I was not exactly an heroic nor a sympathetic figure in the eyes of Iwalani’s friends—and they made no bones about it. The fact that we might have been together—any time she cared to come here to live—made nothing. The other fact that we never particularly wanted to be together—made even less. The fact that our marriage was a boner of the worst sort was never for one moment allowed to be our own affair ... we couldn’t even make the best of it, living decently apart, without comment. Oh, the Tribe flayed me—and threw me out!” said Luke. “I am a Modern Tendency and a Hideous Instance....”

“Have you been horribly unhappy?” asked Melissa wistfully. The bitterness in his eyes hurt her.

“No—” said Luke. And was all at once not bitter at all—only rather quiet and infinitely tender.

He added as if it were not in the least a strange thing to be saying.... “I couldn’t be too unhappy—with you in the world ... and knowing I was coming back here where you were.”

“Luke—don’t!”

“Why not? I dare say Iwalani died without a thought of me in her heart ... we’d been—barely friends—for five years. I can wait a conventional time if you’d rather—but, Lissa—aren’t you too tired to pretend? Let me tell you the truth—now! There must be one woman in the world a man doesn’t have to lie to!” Two tears slipped down Melissa’s cheeks. She shut her eyes. Luke put his arms around her and she turned her cheek against his shoulder ... she felt his lips upon her hair. She heard him say very low and not very steadily—“Love me, Lissa?”

She moved her head in answer—wordless.

She hadn’t known how sweet it would be to be quiet in Luke’s arms. Not to be lonely any more. To feel the heavenly warmth of human contact and at the same moment to be intimately understood ... flesh and something not flesh satisfied together.... “Luke—” she whispered—“I’ve wanted you so....”

Luke kissed her then, holding her close, and in that moment, through the passionate gentleness of his lips upon hers, Melissa was aware of doubt belying her own soft whisper....

Could there be comfort in contact, intimacy in understanding—and yet—not all?

Something still wanting ... something unanswered ... in the very moment of surrender, something that winced and withheld itself ... or was it—not Luke—that she wanted? After all?

“Lissa—” said Luke, while she desperately questioned.... “Lissa darling!...” His voice was the tenderest Melissa had ever heard. It shamed her.

She let him kiss her again—but lifting up her face, she shut her eyes and shut her hands hard, and said in her soul to something that pitifully protested....

“Hush ... hush ... hush!”

CHAPTER XXVII

Luke was recklessly happy, as Melissa’s lover.

He might have been coming to it all his life. It changed him in a way that Melissa almost hid her face to see. Because she hadn’t, as she very soon knew, any right to have worked such a change in him. She loved him—but not enough. And he loved her too much. Poignantly too much, for Melissa’s peace of mind. His old casual whimsicality, his airy smartness, his half-cynical, half-rebellious attitude toward life, melted imperceptibly, shifted subtly but undeniably into unguarded acceptance of happiness. Into unreserved belief in the reality of love. The old Luke she could have laughed with, trifled with, gently derided. The new Luke looked at her with his heart in his once-mocking eyes ... and she left her hands in his ... said what he waited for her to say. With her own heart curiously tormented.

Between shadow and substance.

She had turned to Luke when, in the first dragging days of her convalescence Mister Roderick seemed gone for good. With strength returning in her, Mister Roderick came back. And Mister Roderick, unseen, unheard, untouched, by Melissa’s mortal senses, was yet realer than Luke ... in the flesh beside her. Where Luke left off, Mister Roderick began. Poor Melissa! She remembered sometimes with a dim sense of panic, the “woman wailing for her demon lover....”

It didn’t seem possible that phantasy could so far override the actual.

And yet ... she turned from Luke’s arms to a dream in the darkness.

Perhaps, in the back of her mind was always the surety that others had seen him if she had not. That the Marchesa vouched for his reality—and Kathleen. That before very long he would be coming back from whatever far places he had wandered in ... and that then....

Unfair—unfair and ungrateful! Untrue to Luke who was now so passionately true to her. Luke who told his soul, with a smile, when she looked at him.

“I wish—” said Melissa uncertainly, “I wish you’d sometimes be rude—and insulting—and scornful—as you used ... do you remember? You said once I was out to marry money. Have you forgotten that? Aren’t you afraid....”

“Of what?” asked Luke pleasantly, rapping with his stick upon the window of the taxi and motioning the driver to go round the Park again.

A dark wide silent dusty Park, in whose midnight depths there might conceivably lurk hold-up men and bandits, but where there was at least small audience and none to overhear.

“Aren’t you afraid,” insisted Melissa, “that it may be your money that I’m after?...”

“No—” said Luke with the most disarming candor, “not any more.”

“How can you be so sure, Luke?”

“Don’t know—too happy to tinker with it.”

“But if it were true—at first—why isn’t it true, now?”

“Don’t know. Why does June come after May?”

It was past June then and heat like a fog had lain all day upon the town.

“Luke—” said Melissa in an odd, hushed voice, “it was October a year ago I came to the apartment—wasn’t it?”

Luke replied with some irrelevant phrase-making as to the unimportance of time and the impossibility of measuring it.

“That first night—” said Melissa, “I heard you whistling—‘Somebody loves me ... I wonder who?’”

“Never whistle it any more,” said Luke with the amazing banality of a clever man in love.... “I know now....”

“Do you?” asked Melissa wistfully.

“Don’t I?” said Luke.

The taxi lurched over a rut and he tightened his arm about her. He quoted softly—“‘Where the apple reddens, never pry—Lest we lose our Eden, Eve and I.’ Introspection—between lovers—both futile and dangerous.”

“It’s getting on to a year, now,” said Melissa, half to herself, “and I feel as if it had been ten.”

“Influenza,” Luke reminded her, “is apt to leave one that way. Never mind ... you’re coming out of it fast! You smiled twice at the most awful slapstick to-night. Next week I’m going to take you to see Dante in the movies. If you react to that—I’ll know you’re all well again.”

“React how?” asked Melissa. Luke’s nonsense comforted her strangely. Life couldn’t be either too real or too awkwardly earnest before that lazy low-voiced observer of its inadequacies. She forgot that flippancy is frequently the chain armor of an acutely sensitized soul. When Luke laughed she thought him amused—which he wasn’t always.

“If the Inferno doesn’t cheer you—back you go to bed!” he assured her.

“Oh, I’m cheered—so far as that’s concerned,” Melissa insisted.

“But not—inebriated, spiritually speaking,” said Luke—“and I’d like you to be ... mere matter of personal vanity! You don’t seem to find our affair the ... well, the spring in the desert—that you should. Melissa ... I love you!”

“I love you, too,” said Melissa, close against his cheek—a remorseful whisper.

She did love him—but not enough. In a way that would never satisfy him ... when he came to know. She had known—the first time he told her. And she had not stopped his telling her. So many kinds of love in a woman’s life ... how to be sure of a great love at the end—when one has sent all the little loves packing? People lie and steal—emotionally—from the blackest fear in the world—the fear of loneliness. Not one woman out of many women finds the man who was born to be her lover ... this one passes—and that one—she looks and listens, soon she hears Time muttering round the corner and puts her hand in the first warm hand outstretched—so as not to encounter that grisly shade—alone. So many reasons—for taking love—and all of them unworthy, evanescent, foredoomed to decay—except the perilous reason of desiring to give it back....

“What are you thinking?” asked Luke softly.

“Introspection between lovers—no, thank you!” said Melissa and made him take her home, saying she was sleepy. A lie sufficiently pretty—but not too white.

She didn’t sleep—ever—when she first got into bed. She lay straight and still, with her eyes shut, her hands folded over her heart and dreamed her dream awake. She had willed to do it at first; latterly she had small choice. Mister Roderick came to her, now, uncalled. There was not a moment of her day when the thought of him didn’t color her mind. For her, illusion had overspread reality.

One way of fixing Luke’s claim, of fighting off his ghostly rival presently occurred to her. In pursuit of which she went to see the Marchesa and having for half an hour or so made desultory conversation upon various quite unimportant matters, converged at length upon the always engrossing subject—among women—of amatory entanglement, and so arrived, stammering a little and flushing, at the pronouncement of her news.

The Marchesa sat back in her winged chair dumb for once—but not for long.

“Mon Dieu!” she gasped eventually and called upon a saint or so as well. “Are you telling the truth?”

“I don’t lie,” said Melissa—but so much her pride had failed her that she added bitterly—“when there’s any other way....”

“You are actually engaged to Kenealy?”

“I have just told you.”

“You didn’t know—I have it from Murdock—that he refused to inherit from his wife—that he has only his own holdings?”

“Of course I knew,” said Melissa coldly. “He told me, himself—when he had just returned.”

“You little idiot!” said the Marchesa and sniffed and laughed—a high, thin, scornful sound. “You unutterable little idiot—why couldn’t you have waited?”

“Why should I have waited?” asked Melissa. She was frightened and ashamed of the way in which her hand tensed to strike that insulting smile from the Marchesa’s overly crimson mouth.

“I thought you were to consult me in everything?” insisted Granny’s twin, leaning forward to stare into Melissa’s face.

“I am sorry,” said Melissa stiffly.

“Are you indeed! Not half so sorry as you will be when I tell you what you’ve done....”

“I have done nothing—except—promise to marry Luke.”

“After a decent length of time—I hope! How long has his wife been dead—two months—isn’t it?”

“Four,” said Melissa, frozen. She added, against her will—“They had not lived together for four years. She did not believe in divorce....” but she could not somehow bring herself to bare for the Marchesa’s relentless inspection, Luke’s conjectures that Iwalani’s death had been Iwalani’s choice.... “I shouldn’t think of marrying him yet—” she said—“I told you, so soon, only because—as you say—I was to tell you—everything.”

“You’re a bit late in the day at that, I think,” observed the Marchesa caustically. “Milles tonnerres! ... if I had dreamed....”

Melissa reminded her mordantly, “I had no reason to suppose you wouldn’t approve.”

“That was months ago,” retorted the Marchesa with airy change of front ... “before your illness ... before I had heard you calling day after day for my nephew....”

“What?” cried poor Melissa, drowned in shame. “I didn’t know—that’s unbearable!”

“Don’t trouble to be so dramatic about it,” the Marchesa implored her. She preened her dry little hands and arched her ankles in a kind of irritated enjoyment of the moment. “I said I heard you. You were out of your head—with fever. It was most enlightening. I can’t think where you got the idea but it was obvious—to both Miss Kenning and me....”

“Please!” said Melissa and put both hands up over her burning face.

“Well—” said the Marchesa, “why be ashamed of it?” Amazing concession for one bearing pincers and thumbscrews about her! “I’ve a good deal more respect for you now than I ever had before. I didn’t think you were capable of a grand passion ... and for a man you’ve never seen.... I was completely charmed by the thought—” (scalpels if not pincers!) “so much so that I cabled him at once....”

Melissa’s hands dropped back in her lap. She lifted a tortured look.

“You—cabled—Mister Roderick—about me?”

“Why on earth do you call him that?” inquired the Marchesa pettishly. “Like a sentimental parlor-maid!”

“It was what Kathleen called him,” said Melissa. She persisted doggedly.... “You say you cabled....”

“He’ll be here any day,” said the Marchesa. “And in the meantime, you’ve gone and got yourself engaged to somebody else. Upon my word—I’m almost tempted never to do any one a kindness again!”

“What did you tell him?” begged Melissa.

“Oh,—nothing—ah—tangible,” the Marchesa waved a guilty recollection of waiting Propositions away from her. “Your name wasn’t mentioned—naturally. You see he’s never heard of you. He’s a romantic creature, however—and when he learns that just from living in his rooms and hearing his servant talk about him, you’ve conceived a hopeless affection for him....”

“I beg of you—” said Melissa. A shiver went over her.

The Marchesa might have been sitting in a crimson-brocaded box upon the first night of a wonderful play by an unknown author. Melissa’s shame, Melissa’s uncontrollable shiver sent just such delicious wind-flaws along her aged veins.

“My good girl!” she cried imperiously, “leave it all to me! Do you suppose he will ever learn the mechanistics of his love-story? Of course not! One arranges that you meet—that is all. I shall have a little supper—just the three of us—here in this room—directly he returns....” Very nearly the little supper spread itself in that instant before Melissa’s magicked gaze. Mister Roderick’s half-smiling eyes across the violets and roses of the Marchesa’s Dresden urn ... the skeptic arrogance of his mouth ... only arrogance was not all ... that touch of ardent deviltry ... why there wasn’t a man in the world like him....

“Luke!” said Melissa suddenly. A rather pitiful cry.

“That—” said the Marchesa settling back with a yawn—she had times of being suddenly and devastatingly tired and giving way to it with a kind of contemptuous helplessness.... “That you will have to arrange. Perhaps the best thing to do....”

“I shall tell him the truth—or nothing,” said Melissa very low.

“As you please!” said the Marchesa. “I was never much of a Sadist, myself.”

CHAPTER XXVIII

Telling Luke, however, was by no means a thing to be casually undertaken. Even if Melissa hadn’t been wretchedly ashamed of the way she had let things drift, of accepting at Luke’s hands a depth of feeling and a poignancy of emotion she knew she could by no means return ... even if it hadn’t been for that—she would still have shrunk from dealing him such a wound. To first convince him of the authenticity of love—then all at once, to slip from his hands and take her proofs otherwhere.... Melissa couldn’t, in long unhappy hours of considering how to say it, arrive at any decent way of stating her case.

She had not played fair—with Luke. And that was the core of it.

She had salved her loneliness with his love. And she had had no right to do so. She had made him absurdly happy—and she was now going to make him proportionately miserable. All because she hadn’t known her own mind.

The commonest womanly attribute.

She grew thin and white, lost what little color she had regained, groping to find a way out of the maze. Doggedly and blindly she obeyed some inward compulsion which would not let her rest with things as they were.

Brazenly she admitted to herself, that Mister Roderick’s return was at least to find her unhandicapped....

She felt at times that she had no more choice in what she was doing than a moth, blundering through the darkness toward a lighted house.... She felt, always the veriest marionette in the Marchesa’s frail jeweled hands. Man after man, of Melissa’s collecting the Marchesa had discarded, settling now by a whim merely—one didn’t quite dare believe in any more altruistic motive—upon the absent nephew, as the true hero.

Willing to sacrifice her nephew, the Marchesa was, to the dramatic exigencies of the situation which her own polissonnerie had created.

Willing and anxious.

Goethe, with a breathing Marguerite to lead into the garden on her way to a living Faust, could have felt no more exquisite if vicarious thrill than the Marchesa, planning her little supper “... just the three of us....”

But what the Marchesa felt or didn’t feel ... what she was or wasn’t getting out of the moment ... mattered very little, in the final estimate, to Melissa.

All Melissa wanted was to have Luke know that she couldn’t marry him ... without the wicked cruelty of telling him so.

He told himself—as she might have foreseen. He hadn’t missed noticing the shadows under her eyes; the nervous quiver about her mouth; the way her hand lay in his, with no answering tension ... the way she winced from his arms, if she hadn’t time to evade them.

He brought things to a focus, one night, soon after Melissa’s conversation with the Marchesa, standing at the sitting-room window, looking down into the Park, one hand in his trousers pocket, the other playing with an old cigarette-holder of which he was inordinately fond. Melissa sat in a deep chair and watched him unsmiling. There had been queer long silences between them that evening ... taut, dangerous hiatuses.

“And so—” said Luke suddenly—nothing at all to do with his last remark which had dealt in the lightest fashion with the superiority of black-checkered taxi-cabs over red ... “and so—they didn’t, after all, live happy ever after ... did they, Lissa?”

Melissa held her breath for a miserable moment, as if a wave toppled above her, or the earth slipped under her feet. Then she called upon her courage and said looking up at him white-faced ... “I don’t know what you mean.”

“That’s unworthy of our united intelligences, my dear,” said Luke and came and sat upon the arm of her chair and held her eyes with his own. “You do know what I mean—don’t you?—and you’re making yourself sick again trying to let me down light. What’s the good? I’m not so fragile as all that ... once it’s over I shall undoubtedly pick myself up and go on to the next—fata morgana....”

“Once what’s over?” asked Melissa—as if she did not know.

(“Coward!” she said to herself bitterly—“coward—and liar—and sneak!”)

“Why—you and me,” said Luke simply. “What else?”

“Is that—over?” said Melissa huskily.

“Isn’t it?” said Luke. He put his hand under her chin and lifted it.

She shut her eyes. Her mouth twisted.

“Poor little Lissa!” said Luke and drew her head against his arm and laid his cheek upon her hair without another word.

“Luke—” said Melissa after a while—an unsteady whisper—“I’d give anything—to love you—enough....”

“Except enough love!” said Luke gently. “Stop crying, Melissa, and sit up and powder your nose. I’ve seen it coming. I think perhaps I knew it all along. I had no right to crowd you—the night I came back. You were so tired and lonely—you’d have listened to any man ... except, perhaps, our friend Austin.... I like to think you wouldn’t have listened to Austin, even then....”

“I had refused to see him—he telephoned—more than once. Murdock too. I saw Murdock for the first time last Thursday. You see it wasn’t just—loneliness....”

“Whatever it was,” said Luke, “it wasn’t as you’ve just observed—enough. And I knew it. And tried to pretend I didn’t. For which, justly, I now get my come-uppance! Lissa—don’t lie, darling—that doesn’t get us anywhere—has there been one moment when in your heart and without reservation—you wanted it to be me?” Even his stubborn lightness stumbled over that. The break in his voice tightened Melissa’s hands upon his arm as if to save him—from herself. He made her tell....

“Not one—was there?”

“Not one,” said Melissa wretchedly.

“That’s what I thought,” said Luke. He stood up and walked over to the table, fingered delphiniums and roses, in a bowl there, blindly.

Melissa followed him. Stood beside him aching to comfort him. Knowing for her own desolation, that the only help she could offer was the withholding of hands and lips not his.

“What taught you better?” asked Luke suddenly. He settled his tie and turned an immobile face. “Or is that an indiscreet question? I might have taught you, myself, you know—if there hadn’t been something in the way....”

Melissa twisted her hands together in silence. Could even Luke understand an obstacle as impalpable as Mister Roderick?

“Another man?” insisted Luke—“not Murdock, for God’s sake! You’ll be counting sheep all your life....”

“Not any one you ever saw,” said Melissa desperately. She added quite well aware how absurd she sounded—“Not—any one that I ever saw ... please, Luke! I can’t talk about it—much.”

“Of course—an ordinary casualty’s got small chance against—the unknown soldier,” said Luke quietly. He looked at Melissa long and hard. “I think,” he said at length, “you’ll come an awful cropper, sweet ... some day. Inside your lovely shell you’re so starved and restless—aren’t you? What is it you’re always looking for?”

“I used to think it was—beauty ...” said Melissa.

“We admit disqualification,” said Luke. “Without protest.”

“Don’t—don’t laugh at me! I can’t bear to be laughed at.”

“I’m laughing at myself—not you. Why do you say you used to think?”

“Because—now—I’m not sure—any more. It’s beauty—and something else....”

“I’m going to hurt you—” said Luke ... “you mean—you used to think you wanted money badly enough to marry for it—didn’t you?”

“Yes—it sounds too horrible!”

“That’s why it’s mostly seen and not heard. Well—and now you still want money—but you want the not impossible he, alongside. No?”

“Yes,” said Melissa unhappily.

“Think he exists?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” said Luke—“Of course that tears it!”

He said further, a little later on, that he hoped he hadn’t asked too many questions and made a nuisance of himself, because after all whom a woman loved and where she married were matters peculiarly her own concern, only....

“I think you’re making a mistake,” said Luke. “We’re two of a kind—in a way—we could have amused ourselves....”

“Amusement isn’t all of it,” Melissa implored him.

“It’s the thing you want to pray for when the lights go up,” said Luke a trifle grimly—and went home.

He didn’t ask to kiss Melissa for the last time—he didn’t even shake hands with her ... which left her incongruously forlorn. He merely opened the door, hat and stick in hand, and said, “See you sometime!” and closed it behind him.

This time, however, he didn’t whistle in the hallway. And Melissa, standing in the middle of the floor with a silly little handkerchief clenched between her fingers, knew what she had done. She could have run after him and cried on her knees to be forgiven. Only she was so glad to be free.

One needs to be ruthless, to be free.... Melissa achieved ruthlessness by turning off all the lights, taking the receiver off the telephone and going to bed in the dark.

She said to herself, on the edge of sleep, “It’s no good thinking if this and if that—it had to happen this way.”

But her last thought of all was—without shame, like most thoughts when the guard of the conscious is dropping—“I’ll see the Marchesa, to-morrow! She may have heard by now....”

CHAPTER XXIX

Anna opened the door to Melissa’s rather nervous ring, upon the following afternoon, and admitted her, unsmiling. The Marchesa was at home, said Anna and would Miss Wayne please come in.

Miss Wayne came in, cool and charming in the sheerest black imaginable, with a wide black hat upon her dusky hair, a string of pearls about her milk-white throat. She dropped a glove and Anna retrieved it ungraciously.

Anna quite obviously had never liked Melissa, but then Anna was a creature of infinite prejudice and Melissa sometimes thought cared for no one at all excepting—in a crabbed sort of way, her employer.

“It’s very warm this afternoon, isn’t it?” Melissa offered weakly, an attempt at conciliation for which she promptly despised herself. Anna admitted reluctantly that it was adding no verbal gingerbread.

“In here,” muttered Anna and led the way to the lair of the home-keeping Marchesa.

Murdock was calling upon the lady ... a fact which stopped Melissa in the doorway, conscious of surprise and somewhat unreasonable displeasure.

“Well, Melissa!” cried the Marchesa in a brisk staccato ... “this is very nice indeed. You’re just in time to hear Murdock’s news ... he has been telling me the most interesting.... Bring that chair, dear boy....” She indicated the gilt trifle upon which Melissa was to sit ... and, Murdock having moved it nearer the Marchesa, waved Melissa into it with an hospitable gesture, and commanded.... “Now, Murdock—tell her what you’ve just been telling me!”

Murdock met Melissa’s eyes not without a touch of embarrassment. He was looking very fit, well turned out, as always, but he had a little the air of one caught in smuggling. He looked at the Marchesa and grinned. Looked back at Melissa and lifted imploring eyebrows.

“Fact is,” he said—“nothing much ... I’ve got a chance to go with this South African expedition that’s taking off next month—you may have heard of it ... been a good deal in the papers—they’re collecting for some zoo or other ... movie stuff on the side ... it listens well. I’ve always wanted to try something like that. Fellow I knew in Harvard—matter of fact we had rooms together one year—he’s the big stick in this—and he’s offered to take me along.... Might be pretty good, eh? Big game shooting and so on.”

“Wonderful,” said Melissa sweetly. Something touched her like a wind off a chilly sea. Murdock then was not waiting upon her choice.

“Nothing could be more appropriate,” agreed the Marchesa, inspecting her freshly rouged nails and smiling to herself.

“Appropriate—how d’you mean?” Murdock inquired doubtfully.

“Of course you don’t read English novels—or you wouldn’t ask,” said the Marchesa.

Murdock said he was sorry—that he got so little time for reading.

The Marchesa said it didn’t matter—that reading would probably only spoil him anyway. That men of dominant personality didn’t need to read a great deal. That books were written about and not for them.

At which Murdock looked deprecatory but pleased.

“Next month?” asked Melissa aloofly in the midst of all this.

Murdock said—“I’m to give ’em a definite answer on Friday. The thing’s still open, you see.”

“Murdock,” said the Marchesa (just a touch of Granny in her deepening tones), “I shall be greatly disappointed in you if you let an opportunity of this sort pass you by. Think!—-It may never come your way again! You are young—you are in magnificent health—you have never been to Africa—you say you have always wanted to shoot tigers....”

Murdock, who couldn’t remember having mentioned tigers especially, but was by no means averse to the portrait of himself as a thwarted Nimrod, nodded gravely.

“What is there to keep you here?” demanded the Marchesa.... “Is there any reason on earth why you should not go?”

Murdock glanced at Melissa and away again a trifle uneasily.

“We shall all be waiting for you, upon your return,” the Marchesa assured him astutely,—“immensely proud of you ... and happy in your prowess.” Unable to sustain existence too long upon such heights, she added with the ghost of a giggle.... “No reason so far as that goes, why you shouldn’t bring us a tiger-skin apiece—is there, Melissa?”

“I think,” said Melissa, “you ought by all means to go, Murdock. It sounds most alluring.”

“Well—I think perhaps I will,” said Murdock cautiously. He committed himself no further.

The Marchesa adroitly required no further assurance. She began directly after that to talk of travel in general, her own migrations in particular, Europe,—Russia—coming down by imperceptible degrees, China—its potteries and bandits ... an amazing monologue rapidly delivered....

Melissa, sitting glazed with disinterest before that scintillant exhibition, caught suddenly a word, a glance, a name, and realized what undercurrent was setting her way.

She said clearly, repeating the Marchesa’s last word “Japan—I’ve never been there....”

“Wonderful country,” the Marchesa mused and shook her silver curls in reminiscent ecstasy. “I was there, years ago—as a guest of the American Ambassador—most interesting! However—I understand it’s all greatly changed. Extraordinarily modernized. My nephew returned from Tokio, only this morning ... dear me, Melissa, how pale you are, child! Is that window too much for you? After a siege like yours—one can’t be too careful.... Murdock, give her that white lace shawl—on the chaise longue, there!”

“I am not cold ... thank you ...!” said Melissa to Murdock, accepting the shawl, however, rather than stop for a discussion of temperature. To the Marchesa, she continued clearly. “You say your nephew returned—this morning—how interesting!”

“Yes—isn’t it nice!” the Marchesa admitted. “Perhaps a little sherry, Melissa, would pick you up—shall I ring for Anna? Murdock—that bell near the door....”

“Please—not for me!” said Melissa and stopped Murdock with an imperative look.

The Marchesa shrugged and grimaced delicately. “One ought to take no chances, after influenza.”

“I’m not taking chances,” said Melissa, very nearly frantic. “I feel most awfully well. Do tell us about your nephew—does Murdock know him?”

“Do you know him?” the Marchesa unexpectedly diverted, inquired of Murdock. “He’s Roderick Delano....” Melissa felt the blood stealing across her throat. She had never heard his name before ... if it hadn’t been his she wouldn’t have liked it. Amalie Delano ... that was what the Marchesa had called herself when Murdock happened in that day—at Melissa’s apartment.... Mister Roderick would be the child of the Marchesa’s brother....

Murdock said suddenly, scowling with the effort of remembering: “There was a Rod Delano at Harvard ... a senior in my freshman year ... awfully popular chap. Everybody liked him.”

“Roderick has more friends,” observed the Marchesa with a rare touch of feeling, “than any young man I know.”

“So he’s back?” said Murdock amiably.... “Been away long?”

Melissa sat tense—and listened. Better, far better that questions came from another source. Any other source.

“Almost a year,” said the Marchesa. “He’s had an amazing time of it. I wonder he came back at all. He seems so in love with the Orient. However—something unexpected developed in his affairs here at home—he was cabled for, he says....”

“Did he come back in answer to a cable?” asked Melissa. She looked at the Marchesa out of dark, pleading eyes and impishly the Marchesa chuckled.

“A most extraordinary message he says—doesn’t yet know what it’s all about. Well—things of that sort explain themselves, don’t they? Sooner or later.... I haven’t had a great deal of talk with him ... he’s coming in to-morrow night for a bit of supper ... perhaps then....”

To-morrow night—a bit of supper—Melissa’s eyelids burned—perhaps then....

“What was he doing in Japan?” asked Murdock casually—“Just kicking about?”

The Marchesa explained with sweet indulgence.... “Oil and iron—large interests ... he’s a born Midas, Roderick!”

“Like to meet him, sometime,” said Murdock.

“You shall,” said the Marchesa—“when you come back from Africa. I promise you a party, Murdock ...” her caressing smile said plainly—to one looker-on at least what sort of party it would be.

Melissa said she was sorry but that she would have to be running along. She couldn’t bear for another moment, the Marchesa’s unscrupulous playing of Murdock—not that her own hands were any cleaner!

Murdock, rising too, said that he would take her home.

The Marchesa didn’t ask either of them to stay. She lay back in the winged chair and looked up at Melissa curiously.

“Are you free, to-morrow night?” she inquired.

“Yes,” said Melissa, looking steadily back into those faded and filmy gray eyes. “Quite free.”

“I should like you to come in—about seven. Don’t make another engagement.”

“I shan’t,” said Melissa—“I assure you.”

Neither could have put it more nakedly—nor more safely.

“Good-by, Murdock,” said the Marchesa and gave him her hand with a smile for consolation. “I’m not asking you, dear boy, because I want all my attention for Roderick ... and if you were there ... he might suffer!”

“Wonderful old girl—isn’t she?” observed Murdock, ringing for the elevator. “Slings a wicked line—even now. She says Granny’s in England, for the summer. Sorry I didn’t see her again before she sailed.”

Melissa agreed with him. She would have agreed with him on any subject imaginable rather than just then have to think what she was saying.

She was still in a maze when they left the building and came out into the airless street. Sunset burned at the end of it.

“Let’s walk,” Murdock offered. “I haven’t had any exercise to-day—I’ll bet you haven’t either.”

Melissa said she hadn’t and that she would like very much to walk.

They walked—and talked—for ten minutes like the merest acquaintances. Discussing the weather, a play or so....

“Melissa,” said Murdock abruptly in the middle of a block—“shall I go with this African outfit—or not?”

“Why—Murdock!” said Melissa. Panic touched her for a moment. She stalled, as Murdock himself would have put it, a trifle tardily: “Why do you ask me?”

“Because if you say stay—I will,” said Murdock simply. “I mean—if you want me to stay—you don’t even have to say it....” He stared at her hopefully. “Y’know—I’ve had a feeling—quite a while, now—that you—well, that you’d sort of lost interest. I thought for a while I had—kind of a drag with you. Now I don’t. I mean I don’t think so. But if I’m wrong....”

He waited anxiously for Melissa to contradict him. She couldn’t. She steeled herself to see that honest eagerness fade and go blank before her silence.

“Guess I’ll go with ’em—” said Murdock presently in quite a different tone of voice. “I thought when you wouldn’t see me all the time you were sick....”

“Murdock—I wasn’t seeing any one....”

“You’ve seen a good deal of Kenealy since you’ve been out again, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” said Melissa with dogged frankness. “I have—but there isn’t—”

“I’m not asking,” said Murdock with a touch of sullenness. “It’s none of my business whom you see—so long as you don’t care to see me.”

“But I do, Murdock—I’ll always care to see you....”

“Old stuff!” said Murdock rudely. “You know what I mean. Only thing I don’t get is ... why did you want to be so darned sweet to me in the first place if you weren’t going to—oh, well ... somebody’s beat my time, of course.”

“Murdock!”

“Here we are!” said Murdock turning into Central Park West with the precision of a drill sergeant. He said nothing more of his emotions and Melissa, not proud of her share in arousing them, was only too grateful for another subject. She felt when she said a quite commonplace good-by to him on the steps of Mister Roderick’s house that she would in all probability never see him again. And Murdock being what he was and life being what it is—she never did.

CHAPTER XXX

Amazing, the swiftness and stillness with which actors in the human comedy group themselves and fall apart and regroup themselves quite otherwise, at the nod of an invisible stage-manager ... shifting like shadows on a road ... like anything but free-willed men and women! Forever making patterns, which they never see entire, and to the beauty or the horror of which they contribute blindly—confidently, even. Secure in their own control of—the moment.

Such a pattern, such a shifting Melissa now realized, without desire to question what shifting and what pattern might come after.

One day, Luke was her friend—not free to be more—next day he was her lover but all his freedom could not keep him there. Now, not even a friend ... since lovers do not go back that way....

One day Murdock stood ready to her hand—the next—gone—wiped out of her scene ... a word or so, one hadn’t, the moment before, been aware one was going to speak ... a word or so in answer ... a silence—and an exit!... Friendship, love and whatnot—all gone off-stage together. In the matter of Murdock.

Beall was like an actor whose lines have not gotten over, whose scenes have merely filled a gap till greater than he came on.

Melissa felt—about Beall—almost as if she had never known him. Had read of him in some briefly amusing book perhaps. Had seen his face upon an ink-smudged page. Heard his voice through a talking-machine.

Never to see him—never to hear him again—she didn’t in the least regret that. He had been a potential, not an active, contact—never vividly existing for her.

Nothing, now, existed for her—vividly—but Mister Roderick. She had willed to be free when he came. And a day and a night away he waited for her ... who had waited so blindly, so stubbornly for him.

Melissa scarcely slept, the night before the Marchesa’s little supper-party. She lay with closed eyes in a blissful half-dream and knew the hours going by. Knew the darkness deepening and dulling and waning ... knew the first warmth of dawn in a cloudy East. She cried to herself again and again—“You little fool! Can’t you sleep? Think what you’ll look like ... to-morrow!”

But it didn’t help her—to oblivion.

Very nearly night-long she conjured up, against the blackness of closed eyelids, Mister Roderick, half-kneeling, cigarette in hand, head back, coolly asking—what? If only Kathleen hadn’t cleaned up the desk! Melissa might still have had the picture of him—under her pillow—that night.

Day came, inevitably, if tardily, and breakfast—at the end of more dragging hours, luncheon, as well.

The Marchesa had said—“Come in about seven.”

At four, Melissa, swathed in a garment of white linen, coifed in white like a moody nun, lay back in a long cushioned chair, before a dressing-table littered with gayly-colored little bottles and jars, and gave herself into the hands of an impersonal young woman in nurse-like uniform.

“I should like to look—rather nice, to-night,” murmured Melissa.

“Your eyes are a bit dark,” said the young woman reprovingly. “Have you been using our eye-lotion regularly?”

Melissa said she had. She didn’t add that she had been using up her emotions as well, in a way to render anybody’s eye-lotion fairly futile.

“Do the best you can,” said Melissa humbly.

“We’ll try a cold astringent pack,” said the young woman and did so with delightful result.

Between five and six, Melissa began the process of dressing, so as not to have to hurry at the last.

She had chosen, for Mister Roderick’s first sight of her, a gown flesh-colored and black. Dangerously simple—a tea-rose in a thunder-storm ... no rings, no pearls, no trappings of any sort. Melissa’s own soft, dark hair, her shadowy eyes, her delicately rosed mouth—the only accents of the picture.

Only a woman in love could have found so much to do to herself by way of imperceptible adornment that the little clock on the bed-table showed ten minutes of seven before Melissa bent to her mirror for a last wistful look and went out, catching her cloak about her, forgetting handkerchief and purse and key....

All of which she remembered about the seventh floor and returned for, abruptly.

She rode up Riverside in a musty yellow taxi. It might have been the King’s coach—or Cinderella’s pumpkin. She said to the driver when she alighted—“Thank you so much....” and tipped him absurdly.

She smiled at the elevator-boy on her way up to the Marchesa’s apartment and when Anna opened the door she smiled again at her.

“Good evening, Miss Wayne,” said Anna, in reply, not to be won over by anything in petticoats. “Will you lay your wraps in here?”

So Melissa laid her wraps in there—it was the Marchesa’s bedroom—and with one more glance at the glass, with a wild little prayer in her heart walked out to meet Mister Roderick.

The Marchesa, as was her custom, sat in the winged chair. She was all black velvet and old-fashioned diamonds—obviously an occasion—a royal cluster of orchids lay in her lap.

Mister Roderick was beside her. He had stooped for something the Marchesa had let fall, just before Melissa came in and he rose—and turned—a trifle slowly.

The Marchesa lifted her orchids to her nose—above them appreciation of a climax glinted between her scant, blackened lashes....

“Melissa—” said the Marchesa, “this is Roderick.” Nothing more. Almost a tremor in the reedy old voice.

“How do you do?” said Melissa. She gave him her hand. She gave him her eyes.

The hand was cold and the eyes were black with unbelief.

It wasn’t Mister Roderick at all.

That is, it was of course Mister Roderick, because the Marchesa said so and she had known him all his life. He was her nephew and she was his aunt. That much was incontrovertible.

But he wasn’t the man of the picture. Any more than Melissa was the Marchesa. And not being the man of the picture—it made no difference who he was. To Melissa.

She heard him say—as she had said—“How do you do?” And took back her hand and looked at the opposite wall in desperate need of a place to hide, till the universe should stop spinning.

A pleasant-faced, stocky young man, with a mild blue eye, a small blond mustache, an amiable mouth....

Not the eyes—not, in a thousand years, the mouth—of the man with the cigarette between his fingers—the man whose picture Melissa had carried about with her over her heart.... Of course the picture had been gone for weeks ... but Melissa knew every shadow and line of it.... She would have known the original in the great Gobi Desert—on Fifth Avenue—in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This man was somebody else—that was all.

And she hadn’t, with the Marchesa watching her, simpering and beaming at her in a glow of great-lady indulgence, time to do more than just accept the fact.

Melissa would very nearly have given her soul in that instant of abysmal disappointment—to be alone. She had, however, to play out the piece.

The Marchesa was saying something about a glass of sherry before dinner.

“Will you ring for Anna, Roderick?”

“The faithful Anna—” said Roderick blandly and rang as requested.

With the wine, the Marchesa gave them a toast—lifting her glass in shaky, be-jeweled fingers, looking from one to the other of them, dramatically—

“To your better acquaintance ... may it never pall!”

“Righto, Aunt Amalie!” said Roderick and looked at Melissa and laughed.

In the nicest sort of way. That was the most obvious thing about him—his entire niceness. The word might have been coined to identify him. One saw at once why he had been—wasn’t it Murdock who said so?—“one of the most popular chaps in his class.” Good humor twitched his sandy eyebrows and widened his generous mouth, at every turn. One saw him being godfather to the first baby of innumerable one-time bachelor friends. Listening to the tea-table confidences of innumerable reckless young married women ... himself, quite safe! He would always advise them to give Tom or Dick or Bill another chance.... Saying that marriage was a serious thing, by Jove!

Showing his belief in the seriousness of it by giving it, for his own part, a wide berth. The complete friend, this Roderick Delano!... But no amorist. He knew his way ’round that!

“Well, Melissa!” said the Marchesa leading the way to the supper-table with a faint clashing of bracelets and a quite perceptible dissemination of Peau d’Espagne.... “I have been telling Roderick how absurdly you adore his apartment. I have been suggesting to him that he go back to Japan and leave you to occupy it in peace....”

“Shall I?” asked Roderick obligingly. He seated first his aunt and then Melissa in the mellow light of the Marchesa’s candles, he looked at Melissa once more.

And his look was warm with approval. Not unnaturally. Melissa that night had made the most of herself, with exquisite result.

She murmured—“I have enjoyed it. It is a charming place. I’m sure you must be wanting it back again.” Empty little words, prettily inflected. Beneath the sound of them she was thinking desperately ... “That window—he never stood there at all ... that wasn’t his room ... nor his fire!... It belongs to this man—all of it. Then who was the other? And where is he, now? Oh God—what a crazy fool I have been!...”

“This shrimp cocktail, dear boy,” said the Marchesa graciously, “is after your old recipe—remember?”

Her nephew remembered. He took on for a moment, at sight of it, the true epicure’s look—which alone would have confirmed his relationship to his hostess. “Just enough onion in the sauce,” he said gravely.

“Onion,” observed the Marchesa, selecting the portliest shrimp within her reach and regarding it affectionately before lifting it to her mouth.... “Onion is like woman’s love—to properly appreciate which ... one should never have too much of it!” She snickered behind her napkin and Roderick commented with a grin.

“Not bad! You’re in form to-night, aren’t you! She’s a wicked young thing, Miss Wayne. I hope you haven’t allowed her to come too near your morals.”

“Melissa,” said the Marchesa at once, “has no morals. She has illusions which may become morals—if they survive.... Roderick, try those cheese-straws—I had them made especially for you.”

And while Roderick critically tried the cheese-straws, Melissa’s heart-breaking inner monologue went on....

“Kathleen said—when I showed her the picture—that it was Mister Roderick!... Now could she have been mistaken? Surely, Kathleen must have known! If it wasn’t—Roderick Delano—who was it?... It must have been some one! Who was he? Where is he? How can I ever find out?... I haven’t even the picture, now....”

“Isn’t this the most delightful little party!” cried the Marchesa gayly.

“Melissa—you haven’t said a word in ten minutes! That da Vinci smile is very effective ... but let Roderick hear your voice! I have been boasting of you. I told him you were the wittiest woman of my acquaintance and there you sit, dumb as....”

“A rose,” said Roderick quickly—“roses don’t need to be witty!” He drew a heavy-headed flower from the Dresden urn in the center of the supper-table and laid it beside Melissa’s plate.

Nice, beyond words—this Roderick—but what was niceness, and a mild blue eye and an amiable smile ... after the eyes and the smile and the man for whom Melissa had been waiting?

She pulled herself together. Pride put words in her mouth. She answered the Marchesa’s sallies acceptably—if not with conspicuous brilliancy. She fastened wide soft eyes on Roderick’s face while he talked of his travels so that he fancied himself for once blessed with a supernal audience and talked the evening through happily enough. He didn’t know, of course, that behind Melissa’s unswerving look, and fixed attention, her thoughts were running all about, madly, insistently questioning....

“Who was he? ... where is he?... How shall I ever...? No one to ask.... Could Kathleen ... but without the picture ... how could I describe—? And if I could—I’d be ashamed! Such a fool.... Oh, Lissa—such a miserable fool!”

An evening to remember!

Violets and roses and plump Dresden cherubs ... porcelain and silver and yellowing lace ... thin golden candle-light ... and the bronzy-gold sheen of an almost theatrically baked chicken ... black hot coffee in tiny frail cups....

Then out of all that, and back once more into the room of the Spanish shawl and the Marchesa’s winged chair, and the time-faded, tryst-keeping photographs.

Melissa thought that ten o’clock would never come. She couldn’t in decency leave earlier.

“Isn’t she quiet, Roderick?” suggested the Marchesa caressingly. “You’d never believe how much we’ve talked of you—Melissa and I! And wait till you see how charming she’s made that place of yours—with flowers and fal-lals and so on ... she’s a very feminine creature, for all this Ice-Maiden pose of hers!” Melissa being close beside her, the Marchesa, with mention of an Ice-Maiden, nipped sharply the under side of Melissa’s arm ... and muttered—“Are you asleep?”

At which Melissa talked a bit faster and louder.

An evening, indubitably, to remember!

CHAPTER XXXI

But a night one should have preferred to forget.

Roderick Delano took Melissa home—in his own car—an impressive dark-blue equipage of obviously recent vintage.

“Like to drive?” he inquired, on the way—“glad to have you use the old boat—any time.”

Melissa said she didn’t drive.

“Glad to teach you,” he suggested. “How about a lesson to-morrow afternoon?”

He was frankly taken with Melissa. The Marchesa’s diplomacy had been to some purpose. “Sounds wonderful,” he said, “the way you’ve dolled up my diggings! Aunt Amalie tells me I wouldn’t know ’em ... all flowers and books and things. When are you going to let me have a look-see?”

“Any time,” Melissa told him.... “I shall be very glad, of course.”

“You’re tired, aren’t you?” said the Marchesa’s nephew abruptly. “Didn’t she say you were just over flu? Suppose we step out and get you home a little faster? Let you go to bed and get a little sleep.... It’s pretty selfish of me, keeping you out like this....”

They had taken the long way home. As has been done before.

“I am—a little tired,” said Melissa.

Something at the back of her mind jeered softly. “Yes—and at the first kind word from a new man—you’re ready to let go—and have him take care of you! Promiscuous—aren’t you, my dear? What are you true to—anyhow?”

“It’s very thoughtful of you,” said the visible and audible Melissa. “I’m not quite—fit—yet.”

“And I’m a brute,” said Delano warmly, “not to have thought of that, myself.”

He took her home, at once. He lingered not at all, at the door.

“Seems funny,” he said with an engaging grin, “—entertaining angels, like this.... Hope the servants look after you properly. Kathleen’s a darn good maid ... had her for years....”

“Oh, yes—Kathleen is—thank you!” said Melissa. She shut the door and locked it. She shut her eyes against the beauty of that shadowy and silent room.

She went to bed but not to sleep. Hour after hour she lay there, self-tortured, self-flayed. She thought, drowsing, toward morning, with twitching limbs and smarting eyelids.... “I’ll get what I can out of Kathleen.”

But she hadn’t much hope—of anything. Black as the altars of Good Friday, Melissa’s world, that night! Only your true romanticist knows despair without so much as a toe-hold on to-morrow.

She slept at last heavily, tired in body and mind. It was after ten o’clock next morning when a noise in the room waked her, a small, discreet, regretful noise, but one, nevertheless at which Melissa sat straight up in bed—trembling.

“There now!” said Kathleen’s gentle monotone, “I was goin’ right out without disturbin’ ye.... I c’n come in again later, as good as not ... ’twas only a par’rcel I brought in ... delivered late last night. ... I thought it might be somethin’ ye’d be wantin’ ... before ye went out.”

“Thank you, Kathleen,” said Melissa, stretched white arms and swept the tangled dark hair away from her eyes.

“Are ye tired, maybe?” asked Kathleen. She laid the parcel, stockings or gloves by the look of its long narrow boxing, down on the bed and turned toward the windows. “I’ll just let down the shades a bit more—and ye c’n go back to sleep.”

“No—I’ve got to get up!” said Melissa. She ached with weariness. Like shapes of trees appearing through a thinning fog, things came back to her slowly. A blue car.... A small blond mustache ... small blond cupids on a Dresden urn. The Marchesa—black velvet and orchids and diamonds ... the Marchesa’s party ... the Marchesa’s nephew....

That was when the fog lifted, and stark and cruel and cold, everything stood clear.

The nephew had come back. And he was not Mister Roderick.

He was Roderick Delano, that is—but he was not the man whose picture Melissa had shown to Kathleen and whom Kathleen had told her....

Kathleen was busy with the window-shades. Her plump blue and white shoulders, her fluffy brown head, silhouetted against a tide of aureate sunshine.

“Kathleen,” said Melissa, “I want to ask you something ...” her voice quavered unexpectedly. For time in which to steady it—she took up the neatly wrapped and labeled box from the coverlet beside her and turned it about, in nervous fingers. The address was strange. She said in another tone—curious, merely, and surprised—grateful for any temporary shield to her emotion: “Kathleen—this isn’t for me! It’s for a Mrs. Walters....”

“Ma’am?” said Kathleen startled. She came back to the bed and held out her hand for the parcel. “It’s not for you? There was two of ’em there ...” turning so that light fell across the name she lifted it close to her eyes and squinted sharply....

“Of course—I must have got the wrong one,” said Kathleen, shamefacedly, “it’s that dark in the office ... and—I hadn’t me glasses....”

“Glasses...?” Melissa repeated—in a pleasantly even murmur—but like daylight at the end of a tunnel, something glimmered all at once and grew large. She shrank, but the truth was there, suddenly flooding everything ... by a mere mishap ... by the silliest chance....

“Do you have to wear glasses, Kathleen?” asked Melissa.

Kathleen blushed—and giggled.

“I look so awful in ’em, Miss Wayne ... and it’s only for readin’ and such that I need ’em....”

“Are you—near-sighted?” Melissa persisted. Kathleen responded with a gush of confidence.

“I am—from the time I was a little gir-rl! But I get along well enough mostly. Y’see, Miss Wayne—I carry ’em in my pocket—and if there’s need of ’em—I just whip ’em on and off. I’m a vain woman—I don’t like to be seen, the way I look in spectacles—and that’s the truth!”

“I see,” said Melissa quietly.

“Was there somethin’ you wanted to ask me?” said Kathleen, turning in the doorway, Mrs. Walters’ parcel in her hands. “You was beginnin’—a little bit ago....”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Melissa.

She didn’t get up at once. She lay, her face hidden in the pillow, for some time, after Kathleen had gone out very softly, shutting the door with a gentle click.

It did not matter, indeed! Nothing mattered any longer.

Why ask questions of Kathleen about a small and faded picture which it now appeared she had looked at—but not seen?

CHAPTER XXXII

The Marchesa, as might have been expected, descended upon Melissa at once—upon the afternoon of the day following the supper-party, to be exact—in pursuit of explanations, and with recrimination in her eye.

“Well,” said she, directly the door had closed and Melissa had courteously drawn forward a chair for her. “I will say—I was never so disgusted with a woman in all my life! And for me—my good girl—that is saying quite a bit. Quite—a—bit! What in the world was the matter with you? You might have been a Quaker. Not that you looked it—I haven’t a word to say about the way you looked ... all that black and flesh-color—excellent! Extremely seductive—without being vulgar! But your conversation—I flatter you by giving it such a name! The merest school-girl monosyllables. Not a particle of charm ... not a flicker of esprit ... not a shimmer of wit ... not a vestige of allure! Will you tell me—” demanded the Marchesa, wagging a furious little forefinger under Melissa’s nose—“how you expect to captivate any man, with no more effort than you put forth last night? Do you expect Roderick to fall into your lap?... Without your lifting a finger? Do you intend....”

“Please!” said Melissa, desperately.

“Well?” said the Marchesa and sat glaring.

“I was not trying—” said Melissa, “to captivate—any one.”

“Quite obvious!” the Marchesa snapped out and blew her nose and sniffed in ungoverned contempt. “If it hadn’t been for me—he’d never have looked at you twice—as it is—you’ll have to exert yourself to keep the ground I gained for you. When I think what the two of us could do—with my brain and your looks—with my experience and your youth ... nom d’un nom d’un nom!” shrilled the Marchesa suddenly in a passion of impotent annoyance ... “it is enough to infuriate a saint! Which I am not—and never was, I’m glad to say!” The last reflection soothed her somewhat. She cackled briefly on the heels of it and sat looking at Melissa for reply.

Melissa, hands tightly folded in her lap, looked back. Without a word.

“Well—” said the Marchesa imperiously, “for a young woman whose constant conversation in delirium—when one is supposed to be frank, if ever—was of one man—who broke her engagement to another man, deliberately,—in order only to ... I will say, Melissa—that your behavior last night was—utterly ridiculous! How do you explain it? Come!...”

“I do not explain it,” said Melissa, low-voiced and unhappy.

The Marchesa shook out the folds of one of her absurd little handkerchiefs and crossed her wrists and ankles.

“Oh, yes, you do!” she corrected. “Don’t forget—I was to know everything—at once! If there’s anything connected with Roderick’s return which you have not told me ... if I have not your entire confidence, you are not living up to the spirit of our agreement. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” said Melissa, “that is so.”

“Ha!” said the Marchesa in triumph. “You have a sense of honor, I admit. It’s as rare in a woman as thorns on a violet—and almost as unnecessary ... however—I appeal to it in the present instance! I wish you to tell me—why, having been mad to meet Roderick in the first place—completely obsessed with the thought of him—you behave, when you do meet him, as if he were—of no importance whatsoever—any casual acquaintance—just an average young man—in brief—nobody!”

Melissa’s thoughts swarmed and settled like bees—a thousand potential stings. Her head was heavy with want of sleep—with endless and futile conjecture. She said in a sudden mad desire to destroy the web which her own folly had woven about her.... “Suppose I told you—it was because—your nephew when I came to meet him—was not—Mister Roderick ... at all....”

The Marchesa stared for a long moment. Then broke into the thinnest of reassuring cachinnations.

“He has gotten a bit stout,” she admitted. “And that blond amiable type seems to lose its hair very early, somehow. I have given Roderick my own tonic—(from a marvelous Frenchman, the best hairdresser in Paris) ... and implored him to use it ... but he’s simply too lazy. However—my dear—do you mean to say—you can’t be such a ridiculous idealist! He’s just what he always was—an utter dear—with a nice sense of humor ... and if he is going a bit bald and taking on weight, why all the more reason why you’ll never be worried with other women ... surely that’s an advantage!”

Melissa sat mute—without hope. Before a cul-de-sac ... a blind alley. No good trying to tell—what she hadn’t even a picture to substantiate. Obviously, no good exposing her heart for the fleshing of the Marchesa’s talons, merely.

She said more cautiously—poor Melissa, who had no longer any room for scorn!... “He is very charming. I’m sorry I was so—stupid—last night.”

“There!” said the Marchesa ... “that’s more like it!” Actually she leaned over and patted Melissa’s arm. Actually the hawk-eyes seemed to soften. “I’m very fond of Roderick,” his aunt admitted with, for her, unbelievable simplicity. “I always have been. He’s a fool—but he’s a sweet fool. He has a wonderful nature. I’d like to see him married. He might not enjoy it—but it would be good for him. I don’t want him to be lonely—when he’s older ...” she looked down at her small wrinkled hands where diamonds burned coldly on ashen flesh,—“when he’s older—he may want some one....”

The telephone rang. Melissa rose to answer it.

“So—if that’s Roderick,” the Marchesa finished hurriedly—“and I dare say it is ... he seemed in spite of everything last night, to be tremendously taken with you ... why—don’t be absurd, Melissa ... tell him to come up!”

Melissa couldn’t very well tell Roderick to come up, because he wasn’t near enough. He was telephoning, he said, from his club, and he wanted to know how she did. Very well, Melissa thanked him and succeeded in sounding appreciative, so that the Marchesa, listening avidly, nodded approval and gestured for further by-play.

“I wish,” said Roderick, “you’d consider dining with me, to-night....” Melissa considered, motionless.

“What on earth!” hissed the Marchesa, “he’ll think you’ve fainted—stop staring ... and tell him you’ll do whatever he likes!”

Melissa turned back to the mouthpiece.

“I will do,” she said softly but clearly, “whatever you like.”

A smile twitched the corners of her mouth. Her eyes smoldered.

Roderick said he couldn’t ask for more.

“You shan’t have less,” said Melissa.

The Marchesa applauded in dumb-show. Her old eyes lightened like sparks through smoke.

“At seven?” asked Roderick. He could be heard, a choppy kind of crackle, beyond the instrument.

“At seven—” said Melissa.

“Is it dinner?” demanded the Marchesa, hushed but insistent. “Tell him you’ll drive to some place up the river—no atmosphere in town....”

“Can’t we drive—” asked Melissa sweetly, “to some place up the river...? There’s no air left in town.”

The Marchesa snickered, and settled her hat at a smarter angle.

“Ra-ther!” said Roderick. “You don’t know how I’m looking forward to seeing you—”

“That’s very nice of you,” said Melissa.

“Say—‘I, too!’” whispered the Marchesa, pulling forward the curl above her left ear.

“I too,” said Melissa—and broke the connection before Roderick could speak again.

“Was it something,” inquired the Marchesa eagerly—“about his hating to have to wait—till to-night?”

“Something to that effect,” said Melissa.

The Marchesa adjusted the inevitable black velvet neck-band and drew the tip of her little finger delicately along her lower lip.

“They don’t change very much,” she observed with an arch slow smile,—“the cliches of emotion!”

CHAPTER XXXIII

So Melissa went to dinner, with Roderick, at a place up the river, that first night, and upon other nights, and at other places, she went to dinner with him a number of times thereafter.

He progressed so frankly from acquaintance to friendship, from friendship to things warmer, making no bones at any time of the sincerity of his interest, the honorable quality, so to speak, of his intentions, that Melissa had only to look on, quiescent, to be not too unresponsive ... and see the pleasantest, safest sort of future unroll itself neatly before her.

She began to feel that she possessed some quality of appeal, quite beyond her own volition, for men who possessed nothing for her.

Murdock and Austin and Luke ... now Roderick!

Her year had been fruitful of opportunity. All that she asked for had been poured into her lap. This she had put away from her and that she had let slip. If she were to make her fortune at all, remained acceptance of the one now available suitor.

“Roderick,” the Marchesa assured her, “has never been in love before. I have known him all his life. If you let him get away from you ... you deserve to spend the rest of your days in an office, pecking at a typewriter....” she added with sinister coolness—“and so far as I am concerned, my dear Melissa—that is exactly what you will do.”

“I believe that was our understanding,” said Melissa.

The two stared at each other coldly. A kind of hatred tinctured with unwilling respect existed between them.

“If you marry him—you need not be afraid—I shall let you alone,” said the Marchesa as if she read Melissa’s thought, and were amused by it.

“He has not asked me to marry him,” said Melissa ... “so why discuss it?”

“If he hasn’t,” retorted the Marchesa nibbling the edge of her fan with sharp yellow little teeth—“it’s because you haven’t wanted him to. Don’t attempt to deceive me, my dear—you’re not clever enough, by half. Save your pretty chicaneries for Roderick. He is not clever enough for you!”

Which was all of it so—as Melissa very well knew. But liked the Marchesa none the better for putting things thus straightly.

Roderick had shortly to be taken—or left.

Melissa let down her guard, the merest fraction and he came on with a rush. She withdrew and he stopped—the soul of decent consideration. An old game but one, as the Marchesa had observed, which did not change in its essentials.

It was on the day when Melissa passed Luke and Em’ly Armistead on Fifth Avenue together, that she abruptly stopped maneuvering and decided to let Roderick have his say.

Not that Luke and Em’ly saw Melissa. Not that a word passed or a sign. Merely, through the window of her taxi, returning from a particularly depressing Shakespearean matinee, Melissa caught sight of Luke’s dark head—uncovered, beside Em’ly’s crimson-hatted blond one. They were parting on a corner. Laughing into each other’s eyes. A parting which apparently had no need of haste.

And Melissa remembered. Em’ly had always wanted Luke. In his loneliness and present disillusionment she could very likely have him. His next fata morgana. Any woman will understand why Melissa, not wanting Luke herself yet went home and sat down to the telephone ... called Roderick’s number....

What came after is not so easy of explanation.

She drove and dined that night with Roderick, she let him bring her back to the apartment, fairly early, she stood with him upon her narrow balcony and looked across the Park through bloomy breathless shadows ... she let him tell her how he had always loved those rooms, how he loved them twice as much, now ... but that he never wanted to live in them again—unless—she were living in them, too....

Very sturdy in his love-making, Roderick, perhaps a shade pathetic, because so doggedly in earnest ... he panted a little, it is to be feared, and twice wiped his forehead upon a spotless linen handkerchief. In spite of which it seemed at first as if he had a chance—every chance—It was not until he put his arms about Melissa unexpectedly, that she had jerked away from him and went back into the room, tears streaming down her face.

Roderick followed—not unnaturally.

“Have I said something—to hurt you?” he asked anxiously.

“Nothing—” said Melissa, “not that!”

She couldn’t tell him that at the window—at her very shoulder—the man of the picture had seemed suddenly to stand, looking at her curiously, quietly, with that arrogant, half-smiling question in his eyes.

And Melissa couldn’t betray him—that was all. She knew, at last, to what she was true.

Knowing, however late the hour, she set her teeth and went through with it blindly. The thing that was her ultimate choice. The thing that had no reality, that transcended reality.

She told the Marchesa’s nephew she didn’t love him. That she couldn’t marry him. That she was sick with shame to have let him think she might.

“Good Lord—” said he comfortingly, “that’s my mistake—not yours! Maybe I’ve been in too much of a rush ... don’t make this final ... wait—just be friends—and let me ask you again....”

“It’s no use,” said Melissa. She said it till he believed her.

She said one other thing when he was leaving her, crushing her hand in his warm, moist one, looking at her out of hungry, honest eyes, trying to carry off his hard luck with a jest—and not succeeding notably.

“Will you tell your aunt—at once—about this evening?” asked Melissa.

“If you want me to, I will—but—”

“I’d like her to know. She’s been—kind—to me.”

“Then can’t you be a little—kinder to her? She’d be pleased as Punch to have you for a niece ... why—she sent me some kind of a crazy cable—before I left Japan—wanted to get me back here—to meet you.... Couldn’t you....”

“Don’t say it—again—I can’t....”

“All right—I won’t. You’ll let me see you again—soon—anyhow?”

“I don’t know—I won’t promise.”

“Why not—for pity’s sake! You’ll still have friends—won’t you?”

“Please—I want you to go, now—” said Melissa unsteadily. And he went.

As for her still having friends, in that especial moment she really hadn’t anything—having traded substance for shadow and spent her all in the trade.

To-morrow, the Marchesa—after the Marchesa, the deluge.

Melissa slept well, that night. She knew at last what it was that she wanted.

Not the slightest chance of getting it—so far as any one could see—but after all ... the great thing is to know!

Once more the Marchesa, entering with a cry and a sharply slammed door ... not even sending up her name before her ... not even waiting to learn if Melissa could see her ... ignoring any claim Melissa might have to privacy ... as if Melissa had been merely her creature.

Which Melissa wasn’t to be—any longer.

All this at eleven in the morning. Roderick, having breakfasted with his aunt and communicated his defeat. Little guessing what fuse he ignited. In the way of the beloved.

“Melissa—” said the Marchesa violently. “What is all this? I insist upon knowing. I could not believe my ears—when Roderick told me....”

Melissa asked the Marchesa to sit down. She sat down herself and looked at the Marchesa quietly.

“I asked him,” she said—“to tell you.”

“Of all the impudence!... Incredible...!” Unlovely rage roughened the Marchesa’s voice, distorted her delicate features. “Do you mean to say that after everything ... you have deliberately broken that poor boy’s heart—”

A vagrant recollection of Roderick eating eggs and bacon, toast and marmalade, with a large pot of coffee at his elbow, stemmed his aunt’s eloquence for the fraction of an instant ... “at least,” she amended thoughtfully, “he seems very much upset.”

“I’m sorry,” said Melissa.

The Marchesa looked her over with furious acuteness.

“It’s true, then—you’ve refused him?”

“Yes.”

“Not good enough for your ladyship?”

Melissa made no answer.

“You are the most amazing fool,” said the Marchesa viciously, “that I have ever known.”

Melissa didn’t answer that either. She rather thought so, herself.

“Very well,” continued her visitor, “if you think that in the remaining six weeks of your year you can accomplish anything at all ... if you think that I am going to advise you any further....”

“That,” said Melissa, interrupting her coolly, “is what I should like to speak to you about. I shall not be here any longer....”

Even the Marchesa, as the significance of that took her—sat momentarily open-mouthed.

“Where—may I ask....”

“I am leaving the apartment to-day,” said Melissa. She added—“The clothes which you—bought for me—I will leave in the closet. I am taking nothing but things that belong to me.”

“Indeed?... Blue serge and little black hat again? You’ll never do it, my dear!” A brief rattle of laughter.

Melissa looked down at herself curiously. “It is what I have on.”

The Marchesa stared—and stopped laughing. “So it is. Not quite the same, however. I’ve given you one thing you won’t be able to leave in that closet.... charm! You could wear a gunny-sack, now—and look well in it.”

Extraordinary old creature! She preened herself, at that, with a smirk and a chuckle and a flutter.

“I’ve done something to you, Melissa, which you can’t undo with a change of hats. I’ve altered your soul—that’s what I’ve done!”

“I didn’t know myself—that was all.”

“And now you do?”

“And now I do.”

“Who held the mirror? Are you going back to Kenealy?”

“I am not going back to any one,” said Melissa. “And you will forgive me if I decline to discuss myself any further. As I said—I am leaving to-day—which terminates our agreement. I wish to thank you....”

“Don’t be absurd!” said the Marchesa with vast annoyance. “You never liked me—and you know it. I must say, Melissa, I’m disappointed in you. You’ve had a most remarkable opportunity—and you’ve made nothing at all of it ... exactly nothing at all! Well—” she rose a trifle creakily ... “shall I tell them downstairs, that you’re leaving to-day?... You wouldn’t like—” this with a slight leer—“to think it over?”

“I have already told them.”

“Indeed! You’ll miss this place—whether you know it now—or not....”

Melissa’s eyes were dark and unsmiling. A tremor passed over her mouth. She looked about her and shut her hands hard in the folds of her frock.

“You’ve gotten soft ... you’re uncommonly dependent on your surroundings ... it will be harder than before ... going back to one room—with no view—and no gas-jet. You’ll have to go back to work you know, too. I hope you don’t expect me to finance you any further?”

Melissa’s face flamed. Without a word she turned toward the door.

“Just as well,” said the Marchesa, “that you are not marrying Roderick after all ... with that temper ... you’d make his life a burden!”

She stopped once more on the threshold, looked at Melissa strangely, laughed her thin raucous laughter and narrowed withered eyelids.

“It’s a man, of course!” she said. Her Credo and apologia.

The porter came up as the Marchesa went down.

He asked for Melissa’s bags and wanted an address to which to send them. Melissa gave him one—Nelly Rivers’ studio. She had called Nelly, early that morning and Nelly had said: “Well—I’m not altogether surprised, old thing! I thought you were too good for the Persian-pussy stuff. Stay with me to-night—or as long as you need. Look for a job, to-morrow.”

Melissa did not intend to wait for to-morrow. She was going to look for a job that afternoon ... with loneliness in her heart ... but with hands untied.

She thought, a faint smile twitching her lips, as she watched the porter trundle her belongings out of sight ... “Gold-diggers are born and not made.”

But deeper than that, she knew what had brought all her gold-digging to nothing.

Nelly’s song had said it.

“—The dream of an unborn kiss....”

Making other dreams dust.

Making other kisses futile.

The cruelest dream to follow ... but heaven, if ever, to find!

CHAPTER XXXIV

Nelly took Melissa to luncheon at a tidy little place called The Roof-Tree Inn, where over a cup of tea and a salad they discussed at length Melissa’s insurrection and its consequences.

Nelly was mildly sardonic about the Marchesa.

“Granny ... h’m’m!” said she. “I wondered a bit at the time—just how deep Granny went. But seeing as it was none of my affair—Murdock was so frightfully pleased with her—you, so frightfully close about it all....”

“I couldn’t,” said Melissa, eating quantities of bread and butter with a delightful sense of freedom. “I couldn’t explain anything without explaining everything ... and just at the moment I was really—”

“Pretty well under the old girl’s thumb. So I gathered,” said Nelly dryly. “The way you and she beat it back to New York the minute Luke’s cable came. That was none too subtle, now—was it?”

“None of it was very subtle,” admitted Melissa, flushing. “I felt sometimes as if everybody must know exactly the sort of game we were playing....”

“One thing saved you,” said Nelly gravely. “Not at all an uncommon game. Good many other ladies playing it all the time.” She laughed abruptly and reaching across the little table patted Melissa’s hand. “Don’t you care, old dear! You’ve bucked her off, now—which is the chief consideration. You’ll be on your own, henceforward—and thank God, fasting!... You say Roderick went straight to her with the news when you wouldn’t have him?”

“I asked him to tell her, at once,” said Melissa.

“And she swooped down on you—directly?”

“Yes—but—you can’t altogether blame her. She’s spent a good bit on me....”

“She’s gotten a good bit out of you, too, I’d say—in the way of belated excitement, for her necessarily innocuous old age. No—I wouldn’t let that worry me—the matter of value received, in her case. I’d say you’d been manna in the wilderness. Darned clever of her to have contrived it! Thing to consider now is—where to find you a job—and how soon?”

“I’m starting out this afternoon—to look for one.”

“Good enough,” said Nelly, pouring herself a second cup and reaching for her cigarette-case. “However—why waste time in a general drive? I’ve been thinking it over, since you telephoned this morning, and I think I know just the thing....”

“Nelly—you’re too good to me!”

“Rot!” said Nelly pleasantly. “I’d like to make an honest woman of you. I’m getting a big kick out of it. How’s this?... Are you a pretty fair typist?”

“Rather more than fair,” said Melissa, looking back at her, unsmiling.

“Shorthand?”

“Of course.”

“What did you say your last position was? Before the gilded cage and the drugged bird-seed?”

“I was in a publishing office.”

“Can you give them as reference?”

Melissa frowned. “I don’t suppose I could—you see, when the Marchesa offered to do what she did—I just—walked out on them.”

“Not so good, h’m’m?”

“No—I’m quite sure they were annoyed. The junior partner was rather keen on my doing his letters and all that.”

“I see. Well—” said Nelly thoughtfully, “I’ll use what drag I’ve got for you. Ever hear of Neith and Brooks ... the playbrokers?”

Melissa said she never had. She sat forward in her chair, tense with an eagerness which she couldn’t bear even Nelly to see.

“Brooks is rather a friend of mine,” said Nelly. “I happen to know he’s looking for some one. Had dinner with him the other night. He talked a lot of shop. I might be able to get you in there. It’s just a chance. I’ll take your word for it that you’re good.” She had taken out a card and was scribbling something on it with a stubby pencil from her bag—she glanced up at Melissa keenly.

“As a typist—I’m good,” said Melissa.

“They probably won’t want you to take over the management of the office at once,” Nelly assured her. She skidded the card across the table. “Give that to old Brooks—with my love. He may come through and he may not. It’s worth trying. Sure you’re through with the other thing?”

“Quite sure,” said Melissa. “I thought I had made you see, Nelly....”

“Only kidding,” said Nelly briefly. “I believe you. Couldn’t be bothered—if I didn’t. One thing I don’t get ... you went into it with the idea of collecting an eligible young man ... correct me if I’m wrong....”

“No—you’re not wrong. That was why I did it.”

“And you had—well—conservatively speaking—four good chances—and threw ’em all out ... is that right?”

“Quite right,” said Melissa. “That is—with Austin.... I merely supposed....”

“You could have had Austin,” said Nelly calmly. “He told me all about it one night on a particularly good party. He was hooked. You had only to pull him in. Naturally when you didn’t—he got away ... never mind Austin ... what I’m getting at is—why the change of heart? If you wanted less than a year ago to marry—why don’t you want to, now? What’s happened in the meantime to stand you up on your own two feet? Are you trying to tell me that the mere fact that none of these men was the mythical One Man.... I’d like to believe you, my dear—but it’s difficult! Luke alone—Luke’s a knock-out.... No woman in her senses would say no to him—unless there were somebody else, perhaps....”

Melissa locked her hands together upon the table. “There was somebody else,” she said, “or it would have been Luke.”

Then she told Nelly what she hadn’t quite meant to tell because it made so implausible a story—with the picture gone—and not even Kathleen for witness.... When she had finished, Nelly was silent for a moment or so, then shrugged and snapped her fingers and laughed. As Melissa had expected.

“You are an old dear!” she said. “It’s a sweet story ... but are you absolutely certain it isn’t a hang-over from that beastly illness you had? Remember you were out of your head for days. Or so they told me whenever I telephoned. You might have dreamed it, then ... mightn’t you?... Influenza does queer things to the old bean....”

“You don’t mean you think I’m—not sane?” cried Melissa in horror.

“Heavens no! Don’t be absurd! But you might have gotten an idée fixe at that time—and not shaken it off, afterwards. D’y’ see? Or more likely still ... look here! People change from year to year. A bit more weight—a bit less hair—and ... there goes Romeo—here comes Babbitt! The picture may have been taken in Mr. Delano’s tenderer youth ... before the clumsy hand of Time....”

Melissa shook her head. A sense of utter futility numbed her. She felt that she had made her last attempt to explain to any one, however sympathetic, the change in herself and the reason for that change.

She said quietly: “It wasn’t Delano. It couldn’t have been.” But she stood as she said it and picked up bag and gloves so as to avoid any further discussion. “Well, Nelly ... if you think there’s a chance ... I’ll call on Mr. Brooks this afternoon ... and thanks, a lot!”

“Good luck!” said Nelly.

They parted on the sidewalk with a handclasp that was, for Melissa, at least, curiously comforting.

She thought, as she rode up Fifth Avenue on top of a bus—Neith and Brooks had an office in the West Thirties—what luck it was for her, having Nelly as counselor.

Odd, that out of the whole ten months in surroundings which allowed her all the chance in the world to meet and attach the sort of people she wanted, she should have come through with one friend ... and that a woman!

“But Nelly,” thought Melissa, watching the tall buildings slide past beneath a sultry blue sky ... “is not in the least like other women. She’s honest. And she’s free.”

So was Melissa free—once more. Free to be as honest as she liked—or was able. Something like a cry fluttered in her throat. Her eyes filled suddenly with tears. She blinked them away and set her teeth on her lip.

“What a fool I’ve been! To let that horrible old woman use me like that ... a doll she put together ...” the phrase had always rankled ... “whether I get this place or not ... I’ll get some place, somewhere ... it’s going to be good, earning what I eat—and wear—once again! Owning my own soul....”

She left the bus at Thirty-first Street and walked over to the address which Nelly had given her. When she stood before the black-lettered door of Neith and Brooks, her heart was thudding in her breast and her hands were clenched on the little gray leather bag she carried but her head was well up and her voice was clear; the same contralto which had first procured her an engagement at reading aloud to the Marchesa ... how long, how long ago!

“I have a card to Mr. Brooks, from Miss Rivers,” said Melissa. A non-committal young person took it in to him.

After ten minutes in the outer office, Melissa was admitted.

Mr. Brooks proved not too alarming. A large, rangy, tweed-suited gentleman with a slightly husky voice and roughish brown hair. He looked Melissa over at some length and twisting Nelly’s card between his fingers admitted that he was looking for some one with a fair amount of speed and a more than fair amount of intelligence.

“Girl that’s been taking my letters for over five years, leaving this week to get married,” said Mr. Brooks morosely. “I’m a creature of habit. Get used to one stenographer and hate to make a change. Nelly Rivers says you’re good.”

Melissa only bowed.

“Y’ look intelligent enough,” continued Mr. Brooks impersonally.

Melissa bowed again.

Mr. Brooks was interrupted by the telephone at his elbow. He held a brief and rather temperamental conversation with some man at the other end of it who wished to know—apparently—when he could have lunch with Mr. Brooks, and discuss a play.

“Call me up next Friday—” said Mr. Brooks in slightly irritated conclusion and returned to Melissa. He was interrupted at about two minute intervals, thereafter, in the course of a rather meandering interview, in which Melissa nevertheless fancied she discerned on his part keen appraisement and cool swiftness of decision.

She felt she should like to work for Mr. Brooks. And said so, surprisingly to herself, “I will do my best,” said Melissa earnestly.

“Well—like to do Nelly a favor—and have a good deal of respect for her judgment. Give you a trial,” said Mr. Brooks. He added details of salary and working hours.

As Melissa went out, he was once more hunched over the telephone, exclaiming with extraordinary vehemence.... “For God’s sake, man—I’m full up the rest of this week. Call me about Tuesday and I’ll take it up with you, then....”

Life, as Mr. Brooks’ stenographer, Melissa decided, going down in the elevator, would not be empty of purpose. Nor of interest.

Except for Nelly she might never have heard of Mr. Brooks—might merely have made the weary round of office after office, clipping advertisements from the Help Wanted columns of the Times, being turned away here and put off there, being asked to leave her address ... and knowing exactly what that meant. After days of waiting ... nothing at all!

Nelly had bridged all that—with a card and a scribbled word.

Melissa went back to the studio, flushed with gratitude.

She told Nelly everything over a rather patchy but sufficiently appetizing dinner of sausages and scrambled eggs which Nelly got together in the tiny kitchen just off the bathroom,—and Nelly hugged her and laughed.

“Fine for Brooks! I thought we could land him. Now make good or bust—will you?”

“I’ll do my best,” promised Melissa once more.

“Because, you see,” said Nelly casually—“I may be opening next month in a musical show he’s interested in....”

“Oh, Nelly—”

“And I don’t want to give myself a black eye—in the meantime.”

She wouldn’t let Melissa thank her. She began to sing through the sputter of her cookery—in a rich legato—

Melissa sat with one foot tucked under her on the chair by the kitchen window listening, her dark eyes wistful.

CHAPTER XXXV

Nelly had said—“Stay as long as you like—” but Melissa went house-hunting at once. On the Monday after she left Delano’s apartment, she began work as Mr. Brooks’ stenographer, Monday night she took her bags and the one rather battered old trunk which held all her belongings and moved into a small but comparatively well-aired and well-lighted room on Forty-ninth Street just off Fifth Avenue. Nelly’s advice again. Nelly knew the woman who rented the room. She took Melissa there and vouched for her, saw her settled, presented her, as a final touch, with a deliciously gay chiffon cushion for a chair that stood by the window.

“Utterly useless,” said Nelly, “it won’t last a month. But neither does the moon—and who cares? Question to ask about anything is—not how long does it last ... but how long will you remember it? ... that sounds like Luke. I must have heard him say it sometime. Are you seeing him, by the way?”

“I’m not seeing any one—except you,” said Melissa.

“Making a clean break, h’m’m?”

“Don’t you think it’s the only way?”

“It’s good enough, in any case. Until you feel you’ve got ground under your feet. Think you’re going to like working with Brooks?”

“I know I’m going to like it. You feel he’s getting at something. With the other people I worked for ... it was deadly routine ... putting one foot before the other all day long.”

Nelly smiled, a slow deepening of amusement.

“Maybe so—maybe not. Don’t forget—there’s a difference in you! You’ve had a spoon in the flesh-pots and discovered they aren’t as filling as you thought ... it’s just possible you’ve got a new slant on work of any sort. You want it now, where, before, you resented it. No one’s any good at a job who doesn’t like doing it. That’s stale stuff ... don’t quote me! I merely imply that even your old job might seem different to you, now.”

Melissa didn’t argue the subject.

When Nelly had gone she sat down in the chair by the window with the frivolous rose-colored cushion behind her head, and tried to think what lay at the end of it all. Where she was going and why. To be on her own gave her a mind at peace—not a heart.

Melissa concluded, watching lights in windows across the street wink out one by one, watching curtains drawn and shades lowered, that the less attention she paid her heart the better for her, fewer aches and briefer bruisings.

“One ought to be able to fill up one’s time—with work. I couldn’t make a go of doing nothing. I’m obviously no good as a sheltered woman.” Nelly’s mocking phrase. Nelly, however, was self-sufficient, magnificently so. Melissa wasn’t. Melissa was—incomplete. Groping blindly, always after fulfillment.

—One room, one close, plain quiet room, after those high mellow walls, those crystalline high windows, that baronial fireplace ... the bedroom with the Burgundian curtains!

No telephone shrilling ... “Lissa—what are you doing, to-night? Want to go somewhere and dance? ... want to drive up the River...?”

No covetous hand settling fur and brocade about one’s shoulder with a disturbing pressure in the moment of withdrawal ... no eager masculine voice consulting one’s preferences in the matter of sole Marguery or crab-meat.

Melissa had dined—that first night of her moving—on a chop and a potato, neither worthy of special mention.

Chops and potatoes, she would very likely dine on, many a night again.

Paying the bill, however. Which now made anything palatable.

Deliberately she visioned dining across the table from Roderick, night after night ... listening to his pleasant easy laughter ... fat-man’s laughter it would be in just a year or so ... watching him savor his food and hearing him discuss it. Hearing his friendly knowledgeable comment on people and places. Wanting to talk books with him—only he didn’t read a great deal. Wanting to go somewhere with him and listen to music—only music bored him except the noisier sorts. Wanting to lay life on the table and the wherefores of love and death, talking it all out, to no conclusion perhaps save the soul-ease of two on the high tower of Babel speaking one tongue—only Roderick didn’t care about talking. Just talking—He liked action for his money—so he said. And paid for it. And got it.

Melissa came away from her rosy cushion and her lonely window not at all dissatisfied. She didn’t want Roderick. She liked him very much but she could think of him (looking into another woman’s eyes while he slipped a wedding-ring on her finger) without a qualm—unmoved by so much as a jealous shiver.... Even Luke—she missed Luke—but she didn’t want him too close. While as for that other—the man in the picture—it broke Melissa’s heart in her breast to even vaguely imagine his voice unsteady, his smile gone, his eyes shining ... for any one else in the world but Melissa, herself.

His voice would break—and his smile would go—Melissa could hear and see it till it was realler almost than she could bear ... when he stooped his head to a lifted face ... the look in those ironical eyes, the shining, unguarded, passionate heaven of possession and surrender....

If Melissa wasn’t to be the woman he looked at that way—it stretched her upon a rack, to think it might be some one else.

As far as she could, she endeavored not to think of him at all.

But having thought of nothing else for some time abrupt dismissal wasn’t easy.

Coming home each night, tired to the point of wanting nothing so much as dinner and bed, was all that helped her. She threw herself into the service of the harassed and over-burdened Mr. Brooks with an almost fanatic intensity. She was at her desk before nine and left it most often last of all the office force. She devoured all the work she could reach. She was undismayed, uncomplaining, before any amount of overtime.

“Looks like a find,” commented Mr. Brooks to Nelly who relayed the remark to Melissa by way of encouragement.

“All you’ve got to do now is—stay with it!” finished Nelly approvingly. “It’s a good place. You ought to be able to work into reading plays for him sooner or later....”

“Oh—do you think so?” said Melissa, touched with a new hope.

“Why not?” said Nelly. “You’ve read a good bit on your own—you’ve a good head and at least average critical sense.... I’ve known readers with less.” She added abruptly.... “Are you satisfied? Not missing the other stuff?”

“I’m interested,” said Melissa.

“That’s as far as you’ll go—h’m’m?”

“Nelly—I’ve never been satisfied....”

“Perhaps that’s just as well,” said Nelly coolly. “Keeps you fighting.”

Melissa saw Nelly once or twice a week—of an evening, mostly—when in the dimly-lighted studio, with the surf-like mutter of the city coming in at wide-opened windows, the two slouched pleasantly in deep shabby old chairs and talked by the hour. Melissa had never had a woman for a friend before. She grew closer to Nelly daily, in the most unexpected way. Nelly’s utter frankness ... her honest and slightly acrid acceptance of facts, pleasant or unpleasant, demanding merely that they be facts ... she was like a wind coming over mountains or off the sea. Melissa would never stand alone—as Nelly preferred to stand. But having known Nelly, she could never again accept dependence.

She thought of the Marchesa sometimes with an absolute violence of dislike—as one does of people who have seen one in unworthy attitudes ... she thought of Roderick—occasionally—with a sort of neutral friendliness.

One day she met him coming out of Brentano’s, of all places, where she had gone in search of a play Mr. Brooks wanted, for reference, and she stopped, almost without volition and put out her hand and called his name with a little laugh. Roderick was frankly bowled over.

He beset her with questions and reproaches, drawing her a little aside, standing between her and any possibility of escape.

“I have turned this darned town upside down,” he protested warmly. “Trying to find you. My aunt wouldn’t give me your address....”

“She hasn’t it,” said Melissa sweetly.

Undeniably pleasant to be the object of such search—however futile!

“You look like a million,” said Roderick. “What are you doing with yourself?”

“Working—mostly.”

“You don’t mean it!”

“I do—why not?”

“Melissa—that makes me sick!”

“How absurd—it makes me awfully happy.”

“Where are you living?”

“In a house.”

He put his hand on her arm and shook it gently, real reproach in his eyes. “No funny fooling! Aren’t you going to let me come and see you?”

“I haven’t any drawing-room—and I am not du Barry.”

“Let me take you out then—in the car.”

“Can’t be done. I’m a business woman now. No time for playing around.”

“You’ve got to play sometime. You’ll make yourself sick.”

“Do I look it?”

He admitted reluctantly. “No, you don’t ... you look wonderful. Melissa—honestly—what’s it all about? It gave me an awful jolt to have you slip away like that—without a word ... you don’t know....”

“I had to do it. I couldn’t go on that way any longer.”

“Not going to tell me any more than that? Have you broken with everybody? Aren’t you seeing any one at all?”

“Not any—men.”

“Em’ly Armistead?” asked Roderick with unexpected acuteness.... “Or Nelly Rivers?” He caught her flushing. “I’ll ask Nelly.... I’ll get Kenealy to ask her.”

“You won’t—if I’d rather not.”

“Do you really want to be—let alone?”

“Please!” said Melissa. “Yes—I’d rather—just now. If later on—or ever—I change my mind—I’ll call you. Will that do?”

Roderick said a trifle moodily—“I’m going to Canada next week—be gone about a month—on a shooting trip. Can’t I see you when I come back?”

“I’ll call you—if I decide—at the apartment.”

“It’s darned unkind of you, I’ll say—” said Roderick ruefully and slipped a hand inside her arm and turned her into the tide of the Avenue. “Come and have tea with me, anyhow—”

“I’ll let you put me on a bus,” said Melissa firmly. And would not even let him take it himself, as well.

She flickered her fingers at him standing disconsolate on the sidewalk as the bus lumbered away. She had a moment’s regret but stifled it instantly.

“You can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds and that’s that!” she told herself stubbornly.

Just friendship was by no means Roderick’s aim. No good having to decline him and his worldly goods all over again.

“I’ll stay with my stuff,” thought Melissa and would not let herself be forlorn about it.

If it had been Luke ... she missed Luke at times ... she wasn’t too sure she’d have been able to refuse seeing him ... if she’d had the chance.

Luke had been so utterly companionable, so infinitely swift of understanding. Melissa said to Nelly that she’d rather like to see Luke again—sometime—and three days later Nelly telephoned: “Run in on your way home from the office—just a minute—needn’t stay unless you want to.”

When Melissa ran in there was Luke, sitting in a window, smoking ... himself and none other, just as casual, just as charming, just as dear as he had ever been.... Melissa gave him both hands with a rush of delicious surprise ... but the moment after, Em’ly Armistead walked out of the bedroom, cigarette in one hand red hat in the other ... at which Melissa once more withdrew into herself like any chambered nautilus.

She thought it wasn’t too kind of Nelly. Pointing a moral so obviously.

CHAPTER XXXVI

Luke stayed however, after Em’ly Armistead had gone. The red hat had been really a preliminary to departure. And when Melissa went, he walked home with her, over her protest, making the lightest of casual small-talk on the way, never dropping his smile nor his voice till Melissa said ... “Here is where I live ...” and set her foot on the lowest step of a dingy brownstone house.

“Here?—” said Luke, at that ... “what a little way?” and looked down into her eyes and questioned mutely—“Remember?”

Melissa answered in spite of herself. “That’s what you said the day you brought me back—from the Park....”

“You and Jerry Tarleton,” said Luke. “Seems a long time ago—doesn’t it?”

Melissa only nodded.

“You didn’t ask me in, then—I suppose you won’t ask me in now, either.”

“I can’t, Luke—I’ve only one room.”

“There’s still the Park.”

She shook her head, more rebellious and regretful than she showed. “It isn’t any use ... is it? You’d only—unsettle me....”

“If I can unsettle you,” said Luke quickly—“that means—”

“Unsettle—not change,” Melissa told him. She smiled faintly.

“Luke—you and Em’ly Armistead make a very decorative pair.”

“Like William and Mary on a shillin’?” said Luke gravely. He added—“Am I to take that as final?”

“Then you haven’t yet?” asked Melissa. The sudden light in his eyes frightened and shamed her. However much he might linger on street-corners with the wearer of the red hat, however much she might preempt him and he, quiescent, allow it, Melissa knew in that instant that he had forgotten nothing at all. That he had changed not in the least since the night in the apartment when he had told her he loved her, and when she—because she was lonely and because his touch comforted and reassured her that there was warmth in the world, had listened and later repented.

That mistake at least she would not make twice. If she couldn’t give him the thing he wanted she could at least pay him tribute with the truth.

She said, putting her hand into his—“Luke—you don’t know what a temptation you are! I like you—I love you—but it falls short, that’s all. I don’t know why. I wish with my whole heart it didn’t. Do you suppose I shouldn’t be only too happy to love you, all the way—if I could? Do you suppose I don’t miss your friendship...?”

“That’s gone overboard for good,” said Luke grimly. “Sorry! It’s the other or nothing. I spoof others—myself I cannot spoof.”

“Then—it’s nothing,” said Melissa.

“Fair enough!” said Luke, held her hand hard for a moment and let it go lightly. “In which case ... you may be right about Em’ly and me. I’m lonesome as hell ... so is she ... wherein we’re congenial—very! She’s kind enough to care for me. I’m fond of her. She knows you had the refusal of me so to speak. She doesn’t mind. All the cards are on the table ... curious, isn’t it? Talk of this sort between a man and a woman. Even a generation ago—it couldn’t have been done. We’d have been all bogged down in any number of delicate pretenses. You could never have admitted to me that mentally I satisfy you but physically I don’t. What’s the matter? Isn’t that the answer?”

Honesty with a vengeance!

“Yes ...” said Melissa.... “I suppose it is.”

“You know it is!” said Luke. “And you’re entirely right to hold out for a man who meets both requirements. Returning to our moutons.... Em’ly couldn’t conceivably have admitted under Victorian rule, that she wanted to marry a man who wanted to marry another woman. I couldn’t—under any set of circumstances without losing my face as a gentleman have admitted to you that Em’ly wanted me to marry her ... interesting, isn’t it? Question arises ... does all this frankness stop the bleeding? Not altogether. Well ...” he made a gesture of departure.... “You won’t be asked to the wedding, Melissa!”

“I don’t want to be,” said Melissa unhappily.

“I know,” said Luke, “that’s the devil of it! I’ve almost got you. If I weren’t quite so clever and you weren’t quite so true.... I seem to feel that’s lifted from something ... but never mind! Point is—we get no forrarder by palaver ... merely another turn of the screw—and so—good-by, my dear!”

“Good-by, Luke,” said Melissa.

She watched him down the street, standing with her hand on the door-knob, fighting a weak desire to call him back to give up asking the impossible, to give up looking for something that might not exist, that might, even if it existed be utterly unattainable ... this was the second time she had said good-by to Luke, when she could have kept him—and it hurt. It still hurt.

“Don’t be a soppy little fool,” she said to herself and went in and up to her room with her mouth in a hard straight line. “No good being honest if you’re not going to be honest all the time.”

Melissa had dallied with half-truths and found them not what she wanted. At the price of devastating loneliness she was willing to hold out for the real thing, wherever and whatever it might be.

Although it was not without the range of possibility that she might be paying for something which she was never to get.

If there were anything in the world to go by ... if one had the shadow of a sign ... the shred of a talisman.

Like the picture that had been the beginning of all Melissa’s uncertainties.

She didn’t know just when it came into her head that if she could have only half an hour alone in the room with the fireplace and the windows, the room where the man in the picture had been realler than other men walking, ... she could get back her hold on herself, stabilize her faith in the ultimate outcome of things....

It was half after six by the watch on her wrist. She had had no dinner—she wanted none. She smoothed her hair, put on her hat—she had thrown it on the bed when she came in—took her gloves and her bag and went out. There was dusk in the street and the glimmer of blossoming lights. Dusk and a few faint stars in the sky.

Melissa stopped a scouting taxi and got into it.

She gave the driver the number of Roderick’s house.... Central Park West. Her heart stirred when she said the words as if she had said Avalon ... or Arcady.

She thought—“This is the completest madness! I haven’t any money for taxis.”

Paying the man, before the two moony lamps on Roderick’s doorstep, she thought again. “Completest madness ... but it’s the only thing in the world I want! ... so, why not?”

She went in and asked for Kathleen.... “She isn’t by any chance here?... I know it’s frightfully late.”

The clerk at the desk was effusively pleasant. Verbosely explanatory.

“Kathleen is taking the place of the night maid this week ... only too glad, Miss Wayne.... I’ll send for her at once.”

Kathleen appeared in no time, blue print, brown hair and fresh cheeks delightfully unaltered. Melissa had somehow expected to find her an elderly woman, lined and dimmed, grayed and stiffened ... not actually, of course—but there seemed so many years between Melissa’s leaving the apartment and this absurd and hopeless return.

“Kathleen,” said Melissa, drawing her a bit to one side and speaking very low and fast.... “I seem to have left something upstairs ... that is, there’s something I can’t find and I thought it might be ... could you take me up for a moment or so and let me look.... Mister Roderick is in Canada now—on a hunting trip, isn’t he? He told me he was going....”

Incoherent and stammering—flushed and deprecatory—horribly, to be begging favors like that, of a maid ... of a clerk ... of any one at all who could open that silk-hung door!

Kathleen answered instantly, simple as a child and kindly as a mother: “I’ll take ye up right now ... yes—he’s been gone, Mister Roderick, almost a week. There’s not a soul ... what was it ye left, Miss Wayne?”

What was it she had left? One grappled a presentable lie with difficulty—not having thought out that part of it.

“Some—letters—Kathleen—a bit of paper—nothing you’d have noticed. It isn’t of the least importance to any one but me.” (At least no lie there! There, at least, the ungarbed truth.)

“I ain’t seen a thing,” said Kathleen comfortably. She led the way to the elevator, put Melissa into it with a touch on her arm respectfully affectionate.

“Ye’re lookin’ fine, Miss Wayne.”

“I’m feeling very well, Kathleen ... thank you.”

The elevator rose with a cruel slowness. Kathleen observed that the day had been nice. Melissa murmured something in answer. Not knowing clearly what. All her soul was straining ahead of her—to that quiet dimly lighted entresol—with the mirror and the two tall chairs ... to that narrow hallway where Luke had once said—“I live in the next apartment—d’y’ see?” ... to that door ... to the turn of the key that would open it....

And after it was opened—after the flimsy pretext of looking for something never lost—what use? What could come of it all? At most, a ghostly shadow at one’s shoulder ... the flicker of a disembodied smile ... the husk of a dream-voice....

“So you came back to see if I were still here? Have you missed me as much as that?”

Had she missed him!... Had her days and her nights, under all the cover of work and quiet been anything, ever, but blind dumb straining ... wanting and groping and coming out forever at the same door wherein one went....

“Tenth!” said the elevator boy with enormous indifference and Kathleen and Melissa got out into the well-ordered silence of the corridor.

“Now ye can go right in—” began Kathleen comfortably. “Bill has been fixin’ the windows—one of ’em sticks.... I see he’s left the door open.... Bill!” This to a blue-overalled back disappearing in the direction of the service elevator.... Bill stopped—waited. Kathleen in full flight toward him flung back over a plump shoulder:

“Just go right in, Miss Wayne. I got to speak to Bill. I’ll be close after ye. There ain’t a soul there....”

Reassured of which, Melissa laid her hand upon the knob of the silk-hung door, now slightly ajar, opened it slowly and went in.

As far as the threshold. No further. There she stopped, breath failing her, eyes wide and dark, lips parted ... stopped and put her hand to her breast, the woman’s age-old gesture of defense and betrayal.

Kathleen had said.... “There ain’t a soul there—”

But there he was ... down on one knee, on the floor by the desk with the light from the golden-shaded lamp, bronze on his bent head—redly bronze—as Melissa’s footstep broke the quiet of the room he looked up....

Exactly the lifted head and the look of the lost picture ... the slightly amused aloof smile, inquiry in the eyes....

Very softly Melissa came into the room—without a word—hardly drawing breath. She did not take her gaze from his face. When he stood up, looking back at her, equally in silence, her hand went out, without her knowing it ... both hands ... and her eyes besought him not to vanish. So she had seen him in her fevered dreams—so she had dreamed him waking. If now, gone mad, she had at last materialized him—it was a lovely madness. That was all.

She thought in a far-off flash of warning.... “I’ll never know after this, what’s real and what isn’t.”

But she went toward him nevertheless.

She thought. “I haven’t been sane—all along ...” and shivered a little.

But she took the last step or so that parted them.

Then she was quite close and all at once in a flare of reckless and desperate happiness—because she hadn’t after all lost him ... because her dream had after all returned to her and she to her dream—Melissa put out her arms and lifted her face—with a sob and a broken whisper....

He muttered, “God!” she thought. She wasn’t sure. Then the world slipped and staggered under her feet.

Because his lips were warm and his arms were hard—and she knew with his lips on hers and his arms around her—that he was real.

She tried then to free herself—and then, having kissed her he would not let her go but kissed her again—the second time as if she had touched him with flame which only her touch could assuage.

There wasn’t a word between them. Faintly—for an instant—she struggled—panicky, fleeting and overborne—he only drew her closer until she lifted her face again....

A mad moment ... a moment of exquisite unbelievable madness into which Kathleen arriving suddenly flat-footedly like the emissary of all jealous gods, cast the first shattering stone.

“Ah-h!” shrilled Kathleen—stricken in the doorway. “Mister Carroll—I never knew ye was here...!”

Well—Melissa hadn’t known it either.

CHAPTER XXXVII

They stood apart, Melissa’s face incarnadined, the other darkly flushed but quiet.

“’Evening, Kathleen,” he said, in a deep indolent drawl.... “I’ll stay here to-night, if it’s not too much trouble. Going back to Pineville, to-morrow.”

Kathleen gurgled like a brook. Her embarrassment spent itself in voluble assurance and reassurance.

“It’s no trouble at all, Mister Carroll! The room is always ready ... when Mister Roderick is here or when he ain’t ... wasn’t I sayin’ to Bill only this mornin’ that ye hadn’t been up in so long I’d ’most forgotten when it was! Mister Roderick’s off in Canada somewhere....”

“I know. I saw him in Detroit the other day.”

“Was he well?” inquired Kathleen politely.

“Very,” said Mr. Carroll gravely.

Kathleen’s curiosity leaped its fences.

“An’ you and Miss Wayne knowin’ each other...! It’s a small world!”

“We’ve known each other a long time,” Mr. Carroll returned, looked at Melissa and in mercy looked away again. “But we haven’t seen each other—recently.”

“It’s nice—you meetin’ again,” said Kathleen warmly.

“Yes—” said Mr. Carroll, “it is—nice.”

All this time, Melissa had stood like a creature bewitched, not uttering a sound, hardly lifting her eyes, swept with alternate waves of self-horror and dizzying happiness. She couldn’t however be silent any longer. She pulled herself together, she kept her head up and her glance before her.... “It’s been—as you say—very nice—but I can’t stop—I’m late.”

“By a number of years,” said Mr. Carroll ... “not too late, however.”

As if a foil had touched her over the heart, Melissa got the impact of that.

“Did ye find what it was ye came to look for?” asked Kathleen anxiously.

“Thank you, Kathleen—she did.”

Melissa had no choice but to echo—“Thank you, Kathleen.” She turned toward the door.

“I’ll see you down,” said Mr. Carroll.

“Please don’t—it isn’t necessary.”

He repeated coolly—“I’ll see you down.”

Melissa preceded him without further protest.

After all, one had to explain things, somehow.

He offered at the door of the house: “Sorry I haven’t a car!”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Melissa. Light grew in her brain—a white light and pervasive—in the effulgence of which she perceived an extraordinary fact. It didn’t matter really—whether he had a car or not. All that mattered was—his being there beside her.

“Where shall we go to talk?” he suggested.

“Are we going—to talk?” (Merely for the pleasure of hearing him say so!)

“Did you think we weren’t?”

“I didn’t know.”

“You do know. This isn’t a game.”

“Perhaps—the Park,” said Melissa. After all, the Park was there before them. Nearest substitute for Eden—no bright angel at the gate—as yet.

She said.... “Why not the Park?... We might find a bench.”

“Come on!” said Mr. Carroll.

He had never in Melissa’s imaginings been so—unsmiling. If he had smiled—she couldn’t have gone with him. It was his grim and lordly earnest....

They came to a bench, shortly, and sat down upon it. Beneath a tree whose leaves were yellowing, drying, crisping at the edges, seared with the prescience of death. A light farther on cast spidery shadows.

“Now....” he said—“for God’s sake—who are you?”

“Does it—matter?” asked Melissa low-voiced.

“If it didn’t matter—we wouldn’t be here.”

“Mere curiosity....”

“I haven’t any. Ordinarily. This has nothing to do with ordinary circumstances. I have a right at least to know who you are—and who you took me for ... you did take me for some one—of course....”

“For yourself—only—not real,” said Melissa simply.

She knotted her hands together in her lap. She stared at the backs of them fixedly.

He leaned forward looking as fixedly into her face.

“For myself?—Have we ever met before? I know we haven’t.”

“Not a real meeting—a—picture.”

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed and laughed abruptly. “I’m not a moving-picture actor—did you think— It was some one else, then....”

Melissa set her teeth and went in deeper.

“Not a movie ... a little picture ... a snap-shot ... in the drawer of Roderick’s desk.”

“Of me? You mean of me?”

“Yes—of you—down on one knee—looking up. That’s why when I came into the room ... it was exactly the same....”

He said still bemused but determined: “I had dropped a pen-point—the last one in the place—I was looking for it.”

Melissa returned without lifting her eyes. “I didn’t know. It was the same—attitude—exactly.”

“What did you think I was—a ghost? I remember that picture, now. Rod took it one summer—down home. Fooling around. You mean to say he still has it?”

“Not any more,” said Melissa—“I lost it.”

“You?”

“Yes.”

Monosyllabic impasse! He folded his arms tightly. A ripple in Melissa’s veins told her dimly why.

“Let’s get this straight. Good, I’m a lawyer! You take a lot of cross-examining—don’t you?”

“Perhaps I won’t take much more of it.”

“Oh, yes, you will—you’re not a short sport, whoever you are! That’s in your eyes—that and some other things. About the picture—you mean to say you—liked it—so much?” When she did not at once answer, she felt his hand come over hers. “Y’ see—it’s no good behaving as if this were an average occurrence. Back in the room there—that was the—highest—moment I’ve ever lived! You can’t make me believe it wasn’t the same with you. Why—you looked at me—remember that thing?—‘She looked at him as one who awakes— The past was a sleep and her life began.’... I sound a conceited fool. But it’s true. You did. You looked at me as if I were some one come back to you—from the other side of the world....”

“You were,” said Melissa—nothing more.

“You’ve got to tell me why.”

“It’s too long a story.”

“I’ll take the rest of my time to hear it—if necessary.”

Driven to the edge she implored him: “You’ll never understand. Nobody would.”

He said briefly: “Try me! And don’t forget—I’ve had you in my arms. We’re strangers only on the surface.”

It was true. It was fundamentally and beyond all questioning, true. Melissa moved her hand under his and instantly their fingers interlaced. She lifted her eyes. His were shining.

She said: “Well—to begin with—” and stopped.

“Go on,” he told her gently.

So Melissa went on. She wouldn’t have believed she could sit there and tell him all her sordid bargain with the Marchesa. But she did. Not sparing herself. Not sparing the Marchesa either, for that matter. She told him about her man-hunting, in completest detail ... about Luke, picked up in the Park, for a start, and about Murdock and the rest, acquired through Luke.

“I don’t believe you!” he objected when she came to her pursuit of Beall whom she hadn’t even liked.

“Hasn’t it ever been done before?”

“Lord—yes! But you ... you’re not like that. A man’s got only to look at you....”

Melissa said swiftly, for fear he sensed her heart’s too-heavy beating in the silence.... “It was something in me that wasn’t—quite rotten—that kept the little picture—of you.”

Under his breath, he muttered. “You dear!”

“You see,” said Melissa, “I was choking off something—that—hated—what I was doing. And at the same time ... I was—bound not to stop—till I got what I—thought—I wanted. Of course there was always the Marchesa—egging me on—but I don’t give that as an excuse. I—myself—was trying—to sell myself—”

Carroll damned the Marchesa up and down in a brief and bitter masterpiece of profanity. “Her affection for Roderick is the only decent thing about her.”

“Do you know Roderick—well?”

“We went through Harvard together. I know him better than I do my own brother. We’ve been friends for years. I have the run of his apartment when I’m up here—which isn’t often. That’s how you happened across me, this evening.”

“Where is Pineville?” asked Melissa suddenly with a slight quiver in her voice.

“In Alabama. It’s where I live. In a torn-down old house which is all my worldly wealth—except what I make at law. And that’s darn little as yet. Too fond of politics to be much good at private practice.” He inquired abruptly—“What’s your name?”

“Melissa.”

“Honestly?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I was afraid it would be ... something I didn’t like ... Melissa ... that’s romance!”

“What’s yours?” asked Melissa softly. She waited breathless to hear it. People passing, motors in the distance, lights among the trees ... all shadow-stuff ... nothing real but the hand on hers, the voice in her ears.

“My name’s Ben,” he said. “Ben Carroll. Benjamin Fitzhugh, if you’d like it in full.”

“I do like it ... in full,” said Melissa.

Carroll said in a deeper drawl than before, a drawl incredibly caressing:

“You’re the sweetest thing I ever saw!... How did you lose the picture?”

Melissa wavered then gave him the truth.... “I ... I was ill and Kathleen cleaned out the desk where I kept it when I wasn’t—”

“When you weren’t what?—-Go on!”

“When I wasn’t—wearing it around—if you really want to know.”

“You didn’t!”

“I did.”

He lifted her hand to his lips very gently.

“You see—” said Melissa—“I used to—well—talk to you ... in my mind ... about things. You were—a kind of refuge—to me. From myself—and what I was doing. And when I was ill—”

“Were you very ill?” Distress in his voice melted the last vestige of her pride.

“I had influenza—rather badly. I was out of my head and then, you see, I thought you were real.... I thought you were there—all the time.”

He said very low and his voice shook: “I am real, Melissa ... and I’m going to be there—all the time.”

“Are you?” asked Melissa just above a whisper.

“If I’m not ... what do you think all this is about? Melissa—when I kissed you—”

“Don’t!” said Melissa faintly.

“Let’s get out of this—” said Ben Carroll, rising suddenly.... “—and catch us a taxi! We can’t talk here.”

CHAPTER XXXVIII

They rode miles up the river in the taxi and as many miles back until even to glamoured eyes the meter showed a perceptible tendency to exaggeration.

Melissa observed it first. She said, with her cheek against his sleeve: “Take me home. Didn’t you say you weren’t—wealthy?”

“Poor as Job’s turkey. I don’t know if I mentioned it.”

“Well—look at that thing! If it goes any higher it’ll be out of the top. You won’t have any money to go back to Pineville, to-morrow....”

“Oh, good Lord!” he muttered dazedly.... “I’d forgotten.... I’m not going to-morrow! It’s too much to ask.”

“I’m not asking it,” said Melissa, demurely. “I’m not asking anything. I’m just sitting very quiet—to see what happens next.”

He bent his red head to her dark one.

“You are—the sweetest thing!... You look like all the slim cool disdainful sophisticated women in the world ... but you aren’t! ... you’re an adorable child, with her arms full of fairy-tales!”

“I’m—me ... with you,—if you see what I mean,” said Melissa. “It’s like something being let out of prison. I can be nicer for you than I could ever have been for any one else in the world ... if you hadn’t come, I could never have been my inside self. Because—while some men understand you with their minds—you can’t bear them to touch you ... and others fool your senses, for a time, but they’ve nothing to say to your head ... what one wants....”

She didn’t say what one wanted. He lifted their locked hands to his lips and said it for her. “You’re satisfied?”

“If you are.”

“If I am!” said Carroll—and laughed shortly.

They left the taxi at Columbus Circle and walked over to the Avenue.

Melissa told him about Mr. Brooks and the play-broking and the office. He told Melissa about Pineville, his rather scattering practice and his incurable flair for politics, with Washington as an eventual goal.

“You see,” he explained eagerly ... for all his casual control, he had moments of vehement earnest, startling in their intensity ... “what I feel about the whole thing is this.... So long as the man with a brain and a code and a decent background doesn’t care if he votes or not—leaves it all to the man in the street and hide-bound party organization ... just so long we’ll get what we’ve gotten for a good many years ... graft and mismanagement and stupidity in high places. We’ve only ourselves to thank when we let fat fools ride over our heads into Congress ... does this bore you?”

“No,” said Melissa—“I like it. Go on.”

Lights along the Avenue like foggy pearls. Buses and motors going by in a misty stream. Tall buildings, wraith-like.

He said suddenly, “I feel as if there were no one alive in the world to-night—but you and me.”

“I know,” said Melissa. “So do I.”

“Do you think we’ll always be able to speak the truth to each other...? With a beginning like this—nothing else would be good enough.”

Before she could answer he went on: “I give you my word—I’ll never lie to you ... even if I lose you for it.”

“I give you my word, too,” said Melissa. A curious moment of betrothal. His fingers bruised her arm.

“On top of that—tell me this—can you live in Pineville—after New York? In a big old white house with not enough furniture in half the rooms. With an old nigger woman to cook and clean up—with only a flivver to ride in—but a yellow rose over your doorstep.”

“If you’re there, too,” said Melissa.

“How soon?” asked Carroll ... “darling!”

They talked that over for blocks.

He could see no need for waiting. “We won’t have much money—just enough to live on. I’m running for reëlection as Mayor this year ... if I get it ... the thing opens out ... some day, perhaps ... Governor ... and after that....”

Melissa felt a premonitory stir, vague in the recesses of her consciousness ... like music and marching feet, a long way off. Was there a day, hid in the mists ahead, when she would look back at this and say to him.... “You knew—didn’t you!”

Was that wonderful deep voice born to sway its thousands?

Or were he and she just two crazy happy fools tempting fate?

Either way, they had by extraordinary chance found each other and whatever he did, Melissa asked no more of life than to do it with him.

Crossing at Forty-ninth Street he said with one of his brusque laughs. “I’m hungry as the devil. I hadn’t any dinner. I’d forgotten all about it.”

“Neither had I,” said Melissa. “I’d forgotten too.” They stared at each other in delighted horror.

He said: “Where’ll we go?—what’s nearest?”

“Childs’,” said Melissa and was firm. They had wheat-cakes and coffee at ten o’clock. Their first meal together. Afterward they walked for an hour or so more and told each other a great many things which apparently could not be held over for another day.

Carroll said at parting, at reluctant and eventual parting, that he would stay on for a week in Roderick’s place, if at the end of that time Melissa would go home with him.

Melissa began to object, met the look in his eyes and said she would.

“I was on the way to reading plays for Mr. Brooks, too!”

“I’ll let you read proof on my speeches.”

“Will you let me help you write them?”

“That’s what I want you for, really.”

She sent him away, not without effort.

His smile was burned into her soul and his eyes and the feel of his hand. If she never saw him again, his voice was in her ears for the rest of her days—and nights.

CHAPTER XXXIX. — Transcriber’s Notes

Nelly, upon receiving at noon of the following day Melissa’s ardent confession, lifted her eyebrows, sighed and shook hands across the table ... once more of the Roof-Tree Inn.

“I’m disappointed, of course,” she said ... “but not too surprised. A job wasn’t really what you wanted. You tried to escape from it in the first place ... subconscious honesty on your part. You belong in some man’s home. You were trying blindly to get there. Of course the thing was complicated by your insistence on caring for the man. You’re a born lover, Melissa—that’s your trouble! It makes anything else seem—unimportant—to you. It shows in you, too ... like deep red in a rose. That’s what drew all those men around you.” She sketched a crooked pattern on the table with her thumbnail. “Thing I don’t get is ... out of the lot of them—Ben Carroll! In Heaven’s name, why?”

Nelly knew him. Nelly had known him for years. Casually. Without any desire to know him more nearly. She had met him on parties with Roderick—and Luke.

“Nelly—don’t you think he’s—wonderful?”

“No—can’t say I do. He’s got a pleasant voice....”

“Pleasant! He’s got the most beautiful voice I ever listened to! And his eyes, Nelly ... and the way he carries his head....”

“This,” said Nelly Rivers grinning, “is hardly decent. You’ll admit his hair’s red—or won’t you?”

“Bronze,” said Melissa, shamefaced.

“Good Lord! It’s brindle. And he’s so abominably sure of himself.”

“Nelly—a big man’s got to be!”

“He isn’t a big man yet—by long odds ... he’s a poor young lawyer with the political bee in his bonnet. He’s a dreamer....”

“So am I,” said Melissa softly.

“He’s ambitious—with nothing to go on.”

“Ambition—like his—finds something to go on.”

“As his wife you’ll have your head in the clouds—but your toes in the ashes, my dear—”

“Well—I’ll have his heart in my hand, which makes it even,” said Melissa.

She looked at Nelly imploringly.

“Pansy-eyes!” said Nelly. “I hate to see you being such a fool. He isn’t worth it. He’s just one more nice young man ... he hasn’t half Luke’s charm....”

“He has twice Luke’s strength....”

“Roderick could take much better care of you ... if you’ve got to marry some one.”

“Roderick would bore me—past caring for.”

“Have it your own way! Marry him and go along with him. Take all the disillusionment—that’s coming to you!... But when your head clears and you can see the road again ... pick yourself up and come back—the latch-string’s always out.”

“Oh, Nelly—” said Melissa with unsteady lip, “—a lover like Ben ... and a friend like you!...”

“Sunk—aren’t you?” said Nelly cheerfully. “Well—sweets to the sweet, old dear! Don’t make yourself too sick—that’s all. I’ve got to run along, now. God knows what I’ll say to Brooks! I told him you were sworn to Celibacy.”

“I saw him this morning,” said Melissa humbly. “He wasn’t pleased. But he wasn’t too—unpleasant.”

“Oh, I haven’t a doubt,” said Nelly, pulling on her gloves and settling her hat with an impatient touch—“if the Angel of the flaming sword had been a male—and you had been Eve—you’d be in the Garden yet! Cheerio!”

She left Melissa slightly disconcerted. It appeared, by way of Nelly, that Carroll, in the eye of the unprejudiced observer, was “just one more nice young man.” Not the dream come true—the ineffable unbelievable dream—but merely a “poor young lawyer—brindle-haired ... with the political bee in his bonnet.”

Melissa had a moment’s terrifying sense of walking in mist which might at any moment dissolve and leave her on barren shores.

Something Luke had once said came into her mind ... “All you’ve got is the world you’re in ... you’re inside a bubble of your own blowing ... sit tight and pray it doesn’t burst with you....”

But if one believed the bubble to be the world—it was the world—while one believed it. There wasn’t any world outside one’s belief in it. And what one saw in one’s lover, he was ... whether any one else saw him so or not.

Just as the beautiful woman, the white flame of existence, that he saw in oneself, became (directly a taxi-driver regarded her—or a clerk in a shop—or a boy on the street, say)—merely a rather pretty person, needing perhaps, a little powder on her nose.

“Love—” thought Melissa—“is seeing each other clear! Outsiders have murky vision.”

Carroll talked to her early in the afternoon over the telephone and she promised to meet him at half-past five at the entrance to the Marchesa’s apartment.

“I’d like to see her—just this once more—” said Melissa, “after all—except for her, we wouldn’t have....”

“Oh, yes, we would—somehow!” said Carroll.

Even over the wire the deep tones of his voice, its drawling caress, its beautiful vibrant clearness stirred Melissa’s senses while it spoke to her soul.

“You’ll meet me there, won’t you, Ben?”

“Meet you anywhere.”

“At half-after five?”

“Awfully late.”

“It can’t be any earlier. She sleeps in the afternoon. I just want to say good-by to her—and tell her about us.”

“Don’t tell her too much. She might talk you out of it.”

“Nobody could.”

“You mean that?”

“You know I do.”

“Very well—I’ll let you go, then. Don’t make me wait. I haven’t seen you in a long time.”

Melissa closed the connection very softly and sat with her hand against her lips for some moments thereafter. Heavenly nonsense—foam on an uncharted sea! Words playing over the untellable—like rockets spangling the illimitable dark.

She called Anna and asked if she might see the Marchesa at five.

Anna, perennially ungracious, conveyed the fact that she might—at five—no later.

“Thank you, Anna,” said Melissa. She could have thanked the sun that day for being in the sky.

At five, to the moment, she rang the Marchesa’s bell and was admitted.

Yellow roses, drooping on the tea-table beside the frosted silver tea-service, the shallow Dresden cups; yellow roses and violets on the mantel-shelf among the uniformed and tail-coated suitors attitudinizing in their too ornate frames. The Spanish shawl bloomed dimly along an end of the piano. On the chaise longue foolish little heart-shaped and circular cushions of Normandy lace still invited to doubtful repose. On the walls, Paolo, once aide to the King of Italy, still proclaimed across a faithful trouser-leg, “Toute à vous, Amalie!” ... Paolo and others. Pointing the fading innuendoes of the naughty French prints. Inferring all things possible to youth and beauty and passion. Discreetly recording—nothing—beyond a pretty phrase and a signature.

The Marchesa sat in the winged chair and looked Melissa over with the eyes of an old lady eagle who has been much given to sun-worship. She waved a small pink-nailed claw, heavy with diamonds. She said with a cracked chuckle:

“Well—well! I thought I had seen the last of you. Changed your mind, have you? Come back for a second helping. It’s no earthly use, my good girl. Do sit down! Makes me nervous—your standing over me like that. Have you gotten thinner? You look so tall. And you need a good deal more rouge. Sit down and tell me to what I owe the pleasure of this visit—though I warn you—it’s not the least use! You had your chance and you threw it away. You made your bed and you can lie on it.” She added a delicate jest in impeccable French.

Melissa felt all the old antagonism rise in her like a wave. Her color rose with it.

“That blush of yours is the best thing about you,” observed the Marchesa critically. “Don’t waste it on me. I’m no longer interested. When I think what you might have done—with my assistance....”

Melissa said clearly, holding herself well in check. “That is why I am here. I only want to thank you ... for having given me a chance ... to meet ... the man I am going to marry.” She looked the Marchesa fair in the eyes and knew, not without a tinge of malicious triumph—instantly regretted—that she had scored and underscored in the announcement.

“Marry ... what ... what man?” cried the Marchesa shrilly. She clenched withered fingers on the arms of her chair, staring into Melissa’s face, like a rouged and powdered fury, with silver curls for snakes. “Do you mean to tell me, Roderick has been after you again? In spite of all I said to him?... You’re lying!... I don’t believe you ... he’s got far too much sense ... besides, I have other plans....”

“I am not speaking of your nephew,” said Melissa coldly. The Marchesa’s venom sickened her. She hurried on, her whole being turning to the street below, to Ben, perhaps even now, waiting ... watching the doorway for her....

“I am going to marry Ben Carroll,” she said while the Marchesa’s fingers relaxed and her jaw dropped ... “he is a friend of Mr. Delano’s. I met him in Mr. Delano’s apartment. I don’t know if you know him.”

The Marchesa looked at Melissa for a long curious moment in silence.

“Ben Carroll—” she said at length. “Ben Carroll! Of course I know him! That red-headed ne’er-do-weel from Alabama. Upon my word you have feathered your nest! He’s poor as Job’s turkey....”

“So he tells me,” said Melissa smiling.

“You’re in love with him!” said the Marchesa abruptly. “You’ve got that moony look you used to have—when—when I talked about Roderick—before you ever met him ... wait a moment! wait a moment! I think I begin to see.... Oh—this is too much!”

“I’m sorry—I can’t wait—” interrupted Melissa, rising in a panic. Ferret and pointer again! That horrid eager sniffing at the door of one’s dearest secrecies ... that uncanny shrill outcry ... it came while she dreaded it ... the Marchesa burst into peal after peal of thin hysteric laughter.

“Carroll was your Mister Roderick—was he? I don’t know just how but give me time and I’ll have it! ... he must have been! You’ve got the same look when you speak of him. And—I remember now—it all comes back to me—you thought Roderick so changed. The first night you saw him. Oh, mon Dieu—imagine Roderick with red hair! Imagine Roderick with any hair at all!... He’s been bald for years ... so many good men are.”

“I’m sorry,” said Melissa, chill as frost, “—I really must go—it’s half-after five....”

“Half-after five ... sacr-r-ré! ...” the Marchesa’s amusement evaporated instantly. Her interest with it. She displayed all at once an almost feverish willingness to speed the parting guest. She gestured toward the door. She grimaced sweetly. She scattered farewell phrases like largesse.

“I hope you’ll be very happy, I’m sure!—Though I must say I doubt it. With no money—and that hair! Temperament of course. He’ll be unfaithful to you in no time.... I’d no idea it was so late ... don’t let me keep you! So glad to have seen you again, Melissa....”

Melissa said good-by and went, slightly annoyed, not unnaturally, to be thus evicted.

On the threshold she heard a sudden flow of speech behind her. The Marchesa, to Anna, in urgent command.

“When that girl from the library comes, Anna ... have her up at once—at once, do you hear! And, Anna ... you might bring in some sherry and biscuits....”

A reminiscent bit of business.

Melissa waited for the elevator, oddly startled.

Stepping into it when it came, she brushed against a girl stepping out. A pretty creature in a simple dark frock, with a small dark hat on her bright hair, mutinous eyes, a sulky red mouth.

“Can you tell me—I want the apartment of the Marchesa di Ricci.”

Melissa listened spellbound while the slave of the elevator gave direction.

Going down, she wondered ... and put wonder away from her.

What did it matter—what did anything matter except the man in the doorway, waiting?

He took the hand she put out to him, he looked down at her. He was himself of the picture, he was himself of the night before ... he was reality no longer to be questioned, in the midst of a shifting world.

He said: “How have you been?” his voice slightly unsteady.

Melissa couldn’t answer. She slipped her hand inside his arm. They turned west—for no reason at all.

He said: “Where’ll we go for dinner?”

Melissa, getting hold of herself, replied: “There’s a little rotisserie, on Sixth Avenue....”

“All right—we’ll find a taxi.”

“No, we won’t—we’ll take a bus.”

“Melissa—I’ve got something for you ...” he took a small box out of his pocket. A slight tremor about his mouth—barely a smile—wrung Melissa’s heart. “Do I have to give it to you on top of a bus?”

“There’s a taxi!” said Melissa.

He signaled. The taxi drew up.

“Miss me to-day?” he asked, helping Melissa in.

She turned her head and touched her lips to his coat-sleeve.

The door closed. The taxi lurched forward.

“Where did you tell him to go?” asked Melissa.

“Anywhere he liked,” said Ben Carroll.

Melissa put out her left hand ... made a wistful face.

“It was my mother’s,” said Ben Carroll and slipped a cluster of pearls on her finger.

Early dusk—and the taxi rattled swiftly along. They kissed, in its undersea gloom. Their hands clung hard.

“Always!” he said.

Melissa whispered: “As long as I live.”

Brave words ... beautiful as old battle-flags, riddled with bullets, ragged with time, ... but able still to draw men to follow!

At that moment the Marchesa was saying, between sips of sherry and greedy bites at a biscuit.... “I’ll expect you, of course to confide in me, absolutely—to come to me about everything. What we can’t do, my dear—with your youth—and my experience!”

THE END