The Next Corner

PARIS. A June morning with the freshness and sweetness of the wet, inner leaves of a young rose. Clocks had just finished striking six.

In a room on an entresol that overlooked the uphill Rue de Chaillot a young woman lay asleep. A pencil of the sun had wavered in through the drawn persiennes, had reached her and was rising by almost invisible progress over the rose-colored covering to her face. After flickering across a bare shoulder that had slipped from a gown as sheer as a veil, and touching a cheek where wisps of whitish-blond hair clung, it gave a stab at the closed lids whose fringes lay on her pallor like the wings of brown moths.

At its touch they flew open. And they stayed open. This was not a drowsy awakening. The wild look about the room was a net that caught up details.

The place had the Gallic mixture of heaviness and caprice to which were added notes that told of an alien occupant. Mirrors were set wherever a mirror could be. Antiquated, damask draperies around the bulging bed had been tightly roped back for a free passage of air through the wide-open windows. The cumbersome armoires were so packed that ends of lacy and silken skirts kept them from closing; American slippers lay sideways with a coil of pale silk stockings just as they had been flung off; a mass of gardenias had died among a trail of silver ribbon on the bureau top in the company of brushes, rouge pots and perfume bottles; midway on the floor there was a telegram beside its jaggedly torn envelope; on a chaise longue a gown of smoky green tulle sprawled in the semblance of a body in despair.

It was on the tulle gown that Elsie's gaze fixed itself. She remembered what a recklessly happy heart it had covered all through the night of mad frivolity, and with what shaking hands—after reading the telegram—she had managed to unhook it only a few hours before. In its grotesque humanness it suddenly seemed to be herself, stretched over there in abandoned grief.

Her arm shot up to her eyes and for a few seconds stayed rigid, her teeth sunk into her underlip.

"Oh, well!" came from her with smothered desperation. She squirmed from the bedclothes and went to the window.

On her journey across the big room she picked up the telegram. When she had opened the persiennes a little, she spread out the paper to read again the words she knew by heart:

"Instead of going on with Cranston I am already on my way to France to pick you up there. Bully that we can, after all, go home together. I won't be able to get to you before Friday evening. By going on the night train to Havre we can get Saturday's ship, which I think is scheduled to start early. Feeling tiptop, and hope you are. Looking forward with much happiness to seeing you

"ROBERT."

She went over this twice and standing there, dreaming, the light on her face, she visualized the future she was returning to by the past from which, nearly three years before, she had escaped.

The picture of her childhood was a muddled thing, like a spoiled wash drawing where people were ghosts. Of her father, who had died when she was a baby, she had no memory at all. She had grown up, the only child of Nina Race. This persistently young and gifted mother was a celebrated concert singer who traveled much and over great distances, taking Elsie with her sometimes, more often leaving her behind with a hueless sort of elderly aunt as guardian.

But whether she went, dazzled and fatigued, with her mother, or stayed with Aunt Esther who could not be weaned from the whaleboned basques of the seventies and who sucked lemon drops while through the whole year she crocheted the things meant for Christmas gifts, her life was spent in hotels; second-class ones with Aunt Esther, the best when with the successful singer.

An hotel child. She had come to see that there was nothing on God's earth more unfitting and unfair. Eating, one of a crowd. Studying her lessons with the voices of strangers beating on the thin doors between bedrooms. Not only forbidden to play in the halls that had the invitation of emptiness and expanse; always told to speak even more quietly there. "Hush!"—Oh, what a shackling word that had been all through the forming years, when her spirit was cramped in constantly changing rooms that always bore a dreary resemblance to each other; and where crowds looked at her only to pass her over.

She saw other children in shops and streets and carriages, held to their mothers and kissed when they cried; petted and kissed with delight when they capered and laughed. No one kissed away her tears. Her passionate heart, that cried for love as dry lips crave water, that needed an idol on which to expend its glowing worship, was not of interest to any one except as an organ to beat normally with health. Cats and dogs, and dolls grown frayed from the endearments of her craving hands were all she had as solace, and these only at times, because of the shifting hotel life where so often pets were forbidden and dolls were mislaid or left behind.

Perhaps when she went with her mother to strange cities it was a little more trying, especially after she was sixteen. Nina, chronically juvenile in type, lovely, gay, good-humored, was a magnet to crowds of friends, with several men always on the edge of asking her to marry them, or about to take to drink because she would not. And then would come Nina's daughter like a fist-blow statistic of Nina's age,—a serious girl, thin as a wand and with big, gray eyes, who seemed sullen, she said so little; a guest who didn't "mix," and whose entrance sent all the naughty sparkle out of Nina's parties.

The sense of misrelation to her environment had become an agony to Elsie when at last a friend of Nina's, met during a tour of the mining towns of the Northwest, had found her worth drawing from her dumb shyness and trying to know. As a result she had responded to Robert Maury with an enthusiasm that had seemed to him and to herself to be awakened love but that really had been the gratitude of the rescued. Almost at once, mostly because it suited her mother's plans which were about to take her through South America, she had married Robert.

He was of Scotch-Irish descent, thirty-seven now—and had always looked less than his years—of good height, spare and strong; light-moving, impulsive in manner. His ruggedly cut face with steady blue eyes, his bony jaw, his mouth, elastic and whimsical in humor and like granite in decision, had been an honest declaration of his nature as she had come to know it. He was a fair dealer; practical without hardness; quick to feel affection and reticent in expression of it; of even and healthy passions that could be quenched as summer tempests and instantly forgotten under the control of the mind; and yet with a substratum of Celtic mysticism which could fill him at moments with an ecstasy of vision of which he rarely spoke. A man who had the curb upon every phase of himself, his own master hardily and hers very gently.

Robert was a mining engineer with little money and large prospects when, at nineteen, she had become his wife. And for nearly four years she had lived with him in forlorn mining settlements in the northwestern part of the States and Canada,—an experience as lacking to her in color and the thrill of life as if she had been pent up in a lighthouse.

During it she had borne a child; had loved it with all the fierce, imaginative passion that was in her and that her husband had never touched; had seen it grow into a lovely toddler; had seen it sicken; had battled for its life with a fairly blasphemous resistance against the Power that could take it from her; had watched it die.

There had been a terrible year after that, when she had felt herself a gray figure moving through the fogs of melancholia, seeing always that little child change from loving-eyed, warm, breathing flesh against her heart to a sculptured thing with sunk-in lashes on marble cheeks and tiny lips of steel.

And then a path had shown through the fog. Robert, very successful now, had been selected by an English mining syndicate as one of several men to report on mines in Burmah. It was not an expedition to include women, least of all such a ghost of a woman as she was then, so he had left it to her to select where, with an attendant nurse, she would live during his long absence.

Her mother was in Russia at the time, and Aunt Esther had returned to her native Vermont village. She brushed out both and with the freakish impulse of the sick had selected Paris, for no reason except a recurrence of its name in her thoughts after reading George Moore's "Confessions of A Young Man." It had been a whisper at first, then a tug and a demand.

Elsie took some listless steps to the mirror above the bureau and studied herself. For nearly three years this glass had reflected her face. Now that she was questioning it almost for the last time—for this was to be her last day in Paris—she seemed to see many ghosts of herself there, as she had been in the beginning and through the quickening experiences that had gone to the making of the woman of twenty-six that she was on this last morning.

How raw she had been at first; and drunk, innocently drunk, with the joy of every simple day, crowded with new things!

Health had come quickly and the nurse had been dismissed. Quickly, too, she had made friends. Not always the right or best sort of friends, she well knew. At first she had tried to keep her values clear and only come close to men and women that she felt her husband would have thought fit for her friendship. Soon, pliably, she had come not to care what others were, providing they were amusing. "Not to be bored" was the slogan of the cosmopolitan crowd who from various eddies had floated to the part of the Paris stream that whirled her along.

She had not been wholly without purpose. Her voice, an attenuated sort of inheritance from her mother, had been trained fitfully. It was not a serious ambition with her, and it had no market value. Truthful to herself, she knew that after her arid childhood and the monotone of her marriage she had been for these three years in Paris a nervous devourer of life,—large slices of it, with many sorts of sauce upon them. With greed and fever she had eaten them honestly, in the sight of all. Too honestly. Few believed that her indiscretions were of the surface, that the high flavors had only touched her mental palate without as yet taking any healthy property from the blood current.

Still while she was different from the married women she knew, most of whom had lovers and several a cynically easy succession of them, she was not quite on the other side of the line. Not as she had been. Not now. Not to-day. The feeling that one has been close to the commission of a wrong act can have much of the body of the accomplished fault. So the telegram that she had found waiting for her when she had come in close to dawn, tossed, warm, with a man's first kisses burning on her mouth, and that had fallen from her weak fingers, had been like her husband's hand fastening upon her shoulder.

Now she flung it among the cosmetic and perfume bottles. There was a desperate tilt to her head, a quiver to her nostrils,—the look of a last hope in a fight.

"If I don't go back? If I refuse?" she thought. "Other women have burned the boats behind them. Were they always sorry, afterward—always? If I—oh, if I—take daringly what I love, what I crave—?"

She lifted the gardenias. They were almost brown and without scent except for a curious cigarette odor still held in the trail of ribbon; this was unlike any of the several sorts of tobacco popular in Paris; this was Spanish,—a pungent, enduring, woody flavor, that recalled only one man Elsie knew, and she drew it in with longing, her eyes shut. As she buried her face among the flowers she was sorry that in the excitement of reading the telegram she had left them to die. They had been so like stars of white velvet last night. And in their death they seemed also to be that night, mad and sweet but lost,—one that never could be again.

She was leaving Paris. She was going to-night. To-night.

Her hands were very small and had a way of trembling when she was agitated. They trembled now as her fingers moved among the limp stems. She kissed them. A name left her lips, faintly at first, then with a raging sadness that shook her. It was not her husband's name.

Several hours hung on Elsie's hands before the machinery of the day would be set going. Her apartment, though in an exclusive part of Paris with the great Arc towering on its rise close by, and a high-priced one because of its situation, was very small, without a room for a resident maid. Julie, her femme de ménage, would not appear until half-past eight; and it would be another twenty minutes after that before the fragrance of coffee would come as the genial herald of the day's start.

The prospect was not to be borne peacefully. Elsie's nerves were so responsive to her imagination they easily became a fine torture to her. Besides, she did not mean to waste even one moment of this last day in the city that had wound its fibers about her heart.

Still in her nightgown, she sped to the brick-paved kitchen where copper bowls and pans sparkled on the walls with the effect of ornaments, and started the coffee to percolate. While that was in progress she bathed and dressed for the street, putting on a pink muslin that sent a rosiness over the silver-gold hair, and a Leghorn hat whose brim slashed her eyes with shadow.

She was sitting with her elbows on the kitchen table, drinking the coffee listlessly when Julie arrived laden with fresh croissants, fresh butter, a sheaf of purple iris from the market outside the Madeleine and the morning letters. Her eyes over the flowers became rigid black spots at sight of Elsie.

"Madame?" she shrilled. "I did not imagine you would open your eyes for hours. Is it that something's wrong?"

Julie had a deep love for her young mistress who was talkative and happy over every small attention and never found fault. She sympathized with her, too, in a manner that was fairly that of a fighter, at having to live alone "as if—voilá!—she were already a widow!" And she had the Gallic suspicion of a husband who could so settle himself apart from his wife. It was no wonder that a woman as lovely and séduisante as her young madame should have men fluttering about her as bees after honey. What would you? It was but natural! Any husband might have expected this situation, she thought. And if he lost his wife—this absent American whom she had never seen—he would have only himself to blame.

"Serve him right!" she would conclude, her small teeth shut, and in the thought felt herself a champion of all women against all men, her own husband prominently included.

Elsie decided to spare the good creature the grief that knowledge of her departure would bring, until she came back, when it would also be time to notify the Austrian countess who had let the furnished apartment to her and begin the complicated packing.

Lightsome, tender and delicious she looked to Julie's adoring eyes—like a big flower of gold and whitish-pink against the flashing, copper-lined walls—until she saw her face fully, marked its dead pallor under the big hat.

"It's such a glorious morning," Elsie said, sadness through one of her softly whimsical smiles. "I grew energetic—thought I'd go for an early walk."

She took the letters in one hand, a last morsel of croissant in the other, and started for the door when Julie's face, openly troubled, drew her back. "Qu'est-ce qu'il y a, Julie? Pourquoi tu me regardes comme ça?" she asked kindly.

"Something has happened—something triste," said the woman, hands on hips, head nodding. "I know that look in your eyes, madame—as if you saw down into a grave!"

Elsie could not keep back a light rush of tears. She thrust her head forward with a curving dart like a gull's on starting to soar and laid her warm lips on Julie's cheek.

"You dear Julie," she said, her arm along the sturdy peasant shoulders, "you have been the kindest woman! I don't know what I'd have done without you. I'll—never forget you—" broke from her sharply as she turned away.

"Madame?" This was muted, all dazed alarm. "It is not that—not that you are going to leave me?"

Elsie had gone. On the street the glow and freshness took her breath. The morning was an etherialized pearl. As her head sank back, swimming with sense of the beauty about her, regret twisted more deeply into her. Oh, she did not want to leave Paris! Why must it be? Oh, why—oh, why?

Cool and careful loving was never possible to her. Whatever she took into her heart she cherished with fire and depth. Her feeling for this city, that from the first day had gladdened her, had exaltation in it. She could understand a Frenchwoman dying to save it; killing to save it. Herself, this morning, would have taken it in her arms if she could—its sculptured loveliness, blue-gray haze, leafy perspectives, fragrance and charm—all that made it Paris.

The sweep of the Champs Elysées between the full-blossomed chestnuts showed only a few early work people, motors with long distances between, and a trio of horsemen on their way to the Bois for breakfast. Elsie gave each of the riders a scrutinizing glance before making her way to the mustard-colored metal seats under the trees, and from which one of the aged women who had them in charge was wiping the night dew.

It was as a sort of farewell ceremony that she gave the caretaker the change from the two-franc piece with which she paid for a chair and looked tenderly into the half-blind eyes that flickered at her in delighted surprise while the voice said fumblingly: "Je vous remercie, mademoiselle!" This sight of lonely old age on the youthful morning kept her thoughts on their minor key as she sorted her letters.

There was only one that tempted her to an immediate reading. This was from her mother. And by experience Elsie knew that any sort of surprise might spring at her with the opening of the envelope. One received seven months earlier had told her of the death of Nina's voice from diphtheria; and another, following shortly after, had set forth in detail how, having lost her career and its large income, she had married Percy Vining, fourteen years younger than herself, who owned a millinery shop on Fifth Avenue. That this one held something exciting was evident at the first glance. It was in Nina's most dislocated manner, a thing of dashes and underscorings and exclamations:

"Elsie," it began, "I can't tell you how you are maddening and disappointing me! After all I said to you when I was in Paris—not a year ago—you seem to have kept on, until you have made a fool of yourself about Don Arturo! I enclose you the anonymous letter that I've just received, so you can see I am not imagining things. Of course it's from some cat of a woman who is probably crazy herself about that adorable Spaniard—for you see how just I am? No one admits more than I do all his good looks and fairly uncanny fascination. All I asked—and still ask—is that while I can't blame you for having Don Arturo hanging about—don't take him seriously. My dear, you are so impulsive! In spite of that cynical pose that the Paris game has taught you, it's my belief that you could be an awful fool and make some blunder that would bring life down on you in a smash-up!

"But I keep hoping that while it may be true that wherever you go Don Arturo is at your heels, you won't do anything to make Robert divorce you. If you do—you'll be ruined. For Arturo would never marry you. I know this. Traveling all over this world as I've done, I've got a line on all sorts of men. Among them I understand Spaniards of Don Arturo's class—and they are not like anything else on earth. I lived a year in Madrid, you know, and the sort of pride you meet among the grandees makes all the other prides in the world look like tin whistles beside a full string orchestra. Now your Don Arturo Valda y Moncado, Marqués de Burgos, is a grandee of the first class. You don't get at his pride on the outside because after two years at Oxford and living practically ever since in Paris, he has sense enough to mask it. But if you could meet his family—that mother and sister of his who haven't traveled at all—one glance would show you what short work they'd make of your hopes of marriage with him. I don't believe they'd expect you to sit down in their presence unless they told you you could. And you wouldn't laugh at them either. This pride is so fixed, so old, it's solemn—sort of terrifying.

"I'll bet you're thinking that I'm such a fool for having married Percy and his little hat shop, you're giving one of your cool, shadowy smiles at all this advice. (Oh, I can see that short upper lip go up!) But, just the same I know my business. While Percy is thirty and I am—well, I'd die before I'd put it on paper!—he looks older. Also, he makes me laugh. Also he doesn't fuss because I don't stick to one color hair. In fact, my Perce doesn't expect anything of anybody—and so he never gets left! Then, too, he has a snug little business. And best of all he's a Roman Catholic and I married him in his church—so he'll never get away from me through any easy divorce. From all this, don't you see how sensibly I've attended to my future? My dear, I could bite a tack through with my wisdom teeth, although people think me just a pretty fool.

"I was so glad to get Robert's short letter saying he was coming back within the month, though he could not go on to Paris for you. Now I suggest—I even beseech you, Elsie—to come now and be here ahead of him, to greet him. Cable me, and I'll get rooms reserved at my hotel.

"A last word! If you should do anything rash in regard to Don Arturo that queers you with Robert, don't look for assistance from me. As far as money goes I haven't a cent left after my insane speculations, and Percy's business only nets us an income on which we manage to live. Besides, sweet as the dear boy is, he would not tolerate my taking you in with us. Couldn't stand the father stunt—too bridegroomy!

"For years, while Robert was a poor man, you lived with him in those awful western holes and made him happy. So don't lose him now when, as he tells me, he has made a pile of money and is one of the directors of the Burmah company. Robert's rich. And Arturo, like so many of Spain's grandees, is deadly poor. That confidential man of his—Serafin, isn't it?—told me as if it were the most natural thing, that Arturo's sister and mother live in a secret sort of poverty in just a wing of the old casa señorial at Burgos so they can scrape enough together to support him as a gentleman in Paris. The idea of Arturo's working would be like sacrilege to all of them. They'd faint at the suggestion!

"Now I've warned you, Elsie. Don't be a fool! Come home and be ready for your husband.

"Your little Muv—who loves her baby."

Elsie read this with breathless interest until she reached the advice tendered to the wife of a rich man in love with a poor one. At this the cool smile spoken of in the letter had raised her mutinous lip, as it had so often in past years when at some break in her mother's mask she had had a peep behind it. In the closing paragraphs lay the whole meaning of this violent persuasion. It was propaganda in the cause of dollars and ease. Reduced to an essence it could have read: "Now that your husband has wealth keep in with him, making him believe you love him, though you may not. The other man has no money."

And this was the conclusion she had, through the undercurrent of her thought, been coming to ever since she read her husband's telegram. Not because he was rich and Arturo poor, but because she was—herself.

She had no exact knowledge of all the phases of her nature, but of one thing she had always been aware,—her lack of initiative. This was as plain to her as the shape of her useless little hands. The new and perplexing she had met easily and with success, because there had been always the consciousness of some one as a wall back of her, a brace, a shelter. In childhood, though she had been perishing for affection, her safeguards had been her mother and Aunt Esther. Afterward there had been Robert,—he, most of all. And though thousands of miles from her for years, he yet remained her sureness and her strength. Nothing could ever seriously harm her while he found her precious.

Arturo? Ah, that was different altogether. With the question there struggled up from some deep cave in her spirit a reckless magnetism toward love with him along strange paths. And yet the desire, now as always, coiled on itself, much as one who, though knowing how to swim, has a panic on venturing into water beyond his depth and strikes home to the shallows where the feet, when they choose, can feel the safe sands under them.

There was never clear sight of any goal with this lover who had taught her the meaning of passion's intoxication. All the paths with him were veiled, just as back of his bitterly adoring gaze there was always something she could not read; something that belonged to traditions in him unintelligible to her and that in a vague way he gave the impression of living up to immutably.

No, there was nothing of surety with her lover. And she was afraid of any venturesome step that might lead some day to dangerous places where alone she would have to face life in the raw, fight it with bare hands. The wrong sort of training had turned her out a runaway from results. This knowledge made her despise herself. But it was there. It had to be faced.

Lost in her thoughts, she had kept folding the letter over and over, finality in her downward look, and did not see the rider who at sight of her pulled up his horse, then came on close to the pavement at a walk. His shadow was upon her before she raised her eyes and saw the face that went with her in her dreams.

Don Arturo slipped to the ground and with his free hand lifted one of hers to his lips.

"Good morning," he said, adding very softly, "my own, and my very dearest?"

Elsie left her hand in his. That it was cold and quivered sent the glow of the master over him. He held it a moment, then as passers-by were becoming more frequent, dropped it and assumed a casual air. He knew how to talk to a woman so that she could read his devotion while to the closest watcher he would seem but casually attentive.

"I came in a roundabout way to ride past your house, thinking you'd be fast asleep," Arturo said very boyishly. "I never dreamed of seeing you out so early after getting home so late. Maybe you were like me?—too happy to sleep?" He asked the question with a look of the most intense love. His voice was languid, the tone rich; his English, with the faintly emphasized exactness of the foreigner, that of the Oxford man. "Tell me, Elsie, was it so?"

"I slept for a few hours. I woke up early."

"That is the way with love. It wants us to be awake in the beautiful world that it makes for us. Ah—and isn't it beautiful?"

It was hard to have to tell him in this public place what it was that had driven her out. Back of her soft lips her teeth were set. She was recording every detail about him to be remembered when she was far from him in a different world,—and divided forever.

He was twenty-nine. An air of ingenuousness would disclose the boy in him. Sometimes the marks of emotional experience—of a silken depravity—peeped out and made him seem in the thirties. His gaze, with the Spaniard's meditative sadness in repose, was often listless or petulant. Though his riding clothes were very plain, showed signs of use and were worn with carelessness, the warm grace of the south that gives just a shade of effeminacy hung about him. His eyes were pure black, unmuddied by the faintest brown, sparkling like cut jet through a dreaming glow. His lightly-mustached lips were sensitively curved, with deep descending corners and with a smile that showed dazzling teeth and a mouth as fresh as a child's. This smile came rarely through his soft-lying gravity; when it did, it rose slowly to rest in his eyes and deepen there musingly to the audacious saying of things he would not dare put into words.

His Antinous-like beauty had two blurring notes; a look of cruelty as cold as steel that often moved over the lips, flattening them,—a look sometimes seen even on the faces of beautiful Spanish women when watching the blood-spilling of a bullfight; and a thickness to the neck that went sharply into shoulders too broad for his lithe body that was but little above middle height. These blemishes gave to his idyllic symmetry a look of sensual aggression and strength that but heightened his attractiveness to women.

He radiated happiness as he went on brightly: "I'm breakfasting with some men at Pré Catalan—my cousins. They leave Paris to-night. I'd have forgotten the matter altogether if Serafin had not reminded me. They would have been mortally insulted if I'd failed to appear—we Spaniards are so childishly oversensitive about the politesse of life. Yes, if the engagement had been with any one else, I'd have stayed in my bed—" His voice sank, his sultry eyes met hers with a message that had the effect upon her of a passionate caress, and words followed, all rushed and huddled together, "—in my dark room—dreaming there of you, in the darkness. Darling, darling—of those last moments with you!"

She drank in the words. Perhaps in this brief meeting on the Paris thoroughfare she was hearing his voice for the last time. It seemed an uncanny, impossible, even a wrong thing to imagine; and yet there it was, just ahead, waiting, sure.

"What is the matter?" he asked suddenly, and from the misgiving in his quickly widened gaze she saw he had put his own interpretation upon her silence. "What's become of all your brightness? It's strange not to see you fluttering and jesting and laughing. But I understand. You are regretting—!"

The impatient words stopped when Elsie's hands went up and down in a denial of singular hopelessness. "I was going to send for you—to tell you something, Arturo. But seeing you now, I'll tell you—"

"I do not want to hear it," broke from him coldly. He straightened beside the horse. "I know what you'll say. Haven't I listened to you for a year, during which I might eat out my heart and show it to you, tortured, getting your attention—oh, yes, and even your invitation, por Dios!—yet never, until last night, permitted more than a kiss upon your hand! I'm tired of that, Elsie. I won't have it any more. You've got to stop taking one step forward and another back. You are as full of wretched love for me as I am for you. Your lips told me that last night. Last night I found you. I shall keep you. I intend to fill my life with your love!"

His ivory pallor had grayed with anger; he was dangerous in manner. Often he had looked at her this way,—as if his devotion were close neighbor to hatred; as if, since he could not conquer her, he wished to hurt her cruelly to satisfy the exasperated need that was consuming him. And yet, as always, he managed to communicate to her the appeal of one hungry, demanding bread.

"I won't be played with any longer. I'm a man to keep what is mine—once I am sure that it is mine."

When he would have mounted the horse she stood up and went close to him. "You don't understand. Everything's changed," she said, a joyless smile working over her mouth, "and probably a good thing too—for me! When I got in last night—this morning—there was a telegram from my husband—"

"Another?" he asked with curled lip and a look of insult. "He is a man of telegrams! He is made of bits of paper!"

"Robert's coming for me." Her voice was faint, though she met his stormy gaze steadily. "Coming to-night. I leave here with him—to-night. We sail in the morning from Havre, for home." She gave an unhappy laugh, a twitch to one shoulder, as she watched him. "I won't annoy you any more, you see, Arturo! I won't torture you any more! You ought to be glad!"

He looked away from her. Intense quiet went over him. His brows came down, and he fingered the bit as if thinking only of its arrangement.

"So—that's it?" he muttered and swung himself up to the horse's back. "Very well," he shrugged.

Elsie remained looking up at him, feeling as if he had flicked her face with his crop. She seemed thrust into distance.

"You're not going—without saying—" came from her with longing.

"Saying what?" he asked, his look dreary, enraged. "What is there to be said?"

"Don't be childish, Arturo! Don't blame me for what I can't help," Elsie persisted. "We must part friends—oh, we must always be friends!"

"Will you be at home this afternoon—at home to me?" he asked with curt vehemence.

"I would, but Julie will be packing, and the woman who owns the furniture will be there with her inventory—"

"Yes, that would be unfortunate," he replied, his suave tone suggesting still deeper rage. "Well, then, there is the Countess Longueval—her tea. Will you be there?"

"I'd forgotten that! Yes, Arturo, I'll manage surely—I'll go."

"That will have to do then." He sat up straight, musing for a few seconds, then bent swiftly to her with a beseeching look. "I suppose it will have to do. I don't suppose you would—or, would you?—lunch with me somewhere, where we could be alone?" He swayed down closer and gripped her shoulder in a storm of hope. "Come with me to-day," and the whisper had fire in it. "Will you? I know a place—! Will you, Elsie? On this last day will you come with me, my darling?—Let me kiss you, bid you good-by so? Oh, you owe me that for all my long love and patience. Don't you? Will you come? Say yes, dear! Ah, do say it!"

In the morning sunlight, in the bustling day, his words sent rapture over her, mixed as it was with guilt and trouble. Steadying herself against it, she turned from him.

"No. No."

"You won't?"

"No."

"You don't love me!" He pushed her off in a gentle way, yet with his expressive fingers spread wide in the force of excommunication. "You don't love me at all. I could die for you, and you care nothing for me, nothing. I don't believe," he said with a sneer, "it's in you to love any man. You're a spirit—without senses."

"I hope you are right!" she cried, her gray eyes alight and fixed steadily on him. "Better for me if that's true!"

Don Arturo sat quite still and stared ahead. When he spoke again his voice was thick and had pain in it. "Remember this," he said, remaining upright, only his glance upon her; "you have made me suffer what I have never suffered for a woman before!"

He touched the horse, went from her at a rapid trot and without looking back. Elsie watched him till in the perspective the opposing lines of blossoms seemed to make an arch over him and then fall behind him in a curtain.

Half an hour later he appeared the gayest of the group at breakfast. While he loved Elsie with a stubborn fire, was savage and sick at the thought of losing her, this did not shadow all moods nor interrupt his enjoyment as a man with men; nor very soon prevent his meaningless kisses from brushing the ear and the little finger of Colette Le Nours, an eighteen-year-old dancer worshipped on the boulevards, and who had left her table to join the young Spaniards when they called to her in chorus.

She was markedly different from Elsie. She had a brightly painted, gypsyish little face; a rasping contralto voice which poured out the coarsest argot of the Apaches in an artless way that sent her audience into delighted screams; she also stuck out her tongue, or put it in her cheek, or wriggled her thumb against her buttonlike nose. She existed for Arturo for these rollicking, few moments; Elsie for many and serious hours later. One had her place with him, though more briefly, quite as much as the other.

They were still at the table and Colette had turned her back on the rest for a duo with "ce beau Arturo," in which she was a most businesslike pursuer and he a most urbane and smiling dodger, when Serafin appeared, coming toward the group, the unhurried ease of the Latin mixing with a pervading deference.

His place in Don Arturo's life was an involved and interesting one. Though he received wages, he was privileged to a spurious sort of intimacy with his employer—a situation recognized amiably by the cousins present—his peasant mother of the mountains having supplied the blue-blooded one with his first red-blooded nourishment. The bond of affection between the Spanish ama and her nursling is even more lasting than that between the children of our own South and the black mammy, and it can extend to her offspring if they are found agreeable or of use. Serafin's usefulness was evident in the first look.

It seemed impossible that almost to a day he was Arturo's age, for he seemed forty,—very tall, angular, with a long, priestly face, bold features and eyes with a Mongolian slant. They were arresting in their queerness, those eyes,—so sunken that with their wrinkled lids but slightly lowered his face seemed a saffron mask; when they were open they showed as spots of fire in the bony hollows; their puckers at the lifted, outer corners gave his look, even in repose, the speculative shrewdness of a fox, so that he had earned this nickname and was called by his intimates "Zorro" almost as often as Serafin.

Coming of Basque stock, of which the best business men in the Peninsula are made, he had none of Don Arturo's poetic sensuality, very little of his rooted weakness for women that could so unnerve and distract his life. He was as practical in every instinct as a Birmingham factory owner. To this quality of mind was added six years of business experience in the stock markets of New York and Chicago. His passion was the accumulation of money. At twenty he had left the service of Don Arturo's family and gone to America after it; there he had made what to his peasant eyes was a large fortune, only to lose it almost at once through greed in speculation and had become for a time a nervous wreck. Practically insolvent, venomously disappointed, he had returned to the post still to be had with his former master.

For three years now, though still an ailing man, he had been Don Arturo's valet, secretary, courier; his right hand, eyesight, cat's-paw, buffer or brain. He would have been his conscience and heart, too, if required. But the former was a word he never heard and would have puzzled much about, and the latter a province whose affairs were so much to Don Arturo's liking that this able assistant was never permitted more than a sentry's peep through the gate.

Removing his hat in a profound bow to all at the table, Serafin bestowed a more intimate one upon Don Arturo while remaining a short distance from his chair. "If I might speak to you, Señor Marqués?" he asked, some significant thing most delicately conveyed in the tone.

Arturo rose, and with excuses to his cousins, as polite as if they were all strangers at a formal meeting, moved off with his man, turning almost immediately out of sight around a thickly hedged path.

"You will be interested in this, señor," Serafin said alertly, and taking a folded newspaper from his pocket, he shook it out. His quiet eyes had their fox look marked as he laid the fanged nail of a bony and tobacco-brown finger on one paragraph. "Mira! You did not know, señor?"

Arturo read the few lines in the Paris Herald stating that Robert Maury of the Ludgate and Burmah Mining Corporation had been announced by telegraph as a passenger on the Paul Lecat from Singapore that had docked at Marseilles two days before. He was due in Paris at an early date.

Colette Le Nours and every phase of the life she represented vanished from Arturo's thoughts as if she had not existed. A blade seemed to twist through his heart. Open desolation in his eyes, he fixed them upon Serafin.

"I already know about this," he said lifelessly. "As I rode here I ran across Mrs. Maury, and she told me."

"Ah, si?" Serafin folded the newspaper again.

Arturo sat down on one of the benches against the privet hedge and sank into thought. He looked past Serafin for a full moment and then began to talk in a carefully quiet tone and rapidly, his eyes fixed ahead, only his lips moving to the patting rise and fall of one hand against his arm. Serafin was listening as immovably. He was receiving exact directions, and his replies were the brief ones of the intelligent agent who reduces himself to a pair of ears.

They spoke in Spanish, Arturo in the lisping Castilian of the Madrileno, Serafin with a more robust utterance,—that of the Basque country mixed with a few Cuban and South American individualisms picked up in his travels. The name of Mrs. Sidney Vrain and the Countess Longueval occurred frequently, to which Serafin would nod with an alert: "Si—si,—señor—si."

Arturo stood up at length. He gave a brief, sharp shrug, his expression dull. "It will be quite useless, probably. Only the smallest sort of a chance that she will help me in this." He went down the path to the restaurant, adding over his shoulder, "I'll get away from here in a few moments and go home. You go to Mrs. Vrain's at once. She'll be just about rising, I imagine. Tell her not to fail me. At four I'll expect her at the Longuevals'—for a talk at the end of the corridor, upstairs—she knows."

Serafin assured him of obedience, saluted and departed.

The home of the Countess Longueval was one of the loveliest of the ancient dwellings in the Faubourg St. Germain. Elsie was glad that she was to see it once more. As she made ready for the tea she imagined herself in its garden, a place so quiet it seemed to be a part of the deep country instead of a high-walled patch on a Paris street. She saw its balconies set with tea tables, the crinkled blinds of buttercup color drawn high on the open windows so that they were as doors through which the guests passed; she saw the footmen in the Longueval buff and silver and the bushes of forsythia, twinkling, golden, making effective screens for an occasional bench placed back of them in tête-à-tête seclusion.

The flare of yellow in this mind picture made her decide to wear that color on this last day. Then, too, it was one that Arturo thought charming for her. She recalled his words a few months previous at a dance when she had worn a cloud of lemon-colored tulle with beaten gold hoops in her ears and a flash of the same from her girdle.

"This color brings out the yellow lights that always lurk in gray-hazel eyes. I wish you'd wear it often, Elsie. When your eyes are the pure gray your heart is very cold and careful. They say pleasanter things to me—when they are gold."

And with this effect before her she began to make up her face,—for Elsie was tout-à-fait Parisienne in the frank use of cosmetics. It did not in the least matter that as turned out by nature she was a delicately lovely type, with deep brown lashes a silken fringe around unshadowed eyes, and lips of coral pink. From the viewpoint of her whim-following world a certain decadent effect that could be gained only by artifice was far more alluring than any ungarnished attractiveness. This was smeared on real beauty as a glove is put upon the hand.

So Elsie sat before her mirror with pots, pencils and brushes. She began by covering her skin with a white cream and smoothing it down with powder. Melted black pigment stiffened her lashes into borders of delicately individualized wires and wiped out their natural brown, the most intriguing touch following in the laying on of bluish shadows on the lids so that the eyes looked from them lengthened and languid. Rouge made the lobes of the small ears blaze, and scarlet paste used freely on the mouth had a flaunting invitation. When with patience and care Elsie had disordered her hair into what appeared unstudied airiness, the work was done; and ethereal as this hair truly was—a pale jonquil hue that seemed dusted with white—it deepened by contrast the laid-on worldliness that it framed.

She was satisfied. She had become used to this changed face with geranium-red mouth and drugged looking eyes burning against its deathly pallor. She was now of an accepted type. She was like all her friends.

Still, as Julie, with lids like fresh burns from weeping at the prospect of parting from her, pinned a veil so that it lay like a film scarcely lower than her brooding gaze, a speculation quivered through the calm of habit, a touch of drollery pulled at the garish mouth.

"Robert won't like me—that's sure. He may even ask me to wash my face!" There was amused patronage in the conclusion: "He won't understand."

Earlier arrivals than Elsie had reached the Longueval house. Among the first comers was Mrs. Sidney Vrain. After a casual greeting to her small, dark-eyed hostess who flashed like a jeweler's window and whose whitened face had the impudent prettiness of a marmoset, she sailed on her way as one well used to the place, and at the top of the first stairway reached a corner partitioned off by ancient tapestries. It was a spot arranged as a lounge. Liquors and seltzer were on a ledge against the wall. There were several small smoking tables, armchairs and a divan as wide as a bed.

The place was empty. She had expected this. The Marqués de Burgos had a genius these days for making her expect him and then, with graceful apologies, arriving when he pleased. Mrs. Vrain pulled off one yard-long, flesh-colored glove of such thin suede she gave the effect of peeling the skin from elbow to hand, mixed herself a brandy and soda, drained it without pause, tossed the pillows to a desired angle and with a cigarette taken from her own gold case—as large as one of the Tauchnitz novels beside which she laid it—threw herself upon them. She smoked thoughtfully, an ill-humored gaze fixed on the turn of the stairs.

Those familiar with her would scarcely have known that she was annoyed in any special way, for she was a chronically discontented being and showed it. Her walk was always the most indifferent slouch. She would step from a motor and let the fish tail of a tulle gown crawl over yards of wet pavement or the dirt of theater lobbies with no more concern than if it were a dishcloth; she always flung things from her as if they were of no account,—her gold chatelaine bag to her maid, or tips to waiters, or her furs to her footman. They were all treated with the soured sort of sullenness that was poisoning her.

She felt she had much to complain of. She was forty-four. As if that were not bad enough, she looked it. Her big body, in youth that of a powerful, lightly-fleshed goddess, had grown fat with the blowsiness of the overfed and sensuously inactive; a harsh redness was spread over her skin; and veins that no beauty doctor could rub out showed through layers of powder over the puffy cheeks and thickened nose. There was of course the way of self-denial that after prolonged marches could have helped her back to much of the lost comeliness. That was not a path with any invitation for Paula Vrain. As her own words set forth:

"To cut out all the delicious alcohol pick-me-ups, and the sweets and the sauces; to keep walking and sweating, and never knowing an easy moment at having your chocolate in bed or lying down in the afternoon with a novel—that's a bit too thick for me, thanks! I want my old figure and complexion, but I want them while I keep on living. For, my dear, I must have the fleshpots—I must, or go balmy—and that's all there is to it."

The death of her attractiveness to men made her secret bitterness; that one man, once hers and still loved wretchedly in silence, had slipped to the crowd who never looked at her any more as a woman to be desired made its core.

Arturo arrived at the rendezvous twenty minutes late. He came with his unhurried, Castilian manner, voluble in soft-voiced regret, intensely calm. Yet the jealous eyes that watched him irritably noted a difference from his usual self. Under his repose there was suspense, and his skin had the dead sand-color that means pallor in a dark face. Yes, something had gone wrong with him, and he had come to her for help. Her red-brown eyes burned harder. She was glad he was not happy; that from some cause he was knowing pain like that which she had come to bear through him. And yet, how dear he was to her still and always would be!

It seemed to her then, as so often before, that powers designedly complicating life must have had a hand in the blending of such attractiveness as Arturo had. There was no effort on his part, rather an amiable indifference that could be exasperating; still, on meeting his eyes, or while wishing to meet them, one's will felt glamour and was held. And this not only because he had almost more beauty than should go to a man, for she had known others as handsome who had never stirred the pulses of women as he could. No, Arturo seemed to her the complete illustration of the inscrutable thing called charm. Else,—why should she have loved him so terribly, "have made", as she had often said, "a door-mat of herself for him", been ready for the most final open recklessness for his sake and only kept in bounds by his smiling circumspection? Why? And not only that past slavery; why should the mystery persist when their affaire had a two-year-old gravestone over it, so that she felt hope when he sought her in the most passing way, and was only really miserable when he took pains to let her see plainly the absolute death of all passion for her?

This unanswerable "why" had brought her punctually to a meeting with him to-day. And as she watched him light one of his own Spanish cigarettes, its strange perfume—the same that had clung to the silver ribbon on Elsie's gardenias—recalling their secret meetings of other times, she ached to spend her despondent heart in one of the fiery kisses that once had made heaven of life. Gone. Lost. Dead. And she was a fool!

With this last reflection she sat up among the pillows and gave a hitch to her skirt to show a slippered foot that in spite of her weight, was slender and delicately arched. "I came on time," she said flatly in the sulky, rugged voice that once had fallen with a perverse sort of pleasure upon Arturo's ears. "I don't flatter myself for a moment that you wanted this tête-à-tête for just—me. I can be useful to you," she mocked. "What is it? What do you want?"

"Don't trouble to say unkind things to me, Paula," he said with cool reproach. "That sort of preface, to which you are so inclined, ought to have no place with friends." He leaned toward her. "Anything you'd want me to do as a comrade, I'd do. And it is as a good comrade—the only woman that I know that way—that I ask you to save me to-day."

"Save you?" She looked genuinely concerned. "Are you in trouble, Arturo?—real trouble? If you are, of course—"

He thanked her with a lift of the brows as only a Spaniard could. "Not what you would call trouble, perhaps. I don't need money—and if I did, I should never ask you, of course—nor is there any danger or disgrace threatening me. Just the same," and desperation hardened his voice, "I feel like a man on whom sentence of banishment has been passed. And there is a chance—just one—that you might be able to delay it. Will you do this for me, Paula? Amiga—will you?"

"What is it?" she asked; the tone icy, for usefulness to him as a friend—and he had emphasized the amiga—was as sawdust on her lips.

"It's asking you to be very big and unselfish," Arturo confessed, "but I know, Paula, that you can be like that—for me! It is asking you to help me to a little happiness with a woman I love, before she goes out of my life forever."

She looked at him through a cold rage. Yet as he had said "for him," so wholly was she still his, she knew she was going to listen to more; even, it might be, help him to his desire, though it contributed another thorn to her unrest.

"I know who you mean—at least I think I do. Elsie Maury. And yet I can't believe you'd have—have—the cheek—to ask me—!" She broke off, the fire of misery in her look.

Arturo knew from experience how to meet the various phases of her sick resentment. The only thing she could not endure from him was aloofness that might end even friendship between them. He drew away, a chilled, deliberate gaze studying her.

"Why shouldn't I ask you?"

"Because I hate her!"

"Why should you hate her?"

"Because you don't, I suppose," she said thickly.

"Is she to blame for that? Why not hate me, if you must hate some one?"

"Oh, you make me seem such a fool—!" Exasperated, she drew herself nearer the decanter and lifted it over a glass.

Arturo's fingers, with the strength that delicate things sometimes surprisingly have, the force of wire instead of iron, went about her wrist. "You've had enough brandy. It excites you. Wait till we finish, Paula. Then I'll drink with you—in gratitude if you are kind; in a properly chastened spirit, if you are not. The latter is the more likely—I can see!"

She pulled her wrist from him and sat back obediently. "Am I permitted a cigarette?" she flashed, and lighted one, her hand trembling against her will. "I can't imagine what you see in her," followed, venom in the shut-in tone.

"Of course you don't! But does that matter? It isn't necessary—is it?"

"It's her blondness that gets you. For she's not pretty. Not what you'd really call pretty!"

"No, she's worse than that."

"She hasn't the ghost of a figure!"

"I hate figures," said Arturo serenely.

She winced, conscious of the flesh above her laced-in waist. "Then you are different from most men," she retorted.

"You are beginning to flatter me."

She sat very silent after this, smoking in a busy, nervous way, and suddenly the tears stole down her cheeks. As she threw the cigarette from her and covered her face with her open hands, hands so illustrative of her life—burdened with rings, fleshy, with beautiful nails and nicotine-stained finger tips—a quiver of real sympathy went over Arturo's face. He left his chair and sat on the divan, close to her.

"My dear Paula, my dear girl!" He drew down one of the hands and patted it, while with the other she pulled from her girdle an expensive handkerchief that seemed a rag of lace and dabbed carefully her blackened lashes. "What's the use? I want your friendship, I want it terribly, and as a friend I'd do anything on earth for you. I am not worth the other, my dear. I tell you that honestly. I am not worth it."

"What do I care," Paula demanded wildly, "if you are worth it or not? It wasn't your worth that began it, heaven knows! It's just—that I can't—seem to get over it as you have." She flung her arm suddenly about his neck. "Haven't you any love left for me—none? I am so miserable, worn out with longing for what has gone. Nothing matters to me. I hate everything! Do kiss me once, for memory?" she begged brokenly.

He drew down her arm gently. Her eyes fell under his serious gaze. She knew the most final defeat.

"Too much in love with your Elsie to forget her for even a moment?" she mocked.

Arturo stood up. "It was a mistake to come to you, Paula. I did not know—" He broke off and added with great kindness: "I'm sorry you are so unhappy. I cannot help it. And remember this—I am unhappy, too." As he reached the entrance curtain he paused sharply and came back. "One thing I want to make very clear to you, though. Don't suppose from what I've said that Elsie and I have had an affaire. Oh, no, indeed," he said vehemently. "Make no mistake about that. She has been a bit—provocative, shall we call it?—but a model in wives, I assure you! There was just a chance that you—" He looked down at her thoughtfully. "No matter—that's past!"

"What do you mean by saying she's going out of your life and all that rot?" Paula suddenly demanded, her glance not meeting his. "Has her mother called her back to America?" Her voice showed new hope. She had not dreamed of such a satisfactory result from her anonymous letter to Nina. "Is she sailing at once?"

"Yes, but her mother has nothing to do with it. How could you think that what that wax doll might say would matter? Ah, no; it's her husband. Quite a different tea party, as you English say. He gets here to-night and by to-morrow she will be on her way to America." His voice had been growing dull. "As surely as I stand here, I know that once Elsie goes I will never see her again."

"You know it?" she shrugged in angry impatience, "how can you know it?"

"I feel it. Premonitions of that sort with me are never wrong."

"America is only five days away on a fast ship—"

"I shall never go to America. I know that, too."

The sound of voices below had been strengthening—louder laughter, dashes of music, and now stragglers were mounting the stairs. Paula, as she regained her composure, even felt a spurious sort of happiness. With an emphasis of gesture she mixed herself an especially strong brandy and soda, of which she felt in need.

"Come here, Arturo. Sit down again," she said briskly, and as he did so she gave him a hardy grin. "I'm a silly ass sometimes! Don't mind what I said. It's true that I've somehow kept on remembering what you've forgotten, and at times it gets back at me, gives me an awful knock, but when I said I hated everything—I was a liar. Oh, there's a lot to live for yet, even without a grande passion. This, for instance," and she lifted the glass. "Now what do you want me to do? If it isn't too hard—! You don't want me to abduct the immaculate one for you, I hope?"

Arturo seized her arms. She would have given a good part of her wealth to have called there for herself the unabashed longing that in a second transformed his face.

"I've decided to go on to Spain with my cousins to-night. They'll go straight to Burgos, but I'll go to the mountains, to El Miradero. All I ask you to do is to accept my invitation to come up there in a few days for a fortnight and persuade Elsie to ask her husband to let her wait over and come with you."

"That's all?" she asked in mocking dismay. "A pretty large order, I call it!"

"You can manage it, Paula. Get Elsie to ask her husband to let her stay behind him just long enough for her to see Spain—she never has—and both of you come a few days later. Sidney won't be back from yachting for another month, so there's nothing to prevent your coming. And you, who know El Miradero, who loved its beauty—surely you can tempt her to make this effort. Only delay her return to America! That's all I want. I don't look beyond that. Probably," he added bitterly, "I could bear her going then, when I'd got used to it. I feel all astray with myself now, from the suddenness of it."

"As a matter of fact," Paula drawled thoughtfully, "I'm leaving for a few days' visit to Sidney's sister at Bordeaux—you know she married oodles of money—all that wine business down there. And I thought that after it I'd have a little whirl at San Sebastian before coming back here—"

"Well, there you are!" came joyously from Arturo. "Just keep to your plans. Elsie could join you at San Sebastian—directly en route to me!"

Paula sipped and thought again silently for a moment, "Quite easy," she said. "But let me tell you something—I think you're a fool to get any deeper into this affaire. Elsie Maury's the sort to play around fire—let her get burned though, and it would be a tragedy for you both. She has the enlarged kind of conscience. I've met other Americans like that—an unfinished race! Will you take my advice and let her alone? Or," she added slowly with some intense meaning, "will you risk having her on your hands for life?"

"You sound clairvoyant. I've told you I have no plans—I only want to delay her going." He said this sadly, musingly.

She moved to replace the glass. A smiling and faintly sinister cunning passed over her face. When she turned to him her eyes were businesslike. "All right then, if you insist. I'll do what I can."

She stood up, powdered her nose, used her lip stick and lifted the skinlike gloves. "Will you see her now—she must be here—or do you want me to see her first?"

"You speak to her first." The words were faint and thick with feeling. He followed her into the corridor, laid his hand on her arm, and she felt its burning through the chiffon sleeve. "Get her to come with you to El Miradero, and Paula—I'll be your servant as long as I live!"

"Thanks," she said drily, adding: "I mean to help you—thoroughly. That's the way I am; absolutely indifferent, or a mistress of detail who spares no pains!"

As she went down the stairs, her eyes, steadily lifted to his, were smiling in their kindest way.

She found Elsie, in the midst of her golden gown, seated close to a great vase of lilies in an inner room.

A boyish Hindoo, who was the son of a Maharajah and very much the fashion of that spring, hung about her, worshipping her fairness, as he often did. He had been bending his turbanned head to talk softly to her for the last ten minutes, but his slumbering black eyes were without content. He could see that she scarcely heard him. Her gaze wandered; her replies were absent. He knew that when the Marqués de Burgos came she would be different, awakened; and that for the rest of the time there the young Spaniard would keep close to her.

Of the specific pain of this waiting to Elsie he did not guess. It was her last chance to see Arturo. She had come early, expecting to find him there, eager to make the most of every moment with her. And as yet he had not sought her. As his last words kept coming back to her, she began to believe she would not see him at all: "You have made me suffer what I have never suffered for a woman before," he had said. And so, perhaps that was to be her last memory of him through the future far away from him? Well, if it had to be—! She must conquer herself. It was only accepting the inevitable a little sooner than she had expected.

Her depression had grown fixed when Paula Vrain sailed up to her, aglow and smiling in a way that was unusual. She greeted the Hindoo and then put her arm about Elsie's waist, schoolgirl fashion.

"Come along o' me, dear. I want to have a talk with you," and when she had whisked her to a quiet spot behind a stairway she hurried on without preface: "I'm going to Arturo's shooting place up in the Cantabrian mountains. He's often told you of his little house, El Miradero. Now you're coming too, aren't you?"

"Why, no."

"No? Why not?"

"This is the first I've heard of it, and besides—"

"Oh, I know!" Paula rattled on. "He meant it to be a piquant surprise to-day. He told me to insist on your coming with me. I'm not to take 'no' for an answer!"

"When did he tell you that?"

"A moment ago. He's here. He told me all about how you were expecting to leave to-night for America and the poor boy is too miserable to ask you, himself. So, as I and a few others—just who they are I don't know; Spanish probably—are to be there, he begged me to come to you as his missionary. Don't disappoint him, Elsie! Get another furlough from your husband—just two weeks more. I'm going for a few days to San Sebastian and will motor from there to El Miradero.

"Oh, my dear, it's so lovely!" she ran on with an enthusiasm that was secretly fatiguing her. "All of Spain is worth while—so romantic—so queer! It would be a burning shame to go back to the States without seeing it—and under such conditions!—In the towns—and we two might stop over a night or two on our way back—there are the serenos, as they call the night watchmen, in long cloaks and hoods and carrying lanterns, who sing a drowsy sort of song that all's well and clear—for all the world like an opera scene. The tune goes like this—" and she hummed it:

"The mantillas are lovely too! And the boinas—they're the scarlet caps of the countrymen—and oh, the masses of carnations of every tint that one sees everywhere—the girls go along with them stuck in a corner of their mouths, and the men in their hats, and I've even seen them sticking out of the guns of the carabineros!

"You see I was at El Miradero three years ago. It's up on a terribly rough, steep mountain. You seem at the end of the world, looking down through the clouds. A gorgeous view! You've never known what solitude and stillness mean until you stand there. Miradero means watch tower, and that's exactly what it is. Not a thing passes down that mountain road but a huge, jingling mule coach that Arturo relies on altogether,—he hasn't a horse or vehicle on the place. You know he's deadly poor and he goes up there to the simplest life. During the summers his mother and sister live at an ancestral, awfully run-down country place about five miles away. This is the only time in the whole year that they have a chance to be with Arturo, and when he's alone they drive over in an ancient barouche to see him, or he goes on a rough tramp to them.

"I got a squint at them once, and I assure you it did me for all time! The old marquésa, Dona Jacinta, looked for all the world like some queen's marble effigy that had got slowly off its tomb and robed itself in the most solemn black. The sister, too—Magdalena—is the most amazing stick! She's five years older than Arturo and spends most of her life on her knees in the great cathedral at Burgos. Servants—a pack of them that I'd like to bet are honored to serve for next to nothing—trail about after them, carrying their prayer books and reticules and scent bottles and little parasols. But you won't be bored by the family. They never appear unless sure that Arturo is absolutely alone and uncontaminated by his friends.

"Oh, you've no idea how fascinating he is at El Miradero! So simple, so real, in the roughest of clothes—exactly like a boy on a holiday! And all Spaniards are at their best once you step under their roof.—I'll fetch my new car and Athénée, so even if I crowd the little house you and I will have all the comforts. You needn't bother bringing a maid, you see. Athénée will do everything for us both.—Just a two weeks' entrancing Spanish holiday, Elsie, and as the Vance Hamiltons are sailing about then for New York, why not get your passage on the same ship? Now—are you game? Is it a go?"

Elsie had allowed herself to be carried on by the stream of words. They unfolded alluring pictures before her and eased her heart. Arturo was close to her, thinking of her, and she felt sure this mountain visit was a quickly arranged plan so that he might not lose her at once. Of course she could not go—and how she longed to!—but it gave meaning back to life that he had not gone from her in rage, leaving her with an aching sense of emptiness and futility.

Paula, who had declared that she was not pretty, realized unwillingly in that moment how she was something more even than beautiful. She had never seen a face so changefully vivid. She loved and understood music, and as Elsie sat there, absorbed, she saw in the veiled eyes ardors that touched her, as in sublime harmonies,—the burning trouble of the overture to "Tristan and Isolde," the renunciation that floated, oncoming and receding, through the Meditation of Thai's.

"I can't go." Elsie said this without force, yet positively. "And it may be years before I see Paris again." A 'cello in the distance was playing Rudolph's attic song from "La Bohème." As she listened, a pang went over her face. "It's all wrong, of course. I'm—damaged! I should not have stayed here to become what I am. I should have insisted on going to Burmah to Robert. I didn't. Then I grew to love it here too much. And now it's punishing me. I want it—and nothing else. I dread what I'm going to. I've grown away from it all." Her lips came shut on a sharp sigh. "But I've got to go."

"Tell me why," Paula demanded.

"That's my life. This has been my playtime. My husband gets here to-night. We leave at once. I'm all packed. I'm going."

"Going when you don't want to? What rubbish!"

"I ought to want to," Elsie protested, "and in one way, somehow, I do. My husband is one of the kindest men in the world, Paula. I'll go home with him and never let him know that it's an awful pull to leave—what I've grown used to."

For a while they sat silent, Paula pouting and somnolent. Elsie's face, showing each fugitive thought intensely in its passing, looked moody and driven as she began, dreamily, to speak again:

"I wonder how I'll feel when I'm really gone?—I wonder! ... I've been happier in Paris than I ever was in my whole life, except when—I had my baby."

"Oh, yes, you did have a baby; I remember your telling me," Paula said, vaguely polite.

"Letty.... Almost three—when she died." The deep thrill in the simple words gave them majesty. "I haven't missed her here as I will again in America. If I were only going back—to her!"

"Of course," came from Paula through a bitten yawn. "But, d'you know, I never felt that way about my two? The girl's a little liar and a peacock, and the boy's a glutton," she peacefully declared.

Elsie felt herself draw in, rebuffed and chilled by the words, by the whole air of the speaker's big body,—detached, lounging, bored.

After another dead pause Paula gave a lunge up and straightened. "Well!—So you'll really go without ever seeing El Miradero?"

"I must."

"You're tiresome!—talking as if you can't please your husband and yet have your own way. You're not so dull," she drawled with mocking astonishment. "Put it to him that you've not seen Spain, that there will never be a chance like this again—as there never will!—then swear to sail home with the Vance Hamiltons in about two weeks or so. Can't you do that?"

"No!"

"I could—and I'm not a quick-witted Yankee. Do have a shy at it anyway—for my sake," she urged, adding as she stood up, "There's Arturo. I'll send him to you," and she slouched away, swinging her bag.

It was close to five o'clock when a taxicab stopped before the apartment house on the Rue de Chaillot from which Elsie had set forth a half hour earlier for the Longueval tea. A cowhide trunk, of shining darkness from use and mottled with the gay labels of the Orient, was strapped upon it; a few valises of the same sort banked the interior. At a glance they were all a man's belongings, and the owner, Robert Maury, sat among them.

He was in tweeds of a few years' previous cut that hung upon him in an overloose way. With skin browned to coffee color, he looked healthy in spite of the emaciation that had come from hard work and a wasting strain on the body through great and humid heat.

He was a big man, lean, flexible, with black hair that had the glitter of gray on some of its small ripples. His shoulders were spare, very broad and so absolutely level they were bladelike; with them went the torso of one who has spent much of his life in the saddle,—swung back, so that as he walked, and even through a coat, a cleft would appear along the spine between the powerful muscles ridged on each side. He had an impulsive, jerky way of moving, not without grace, and this showed as he plunged down his head to give a glance of inquiring interest at the windows of the house before which the cab had stopped.

"Entresol—the floor above the street—she often said that in her letters," he thought, his look tenderly quizzical as he added: "With the pink ruffled blinds, of course. That must be it. She's there."

He had grown used to humming and whistling at his work in the solitudes, and as he sprang out he wanted to sing, wanted to shout up to the near-by windows with the rosy blinds, "Elsie—hi—oh!" as he often had when riding home to her in the old mining days in the American Northwest.

He checked the desire, as he had been subduing so many of his impulses to the formality of shipboard since embarking at Singapore. He was in Paris, its exquisite and permanent finish the result of a dozen centuries; no longer an individual in a wilderness, he was one of a vast and conservative herd, ruled by herd laws that made all move in public with the one step and the one composed look whatever the heart might feel, whether of good or ill. A restraint from this consciousness was growing every moment.

So instead of shouldering most of his luggage as he would have liked, he permitted the professor-like concierge, with side whiskers and alpaca cap, to carry it up. And when this was done, instead of telling the cocher what a treat to eyes tired of Asia was his face, like a big, pink and white cherry, his white glazed top hat and the full-blown tulip in his tightly buttoned light overcoat, he contented himself with bestowing on him a pourboire that brought the hat off in an emotional flourish, since it was an appreciation far more to his liking than any returned wanderer's spoken enthusiasm would have been.

"Ah, ces Americains! Toujours genereaux!" he spluttered joyously as he climbed back to his seat.

Robert found Julie at the open door of the apartment, staring at his luggage. She removed the stare to him, and before he could speak began a scurry of surprised sentences which Robert's school French went limping after:

Oh, what ill luck that Monsieur Maury had not informed madame that he was coming earlier than he had previously stated!—Madame's trunks were all ready, and a truck from the hotel around the corner was to come for them after dinner and take them to the train—but madame was out! Madame would not of course have gone—oh, not at all for a single second!—if she had dreamed of monsieur's coming so very far ahead—but would monsieur be so good as to come right in to the salon?—and it was this way, if he pleased—Ah, was that his foot?—What a misfortune!—The stingy, Austrian lessee of the flat had already turned off the electricity, so would he be very careful and keep along by the wall as the hall was so dark and so full of madame's things—ah, that was well! She would pull up the salon blinds now, and clear a chair for monsieur—like that!—And would he not have some tea or coffee or sherry or whiskey—as there was some left of everything—while he waited for madame?

Robert had followed her obediently through the almost black hall, stubbing his toe against one low trunk and his elbow against a high one. Trunks. Only trunks to greet him! He found himself looking at them in stupefaction. Elsie was not there, but her trunks—and surely there were a dozen of them—were like hillocks in the place. The warmth sank out of his blood as he gazed about the strange room from which every personal possession of Elsie's had disappeared. A chilling sense of intrusion and detachment crept over him.

When he had found that he could come hours earlier than his telegram had stated, he had not hesitated to hurry on, impelled to it by one picture,—the delight of standing suddenly before Elsie, seeing her wheel to him in surprise with the well-remembered little squeal of joy that she used to give sometimes; this to be followed by her childish jump into his arms—for she had always been much of a child with him—when she would croon into his neck at the delight of meeting. It was so he had remembered her.

He sat down, very meekly, it seemed to Julie. She would have liked him better if he had shown temper at his wife's absence. That would have been unreasonable, of course, but Julie liked men to be very unreasonable in their demands on the love of women. She did not realize that he was dazed by a doubt that had come with full clearness before him for the first time. Would he find his wife changed? Not only changed in small things; would Elsie be a different sort of woman? He had had glimmers of this possibility often before but had been too busy and too tired for progressive analysis in his reveries over her hasty, mildly affectionate, sometimes lengthy and sometimes brief letters. He had always seen her as she was in the photograph that stood on the bureau in his bungalow,—her pale hair, with the look of whitish dust upon it, parted over her serene brow and knotted low; a round-necked frock showing the swaying throat above which the small head was poised so winningly; about her the purity that had always suggested to him the restfulness of a church, the light of tapers, lilies in pale hands. So she was in that picture and so she had seemed to him from the beginning when he had met her just past childhood among her mother's card-playing, cocktail-drinking set, pensive and interested, uncritical of what her deeply gray eyes rested on, yet separate from it.

And now!—These trunks? This maid with the cunning and schooled look whose study of him his sharp eyes had noted? Most of all, the old, soaked-in fragrance in the air—not of flowers, for to that he would have responded—but of some cloying essence related to the sense-awaking, muscadine sweetness of the East used by the native women who danced and bargained, or bargained without dancing? Slightly as he had known the Cyprian world, and that only through curiosity at long intervals, he felt an aura of distaste go over him to be reminded of it even by a perfume, on entering the home that had been his wife's for three years.

"Where has Madame Maury gone?" He asked this very clearly.

"Oh, merely to a large tea at the Countess Longueval's on the Rue de Lille, over on the other side of the river," Julie hurried on, anxious to help her mistress, for the open scrutiny of this man's light-blue eyes began to impress her. "Ah, it was the last chance to say good-by to so many friends, monsieur. Madame is so much a favorite! Ah, truly she has many friends to lament her going. As for me," and the sincere tears showed, "I cannot think of what my life will be without my adorable young madame. Desolate! Nothing—nothing at all! Ah, le bon Dieu!"

Robert's hand went toward his pocket at this outburst, then sensitively he decided to defer material approval of such real devotion until the hour of parting.

"I quite understand your regret," he said, and asked, "What number on the Rue de Lille is this house?"

Julie gave it, adding, "Shall I not telephone to madame there, to return at once, and—?"

"On no account!"

The low-toned decision was that of the master and sent him up in her opinion. This man was not a meek sheep. She saw that now. He had fire in him, kept out of sight. A quiet man on the surface—that was all. It was then very well that the chère, petite madame, was leaving before matters had gone any further with that young Spaniard who cared not who saw the desperate almost angry love for her in his gaze—ah, and Dieu, what an adorable man! She could, herself, be quite insane about him. But it was best there was to be a sudden end of him, for this big, brown stranger with the fagged eyes, though he could keep the world between him and his wife for so long, was not one to be played for a fool. Oh, no, not at all! And the Spaniard, fashioned though he was to pull a woman's heart out of her, was not to be trusted to last in the daily wear and tear of life. That she had always felt!

She renewed her offer of tea to Robert. He refused it, adding:

"I'll smoke here a few moments. Afterward, if you'll be good enough to show me, I'll freshen up a little from the train, and perhaps look in at the Rue de Lille."

"Bien, monsieur! Just in here—voilà?—is the water and fresh towels." She hurried away, her look secretly anxious.

And as Robert smoked in the room made cheerless by the impending departure, the prettiness of it spoiled by trunks, hat boxes and frippery rubbish arranged in heaps for discarding, he tried to see, side by side, the three, separate years as he and Elsie had spent them:

Himself, a machine; a fanatical worker, living in his brain and for ambition; every appetite, every bodily need made to intensify its use toward success. With this there had come a closeness to Infinity that had kept him from callousness,—oh, the wide spaces where the cold fire of stars had hung so low they spoke to him as voices from those distant worlds! He had worked with brain and hands through days of furnace heat to lie on his bungalow porch when they were done, gazing with wordless wonder and trust up at these friendly stars until, with deep sleep, he would seem to fall into kind, cool, black depths where winds rose to gales and revived the wasted body until the dawn burned again and brought the straining life. This had lasted in a drugged sort of peace until a few months previous when his return to Europe, and after that to America, had showed on the horizon.

"Come," home called; then louder and louder, "Come back! Oh, come, come!"

He had begun then to wish for many things, blurred before: For Elsie first, for the living girl of the banded hair and the deep-musing smile, her grace and girlishness and simpleness and truth. And with her beside him for a sight of temperate skies: the streams of France under slim, plumed poplars; perhaps the hedges of England with glowworms lighting the long and pallid dusks while the hawthorn scent made the heart ache from its too much sweetness. And after that, America—home—the first winter taste of it—glacially splendid, pure, sparkling, a tonic of whiteness! All this with Elsie.

He looked into the uphill street at the high, drab houses whose windows were hung with lace or silk, and at the silver-bright motors rushing past them. What different years she had known! Paris—perhaps of all the civilized world the spot most embellished in a multiform way, most unlike his humid, Burmese wild—her home; and vividly so, for this apartment was close to the world-known Champs Elysées, that was the artery through its heart. These trunks held the things most precious to her. This maid of hers was critical of him, almost as if he had come an intruding spy within an enemy's lines. And herself?—she was spending the last moments of this last day with a crowd of society people who must have come to mean much more to her than he had guessed. He felt a heated eagerness either to rout or ratify these impressions. He wanted to know more of her and quickly. He would see who her friends were; see her among them.

Still with the feeling of being out of his element, he made such preparations as were possible for appearance at a fashionable tea. The water dashing into the marble basin upon his hands was like a loosened cataract to his sensitive ears; he found himself walking in a hushed way with small and careful steps unlike his own; it seemed a staggering intrusion to enter his wife's bedroom at all and, as he fastened his tie before the mirror there, his hands were unsteady.

He was not a fanciful man and even as this mood persisted he resented it, was inclined to give one of his short and vigorous laughs at it. What folly—! Just because Elsie was absent and the many trunks and the heavy perfume were there instead, he was acting like a nervous schoolboy.

With this thought setting his teeth in amused self-impatience, he found his hat in the salon and then came back deliberately to the bedroom for no reason than to send a defiantly hardy gaze about it. He went to the big bed and looked down at the pillows, fancying Elsie's face there, a smile and the mist of sleep in her eyes. Needle points of tenderness went over him as his darkened fingers, with traces of old sun blisters on them, fingered the lace upon the spread. A dream came into his eyes. If he could see her there! ...

Why—if he could see her at all! One full look, and he felt sure that this depression, as of an untimely outsider, would leave him. And he could be gazing into her face in ten minutes! He roused himself. He would go at once.

Julie answered his call and found he had opened the door to the outer passage. From there he gave her a short and distinct message: He might miss his wife at the tea; she might already be on her way home. In that case Julie was to say that she was to wait, and he would return immediately.

She peeped like a conspirator from the salon window until she saw him hail a cab, after which, with her lips pursed shrewdly, she made a rush for the telephone. "A husband," her thoughts ran, "when expected, can be a pleasant thing. Not expected, the devil himself might be more welcome. I know what I know! Madame must be told that he is on hand and very much to be counted in. Why, he is crazy with love for her, although he has the cold English air! Oh, yes! Now that he is here—well, my faith, make no mistake!—he is here!"

One of the Longueval footmen in buff and silver took Julie's flustered telephone message for Madame Maury that her husband had unexpectedly arrived and was on his way to her at the countess's. He made an attempt to find her among the crowd that strayed over gardens and house. Not succeeding and other duties calling, he deferred the search; meant to continue it; forgot it.

Elsie was in the garden on a bench behind one of the forsythia bushes from which the yellow flowers were almost gone, and Arturo was beside her. He had been there for ten minutes, during which he had talked earnestly, and then had become silent while smoking the cigarettes whose odd fragrance she knew would always be remembered with some touch of the glamour that pained her now. Within a window close to them, an English singer, with a contralto of such searching sweetness it touched the most cynical to a passing reality of love's "old, old pain", gave Kipling's words to the padding, yearning, Eastern music:

Alone, upon the housetops to the north,
I turn and watch the lightning in the sky,
The glamour of thy footsteps in the north—
Come back to me, beloved, or I die!

Far, far below the still bazaar is laid,
Far, far below the weary camels lie,
The camels and the captives of thy raid—
Come back to me, beloved, or I die!

They both sat listening, not looking at each other. They seemed to hear the jingling clatter of the camels sinking cumberously to rest; distant cymbal clashes from the captives who danced; the sob of the woman watching from the housetop. Arturo was very pale. Elsie, who had lighted one of his cigarettes for herself, let it burn out in her drooped hand:

My father's wife is old and harsh with years,
And drudge of all my father's house am I,
My bread is sorrow and my drink is tears—
Come back to me, beloved, or I die!

"Will you come to El Miradero?" Arturo asked and so closely upon the last cry of the song the question seemed its concluding despair. He did not move to her, seemed to find it hard even to look at her. "Will I see you there?"

"I've told you," Elsie said, and made a regretful, negative sign with the hand that held the cigarette.

"Won't even try!"

"Cannot. I've told you why, Arturo," she said in a deeply sorrowful way.

"Then this is the end—now—and here." His hand stole across and lay upon her shoulder in the lightest way. "It has been my own folly believing that you loved me," and his hopeless voice had a boy's tears.

The tenderness she felt for him broke through the cloud upon her eyes. "Don't say that; nor think it. I care—Arturo."

"Words, words."

"Words? The thought of never seeing you again is a sort of death. And yet there's another thing—there's my caring for Robert, for I do care for him too, in a different way—"

A triangular frown shot up between Arturo's brows. "I know," he broke in, the tone uninterested. "You don't hate him; you even like him. He was a habit with you once, and habits can be resumed."

"No, I must be honest." She faced him, a light as from a shrine within quivering through the make-up of her exquisite, little face. "The question I see is this: If I go away where I will never see you, never hear any one even speak your name, won't I learn to forget you and be satisfied again in the affection I had for him? His feeling for me is not like yours—a terrifying sort of happiness to me. Yet it's steady; so deep! He'd die for me."

He laughed. "Without a doubt. And yet for years he has lived quite comfortably without you! However—" His bitter look was flung along the silence that held them. "I see you are determined. Besides, I am a fatalist. Some ancestor of mine must have been converted to Islam's belief in predestination when the Moors held Spain. Yes, it can only be a heritage from Morocco that I have the most absolute faith in the end being arranged for us, waiting for us—though hidden from us—before we take one step. It seems now that no matter what I wish or do, it is written that I am to lose you."

He gave a swift, wretched look around. No one was near them. Before Elsie knew his intention, before she could have checked it if she had wished, he had bent his dark and gleaming face to hers with a sensuously yearning movement that was a sort of agony to her, and found her mouth. His lips quivered there in a raging, deep-reaching kiss under which her will first hardened in terror and then dissolved in a despairing rapture.

"Darling, darling, darling," he whispered, the tone shaken, "adios, ah, adios—if it must be—!"

He was gone while his breath lingered on her face. Before she could realize it he was lost in the fringe of people about the windows, and she was sitting alone in the leaf shadows, the most riotous sweetness with a bitter edge going over her spirit. She remained so, with strained eyes and breathless.

As if she peered through a storm she was looking into herself, trying to find the deep under truths that women have a way of edging from. Many centuries have gone to the making of concealment and pretense with them, yet to all but the generically celibate moments come that bring the consciousness of not having lived in any real sense until, whether early or late, there has been surrender to passionate obsession. Elsie knew this now and for a moment felt rage at the fate that robbed her of it when it was close to her, inviting her, cajoling her to its mastering delight.

Perverse it was, this infatuation. For when she tried to study it as one would the colors in a fabric, she saw that the things for which she had come to love Arturo were not the things she naturally valued in a man. She loved his implanted pride of race—no doubt narrow, intolerant—yet outwardly all allure, silken and soft, and that created his amused consideration of the restraining morality meant for the small people. She loved his smiling civility that could, when he wished, so mysteriously convey a rigid exclusiveness; the exotic richness of his dark glance that, slowly traveling over her, would make her flush with a guilty delight as if he had miraculously bared her body, looked, and found her sweet. She loved his beauty—all the blended charm of it—his gaze, and smile, and voice, the way he moved with prodigal freedom, warm grace. And perhaps, most of all, she loved all these things because they swept over her with an electric sense of danger,—a fear of him that could make her heart give jerking beats and seem to hold her, thrilled and listening, high above the dull things of every day.

And was this all?—no gleam of reverence, of the spirit, in her feeling for him? Ah, there was. To-day, and for the first time, she saw it. She respected him that he could love as he did her, as simple and unashamed in his reasoning about it as the primeval man who tracked the woman he wanted for mate patiently, tirelessly, through the veiled turnings of the forests. For a year he had kept beside her, his heart in his face. All had read it there. He had given no thought to them. She had been the sun in his eyes and he had seen nothing else. Wayward, spoiled, selfish he was, living indolently, according to the debilitating law of his class, upon what money came through the sacrifices of women; yet he had made her know what she had never before known,—the sweetness of that absolute supremacy over the will and heart of a man, like no other joy in the life of a woman that, while it holds, can make up to her for the loss of many things otherwise precious.

Coveting another sight of Arturo, wondering if he were really gone, Elsie, a little later, strolled into a small room in one of the wings. She knew that a roulette wheel had been set up there for the countess's intimates. The call of the man acting as croupier had reached her on a regular rhythm through the curtains: "Fait vos jeux!—Rien va plus!" And so had the clatter of the ivory counters, gaily disputing voices, laughter, even screams.

She had always been too poor to gamble with her extravagant or wealthy friends; to-day did not even watch the players, and with the Hindoo again beside her, sat at one side, apart from the crowd. She was silent, and a tiredness to the core made her whitened face, with the shadowed lids half-veiled, an absolute mask.

Through a confused moment where only her own thoughts were plain she seemed to look straight at a man who entered, although in reality she saw him but vaguely. He gave her a brief glance, looked away; then, startled, he turned sharply, came a step nearer and stopped again, recognition and dismay in his gaze. The look plunged through the cloud on Elsie's mind, and it rallied to attention. At this the actual earth seemed to drop from under her chair.

She was looking at Robert. He it was who stood there, motionless, whose eyes with their studying look had the effect of a hand pressing her back, barring her approach to him. "Stay where you are," they seemed to say, "while I get used to believing that this can be you."

She rose in a nervously listless way, a cigarette burning between her fingers, and swept to him.

"Robert! I thought I must be seeing things!" This came in a shrill tone, her vampirish mouth jerking sideways.

Quite suddenly she knew that communion between them could be bearable to her only if kept to a surface lightness. And as a help she deliberately continued a freakish gaiety that seemed to reach Robert across a distance and hold him there. It was not her usual manner, for in spite of the froth and caprice of her life she had retained a sincerity of bearing and utterance unlike most of the women who were her intimates.

The effect she produced on him, in her yellow gauze, that though fashioned for afternoon wear was so transparent it left a good deal of her body visible, with her face undisguisedly tricked out and her gleaming cigarette poised, was a harsh one,—a marionette with whom fashion was idolatry; an over-decorated, empty eggshell. She could feel this and in a desperate way persisted in the affectation that sustained her, the more so that under Robert's earnest gaze a feeling of guilt made her hideously uncomfortable.

"Throw that away," Robert said quietly with a scant look at the cigarette.

She gave an empty laugh,—a new laugh to him, of a part with her fluttering, disdainful carriage. "Your first words a command! I'd forgotten the thing!" She turned to flick it from her fingers to a table that held the smokers' service. "How on earth did you get here?" she ran on, and without waiting for his reply, continued, "Julie sent you, of course. Let's get out of this," and as he mutely followed: "What a banal ending to our third act, Robert! Husband and wife meet after long years,—why, sacred from all eyes, that should have occurred at home. You know," and in the gayest way she thrust a hand through his arm, "it's impossible to be emotional in a crowd. Among a crowd of your Burmese or Hindoos, perhaps yes—not one like this. So you've queered the drama, my dear."

"It seems so," Robert admitted, and then vigorously, "How soon can you get away?"

"Now," she said casually; "we'll go now."

"You'll have to say good-by to your hostess first—"

"Heavens, no!" she laughed. "Haven't an idea where she is—and she wouldn't thank me. Come along. There are millions of taxicabs hanging about."

She went with birdlike grace through the garden ahead of him. He could not see that her eyes were searching for Arturo, for a last sight of him, though only at a distance and among a crowd. They could not find him. He must have gone away in his despair, and frankly; as she was going in hers, but masking it under laughter.

"You hadn't any tea," Elsie exclaimed as they waited for a cab to come to them. "You were used to your tea in Burmah with all those English—of course! You must have some. Julie can manage it, I dare say."

He saw the disordered apartment, the trunks, and the woman's too intelligent eyes, and felt the same scent that floated to him from his wife's golden draperies intensified there to an informing reminder. "We've plenty of time. Can't we go somewhere for tea?"

"Oh, would you like to?" she drawled gladly. "That would be quite too chic. I'll take you to a place that is the last word in novelties. Tout-à-fait Parisian!" She gave an address as they entered a cab.

The outline of the situation between them, the details of her part—that of the wife meeting her husband after long absence—were clear to her. She drew off her glove submissively and laid her hand on one of Robert's with a faintly urgent pressure.

"I can't believe it yet, Robert. I simply can't believe it," she said helplessly, and smiled.

He smiled back, not his own smile; his lips were pushed to it. "I had not meant to be so startling, my dear."

They were whizzing along a stretch of empty, pale gray street that gave him perfect opportunity to kiss her. He knew this, knew that she expected it. There was something appalling in feeling that he had no desire to kiss that foolish mouth, hard with a metallic red dye. He drew her to him, and their lips met briefly.

"You're different, Robert," she said as she sank back, studying him dreamily, and felt a great satisfaction in being able to say this truthfully. The subversion in herself could be better defended since he, too, was changed.

"I'm burnt almost black and I've lost twenty pounds, if that's what you mean."

"I don't mean that. And I don't mean those tiny lines that have come about your eyes—"

"Sun squint—focussing through a blinding glare. They won't last, so don't let them trouble you."

"There's something else," she murmured, and the smeared lids fluttered over her steadily placed gaze. "Either you're very tired—or you've grown old—or you're bored. You used to be so impulsive, with a happy look—and I liked that."

Never given to evasions, he had been swept absolutely clean of pretense in the simplicity in which he had lived. The impulse to speak out had to be obeyed. And through it he might get a little nearer to her.

"Well, let me tell you something, Elsie. You don't seem yourself. Not the same at all!"

She laughed out; a dismayed trill born back of the lips. "Really? Ah, my dear, you must remember I'm three years older; and that I was a girl literally from the backwoods when you saw me last. I'm not that now—Dieu merci!—so I dare say I seem astoundingly different to you." The crayoned eyebrows, that vanished into hair strokes like the tilted-up ends of a lash, flickered demurringly. "You liked the old me better than this me—now, didn't you?"

"I did." He pressed her hand gently while deliberately studying her. "Why do you do all that?"

"All what?"

"Put all that stuff on your face?"

"How crude you are!" she frowned, and continued on a drawl. "Embellissement, mon cher. Pour la beauté, pour le charme!"

"Do speak English!"

"Very well. Any other questions?"

"Yes," he said brusquely. "Do you suppose that you fool anybody?"

"Oh, you dear, big, simple thing!" Elsie retorted and sank away from him in a flurry of gayety. "Why, all the women here touch up! We don't try to fool any one. We do it before every one, and it is chic to like to do it. Voilà!" She whisked her hand from his hold and pulled a silver vanity case from her bag. "Now that you're rich you'll give me a gold one—won't you?" she murmured as she opened it.

A mirror that lined the inner part of the top flashed out, and beneath it Robert saw a half dozen, tiny, silver lids that covered what were mysteries to him. He did, however understand the use of the lip stick that she daintily poised and whose tip was a venomously red bullet.

"What are you going to do?" came from him in exasperated surprise.

"Show you, my dear, how we Parisiennes dot the 'i' of whatever stock of good looks we have—"

"It doesn't help your stock with me," he said and drew down her hand with force. "Please put that away or—better still—chuck it out of the window!"

"Oh, really?—Well, I'll put it away," she said with the meekness of fatigue. "You great simple-minded barbarian, you'll have to get used to things that are not quite—raw. We can't all be rough diamonds and virgin gold. That's all you've seen for so long—and that's what you are. Virgin gold?" she mused. "Not in demand in big cities. A little alloy—not quite perfection—is much preferred. And it really wears better, my dear."

"You are mistaken, and you are misjudging me," he said very clearly, jarred by the gay patronage of the tone. "I'm quite of the world in my tolerance. If you needed help of this sort and applied it delicately to your face, I'd not mind. In fact, if delicately done, probably I'd not know of it. Civilization of this sort doesn't exist only in cities like Paris." His voice grew kinder, although his eyes remained sternly grave. "It's been from the beginning of the world, and it is in the East, wherever there are women. But—and make a note of it—they are always women of a certain sort. For instance, when I was in Canton I saw Chinese women who went this Paris face-painting a good many points better—even made their lips seem of solid gold. But they were the women of the flower boats. You know what that means?"

"Oh, yes. I remember you wrote me all about those curious, little creatures. Well, I'm glad you weren't such a pillar of propriety that you wouldn't have a look at them in their pretty flower boats." Her tone became open ennui. "I tell you, Robert, frankly, it does seem an awful waste of time objecting to a lot of unimportant, surface things. Let people do what they like, I say—of course, nothing that would send them to jail! That's what we feel here, at any rate. Why bother? It's all the same in a hundred years!"

"I don't like your philosophy." He said this in a tone she remembered from the past. It had never been used to her then, and only in directions to those under him when he outlined something conclusively, a silencing of argument in the economy of words, every one of which was bitten off clean.

She laughed—the same trill from the lips. "Sorry," she said briefly.

"And though this may seem to you the opinion of one akin to a lout or a clodhopper—lacking your opportunity for polish, you know—I'll be glad when you can come to see that your face is prettier, better in every way, without whitewash and red ink—for that's the impression I get from it."

"And when will that time be, I wonder?" She murmured this, giving a brief shrug, yet with anger in the tone.

"No need to wonder. I'm sure it will be when you have left Paris behind you—perhaps not until it has been left behind a long time. Yet, I am hopeful."

At his words her hidden grief took on active life, put fangs into her. As she remained serious, he quickly grew tender.

"Elsie," he said, closed his hand on hers and gave it a steady pressure, "fancy us getting into this dispute when we've just found each other again! You'll bear with me a little. If you seem to me foolishly to damage your real and bewitching self, I dare say I do seem a rough fellow to you. We'll help each other. Shall we?"

"We've got to," Elsie said, and the words had something of a comrade's earnestness, though her spirit was now weeping for its secret bread.

Soon they were seated in the tea shop.

The place came at Robert like a knock on a fresh sore. There are in Paris—or were before the war had made it augustly grave—small tea rooms in several and queer places. Some opened frankly off a boulevard or residence street. Some, catering to a selected clientele, were found in a back courtyard reached through an impasse; or in the rear of modiste and manicure shops; or up a flight of stairs in a studio building; or across the Seine in some cul-de-sac of the Quartier. However diversified their placing, and whether luxurious or plain in furnishing, their significant qualities were alike. All were oriental, therefore fittingly kept in heavy shadow, perfumed, secretive. Quite respectable as far as conduct, they yet were safe places for those who wished to meet to talk and not be seen.

This one was in the neighborhood of the Rond Point, the street thick with trees. Elsie led Robert up a green alley to a small house at the back of a garden. The lower floor had a show window crowded with various lengths of ancient lace, with antique jewelry and silver. There was only an old Frenchman in the shop, polishing a bit of metal. Elsie nodded to him and went up a stairway that would have seemed to lead to the merchant's home. Instead, at a turning, the light changed to a violet dusk, the scent of rose potpourri stole out, and a Hindoo was seen at the top, sitting on the floor, his knees hunched. He rose, bowed deeply to the visitors, and on linen-sandalled feet went soundlessly ahead of them to one of the screened tables. Before this was reached other screens were passed, subdued voices and laughter coming from behind them. No one looked out. Visitors here had no curiosity about their neighbors.

"This feverish effect seems rather overdone if its raison d'être is really—tea." Robert said this coldly. "Do you come here often?"

"Tea is merely a trimming. This sort of thing is a fad. Its queerness helps Parisians to escape for an hour from themselves and the actual," Elsie said, her elbows on the table, chin on her laced fingers.

She felt a drowsy indifference to whatever Robert might think of these caprices. No doubt they were foolish. Very well—what of it?

"I was here only once before, and that's three months ago. As a guide takes a tourist about, I thought it might amuse you to see the odd little place. You're not amused. Too bad!"

During a few moments they became silent. They faced each other, while in the mysteriously sacred province of each brain thoughts rose and throbbed that in effect separated them as if the world had suddenly parted their bodies again. Elsie was remembering her only other visit to this place.

On a March day of raw, high winds she had gone there to meet Arturo. Unable to come, he had sent Serafin with his apology and with instructions to talk to Elsie and detain her there for a half hour, when he hoped to appear.

She had been content to watch the man's long, shorn face and slanted, unsmiling eyes while he told her of interesting things; of Spain; but mostly of his master, his beloved foster brother. He had dwelt with unction on Arturo's rank:

The title had been created in 1470. He was the eighteenth Marqués de Burgos and twice a grandee of the first class. "Gravedad, lealdad y amor de Dios" was the motto of his family.

"Perhaps my master has lost sight of the last—the love of God—in the life of cities as young men live it to-day; but the other things are his—dignity and loyalty—these, through everything. Ah, señora, I wish you could know Spain and behold my master there in his rightful place! It is beautiful to see. Yes, the honor done his family is very beautiful—for it is now so poor that the old palace in Burgos with its quarterings engraved over the great, arched doors is crumbling in many places. Out in the world, particularly in America, nothing seems to matter but money. It is not so in Spain. The uncontaminated sangre azul is worshipped there just for itself," he had said, a shining awe in his sunken eyes. "When the Señor Marqués goes to court, he enters the greatest of the three halls, the antecámera. There is no honor that he does not have. When he goes to an audience with royalty the guards strike the marble floor with their swords for him, and the sound is like a thousand fencers in combat. Ah, it is glorious to be of this blue blood of Spain, descended from the hidalgos of Castile, one of the ancient ones in the Grandeza!"

All this had made a mind picture that had captivated Elsie. Then, of a sudden, in mixed unbelief and rage, she had seen the man change; he had trembled hideously, one dark hand with nails that were polished fangs had closed on hers, and while his teeth were set against the words they yet had broken from him in spurts:

"I love you, too.—Men must love you easily.—You are the kind of woman that men of my race cannot see without emotion—you are so white—a golden fairness—saint—angel! Ah," as, her eyes blazing, she managed at last to get her hand from him, "I am without hope, señora. Never had I meant to speak.—This place has witchery—silent, and dark and sweet, and you there before me listening so sweetly—ah, give me of your pity! Forgive me!"

"You need forgiveness," she had replied, rising in cold rage. "If I tell the Marqués de Burgos that his servant—"

"Never!"

She had paused, terrified by the fire that had leaped to the sunken eyes with the look of a goaded animal as it turns to attack.

"Never that! You do not understand. You are ignorant of anything that is not American—like all your shop-keeping race. I am a Basque! You don't know what that means. You don't know that I belong not to Spain really, but to a free people. I am entitled to bear arms; all Basques are. But because we have through centuries become a poor and plain people of the mountains, we have laid aside our noble rights, and we serve—but only where we wish! Only where our hearts call! We serve willingly then, but proudly. So tell the Señor Marqués what I have said to you. For a moment as the Marqués de Burgos, although my foster brother, he will be enraged—that is true. As a man, he will quickly understand my temptation and overlook it. Spaniards are different from your fish-cold Americans! They find toleration for any mistake born of what is called here le crime passionel."

"Let me pass," Elsie had said, and had gone, her crêpe tunic, that fluttered backward with the free turbulence of the Winged Victory's draperies, giving the effect of a queen's withdrawal.

Yet with malice born of her insulted pride, she had paused at the counter so that Serafin could see her pay and hear her distinct words to the Hindoo: "This is for my tea—and this is for tea for the valet of the Marqués de Burgos, should he wish any, while he waits here for his employer."

She had felt too humiliated to tell Arturo, and the incident had seemed forgotten. Its resurrection in her thoughts was like a repulsive roughness brushing her flesh.

Robert's mind had been quickening during the few moments' silence; at first not with past events. His eyes, while resting on Elsie, often did not see her at all, or but vaguely, while he stared inward, analyzing his disappointment in its relation to himself.

He had expected rapture from his home-coming. And the first flavor had been delicious. Nothing short of perfection could have continued at this height. And instead of perfection there was only the blurred, the damaged, the unfamiliar, the unexpected. His most important possession, from promise of sweetness, had taken on the sterility of stone. This strange Elsie eluded him, irritated him. She seemed branded by a life lived foolishly in Paris. The city loomed up between them, dividing them. A hundred years seemed to have passed since he had joyously looked up at the rose-pink shades of the apartment on the Rue de Chaillot. He felt dejected, baffled.

And through this bewilderment he sought for the basic truth in himself. After all, how much had he missed Elsie during his absence from her?

Two beings, closely bound, are separated for years and live diversely. Change does not come to one alone. Absence must act alike on the chemistry of both,—transmute the old, assimilate the new, mellow and shape and crystallize. Outwardly Elsie was so unlike his memory of her he was revolted, saddened. He saw that inwardly he was, in his way, as altered. He had grown nearer to the essential and natural things; used to spell-bound self-communing; had come nearer to his spirit; impatient of intrusions that were unsought.

Loneliness can be a thing that finds food in itself. Bitter at first, it can stealthily change to an addiction to isolation and solitude. And isolation like his with only men, they fiercely alive in a struggle with the earth, might so emphasize sheer manful virility that the revival of life with a woman might be found full of irritating dislocations that only perfect sympathy could disregard.

A feeling of inertia without the liveliness of pain became a weight upon him. There had been much of the boy in him at his work always. It seemed to have left him forever. He felt old, and with this intolerant in the doggedly acrid way that the old can so easily become.

Almost at once he knew that these reflections led to one desire—to get away by himself for an interlude of liberty before taking up the problem of Elsie—her casualness, flippancy, insincerity, her veneer and her many trunks.

In contrast to companionship with her, he saw the journey home as it might be without her. England first—this a wise business move of which he had not yet spoken to her—and then the voyage to New York with four men with whom he felt that satisfying intimacy that makes no slightest effort to express itself; irresponsible drifting while—as on his journey across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean—drinking in the heaving reaches of water with his land-burnt eyes, tasting the salt winds as reviving food; pipes; poker; and desultory talks on deck as late as he pleased.

This picture began to have the appeal that thought of a stolen holiday has to a fagged schoolboy, demanding that he creep from the classroom and make a plunge for a day of delights where birds' nests were to be had for the climbing and racing brooks would send ripples over bare feet.

A dislike of himself began mixing with the longing even while it was sharp enough to hurt. To want to escape the revived responsibility had almost the yellow of treachery. He fought the temptation, thrust it away. It would only go around a turning in his mind. He was aware that it was there, its eye peeping, ear listening.

When the tea came Elsie poured it silently. She had gleaned something of Robert's thoughts and they rankled. She had the feeling of being one of two people on opposite sides of a gulf whose hands strive to reach across it while only their fingers touch; a clasp impossible.

How little letters could count during a long separation, letters like theirs. She had put only the surface of her life into hers. His had been mere bulletins; mostly he had relied on telegrams. "He is made of bits of paper," Arturo had said. It almost seemed that he had been right. She knew how reticent Robert was naturally in expression of affection. So he had believed his telegrams sufficient, had thought it unnecessary to keep dwelling on the love between them, not realizing—as she knew now with the guilty sureness of her needs—that love like any other thing must, to endure, be fed in some way; by constant assurance when nothing closer is possible.

"He is disappointed in me," was her thought. "He feels miles away from me. He isn't going to try to make love to me. Oh, I'm glad of that!"

"There's one thing I haven't told you about, Elsie," Robert said, after a cup of the excellent tea had brightened him. He had not known how parched and travel-tired he was.

She shrugged in mild inquiry. "That—?"

"We are going to England to-night, and home that way."

This roused her violently. A dark flush lurched over her face. She pushed her head forward. "To England, you say? Why, England?"

"Some of the directors met us at the ship, and we had a meeting, but several weren't able to get away from London. As there's a bit of a row on—something you wouldn't understand—we decided it would be best for us all to get together once in London and have the thing settled. I changed the tickets—yours and mine—at the office of the French Line on my way to your place from the train. I want to get to Dieppe to-night, reach London in good time to-morrow, and after a week or ten days in England, we'll sail from Liverpool."

Her discontent showed frankly. For three years she had been her own law, directed her life according to her mood,—the most whimsical. Now she was moved as a pawn by a master player, and it was not pleasant.

"You don't seem to realize that all my trunks are tagged for Havre."

"I'll change them in a few moments, my dear," he said with an easy touch of authority. "Don't let that annoy you."

A blaze flashed through her. "But I don't like that long train journey to Dieppe and then having to cross the Channel by the longest way—an all-night journey. I did it once for economy, and I said I never would again."

"It can't be helped now," he remarked peacefully and ate the last slice of toast and marmalade with enjoyment.

She looked at her wrist watch. "We'll have to rush through dinner, then rush for a train, then rush for the boat. That horrid boat! That beastly, hateful, cheap tourist, all-night journey!" Her eyes had a jet-black anger he had not seen in them before. And in truth she had never felt before as she did at this moment,—a nervous desperation; a longing to let herself go and weep wildly without check.

"Does it really matter so much?" he asked, his brows lifted and held so as he sharpened into new attention.

"I kept to your arrangements, Robert," Elsie went on unevenly, "and got ready as you wished, although even then I had precious little notice. Must you constantly change your plans?"

"Not I—business changes them."

"Well, it's hard enough without an entire upheaval like this. I'm completely bouleversé. Why, I loathe the Channel even in the short crossing from Calais!"

"Is there something you'd rather do?" he asked and tried to shut out the voice now whispering with enticement of the truant's delights. "Would you rather go on from France as arranged and meet me in New York?"

Several seconds passed before Elsie could speak. A hush tightened upon her, seemed to hold back her breath. "Go back, on this boat, alone? But you've changed the tickets!"

"Well, not necessarily on this boat. Arranged this way, you need not hurry. Send your trunks along as arranged now to Havre, to await your orders there, and leave Paris for home about the time that I leave England—that is, if you want to."

She began crumbling the bread to mask the quivering of her fingers. Before her mind the picture of a mountain swept up mistily, an odd-looking little house, with pale walls splashed with roses, on its crest. And then the things of which Paula had spoken: the hooded serenos with lanterns; carnations everywhere; and the one mule cart going down through the high solitude at a waddling pace. She heard the gay voices of a mixed number in the small house,—Arturo's guests; guitar music on the thin, chill, mountain air; the tinkling of glasses. She did not see Arturo nor hear his voice. He was there too pervadingly to appear as one of the details; back of every sound he was whispering to her; his warm and quivering lips were seeking hers.

She continued silent. She saw that it would not only be possible for her to manage the visit to El Miradero; she could easily go; if she spoke the words, Robert would in all likelihood urge her to go. And yet with this sure knowledge came a distinct recoil from the thought, a terror of it, so deep in her it seemed a little, far-off ghost, watching.

"Don't go, don't go, don't go," she felt rather than heard it say. "Why delay the break a few weeks? It will be even harder then, with just so many more memories to torment you. Go home now. Be brave. Go home now, or something may happen to keep you from ever going home! You're not happy with Robert in this meeting, but you will be later on. He is strong, he is kind, he is steadfast."

On the wake of this appeal from her underlying fear she recalled Arturo's words about fate. If it were to be, it would be. And he was right. She had not made the slightest effort to remain in Paris; such a thing had seemed impossible. And here the power to do so was in her hands, thrust into them by her husband. Surely this was fate? She determined to test this belief; let it lead her, she to be relieved from responsibility in the result.

"The apartment is given up," she said decidedly. "I couldn't stay on there. An hour after I telephoned to Countess Verholst that I was leaving, she rented it. No, I'd better go with you."

"If you'd rather. I want you to be contented." This seemed the end, when Robert added: "You could, you know, keep out what trunks you'd need and stay at the Ritz until you sail."

The Ritz! That added its temptation. She had not hoped ever to be able to afford that. Yes, it would be chic to stop there for awhile and then—maybe—start for Spain with Paula. Still she held to her resolve, to what instinct counselled as wise.

"If I did that, Robert, I could go back on the 'Provence,' with the Vance Hamiltons. But I know Paula Vrain would keep insisting that in the meantime I go on with her—You know Sidney Vrain in London—" she broke off, "the shipowner?"

"Of course.—Insisting on your going—where?"

"With her to a house party at the—the Marqués de Burgos's place in the Cantabrian mountains—not far into them—and they are in the north of Spain, you know—only across the border from France, I imagine.—" She paused, her heart beating with a queer burning.

Robert's eyes grew a bright blue; he tried not to make them eager. But Elsie read the truth in them and remembered it often, afterward. He looked the capable business man disentangling a difficulty with ease.

"Well, go," he said. "Why not?"

"I might not get to New York until a good bit later than you. I ought not to do that—now—when you're just back from Burmah. No—it doesn't matter."

"I'll have to be about New York for a month or so before my next opportunity is ripe, before we both get on the wing again, so a short delay in your coming home would be a trifle. I haven't had time as yet to tell you about my next move," he glowed. "Salary first—later shares for me—if I can only get big results—!"

"Aren't you going to live in New York after this? Aren't you going to give up business that takes you to the ends of the world? Surely you're not going to keep on this way? Surely we'll live in New York?"

"Not yet. Maybe not for a year or two," he said crisply with a shrewd, smiling anticipation. "South American mines—Venezuela—are on the tapis for us. I know the country well. I've already made an offer for a big hacienda just outside Valencia—what you'll call a dream place and that you'll queen it over."

Again Elsie felt herself the pawn moved by the master player.

"Queen it in—Venezuela?" she murmured.

"Yes; while I go after the biggest thing yet. A million for me—no less—if it's what I think it is."

"Venezuela!" she murmured with slow bitterness.

"Lovely place," Robert said again, and then hurriedly: "Well? We haven't much time for deciding. What do you want to do? Stop on here and go for your look at Spain? Or shall we keep to the English plan?"

"Which would you rather I'd do? You must have some preference," she urged, and felt the hush wind a veil about her as before.

"To be honest," said Robert, "it seems foolish to lug you over to London when I'll be up to my neck in business all the time I'm there; and a shame for you not to see Spain. That's what I think, but you do just as you like."

"Spain, then," she said. She was looking down at her glove as she jerked it on, but what she really saw was a

Elsie was in the Sud-Express, train de luxe. She was travelling in the most luxurious way possible. In fact, since Robert's persuasion to this last, tangential diversion had come without her even seeking it, she had had almost a week of the most delicious wallowing in luxury. Certainly he was generous. What a sheaf of mauve-pink, highly numbered franc notes he had given her,—thousands!

She could not help feeling that by a princely lavishness he had sought to conciliate himself for his wish to get away from her. The woman in her, while it did not crave him, objected to this; she did not want any man who could mean anything to her to suggest an ease if relieved of her, as Robert unconsciously had done. Yes, assuredly the feminine antennae had sensed this. Liberal to a fault, excessively attentive in his hurried arrangements for her comfort at the Ritz, and then, but a few hours after his coming:

"Good-by, Elsie. Have a good time, my dear. I'll be up to my eyes in business in London, and it will be one continual shop talk on the ship. You'll get home in a few weeks with those Hamiltons you spoke of. Just a little while and we'll meet in New York. I'll be at the pier for you. Good-by, my dear. Get everything you want. Have a good time. Good-by."

Well, here she was—free—tingling with that delight in danger that everything connected with Arturo communicated to her, with at least three thousand dollars in money in her bag as well as a roughly cut emerald on the finest of chains, the sort of thing for which she had often longed sinfully. Ah, the days at the Ritz! Luxury was sweet. She had come to love the spacious Place Vendome from the sense of power that she felt every time she stepped into it from the hotel. She had come to have a sun-warmed, idling feeling in the Rue de la Paix, that street of temptation to extravagance so unfittingly named. Street of Peace, indeed? Never that before for her when economy had strapped her, when she had had to produce the effect of modish expensiveness on a small income. It had been delicious to have had that changed as if by some Aladdin.

Mannequins in the most important fashion workshops of the world had paced before her, while she felt the self-complacency of the buying customer. Several of the gowns, so beguiling in their shimmering beauty they deserved a lovelier and a flowerlike name, she had purchased right off the girls' adorable backs, of which all but a fraction at the girdle was allowed to be seen. And she had brought two with her. Yes, she had not been able to resist them, rough and simple as Paula had described life at El Miradero to be.

The details of the excursion had been arranged quite easily. Having seen Robert off on the train to Dieppe, she had telephoned to Arturo's apartment, hoping to tell him of the change in her plans before he left Paris, and had been able only to get Serafin. It was the first time they had spoken since his unwisdom in the tea shop. With overelaborate courtesy he stated that the Señor Marqués had already departed on the night express for Spain with his cousins,—they to go on to Burgos, he to the mountains.

"I am to follow to-morrow and will then inform the Señor Marqués that you are to arrive at El Miradero later in the week with Mrs. Vrain," he said. "Mrs. Vrain knows everything necessary about the journey, as she has taken it before, yet lest Mrs. Vrain might have forgotten anything helpful I will, with your permission, send you at once a note with full directions, madame."

The next day Elsie found Paula. She was in her boudoir, looking astoundingly ugly with her hair in strings over a damp towel while a master in the business smeared it with wet henna. Her maid was already head down in a sea of packing.

"Ripping, my dear, that you can go! But I'm off to Bordeaux first, you know," she had said, while managing to smoke between the dabs of the man's fingers against her ears. "Duty visit—beastly—but necessary. I'll cut it short and fly on to San Sebastian. You'll find me waiting for you there—that is, I'll be there, unless I find that I'll be able to motor still farther, to Bilbao, which is not very far from the village from which that mule coach I told you about goes up the mountain. So we'll leave it that way. If I'm not at the station at San Sebastian, I'll be at Bilbao. Meanwhile turn yourself loose for three or four days on the Rue de la Paix."

After that, Paula, having sketched all the phases of the journey, had sent a footman to buy Elsie's ticket and to reserve a compartment for her well ahead in the wagon-lit.

"It's nothing of a trip. One night on the train—then all the rest is easy, dreamy, delicious," Paula had genially declared.

And so Elsie had found it. Through the golden evening the moments had been reeled off as from well-oiled machinery, and she arose early to watch for the first sight of the Pyrenees which, though appearing while she was still in France, would be as the doorway into Spain. When their pale, far, waving peaks came with a solemn sort of suddenness out of the early mist, a warm feeling as of being greeted went over her. Spain was no longer a country to be reached after a journey. Nor was Arturo at a distance; he even seemed there, facing her, smoking in his dreamy, Spanish way, his eyes with brooding anger and misery fixed on her as they had been so constantly in the battle that had gone on between them.

Through the days at the Ritz she had schooled herself in a new determination. Nothing was going to happen during this visit that would cause her regret afterward. She would be very sensible, cautious. She would keep close to Paula and others of the guests, avoiding any hours apart with Arturo. He must be made to see clearly from the first moment that though she had come for this chapter with him, it was the last chapter, finis already written.

She gave a few moments' unmixed thought here to Robert, especially to a letter from him that had reached her at the Ritz just before she left; this told her that the business in London had been rushed through, that he was sailing for New York that day. She also thought very clearly, and quite without emotion, of his strength and kindness.

A look into the mirror of her vanity case brought a wondering, half-amused shrug. How she had gibed at his criticism—and behold!—it had borne fruit, for her face was but lightly touched with the pencils and powders. Of course he had been right. The habit of plastering one's self into a Pierrot can grow into a sort of debauch without one's realizing it. She had a sense of his approval the while she pictured him leaning on a deck rail, smoking a pipe, the droll, little sun lines showing about his eyes.

This typical memory of him strengthened her resolve in wisdom. She owed this to him for the royal trust with which he had sent her on her way. And there was her life—-perhaps a long one—to be spent with him. It could only be bearable if she had nothing to hide that she felt placed her outside his forgiveness. Yet from the mountain epilogue she would get some happiness,—the pale and tender glow that belongs to renunciation. This would spread through the secret niches of her spirit, and in the years to come, as retrospection, it would effuse a ghostly sweetness into gray days.

When Irun was passed and she neared San Sebastian, the excitement born of novelty mixed with her sane and confident mood. Soon she would be beside Paula in her motor; soon on the thin, chill, mountain air that she had always felt in fancy from her first longing for this experience, she would hear Arturo speak to her again, a cluster of his holiday-making, Spanish friends about him, carefree days would follow under his roof in a setting of beauty. Oh, life was an alluring thing, a draught of many flavors that mingled to make something so wonderful one would have nothing missing from it,—no, not even the pain!

If, as some believe, powers for evil and good hover unseen about us, some grim presence may have smiled darkly as Elsie rejoiced in the thought of this mixed blend of emotions, seeing that she had missed the vital truth about it,—how, with bitterest grief and disappointment, life's sweet savor can endure, but only to that one who remains firm in self-control; how strength is another name for happiness; and weakness alone makes the slavery that slays hope.

Paula was not at San Sebastian. After breakfast, Elsie went on to Bilbao on a branch line. Her anticipation had gone into a childish depression. She had counted so surely on seeing the Englishwoman's coarse, good-humored face turned to her in smiling welcome that missing it sent the sun under a cloud. And now her thoughts fastened on Bilbao with a running thrill of suspense.

Everything that she saw from the train that was typically Spanish helped to divert her: the first mantilla; the first carabinero in blue uniform and white shako; squat, heavy-browed houses of various, bright tints; the Chinese suggestion in the high cheek bones of the Basque peasants, reminding her of Serafin, carnations in heaps in venders' baskets; an oxcart, the animals yoked together with a great bar hung with sheepskin, scarlet fringes dancing above their eyes; a priest coming down a white road on a donkey. And in a larger sense, wherever her eyes rested, the encompassing beauty!—roads twisting like ribbons unwound from a great spool, deep glens, twinkling streams, and above them flashing in sunlight the peaks of the Cantabrian mountains toward which she was to journey. With all of these impressions the meeting with Paula, a shadowy picture, would dance in and out.

And now the long tunnel leading to Bilbao was reached. Elsie gathered her smallest hand luggage and made ready, after the fashion of the nervous and over-eager traveler, to quit the compartment at the earliest instant possible. When the train stopped, her eyes swept the waiting crowd for a familiar face, Paula's, perhaps at once; if not, then her chauffeur's or her maid's. None of these came out of the sea of features where every mouth was moving rapidly in a chatter that made a noise like fine machinery, and the tension about her heart was hardening to a questioning distress when she saw Serafin.

He was but a few yards from the train as she descended, his hat lifted above his swarthy, priestly face. She had not imagined that he could ever bring her the relief which came now at sight of him. But he represented reality at the end of this lonely dream-journey. He was something that steadied her, made her see beyond him all the rest of the experience waiting for her.

So she greeted him with a sparkling gladness and he received it gratefully, with marked respect. To her first questions about Paula he made hurried replies. He had not seen Mrs. Vrain, not yet; and fearing some delay on her part had—on his own responsibility, not having been directed to do so by the Señor Marqués—taken the precaution to arrange for a few seats in a motor omnibus that took passengers to where the mule coach started. And he would search for Mrs. Vrain again as soon as he had seen the luggage through the Customs, if madame would wait until he was at liberty. Meanwhile, seated comfortably in the spot he selected, she could keep on the lookout for her friend.

This Elsie did and so unsuccessfully that as the moments passed a cold animosity toward Paula crept over her. It had been horrid in the first place for her to have insisted that no maid but her own Athénée would be necessary; while it would have been difficult for Julie to have left her husband, Elsie felt she could have been persuaded to go with her, and with Julie beside her nothing could have made her feel as amiss as she did at that moment. It had also been horrid of Paula not to have managed arriving at San Sebastian on time, horrid to have treated a woman friend so. And here was the second place of meeting that she had named, and she was late!

This was her mood when Serafin joined her, with porters bearing her small trunk and dressing bag. He had attended to everything. He had not seen Mrs. Vrain. She was not at the station. And now they must hurry on.

"But we can't hurry on!" Elsie protested. "We can't go without Mrs. Vrain!"

He gave a prolonged and peaceful shrug. "Of course, as you wish, madame, but I would have to leave you. If I do not catch the coach, there will be no way for me to go up until to-morrow at this time. What I believe is this—Mrs. Vrain, detained by some trouble to the car on the road and realizing her failure to meet your train, will, no doubt, come on by a short cut over the mountains. You see, madame? Why should you wait here since, in all probability, Mrs. Vrain will not now come to Bilbao at all—as why should she, with a powerful motor to simplify matters?"

"She might think that no one would come to meet me, and she'd look for me here, no matter how late," Elsie said, not a flavor of hope in the tone.

"Ah, no," he smiled gently, "she understands the Señor Marqués better than that. And now you must decide, madame—we have not a moment. I feel sure that when we reach El Miradero, Mrs. Vrain will already be there."

It seemed to Elsie that decision was taken from her. Her brain was humming. She could think of nothing better than what Serafin urged. So while insisting on going with him for a last hurried look about the station, from which the crowd had thinned to a few scattered groups, she gave herself into his charge.

She was indifferent to the interesting notes on the rest of the journey; they passed from her distressed mind without recording themselves save in a cloudy way. In the motor omnibus, even afterward in the loose-jointed, mountain coach with its five mules on a string, its noisy jingling, and radiantly arrayed driver in green velvet trousers and scarlet boina—all of which would have been a delightful novelty to her in a happy mood—she sat pale and absorbed. Her anger against Paula had changed to sensitive pain. She was hurt, and deeply, at having been left to this solitary rõle in their adventure. Surely this was the result of a rooted selfishness on Paula's part, the worldly casualness that so easily can become cruelty; really what might be called a social misdemeanor.

"If women were kind to each other, if they stood by each other as men do by men, a mistake like this could not happen," Elsie thought.

Two hours later, when more than half of the journey was done, she gave a violent start, fairly jerked from her reverie on realizing that because of the ferment of her thoughts she had missed seeing the one sure road out of the uncertainty,—how easily Serafin could have gone on, leaving her to wait in the best hotel in Bilbao until Paula, arriving at El Miradero by some shorter route, would have sent down her car for her. Oh, she had been stupid! And now it was too late.

One of the Spaniards seated near her, pretending to read a paper but really devouring her thistle-down blondness with glowing eyes, saw her lips shake of a sudden as a child's do before a fit of weeping; saw her turn and give a wild, lingering look of regret back along the rough descent.

One after the other the passengers had left the coach, and for more than an hour Elsie and Serafin had been alone in it. He sat with the red-capped driver who at times would hop down to even the sagging mules and encourage them with a whooping chant that the gorges took up until it seemed that a crowd of unseen runners surrounded them, repeating it:

"Ea! Ea! Arre! Mulo!" And again: "Ea! Ea! Arre! Mulo!"

The shouts depressed Elsie, adding, as they did, to the strangeness of the scene and her loneliness. Her eyes were observant now, looking sharply to every turning, hoping it would give signs of the journey's end. And what a long dragging journey it had been and still was; a steady three hours' climb up the winding roads through woods of beech and walnut, over rough bridges, over ravines, even over mountain torrents. Through what solitudes! How removed from human life—from any life!—for there seemed to be no birds in those slanted woods, and hours had passed since the last tinkling of cowbells was heard.

It had been scorching in the village from which they started, and at the beginning of the ascent sunlight had filled the coach. Now the interior was thick shadow. And when a clearing at one height was reached, Elsie became aware that the gloom was not only from the twilight. Clouds of smoky darkness moved rapidly over the sky and lightning played almost continuously, though without any sound of thunder, on the imperial peaks in the distance.

She took a seat nearer to Serafin, and as she spoke he turned.

"How quickly this storm has come," she said. Her voice had a wan sound.

"It is not a storm yet, madame," he assured her. "Often this darkness leaps into view up here and then plunges below. Sometimes at El Miradero we look down on rain clouds that are sending torrents into the lower valleys and not a drop is falling about us."

The words did not comfort Elsie. She drew back, coldness creeping through her as she realized that it was the descent through the valleys that interested her, calm weather down there that seemed at the moment urgently important to her. This was curious. She wondered about it. And as she sat in the gloom, her cold hands locked, she saw that the thought of her return, perhaps a quick one, had been with her while going upward. Before reaching El Miradero, in spirit she had seen herself departing from it, because in spirit she had some dark knowledge that Paula would not be waiting for her there.

A small house, two-storied and low-browed, of crumbling yellow stone, with roof of red tiles, and so built on the projection of a mountain it seemed to cling by talons over perpendicular depths; a rude balcony on the precipice side and on that which looked over a garden facing the road; through several openings on this balcony—called windows, although they were only big square cuts in the stone, without glass—a dusky interior of velvety richness; salmon-pink, apricot and crimson carnations, planted so that they seemed a flounce of contrasting brilliance against the lower part of the yellow walls; vines crawling about every casement. This was El Miradero.

Arturo came through one of the balcony doorways on the side away from the abyss and stood looking down the mountain. The Paris pallor was still on his face, but he wore country clothes that had seen hard service—hob-nailed shoes and yarn stockings, corduroy breeches, a jacket that hung hussar-fashion from one shoulder, a flannel shirt, a soft velour hat pulled over the eyes. He looked abstracted, ill at ease. After a dull gaze into the distance he vaulted over the railing and crossed the garden.

Here, one of his two men servants, a lad of about seventeen, rested against a wall from which a long view of the dipping road, around a curve that took in miles, could be seen. "Nothing except the coach has passed, excellentisimo," the boy said in answer to his questioning look. "That turned the corner twenty minutes since."

"Very well. You need not wait, Aniceto." And when he had gone silently on his alpargatas—those peace-producing, linen-soled shoes that Spanish servants wear—Arturo lighted a cigarette and took his place.

He felt puzzled. Since the early afternoon he had been expecting the throb of Paula's motor up the mountain, a luncheon of the Spanish dishes that she especially liked—fresh tunny fish in a steak, and pisto, where eggs were fried in oil with peppers and pimientos—waiting to be cooked the instant she arrived. If she had met Elsie at San Sebastian as she had written him she meant to do, in such a car as hers they should have arrived hours ago; if the meeting had been deferred until Bilbao, they should have arrived at about the same time or only a little later. Yet he was still waiting. And now the mule coach was almost due—the crawling coach—so it could only mean that Serafin was returning and probably without news of them.

From the first he had been humble about Elsie's visit to El Miradero, absolutely honest with Paula Vrain when he had begged: "Only delay her return to America. I don't look beyond that. Probably I could bear her going then, when I'd got used to it." This had seemed to fail and he had left Paris believing he had seen Elsie for the last time, only to have heard from Serafin that the Fate he believed in had interposed and instead of sending her across the seas was hurrying her to him in his beloved wilderness. So his disappointment was two-edged since after several days of a covetous, morbidly troubled sort of delight that had tried to keep the looming farewell out of the picture, he was to suffer again. She had not come. Something had happened. Or she had changed her mind, perhaps because Paula had changed hers, and he was not to see her at all.

The driver's shouts and the clanking of the mules' harness came clearly to him. He stepped into the road. As the coach came on a last triumphant lurch to the upland valley where he stood, he saw Serafin with the driver and—scarcely believing his eyes—saw beyond him Elsie's face looking anxiously from the thick shadow. His body, that had been chilled, warmed in a rush. Questions seemed to laugh and scamper from him. No matter how, or why, she was there, in the coach! She was there! Joy made him dizzy, and his face a flash of happiness as he pulled on his coat, he ran to meet her.

It is a curious phase of intense infatuation that in trying to recall the expressions and tricks of manner of the one beloved, memory will often fail altogether, so that a meeting will strike with the freshness of a first, entranced look; an effect of singular power. This unexpected thing cast its spell over Arturo so that he gazed, stilled, almost astounded, at Elsie, feeling her charm as no livingness of fancy had given it to him.

She was an appealing sight. Her delicately cut face was fatigued, and through a film of veiling and above the high collar of a blue military cloak it suggested a flower dimmed by travel dust; from the pale hair coiled against her ears, wisps glittered on the air like blown corn silk; as she moved a lovely fragrance came from her clothes and mixed with the spice of a huge bunch of carnations that she had bought from a peasant on the way and held pressed against her breast. She seemed to him an accumulation of all sweet and beckoning things.

Yet as the details of courtesy make the sign-manual of high breeding to the Spaniard, Arturo instinctively kept sight of those in which he had been reared, conquered the visible signs of his lover's heart. With a striking gravity, and bareheaded, he helped Elsie to the ground. He took the flowers from her and gave them to Aniceto, who had come running at sound of the coach's arrival. Holding both her hands he lifted them slowly, and in turn, to his lips.

"Welcome, Elsie, to El Miradero," he said with charming quietude and sincerity, and then glowingly in Spanish: "My house is yours! My heart is beneath your feet!"

There was silence as she waited for him to say that for which she had ceased to hope.

"Paula! She's not here?" The tone was thin, repressed.

"Not yet," and as the rain started with violence he put his hand under her arm and raced her in a joyous way through the garden.

At Elsie's question illumination had spread through Arturo. He had seen his last moment with Paula at the Longueval house when she had said: "I mean to help you—thoroughly. That's the way I am; absolutely indifferent, or a mistress of detail who spares no pains!"—and he had seen the watching smile she had kept upon him as she went down the stairs. Paula was not coming; probably had never meant to come. He pushed the troublesome thought away so that he might delight to the full in one,—that Elsie was at his side. Let events take what course they might, nothing could alter that. She was with him again.

"Paula is late; that's all," he thought it well to add, as they reached the door on the balcony.

"Late?" Elsie echoed with accusation. "She has failed me everywhere!"

"Well, isn't she always full of whims and surprises? By the time you've changed for dinner, she'll come tearing into sight up the mountain."

She jerked her arm from him and stopped sharply on the threshold to look back. The downpour was hissing through a deepening fog. The terraces of mountains were smoky monoliths except when revealed by the lightning, now continual blue-white glares. She looked down at the valley she had left, and it had gone,—in its place a black pit.

"Never mind the storm! We'll shut it out! You must have some refresco and then I'll take you to your room. It's off Paula's so that you two can have long bedroom talks at night!"

With excited happiness he took off her wet cloak and drew her to a small table where a queerly-shaped jug of cold wine with sliced fruit in it and a tray of sandwiches stood. As she had not eaten since breakfast a weary sort of hunger helped the weight on Elsie's spirit, and at his gay command she both ate and drank a little. Afterward, when he opened a door for her on the upper floor, he paused there and again made her welcome in the gravely gracious, Spanish way. She listened, and from her under-sense of trouble could not reply.

"You are at home—'su casa'—as we say," he continued wistfully, and looking very boyish in the loose, rough clothes, his black hair, usually so sleek, roughened over the brows, while he held her hand gently in both of his as if it were a small bird he guarded there. "You must be very happy, Elsie, at El Miradero!"

She smiled, nodded jerkily and went in. At once the set look and steady step that her will had managed fell away, and in an apathetic sort of confusion she stood with her weight against the closed door, seeing the odd room only through a blur. Later its plaster walls painted a bright blue, the spangled shrine beside the rough, iron bed that yet was covered by a wine-colored velvet cope embroidered with gold and evidently centuries old, made their appeal to her. Not now. She left the door. Still with her hat on, she sank on a chair beside the trunk that, at Serafin's direction, had been conveniently placed and opened for her. For a long time she remained so, chin on her doubled hand, hardening herself, struggling for composure.

One thing became as flawlessly clear as sunlight on a steel shield; if Paula did not arrive at El Miradero, nothing would win her to remain there for the night. She would wait for one hour. If by that time Paula had not come,—then the journey down the mountain!

The storm seemed to reply to this resolve with screeching derision. Go back? As memory showed her the plunging and twisting roads, edging ravines, over which she had been dragged for hours and then made a picture of the hobgoblin pandemonium they would be on a night like this, she stood up, her hushed face turned to the closed, wooden shutters that had need of their strong latches. The rain was attacking them with the noise of loosened rivers; the wind had split into contrary gales with the raucous voices of Communistic hags.

And after she had stood still for a while listening to the clamor, the inner silence of the house suddenly took on some meaning full of cloudy trouble. She opened the door and stepped out, with no clearer purpose than to find Arturo, confide her vexation, and get his promise to have her taken back to Bilbao as soon as she felt she must go.

Turning a corner she found herself on a rudely built little gallery that overlooked the living room. She was in deep shadow; from below the lovely beaming that mixed firelight and candlelight give swept up. Yet instead of hurrying down she hesitated there, keeping well out of view. She did this without a defined reason, while through her surreptitious sort of stealth some separated thought was trying to get at her mind, seeking assurance, as a small, worried thing will hunt for a corner into which it can crawl.

The sounds of the house were soft and came to her clearly here: servants speaking; Serafin's answer to a distant call from Arturo; later, and a little nearer, another command from Arturo; and again Serafin's reply. No other voice than these four. The mole-like uneasiness had clear outlines,—there was no evidence of the other guests; there had been no mention of them.

She went close to the rail, from which she had a good view of the room. This was beautiful, its mountain simplicity mixed with odd, rich notes making for comfort. The solid part of a tree blazed on a deep hearth and gave out hissing paroxysms when spray came down the chimney. The wide chairs were of planks. There were couches with skins over them. A large desk that faced the wall, its high back to the room, seemed an early Spanish model of oak, black from age and with the deep-seated glow of ancient things. Another striking effect came from the table; though but an oblong of heavy planks, its appointments, even to shaded candles and flowers in small vases, were fitting for a formal dinner in Paris. Her look was held by it. It was set for three. Paula was of course the third, and she was still absent. Under that roof, then, no one was with Arturo but the men in his employ and herself.

A dismayed moment engulfed her. She came out of it shaken, her breath difficult. Paula had fed her with every sort of lie. They could only have been a bait to get her to El Miradero and find herself alone there with Arturo. Paula's lies? Were they not also Arturo's? Had Paula been anything more than his cat's-paw? A burning hatred of the woman swept over Elsie. When, as the feeling ebbed, she struggled to hate Arturo too, all she could feel was a disappointment that filled her like a sickness and turned the necessary accounting with him into a thing of misery.

She had taken a few steps toward the stairs when his voice came up and with the ring of such sharp anger in it, she drew back and waited in the darkness. She saw him cross the room and come to full view before the fire. He had dressed informally. In his dinner jacket he was again the man she had known in Paris, but the look on his face, a cold sternness with perplexity, was new to her. His gesture summoning Serafin to come nearer—an abrupt jerk of his thumb toward himself—was contemptuous rebuke.

She saw him look into the Basque's face, and it was plain that with a frozen sort of anger he had begun accusing him of something for which Serafin, with suave shrugs and the constant outspreading of his dark hands, was making respectful excuses. Their Spanish was rapid and subdued and her knowledge of the language slight. She could only watch; only glean from the constant recurrence of her name and Paula's that Arturo was enraged at Serafin for something connected with them both.

Her disquiet lessened under the strength of her longing to acquit Arturo of treachery; this gave her heart a big fullness. And when one phrase in Spanish that she could understand came from him cuttingly, she rejoiced:

"Paula is a devil," Arturo said. "She is nothing less than a devil to have done this! And you—-you, are no better!"

While he was still speaking he saw Elsie, except for her cloak dressed as when she left the coach, hurrying down the narrow stairs to him. As he went to meet her and drew her to the fire, Serafin went out.

"I understood a little," Elsie said, the flare showing up the desperation of her face. "You'll get me out of this, Arturo. From what you said to Serafin I know it's all Paula's fault—why she did it I don't know. I'm only glad it was not you who tricked me into coming here—" The words broke. "Your only guest!"

Her look implored him to contradict this. His silence was a reply.

"Am I—the only one here?"

"Paula told you that there were to be others?"

"She said you were to have a house party. From the very first, she said that!"

"I never intended it. I never told her so. She must have been enraged because I wanted you here. She's tricked us both—laughing at us both."

Elsie sat down heavily. Furious weeping jolted over her. "What a cat!" she blurted. "Cruel, smiling cat! I hate her!"

"So do I," Arturo said in a still, icy way. "I'm angry—and I'm sorry. You do believe me?"

"I do—oh, yes," she said as well as she could, adding on a hurried breath, "Never mind that now. What are we to do? You must do something—get something to take me down to that place we started from, and I'll stay there if I can't go on to Bilbao to-night."

As instead of moving he grew more grave, she tugged at his hands. "Don't you hear, Arturo?"

"I have to tell you—" he muttered and stopped; the lids came down over his somber gaze.

"What?" she asked with dread. "You must get something to take me down—now! I won't stay for dinner. I want to go. Oh, do hurry, Arturo—please! I'll call Serafin," and she started toward the door.

"Elsie!"

The ringing word brought her back. A desperate quiet had come to him. "You have been deceived quite enough. Even Serafin deceived you, for he knew very well he should not have brought you up here while there was any doubt of Paula's coming. He knew very well that there is no way—" and now his hands sank with force upon her shoulders as she stood lifelessly before him, "—no way by which you could go back until to-morrow morning."

"No way?" The words formed on her lips without sound.

"Even without this storm—no possible way, Elsie!"

"I don't know what you mean!—Not true!" This, though an unsteady breath, was a frenzied denial.

"If I could only make it not true!"

The sincerity in the tone was unquestionable, and Elsie's eyes became pools of abject dread. "Then I'm not to get away from here to-night!" blurted from her in such entreaty and panic he forced her to a chair and knelt beside her.

Elsie scarcely saw him. The most uncannily enlightening feeling she had ever known filled her; an encompassing suspense. She tried to struggle through it. Surely there was no need of it? The situation in which she found herself—the result of Paula's jealous venom and Serafin's malice for his humiliation at her hands—was distasteful, but could be accepted sensibly and lived through?

Instantly she knew that the fear which had come upon her was for something beyond this; it had a clairvoyant whisper that seemed to mourn over some dark and chilling consequence of the situation, and from which only flight could save her.

"I am going—I am!" she kept stuttering in answer to this urging, her face, with a groping bewilderment on it, turned away. "I must go! I must—must—"

"Ah, listen, Elsie—and dear, try to be sensible. As soon as you were in your room," Arturo went on in a quieting voice, "I sent Aniceto up to the only house within reach, a place where they have a motor. It was shut up; the family had left on some excursion or perhaps gone back to Burgos until later on. That was my only hope. You see this is an uncivilized place, and this is a rude, little house, Elsie. I come here for solitude and have never before needed horses.

"The coaches, then, are all we have to depend on. There will not be another until about three or so in the morning—it goes down at that time so that people can get a morning train comfortably, after breakfasting in one of the valley towns. Until then nothing comes this way except Eduardo, a man on a donkey, who carries letters to a wayside post box at the foot of the mountains. He is made use of this way as a messenger because he has work on the railroad that takes him down late at night—but he is useless in our present difficulty. I am making all this clear to you, my darling, because I want you to make the best of what cannot be helped. You must not be afraid. You will stay here and trust me, Elsie. For you can—trust me!"

And then Elsie saw that what threatened her would have its beginning in herself. As he spoke, Arturo's hands had crept from her shoulders to her throat, a furtive, hypnotic persuasion in their fondling touch. The familiar, imperious fire in him she could have steeled herself against. The something unselfish in his concern for her, in his anger at the tricks played upon her, a certain elevation in his bearing, a touch of sorrow, were new appeals that made her feel she was tenderly loved.

And assuredly at that moment only fair things were in Arturo's heart,—"the dignity and loyalty and the love of God" of his race in the ascendant. He believed what he said. And Elsie believed it, too, but saw what lay dangerously close to it—his hunger for her crying out in his touch and her ungovernable response to it—rejected by her mind, luring her senses with the dark pull of a drug. Her enemy was within.

She broke from him heavily and on feet that seemed weighted reached the stairs, fright in her crowding words.

"You know I can't stay here—you know that as well as I do. And I don't want to, I don't want to! I must get to Bilbao—or some place—there must be some way I can get down the mountain—I'll go, if I have to walk!"

After she had gone Arturo remained in a graven sort of stillness. Such an intent and searching look shot into his eyes, as he stood gazing up at the spot where Elsie had vanished, it seemed as if some other had slipped into the darkness, was challenging him, calling down to him through it. The whole effect of his face changed. It grew grim, driven, concentrated in a demand. The wilful lines so faint about the mouth showed like dug-in wires, flattening it. An avid gleam came to his eyes.

This absorption lasted a few moments. As a hard shudder went over him he seemed to surrender to some force that drew him on slowly to the stairs. After a pause there he went up them, his step determined.

In the passage, a few yards beyond Elsie's door, a candle burned in a hanging lantern whose glass was tinted the Spanish yellow and crimson arranged in mosaics. Under this he waited restfully until Elsie came out of her room. She had on her military cloak, her smallest bag in her hand.

At sight of him in that attitude, his breathless, tormented, resolute look fixed upon her—a look without the slightest kinship to the lovely kindness of his eyes when she had left him—she could not speak at first. He gave her no help. Through his silence the thought came to her that he felt no need of further persuasion; silence and waiting were his allies, and enough.

She began a rush of fluttering words: "I'll go on.—Send all my things to Paris! I'll go back to the Ritz!—You'll come with me, Arturo, and show me the way? You'll help me get down, won't you?—won't you?"

He took her arm in a gentle yet directing grip and led her to the end of the passage where one of the fastened window shutters showed.

"I want you to listen to the storm," he said with monitory quiet. "Listen to it."

She stood in silence beside him. He felt her tremble, saw her eyes shrink as if from a sun too strong. The whole world seemed at war outside, women wailing, and hoofs ringing, and soldiers attacking, and fiends whistling in some abominable triumph.

"But if you helped me, if you came down with me—couldn't we manage—somehow?" She urged the words out with a lifeless sort of obstinacy.

His answer was to force up the heavy bar on the shutter and recklessly hold it open. The wind, with the quality of sheet iron, tore in through the glassless space and struck them back, the rain went over their heads like the wash of a big wave; and this during a second. As Arturo fought the gale and fastened the shutter again, Elsie sank against the wall. She stood there, gasping, wiping her face, the bag fallen to her feet. Arturo, too, had pulled a big handkerchief from his sleeve, used it as if it were a bath towel and shook the water from his hair, while breaking into laughter with cries in Spanish.

Mad laughter it was. Elsie had never heard anything even faintly like it from him before, for in his pleasure he had never been gay, never frivolous like their companions. It seemed that the prancing in of the wild night, striking him, had acted as a challenge, called to him to be like it, conquering all, afraid of nothing. In the mixed glow from the lantern he seemed a storm-mad faun, drunk with the urge of his own dancing blood.

Still laughing, deadly pale, and with overbright eyes he came straight to her and curved his hands about her face. As he looked down at her he grew serious.

"My darling," he said with slow determination, a glowing clearness.

She tore at his fingers. They seemed molded to her head.

"Don't," came on a shudder, a breath, for with his touch and the blows of his heart against her own the peril within herself had taken on a stifling sweetness. "Oh, please—remember! Oh, what am I to do?"

This stammering fear he answered by crushing her to him, his arms trembling in yearning, hard in decision. "You are to remain with me here, cara—mi cielo—my adored and treasured love!"

"No!"

"No?" He cried this out with a return of the mad laughter and kissed her cheek. "No?" he asked mockingly as he pulled the pin from her hat and flung both aside. In a relentless way he pressed her face down and his lips swept over her hair, her ear, her throat. "No?" he asked again, this time very gravely, with a note of pain. His beautiful mouth, thirsting, hung just above hers. "Do you say that to me, Elsie? If you do, I will let you go." He waited still, his breath broken. "Can you say it? Ah, can you, Elsie? ... Can you? ..."

She could not. Under the stealing, agonizing, enfeebling delight of that delayed kiss, the will to resist—a struggling light—went out, and darkness like a flood rushed in. Elsie seemed drowning in it when Arturo's lips at last burned down on hers and kept them through wild words that were almost without sound:

"I'm not going to lose you—going to keep you! I didn't seek this! It's come and I'll seize it. It is our destiny!—Oh, I love you—how I love you! I love you too much! Above all in life, in all the world I adore you! I've been sick for you, torn for you. You shall not go! It's no use—how can I be different from what I am?"

For a time he held her with overmastering greed, the red and yellow stains from the lantern dancing on their pale faces, the storm knocking and chuckling and whistling around them. Elsie grew weak in his arms. There was triumph in being so conquered. This was life! This was all! Without it there was nothing!

The intoxication lasted only a moment. The unescapable despondency that flavors all collapse came to her as from some warning wail rising above the clamor in herself. She drew away from Arturo, with eyes growing sick in her awakening.

"Why have you done this?" her whisper came. Her hands grasped her surging head. There was a dreadful note in the question that followed: "Where are you taking me?"

And that dreadful note of utter helplessness in the voice he loved came at Arturo with such reproach it steadied him. With a struggle he opposed the feeling that held him as with a beast's claws. Ghastly now and trembling, he yet touched Elsie very gently.

"Dearest, don't look at me so—ah, don't look at me like that!"

In an assuring way he drew her to a rough bench that ran beside the wall, and for a moment they sat side by side in silence. Arturo only held her cold hand, lifting it once to his face with a scrupulous tenderness; and once he touched his lips with their held-back, excited breath to her wet sleeve. His beauty had taken on new power,—the splendor of line and light of a questing tiger. His eyes showed the fever that tormented him kept brooding under heavy and languid pulses while he comforted her.

"You are not afraid of me now, darling? You don't think I would ever be unkind to you?"

The dire appeal had gone out of Elsie's face, leaving in single strength a passionate adoration. As before, it was his gentleness, his care that fed her craving for him. In an unexpected way, appealing as a child's, she took her hand from him and put her arms about his neck. As he waited with a look of amazed and humble joy, for it was her first impulsive caress, she drew his face down to her and kissed him,—this also in the way of a trustful child.

"I do love you, Arturo," she said very earnestly. "I can't leave you—"

"Preciosa! My very heart!"

"All the fight has gone out of me. But it's the afterward—all that will come afterward—that frightens me. Oh, make me see. Show me where I am going!" She laid her face on his shoulder, hiding it, and as his lips touched her neck a rapture went through her that ended in a shudder. "I'm a coward," broke from her, still with her face down. "To be wicked, one ought to be fearless."

"Is this being wicked?" he asked into her ear that through the loose hairs veiling it was like an opening blossom. "Wouldn't it be more wicked to leave me when you love me and go away to live with a man you do not love?" She lifted her head and looked at him with defenseless eyes that showed her groping for truth. "You did not think of that, ever?" he asked with dreamy reproach.

A light came out of the trouble in Elsie's face. Her arms tightened about him. "Then you do see, Arturo, the one thing that's plain to me—if I stay here with you I can never go back to Robert?" She stood up, her hands against her wan cheeks, dragging at them. "Never, never, never will I go back. I'd even pray never to come face to face with him again," she whispered, and after a pause as she bent down, her hands upon his shoulders, added with almost a sad desperation: "My old life I'll throw away forever. Whatever happens to me, going with you—whatever I become—there will be no one but you!"

The words checked Arturo. They, and the feel of her holding fingers again swept a memory of Paula's words to him: "Will you take my advice and let her alone? Or, will you risk having her on your hands for life?" This was what she had meant. Gazing up at Elsie he saw also unaccustomed heights that would demand unselfishness, and to which, holding her, he might be drawn. Justice and pity strove within him, urging truth.

Only briefly. After the fashion of his race, intensified by his manner of life, he delayed meeting the issue; later he would see more clearly. Just now it was enough that Elsie was like a wonderful flower that the storm had broken and blown to him. Her falling hair a glittering mist over brow and cheeks; her eyes luminous in the sad gaze of one demanding its secret of Fate; the spiritualized pallor of her skin, her charming hands, so like a child's, framing her face; the waiting breath upon her parted lips—all the gold and white of her—these made him know a worship to the limits of his nature, acted as a spur upon his refined and corrupted mind. He knew, too, of the ardors within her fragility, hidden there until he had made her love him; that he had found there like fire under snow. And there would be still deeper ecstasies—oh, wonders!—that he would arouse as the practised musician calls multiform rhapsodies from wood and strings. Self-discipline? Renunciation? No! He had never quite risen to the call of what was good in him, and he could not now, could not escape from the goad of his passion for her. The last wavering reflection vanished, and he was only aware of the drumming blood in his brain, a conquering languor.

"Let us finish this and not speak of it any more," he said, and made her sit down again. He knelt before her, his arms loosely about her waist. "When I say that I want nothing but your happiness, can you doubt me?" he asked and drew back a little so that she could look fully into the shadows and glow of his eyes. "Now tell me what troubles you?"

She grew calm at his words. "There's my husband. I can't forget him. I can't play with him, Arturo, or cheat him. I know that lots of women can. In Paris we both knew women who did. I cannot. I can't be untrue to my husband and ever see him again."

"Well, then—let me ask you—will you grieve for not seeing him again?"

"Not if you love me—" and now her face showed the bite of conscience through the glamour he had brought there, "not if you really love me. That could make it seem—to me—right."

"I shall always love you," he said simply. "Do you think any woman has ever been to me what you have been? Have I endured a hell of failure for a year for any other and still hung about her, suffering, as I have for you? I never have. I shall love you as long as I live! Does this satisfy you?"

She gave him a searching gaze. "Yes," she sighed, and yet content was missing.

"I can't say that we can ever arrange our lives—conventionally—you understand? There's my family—my mother—I am dependent on her. Also, she is old and loves me very much, as I do her. Then, as I've often told you, she has certain beliefs and feelings that are as her life blood and which I dare not, would not wish ever to offend. But my sweet one, so precious to me, there is the whole world with many beautiful quiet places or gay bright cities where we could live together and snap our fingers at formal society and its rules. Would this be enough for you?"

He moved to one side, completely releasing her, and leaning his arm on the bench looked up at her in a patient, numbed way. "You see, I will not try to persuade you with my emotion—ah, dearest, which is so terrible!—I will let you decide for yourself. Would what I offer be enough for you?"

"Oh, yes; oh, yes," she said and shuddered as if joy frightened her. As he had fully expected, it was she, rewarding his self-control, who sought him. Her hand smoothed his cheek. After kissing the hollowed, rosy palm he tucked it against his throat. "I understand that you can't promise more, Arturo. It would be a happiness that seems too great—if—if only—"

"If! Well, dear? What?"

"If only Robert—knew!"

"He will know, in time."

"If he knew—now!" she said wistfully, desperately.

A boyish laugh broke from Arturo. "Madre mia, I'm glad he cannot—that we have not yet miracles! You are a foolish child, Elsie, if ever there was one," and he gave her a sudden, kindly caress. "You seem sometimes not more than ten years of age. Nothing could make your husband know—now. Not unless you have mastered telepathy. Have you?" He smiled up at her. "Or what do you mean?"

"Oh, I don't know exactly. But if he knew—if I could have told him before I left him, then I'd feel different—true. Then there would not be one regret. I feel guilty—until I tell him."

The poetry went out of Arturo's face. A look of blind rage swept over it. "I never heard of such a thing. We are to remain here as two strangers, I suppose, until we are sure that Mr. Robert Maury has had time to receive your letter in which you tell him that you are leaving him for me. Can you expect me to consent to that?" He sprang up and looked down at her with grave, cold eyes. "You are playing with me. It amuses you to torment my soul."

As she stared back at him she had the harassed look of one trying to hold to a tune through a clash of bells. "No," she murmured, "no. But at least, as you've said—I can write!" Her face clearing, she came quickly to him as he still stood with rigid arms and somber gaze. "That would do, Arturo!—yes, I'd be satisfied if I wrote to Robert, if I knew that from the moment I made my decision, from the very beginning, my letter telling him the truth was on its way." She laid her head with pleading on his shoulder. "Don't be angry! I suppose I am foolish—do I seem foolish?"

"Very," he said, and not able to resist the appeal of her closeness let his arms fasten about her. "I can't understand your thinking of this man at all since you love me as you do. There isn't a woman living of whom I could think in such a moment!"

"But you did," Elsie urged gently, looking up. "You thought of your mother."

Just the mention of his mother in that casual way by a stranger and the something in him that often had baffled Elsie was plain for a moment in a look that was a spirit-quelling thing. It intrenched him at once behind a rampart of pride, made her conscious of all the proud quarterings over his doors.

"That was different." This was conclusive as his hold upon her loosened. After a pause he added with formality: "I had to explain—some things. You had not the same reason. It is not necessary for you to guard your action so that you may take support from your husband. There's not that need of consideration of him. But perhaps I am wrong?" he asked with a slowness that was cruel. "It may be your intention to continue to take an income from him? Such a thing to me would be unnatural, detestable—but I am unused to American ways."

Elsie had retreated, staring at him, her look appalled. "How could you say that? It was horrible to say that to me. Oh, it was a brutal, hateful thing," she almost sobbed.

"It was!" Arturo cried and flung his head back violently in self-contempt. He came to her, penitent, shaken with tenderness. "Forgive me, my dearest. I have a bad temper! I am a Spaniard, you know, so sometimes I get into a dreadful rage. It doesn't last," he smiled, "and it's because I am so terribly in love with you that I feel sheer insanity when you speak of any man but me!" He led her to the door of the bedroom and took her face in his hands. "Am I forgiven?"

"Yes, of course."

"Then write your letter, if you wish. Bring it down when you come to dinner—and hurry, for it is past ten. Eduardo shall have it when he goes down the mountain in about an hour. I'll tell Serafin to have the lantern hung out that is the signal for him to stop—"

"Serafin!" rang in her thoughts, but she did not utter it. Having kept secret the experience with the Basque that had made her dislike him, she shrank from telling it now.

"Wear your prettiest gown," Arturo whispered. "Have you what I love—something gold?"

"No. Only one white and one black."

"Wear the white." He bent her head back. "Bride's color," he whispered, and for a moment there was nothing upon the earth but his arms, his loved breath and lips, and the eyes that she saw close as if by the weight of his delight.

"Go." His voice was smothered, his smile much like a distracted boy's. "Go quickly—and come back to me quickly. I want every moment!"

Arturo returned to the living room. Except that he went rapidly, there was little sign in his face of his wild joy. A manner that could be a mask when with inferiors was usual, easy to assume. He lighted a cigarette before giving the loud clap of the hands that summoned servants.

Aniceto glided in at one door, Serafin came gravely from another. After brief instructions to the boy about serving the long-delayed dinner and which he fled at once to carry out, Arturo looked peacefully at the Basque. His earlier displeasure was still felt between them and showed in an excessive impassiveness on Serafin's side as he waited, a conciseness on Arturo's when he spoke.

In the most natural way he stated that Mrs. Maury was going to remain with him indefinitely. She was sending an important letter to her husband, by Eduardo, and Serafin would see that the lantern was immediately hung out. Aniceto and the cook were all that would be required by him at El Miradero for the present. Serafin would therefore leave. He must take the morning coach, and in Bilbao rent a touring car for Arturo for a month. He would return with it and a chauffeur. Going on in it past El Miradero to the Señora Marquésa's country house, he would assure her of Arturo's well-being, and without going into details, make her understand that neither she nor his sister must visit him; that instead, Arturo would motor over within the week to spend the day with them. This done, Serafin was to send the car back to El Miradero while continuing where he pleased on a vacation,—to Burgos or if he wished still farther, to pay his family a visit. When Arturo needed him he would be recalled. For to-night he was to wait at table—and—well, that was all.

Serafin received these directions without the slightest change of expression. He bowed deeply, saying he would put out the lantern at once and would be ready, as the Señor Marqués wished, to depart by the coach. He also begged to say that he regretted keenly having displeased the Señor Marqués, yet assured him that in urging his guest to come on alone to El Miradero he had been thinking of his master's contentment only,—only hoping to bring about, for his sake, exactly what had transpired. And the Señor Marqués could count on him as on his own right hand, until his last breath.

After listening, while musingly smoking, to these assurances of fidelity, Arturo thanked him sincerely though in the briefest way. Serafin bowed profoundly several times and went about his duties.

There had not been a trace of Aniceto's servility or haste on Serafin's part in this little scene, nevertheless his loyalty and veneration were clear to Arturo. He understood the erectness and dignity of his Basque foster brother; it did not in the slightest way alter the fact that if Serafin could at that moment have chosen his station in life, he would have been, like Arturo, an hidalgo of Spain rather than king of any other land.

The letter to Robert was the dominant thought to Elsie through the sweet and stinging tumult of her mind. Only when it was on its way would a dogging sense of treachery to him leave her. Sending it, she would be as honest as time and distance made possible. Sending it, she would burn all her boats, their flames the signs that the river that flowed between what she had been and would be in the future, could never be crossed—unless—unless the man she loved would, sometime, marry her. And even then? ... Ah, even then, would there not always be her public defiance of law,—a shadow that would never down while eyes could look at her with memory of it?

At this thought, as she sat bent over the desk and tried to write, words from her mother's letter recurred to her, and for a few seconds the shallow, pretty face seemed beside her, but twisted in rage as the lips echoed their written warning: "You fool—!"

Elsie gave the whisper of a desperate laugh. Well, an honest fool. There was pride in knowing that. And with the feeling judgment of her mother grew hard.

As they come to the drowning, so in this moment of critical venturing a murked procession of pictures of her childhood rose before Elsie. She saw herself tolerated or pushed aside by Nina Race, the singer; frostbitten in her childish soul with her glacial aunt; never with a home; never loved; at last hurried into marriage when so young with the first man that wanted her because it meant her mother's escape from her as an incubus,—and an incubus that stood for a calendar showing what Nina's approximate age must be. No love anywhere. Ah, that was it! Had she had the love on which most children ripen sweetly and which with her had always been an absolute need of the ingrained and suppressed ardor of her nature, it was not likely that the feeling that filled her now—like the vertigo of heights—would have found her ready, at last, to pay its heavy price.

Her pen lay motionless on the paper while she followed the trail of self-defending thought to Robert. A man of splendid qualities, his complete mastery of himself had been a numbing, fretting thing to her. There had always been a wall between them. Always the flame in herself had been left to burn like a candle in a bare and untenanted room. Although she had borne him a child, it was the child that she had passionately loved. (Ah, had her darling lived! How nearly had losing it taken her sanity!) For its father her feeling had been, at the strongest, a grateful devotion mixed with eagerness to stand level with him as a comrade. She was sure he cared deeply for her, in his way; a careful, self-watching way, so that often he would seem to have retreated into some inner house with doors shut, she to be satisfied—knowing he was near—to sit in its vestibule or wander in its garden. So as he had never spent himself prodigally in loving what he had, neither would he, she felt sure, in regret for what he would lose. He would not miss her much. At their recent meeting he had felt that she had become a light sort of woman and had been glad to get away from her. When, from her own written words, he would see her as both light and soiled, he would forget her easily.

As to his possible meaning to herself once her letter was gone? She tried to see this from every side. He had been little more than a shadow to her for years; a shadow that she had known would instantly have taken on enduring substance had she called to him, or sought him, needing him; a shadow that had generously provided for her from a distance; yet, not one that had ever winged to her over the space between them the knowledge of a hungry heart that waited, aching for the moment that would give her again to him. And so from now on he would become merely a less distinct shadow until soon even that much of him would go and nothing of the past would waver across her sunlight at all.

She wrote the letter:

"June—1914—El Miradero.

"This is going to hurt you, Robert, and I am deeply, deeply sorry—but it is inevitable. You see I am writing from the lodge in the Cantabrians. You know it belongs to the young Marqués de Burgos, but perhaps you don't realize that he is the Don Arturo I sometimes spoke of in my letters. He has loved me a long time. To-night I decided to remain with him because I came to see that if I gave him up and went back to you I would be too unhappy to live.

"Please don't think me deceitful! Please believe that when you left me in Paris I did not dream that I'd ever come to such a decision! I meant after a visit here to go on to New York as we arranged, never see Arturo again, never hear from him. I meant to set myself to forget him. This is the truth.

"I couldn't keep to it. When I found myself alone with him, up in these mountains, separated from the whole world, the world and its laws lost their strength. I got to know myself. I could not keep faith with you.

"There's no use trying to explain—I feel something for Arturo unlike anything I ever felt before, a happiness almost too great to believe.

"He has very little money. We'll have to wander about Europe in the simplest way. I gladly give up home, friends, the good opinion of the world for him. I would endure any hardships for his sake. I am in love—madly in love!

"You see I am hiding nothing. I do this deliberately so that you will realize how clearly I understand what to-night I have chosen, and that the truth written here will be enough to gain you a divorce. Free yourself from me at once, and I pray—from my heart—that later you will love a woman who will make up to you for the pain I am causing you now.

"I'm not writing to my mother. Please see her and show her this letter? She was afraid that I'd take this step. She'll say that I'm a fool—that I'll pay for it in bitter disappointment. Perhaps I will—but I have made my choice.

"Good-by, Robert. You have loved me, I know. I am so sorry to grieve and disappoint you. In all likelihood we'll not meet again, and I hope we don't. I care for you too much in a kind way to wish ever to see you after you read this. Good-by again.

"ELSIE."

As she dressed she could hear the lingering sounds of the storm. Though the rain seemed to have ceased, the wind still shook the house.

She put on the white Rue de la Paix gown. It was of a shimmering tissue; her shoulders and arms rose out of it as from a tulip made of crystallized vapor; it clung suavely about her to below the knees; from there broke into a froth about her pointed, flashing slippers. Two spots of dark red, like burns, showed high up on her blanched cheeks. From her day-long anxiety and the clash of emotions there was luster in her restless gaze, not unlike the bright look of wasting that one has who is spent from illness. And it was so—thin, misty, hushed and starry-eyed—that Arturo saw her come down the stairs and make her tremulous advance to him where he stood before the fire.

She had passed Serafin in the hall above. He had been opening one of the shutters and had not even glanced at her. Still, while going by him she had been aware of a covert simper that had seemed to exude from the pulled-up corner of his eye and his twisted mouth. She had felt it like a smearing gibe that lingered upon her as his hand had done once upon hers; and she felt a disgust for him now as she had then. Her first words to Arturo, as he drew her to him with a quiet sort of rapture, expressed this, though guardedly:

"I wish Serafin weren't here, Arturo. I would rather he didn't know—"

Arturo held her away gaily, his eyes droll and astonished. "Santo Dios—but he is a servant!" He broke into some musical, exclamatory Spanish and added with a wondering shrug of his supple shoulders: "He does not exist!"

"I don't like him. Something about him—"

"Well, don't think of him. As it happens, I have already arranged everything as you would like it. He is going."

"But you have not told him—?"

"As far as he knows, you are merely remaining until I can get you comfortably away by motor. He leaves here by the early coach, brings back the car, then goes on to see my mother for me and to attend to some business in Burgos. He will know nothing about us until later, probably when we've gone from here and at a time when we shall hide nothing from the world. Does that content you, Elsie?"

"Yes, I'm glad. You were thoughtful, Arturo."

"I love you," he said in a soft, even, lingering tone that somehow was the most final declaration.

He had spoken this mangled half-truth with every accent of sincerity because he was without consciousness of duplicity. Some men everywhere, and most Latins, are graceful liars to women. Lies can even have beauty when they are salve upon the needless angers, fears and doubts of those unreasonable beings who always expect too much of human nature, who yet are delicious, and without whom life is both inconceivable and impossible.

"Have you written your foolish letter?"

She drew it from her girdle, a gray-blue square. "You think it so foolish? Why?"

"I suppose because I have an inborn dislike to setting down the irremediable in black and white, to seeing any step taken impulsively that afterthought cannot affect." With a dubious smile he spread out his hands helplessly.

"This feeling comes, no doubt, from the eternal 'to-morrow I will do it—' the mañaña that is the curse of Spain."

"And with me," she said, fingering the letter delicately, "this represents conscience. Don't you see?—it is as a bit of my conscience, Arturo, that I send it. Here—I left it open for you to read." She pressed it into his hands and sat down, looking up at him, while her pulses kept knocking at her ears through her white stillness.

As Arturo balanced the letter his face quivered slightly with a look of ironic distaste. "I would not care to read it, Elsie. Tell me simply what it expresses. You have said clearly that you are here with me and mean to remain with me?"

"Yes."

"You have assumed, too, that he will get a divorce?"

"I have told him to."

"Then you have said everything. I'll seal it for you with this ring," and he held up his hand on which there was the dull gold crest of his family, long familiar to her.

With poised breath she watched him go to the desk. As she heard him strike the match to melt the wax a feeling of sudden, disorganizing sympathy for Robert made her weak. She bent her face, and a wave of miserable prayer for him—and for herself—swept up from her heart.

"Here it is." Arturo was standing before her with the letter sealed and stamped. "And I hear Serafin coming for it." At this she stood up and waited for him to utter the serious message that hung in his long gaze: "Now, Elsie, my darling—think—are you sure you wish to send it? Wouldn't later do?"

Serafin was a shadow in the doorway behind her as she answered. Her voice reached him with the ringing clearness of a child's, it was so desperate and sure: "It must go! Let me be honest with him from the beginning!"

"Eduardo is waiting, Señor Marqués," Serafin said, and approached to take the letter Arturo held out.

His voice startled Elsie. She had not known he was so close. He must have heard what she said. As he spoke she turned fully upon him and at once was struck by an alertness never seen in him before, while his face seemed locked in a look of greediness so pushing he forgot to hide it. Clearly, she felt, he was burning to send the letter on its way.

She would have been lacking in the acute precognition of women if during those few seconds this discovery had not tried to wing its warning to her. If her enemy were so eager to have the letter go, how could it be other than injurious to herself to satisfy him?

A frayed breath broke from her and with a touch of wildness she half turned Arturo aside, her hand closing on his above the gray-blue square. "Wait—wait! Oh, maybe I ought to say something more in it," she said very low, hoping that Serafin would not hear, "—say more than I did, Arturo, about all—oh, all his goodness to me!—be a little more kind. Send word for Eduardo to wait a few moments, Arturo—please. I could say—"

"No." Arturo whispered this to her, the decision in his face like the blue light from steel. "If you are sincere, want to be forgotten quickly and quickly given your freedom—don't be too kind! You have written the plain truth. Then send it—or destroy it. Shall I fling it in the fire?"

For a few seconds her eyes wavered in doubt while no hint of the detonating consequences that hung upon her answer stole to her. "No." She gave this with firmness as she made a gesture of acceptance toward Serafin and moved to a chair, steadying her hands upon its back.

Her deep gaze followed the man as he hurried from the room with the letter. Arturo came to her side, and they both stood listening. A moment later Serafin's voice and another's reached them from without; then a hoarse 'Buenas noches' and frantic, coercive chirrups followed by the diminishing clatter of hoofs on the flagged road beside the garden.

When there was silence again except for the wind that was now like the woods' high singing, Arturo drew Elsie to the couch before the fire.

"That is done—and now it is to be forgotten. Let us not speak of that letter again," he implored.

"Only this once. You're very sorry that I sent it. Isn't that so?"

"At first I was—yes. Not now. For I see quite well that you would not have been happy otherwise. Ah, my Elsie—if women had been even half as true with me as you have been with Robert Maury!"

Dinner was served immediately, and from the beginning Arturo made it a joyous thing. Even his pretense of a slight formality with Elsie in Serafin's presence was saturated with the hidden gladness of their mutual understanding. And when Serafin was absent, their hasty caresses had the sweetness of the stolen thing. For all Arturo's poverty, he had some bottles of vintage champagne at El Miradero and one was brought out, the cobwebs dusted from it, and drunk with toasts that, while not more in speech than the usual "A toi!" or "Salud!" were messages of love in warm glances.

In the shaded light Elsie was magically lovely,—in every detail the sort of blond witch that at sight disturbs the pulses of men of the dark, southern races. She in radiant white, the candles under white lace, no color on the table but a big dish of apricots and carnations of the same hue in small vases, made a picture of great beauty.

When only the fruit and wine were left, and Serafin, with a low-voiced "Buenas noches, Señor Marqués" and a bow that included Elsie, had departed for the night, Arturo moved close to her at once, his black eyes restless with love.

"You make me think of snow and stars in Russia," he said, his arm about her. "Did you go to Russia, chiquita, when la petite Nina went?"

"No, my mother never took me on European journeys—just American cities, now and then. I told you how I lived in New York with my father's older sister when I was little. But after I was married I lived only in mining places for years. When I came to Paris, that was the first time I crossed the ocean."

"Mining towns?—Huy!" he said with distaste, "Ah, no wonder after such crudity Paris went to your little head, Elsie. I remember that it was your hungry, joyous air—a gamine's—as you ran about everywhere, afraid of missing a single, exciting thing, that first caught my heart."

Elsie's eyes took on a serious, self-studying look, a smile tinged with bitterness. "Paris did go to my head—ah, yes, just as you say. There was a mental fever at first and, after I met you, moral coma must have set in gradually—for you see, Arturo?—to-night is the sequel!"

Arturo ignored this. "Yes," he murmured, "you look like one winter night in St. Petersburg that I especially remember; it stands out like a diamond. The Nevsky, pure white, packed with snow that creaked under the feet like powdered glass and sent up sparks—the big horses in the sledges seeming coated with sugar—and the moonlight so queer and greenish against such whiteness, and the ice tossing off blue lights—"

"How beautiful, Arturo! But as you detested the Paris winter, I can't imagine your loving that icy sort of splendor."

"I did not say I loved it—I remember it for its beauty. You have looked like it, to-night, you slim, white wonder, as you have smiled across the table at me. Only the outside! Deeper," he said, with a long sigh, "there is a red, red rose for a heart. Do I not know?" he whispered, and let his lips brush her shoulder in the softest way.

"Shall we go to Russia, Arturo?" she asked, her head bent to his.

"Anywhere—everywhere! Let us be two Spanish gypsies, who care not whether they are liked or hated by others, or what land it is, as long as they can keep together. But the place I think of for us now is—Taormina." He drew back, his face inspired. "Ah, how you will love that spot, Elsie! No infidel," he said with the spiritual earnestness that lingered in him under his aimlessness and voluptuous selfishness, "could stand on the hills of Taormina above the sea and say: 'This is but the result of chance. No God made it.' For it is—God!"

A soul-moving comfort, as from the Infinity he pictured, touched Elsie. It was the first time he had spoken of faith in a life to come, and she felt a rill of gratitude break deeply in her heart that he should have said these words to her on this night of nights. He was not to be bound by promises, yet she felt suddenly a sure belief that the eternal was in his love, since he could speak of God to her,—to her, a rebel against law; alone with him there; every tie with her past security deliberately cut; at his mercy for happiness or wretchedness in the years to come.

As he saw the seriousness flow into her gaze he scowled lovingly. "I have made you think of solemn things. That must not be. We can take the heaven of the Church on trust—for I feel that God will not be too hard upon us—and wander now in our own paradise here." His arm tightened about her in hushed, strong yearning. "When we Spaniards have great joy, Elsie, we say: 'Tomar el cielo con las manos!"—that is: 'We will seize heaven with our hands!' And that is where I am taking you—ah, Elsie!—to that heaven with me."

The wind seemed to cap these fervid words with an orchestral epilogue; it trilled and sighed through one of the now opened windows, then rose in warm, high strains that yet were soft, as if a multitude hummed through closed lips.

"It must be lovely out on the galleries after the storm," Arturo said, springing up. "The moon is in its last nights and rises late. I want you to see it—but you can't go as you are—you'd be a drenched butterfly."

There was a gay ten minutes during which he insisted on fetching black slippers from her room, kneeling before her to put them on, laughing while he kissed each silk-clad foot before he did so.

"Ah, que noche!"—he said with the voice of one drowsy from too much delight. "But this is a sweet thing to do—to wait upon you, dress you, help you so! And now your gown?—what can we put about you that won't spoil it? It would tear like a cobweb—"

"It's stronger than it looks," Elsie said, nodding wisely. "It will have to stand long wear and a good many dry cleanings before I can throw it away—"

"Ah, si? Pobre chiquita!" A cloud went over him. "You are poor now, pretty thing. I am so sorry."

"But I am so happy!" she retorted, and then: "Shall I get my cloak?"

"No!" He was alight again, his finger held up. "There is something that I just remember. I have packed here some ancient mantillas of my family, that my mother let me have for decoration." As he went to a scarlet, enamelled chest in a corner, he was radiant. When from a flat package he drew out half a dozen gloriously embroidered shawls with the cry: "Look! And this—and this, too!" she saw their likeness to two happy children, playing a game.

With the opening of the paper a cascade of colors had fairly spilled into the room—streams of crimson and gold, amethyst and apricot; of sky-blue, opaline, apple-green, flame—a rainbow flood. He chose one with the Spanish colors to shroud in the native way, that was almost Eastern, about her head and shoulders. At the gold and scarlet framing her so vividly, hushed exclamations of almost religious ecstasy broke in Spanish from him, and Elsie felt the flavor of fear at the taste of too much happiness. It faded for a moment at some words that drifted from him thoughtlessly:

"I used these at a mantilla party that I had here last year—ah, very gay we were!—but not one looked as you do, my darling."

She drew back a little. "Some woman wore this, then?"

As he gave a shrug of regret for having spoken, he said with light defiance: "Well, yes. Not a man, surely!—But, don't mind!" His arm enfolding her impetuously, he drew her across the room and paused at the entrance to the balcony. "All that sort of thing is done with forever, Elsie—a mixed-up splash in my mind, from which no face—not one—looks out!" As a conclusion to the words he pulled open the door.

And a wonder was before them. The high peaks were silver, the lowest valleys gaping mouths of shadow; a dying moon traveled the sky that was streaked with the fanged trails of swollen wind clouds; just below them lay the garden, its flowers drained of color, its earthy walks seeming padded with snow, while across it the pattern of the house was flung as if stencilled in charcoal. The whole world was black and white.

With this there was the music of moving water left by the flood of rain. A complaining gurgle ran along the gutters of the roof above them, and over its projecting, pointed corners a lilting note from the fall of thin streams; somewhere, farther on, the rush of a disgorging spout was heard, that ended, more faintly, as a big splash into some chasm. On the intense stillness there was no other sound.

They stood in silence. Uncertainty and the faintest quiver of regret departed from Elsie as she dreamed there, her head against Arturo's arm. What she looked upon was so unlike any encompassment that had ever been hers, she felt a yielding to its force as one might accept the bewildering conditions after death and think of earth no more. Her very loneliness with this man, the wild, sweet flavor of whose love had captured her, and her now stark need of him, filled her curiously with a fatalistic contentment, a rich drowsiness. The years ahead of them! ... Ah, the long years—if Fate were kind—of which to-night was the prologue! ...

And with this surrender, the intense passion in her nature found expression in little ways of response,—the ways born with some women, never even dimly seen by others, and beyond the acquiring of those who, seeing, try to capture them for success in the land of love. It is age-old, this magic, and goes only where it will, like royal favor. Elsie had it. Benumbed in the taciturn days with Robert, a frightening force and fought down with suffering, heretofore, in her resistance to Arturo's fiery pursuit, she let it sweep over her now; a sensuous melting.

Her head sank far back, her eyes looked up fully into his, her hand shot up to his face. And there it spoke to him as no words could. That small hand, soft as flowers yet with a savage call in it, stroked his cheek with gossamer lightness; stole to his hair, the fingers creeping through it; and came back to flutter with the brush of a butterfly's wings over the lovely line of his brows. "Oh, but I do love you," she said, a hard sound of pain in the words, and with sudden violence drew down his head to the tempest of her breath and lips.

This avowal of herself, unsought, flooded Arturo with a new joy too wonderful for belief, and left him hushed, trembling.

"Elsie!" broke from him when he could speak, "Ah, you are too sweet—too precious! Never shall we part—never, never!"

"And I'll never think again with hard judgment for what I have chosen," she murmured. "I am happy, Arturo."

"Say 'Arturito'—that is my little name. In Spain we always add on letters like that to a name, where we love."

"Arturito," Elsie repeated.

"How shall I make your name into a little one, that way, that will be for me and no other? It is so English, I cannot. Never mind. I'll think of a Spanish one for you.—Come to the other side. I want to show you the precipice in this light."

They had almost turned from the rail when he felt Elsie's fingers grow hard on his shoulder. "What is that, down there?" she said with a driven breath, looking back toward the side that they were leaving.

"Where?"

"You see that shadow on the path—there—the one that does not fit into the shape of the house like the rest? It is not from the house, Arturo. It—moved. I saw it."

"It does not move now," he said. "Yet you are right—"

"It is a cloak—like a shoulder, too—and a hat. Don't you see?"

As they spoke and he was bending over the balcony to call out, the shadow vanished.

"Serafin," he said to her in explanation. "Yes, it was Serafin wandering about on the road. He does that often. Come—" and as they turned the corner, he added with a laughing murmur not without its tinge of cruelty since it found pleasure in another's pain, "I know very well how he hates having to leave here. He has an adoration for El Miradero. You see, he is of the mountains. Yes, he hates to go away by the coach—and it's only a few hours off now, for it is growing late."

The abyss that met them on the other stretch of balcony was a thing to hit upon the heart and keep it suspended,—beautiful, appalling. Elsie felt as if she were clinging to Arturo in a nest built, in a spirit of mad folly, over death. She turned from the frowning depths and hid her face against him.

"I didn't know we—hung—like this," she murmured, and gave a shiver.

"Chiquita—frightened?"

"Isn't it foolish to have the house built so?"

"It is said to be safer, as it makes it a part of the strong mountain."

"I can't look down there. Let us go back."

"Come, then." He led her to the other side and through the door that he had left open.

After the awful majesty without, the room had the spell of home. Elsie hurried to the fire and, flinging off the gay shawl, sat on a stool. She bent over the heap of red-hot embers, from which rich forest scents rose, and that turned the silvered whiteness clothing her into a crust of dancing sparks.

"You are not as cold as that," Arturo mocked lovingly, coming to her.

"Yes, I am. That moon made me see—horrors."

"Ah, Elsie, you have a fearfully vivid mind. Your imagination is the thing that makes you afraid. You see all around an idea.—You were very much afraid of me at first. You remember?"

"Yes," she nodded musingly.

"But now you are not?"

"No," she said clearly, with a look of dreaming love.

"Not at all?" he asked, frowning as if disappointed, and knelt beside her.

"Not a bit," she smiled. "It is your turn now. You must be afraid of me—afraid of losing me. If I run away from you, you'll never find me in these mountains!"

He answered with a laugh that, while soft, was of the richest triumph. "You will never run away from me," and by his look she knew how truly she was the woman adored, and with madness desired. "I have made you love me. And you are going to love me more and more, every day!—Darling, you hear?—it is striking twelve. Shall we go up-stairs?"

"Not yet," Elsie murmured. "A little longer by the fire."

"Then I'll give it a last flare."

He said this with sultry calmness, turned to the desk and came back with rustling papers in his hands. To her look of inquiry he gave a smiling sneer, a twitch of the brows.

"You would never imagine what these are: old love letters, to me! I spread them out and read them in a fit of melancholy the other day, when I thought you were not coming."

While kneeling to push the papers under the embers he saw that at the words her face had darkened, and with the new, high flame upon him, he swung back to her to lay his head with ecstasy on her breast:

"Ah, don't you see how I dreamed over these husks from a few who had loved me, when I thought you did not and had gone from me forever? And don't you see how they make a fitting blaze to light a last log for us to-night?"

After throwing on some wood, he settled himself at her feet, facing her, his arms on her knees, his back to the room, and drew from his finger the ring with which he had sealed her letter. In a serious and tender way he lifted her left hand.

"This is tight on my little finger, so it may fit your biggest one. There!—It is loose upon it, but it will do. Now, listen to me, Elsie," and he held her gaze with one of deepest love, "I give this ring to you. There is no other like it in the world. I give it to you—forever. It binds us—forever. White dove—very dearest—if I could give you more! ..."

As he crouched lower, his head almost on her knees, Elsie, her face illumined, bent silently over the ring. He watched her with luxurious content and saw her, still without speaking, lift her hand high to let the firelight play upon it. Then he saw the raised arm stiffen convulsively—saw it sink as if it were stone—while her face became that of a statue, its rigid gaze fastened in terror beyond him.

A frog-like coldness was roughening him as, still looking at her, he started inquiringly to his knees: "Elsie—?"

"A man—!" Her stare unchanged, this broke from her, a hushed stammer that acted on Arturo like the pull of a rope.

He sprang to his feet, swung about.

And there was a man. He was between the portières that shut off the hall to the servants' quarters; they were of some pale heavy stuff and he made a somber splash against them. For his clothes were of raven blackness,—the accentuated mourning of Spain; that they were also the ample Spanish cloak whose folds upon one shoulder were packed to his ear, and the broad-brimmed hat which cast its wide shade, added notes so outré to foreign eyes, they called for drama as a background. Out of this sable oblong his middle-aged peasant face gleamed, chalk-white; his shadowed eyes were oblique like Serafin's, and deep-set, Asiatic, they burned a call to accounting across the big room.

The shadow that had moved upon the garden! Memory of it came at Elsie like the worrying of amazed hands. Here it was materialized. It had entered the house. Steadfast, it faced them, stormy with some meaning.

She had risen and stood away from the fire, a little behind Arturo. The situation had evolved so rapidly, its reality eluded her and she could only take it in as a picture. The man's look held riveted grief, enveloping contempt; it was hard and cold as iron, yet with flame in it. Peasant though he was, as shown by the broad face, thick, short body, the coarse hand that clutched his cloak, his cumbersome clay-covered boots, the subtlety and reserve hung about him that she had come to recognize as the proud heritage of the Basque.

She could not see Arturo's face, only knew that at the first sight of the man he had stood frozen and still in some terrible way.

After this moment of silence, neither moving, the stranger poured out a flood of rapid Spanish. It was like the bursting of waters long imprisoned, that swept out of him as if without any will of his. Unintelligible to her in the words, their meaning—an accusation of bitter hate—was as clear as sunlight. Arturo was cold, only a curt, annoyed phrase breaking from him now and then in denial.

"I see you have not forgotten me," had been the peasant's greeting. "I have come, as I wrote you I would. I heard you were here, and I waited my chance. For days I have been in this neighborhood, watching, while I hid like a thief. And to-night—you left your door open! I walked in. Yes, through your open door I came, for God had willed it so. From the day I knew she had gone with you—a year ago, now—I knew that sometime we would stand just as we are!—My daughter has been in her grave a month now, with her child, both in one coffin—in ground unsanctified.... I came on here—and you left your door open, so that without difficulty I could enter." He gave a chilling murmur as a laugh. "You see, Señor Marqués, how God has ordered it all—made the path easy for me? Why, look!—my daughter in her unsanctified grave—and your door wide open to me!"

The strife grew tense. An implacable fierceness had come to the visitor's whole manner, though he had not stirred a step, the vehemence entirely in the gestures of hand and fingers, while the rushing Spanish phrases, absolutely unaccented and evenly rhythmed as the rat-a-tat of wheelwork, left Elsie dazed. While aware that her heart was beating very fast, she was not terribly alarmed, not even when, during the running clatter of words, the man had pointed at her with a look of overwhelming insult, for she had come to know that among the Spanish even a slight difference of opinion could cause a cascade of excited language. Arturo's sharp "Pero no!" and the countryman's sweeping, fierce, "Pero si, Señor Marqués!" might mean no more than that he was a discharged servant or a tradesman to whom money was owing.

Her first fear came with a shaping misgiving after this thought: Why, in such case, did not Arturo ring for his servants? Why did he stand in one spot as if stricken of the power to move, or as if the slightest move might be dangerous, perhaps the thing to project disaster of some sort? Why, instead of disdaining to listen to the man, did he remain stock-still, listening with strained attention? Why did his replies, crisp and contemptuous though they were, come on a hurried breath as if he were fagged from running?

In a moment she knew why. He edged slowly toward her in a guarded way, while keeping a semi-gaze on his opponent. And fright was written upon Arturo. It was controlled fright, that longed to send out a call for help and did not dare. Lips and eyes seemed those of a mask, they were so stiff, while in piteous unlikeness to them a line of small drops, that could have come only from the viscera of feeling, sparkled upon the livid forehead; the nostrils were pinched, a greenish tinge spreading from them. Yet, most appalling to Elsie was his attempt to convey an air of confidence matching a tone that he tried to keep suave, merely that of a courteous host, while his words made his stark peril plain to her:

"Go quietly, Elsie, as if you were bidding me good night. He does not understand what I am saying, but I dare not mention a name. Send my valet to me at once. The room is on the right side of the hall past where this fellow is standing. Don't knock or call. Go in, send him to me without his waiting to dress. But don't seem to hurry. Quietly, for God's sake. Don't let him suspect." He managed a smile that had the twitch of a grimace and the hand that he waved slightly, as if in genial farewell, trembled in spite of his rigorous effort to keep it steady.

She tried to obey him, tried to copy his attempt at composure, and began her walk to the curtains beside which the shadow still stood. To her weighted feet they seemed a mile away.

The man had continued talking. As she slowly neared him, his voice took on a conclusive fall. "We were a happy family. My daughter was good. You have tried to say differently in your excuse. A lie. Ascuncion was good. We had reared her carefully. When you first came her way, I knew the sort you were, and I drove you off with threats. Then she disappeared—went to you. Ah," he said with terrible bitterness, "it was not many months before she was back—different then! You had left her with money and directions to go home, and had gone your way. And that ended the matter for you, señor. But, ah, no!— You took her, finished with her, threw her away, and she is in unsanctified ground to-night. So now we will have the end—the one that satisfies me."

The curtains were reached. Elsie had put her hand upon them when a few words that she could understand rang out behind her, such hate in them they seemed to fall upon her own sensitive body like stones—"perfidio!—ladron!"

On the last raging syllable there was a shot.

The crash sent her unsteadily and face downward against the curtain that she held to while a gasping call for Serafin left her. When she tried to swing about, a hand fastened brutally on her bare shoulder and pressed her head forward so that she could not turn an inch.

There was not a sound in the room behind her. No cry, no step, and yet she knew that the stillness was more to be feared than anger or prayers, that something dreadful was there which she could not see.

Another shot made clamor. Though this came as the end of all things to Elsie's frayed sense, she heard a stumble after it, a sound as of a falling chair, and Arturo's voice saying "Serafin" in a bubbling, feeble way. The big hand that bruised her relaxed, gave her a flouting thrust, and she managed to turn. She was like something that had no feet to keep her upon substance, something that seemed made of water—and she saw Arturo...

He was sprawled across an overturned chair, his head back. She could see his open mouth, blood stealing from it. And he was still, oh, informingly still in that contorted pose, so different from his grace, so different from—himself. The white square of his shirt was changing to a scarlet square and the hand that was hanging was also red.

"Señor—!" This, a call, hoarse and trembling, shattered the hush, and close to the spot where Elsie stood on those shadowy feet that had threatened to throw her, Serafin appeared.

The curtains leaped out with the force of his fling as he ran to Arturo. His entrance was like the rush of a storm. He was in a dressing gown that hung open, showing his night clothes, his hair tossed. He bent down—briefly—rose stiffly, and fixed his eyes upon the man.

"Muerto!" As he said this, his hand rose, shaking, and he crossed himself.

Elsie had not realized his love for Arturo. The engulfing anguish in that one word that, though never heard before, she understood, made her know it now.

The stranger had gone slowly to the balcony door. He pulled it open. Ghastly, of a deadly composure, he stood straight and began to speak to Serafin in quiet tones, each sentence with a clipped finish:

"No one has seen me come, and none shall see me go. I am leaving for America. You can keep silent, if you will. But accuse me, have me caught, and I will make his name—a dog's—through Spain." He looked earnestly at the crumpled body growing rigid in the supreme stillness. "Her soul will rest now, perhaps," he said with deep sadness, and went out with an unhurried, almost a reverent step, closing the door after him.

Serafin knelt beside Arturo. He made the sign of the cross above the stark face. Utter hopelessness hung upon him as he gazed and gazed, touching the forehead and cheek—an awed caress. As Elsie saw him nerve himself to make his fingers close the eyes and press on the lids, as she saw his dark, thin hands force the mouth shut, a strength came out of the fog of horror and sent her to him, stumbling, voiceless, all the sense of which she was capable focussed in a stupid, asking gaze.

He looked up, saw her, and rose. As he faced her, implacable hatred flashed through his haggardness and flickered around his drawn eyes.

"Dead?" Elsie asked, the word thick in some horrible way and crowding her bitter-tasting mouth.

"Yes."

"Oh, no," came on a thin, imploring wail. "Oh, no," she said again, looking down at the body that seemed broken there before them, stained red and sprawling ignobly,—so lacking now in any trace of pride.

Serafin sullenly glowered upon her, a look to kill. When she had half knelt, he caught her up under the arms and flung her back with a force that sent her against the table.

"This is your fault," she heard him say as if through a haze. "It was because of you that he came here so early. Even when he believed you had gone to America, he quit Paris because he could not bear it with you not there. Never before did he come here until late in July. If he had waited until then, things might have been arranged. He knew of his danger—I warned him. But he paid no heed—because of you, because he had lost his senses about you. And that is why he is there—dead. Because of you!"

"Oh, no," was all Elsie could say, a prayer, a dazed whimper.

"Yes, yes!" This rang from him with increased venom. "And no doubt you are sorry now, madame, that you did not take his advice and destroy the letter that Eduardo took away. You sent it, because you were so sure—in your conceit. I hope you are sorry. I hope you would give your right hand to recall it!"

Her sick, turgid look, struggling to grasp memory, might have touched a stone. Her hand went up to her wet face. Oh, yes—the letter—the letter to Robert that cut her off from him, from her old life, that left her a stranger to everything familiar. Oh, yes, the letter! ...

One moment she saw it, a gray-blue atom, making its way steadily westward like a slow-flying bird. The next, and its meaning slipped from her into a swallowing space. She felt only the nearer tragedy, saw only the dead man who had loved her.

The harshly painted wall of cornflower blue and beside it the bed draped with the velvet cope of crimson and gold. Elsie, in the room that was to have been hers, sat staring at these with unmoving eyes. She did not see them for what they were; they seemed only the bright background against which the scenes in her thoughts raced past.

Her lips were slackly apart as if she had the wish to cry out at what she watched, but not the power. She still wore her mistlike gown; it was stained, crushed, one of its frail lengths torn. This, and the loosened hair that sagged downward in a half coil were notes in the picture of disaster that she made. She sat as if she had not moved for years, as if she would never move again.

Over and over the happenings of the past two hours took on for her a shadowy sort of life: There was Serafin ordering her away to her room and calling in the horrified servants to the work of readjustment. There she was, trying to obey him, yet loitering piteously, too nerve-strapped for the relief of tears. She saw him come to her and try to sweep her from the room with his arm that had the authority of a conqueror's; at last half-carry her up the stairs.

In the bedroom, he had put her into a chair and stood over her. She had been conscious of looking up at him, a longing for comfort of some sort struggling through a dumbness whose rivets were horror. And she had been conscious, too, that his face was as livid as Arturo's, while the eyes whose brightness made an uncanny contrast were cautious and businesslike as were all his movements and tones. He was passionately capable.

Most of his words stuck to her memory in patches: "Get your wits about you ... you look stupid enough to spoil everything ... Listen to me, madame ... work to be done here ... you must realize where we all stand, and help.... How much of the quarrel did you understand?"

He shook her as he spoke, and she had made a hideous effort to drag response from her mazed brain; it was like groping into the mess of a wreck where the dead lay to fish out some ghastly detail. What had she understood? Little, she told him; almost nothing. Only at the last, when the murderer had spoken slowly, two words had made sense to her—perfidio and ladron.

"Perfidious thief?" Serafin suggested, and she had nodded. "Exactly," he went on. "The quarrel was about some money that the Señor Marqués had owed the countryman for a long time. You see? But that is not to be made public. No one is to know there was a quarrel at all. You understand me? It is to be supposed that the Señor Marqués surprised a thief breaking into his house—there are plenty of them in these mountains—that shots were exchanged, the thief's killing him. That is to be the story. The servants know little and will do as I instruct. And the thief will disappear, an unknown man, who will not be traced. The family's name must be safeguarded, kept clean of the slightest scandal. Do you fully realize what I am saying to you?"

With her struggling gaze upon him she had said she understood.

"Very good, then. When, a little later, you hear two shots, do not be alarmed. You will know that I am emptying two chambers from the Señor Marqués's pistol, so it will appear that he fired to defend himself. If at any future time, by any chance, you are dragged into this, you will know what to say?"

"Yes," she had replied obediently, following him by an effort. "I will be careful when the people come here. I—I will say—"

"You will not be here to say anything," Serafin had broken in and seized her by the arm. "There will be enough to explain in my venturing to move the body—pretending I did not know that I had no right to touch it—but I could not leave it as it was, for it may be afternoon before the authorities arrive. So I do not want you on my hands. Take off that dress and get ready to leave. Put on what you came in—fortunate that your trunk has not been unpacked.—Get ready!" and with his breathless air intensifying in capableness, he had left, closing the door after him.

These various points had remained clear to her only for a short while; all, but the fact that no one must know it was because of a sordid money trouble that Arturo had been murdered, disappeared in the eclipse that had come upon her.

She did not know how long Serafin had been gone when two shots rang out from somewhere within the house. They brought her to her feet. These—the same sounds that had produced the earlier débâcle—struck through her torpor now and caught her up as part of life. Like the keynote that starts a tune, they made Arturo's last guarded appeal real to her again; that woeful simulation of a smile out of the doom in his face came back at her; through all her serves she heard his fall once more, then saw herself turning to see him where he lay....

After one whirling moment she recalled Serafin's warning words about the shots, and though this came as a relief that brought a cold moisture upon her skin, now that she was aroused she had but one motive—to get out of the lonely room whose specters were as agonizing as the reality she was to seek, and over which she could spend her heart in tears. For the tears had come. They were shaking her as she opened the door, as she went along the gallery and down the stairs.

The living room was empty, Serafin's voice and a servant's sounding from somewhere outside. As Elsie made her way, both hands gripping the balustrade, her eyes sought the spot where Arturo had fallen. The overturned chair was exactly as it had been, and beside it an irregular, pulpy-looking stain that seemed black except where the candles showed it bright red on the palest patches of the rug. To these records of the tragedy a pistol had been added and lay a few feet from them.

At the foot of the stairs her gaze swayed beyond these things, then beyond the lighted middle part to the corners, searching, without finding what she sought. Instinct made her cross to the hall that she knew led to Arturo's room on the precipice side of the house, and in a moment it faced her with open door at the end of the passage, dimly lighted and also empty,—a different emptiness. On its threshold the feeling that she was alone left her; there was something fearfully living about the great, great Hush that seemed to guard the long ridge covered by a sheet and rising from the center of the bed.

In swooning grief she fell to her knees beside this, laid her arm solemnly across it. She could not look upon the face that had the expression of sculpture under the thin linen. The iron hardness of the body, the silence where the high-throbbing heart had been were as much as she could bear. Under their appalling message, she seemed to drown.

A hand joggling her shoulder, a repressed voice uttering angry words came to Elsie as if from far away. She was lying half over the bed, her face upturned, the lashes, on which the pouring tears had dried stiffly, jutting from below the tensely shut eyes.

"You are—here!" Low-voiced fury in Spanish followed, and then: "Get up, get up!"

She made a stumbling effort to obey and failed. The submerging, emptying quality of grief like hers made her feel as if she too had died. It was as the shell of a body that still had eyes that she looked up at Serafin, tried to take in what he was saying.

"You have not done as I told you!"

"Done?" ...

"You are still like this. I told you nearly an hour ago, to dress yourself for going away—"

"Going?—Going?" ...

"Get up!"

The venom in the thin-lipped undertone shook her more than a yell would have done. When she tried to scramble to her feet and tripped on the torn flounce, he jerked her up and held her so, steadying her, his long and pitiless face close to hers.

"You will not make a scene," he said, and it was advice that threatened. "You are going quietly. You see this is the only thing to be done."

Without replying, she tried vainly to get free of him, and as her look rested again on the sheeted body, the floods that she had thought spent rushed out with new wildness. "Oh, see, oh, see!—Oh, Arturo?" She turned toward Serafin, her face twisted. "Go away a little while. Oh, leave me here—a little while!"

"Señora!" This came in a stern call as to one at a distance. He shook her, keeping her face in the grip of his palms. "Look at me." As her eyes opened, showing a clot of tears and dull pain, he spoke each word in separated clearness as if teaching a child a lesson. "Every moment is precious, and you are wasting them. You must leave El Miradero on the coach. It is due here almost at once." As he felt her tremble at this, then harden and draw back, he went on with a decision that had an exultant brutality: "If you do not go up and change your dress, if you refuse to go quietly, at once, I will make you. Do you hear? You do not know me, señora. When it becomes necessary for me to act without consideration, I can do so very thoroughly. Don't make me force you to leave."

He had not counted on the strength that can belong to hysterical distress. Elsie's arms swept him back. She changed to a menace. The fury in her face rubbed out its beauty and brought the look of an animal almost overcome that backs before its enemy watchfully, ready to attack in some way to save its life.

And then, as through her anger the thought took her that such words could be spoken to her beside Arturo only because he could not hear them nor any sound of life again, the piteous impotence of the dead pierced her with its appeal, and to struggle beside that Stillness that could not defend her became suddenly an ugly thing. Keeping her face to Serafin, she drew back into the hall, he following her.

"I'll speak to you here," she said.

He closed the door, his hand continuing on the knob, and looked at her with the air of one who finds waiting hard.

"Now what do you mean?" Elsie asked, making a supreme effort to be mistress of the moment, as was her right. She kept very straight before him, though quivering deeply, he could see. "You tell me what I must do? You—tell me!" came on a choking sob with wrath. "You forget your position here, and that I am a guest." She almost broke down, had to steady herself by seizing the casing of the door. "It's horrible to be tortured by you this way. Let me alone, oh, let me alone! Oh, can't you see—?"

Serafin did not permit himself to look directly at her. He allowed her last words to die away before he spoke, and then the implacability that had come to his level gaze was in his words. "As I told you, madame, we are wasting very precious time. Now I ask you politely—will you go?"

"You keep saying that," she muttered desperately. "Go? Where can I go? I'll stay here a little while, till I can see—what to do. I've a right here—"

"I tell you it is impossible. It would be very unwise for you to be found here by the authorities—"

"I could explain," she broke in, her mind clearer, her urging passionate. "I came as a guest—and I'll say what you told me—I'll remember—I'll say I was in my room, and heard the shots, and came down. What harm could there be, if—"

"We will leave all that then. There is another reason." The words that followed were cold and measured, an immutable exclusion of her under them. "When Aniceto went on his bicycle an hour ago for the police, he went also to the Señora Marquésa's house to tell her that her son was dead. She and her daughter will soon be here."

Elsie remained silent, only leaning more heavily against the door.

"This is enough. From this you see how you cannot stay."

"Why not?" She asked this faintly, though a new sort of fear of him began in her at the look of disrespect that brazenly widened his eyes. "If I tell Arturo's mother how I came here—if I explain—"

"Explain?" he mocked. "You are not a fool, madame! You know the world. You know that the Señora Marquésa cannot meet the woman who was here with her son!"

Elsie slowly grew very cold, her look floundering about him. "The—woman?" The word sent her mouth awry as if an acid had touched it.

"Exactly," he replied incisively. "Bad enough any time, but to see the woman who was with him when he was killed—impossible! The Señora Marquésa never thinks of such things, and her son kept her sacred from them. Were she to be insulted by the sight of such as you—"

"Don't say any more," came in a thick sound.

"She would have you removed from her presence," he continued evenly; "she would not look upon you."

A blinding rage went over Elsie and gave her strength. Through it she remembered that Arturo had said he had protected her from his man by making him suppose she was to leave El Miradero almost at once, but she also remembered that Serafin had overheard what sort of message her letter to Robert had carried. Even without this latter certainty she must speak the truth now in defending herself. The moment was too soul-shaking for anything less, however wise, and it carried her on its rush, defenseless, desperate.

"I'm not what you say! You know I am not!" While this burst from her frantically, her lips trembled in entreaty. "Don't dare to say I'm not fit to meet this woman. Her son loved me. You know it. Don't you?"

He gave an ironic twitch of the brows and shoulders and let its meaning sink in. "Why, yes—sufficiently," he answered, meeting her shocked stare calmly, and added with an inference that smirched, "Sufficiently for him to have had you here with him—that, of course." After this he spoke rapidly, his impatience returning till, in effect, it was what he would have used to an exasperating beggar. "You cannot be under the same roof with the Señora Marquésa—not for a moment. It would be not less than sacrilege. It would kill her to see you." He took her by the elbow and pushed her forward. "There is nothing more to be said."

When she felt the touch of his hand on her flesh, felt herself moved by him as if she were an inanimate obstacle, the sense that something monstrous was happening to her which decency compelled her to resist changed Elsie to a storm of energy, repulsion and dread filling her. She managed to break from his grip and, wheeling back, seized the knob of the door.

Before she could turn it he bent over her, his powerful, swarthy hands closing fast on both of hers and holding them as motionless as if clamped. Elsie set her teeth, a violence that held her brain taut until it seemed at breaking point going into her clutch, as she tried to keep what advantage she had gained. They bent and twisted together like one body, yet opposing each other, her hair slipping to full freedom and sagging against her face, his breath a burning as he pressed down upon her.

"If you'd explained to me differently—kindly—I'd have listened. I'd go—quietly. But you to drive me out—insult me? Oh, never—oh, no," she kept muttering, almost voiceless. "Oh, no—oh, no—"

And yet it was futile from the first second. As she spoke the words, she knew she would be conquered. Those dark hands, as tenacious as an ape's, seemed to have hold not only on both of her own, that were twined and strained around the knob, but on her very life. She was afraid of him there, at her back, unseen, hideously close—and then—she screamed. Her hands slackened of themselves, writhed from beneath his, flew from the door, and she sank against the wall shuddering, her eyes distracted.

He had kissed her on the neck.

"You—you beast—" The words were a shattered whisper, and her fingers dragged at the spot where his lips had fastened, as if to tear it away. "You hateful—vile—"

As she looked into the deep-set, living points of his eyes, her shoulders drawn up in nausea, her beauty and exquisiteness gone into disarray, she was a specter of despair.

"'Necessity knows no law.'" Serafin said this cuttingly, his breath broken and hurried. "Are you ready to go?"

"If you don't touch me—" fell from her—a ghost's voice out of a maze, her look a demented woman's—"if—you don't touch me again!"

Lasting furrows seemed to have come to her face as, bent forward, jolted by crowding sobs, without tears, she went heavily before him.

A servant, the one that Elsie had not seen before, had taken away her luggage and she was ready to leave El Miradero. She had pulled the collar of her cloak to its highest so that it half hid her face, her gloved hands clutched each other, at intervals a dry spasm closed her throat. With leaden shame upon her, she sat in her bedroom, waiting, as Serafin had told her to do.

He had also told her to leave behind her the white gown she had worn, having shown her that the gossamer edges, brushed by the stained rug when at the first she had sought to kneel by Arturo's body, were sprayed with crimson. Just as well, Serafin had said, that it was not found in her luggage at the Customs; he would burn it.

She had obeyed the didactic tones without uttering a word; had moved in a sort of mental dishevelment where thought of what she was to do, once she had left the mountains, would leap up only as a lightning question. When he brought up coffee and told her to drink it to keep up her strength on the long ride in the chill of the early morning, she had done so; and when he had placed a package in her bag, telling her it held sandwiches and she was to eat them before leaving the coach, she had listened with nervous earnestness to his words, feeling the need of any advice that would help her, yet without once letting her eyes rest upon his face.

"You will find the motor omnibus waiting at the foot of the mountain, all ready to go on without permitting any delay for breakfast, since in this fog that has come up after last night's rain the mule coach is already late," he had said.

During these preparations he had come and gone with quick, almost soundless steps, his easy accomplishment of every detail reaching Elsie even through her repudiation of him. When he said, "Come, madame," she rose without change of expression, with the automatic obedience of a prisoner.

At the foot of the stairs one of the unconquerable moments seized her, seemed to sear through some enamel encasing her nerves, and set them jumping with pain. She stood still, a desperate figure, and gazed across the big space with its reminders of tragedy to the curtains, beyond which was Arturo's room and the bed with its clay-cold burden. To look upon the dead face would have been pain beyond enduring, and yet, the knowledge that, had she wished this, it would not have been permitted her, was a slur upon her sorrow. Good-by surged from her choked heart and flowed toward the spot on which her bitter gaze was fixed, until, aware that Serafin had opened the balcony door and was looking back at her with a scowl, she steeled herself and followed him out.

It was after four o'clock. Faint daylight was harsh with the mountain cold. In this wan hour that weakens even the strong and happy a wilting consciousness of her depreciation in value and her terrible loneliness went over Elsie. The fog of which Serafin had spoken and that made a cloud bath about her added to the strangeness. It choked the valleys; and the great peaks, with the first rays traveling down them, came out of it like points of dark stone pushing through cotton wool. In moving along the veiled paths she had to follow Serafin closely.

"Fortunate, after all," she heard him say over his shoulder, "that this fog is keeping back the mules, or you would have been too late. Let us hurry now."

She wanted to ask why they were going so fast to the road, since the coach was not yet there; could not; nor could she bring herself to any sort of speech with him. His next words gave the reason:

"We are going down the mountain a half mile or so, to the first crossroad. Your luggage is already there, and there you will get on the coach, so it will be thought you have come up from some house on that side. The driver will not be the one you traveled with yesterday, and he will not associate you in any way with El Miradero. He is generally stupid and sleepy, and if you are careful will pay no attention to you. Try not to speak at all while in the coach, so he will not be sure that you are a foreigner, and when other people get in, sit quietly with your veil down. Remember all I am saying to you, madame." he said in a sudden forceful and cold conclusion. "Once it is known what has happened here, it will be well indeed for you to have caused no notice and to be out of Spain. Do not—"

The words broke. Serafin came to a quivering stop. "Wait!" he said, his head lifted, listening.

They stood in silence, the vapor a moving curtain between them, and through it from the road where it rose beyond El Miradero, a mixed sound gradually separated into meaning,—a nearing rumble, the ring of horses' hoofs, a voice on a high distracted note.

"Too late!—I must go back—be on hand to receive them." He muttered this with desperation while with unconscious force he took Elsie by the arm and pulled her toward the garden. She had never seen him so unstrung by feeling. Even in the first dreadful moment beside Arturo's body he had not lost command of himself as he did now. His mouth jerked, his hands moved wildly as he drew her to a place under the balcony where a vine-hung partition made a shelter.

"Wait here, and keep out of sight until I return," he stammered, and disappeared.

Elsie remained motionless. She felt sure that only the coming of the police could have produced Serafin's look of panic. She learned differently when out of the faintly luminous fog an old-fashioned barouche, drawn by a pair of huge draft horses as cumbersome as itself, was revealed; it lumbered to the door only a few yards from her and she saw two black-robed women in it.

The mother, the sister!—for the moment forgotten by her. It was their coming that had made a trembling servant of the steel-nerved Serafin, representing as they did a worship as vitally a part of him as his blood. With this thought Elsie's weight of abasement took on a razor edge. The mother, the sister,—and she there, in hiding!

Since life with Arturo as her lover had not begun, her own knowledge of her physical impeccancy had, in one way, annulled what had been her intention; in one way the shots that had taken Arturo's life had made her, to herself, scarcely different from what she had been in Paris,—a rebel, loving secretly, whose daring had gone no farther than her thoughts and her lover's despairing kisses. And yet in another way, that she saw now made the scales by which she was to be rated, she could not escape from what she had meant to do, from the intention set forth clearly and finally in her letter, and by which she became, in status, Arturo's mistress. Her body sickened at her plight while this knowledge bit in, while she watched the women who must not see her.

Both wore mourning for Arturo's father, who had died several years before; the sister, gravely moving and nun-like; the mother with waxen, high-nosed face, her black eyes staring from between the folds of crêpe that rose above her in a canopy. As Serafin helped them to the steps, their bewildered questions, clinkingly distinct through the fine still air, changed at his reply into a wail for the dead, as all stood fixed, with lifted faces, and crossed themselves. Then bent forward, swaying, the women who had loved Arturo entered his home.

A moment's deep silence followed. Elsie waited, leaning heavily against the lattice. In her fancy she saw them going past the ghastly patch where the crimson cried out to them as a mouth—followed them to the hall beyond—to the white bed where the great Stillness was.

And there their anguish found voice. Through the open window that was but a little way above her, just around the corner of the house, the grief that she had been forced to keep dumb in herself swept down to her in the weeping of strangers. Listening, her face gripped in her hands, she, too, let the sobs shatter her.

"Dead!—Ay-é! Ay-é!—Oh, Arturo!—Oh, mother, our poor mother?—" She heard a voice cry out in frantic unbelief.

"Arturito!" followed on the thin, shaken notes of the old. "Ah, let me hold him!—Dios, Dios!—Ah, my heart, my life, thou beautiful one, my little son—Arturito! Without thee?—ay, de mí!—without thee?" ... And this question on a rising scream was like the death agony of some jungle creature.

So, the bluest blood—the thin stream of the sacred sangre azul—had no other voice for pain like this than that of the peasants' red and plenteous stream; called vainly to heaven on the same key. No need for Elsie to understand the words to know they voiced the insensate loss that can turn life over as a bowl, emptied.

"Without thee?" the mother wailed. And so Elsie's heart cried, too,—one vast, blind question. How could she bear it? How live? ...

"Come at once. Quietly!" was whispered at her side, and through her blinding tears she saw Serafin. He was not the despot who had controlled her before. His face was pensive; moisture had softened his queer eyes. He went ahead swiftly, with a silent tread and without a look at her until, after five minutes' walk down-hill, he turned and pointed to the outlines of her trunk and valises showing against the trees.

"This is the place. The coach can't be long now. I have told you what to do," he said, with a touch of his former authority through the hush that had come upon him.

With no sign of having heard him, Elsie sat down on the trunk, her elbow sinking heavily in weakness to the bags upon it.

"If you follow carefully what I have said, you will have no trouble. Wait here."

Without a word of farewell he gave a curt lift to his hat and left her, lost quickly in the mist around the road's turn. As suddenly he appeared again.

"I came back to say that I can understand how you feel you have cause to think of me as your enemy," he said in a quick, uneven tone, as if urged to speak by some feeling that mastered him. "And you are right. I have been your enemy since the day in Paris when you showed me great cruelty for my mistake. You would not see me as the Señor Marqués's foster brother and an educated man, who had for a moment lost his head. No! Because I served one to whom I was deeply attached—although except for his family there is no other creature on the earth that I would serve in the same way—I was to you a servant only. You have never looked at or spoken to me as anything else. You therefore see now how one can be made to pay for unkindness, for had you been a little merciful to me, I would not have allowed you to come up to El Miradero without Mrs. Vrain. Have I made myself quite clear?"

While he was speaking, the memory of her struggle with him outside Arturo's door and his insult there burned fiercely again in Elsie, and through her wretchedness she also noticed sharply that he had ceased to use his deferential "madame." She had no wish to reply to him. And she knew, as women do know these things, that her silence would gall him, while the most disparaging thing she could say would brush over him without effect. She had not been looking at him; now she turned her shoulder fully on him and gazed ahead through the fog.

"I see," he cried out as if amused. "Not worth your attention? Still a servant? Have it so! This would be something to offend me more if you had any of my respect. But you have not. Nevertheless I will make a proposition to you," he continued in an unctuously silky way through which the intentional gibe was plain, "one that I always meant to express after the marqués had tired of you—providing, of course, you retained your beauty, which happens to be of a sort to appeal powerfully to me—that I would be willing to assume his responsibility toward you. You understand?"

She gave no sign.

"In accepting, you would have to live very humbly and in my class. But as by your own written confession you are exposed to your husband for what you are—a stupidly quixotic thing to have done, by the way, although quite American—and as after this catastrophe you are stranded, with nothing at all ahead of you except the precarious career of a cocotte, you will be very sensible if you consider my offer seriously. Not always is a woman of your sort given such swift opportunity to arrange herself after the loss of her man. Often there are long intervals between lovers, when she can come close to absolute penury. So what do you say? If you will have me, I am willing to take you on. And, if so, you can wait for me at some place in France—Bordeaux would be best, as it's of good size and you would stand less chance of being noticed. I would surely join you within ten days."

As this last and deadly slur grew plain to Elsie, blackness spread before her fixed eyes, while with overpowering consciousness she felt that having heard those words, her soul was smeared and seared with vileness forever; that inwardly she would be as changed as she would have been outwardly, if in some disaster she had lost arms or legs. For as long as she lived she knew she would have to fight to forget this befouling thing.

Not by the slightest movement or half glance did she betray this, holding with shut teeth to immobility and silence. The shudder that she could not control—the horror that held her up, rigid, for many seconds, and then released her so sharply that she sank still lower over the bags—sufficiently appeased Serafin's implacable grudge.

"You refuse?" he asked, laughed, a regret that was mockery in his rather high, clinking voice. "Ah, well, I had little hope, I must confess. And perhaps it is all for the best, as far as I am concerned. No doubt I'll be spared a good deal of irritation, for I understand you so thoroughly. Women like you, living for fashion and excitement, are useless in any good way. You have the little hearts of cats. And what do you do with the men who love you and trust you? You get them in your claws—you eat up their lives—you betray them. So, when you try to insult me, I tell you you cannot, for you are nothing—of no value in the world at all—you, with your little heart of a cat!"

The fog had taken him again. This time he was gone and would not return. Still he seemed there; for his dreadful words stayed. And while Elsie resisted them, a sense of outrage choking her, the thought that her own act had made such dishonor possible was unbearable. For a moment her surroundings faded, and she saw herself as the woman she had been long, long ago, it seemed now—ah, how long!—living in a simple place of peace, her baby on her knees, its satin fingers clutching hers in wonder, she crooning to it in a welter of pure adoration.

When an eagle screeched above her and sped through the gloom, its darting shadow and her own heart, knocking, seemed the only life in the void. And when, following this, sounds came, they did not help her, for through the muffling haze she heard only the coach driver's cry and the clanking of the harness bells, just as she had heard them yesterday. Yesterday!—when she was waited for with longing, received with homage. Like the other memory, that, too, seemed remote, distant a stretch of years from this forlorn departure. She bent over slackly, as if she were old. Her face had the look of the lost.

And this was what it meant to be a mistress! To be adored, guarded in a man's arms, to feel that his absorbing love was all that he wanted of life, that without you the world was empty for him,—and then, once the breath was out of his body, to be made to taste shame with your sorrow; to have no right to cling to the dead, no right even to stay near, no right to tears through which at last would come some touch of gentle healing. To become something that did not fit in anywhere, something not wanted,—a nuisance. To be dragged away by dark, tendony, cruel hands so that the eyes of pure women might not see you, and to be flung out, bundled out—anywhere—anywhere—only go you must!

The horrible sadness of the pariah who looks through chinks at the life of the normal,—she knew it. One must have caste to live at all. To be labelled déclassée was to be already dead.

These were her thoughts as she tumbled into the coach, heard the man fling in her trunks and bags with fury as if he hated them, and resume his directing cry as he ran ahead beside the string of mules: "Arre! Mulo!"

She could cover her twisting face with her hands. There was no one to see.

"Parlez doucement! La malade dort encore."

Some one was speaking French? Elsie's eyes opened and she listened.

"Je ne veux pas la reveiller. Revenez plus tard."

"Bien, ma soeur."

Yes, they were speaking French. The voices were back of her; they faded away, together with the sound of softly shod feet, and no one seemed near her. She remained in an acute sort of silence, while with the mild, slow gaze of weakness she took in details surrounding her.

The bed on which she lay was small in what seemed, from an angle of it that she could see beyond a screen, a very large room. There were other beds in it, small like hers. There was a tall window with square panes that glistened, a half curtain like a starched muslin petticoat bulging across it. A briny smell that she could not name, yet knew had some cleansing quality, filled the air. From without she heard the murmurs of a town, silences between them that belong to the day's halting start.

A shadow went like a great tongue up the plastered wall, wavered there a moment, and a nun came around the screen. Black and white like a charcoal outline on ivory—cool-lipped, bloodless face with tranquil eyes; black robes; high, fluted white coif—she stood at the foot of the bed and smiled at Elsie.

"Bon jour, ma fille. Having said it was better that you miss your medicine and sleep on, you have, yourself awakened," she murmured, and moved in a silent way that was purposeful and exquisitely graceful to the free side of the bed where she seated herself and laid an efficient hand, cool as snowflakes, on the patient's brow, so thoughtful now with every honey-colored hair brushed back. "What would you have, ma fille?"

"A glass of water, ma soeur, if you please."

After this was drained, Elsie remained on her elbow and looked with love at this woman who on the instant had conveyed the sympathy and helpfulness of a friend. "I am in Spain, and yet, this—French—?" she said weakly with drawn brows.

"No. You are in France, my child."

"France?" A breath of wonder, a helpless look.

"In Bordeaux and in the Hospice de la Bonne Mère. Now, lean back. Don't try to think at all, and I will clear away some of what puzzles you. On a train belonging to a branch line that goes from here to Blanquefort, you were taken ill. You fainted, my dear. And so, as soon as possible, they transferred you to a train coming back to Bordeaux, that you might be cared for here. That was three days ago, and you have been doing well. The syncope would almost break, you would sleep feverishly for awhile only to sink again into unconsciousness. Last night you slept naturally, and this morning the fever is practically gone. Now you will get well fast. All you need is to rest, for you are very unstrung. Rest, and light food, and soon—a week or so—you can continue to wherever you were going. Meanwhile, you will want your family or friends to be notified, of course."

As the nun was speaking, the truth in bits had found its way to Elsie. Some black, some red as blood—no, red with blood—they fitted one jagged edge to another as do the portions of a dissected map. And to this knowledge two of the phrases just heard were joined: "Soon you can continue to wherever you were going.—You will want your family or friends to be notified, of course." Where had she been going? She was not sure—or where she wished to go. Family? Friends? She could see none. She was alone.

When the nun had gone away to bring her some food, Elsie lay back among the pillows, and while weakness seemed pulling her down through the bed with the suction of a quicksand, she set herself to look back and look forward, to see with some clearness what she must do.

The happenings of the night at El Miradero came down upon her: all its mixed terror and grief; her humiliating departure from it; the never-to-be-forgotten defilement of Serafin's last words; the ride almost in utter solitude down that dreadful mountain through the cloud bath, the driver guiding the wabbling mules on brinks of torrents and across the brows of precipices with the fog sense of a London policeman.

A misted recollection followed in which she saw herself getting on and off trains, while a grinding ache at the lower part of her head kept growing until it became frightening. Her last clear memory was of a large station, no doubt Bordeaux, and where, in error because of the now enwrapping pain, she must have changed to a local line instead of to the one that would have carried her to Paris.

After this, her dreams in the hospital filtered back to her. They had tortured her during the intervals of feverish sleep of which the nun had spoken. In them she was always in a wilderness, in vast, high solitudes. She had heard water falling, falling, winds tossing branches; had seen shadows made by the dying moon tremble on the great mountains. She was alone always, and always seeking some one,—Arturo first; and he had never answered her call or shown his face. Neither had her mother come, nor Aunt Esther, nor Paula Vrain, nor Julie. She had never called for Robert; had always a child's panic that, instead of the others, hearing her voice he might appear. But he had not. No one had come. No human face had showed between her and the leering moon that also had seemed running from her; and no human sound had broken that stillness.

Through the rest of the day, as she submitted to the gentle care that made her bed cool and smooth, an oasis of peace, she was content to be silent, lying mostly with eyes shut, her fingers stirring at times, and at times a nervous spasm contracting her spine. Her thoughts made a teeming world. Confusing images came and went there. In it she kept constantly seeing the irremediable past; constantly turning from it to find she faced—nothing. Or she seemed struggling to get through a stone wall to some future where she could save herself. She would set her teeth desperately, focussing on this thought. There must be some goal for her if she could find it, and it must not be too distant, for she was weak of spirit and body. Unconsciously she was seeking some one whom she had not hurt, and whose devotion would always be hers without question or reproach.

Her intimates in Paris had not been friends; Paula Vrain was a sample of them. Her mother, as practical as the multiplication table and self-engrossed, would be her exasperated critic. Robert did not appear even on the fleetest thought,—gone forever. And then; through this shifting cloud of useless ghosts, she saw Julie.

Many sweet things of this woman who had served her stole to her memory and freshened it as if flowers had just been placed beside her bed. Her care in small illnesses during three years, her unfailing cheerfulness, admiration, defensive loyalty. Julie, with her little, hard, dark face and the hard, dark eyes that always grew kind when they looked at her—ah, she would welcome her back! To Julie she could open her heart; Julie would take her poor, slack hand, tell her what to do; her future no longer trembled over an empty gulf nor was she a wraith swinging on its edge. There was Julie.

As this feeling grew stronger, a rill of hope would try to rise through her weakness only to be dammed by the opposing thought that, plan and strive as she might for herself, Arturo was no longer among the living—nevermore to be seen upon this earth. Oh, inconceivable! Heart-stilling...! Of a sudden she would feel herself, as before, the smallest thing in that Grasp under which the strongest must break and run like sand. And with this, life would spread before her again in the different, unhappy aspects that had dogged her,—the blinding question mark, the stone wall, the empty gulf.

Nevertheless, after these slips into unavailing grief, the thought of Julie would return and help her. Pictures of cosy and intimate things, the sort that have a powerful appeal for women, would come to her in a floating, interlapping way: The hospital ward became her own room on the Rue de Chaillot, and there was Julie, her arms full of dewy narcissi or purple iris from the Madeleine market, pausing to see if she still slept. Now she was stepping softly through the shadow to open the persiennes a little way to the morning sunlight and coming back to smile at her. "Have you slept well, chère madame?" she heard her say. The water was running in her bath, the breath of verveine was stealing through the half-open door, and Julie was calling to her.—When, cool, tingling, powdered and verbena-scented, she had crept back to the big bed, there was Julie again, this time with a tray that held coffee and croissants, her letters and Le Matin.

So it went, until, with Julie, a longing came to Elsie for Paris, too. Not for the Paris she had known,—never that again, of course; yet still for the city that she had loved and would love forever, in some poor corner of which, beside this helper, she could hide and think, and at last take her first steps in some new life.

Julie. Paris. She fell asleep that night holding these names to her; tried to see only them, clear of the shifting darknesses that sought to intrude about them as a frame.

It was amazing to Elsie to feel what strength had come to her after a week in Julie's home. This was far from the modish and verdured spaces on the right side of the Seine where she had lived. It was a nest tucked under the notched eaves of an old house near the Luxembourg, once a great mansion, now a beehive of poor people.

During these days she had been treated with the loving sort of authority with which Julie would have handled her own babe in swaddling clothes. Morning engagements for work were suspended so that she could bathe, feed and fuss about Elsie, win her from brooding, interest her in the little things about her,—in the parrakeet that a sailor brother had brought from French Guiana; the fat, drowsing cat with glowing coat that is such an important fireside item in nearly every bourgeois home in France; the flower pots on the balcony; the street musicians who straggled at times into the reverberating courtyard far below.

She had heard the whole of Elsie's story the first night, had let her relieve her heart of its weight, and then had commanded silence about it. Not a word, not a look back! The visit to El Miradero was to be as if it had not been until such time as its consequences could be faced by them both and their bearing on the future lightened in some way by the wise counsel of the very wise Julie.

Elsie had been as an obedient child and had risen every morning revived and cool from nights of the most healing sleep. Sometimes she seemed to herself to be a flower struggling back to freshness in a bright vacuum, so separated was she from every impression that heretofore had meant life for her. On the day that Julie first heard Elsie laugh—really laugh out—at one of her drolleries, she felt as gay as if, at last, she had drawn the winning number in the lottery.

They had been talking of Julie's husband. He had resented being driven to take a room with a friend in order to make way for Elsie, and had departed the first night in a towering rage, his roars of farewell crossed by Julie's shrill anger and laughs.

"A week—and Raymond has not come to see you," Elsie had said, as Julie brushed her hair. "I'm sorry! My coming into your home this way—"

"Tiens!" Julie had broken in mockingly between her strokes on the pale floss that hung on the air like a web, and had bent over to pat Elsie's cheek with her forefinger. "You do not understand Raymond and me, ma petite. Coming in here as you did and getting us excited was of the greatest help to us. You see we were getting so dull—oh, my God, so polite! Nothing had happened for weeks to make the air go whirr about us at all. Ouf—it was terrible! It is not healthy for married people to have all the time one big grin on the face and be all the time amiable, madame. I began to see how Raymond was heavy, and how his hair was left now to get long and bushy and dusty—and when he would fall asleep over the paper and snore, I—I—hated him! It was like that with him too. Oh, I could tell how he was seeing that I was not so young any more! In fact we were yawning in each other's faces—and then you came!—and Raymond cursed that I cared for a stranger more than for him—and he cast me off—and I told him to go and never dare to show his pig face here again if he knew what was good for him. So now," Julie had said with a hushed delight, "all is so well again—for, let me tell you—" and her voice dripped with a rich content, "when I came in from the market at his lunch hour I caught a glimpse of him down in the courtyard, behind one of the big doors, watching for me. Well, ma chère, as he peeped out at me he looked—handsome! He had his hair cut most beautifully and a big bouquet was in his buttonhole. It was all I could do not to drop the things and embrace him on the spot. But, not yet," Julie had decided in the compressed tone of one who scrutinizes a knot to unravel it. "Let him dress up a little more—it will do him good!"

It was then that Elsie had laughed out.

And after the surprising thing happened, the smile went sharply from her face, a dead calm came upon her that centered in a gaze on the triangle of Paris sky beyond the slanted window in the roof. That laugh—the amazement that she could laugh—had swept ghosts about her. They rose up in the plain of desolation that was now her life. Arturo was clearest: On the balcony at El Miradero he held her to him, the black and white splendor of the mountains about them, the light from the dying moon on his face. His veiled glance with light through the lashes, as through the shutters of his soul, drank her in. His kiss of desire pulled up her heart, the pain that belongs to ecstasy in it. She heard his words: "Never shall we part—never, never!" And, in a moment it seemed, he was dead. He was lying twisted over the chair, the red square was spreading upon his breast, and the light had left his eyes, all sound his lips!—That which had meant him was not there at all....

And Chance had done this. The Destiny, of which the fatalist in Arturo had so often spoken, had swooped from space as a monstrous hand and in an instant had swept him out of the world he loved. On her its fall had been lighter; belittled, abject, it had permitted her to live. Yes, the great paw that had blurred all the print on her page of life had left her legible below it as an ironic footnote in small type.

She stood up sharply and moved away from Julie. For some seconds she remained like an animal stupidly dismayed.

"Ah, what has seized you?" Julie asked, and shot an arm about her. "Ma cherie, do not undo all the good by thinking of things—"

"It is time!" Elsie came out of the hush. She put Julie from her gently and took a few steps up and down. "Thoughts are coming back very clearly. They seem stepping before me, in my path, rounding me up with questions—and they crush me!"

"Very well. Here!—I will pin your hair—so!—and now we will sit down by the table and go over it all."

Perhaps in no country but France could a working-woman of Julie's type—one who was a poor speller and wrote a hand like a six-year-old child—have been able to bring a many-sided and alert intelligence to a situation like this as well as the imagination to feel all its subtleties.

At the first news of Arturo's fate from Elsie she had shed a few of her difficult tears for him. He had been winning to her by reason of his princely beauty; she had seen him sought after in a way to have spoiled most men and that had not spoiled him; had known how exultantly he had loved life and women in the Paris brightness; and his murder had been like the savage cutting down of a young tree in fresh blossom. But he was gone; never more would he make perplexity in her young mistress's life. And instead there was left something of a fatal gravity that had to do with breathing flesh and blood, with the day in and day out business of living,—the letter of confession and farewell that Elsie had sent to her husband. Oh, the senseless idea of honor that had prompted it! The madness of it! That letter, and not her lover's death, Julie saw as the real disaster to Elsie, through which she must be helped to struggle successfully, or drift—where? During ten minutes she was a concise questioner; and Elsie, intensely appealing with bleak, attentive eyes, gave obedient answers.

"First," said Julie, "let me tell you that I made it my business to go to the Credit Lyonnais and look over the papers on file that had been published about the time you went to that hospital. You see, I did not read any—working over here; and I wanted to know just what had been written about the young marquis's death. Well, I found it was all right. There was an account of how he had been shot by a thief in his mountain place, some very nice lines of regret for him, and some things about how great his family is. C'est tout. Therefore all is well, unless the police should later find out something. So tell me a few things, madame. Are you sure that no one noticed your going away from that place that morning?"

"No one. The coach was empty halfway down the mountain. Then a few old people got in who did not look at me at all."

"And—that Serafin?" said Julie, her lips pursed in malice. "Oh, I never liked him, as you know, madame—like a long, small-eyed eel! Well—you feel sure he will not ever speak to the police of your having been up there during—ah, during that dreadful thing that happened to that splendid young man, his master?"

The dark look of repugnance that always came with thought of Serafin settled on Elsie's face. "Why should he? It was he who made up the story of the thief to put them off the track. Oh, no. I have finished with him forever. I have that to be thankful for, at any rate."

"Good. So all that can be wiped out. Swish—it is gone!" Julie declared. "And now you must school yourself to thinking, madame, that you were never in Spain at all. Next—about your money? You said some money had been stolen from you. To-day we will talk of it. How much did you lose, my child?"

"I went over it yesterday, when you were out," Elsie said. "I know I had nearly fifteen thousand francs when I went to El Miradero. When I was getting ready to leave the hospital and took out the wallet in my bag to get some money to pay them for their care, I found that I had almost nothing, hardly one thousand. Think of it!—hardly two hundred dollars out of nearly three thousand. I said nothing to Soeur Agatha, my sweet nurse who had taken charge of all my things, for of course I had been robbed before I reached the hospital—where, I can't say. It might have been that the servant at El Miradero, who took my luggage down the road that morning in the fog, stole the money—he had plenty of time; or after I had fainted on the train, some thief—" She gave a weary shrug. "I don't know. It is gone, at any rate."

"It's a pity you have so little in the way of jewelry. I have been with ladies who cleverly collected fortunes in that way, and so you see they were never at a loss. You had only two rings as I remember, and not very expensive ones either. Am I right?"

As Elsie listened she recalled the emerald pendant. From the moment of her decision to remain with Arturo she had meant to send this with a good part of his last money gift to Robert; and the same sensitiveness had kept her from wearing the jewel at dinner at El Miradero, lovely though it would have been against her silvery whiteness. She felt sure that once Julie knew of it she would advise selling it, and she was forced to see, too, that necessity made this unpleasantly wise. It was exactly what happened when from the compartment for jewels in the false bottom of her handbag she brought her valuables. Julie gave a shout of joy at sight of the emerald, and some lightning arithmetic resulted in the statement that, with a fair market, Elsie would have for her salvation about a thousand dollars. Besides this there were her many trunks still held in her name at Havre, and these would be of value to some hundreds more.

"Your passage to New York," said Julie in a tone she tried to make casual while appearing blind to the look of surprise and opposition that dawned in Elsie's face, "will take, with other small expenses, about fifteen hundred francs, let us say, and then—"

"I am not going to New York." Elsie looked at her with a stony and sullen sadness.

"No?" asked Julie, and sat back in pretended confusion.

"The last place I would think of going to!"

"Where, then?" asked Julie.

"Here. I've thought a little about it—since yesterday. I'll stay in Paris, Julie. It's big enough to hide me."

"But one must do more than hide, madame," said Julie with wise nods. "One must eat, my child! And your little lump of money would soon melt away."

Elsie's faintly hollowed face gave a twist of bitterness. "I mean to work, of course. You don't seem to have thought of that."

The words brought only a fond pity to Julie's gaze. "At what? You have a voice—that is true. But as you often said to me, it is not a voice like your mother's. It is only a voice for pleasure, for home. Unless—" With candid sorrow she met the eyes that were trying wistfully to read her somber look, "—unless you would seek a place in the cafés. Yes, your voice would get you a welcome there—and your looks, when you have put on a little flesh—"

"Don't!" Elsie swept out of the chair. In a tornado of childish misery she turned to the wall, put her arm up and hid her face against it. "How could you?—Oh, how could you?—Never, never, never can I come to such a horror as that!"

"There I agree with you," Julie said briskly. "No, you must not. A life of that sort of struggle would be as dirt upon you, kill you. Very well. Then come back, ma chère, and tell me—at what would you work?"

Elsie came slowly and stood with her hands pressed upon the top of the low chair. There was a fierceness about her. The mere picture of the half-naked, smirking women that, during gay excursions of curiosity with her friends, she had seen singing in the cafés to the shouted and often gross familiarities of the students, had seen going among tables, drinking with the patrons, pulled at and whispered to by them, brought a rigor of self-preservation to her. For all the shadows left by illness and her unhappy mind, her face showed a new, bright strength; the fine line of her brows lifted into a frown of defiance.

"I mean to find employment somewhere in Paris that will be out of touch with all the people I know here. They are residents, either French or cosmopolitan—but residents. I could serve in one of the cheap and popular little shops that are patronized almost altogether by American tourists and where my English would be useful. I know of one place like that where I used to buy gloves when I first came here. You remember going there with me once—a little slit of a shop, hardly bigger than a cupboard, almost in the shadow of the Galeries Lafayette, kept by a young Frenchman and his wife, and where they cut and sew the gloves right there before you? I got to know them in a friendly way in those early days," Elsie continued hopefully, a pink coming into her cheeks. "It's more than a year since I've looked in upon them, but I know they will give me a chance with them if it's at all possible. At any rate that shall be my first attempt to find work. I hope to come back and tell you, Julie, that I am to be an American clerk in a French shop, selling gloves to my compatriots."

This was the moment on which Julie had counted. Now that she was sure of Elsie's pitiable outlook for herself, it was time to speak.

"Madame!" Her voice was tender, though it had the ring of a summons, and her mouth was set. "Forgive me if I say that you seem a little mad to me as you stand there. Also," she went on, "like one who has fallen overboard from a big comfortable ship to a small boat, and who, without oars, is floating away to—ah, what? Well, I am going to put the oars into your hands and all those things my brother the sailor has told me of—weather glass and compass—and I'm going to advise about what port you had better make for without a minute's delay."

At these slow words and her stressful look, comprehension came out in Elsie's face,—a wan light. "I know what you mean, Julie," she said in a small voice that had a shiver in it. She held up one doubled hand as her eyes closed. "Don't say it."

"As I am your friend, I must," Julie said and stood up. "You have one chance and one only, madame—that is, to go back to your husband!"

"I won't talk of it." Elsie went to the window. "If you are blind—or won't see—then go on. I shall not answer you."

"You think it is impossible because you sent that letter. But ma fille, you have not thought of one thing—how do you know he might not listen to you, if you went down on your knees and prayed to him?"

She went nearer to Elsie, whose back was to her, her chin resting on the sill of the high, slanted window as she stared out with sick eyes.

"I saw your husband but one day, madame," Julie continued bravely, her big firm mouth jolting with earnestness, "and I knew then that when I had often thought him cold and unkind to you by staying so far away from you, I was wrong. Whatever the reason, it was not that. For I saw something in his face that I have not seen in the faces of many men. It was in the eyes—so quiet, so steady and clear as they looked at me—that knowledge of a strong heart came to me, and it was a heart that loved you, madame. Oh, that man—he loved you well!" she said and ventured to place her hard fingers on Elsie's downbent shoulders.

"I did not speak of this at that time, madame, for I saw all ahead so fortunate for you, as you were so soon to join your husband, and besides those last days before you left for Spain were full of such haste and fuss there was not much chance for talk. But I tell you now, madame, that when Monsieur Maury came into the apartment and did not find you, I could see the look go over him that would come to a child's face if some one that it had believed loved it should strike it—tristesse, and a wonder that such a thing could be! Yes, for a moment I saw that, as he stood looking about the empty place. You see, he wanted you! He had come full of love for you. I could tell this," said Julie with deep wisdom, "for I know the look of love when I see it, and I know, too, the look when the heart grows cold as a stone in the breast. That was the way it was. Ah, a great pity you were not there to meet your husband that first day!"

Her hand dropped from Elsie's shoulder. She waited humbly for some reply. None came. And the glimpse she had of the face with shrouded eyes made her think of the death mask of a girl that she had seen once, made from one of the Seine's suicides,—the same look of resolute pain, the same fixed irony to the childish lips.

"If you would go back and tell your husband that you are sorry, madame? Ah, if you would do that!" she sighed.

Elsie turned to her then. She was forlorn, but spirited, burning.

"I was sure that some day you would say this to me. I must set you right, so that you'll never say it again. You don't understand a man like my husband, Julie—an American with Scotch traits. You don't know what his wife's absolute fidelity means to such a man. What I wrote him has changed me forever to him. I don't believe he could take me back, even if, in a certain, kind way—for he is kind—he forgave me. He would never forget it—no, never really care for me again. I am soiled to him, and my value has gone. You can't understand this stern feeling about woman's purity. Your husband, after suffering, would take you back and never let it count against you. The point of view is broader here—different." She took a long breath, with a small, desperate smile. "Besides, I shall never say that I am sorry. Let what I've done make a mess of my life—all right! I shall never be a beggar, and for the best of reasons—because I am not sorry!"

"You are not—?" Julie stammered.

"No, I am not," Elsie repeated, and now both eyes and voice though forbidding, were piercingly plaintive. "Not sorry in the way you would like me to be. I am sorry from the very center of my soul that Arturo had to die," she said and thrust out her hand for Julie to take, which she did, and began to knead lovingly the cold, winding fingers, "and I am sorry that it was necessary to hurt my husband as by this time that letter has hurt him. But I am glad that I loved a man as I loved Arturo. I was walled in before, and he brought me into a sunlight so that I had a glimpse of heaven! He is dead—but what of that? Does that change everything? Only a few weeks ago I put my life into his hands! Is all that finished because he is not—here?" A terrible sadness trembled over her and the look of a worn-out soul came to her gray gaze. "Do tenderness and loyalty to one that is loved disappear with their breath? Oh, Julie, Julie!" ... She paused, staggered by the inexpressible. "I could not say that I am sorry for what that letter stands for—no!—only for the loss and the pain—to the three of us. So you see I am the woman who wrote it, and who meant it, though the man for whose sake I wrote it—has—gone."

There was silence between them. Julie smoothed and then kissed the hand.

"I see, madame. Yes, I see," she said helplessly, "that you are not one to wriggle down the easiest road, as I would do. No!—I was going to tell you to go back to Monsieur Maury, to weep, to kneel before him and to kiss—even the foot—anything, but not to let him escape you! I wanted you to say to him that all those foolish ideas about the young marquis came from the madness that begins in the spring and is so unsettling. I would have had you say that when you were up on that high mountain at the mercy of the man—and Spaniards, you know, are so excitable—that the lover held a pistol to your head until he had made you write the letter, which you did not mean at all—anything, but not to let your husband slip! For you see a husband is not only agreeable, but so useful," sighed Julie, "and to let him get away is like tearing up money. Still, I see now that this cannot be. I have warned you—but each to herself. I cannot make you—me!"

A grim drollery had gone over Elsie's ghost-white face at this burst. She laughed with the sudden sense of fun of a little girl as she pulled Julie to her and kissed her on the lips, then held her away from her as her gaze grew grave again.

"Let it content you, then, that you have warned me, dear Julie. And as you say, each to herself—I to keep the honesty that to me seems plain decency. It was a struggle for me to get up the sort of bravery that was needed for me to do the thing I did. Then I must hold to that bravery. No cringing because my desires miscarried, no bleating like a sick, frightened sheep to get back into a comfortable fold. Oh, no—oh, no!"

The tentacles of war fell as grappling hooks upon nations and unsettled matters of high state. All were not mighty; some were so minute as scarcely to be visible and quivered their way into the workshops, alleyways, attics of the little people, made confusion of obscure lives, pricked at humble hearts.

One of them caught Elsie as a wondering atom when, after only five days of her service at the glove shop, the shutters were put up there with these words chalked upon them: "Closed because the owner has left to join his regiment. Vive la France!"

And this was only the beginning. Mobilization had taken Julie's husband, and she, red-eyed, brave-hearted, was preparing to hurry to her old mother—if she could be reached—who was not far from the French frontier at Liége for which the Germans were making. Paris rang with many sorts of fear and only one purpose,—to save France. Through this and above it there was an hysterical clamor from the travelling Americans around whom the tenacles had fastened, producing complex distresses and also only one purpose,—to get home, to put the seas between them and this incredible horror with which they felt they had nothing to do.

Elsie seemed to herself no larger than an ant that yet had room for a whirling brain, listening to the destruction caused by some appalling wind storm; solid ground seemed slipping from beneath her. She saw panic on all sides as she raced about the city, seeking some chance for her livelihood. Shops were closed everywhere; even the Rue de la Paix was utterly forlorn. Trains to the coast were in the hands of the army for mobilization. Stranded Americans were holding mass meetings at embassies, steamship offices and banks. Transportation and money were words that lost meaning in the hopeless muddle; letters of credit went unhonored; ships on which return voyages had been reserved were withdrawn from passenger service to be used for war, war, war! She heard of men who had lost automobiles; of women who on the continent had grown frantic from days' hunger and had paid for sandwiches with diamonds.

She was at a standstill in this chiaroscuro of dismay when, a few days after the closing of the glove shop, Julie summed up the crisis for her:

"I sold the pendant to-day for what I could get—only a thousand francs—as to-morrow you might not be able to sell it at all. And of course you cannot now get your luggage at Havre—perhaps never—all that is swallowed up in the trouble. So with what little money you have now, madame, we must manage a passage to New York for you as soon as it can be done. France is no place for foreigners. My poor country is like an ox that has been hit on the head with a club, twisting and turning to see some way to help herself. Only the good God knows what will happen to Paris now! So this is a time when home is best. Counting out your husband altogether, at least in America you have your mother—your own flesh and blood. And with us here in this hell, where your own blood is, madame, is the place for you."

Arturo had said at El Miradero: "Ah, Elsie, you have a fearfully vivid mind. You see all around an idea." As she listened to Julie, these words came back to her, for she seemed to see packed Prussian cavalry riding up the Champs Elysées with the arrogance of owners, the Prussian eagles on their helmets making a hideous glitter to the sad eyes of the French crowds watching them. Edging this was a memory of the streets of New York as they looked from the highest windows of the high hotels, and as she had so constantly peered down at them in childhood,—fissures in mountains of battlemented stone where people appeared as lines of black maggots moving in swirling ways. With a new pull of intimacy and yearning this New York became what Julie had pictured,—the spot where she was privileged to stand; her right; her own. And as Julie had said, it was time to seek one's own.

A few days later, with kisses, tears, words of hope and promises of meeting again in better days, Elsie, after forcing a third of her small capital on her good friend, left her. On a French ship that sailed packed to the deck rails, with portholes masked and lights out, she was one of five in a second-class cabin that had been meant to hold three.

They were at breakfast,—the Vinings. At first sight this might call up a picture of Elsie's mother and the hat creator who was her husband in a trim room where a table glowed with damask, sparkled with silver and where a maid, immaculately capped, placed eggs and bacon before the master in his correct summer flannels and ready for business.

Quite different. The Vinings were in half-opened bathrobes, Nina looking scalped under a blue ribbon that hid her hair curlers; an hotel tray took up the end of a table on which there was a litter that began with a manicure set, continued to a heap of soiled gloves ready for the cleaner's, and ended in a half-trimmed hat.

Nina Race, for she was called that about equally with Mrs. Vining—and Percy approved of it as a note out of the ordinary that helped business—was balancing a brocaded mule on her toe and frowning at a letter that had slipped from her limp hand and now lay on the floor. Nina was as fixedly youthful in type as she had been in Elsie's childhood, except for those shadowings that come relentlessly between cheek and chin when men and women get to forty. Her hair was almost golden this year; her nose was that lovely sort of a snub that so helps a woman in her fight against Time; she had a beautiful mouth, much like Elsie's in bowlike form but without its lovable pensiveness, Nina's curling almost ridiculously, with deep curves and nicked corners,—a tilted-up redness of gayety; and even in the cumbersome bathrobe she showed the slimness of a girl with the height that belongs to about fifteen years.

Percy was hunched over the morning paper, reading the headlines about the war and speculating on what influence this new, martial note would have on the season's hats. He was a narrow young man with weary shoulders, long legs so thin they seemed like lathes under his clothes, and flat, pointed feet always conspicuous below tight and short trouser legs in the purple stockings that he usually affected. He was blond, almost bald at thirty, almost chinless, with pale, protruding eyes that seldom smiled. He had a light, floating sort of voice that never strengthened, although he was given to the most vehement expressions. As he was also a perfect imitation of the English fop of comic opera, his extravagant statements in languid accents were of a sort to make one see Bond Street instead of Fifth Avenue. He was always "keen" for a thing, or it was "quite too utterly beastly"; it was "top hole", or he was "fed up with it."

For all this lightweight outwardness he was a rock of sense. Even his seemingly unsuitable marriage was bound to continue a success; he had contracted it with the caution with which he signed a lease. Nina adored him, and he had always found the devotion of one person necessary for his comfort. As she was so much older, she was also very grateful to him, and this kept his ego pleasantly warmed. Moreover, she had anticipatory millinery inspirations that made her a valuable business partner without the depressing need of splitting profits. And best of all—he liked her.

"Well, Perce," Nina said, tilting the coffee pot to extract the last drop, "you've read Elsie's letter to me, and you haven't helped me a bit—"

"Haven't I? I've told you the most important thing—she's stony! She must be, to put up at that rummy hole down in that ghastly neighborhood."

"Maybe she's gone there because it's so French. She does such queer, impulsive things, dearest—always has. If she met some French people on the ship who were going there, and she liked them, that would be quite enough for Elsie. She never had my sense of values." She picked up the letter as she spoke and eyed it drearily.

"Rubbish!" Percy sniffed. "That's not one of the French places; it's cheap commercial! I tell you," he said again as he rose and lifted his shoulders briefly in what might have become a yawn, "she's stony. And it means that she and Maury have had a serious spill—you know you were afraid of it—that Spaniard! See if I'm not right. Probably Maury would have told you all about it when he called here three weeks ago, if we'd been in town and before he went off again somewhere—Pittsburgh, didn't they say at his office, when you telephoned? And you remember how he wrote on his card that he was sorry not to see you!—even said very sorry, I remember."

"Oh, he'd say that anyway, coming for the first time, after being away years—"

"Ah, but he called twice, you see! Now take it from me, your very original daughter broke loose some way—Maury found it out—they've parted—and for the present, at least, she's on the rocks! Let me hear her letter again. I only glanced at the thing."

"'Dear Muv,'" Nina began obediently.

"F-f-f—h!" This was a mincing sound of nausea from Percy. "How I hate her tacking 'mother' to you. Can't see why you, a woman in the public eye, ever had a child. Doesn't fit your type at all. Too utterly dreary!"

"Well, I had her, and I have her still!" Nina sparkled as she curled herself in the armchair, for she had never liked what she called "the mother stunt" and revelled in being told that she did not look the part. "Besides, there is something in it, Percy, that you, not being a mother, can't understand. I've got to go to Elsie and see what I can do for her—just got to."

"Go on with the letter," Percy remarked darkly.

"... I reached here last night after a most exciting and uncomfortable voyage. No doubt you have seen Robert by this time, or heard from him of what has happened and how things are with us. There is more to tell you—things that he does not know about yet. I won't write of it, and please don't telephone me. This is not a thing to be talked of that way. I want you here, muv. Don't imagine I'm going to burden you and Mr. Vining—"

"Rather not!" Percy interrupted. "Why the deuce should I be burdened with a married woman that I've never seen, just because she goes dotty over a foreign bounder?"

"You are a silly," Nina cooed. "You don't know what you're talking about, dear. Arturo is a Spanish marquis—one of the oldest names in Spain. And handsome?—the man's a dream! Why, let me tell you that if he'd take the trouble to come over here, he could marry any one of a dozen of multimillionaires' daughters as easily as turning his hand. I saw women of fortune and title run after him shamelessly, yet for nearly two years he's never looked at one of them—quite mad about Elsie. So don't be too hard on her. She was as ignorant of the world as a baby until she went to Paris and was left there all alone to plunge at her own, impulsive will. Besides, she's a girlish, sweet thing—doesn't look a day over twenty. It's not the least bit surprising to me that Don Arturo completely turned her head!"

"And now we have the trouble of turning it back," Percy said, as he went concavely into the bedroom. "Go on talking. I can hear you from here."

"Where was I?" Nina muttered, bending over the letter again:

"... to burden you and Mr. Vining. I simply want you to help me in the first steps that must be taken—"

"Divorce!" Percy called out with a conclusive, smacking sound. "I forgot she said that. It's divorce as plain as the nose on your face!"

"...So come as soon as you get this. Come in the morning. But oh, let me ask you one thing—don't come to criticize or scold me—"

"Impertinent, I call that!" Percy snapped. "My word—!"

... What's done, is done. Help me to piece together what I have left. Please come right away.—Faithfully—Elsie."

"Not a word of affection!" Percy appeared at the door with his head through a China silk shirt whose bold purple bars gave it the effect of a diminutive awning. "Make a note of that, my dear—" and his bulging eyes had a mean smirk, "your dear daughter merely means to make use of you. She doesn't even try to hide it."

"That's Elsie," said Nina, as she folded the letter, uncurled herself, and passed him into the bedroom. "She's always been so outspoken. To tell you the truth, she doesn't love me—and in a way, I can't blame her."

"What does that mean, may I ask?"

"She was too affectionate as a child, and I didn't encourage it," Nina said lightly. "She was always asking me to kiss her, and often, when I was going out, all ready for the stage, she'd put her arms around me so hard and tight she'd take my breath away. At last, on one night that I remember—she was about eleven and in bed early because she had a cold or something—I came in to say good-night to her. She sprang up and clutched me as if she were insane. 'You haven't kissed me for three days,' she said, and her eyes had a craving, wild kind of look. 'I counted them!' 'And I won't kiss you for three more,' I said, getting away from her, all twisted. 'You paw so,' I couldn't help saying, for I was furious, 'and I hate being pawed!' I never forgot the queer change that went over her, the look she fixed on me. If I'd suddenly turned into a snake before her, she couldn't have grown more still and terrified. 'I won't—any more,' she said, and slipped face down among the bedclothes. And to tell you the truth, Perce, she kept her word. In fact, it worried me how silent and cold she grew when alone with me, so that at last it was I who would sometimes go and kiss her. She'd let me—I can't say more—just let me, for I never had a real kiss from her again, not even on her wedding day," said Nina, who was now powdering neck and face with a lavishness that filled the air with a mist. "No, she doesn't love me as girls love their mothers, and doesn't pretend to."

"I know I'll simply detest her," said Percy in a mincing yet implacable way, as he wriggled his foot into a pump. "I hate that straightforward sort of person—always conceited. I'd take my time about hurrying to her, I can tell you!"

"I shall get to her as fast as a taxi can take me," Nina replied affably. "You see, Perce, you're not a mother."

"I know I'm not!" he screamed in thin-sounding exasperation. "You said that before. And as—obviously—it would be impossible for me to be a mother, please don't say it again!"

It was close to three o'clock when Nina appeared at the hat shop. This word was never used by the Vinings; they called it the "place" or the "business." And outwardly it no more suggested millinery than it did hardware. The one imposing plate-glass window, flat on Fifth Avenue, was as deep as a small room, and in it were several things—a fall of Italian lace, a carpet of ancient embroidery, a vase made of gilded wicker work from which flowers trailed, and a small, stuffed white goat with one lifted hoof placed airily on the vase—but not a hat in sight. Only Percy had the answer to this mystifying decoration and he gave it to no one but Nina:

"You say you don't understand the window, my dear? That's exactly the effect I wanted. What people can't understand, they remember. Besides to get a peep at a Vining hat they've got to come inside—and when they do, it's the fly walking into the arms of the spider! Clever? Ra-ther!"

Percy was carefully crushing a flapping Leghorn of the shepherdess type over the left eye of a portly woman who should have worn the matron's toque of saner days.

"You have something about you—a je ne sais quoi—for this simplicity, madam," he was saying as Nina entered. "It does not matter that the face is a trifle—full—since you have that youthful expression—"

He saw that Nina had a jaded, almost a tousled air as she closed the door on the baking street. After flinging one look eloquent of unhappy news to him, she passed without speaking through the show room into their sanctum at the back, where the accounts were made up and where their most profitable customers often had tea, or something in a cup that looked like it but whose resemblance ended with the color.

She was sipping a gin and lemon when he came in after completing the iniquitous sale. She had flung off her hat and was clutching her head.

"Oh, Perce," she said and flapped one of her small hands close to her ear as a landed, half-dead fish does its tail, "oh, my dear!—"

"As bad as that?" came from his contracted mouth. He sat before her, doubled over, and hugged a lifted knee. "Cough it up," he said, forgetting for the moment to be vulgar in some British way.

She talked with weary breaks for five minutes, during which he made no sound and, when she had finished, Elsie's story was plain to the last detail. Percy's look, at first peevish, had become savage. He hated anything that took attention from himself or disturbed his personal routine. This daughter of his wife's was doing both and had become, as well, a disgraced petitioner instead of the newly rich benefactor who might have put money into his business and whom he had intended to flatter with that end in view. His sudden hatred of her had the potency of vitriol.

"That letter she sent!" Nina said desperately. "Oh, a terrible letter!—didn't leave her a peg to stand on. I made her go over every word of it. She told Robert she didn't care a pin about him any more, that she was madly in love with Arturo, was writing it up in his mountain place, all alone with him, was going to stay on with him for the rest of her life, and told Robert to divorce her at once." She gazed at him in flat helplessness. "And now the Spaniard is—dead! And if she hadn't sent that letter the whole thing could be dismissed, for you see she did nothing seriously wrong—"

"Hadn't the chance," Percy rasped.

"Chance or not, she was kept from the extreme madness. The whole thing could be smothered up as a foolish escapade—only for that awful letter! Oh, I feel as if I'd go crazy."

"And you say she won't try to get back with Maury? Won't beg him—?"

"Beg?" Nina almost screamed. "I wish you'd heard her! She'd see me dead at her feet rather than open her mouth."

"Then as she's a dashed lunatic, you must go to him—tell him how the fellow was killed before the affair had started—"

Nina was almost too tired to continue. "Oh, Perce," she sniffed into a corner of her handkerchief, "I did. I went straight to his office away downtown, and without a bit of lunch. Robert wasn't there. He won't be back till to-morrow. Besides," she said with deeper hopelessness, "between ourselves, I don't believe that anything I could say to him would do a bit of good. It wouldn't count with his conscientious sort that something like a thunderbolt had happened to prevent Elsie from living with De Burgos—"

"He wouldn't believe it," Percy interposed. "I don't myself. No man would! Up in the mountains—scene all set as she wrote—and then she back here as pure as an Easter lily? 'Nay, nay, Pauline!'—too thick, too thick!"

"He might believe it, but it wouldn't help. Robert Maury sees straight colors. With him white and black never mix to make gray. A woman is worth while—or she is not. She's straight—or she's crooked. He'd only consider that his wife had allowed a man to make love to her, and that her intention—set forth in ink—had been to live with that man, and chuck him. Oh—it's just terrible!" she ended on a wretched sigh.

"Then she's not going to make any play at all to get back. And, as you say she is against taking any help from him, it can only mean that she's going to try and fasten down on us like a leech. But I be dashed if—!"

"No, there's just one mite of hope. After I'd talked myself hoarse for an hour, showing how it was only Robert's right to know where she was, so he could get the matter settled—the divorce, you know—she wrote him a few lines and asked him to come to the hotel to-morrow afternoon. Just that—not another word. You'd think she was writing to—to—a piano tuner!" Nina said, and with eyes closed in exhaustion finished the gin.

"She's dotty! A bally lunatic!" was Percy's summing up.

The August day had a deadly heat; there was humidity without sun, except as it came like the suggestion of a burning lens through the mist. Vagrants slept flagrantly in the public gaze on the benches in Union Square. Men, carrying hats, with heads sagging backward to keep their chins from the touch of damp collars, and women in blouses as transparent as their veils moved with an effort and a resentful look as of creatures making an undesired way in an element not their own. Touring cars held the only refreshed ones, in town for the day from country homes.

The physical discomfort was without acuteness for Elsie. She had gone for a morning walk to escape from the boxlike hotel bedroom and was now dragging herself and her thoughts up the rise of Fifth Avenue that was capped by a lilac-tinted cloud. She was in a curious mood. Critical as this hour was for her, she did not seem to care. Her talk with her mother had but emphasized the distance between them, made her see with the clear eyes of the disillusionized her pressing need of self-helpfulness in a world grown dismayingly big and that was able to exist successfully without a thought of her. Yet the knowledge, instead of biting in as it had in Paris, left her unconcerned.

When she had written to Robert, because she could not refuse Nina's abjectly frantic appeal, she had felt cold fear of him; that had gone quickly with all the rest into the apathy that formed the present. In this raw hour, the meeting with him ahead of her, she had sharp sense only for the past. A secret temple, swimming in light, seemed to be in the depths of herself; and there she glowed answeringly, for there all that was finished was alive again.

Elsie was one of those sensitive to the magic of memory. Under it the dream figure of the dead could walk beside her, become the poignant thing; the "vanished hand" hold hers. She was back in Paris—years before—her first days, when every charming impression had the potency of a discovery. Ah, the blue morning haze enwrapping the great Arch on its rise; the sunset making it as a door into the sky. And the dear smells—the tang of warmed asphalt with cool odors from the Seine, the scent of the chestnut blossoms along the Champs Elysées and from the hyacinths and narcissi in the many vendors' carts,—all the magic of Paris when it is spring. Then her meeting with Arturo—the headiness that began; the bewitched confusion. As this became the love of the later time, she was with him in the Longueval garden, the melting voice of the English contralto seeming to plead for him: "Come back to me, beloved, or I die!" With racing blood she was beside him in the upper hall at El Miradero, the storm's stridor filling the trembling house as he swept away her defenses with the yearning of his prayer and the soft fire of his lips. She did not see him dead. Not to-day.

Yes, it was a curious mood and a profitless one, for this pull of the lost had no value in the world struggle before her; ah, no value at all. Still it held, and the dead walked close to her, spoke her name, smiled at her. Up the avenue and then down, she went heavily,—she and her sweet torment.

This relaxed somewhat as she reëntered the hotel; it was so shabby, harsh, so visibly a part of her new decadence. And when the clerk handed her a memorandum to the effect that Mr. Maury had telephoned and would call at four o'clock, the spell broke, sank quite away. Hard, her breath held back, the cold fear of yesterday crept over her again and tightened. She stared at the words as at the face of a judge.

After that her thoughts centered on the future,—its first fragment this interview with Robert that had to be, before finis was written between them. It was an ugly necessity. She would have shirked it but for Nina; would have kept hidden from him, reduced to a memory, while he took what course he pleased. As he had to be faced, she tried to get hold upon what was in her of the practical. She had been starkly honest with him in her letter from El Miradero. Let her only be passive and honest still, while he would tell her briefly how their joint freedom was to be obtained, and then he would go away. It need not be too hard if she but nerved herself to a sort of stony philosophy and acquiescence.

She put on one of the plain gowns that she had bought as suitable for a worker in the Paris shop,—a straight gray linen much like a large apron with sleeves, and with a turned-over, boyish white collar under which a length of black silk was knotted. She did not touch her face except to powder it. Although she still had with her all the toilet trickeries that once had seemed so alluring, she had lost the enthusiasm necessary for their use, even in the most restrained way; they belonged to a woman who had had the heart to be vain.

She was ready at a few moments after three. The time, that at first had seemed to crawl, began to suggest an opponent determined to take her strength. Somewhere, lately, in her reading she had seen a word "harrier-hard"; it had brought her the picture of a hunting dog that held like steel on a taut leash, and she had told herself that she must be like that,—harrier-hard. But when she felt every moment of waiting ten times its length, she dreaded what at the end of so many of them her physical ebb-tide and her thoughts in that dingy room would do with her. She dreaded feeling soft, tearful, lonely, and of having Robert Maury see that she was these things. That must not be. For she had no repentance. The plea of the woman who has made a blunder through misconception of herself was not for her. She had loved Arturo,—she had, and did still. As she had told Julie, her regret was for the pain edging that truth and for the fatality that had turned her hopes into tragedy.

These several anxieties gradually lessened before another that nipped like a gnat,—her mother might arrive just ahead of Robert, or, even worse, while he was there. She was about to try to reach Nina on the telephone and warn her to stay away when word came up from the office that Mrs. Vining was calling. And it lacked only ten minutes of four!

Elsie straightened and kept her eyes on the door, desperation darkening them. This look, with the Quakerish gravity of her gown, was so like an attack upon Nina when she clicked in on the slippers that were as absurdly tiny as their buckles were huge, that she stood still in the doorway, her first planned phrase shattered.

"You should have come earlier," Elsie said, the words nervous and rushed together. "You can't stay now, muv. Robert will be here in a few moments."

"Oh, so he's coming!" Nina entered eagerly, her face radiant. "Well, my dear, you've put on just the right thing to make a good impression; you're like a schoolgirl, pale, and with lovely shadows under your eyes from studying too hard! There are a few other things I want to say to you—"

"Don't say them." Elsie's tense hands urged her prayerfully to the door. "Can't you see that if you talk I'm likely to go to pieces?"

"Goodness, am I so terrible?" Nina pouted. "Well, I'll go—but just listen to this—I didn't dare speak to Percy as I promised you, about giving you a berth as saleswoman with him. He'd have snapped my head off! So, dear," and she held fast to the knob, determined to finish, "do remember how hard it is for any one to get work just now with the summer and this war! And do remember that while of course you'll easily marry again, the preliminaries do require a little time—now don't they? And so, dear," she sighed conclusively, by this time in the hall, "if Robert insists on your taking a small income, even though, as you said, he isn't a mite to blame and you are—do take it. But anyway, if you don't—" A genuine mist here came to Nina's eyes and she shot an excellently tailored arm over the gray linen shoulder, "I want you to know that you can count on me, dear—yes, to my last penny, and Perce can go to the devil! I've got fifteen hundred of my own in a savings bank that he doesn't know a thing about, and if the worst comes—it's yours. I thought this all out, coming down in the taxicab," Nina sniffed, her face wet, as for the first time since that night in the lonely long ago she felt Elsie seize her and kiss her lips with a slow, deep warmth.

"What bright things come to you in a taxicab!" she said, a smile passing over her sad young face. "Ah, so good of you! But never fear, muv; I won't take your little hoard—"

"Then you must take something from Robert! As he's so generous, it's but natural he'd—"

"And I'll never do that!" Elsie breathed with a touch of wildness. "Something will turn up to help me. I'll see, I'll think. Good-by—"

The telephone bell rang.

"Robert!" broke from both in a whisper.

Elsie's lips paled. She seemed for a moment to lose the power of moving. Afterward she was only dully conscious of answering the call, saying that Mr. Maury might come up; and of her mother, who feared to meet him in the halls, retreating with a chair to the bathroom, as the only place in which she could hide, until he had gone his way again.

Elsie was left standing between the two closed doors, listening to the distant clash of the elevator's metal gate and then to an approaching, well-known step,—easy, firm and long. It paused; there was a knock.

"Come in," she said in a voice that was not her own to her ears nor to those of the man who opened the door.

Robert stood with the knob in his hand and looked across at her. There was not even an attempt at the smile of greeting that the situation needed as a brace; neither was there any pleasantry, however trite, to give it the foothold of the commonplace. He seemed dismayed, as in silence he sent a dragging, uneasy glance around the drab room, his brows quivering in a characteristic, quizzical frown. The windows were full on the west, and the sun, that had strengthened during the afternoon, came through a broken yellow blind and fairly broiled upon dust, rents and decrepitude.

"Good God, Elsie," he said in flat-toned wonder, "what are you doing here?"

As she continued silent because she could not speak, he gave a fling of his loose, sharply straight shoulders and came across the room, adding: "What's the meaning of your coming to such a place? You had plenty of money—" He was halted by the defeat that came into her gaze as it rose and fell, wavering about him, never fully looking at him.

"Tell me why you came—here?" he repeated.

"I lost my money," she said in a toneless way. "It was stolen from me."

"Stolen? Well—?" He put his hat and stick on the weak-legged center table between them. The question in his eyes came through bright anger. "You could have asked for more—couldn't you? There's a cable—isn't there? Don't tell me that you were afraid to ask me!"

She met his eyes then. A look of fierce pride ran like light over the flower tints of her face. "I never thought of doing such a thing!"

She had a sharp feeling of still further separation from him. He was a curious man,—his first words irritation caused by a minor action. This was in such direct contrast to what might have been expected, it seemed a chilling eccentricity that affronted her. He was poised against any shock or wound. Nature had supplied him with some exclusive sort of comfort by which in a twinkling the most accustomed thing could change to a cipher. Alone, he was complete! And sharply against this, she felt herself under his lucidly intelligent eyes a rootless weed in water that sagged on cross currents.

This impression left her when his look changed quickly,—so quickly that she was thrilled by it, almost terrified. She could not imagine sharper regret in any face. Ah, now she felt sure she was seeing him as he had looked just after reading her letter in the first moment of unbelief and distress. The thought took on the power of a magnet for steel, drew her far away to the desk in the room at El Miradero, where the wall of harsh blue stretched above the ancient cope upon the bed, and there—while she was impassioned and trembling from the lover she had just left—it seemed to put the pen between her fingers, made her write again:

"... He is Don Arturo.... To-night I decided to remain with him.... If I gave him up and went back to you I would be too unhappy to live.... When I found myself alone with him up in the mountains, the world and its laws lost their strength.... I could not keep faith with you.... I gladly give up home, friends, the good opinion of the world for him.... I am in love—madly in love! ... The truth written here will be enough to gain you a divorce.... Good-by, Robert.... In all likelihood we'll not meet again...."

This consciousness of a finished act so walled her from the present that when Robert held out his hand it appeared to come through the density of substance. His words were even more unexpected:

"I began to be afraid that I was not to see you at all, Elsie," he said, and his fingers closed about hers in a kind way.

"You wanted to see me?" She asked this with heavy wonder.

"More than anything in the world!" And after a glance that was a troubled question, he continued in the clipped tones that she remembered had always meant decision with him. "We have serious things to say to each other."

She drew away her hand and sat down. "We have. And let us get them over, please—as long as I'm here! I didn't mean to come back—oh, never! The war drove me home."

She said this through a shudder. For all his generosity, how paltry she must look to him—having written that she had gone to another man—to be before him again, astray, piteous, making the parting hard for him in spite of his strength.

And oh, how strong he was! She gazed at him across her frayed life. Standing above her with his finely cut face worn by energy, discerning eyes under the restless brows, the hair rippling closely over his head with the effect of a steel-black casque, and wearing the clothes that always expressed him—browns like the calfskins of old books and grays like the rocks he worked among—he seemed more than ever a man of bronze and granite.

The next moment, and while she tried to tell him of Arturo's death, another act of his surprised her even more than had his handclasp. His familiar, very individual way of moving—jerkily, yet with a looseness that was grace—held her silent now as he twirled a chair to him, dropped to it sideways, clasped his long arms over its back, and let his eyes rest on her with an affectionate, flickering smile.

"Elsie," Robert said slowly and earnestly, "why didn't you write to me?"

She heard this clearly,—and felt she had not heard it at all. She kept an empty gaze upon him.

"You promised you would," he said, an echo of old loneliness through every inflection. "But I've not had a line from you since the night in Paris when you left for Spain! Why not?"

So shaken was Elsie that the walls seemed to sway inward and touch above her. Robert went into the perspective, a gray streak from which brilliant eyes questioned, and then came back to tower over her. As the staggering change righted she found herself just as she had been, sitting in a rocking chair, her hands holding fast to its sides, and he before her with a studying, gentle look that held reproach.

"Not a line!" she heard him say. "Wasn't that unnecessarily harsh?"

A shadowy struggle showed in her face. He could not know of the impulse that made it. She wanted to give utterance to her amazement and tell the truth in one wild burst; not to tell it; to wait, although just why she should wait she did not know.

"I hoped you'd tell me to-day that you had written and that the letter was roving about after me. You see, I had expected to go to South America a month ago, straight from the West, and some foreign letters for me that came to New York were sent on there at once. I do go on to Venezuela quickly now. Nevertheless I ordered my mail returned here, because I felt sure that among it there would be some word from you. It's all on its way back now.—The situation between us, Elsie, has disturbed me to the core. I've kept thinking of it constantly. I've caught at every possible hope to escape the seriousness of it. I wouldn't let myself believe that you hadn't written. Lately I've felt that the confusion of the war had delayed or lost some recent letter from you. In fact, I've hoped this up to this very minute—but you didn't write to me, I can see! Didn't write at all?"

While he was speaking, Elsie, looking past him, had been aware of the most cautious opening of the bathroom door, only enough to show her Nina's eyes with a look of wild prayer and a glimpse of her supplicating hands, urging silence. This was a flash before the door came between them again.

"No." Elsie said this on a suspended breath. "I didn't," she added with more force, though a clutch had come upon her throat as the lie struggled through.

Color went darkly over Robert's face and a look that was out of keeping with its sharp strength,—of naïve, boyish dejection. "I don't think I deserved that. I could never have been so inconsiderate of you."

She made no answer; instead, sat gazing at him with a touch of the awestruck uncertainty that comes to eyes on a sudden awakening.

"You got my letters, of course." His voice was now almost coldly patient, the tone of one who starts to examine some troubling thing in a dispassionate way.

"One—I think. Yes, I remember. One came from London before you sailed."

"That went to Paris. But there were others. I wrote you fully half a dozen. One almost at once went from the ship to the Spanish address you gave me; later ones went to the Ritz to be held for you. Didn't you go back there?"

"No."

"Where did you go?"

"I stayed at—at—" She edged from saying she had lived in Julie's home.—"at a small place in the Latin Quarter. I told you my money was stolen. I was ill, too. Julie, my maid, was with me."

"And you never thought that I would write you to the Ritz? Why that seems to me the first thing that would naturally have occurred to you!" He frowned helplessly, so astray by this fact that for a few seconds doubt shadowed the steady, blue gaze. "Something hidden here? What eludes me?" it asked.

While recognizing his look as the charged wire requiring careful handling, Elsie made no effort to reassure him, the recklessness of honesty mixing with deceit. "I forgot the Ritz," she said, the tone deadened.

At the same time she had sense of being several intelligences that worked together and yet independently. With one she saw the situation as Robert, not yet having had her letter, saw it. With a second she lived through the agonies of her secret story in flashes,—most keenly those hours when, as a forlorn light-o'-love, she was cast out of El Miradero, wild and lost, her soul sick from shame. And with still another there came a flare of what might await her, at least in the present, if she persisted in her lie. Help was there and hope, a sedative to banish the hideous feeling of belonging nowhere; escape from the aftermath of loss. And all of these could be paid for by her as the woman who is wanted by a man can always pay.

It was this last that whipped her to her feet, stirred deeply, open-eyed to the cowardice with which she was juggling. The writer of that farewell could not evade it, be false to it. She could not so outrage the one precious thing left to her out of the wreck,—fidelity to the loved dead, and desperate pride in it. She did not want to go back. She could never again be Robert's wife. Her heart was in a grave. Her brain heaved under the onslaught of these resolves, and the truth, already at her lips, had almost rushed over them when Robert drove them away. With one of his quick lunges over the chair's back he had seized her wrist.

"I understand so well just how things are between us," she heard him say. "We've played recklessly with our lives during these years apart; we've grown apart, we have changed. But it isn't too late to start again. I could not bear to lose you, Elsie!"

He was kneeling on the chair as very gently he drew her nearer, taking her hand seriously in both of his. His face was strong with reasonableness, humble in a plea as he went on:

"After I left you in Paris, I felt dissatisfied with myself. Something—what's called the Scotch conscience, I suppose—got after me on the ship when I had plenty of time for thinking things out. I saw how the whole business of life had been wrong with us for years. That was why I had suffered such disappointment in Paris. I had slowly grown self-sufficient—oh, hideously so—and you were confusingly different that day from the memory I had treasured of you! You don't look so now—not at all the same creature. Now you're the girl I knew—so little changed from my first sight of you at Nina's wild card party six years ago and more, that it's really uncanny."

"I am not the same, though," Elsie flashed, a bitter twist moving over her beautiful mouth. "Don't imagine it."

"Ah, well—of course years do leave traces, even when they're not seen. But you're real now, so unlike what you were on that day in Paris when your three years there seemed to have damaged you in some ugly and sophisticated way, given you a cynical mind as well as a strange face! I wanted nothing but to get away from you and readjust myself to the depressing change. And you?—I know you felt just as divided from me—that you snatched at the chance I gave you of going to Spain, to your friends. Yet, while you wanted this, I could see that you resented my eagerness to have you go. Well—there's no use digging further into the causes for what has resulted. I ask you to come with me to South America, and I'll try to make you happy. I don't want you ever to leave me again. I love you, Elsie!"

She shook her head slowly. Deep regret gave body to her words when, after a pause, they came. "I don't love you, Robert. I'm sorry. I cannot go back to you."

He dropped her hands. The blood surged up his face in a painful way that was the voice of his humiliation; ebbed as quickly, leaving it ashen under its brown and clouded over as if an inner light had been snapped out. He went to the open window and gazed at the mist streaks through the heavy sun.

Elsie, aware that the bathroom door had opened very slightly and closed again, did not give it a glance. She sat down, her clasped hands on the table and waited. The look of defeat on Robert's face had touched her to passionate sympathy. She would be glad to end this meeting without mention of the letter. When at last it overtook him, she would not be there to see its bitter effect on him. And if, through some maze of chance, this never happened and he never read those lines, still better; he would be spared that added twist of the screw.

Several moments passed, the room silent save for the streets' clangor, before he turned. When she felt his shadow sway over her as he bent across the table, she looked up.

"Then come back as a friend," he said earnestly. "Don't refuse me this! Let us start again that way. Come with me to South America. I would be very lonely not seeing you at all and troubled about you, too. This would give the old feeling a fighting chance to revive, as separation could not. And whenever you might wish to go, you'd be perfectly free to do so. As a friend, Elsie? Shall we make that compact? What do you say?"

She sat in the shadow, watching him in a way that was rapt. Her fluttering hair sparkled about her face, giving a luminous quality to its pallor that reminded Robert of flowers of delicate tint, drained of all color by the dusk, yet shining within it. A strange longing had come to her hollowed and bright eyes; a hushed look that he could not understand, as if she had stumbled on something valuable and with doubting surprise was trying to believe in its reality. This was exactly what had taken place in her soul.

Could what he asked come true? She did not believe it. And yet, Arturo was dead, and this living man whose remembered kindness had always been an unescapable thread about her heart, even when it had ached with intense love for another, needed her. If she could ever say good-by to despair and again count love as the sum of her life, how good if it could be for this husband whom she had failed! He had asked for a fighting chance. And in spite of her doubt, might there be one—providing the letter never came into his hands?

For the first time since the moment when to her question: "Dead?" Serafin had answered: "Yes," life, in its collapse under the crust of desolation, stirred for her. She had faint sense of a glow, a fancy of quickened days beyond some as yet unseen horizon where things might matter once more and to-morrows beckon. On that feeling spring seemed to peep into the dismal room, a garden to blow its scent through the window.

Her eyes sank before Robert's gaze, neutral save that it was earnest. From the deep well of womanhood in her a galling drop welled up for her deception, even while she muttered with broken eagerness: "Yes, yes, yes."

Soon after this, Robert left. Nina stole out. She was transformed. She found Elsie sitting at the table, leaning on her elbows, her hands arched above her eyes. At sound of a convulsive gurgle from her mother she lifted her head, and her look had a wilting effect on Nina's triumph. It seemed to see things far beyond and around her, and there was a physical sickness in it.

"Don't say you're glad!" broke from her, a threat.

Nina held her breath. "I am glad," she found courage to cry defiantly. "You've saved yourself. Of course I'm glad. Some one cares for you. You've got a future. You're not a bankrupt!"

"I'm worse. I'm a liar!" Her face changed startlingly to a look of inward collapse through which the eyes had the poignancy of a hunted thing, listening. She leaped up. "I can't do it," came from her on a whisper, pitched wildly and high. "I don't know why I said I would. I want to be free. I want to go away—"

"Go where?" Nina demanded in angry fright. "Tell me where you'll go?"

"I don't know. I can try—somehow. I want to try. I can't do this—begin the life of a cheat. I can't understand how I thought I could do it. I hate myself. But it's not too late. I can get away now. You stay here. Tell Robert when he comes—tell him anything—I don't care what. Tell him about Arturo—and the letter—what I said in it!"

There was a distracted, fanatic look about her as she rushed to the closet and pulled a hat from the shelf. While she tried with uncertain fingers to pin it on, Nina ventured to touch her appealingly on the shoulder.

"Don't try to make me stay! It's nothing to you that I think what I do—feel what I do!" broke from Elsie on an angry sob. "You only want me in a home, looked after by a husband—with money! You won't let yourself see that I'm suffering because the man I loved is dead. You don't realize—or care—that it's of him I think and not of Robert at all—oh, not at all!" she finished on a thin wail.

Nina could only wait. She sat down in an exhausted way, terrified, and watched Elsie, as with pupils dilated, her look one of raging resolve, she put her folded coat on the table, opened and closed a bureau drawer in a search for gloves. She was dragging these on, her mouth giving nervous twitches, when Nina, as well as her weakness permitted, began to speak:

"You are running off. All right. But there's just one thing I want you to think about." There was a reasonableness in the tone that she could see brought her a shade of Elsie's attention, the while she continued her preparations.

"Well, what is it? I haven't long. You can send my trunk after me. I'll go to some other hotel—there's one on the next street—"

Nina changed. She grew frantic and sat forward, beating her small fists on her knees: "I want you to forget yourself for a moment!" she cried, the tone like a flung missile, scorn in it. "I want you to think of what the word mercy means!"

Elsie paused to look at her in a dumb way, puzzled.

"I'm not going to judge or scold you for this wretched thing that happened. It happened. And it's over. But there's Robert Maury's side to this," Nina went on, with control of herself, though still forcefully. "It's got to be considered—and now is the time."

"No, no," Elsie said with bitter sadness. "Talking of that won't help at all."

"I may at least ask what he has done to deserve the deliberate cruelty that you are planning to hand out to him? Have you any reason for causing him this shock and suffering when the whole episode that supplied it is finished—finished to the uttermost? No, you have none. So it must be that you hate him! And why should you hate him? Is it because he still cares for you?" she tersely demanded.

Elsie's head had been lifting in denial and at the last words a spasm of pain softened her face. "Hate him? You say that while you know it's not true!"

"Well—then?" Nina demanded on a shrug that was a repetition of her questions.

"I have a tender feeling for Robert—liking—and pity, great pity. I'm not worth his caring, I know."

"And because you pity him, and because you feel you don't deserve his love—is that why you are determined that he shall not escape?"

"The least I can do is to be honest with him—not lie to him!"

"Sometimes a lie is a virtue. I tell you that—flat! The lie you told to-day had mercy in it. And if you take it back—you'll be brutal."

"We don't see things the same way," Elsie said with tremulous intensity. "Robert's sure to suffer, whatever way we look at it. He'll suffer when you tell him why I've gone. But if I did what you want me to do, he'd suffer more when—at last—he found me out."

Nina went to her side. She was too clever to caress Elsie in her present mood,—seemingly quiet, wistfully defensive, with a dangerous flame underneath. She merely laid the rosied nail of her right forefinger upon the table as if pointing to what she described, and met her daughter's eyes, her own look one in which there was no emotion, only bright, concentrated force.

"But that's exactly what I mean. See here! He need not have one unhappy moment because of this—not if you, from kindness alone, take it upon yourself to prevent his finding out. It rests with you to keep that chapter in Spain from ever becoming known to him—no word of it!"

"And how can that be done?" Elsie asked with a weary wonder and unbelief.

"He wants you to go to South America with him. He does this meaning to try to get you back. Of course! And suppose he should succeed?—wouldn't that be the best thing that could happen to you? And suppose he failed?—couldn't you leave? But putting all that to one side, your real reason for going and your real work there would be to get your hands on that letter. You could manage to stay long enough for that. If, then, you felt you had to get away, you know that Robert would keep his promise to you, wouldn't lift a finger to hold you. Could anything be simpler?" Unconsciously she found herself uttering one of Percy's London expressions in Percy's helpless tone: "Now—I ask you!"

Elsie drew away gently and stood at a distance, an uneasy figure, her head heavily hanging. Oh, the many things she saw! The confusion, past, present and to come. There seemed to be about her a web whose shuttle had split and set the coils leaping, while she, an atom, was fighting the blinding tangles for foothold and a loophole of escape. And as she remained so in the room's deep quiet, Nina, who breathlessly watched, saw her look of sickness fade and a hot brightness spread over her face.

"Keep it from reaching him?" she murmured. Her head swayed slightly in negation as she added, "I wish I could!—how could I? Why," and she turned to look fully at her mother, "it may come any moment!"

"And it may be at the bottom of the sea!" Nina replied swiftly, holding to the impression she saw she was beginning to make on Elsie. "In fact, just about the time the letter must have been on its way over, I remember reading that a liner was wrecked—the people all saved—but the ship left to break on rocks somewhere, and of course all its cargo lost. So ten to one that's the explanation, and the wretched thing will never bob up at all! Just the same, to be quite sure, there's only one thing to be done; go with Robert, be nice and friendly with him, and should the letter come—manage to steal it. If—let us say—after six months it hasn't appeared, you may feel sure it never will."

Elsie sat down. With her coat folded on her knees and her gloved hands clasped upon it, she seemed an unhappy stranger in the hotel room. The asthenic sadness that with women so easily reaches conclusion in weak tears, brought them from her dull, wide-opened eyes. Nina watched her, and the picture that in spite of youth she made—one broken in purpose, wearily at sea—sent a stab through her heart of a quality new to her.

"My poor dear, you have made a mess of things!" she cried in pain.

"I hate going with him—to cheat him. He takes me so on faith, he's—so decent!" Elsie muttered, her hands twisting over each other in a grinding perplexity. "I don't see how I can do it."

Nina, suddenly very tired, was aware of every year of her age as she got slowly upon her feet. Well, she would make one more effort and if she failed she would give up, go home to Percy, and to a much needed gin and seltzer.

"There's something I didn't speak of before and that you seem to have forgotten—it's this: That letter makes you out what you never actually were—De Burgos's mistress. It's only fair that you should try to destroy it." Her gaze, with intent meaning, held Elsie's into which had come the look of one edging from the unendurable. After a pause she went on winningly: "And yet this is not your reason for trying to get hold of it. You'll be doing that all for Robert's sake—nothing selfish in it!"

"You think not?" Elsie flung back with a stark honesty. "You're wrong! Any bit of good opinion that's mine, I want to keep. After what I've been through—" and her bitter smile had corrosive knowledge, "oh, I put a high value on men's respect!"

Somewhere across the sun-baked roofs a church clock struck six, and the brazen strokes on the glare and dinginess had a hideous effect on Nina, as if they were a summons to execution.

"Well, dearie?" she sighed, her childish eyes grown dim, her whole air jaded. "Robert will be along soon now. So make up your mind."

Elsie's lips moved desperately. She stood up and slowly drew off her gloves. "I'm going with him." And then, as her mother began to cry from such relief as she had never known, while muttering, "Oh, darling—oh, darling—!" Elsie spoke again quietly and with deep conviction, "But I'll pay. Make no mistake! I'll pay for cheating. Something tells me this."

Nina thought it wise to ignore these words, in fact to avoid all further discussion. Without an instant's delay she started Elsie at packing the valise and busied herself with the trunk, while keeping up a running chatter of her past triumphs in Caracas and other South American cities. When the work was finished she arranged her nose veil, pulled on her dogskin gloves, and took Elsie into a smothering embrace.

"Don't worry," she advised in a satisfied and profoundly wise tone. "Trust to luck! Be a gambler! If I were in your place I'd make myself see my life as a clear road before me, and I'd not worry for a minute about this trouble ever suddenly coming around the next corner!"

She was startled at feeling a hard tremor seize Elsie, and drew back to study her. "What on earth's the matter?" she cried. "What did I say? You look positively terrified! What is it?"

"Nothing, nothing. Don't let us talk any more."

Nina tripped off. She did not want to meet Robert so soon after this intimate dissension and its mending. She was also in a hurry to carry her good news to Percy and plan a dinner for four at Delmonico's for the next night. Moreover, she felt urgent need of her afternoon stimulant. "God knows I've earned it," she thought as the taxicab rushed her uptown.

Elsie, alone, sat listening to every sound from the hotel, an odd stillness around her heart. Robert would arrive in a few moments. If the letters, reforwarded from South America, had been waiting for him at his office?—If among them there had been the gray-blue square with the Spanish stamp?—Nina's words, with an effect the reverse of what she had intended, were like a horrid nudge: The next corner! ... She was not to forget it. She was not to escape it. Day by day she would have to watch it. Even now her eyes were on it, fixed as they were on the door into the hall, waiting for it to open to give her the first sight of Robert's face on his return.

A February morning, very warm, yet full of life. Capricious winds were abroad; they rippled the blue lake of Valencia, careened up and down the lower ranges of mountains enclosing the small, North Andean city of the same name, and over the smiling land blew the thick sweetness of magnolias from gardens and the thin, sharp scent of cinchona shrubs and screw pines growing wild.

One of the loveliest hours of the day was enticingly upon the hacienda that had been the home of the Maury family since the preceding September. The many servants, both negroes and mestizos, had finished the morning settling of the house, and subdued sounds of labor with snatches of syncopated Spanish song floated from the kitchen quarters where they were preparing the mid-day almuerzo.

The patio had patches of shadow under the galleries and wherever the planted palms stood up like great plumes. Turkish rugs clung as if they were thin, iridescent skins to the flagged space beside the fountain in the center, whose splash was a whispering song. There were cane couches; chairs of hide stretched over wooden frames; and on one table, sheltered by a huge red and white umbrella, books, a bowl of fruit, and embroidery in the process of making were scattered.

It was the hour when a woman might well have loved to loiter there, to read, work, or dream. And yet the young mistress of the place was not to be seen. Nor was she ever visible there at this time of the day; nor in her room; nor indeed in the house at all.

This thought was in the mind of Miss Selena Maury as she stood in the doorway, her eyes narrowed and glinting in a look of reflection. She was Robert's sister, fifteen years his senior, and had the management of "El Iris," as the place was called because of its rainbow coloring from trees, flowers, pink walls, inner shutters of jade-green seen through the window bars, and its pot-tiled roof of a curious dusty red.

Her invitation to be her brother's guest and helper had come about casually. With a woman friend, a widow of comfortable means, she had been for many years one of those feminine expatriates who travel tirelessly, live in trunks, who are met with all over the world and are always American. When this lifelong friend had died during a stay in near-by Colombia, and had been buried there, Robert had seen his sister's sudden loneliness as a call for him to comfort her, while at the same time helping himself and Elsie. She had lived much in Spanish and South American boarding houses, spoke the language fluently, was capable, sensible, and he believed simple and kindly. By installing her as housekeeper Elsie would be relieved of responsibility in a land whose customs were strange to her. She would also have a compatriot's companionship during his absences of three or four days at the Logrono mine that was more than fifty miles away. His subtler and more precious reason for wanting her was to lighten the tête-à-tête between himself and his wife that could not help becoming strained at times.

Elsie had been willing for Selena to come, just as she was amiably attentive to all his suggestions,—a mood of acceptance that rarely varied and under which he was conscious of some deadness of soul. She had not been expectant of Miss Maury's arrival which had happened in November, nor had she been indifferent to a degree that showed the smallest lack of courtesy. Her tonelessness, though, could not be escaped. Robert felt that she was with his sister as she was often with him, shut off in some subtle sense from the things she moved among. Neither sullen nor inattentive in any way that could wound—for frequently he had seen her rouse herself to some special act of interest and kindness—he still saw plainly that his sister meant nothing in her reckoning.

All of this was felt by Selena Maury. But while Robert was conscious of Elsie's detachment with a generous regret that it had to be, his sister from the first had resented it secretly and with vindictiveness.

No one guessed that back of her highly-bred, small-featured primness she was a conceited woman, that conceit was the woof of her nature. Although she was gray, frail and small, wore heavily lensed spectacles, and from leanness and rheumatism gave the impression of having wooden joints under her austere clothing—all the notes of a woman grown old and turned into a tolerant watcher of new types and manners—she was in reality an entirely different being.

Miss Maury had been a mentor, a power of a sort among the various collections of woman travellers among whom she had fallen during fifteen years of unimaginative ambling over the world. As she read much and talked with the pedant's labored clearness, she had been counted very clever in these various sewing circles on the verandahs of foreign pensions; she had a certain ironic wit, too, when warmed by appreciation. Women of her own sort—elderly, detached—had unbosomed themselves to her about large and small difficulties, asking her advice as one augustly fitted to point the way. And she had been used to responding in positive and concise phrases that rounded out her ultimatum to the smallest detail. Her ruling was generally accepted. When it was not, her glacial disapproval of the offender could chill a houseful.

Elsie's pointless kindness to her and pointed separation from her had quickly embittered her, until she had come to the apex of active malice. This sister-in-law, just from what she was, young, popular, admired by all their cordial and spontaneously hospitable Venezuelan neighbors, and very lovely in a way that Miss Maury thought spectacular—for blondes somehow conveyed the suggestion of immorality to her—had made her feel her age in a way that was disagreeable. She did not mind age when it meant power. She loathed it when it made her a straggler after a procession that flashed past her without heed or need of her.

Today, as she stood looking across the patio, she was full of unfriendliness and exasperation. She was saying with savage flatness what she had edged from heretofore,—that she did not like Elsie; did not like her at all; did not understand her; did not trust her.

Although Miss Maury, with the squeamishness of the ineradicable vestal, shrank always from consideration of sex in human relations—in fact, had even dared to say that it was a pity the Almighty could not have devised some spiritual miracle for race continuance—she could not fail to see that her brother was not happy as a husband; indeed was not a husband. Something very serious must have happened to create this situation, and with clannish devotion she felt sure the fault was not Robert's. It was puzzling, yet not more so than were other things, small and large, noted by her covertly vigilant eyes.

The most important of these was that Elsie left the house every morning an hour before the midday meal to meet Domingo somewhere on his ride back from the postoffice. She was always brighter afterward, at breakfast, than at any other time. Still this could not be due entirely to her receiving secret letters by lying in wait for Domingo, for having at times questioned the man, Miss Maury had learned that often when Elsie had returned especially refreshed, there had been no mail at all for her, not even a post card.

The sense of a hidden thing was becoming intolerable. The young woman was incomprehensible. There was something very wrong. And with Robert's good in mind Miss Maury meant to discover what she could about it. She had all the sanctimonious qualifications that can twist baseness into right for a purpose, so that spying on her part she would call duty, and the unmasking of another's weakness or sin a triumph of her conscientiousness.

After remaining very still in the doorway for about five minutes she went with a starchy rustle of her drab linen skirt to the top of the house, to a room there used by Robert as a sort of laboratory, and shut the door. The windows here looked over the red, fluted, dipped roof toward the mountain road that Domingo must take on his return from the town. Hung by a strap beside the sill there was a case containing a pair of powerful field glasses. Miss Maury's eyes under their reddened lids had a determined light in them as she pushed open the shutters, adjusted the glasses to her sight, and stared steadily out.

She slowly moved them from a straight direction to the right, up the distant mountain a little, then down slowly and waveringly. At last they came to a fixed pause. There was something remindful of a vulture's claws about the veined old hands as they tightened on the two leather cylinders and held them for a long time without a tremor.

Elsie had left the hacienda shortly after ten. While in sight of the house she had strolled as languidly as did any one of her new Venezuelan friends on the rare occasions when they were induced to walk more than a few yards. She carried an open book on her arm, and under a white umbrella lined with apple-green that stained her fairness with a sea shimmer, seemed easily to read, so slowly did she pace.

At the turn of the hill one of the precipitous heights began, a part of the cordillera that in the far distance became the Sierra Merida, soaring there into snow-capped peaks that sometimes seemed to writhe in the tumultuous radiance drenching them. From this spot and for almost a mile she was walled from the valley where her house stood. And once within its shelter her look and manner changed.

She closed the book and went faster, her eyes steadily on the perspective of the waving road. Having reached one rise, her gaze swept the shallow curve downward and then up to the next hillock that hid what lay beyond. She was never made really sure that this first step of each day had been successfully taken until she would see Domingo, a swaying speck, his legs hanging low over the side of his burro, and coming toward her on a pattering canter.

Often, when he rode rapidly, she would meet him only a half mile from the house. Something had delayed him to-day, for there was no sight of him by the time she had reached a spot where the sheltering elbow of the mountain swooped downward, and she was left facing an open plateau from a road that ran like a shelf against the hill on her other side. This overlooked several of the brightly colored houses built on sixteenth-century Spanish models situated on the town's outskirts and nestling in opposite coves of the mountains, her own home among them. She felt, however, safe from observation in this spot; it was so distant from the hacienda that even if seen, she would appear no more than a fly moving across a great statue's face.

The self-absorbed quiet, the absent gaze that were such constant notes with Elsie were never present during the few times of each day when she became this watcher in ambush. The high-stringed uncertainty that kept her frail and shadowy-eyed would show as now: a questing look in the eyes grown darker under the whitish-gold hair blowing about her brow, her lips pressed so closely together their rich curves were often lost.

Four months had gone since the August afternoon when Robert had carried her away from the shabby hotel, where she had felt the derelict's dull despair, to a new outlook in a flower-filled suite at the Ritz, and then to this lovely land where easeful days were all exactly alike. For a long time on each awakening, one thought had leaped before her as a thing that had waited by her bed the night through: Would the letter come that day?—And when?—Among the heavy mail of the morning?—Or would it be one of the few that sometimes straggled in before the afternoon siesta and for which she would manage to loiter in the entrance hall of the casa? Or would it come at sunset? The fear always followed that something might prevent her capturing it. Conquering this, she would then see herself successfully closing her hand upon it, hiding it, and later, in seclusion, without reading one of those bitterly regretted words, destroying it with a throe of frantic joy. The whole had come to have the excitement that is part of every game,—the craving to win.

Lately her suspense had lessened; every day the belief strengthened that the letter she dreaded was lost conclusively. But she could not trust the feeling. She had to keep watching. She had to be sure.

And this not because what she had was found satisfying. That she was accepting Robert's hospitality under false conditions often made her wretched. Often she felt herself a plain fraud, when her food would seem to choke her, and wild impulses seize her to end their compact, to go away and make the struggle for life in a clean independence. The picture of the unaided fight along new paths would have a vitalizing freshness that straightened her spine; even the thought of frustrations on the way to success would take on a paradoxical attractiveness just because of their living prod that would bring every bit of her into glowingly desperate activity. Several times she made up her mind to seek this liberty; once, when Robert was absent for a full week at the mine, she made ready to leave.

One thing had always deflected her intention, melting her to the miserable sorrow for Robert that she had felt from the first sight of him in New York,—the dread that after she had gone, the letter with its needless stabs would reach him, that he would know how far from him she had gone on the night whose dark ending so often splashed up in phantasmal horror upon the peace about her, would know that her coming with him to Valencia had been on the support of a lie, would believe the lie to have been merely a transient and sordid accommodation for herself. A determination to keep this pain from him would emerge through this tenderness and hold her in her place, hoping for the arrival of the thing whose secret destruction could alone set her free.

What sort of future awaited them she did not know. While Robert held to their bond, savagely silent and neutral, she could feel that he missed her as he would miss the sun. With her the past remained dominant. Sometimes the craving for the dead was too heart-piercing, pulled her into the pit of sadness for days. Again she would loathe and resent the drugged sweetness of her useless life, its blessings all negations,—absence of care and striving, and also absence of love and all the delectable things that belong to it by which the blood leaps and the heart sings. With wistful pangs she would remember her real self, the passionate, lyric self unknown to Robert, and that seemed to have sped away on that night of dying moonlight as had Arturo's soul.

There was still another mood; this generally on sleepless nights. She had never recovered from the shock of those hours when sensation had been a cataclysm; it had left her nerves like loose wires that leap easily in wrong directions and grow tangled; and when memory of the several sorts of contempt she had experienced at Serafin's hands would steal back to her through the dark, his sardonic smile a living thing, she would moan feebly as if she were a wounded creature too weak to move. It was then that by contrast she would clearly long to love her husband—to love him really!—not as she had, with shy and childish affection for what to a great extent was not understood.

And all this time, deeply in her, mixed with this confusion—she wholly unconscious of it—was Nature's big instinct that cannot die in the woman meant for motherhood; in whom it is dire need, especially after she has borne a child. This was dulled dissatisfaction in Elsie; had been there, dulled—while never ceasing to strive toward inevitable fulfillment—under all her first feverish pursuit of pleasure after deep grief, and her subsequent emotional folly.

Domingo was coming. She sat down on a weather-stained stone seat, built against the hill, and waited. The mestizo's song reached her first and then the swift, small beat of his burro's hoofs.

He was a good-looking, brown youth, sitting his animal with the gay air of a boy on a hobbyhorse, his teeth a crescent of snow in a large smile. From his hat of brown plush to the hempen-soled feet that showed beneath ankle-short, nankeen trousers, he had become all radiance at the sight of his mistress. This daily meeting with her on the road pleased him, had the feel of a spurious sort of adventure. Like Miss Maury he had gradually come to sense some serious reason for it. By this time he believed it had to do with a lover left behind in the States who adored the young señora madly—as who would not?—and who perhaps was either imploring her to come to him or threatening to arrive on the spot and slay her for her refusal. Either of these things he felt might reasonably happen any day, since his mistress must be unhappy. Ah, did he not know this well? For was he not a lover of Candida who was the señora's personal maid? And had she not told him that never once since the Americans had come to live at El Iris had she seen the master enter his wife's room,—while his own were even on the other side of the house, with the whole patio dividing them?

"Buenas dias, señora," came gaily from Domingo, as he rollicked up the rise to her side.

"Buenas dias, Domingo. I might as well look at the letters here," said Elsie.

She varied her request to him each day, her tone always a careless one. They spoke in two languages—Elsie haltingly in Spanish which she had been studying for months and an English that Domingo used, a curiously lacerated speech that he had picked up during his service with German-Americans when they had built the railroad from Caracas to Valencia.

"Three for you, señora," Domingo said, as he pulled open the linen sack slung about his waist. "And one for Señorita Maury. There were more, señora. But the señor himself stopped at the post-office this morning early and took away his own."

Domingo felt that it must have been some trick of the sun through the green lining of her umbrella that made his mistress's face seem suddenly to change so oddly. She was always pale in a way he thought angelic—and that no amount of the thick, native powder could impart to his brown Candida—but now she looked as deathlike as her white linen gown; and a question, after flashing up in her eyes for a second, had gone out, leaving them dull, while they remained fixed beyond him in the direction of the town.

"There must be a mistake," she said in a heavy way. The hand which held her own letters had fastened so fiercely about them the knuckles were stretched and glistening. "Señor Maury was not expected in from the mine until to-morrow. Are you sure he was in the town—at the post-office? What did they tell you there?"

"It was Placido Garcia that I saw, señora. He said that Señor Maury was in a big motor car with another gentleman, that he had taken his own letters and had gone away. I did not ask Placido more, but felt sure that the señor had not gone home or he would have taken all the others for the house," and Domingo ended with a flowing, conclusive shrug.

"I see. It's all right," Elsie said, the tone seeming relieved. "You can tell Señorita Maury to expect the señor for almuerzo. No doubt he will arrive for that, after he has attended to some business."

With a sweep of the brown plush hat Domingo pattered off and Elsie was alone. She looked carelessly over the three letters, saw that one was from a Fifth Avenue book shop, another from one of her few girlhood friends married to an army man and living at a post in Arizona, and the third, a heavy one, from her mother.

Nina's letters were always superficial. She ran no risk by writing even one word in the most veiled way touching the hidden scar in her daughter's life; never one to show that she knew of any jar or shadow in the present association of Elsie and her husband. She also had a way of enclosing newspaper clippings of fashions and plays, and sometimes the details of a murder or divorce interesting New York.

After one glance which proved this letter no different from former ones—a lot of chatter of incidental things that any one might safely read—and that showed the bulkiness to be due to some columns cut from a newspaper, Elsie, without reading either, folded them together and replaced them in the big envelope. With the letters on her lap, as she sat back bathed in the umbrella's green glitter, the chill that had struck her with Domingo's news, and that had been held back, seized her again. And again she looked toward Valencia.

This was the first time she had missed seeing all the mail ahead of either Robert or Miss Maury. Her success up to the present moment had been uncanny, for illness or too bad weather or some other mischance might so easily have frustrated her vigilance. So to-day she had her first taste of the peculiarly toothed suspense that never comes from visible danger, but comes only from the shrouded and suggested thing.

A mind picture that had a photographic clearness brought an odd stillness about her heart: She saw her husband in Valencia's post-office, in his hand the gray-blue letter sealed by Arturo's ring which now hung in secrecy on a chain and close to her heart. At first there was only surprise as he studied the evidence of its long journey—soilure, its many addresses, the first postmark probably from Bilbao in July, its Spanish stamp. He opened it with that boyish eagerness that could so charmingly at the most unexpected times sweep away his reserve. And with the reading she saw him frown at first in startled pain; saw his eyes harden as, slowly, to the strong face that could be so kind, a look of stunned and contemptuous knowledge came,—the look that never would leave his secret thoughts of her.

One of those convulsions that imagined disasters can give went through her, ghostly things that move through one on a stabbing breath. Her umbrella sank backward as her face turned to rest against her arm and remained so for a moment until the surrender of will to destiny brought its uninspiring peace. If this disclosure had to come, it would come. Something outside of her and above her, before which she was absolutely defenseless, would in the end decide whether or not this shadow of her own act would turn some corner of her life and face her with its relentless smile. The decision was out of her hands.

She started up. As she turned to go home, the hacienda was at its plainest before her, and almost as if already she were a stranger, having left it forever, she stood still and fixed a deep gaze on its colorful beauty. Almost on the instant her look changed,—for the house seemed balefully watching her. Yes, from a window that she knew belonged to Robert's laboratory she saw two great eyes, a greenish blaze in them as the sunlight caught them, and they were fastened upon her. She could not imagine what they could be; could only stare back at them. And as she stood so, with her lips parted, they vanished.

The mystified look left her as she recalled the field glasses that hung by that window. Once, through them, she had watched the progress of the aeroplane that Robert's mining company had experimented with for use over the most impassable parts of the mountains. Then had Robert reached home? And had he watched her? This was so unlike what he would be apt to do that she was left uncertain, unnerved. Unless he had come into possession of her secret! Ah, then he might watch her so, hating her perhaps? Nothing else seemed to explain it.

A pulse was beating heavily in her head, her feet and hands were cold. She summoned courage, and with the look of unrest that hovers on wildness, went back along the road that led to the hacienda. This might be the last time she would walk toward it. To-morrow might see her leaving it—and Robert—forever.

Still—and the familiar suspense began its nibbling—the letter might not have come to-day; perhaps she felt this sick fear without cause.

It was not being sure that was racking. Oh, horrible, horrible, this never being sure!

Candida was crossing the patio as Domingo entered it. She was a brown-gold mestizo, very young but large. The Spanish in her showed in the diffused, warm grace with which she moved and in her expressive hands, while her Indian heritage was plain in the coarse strands of soot-like hair and her hawk's glance that only softened when her heart was stirred, as when it rested in longing on Domingo.

Because these two were lovers Miss Maury frowned on any talk or meetings between them during the working hours; it irritated her even to catch, en route, the ardent glances they flung to each other over her head. They seemed obedient automatons to her will, whereas outwardly obsequious they were secretly impudent, and kissed all the more when they could, because they hated her.

"The old cat is coming." Candida said this from the corner of her motionless lips while carrying on her head, with a beautiful balance, a tray bearing Elsie's sun-bleached and lacy underclothes. "Don't say that the señora did not meet you on the way, my beloved angel, for I saw the old eagle with her accursed eyes glued to those glasses in the señor's upstairs room, and it is my belief that the devil's old cat saw the señora talking to you and did not like it. Her mouth looks more than ever like the iron mousetrap in the kitchen."

"Little heart, in the very center of my big heart!" was Domingo's answer in a thrilling whisper.

"Admired of my soul, my heaven of whom I dreamed last night!" Candida replied with a bathing glance of the most overwhelming love as she swayed on with her head burden to Elsie's big bedroom just as Miss Maury stepped from the middle door.

"Señorita," said Domingo, his plush hat in one hand, as he extended the single letter with the other.

Miss Maury, while giving a coldly comprehensive glance after Candida, took it, and said acidly, "Nothing but this?"

"I met Señora Maury and gave her—"

"All the others!" she interrupted with thin-toned emphasis.

"No, señorita, only her own. Señor Maury already has his. He was at the post-office this morning."

This interested and surprised Miss Maury so much she listened in silence while Domingo explained fully.

"So Señora Maury said the señor would therefore be at home for almuerzo, and I was to tell you."

"Send the cook to me here," Miss Maury snapped. "Put on your white clothes," she added, as he began to move away, "and try to set the table to-day without making your usual absurd mistakes. You can do this if you keep your eyes and your thoughts on your work."

"Si, señorita," Domingo agreed with lamblike docility, turned his back on her and pursued his way with his tongue stuck out stiffly in humorous disdain of her and her authority, her ugliness, flat-chestedness, and what was, to him, the tragedy of her fifty odd years unsweetened by the love of a man.

Elsie entered shortly after. As she pulled off her white muslin sun hat, Miss Maury was struck by the hard sort of quiet in her face, like the hush before a storm breaks, and by something watchful in her eyes as they moved slowly around the patio to rest at last in a waiting way on the steps that led up to the left gallery beyond which was Robert's room.

"She looks—queer. She's had news to-day that's unsettled her—that's sure!" Miss Maury was thinking, while with a fussiness that was constitutional she rearranged unnecessarily every one of the various objects on the table. "Do you think these long walks every morning—never missing one—agree with you, Elsie? You look exhausted," was what she said.

Elsie had heard this so often and was at the moment so engrossed with her own suspense that without any intention of being rude, she ignored it. "Have you seen Robert?" she asked, still looking aside at the gallery that held his room.

"Where would I see him?" Miss Maury retorted, the resentment she would have put into very different words had she dared going into the question.

"He hasn't come!" A full breath of relief left Elsie, as with the back of her hand she lifted the moist tangle of hair from her brows. "The sun is so warm to-day—isn't it? Funny to think this is February!" In a meaningless way, while her thoughts kept running along the path of her anxiety, she drew the folded newspaper from her mother's letter. "And there may be a blizzard blocking traffic in New York!"

After an uncertain pause, and trailing the closed green-white umbrella beside her, she crossed to her own room.

Miss Maury was about to call out in the over-polite voice of criticism that she had forgotten her hat, signifying that the patio was not the place for scattered wearing apparel, when she saw that for all her opening of the letter, Elsie had also left it with the folded paper on top of it. A thought came to Miss Maury as she noted them. A thought; a plan. She waited. Her hand stole forward, its crookedness from rheumatism giving it the look of rapacity that belongs to talons, and pulled the embroidery so that it covered both. Later, if they were completely forgotten—then—well—it would be easy, with fair play to Robert in mind as part of her duty, and if she could do so with safety—

She did not clearly finish even to herself, but her mouth was tightened, and she felt strong in righteousness. She would have been the most amazed of women if illumination had come to her that to a detective her tactics would have been the familiar ones of a slick shoplifter who first locates what she means to steal, retires, returns, plays with her intention as a cat with a mouse until she sees a secure moment for making off with her loot.

Twenty minutes later, after sitting on the further and sheltered side of the table, her needle darting up and down, Miss Maury had managed to accomplish her purpose, and knew what Elsie as yet did not—every word of Nina's letter; every word of the account set forth in the newspaper. For the former she had only contempt; its babble of frivolous things was eloquent of the flighty little singer as she remembered her at Robert's marriage. But the story told in print, while it made nothing plain to her—for there was not a name in it that she had ever heard before—created a picture of prodigality, sin and doom that brought a ferment of possibilities and questions to her mind.

Who was this Marqués de Burgos whose murder was so vividly described? Had the mother, or daughter, or both of them known him in the dissolute world of which the article spoke? If so, why had Nina failed to write a word in her letter concerning his dreadful death? Had she, perhaps, reasons—good reasons—for thinking it wisest to place only the public announcement of it before her daughter? Or, even more likely, had they known the woman who had been his companion, and who had managed to slip without scandal from the situation as one might escape at the last moment from the hangman's noose? Was this creature, described as a blonde—and by this convincingly meretricious to Miss Maury—one of their own soulless, light-minded intimates?

At this last query a feeling tore through her that made her sit back, breathless. Following it the malice in her freshened, a sense of ascendancy warmed her pleasantly. The blonde woman! The woman whose fairness had, from the description, been conspicuous, like Elsie's! Suppose? ... The thought, when fully faced, was for a moment overpowering, then seized her with more force. If indeed this had been Elsie's self, how completely it explained all that was mysterious about her,—her preoccupation, daily uneasiness, her unfailing watchfulness of the mails in which she felt some news might come to unmask her. Of course! And if it were true, how it made visible the cause of her nervousness that very morning, for she must be conscious that to one who knew details of her Paris life during the past June—as did Robert, no doubt—exposure lurked in the word-picture given of the woman who had played her disgraceful part in this published tragedy.

It seemed almost too horrible to believe. She did not fully rest on her suspicion. And yet—and yet—? As a sunbeam will dart about a dark and littered corner, disclosing and then shutting off its confusion, the thought danced before Miss Maury's excited eyes. Sometimes it struck confusingly on her sight as if mocking her. Her mouth only shut the more fixedly and she was as surely on its trail as when with a folded wet towel she tracked a mosquito, to strike at last, hard and successfully.

When Elsie entered her bedroom, Candida was there putting away the fresh clothes. She did this with the impassioned sort of interest that she gave to the care of all dainty and luxurious things. As she worked, the gold hoops in her ears rocked to her supple swaying, her tawny fingers, glossily mouse-colored on the under side, flickered to their flexible tips with something of the adoration of a bee as it circles in anticipation above a flower before darting down upon it.

"In some earlier existence I believe Candida was a pampered, extravagant princess," Elsie had once said to Robert, "and of course so very wicked that she's now being punished by this dark skin and servitude. She makes a fetich of luxury—clothes and scent and jewelry—and can't resist helping herself to whatever she fancies on my toilet stand, taking small and steady nibbles the way a kitten's paw keeps darting out to grab a spool. I've walked in upon her several times when she's had lumps of my powder sticking to her nose and fairly reeking with my 'illusion of lilies.' She almost fainted at being caught. Poor Candida! Fancy being born with her mad thirst for beauty and pleasure and condemned to the fate of a servant—a mestizo!"

Elsie liked the girl sincerely and had her confidence. She would advise her about her lover; tried to check her passion for the lottery which, with other gambling, took a good part of her wages; and gave her presents of some of her prettiest clothes when only slightly worn. She did not know of the girl's detestation of Miss Maury as nothing had heretofore come about by which she could let down the shutters of her pretended respect. When to-day she was asked a question that gave her a chance to inform her dear señora of the older woman's dislike and suspicion, a glory came into her dusky face.

"It was you, Candida, that I saw looking through the—the—" Elsie had to illustrate the field glass. "—you know?—from the señor's window upstairs?" With this she sat down in the room's central shadow and clasped her hands.

Candida had the emptied tray under her arm. She poised her neck with a touch of ophidian grace that lifted her lovely chin, and as a sign of emphatic negation wagged the pliable index finger of her right hand.

"Not I, señora. It was Señorita Maury. She searched the house for you, and then she went upstairs. I even took off my alpargatas so that I could follow her without a sound. She opened the shutters and stood up there a long time, looking through the glasses, and I knew she was watching you over on the mountain road."

Elsie understood most of this rapid, exclamatory flow. Selena? A new disquiet sent a chill over her flesh, much like the feeling one has on slipping where one had anticipated dryness and safety.

"You speak very queerly, Candida. I do not like it. How did you know that Señorita Maury was watching me?" Elsie asked, reproof in the steady gaze she kept on the girl. "You must be mistaken."

"I knew it by the way she looked," she purred. "Oh, but it was terrible—as if she had just taken a dose of quinine water. It is the way she often looks at you, sweet señora, when you are not thinking of her at all—"

"Candida!" broke from Elsie warningly.

"Ah, excuse—dear señora, please!—but it is the truth. I think Señorita Maury does not like you because you are young, so beautiful—not like her!" Candida continued softly but with resolution. "She does not like anything that is sweet and nice—like love and being young. So neither does she like me or Domingo, who worship so much and wish to marry. And I? I do not like her. And Domingo?—He, too, does not like her. Never, never! Not so much as the nail on his little finger. Nunca—nadissimo!"

"Never speak so again of the señorita! You may go," Elsie said in the low tone of one deeply disappointed and with a look of reproach.

"Si, señora," Candida made a suave gesture with her disengaged hand, bowed gravely and walked in her waving way through the jade-colored doors to the gallery.

Elsie remained sunk in thought, a slack, childish droop to her figure. Knowledge of this antagonism, added to her speculation about Robert, gave her the feeling of being at the mercy of an alien element, close to the pull of an undertow. The grim things in the past that had gone to the structure of the present moment moved before her, while her hearing was a sentry alert for the sound of the motor that would tell her Robert had come to quench or confirm her dread.

It was so that Miss Maury, after leaving the patio, caught a glimpse of her. Through the partially opened door that gave upon the central hall there was just space for the picture Elsie made to show as a gold and white patch in the middle dusk of the great room. And it was so Miss Maury had seen her often, without being noted herself, generally in the brief twilight when waiting for dinner,—motionless, dreaming, with the look of one drugged and packed to the lips with something of which she never spoke.

Robert did not appear for almuerzo although it was delayed a half hour in expectancy of his arrival.

The morning of fierce sunlight, unseasonably hot for February, with one of the rapid changes of weather usual to the place, had become still hotter, but with the sun gone and replaced by a sulphur-green gloom that blanched everything under it. Accompanying this the dry wind called catias gained in force. A whining cry at first, this became a snarl, then deep-toned lament and all to an accompaniment of solid gusts that beat on the house until it seemed to be a drum resounding to unearthly blows.

Elsie had experienced the catias a few times before and always with a sense of sadness and bodily weariness. It never failed to recall the appalling sounds of the mountain hurricane at El Miradero that had mixed with her first guilt and terror as the ecstacy of love for Arturo had overwhelmed her. There was the added depression to-day of having to eat her breakfast indoors and alone with Miss Maury. She felt a distaste for food and forced herself to swallow some of the sancoche de gallina—a rich stew of chicken and herbs—since the business of eating helped to lighten the almost steady silence that hung between them. When at last she could rise she had to hide a dejected yawn.

For a moment she lingered at the window to look out at the patio, emptied of its furnishings and full of an uncanny, quick-silvered glitter. "Isn't that a dreadful sky?" she murmured heavily. "Tragic—tormented—the sort of sky that must have been over Calvary!"

Miss Maury gave her a frowning stare. "You are so fond of using sensational expressions," she said with thin-lipped distinctness. "Was it fashionable—in Paris—to be flippant about sacred things?"

"I'm not in the least flippant!"

Elsie swung about, meaning to try amiably to win the woman to better understanding of her, when before Miss Maury's woodenness, fixedness and narrowness from heel to head the task towered up as hopeless.

"As the lightning's beginning I'll take my siesta in the library. I can darken that better than any of the rooms on the galleries. I hope Robert will wait somewhere until the wind dies down, but if he should come, Selena, will you please call me?" And she went out, a reckless sort of hopelessness mixing all through her with a feeling of lethargy.

Her hand was on the banister to mount to the library when she changed her mind and stopped before a crêpe-curtained corner that held a divan; it was a little place, much like a Pullman sleeper. To lie down in this nook in the heart of the house, with no window at all from which the lightning might be seen, was an impulse to be obeyed. With relief she slipped behind the curtains, pulled them together and settled herself on the couch in the luxuriously coiled way natural to women and cats. Almost at once she sank into a daytime sleep that from the oppression of the storm had the weight of a narcotic.

This seemed not to have lasted more than a few moments when she found herself gazing with bewilderment up through the shadowy space at the metal rings that held the curtains and was conscious of listening. Unless she had just come out of a dream that still held, she had heard Robert say her name in an angry, ringing, and surprised way. She felt herself whiten as she started to her elbow, her muscles hard. No dream? He had spoken. She was hearing him again.

"Elsie?" This with compressed and enraged unbelief. "You are saying these things of her—to me? Selena!—" A cup rattled on a saucer, a chair rasped the terra-cotta floor.

"Don't look at me like that, Robert. Give me a chance to explain. You've always been so headstrong and so ready to misjudge me! Yes—there are a few things I've noticed that I think you ought to know about and for your own good—"

"My good!" he mocked furiously. "That's the sort of ointment you've put on every disagreeable act of yours as far back as my childhood, Selena. Leave my good out of the question. I'll attend to it." The conclusion had a stormy serenity.

"But when I've seen Elsie wildly anxious about the letters—"

"I tell you—"

"When," Selena rasped on in venom now desperate, "from the most casual watching of her I can see—"

There was the sound of the chair being flung across the flooring. "And who told you to watch?" Robert demanded in fury. "Damn all this! Selena—are you crazy?"

"You'll kindly not curse," Selena breathed in a tone of trembling wrath. "That's something new for you!"

"Sorry. But you drive me frantic. I come home and you begin by insinuating that you believe my wife is hoping for and watching for letters from some man that I'm not to know about—that she lives in a dream with thoughts that worry her, and that you've been spying on her. One would think you the mistress of this house and she here to fall in with your ideas and your rules. I can see, too, from your face and manner and from every word you've said that you don't like Elsie. No, you don't like my wife! This is a shock to me. I knew when I asked you here that your views were different from hers, but I supposed that life and age had softened you, made you more tolerant than you used to be. I was wrong. Now I know I've been unjust to Elsie—most unjust—leaving her here alone with you, as I have, even though it was necessary. She must see how you feel toward her—she can't help knowing it—although, unlike you, she's carried no tales, has never said a word about it. Yes, she must be unhappy. My God, Selena, you want to wake up! Things are going to be different here from to-day on!"

There was a heavy silence. Elsie could hear her heart like a resounding something flung back and forth on the push of her uneven breath. Relief was a brightness through her, knowing from Robert's words that he had not received the letter that morning. And with this, pulses of tenderness seemed to have come to life and be quivering all over her body because he was defending her. How his flawless, ardent truth burned away the secret fungus of Selena's rancor! For he was true! Yes, that was his code—and how unlike what her own had become!—to be honest, to be fearless, so that the most difficult, the darkest thing he faced could not help but be conquered.

Her satisfaction vanished like a wisp of smoke, and apprehension spread through her with Selena's next composed yet stolidly resentful words:

"Well, at any rate—read this. You may know the man it's about and understand it—all of it!"

"What is it?" Robert asked curtly.

"Take it. It's from a New York newspaper and came to Elsie this morning in a letter from her mother."

"How do you know all this?"

"Elsie forgot it—left it on the table in the patio. When the wind began and I carried in the things from the table, I glanced at it, hoping it was some news of the war."

"And when you found it wasn't—you read it just the same."

"There seemed no harm in reading what was in a newspaper! Afterward I felt it might be important for you to know about it as well as Elsie. Take it."

"I don't want it." There was a rustling as of a paper being flung down. "If Elsie had wished you to read it she'd have given it to you. Put it with her letter in her bedroom."

"But Robert—"

"Do it now, please."

"You are determined—?"

"Do it now."

Elsie heard the froufrou of Selena's stiff linen skirt; then Robert's pacing step on the stone pavement; the crackle of a match as he paused, and his steps again; soon the returning rustle of Selena.

There was silence for a full minute.

"Listen to me," she heard Robert say with the deadly quiet that she knew meant his most intense mood. "This criticism of Elsie, this attempt of yours to accuse her to me of something vague, yet damaging, has astounded me. She's not the sort of woman you dare to hint at her being. Not that sort—and I know it!" After this, for a full moment there was perfect stillness. Then, "I must think this over, Selena. One thing I will say now, and bear it in mind—never make a movement in regard to Elsie again except what you do openly. Anything else, no matter how you decorate the act to yourself is as mean as—theft!"

Elsie heard his steps retreat toward the side of the house that held his bedroom. She heard Selena open the doors into the patio so that a rush of scented air blew in and bulged the curtains about her hiding place. She waited until the silence was perfect before she stepped out.

In her bedroom, with the door into the hall locked and the big double doors of green that gave on the gallery bolted, Elsie had read the news in the square of paper sent by her mother. She had read every word slowly, some of the paragraphs again and again. And this finished, she was standing with the thing twisted into a coil in her hands. Life seemed to have gone out of her except for a nightmare look.

The extract belonged to a weekly paper where a writer who knew his Debrett, Burke's Peerage and Almanach de Gotha backward, wrote intimately of happenings present and past among the various noble families of all the European countries. In this he gave a belated account and a true one of how the young Marqués de Burgos had met his death the June previous at his Cantabrian lodge.

After introducing him in the purple of his family honors, he had dwelt on his social prestige in Paris, his almost unbelievable good looks, his poverty that he wore as a grace because of the fanatical exclusiveness that kept him from marrying outside of his class for money. Don Arturo's facile idea of honor in gallantry was described:

"... much like that of the young sparks of sixteenth-century England, as shown in Wycherley's and Congreve's comedies, when expert libertinage was a fashionable profession. He was just as charming in manner as these popinjay rakes, as light-minded, extravagant, generous, soulless, and as serenely cruel. Like them he had stalked whatever woman or girl aroused desire. If, innocent, she resisted, and was captured by some trick, she was used for his pleasure, lightly discarded, instantly forgotten."

Sparkling cynicisms miniaturized the Paphian uses to which Don Arturo had so often put El Miradero in its mountain isolation,—how women of fashion, one and then another, had vanished from their known places to be queens there, secretly and briefly, with him; and how peasant girls, also one after another, had entered it, casual loves, who, too late, found that hope had been left behind. It was for the last of these rustic victims that the Marqués de Burgos had been made to pay the supreme penalty.

Her name was Ascuncion Sanchez; her father, a respected and very religious man, a fisherman at Lequeytio. Of conspicuous beauty, with deep, soft-gazing eyes and a smile to melt the heart, Ascuncion had come to sixteen years and to the devotion of the lads of the red-roofed, little Basque town upon the Bay of Biscay. She was in the first enjoyment of her power as a woman desired, walking among her simple-hearted suitors while looking over and beyond them—a child playing the queen—when Don Arturo passed her way.

And as Francesca, surrendering to love for Paola, closed a book and "read no more that day", so Ascuncion, for Arturo, had closed the book of innocence. The child became a woman with a flaming heart, all her artless, affected imperiousness replaced by a real, a tragic worship. Willingly humble, she had asked but to be somehow, somewhere, a hidden possession in Don Arturo's life, content with what morsels of it he could give her, if only his love would endure. Her happiness had been of the briefest, lasting hardly two months of that summer of nineteen hundred and thirteen, when—keeping away from El Miradero to which they would have been tracked—they had hidden in small inns in out-of-the-way Spanish towns. After it, Ascuncion, on the way to motherhood and almost insane from grief, had gone back to her father's home.

The writer felt sure that through the following pleasure-packed autumn and winter in Paris, De Burgos had not given a thought to this girl of the people with her doe's eyes and sweetly-syllabled name; yet when in, June of the following year she and her infant had died, it was decreed under the roof of that Basque fisherman that his life was to pay for hers. From that moment he had not had a chance of escape.

Her father had found him at El Miradero. This was on a certain night late in June, when his anguish for his daughter's destruction was at its freshest,—had, moreover, found him there, light-hearted, with a new mistress, this time a young, strikingly blonde woman to whom De Burgos had spoken in what the fisherman had felt sure was English,—a language whose sibilations had grown familiar from the tourist sportsmen who came often to Lequeytio for hake fishing and whose boats he had managed. This beauty, in the glittering semi-nudity he described, he had felt to be as sophistically wanton as the man he had come to call to an accounting,—the sort of bacchante with whom the aristocrat should always rightfully have been content, leaving the virtuous daughters of the poor to their prayers and to the love of their own men who made wives of them. In her presence he had shot the notable and notorious young Marqués de Burgos. Yes—this grandee, possessing the sacred blue blood he had from childhood been taught to honor, he had killed with the implacable precision with which he would have despatched a mad dog.

The story in conclusion told how for months the truth of Don Arturo's death had been smothered in the servants' statements that it had resulted from an encounter with a thief. They were the only witnesses, as "the soiled butterfly who had been the young man's companion had used her tinsel wings to good effect and vanished—in all likelihood, to Paris. The query: 'Who was she?' remains unanswered."

An accident to Ascuncion's father at Christmas time in the big seaport town to which he had gone with his family, while his neighbors had supposed him in America, had brought out the facts. The man was injured beyond the possibility of living, and his wife, who regarded this tragedy as an expression of divine wrath for his crime, beseeched him to confess. He had done so to a priest, and publicly to a lawyer, saying in a blaze before he died that he spoke not only to clean his soul, but as he no longer had fear of the law, to stain the name of the seducer,—a great name in Spain. Since its owner had secretly used it for vileness, why should he keep it clean?

This was what Elsie had read; what Miss Maury had read; what Robert might so easily have read—Robert, who knew she was at El Miradero on that date in June, given so exactly. Her eyes had gone ahead of the reading, raking the lines in dread of seeing her own name start out at her. When she realized that she had escaped this, her heart still rang through her clammy body with the strokes of a working hammer.

Shudders ran over her. The disillusionment on which Nina in sending her this revelation had shrewdly counted was as real as a thunderbolt. It crashed through her spirit, splitting her beliefs, turning memory from a thing that had sincerity and some tragic beauty into the altogether vile.

She crept into an armchair, the paper still twisted in her hands. Her thoughts went back to the summer of nineteen hundred and thirteen. During months previous to it Arturo had told her of his absorbing love,—for he had not juggled with time, had made this flagrantly manifest soon after their meeting, in the early spring. In that July, bitter in despair, he had left Paris for his mountain solitude. When autumn came he had returned from it to keep at her side again, as fierce in his prayers, seemingly as driven by disappointment, as he had been from the beginning.

And now she was informed of how he had spent those months in Spain, to what work he had been committed: The defilement of innocence and artless trust for a sense gratification; the wrecking of a girl's life at its fresh beginning, with her death and the heartbreak of those who had loved her following on her disgrace. This treachery, often so commonplace in light-living and palliating society that the horror of its true outlines was obscured, she, through feeling, saw clearly,—the cynical self-complacency, the deliberate and mean deceit, the animalism and rooted brutality that alone could make possible this loathsome crime.

Wan, Dantesque figures hurtled through memory as she sat so: Arturo, the fisherman, Serafin, herself, and the sorrowful girl whom she had never seen. With these the word "Ascuncion" began to beat on her mind. She had noticed how often the ghastly-faced stranger had uttered it, either flinging it at Arturo in rage or lingering over it tenderly, and in her ignorance of Spanish then she had not recognized it as a woman's name. Yes, this story of Ascuncion was true. Here was the solution of Arturo's murder. The vengeance that can become the very root of insensate grief had judged him abominable, unfit to live.

By degrees this closeness to the past sank away. As Elsie still sat motionless, she found herself prefiguring what would have awaited her had Arturo lived. She saw the first flare of their life together over—and what was left? What had become of the exultant defiance of the world's opinion, his homage, their consuming happiness, the sweet, only half-guessed, violent joys? They were gone. And Arturo was before her, almost with the look of a stranger. He was as suave, and elegant, and graceful as ever, but the liquidly brilliant eyes, so often imploring and melancholy, had a still indifference that shook her heart. He spoke, and his smooth tones had an ultimate deadness. He was changed, he said. Things would happen so. Who could know one's self surely? She must be sensible. He was changed. And the idyl was over.

The unreasoning misery of women at seeing the glamour depart from what has been intensely precious mixed in her with a feeling of degradation and rage. Against this thing of utter cheapness, this rank thing, she had staked every good in life, even reputation. Her hands went up and spread over her face, covering its distress from the daylight as they had on that morning in the mule coach after the cynical disrespect that is so often the light woman's portion had beaten down her head, given wormwood to her taste. That pain was with her again. Again the shame soiled her.

A little while and she roused herself; something bright began to show in her spent eyes, strengthened into a grave, fixed, gaze. It was a look of purpose. As before she had flung herself without reckoning to disaster for the wrong thing, so now by every possible strategy she would work to save herself from any bitter aftermath attending her weakness and mistake,—now, as never before, since dignity had been stripped from it and thought of it had passed into the intolerable.

An hour later the hot wind, that wailed and pounded, had ceased as suddenly as it began. The servants replaced chairs and rugs in the patio for its usual occupation up to sunset. The air was delicious now, soft as sunned milk, with tingling chills through it whose source was the snow-crowned mountains miles away.

Elsie was almost dressed when she saw Robert come down the steps from his gallery, lay a heap of papers and account books on the table, and stretch himself in a lounging chair beside it. The striped umbrella had been taken away, and the lemon glitter of late afternoon poured over the red roofs that made a square around the patio, turned the fountain's spray behind him to sparks, and struck a flash from the silver in the close ripples of his hair.

From within the shelter of her room as he lay in this full light, Elsie studied him. More gray edged the black locks about his brow than had been there even a few months ago. She saw, too, that while no doubt he had bathed and rested, and had changed into the white linen that he wore at dinner, it was more than likely he had not slept. His eyes had a wakeful brightness and the bluish stains of fatigue. He did not look at the papers, although he lifted some of them for examination; after fingering them he put them back and began to pack his pipe with tobacco; as suddenly he paused, left it unlighted and fell into thought; the lids were lowered under frowning brows, the whole face had a look of sadness.

Elsie had designedly put on a gown he had told her he liked. It was of black chiffon, cut away at the throat in a round, babyish fashion, the skirt a mass of minute ruffles that kept up a fluttering as of breeze-stirred leaves. In this she was a moving shadow, the pearliness of her arms and tender bosom gleaming through its sheerness, her pastel-tinted face and nimbus of hair a radiance above it. The grievous memories just endured had worn her eyes into a look of intensified spirituality; with this the determination to hold tenaciously to good repute had tilted back her head, put an unusual streak of pink into her cheeks, the dawn of a smile upon her hardily lifted lip. It was so that she stepped out on the gallery.

Robert rose quickly. As he watched her approach, a hush stole over the welcome of his look. Her quickened beauty was like revelation. He had never felt it so keenly nor the distance between them so cruel. As his breath grew troubled, the surface of his body seemed brushed by fire.

Elsie had almost reached him when the nervousness she was fighting made her step unsteady, and she stumbled over the end of the rug. Robert seized her by the arms in a gentle, perfectly balanced grip that told of his strength. But when, because of the gauze, he seemed clasping her cool, bare flesh, she felt the sudden betraying tremble of his muscles. He held her so for a few seconds, only long enough to steady her, while his self-control faltered like a flag about to fall, his look into her eyes an aching cry.

Revulsion came as quickly. A flush, a frown of light self-scorn passed over his face, leaving it stern. "Sit down, my dear," he said, and helped her into the long chair. "I missed you. Did you sleep?"

"For a whole hour, I'm sure. You see I hid away from the storm." There was a break in her voice. The knowledge of his unrest and longing had brought it; while this gave assurance of her undiminished, even increased power over him, it was a troubling thing. "I feel the most gruesome heaviness and sadness from those hot winds. You didn't sleep though—did you? You look so very tired," she said, and clasping her hands, met his interested eyes with the faint, poised smile of a child who waits for a story to start.

"I am tired."

"Can't you give up work at all? Take a little rest?"

"I've come in now to stay two days. Business is held up until I get certain instructions from New York."

She sat back as if half-dreaming. There was a pause. She had a rõle to play and must not suddenly be markedly unlike the self-communing woman with whom Robert had grown familiar. After a silence that pulled between them—with none of the charm that silences can have between two where there is contentment—she spoke again.

"Tell me something about what you do at the mines. You're a wonderful bronze from the sun."

"Not only sun—frost."

"Is it so cold?"

"Often it's bitter. During September and October, when it rained, it was a curse—nothing less. The mountain winds through the wet were bone-piercing then. The mules had a bad time. All the roads were a soft mat, and where there was grass it was like progress over soaked sponges. It's better now. Still we all—Americans and natives—at times have to wear knitted wool masks with holes for nose, eyes and mouth. God only knows what I'd have become by this time except for my wool mask!"

Now he lighted the filled pipe and, stretching out in his chair close to hers, began to smoke with enjoyment. He seldom looked at her and in the barest side glances. She noticed this, while feeling that the most acute consciousness of her was in those averted eyes.

By a few questions she led him to talk again of his work and heard of delays and disappointments that she understood only in a sketchy way.

"I've told you that this Logrono mine is an old one, first exploited six years ago and abandoned as hopeless. When my people with their wealth decided, from information that seemed sound, to take it over and begin operations, they felt sure they were on the trail of a bonanza. So did I. I still have faith but not in such results as those on which we counted. Besides all the mess I had to struggle through in starting, another angle is always jutting from the situation, a complication that arises from mining property adjoining ours and that was, in fact, originally part of the whole Logrono mine. This, you see—" He broke off sharply, to brood down at the stem of his pipe before saying with a drily apologetic look at her: "I'm boring you. This stuff doesn't interest you, perhaps isn't even intelligible to you."

"I'm not so stupid!" She smiled slightly, the tone a rallying one. "Try a simplified version. I'll like hearing of something new and that's so important to you."

"Well, briefly—I'm puzzled as to what attitude I ought to take regarding a proposition that's impending from the native owners of the other half of the Logrono mine. They have neither the money nor the outfit for opening up again, although they contend that they know that in their property lies the richest vein of the mountain. Lately, a Venezuelan named Olazaba, a shrewd, very convincing sort of a man and who speaks English almost as well as I do, has spent a good deal of time with me. He's representing the others, though as yet only in a tentative sort of way—putting out feelers that I can see point toward amalgamation. Of course, this would mean a big position for him with his backers. Also he may own a big block of the now worthless stock that in the event of the other half being operated with ours would at once become valuable, so that his real interest may be a purely selfish one in entangling us to his own profit. Do you understand?"

"I think so. You mean that whether the other property were good or not, this man and the others behind him would benefit by association with you."

"Exactly. I'm not inclined to consider the thing at all, for my own belief is that we have the rich half of the mine. And yet—as in all speculations—holding to this idea, I may be turning my back on fortune. Olazaba was on the ground years ago during the earlier operations, and he has a set of arguments that on the surface seem very worth while. I don't know—" He left the rest unsaid and began to smoke thoughtfully.

"I'm ignorant of it all, of course, but I'm sure a woman in such a situation would trust to intuition," Elsie counselled with a serious air. "Opening an old mine!" Her voice grew dreamy as she said this. "I like the picture of that better. Gigantic!—Is it romantic, too?"

"As a picture I've no doubt it's very romantic. As a business, it's been an unholy thing to struggle through! The old dump and buildings and rusted machinery had to be inspected and inventoried; the workings underground that had filled with water had to be drained off before there could be any new drilling to ascertain where the old lead led and the dip of the veins beyond the place where the earlier work had stopped. Some additional property had to be gained and new mineral rights secured. I've arranged a detailed report recommending the installation of still better machinery. All this takes time. I thought when I came here," he added with a touch of despondence as he gazed ahead, puffing softly on the short pipe gripped by his browned hand, "that I'd get big results in about two months—and I'm still anxious. You've no idea of the obstacles and dangers attending the reopening of an old mine like this. To start with, its chambers were full of snakes and bats and a crawling mass of the arana mono—a spider six inches long whose bite causes the most dreadful fever. Timbering caved in. Then, just as we got really going—and from something that looks like the work of enemies—our windlass cable broke. No idle dream, I assure you!"

Elsie bent forward to look into his face, her own rapt and attentive. "I'd no idea you had such a frightfully hard time, Robert. Why didn't you tell me something about it before? You've never said a word!"

His gaze, turning fully upon her, took a most charming turn; it was quizzical, with a touch of the fondness with which one regards an engaging child, and with the faintest shadow of reproach. "You never asked me," he said very simply.

The words silenced Elsie, brought a pang of regret for his loneliness. It was all the sharper as it came with freshened memory of his defense of her that day.

As if he caught this last thought, he bent nearer as she sank back. "Tell me something," he said in the earnest tone that invites confidence. "Be frank with me, Elsie. Are you—?" He hesitated, trouble in his eyes. "Are you unhappy here?"

She forced her face to one of its old, sudden sparkles. "Have I seemed so?—a sort of Mrs. Gummidge? Dreadful! Why, of course, Robert, I haven't been unhappy!"

"Well, are you contented?" As she did not speak he went on, visibly more anxious at her silence. "Does nothing irritate you? I mean, is there any single thing you'd have changed? You have only to tell me," he said, his straight gaze and tranquil force a seal upon the words.

"I like it all." This was muted, slow, deeply sincere. And then words she had not intended to speak, did not want to speak, burst from her uncontrollably. "You are too kind to me. Oh, from the first—from that day in New York, you have been kind. I feel horrid to have you so good to me!" The tone, while continuing subdued, had grown frantic, and tears broke from her in a sudden storm. All the mixed pain of the day was in the collapse. Though she fought it, her lips went awry as her head sank further back, and she turned away her face. "I've been cruel—oh, I know it, although you've never let me see it. Cruel and selfish—that's what I've been! I couldn't help it—but it's true."

Without moving an inch toward her or touching her, Robert let the weakness expend itself. His eyes, startled and anxious at first, grew comprehending and kindled angrily.

"Elsie!" He said this almost in a whisper, with decision, as her composure returned, and waited until she looked at him in an unwilling, clouded way. "I don't intend to answer what you say of my kindness to you. That's not a word, with its charity and patronage, to be used between us—absurd! I know now, however, that what I feared is true. Selena chills you, tries you, has made you nervous—"

"No, no—"

"Now you are kind—to her. You are hiding the truth."

"No!" She bent forward vigorously. "Please don't say any more about it. For you are wrong. If I were not contented here, no one would be to blame for it but my own self."

A longing came to her to bathe her spirit in truth—as much of it as she dared speak—and with this a look of recklessness brought intensity to her face.

"I ought not to have come here. It isn't fair to you. You asked me—I didn't want to—I know it isn't fair."

"It is quite fair."

"No! I ought to go. Suppose I tell you now that I cannot stay?"

He remained silent, not looking at her. "Then you would go. I'd have to let you, and without a word to try to keep you," he said in a quiet voice that had no likeness to peace. "I asked for your companionship, hoping that while we lived under the one roof you might come to know yourself better than you did in New York. You told me then that your love for me was gone. You didn't say you cared for some one else; and you don't say it now."

He stopped. He was waiting, she knew, for her answer in words to make his conviction absolute. She could not bring herself to speak. It was even hard, with her mouth set in a look of repudiation, to move her head slightly in the negative, the while she saw a grave in Spain that could not be remembered any more except with the dark sense of insult.

"That's what I believed. If it had been otherwise, you'd have told me. And so I hoped—I couldn't help it. I couldn't believe, Elsie, that things were at such a pass between us as never to be righted again." After a silence some wistful words came, as if defying his will. "I promised to be grateful for your dear companionship here on the basis of friendship. And I am! Still forgive me if, just once, I speak of what I feel beneath this."

He leant his arm well over on the table and bent closer to look in the face that was so still.

"You tell me that no one has taken my place in your heart. I am true to you. And I have been, often through temptation that might have explained my failing—savagely, tenaciously true to you—because from the beginning I have loved you with my soul. For I am the sort of man who makes a temple about what is in his soul. And who would soil a temple?"

This declaration went through Elsie and seemed to turn her heart over. Her strained eyes, grown very dark, met his look fully, bathed in it, until her lids fluttered down, leaving the face as a lovely mask.

"I knew you loved me that way." This was only a breath and over lips so quiet they seemed chiselled. "I always knew it. You would put me away, often, Robert, in a lonely niche and high up on a pedestal where it could be very cold," she said, a flicker of irony in the faint smile that showed and faded in her face, "but I knew your feeling for me had holiness in it. I confess I did not value that as it deserved." What followed came slowly, an odd, bitter fervor in it. "I value it now."

The four intense words brought Robert elusive trouble. There was no encouragement in them that his flawless love, though prized, had drawn her nearer to him. He fought depression.

"Stay on here a while longer," he urged. "Our marriage is like a house that has partly fallen, but with the foundation sound—since we have kept the faith! Don't say you must go—not yet!"

Candida, trundling the tea wagon, came from the house, followed by Miss Maury. The equipage with its appetizing array was rolled before Elsie.

"I hope you want your tea, Selena, as badly as I do at this moment," she roused herself to say as she began to serve it.

"Yes," was the answer, and no more.

Robert gave his sister a long, studying look. There was an ugly light in her eyes, a faintly greenish tinge through her skin as of a liver actively disturbed, her air of exaggerated resignation really indicating the most contradictory hostility. He became very thoughtful as he took his cup from Elsie.

And she, while her fingers, veiled at times by the floating gauze of the long sleeves, moved prettily among the china and silver, called back her determination to fight any danger that threatened exposure. Selena was such a danger; and without displacing her or injuring her with her brother, Elsie meant, amiably, to defeat her.

"I had a letter from my mother this morning," she casually announced.

Robert did not conceal his pleasure at these words. It was in his look as he deliberately let it fence with Selena's for a second. "What does she say about New York—how it's taking the war?" he asked. "The papers I've seen show that while the government may declare itself neutral until it's black in the face, the people go out of their way to howl their rampant detestation of everything German—and for that at least, God be praised!"

Elsie forced a sound of laughter. "Muv doesn't mention the war, except to describe Percy's latest hat inspiration born of it—something shaped like an aeroplane with big wings on each side. Her other news was like that—her usual prattle."

Much as a desperate creature pushes its way through darkness and cold to some refuge, she made ready to utter once what it was ignominy even to hold in her thought. And while making this bitter struggle she seemed a human lily, something that uglinesses like sin, deceit and guilty fear could never soil.

"She sent me a horrid bit of news, though—an account of how a man we'd both known in Paris was killed. He had seduced a young country girl and her father shot him." Then, while it seemed beyond belief that it was she who spoke the next words, they came with apparent serenity through lips that felt frozen: "Evidently a thoroughly bad lot, although he had not seemed that sort."

Her spirit quailed at thought of having to speak Arturo's name. Surely he would be recalled to Robert as the man to whose house she had gone after their parting in Paris. Yet that she could escape this seemed hopeless. Robert was waiting for her next words; she could feel that to ask who the man was hesitated upon his lips.

Breaking this premonitory silence, there came the sound of a light tread on the pavement at their back that seemed to Elsie nothing less than Godsent. To emphasize it as an interruption and divert interest from herself, she gave a quick look over her shoulder. When she saw Domingo, the mail bag in his hand, going toward her husband, she seemed to go blind just as she sat, with her head turned.

In the excitement of the past few hours she had forgotten the evening post and her usual method of inspecting it first, as though by accident, in the entrance hall. There was nothing she could do but drag back her dulled eyes to rest on Robert and watch him as a prisoner does the jury. Would he draw from the bag a gray-blue letter—a worn and scrawled letter—a letter with a seal? On the long, rigid look she did not breathe....

It was through a lurch of vertigo that she saw she was safe. A few large white envelopes, visibly business communications and circulars from places near by, were all that came out. She made herself perfectly motionless as with all her strength she fought the weakness, glad that Robert's eyes were lowered as he read. When the patio steadied, she relaxed heavily in the chair, peaceful again, though every bit of her was deadly cold.

One look at Miss Maury, and she knew she had not escaped completely. What she read in those eyes, fixed upon her in a quietly immovable way, sent the blood in a rush over her face, up into the roots of her hair.

"You can deceive him," she felt the look say. "He's a man, and in love with you—therefore a fool. You can't deceive me."

That night the Venezuelan neighbors came to the hacienda to play bridge. The tables were made up, and as there were just enough without Elsie she truthfully said that she was glad to be left out, as she wanted to stay in the air. A Spanish lace shawl that Robert had brought her from Caracas wrapped about her head and shoulders, she strolled through the front doors that gave upon the road.

The light from an almost full moon was a drenching pallor on which every smallest leaf was moving jet. Just such a night and such a light as were about her when she had stood above the Cantabrian precipice; and—though farther away—mountains were here, their shining heights rounding out the memory. The scene seemed, in a way, a ghost of that other one. And she, too, with her sickened heart, only a ghost of the woman who had lived on life's most thrilling note that night.

After pacing for a few moments on the path before the door, she crossed quickly to a wood of packed pines that made shadow on the other side. She had never gone even this short distance from the house alone at night, and to step into the darkness of the trees required daring. When, in the silence, stirrings from the bushes and the scampering of tiny frightened feet about her own made her know she had trespassed on the night freedom of the furtive life hidden there, a shudder of repugnance went over her but without bringing her to a pause until she stood beside what she sought. This was a deep-channeled and pebbly stream flowing on such a sharp slant that its rush over a slope made the chatter of small waves. Divisions in the trees let in the moonlight, and where the water was almost level, it lay in patches that seemed silver shields, molten and shivering.

Elsie did not linger for an unnecessary second. Her lids were heavy, her lips set, her whole look somber. She drew the folded news account from her girdle, tore it into long strips, then into fragments, and poured them on the ripples where they clung like a trail of snowflakes before they were tossed on. From a silk handbag she drew Arturo's crested ring and threw it into the deepest flow. She saw it cut the air as a flying spark, strike on one of the protruding stones, and rebound from this to the riotous stream whose song came back to her from the shadows. It was gone.

The tearing to bits of the disclosure and the repudiation of the only tangible thing that she had belonging to the concealed fragment of her life had had the solemnity of a church rite to Elsie, and with it the feeling that comes from the last spadeful of earth on a grave,—as of something forever darkened, finished. Not until this day had Arturo died for her.

Robert played cards—played them absently—until late, and afterward walked home with his guests. All this time his thoughts were of Elsie. Before he slept he came to a decision: Simply by satisfying his freshened longing to make his wife's life more pleasant, her heart lighter, he would be able to answer Selena's antagonism with a body blow. What could he do first? At once his thoughts turned to material gifts.

This instinct, essentially masculine, makes one see the eager, asking hands of women through recorded time. Jewels for Cleopatra, the palfrey and the hawk brought by the mediaeval knight to his castle-bred bride, the beads hung on squaws by countless Hiawathas, down to the necklaces and pendants that to-day pass over the counters of the great jewelers of the world for the women beloved of rich men,—all bear witness to those little hands held out while, consciously or not, eyes are bright with the question: "What will he give me?"

So during his two days away from the mine, Robert spent all of one in Caracas. There he picked out an electric landaulette that was padded like a jewel case; he meant Elsie to learn to run it herself, without having to depend on the family car that needed a man at the wheel. He also bought a piano whose modern mechanism was housed in the frame of an ancient spinet. Elsie never sang now; she was like a bird in captivity gone mute; and he wanted to hear her voice again as he remembered it in the days before the little child had died,—in old English ballads and the love songs of Grieg that suited her sweet, whispering tones, their twilight charm.

On returning from his walk the night before, he had found her sitting in the patio, wrapped in the Spanish shawl, and had told her of these intentions. At first he had been made happy by the sudden look of affection that brought a glow to her dreaming eyes; as suddenly chilled by its quick fading, when with unmistakable sincerity she tried to dissuade him from buying the things for her. And though he had made it plain how glad he would be to have her go with him on the jaunt, she had given several reasons for remaining at home.

On the way to the capital he had sat with folded arms, the brim of his Panama hat pulled into a point over his eyes with their savage pain, and brooded upon these defeats. She had not wanted the luxuries from him because they had seemed hampering obligations, outside their compact. She had not wanted to go with him, and the reasons given—a dislike of the effort in the heat, the closeness of the train—had been dismissed by him as untrue. Simply she had not wanted to go.

Of course no idea had come to him of the picture that his request had flashed before Elsie on the springs of fear, in which she had seen herself leaving for Caracas on the early morning train, remaining absent until midnight or later, the letters coming three times directly into Selena's hands. Even under previous circumstances she could not have endured this; and less than ever from this time on, since she had come to know that the mails were watched for by Selena's mystified eyes as eagerly as by her own.

She was not up when Robert left, and a few hours after his departure, on starting as usual for her morning walk, she had to steel herself against the examining gaze from Miss Maury that she could feel follow her as she strolled away; later in the day she managed to see Domingo in time to get first word from him that no letters had come for any one. These efforts, successful though they were, left her with a feeling of desperation, her brain rasped as from some steady, nagging sound. In consequence, when Robert reached home very late and brightened to find her still up, waiting to hear his account of the day, she was in reality keyed almost to hysteria from the unremitting sense of an enemy in the house whose furtive suspicion dogged her.

Elsie slept badly that night. Another day had gone and the gray-blue letter had not appeared. She lay on her bed—the Spanish bed of hot countries; flat, only a coverlet over the springs in place of a mattress, cool and smooth with its tightly drawn linen—and gazed through the drapery of netting rising in clouds above her, toward the moonlight that filtered through the window in the vaulted roof whose ribbed divisions were like a bat's spread wings, while frantic hatred of what she dreaded began in her.

It had been her inherent straightforwardness, alive even on that June night of reckless joy and surrender, that had made her write the literal truth to Robert. Ah, better for her if, being a rebel, she had been a hard one! Far better if the wish to be fair had not urged her pen to the words that had become her threatened defeat!

She had often lulled herself with her mother's belief that the letter was part of a lost ship's cargo and safely at the bottom of the sea. To-night, as she lay open-eyed with tensely shut hands, she could not think so. A sense of prophecy kept saying to her that at last, maybe when it would have even more destructive power than now, because she would have more to lose, it would reach its haven and, unless she were fortunate, make chaos of her life.

Where was it? Where, at that moment? In existence somewhere, buffeted by accident and change, in having on long and slow journeys, forward and back, followed Robert? Was it one of hundreds in some forgotten mail sack? Neglected for a time in some post-office, would it soon be on its way again? Was it already on its way?

If it had only come to-day. If, to-day, she had been able to see it! If, with the first well-known and the anticipated marks of later travel upon it, she had held it in her hands and had had the joy of tearing if to bits as she had torn the printed tale that had unsealed her eyes to the contemptibleness on which her folly had been built! Oh, if it had only come to-day!

How long would she have to keep to her post as lookout while the cold hatred of a nature that repelled her hung about her, as determined as it was masked? How long must she feel uncertain, her eyes on the next corner around which, at any moment, the sinister might step and face her, its dark smile declaring: "You see I have come. Yes—after all—I have come!" How long before she could feel the danger over? ...

She tossed in a distraught wakefulness.

As the tranquil weeks passed, the desire to have the letter arrive and be destroyed by her became an obsession with Elsie. She was daily coming to a more warm and wistful nearness to her husband. Irresistibly she kept constantly seeing his reticence and self-control against the memory of Arturo's pyrotechny of passion. And Robert gained by the contrast. Arturo's unbridled display of feeling took on the cheapness of redundancy beside what she had come to know was uncompromising manhood in Robert, a pure, high pride. Daily she saw, too, that this strength was only a breakwater to stem a need of her whose hints of fury overleaping it had begun to call to her, strong with the charm that misery and hunger can give to love.

Robert no longer suggested the almost fraternal, self-contained husband of their earlier life; the absorbed worker who had for periods lived on a different plane, she forgotten. Without knowing it he was winning her because, bitterly unhappy without her, he could not always prevent her seeing it. And this is sure to draw a woman when a man is dear. It loses nothing in force because he is a husband and not a lover. If the unhappy longing for her is there, evident to her through circumstances of some sort that thwart it, he becomes a lover, and the unrest from him is a flame that starts its like in her until she is filled with steady consciousness of him.

Robert was far from realizing that such thoughts were Elsie's. During these days he scarcely knew himself, his philosophy became so inefficient and he so bitterly restive. At the mine his body would move capably at his work while his mind was often far from it. The early afternoon, his time of rest, began to have the allure that an empty church has for one unhappy who out of the bustling midday steals into its dusk and silence to sit in solitude, easing pain by dwelling on it. In this hour he was always able to be alone in the manager's house, and he would lounge in his easy, long-limbed way at his desk, gazing through the open door, though not at what was there,—limestone gorges whose riven and mangled sides were damascened with a curious verdigris-brown; the crane, shaped like a bent elbow, towering out of the darkness of the gut in the mountain's side from which the machinery's turmoil seemed the roar of beasts; strings of laden mules prodded by mestizos; forked and furrowed heights in the distance; and, austerely remote, the mystic shimmering white of an occasional peak, like heavenly watchers blanched with disdain for the pigmies who despoiled the land, seeking what to their mean conception meant power.

None of these things were real to Robert as he mused. His mind would cling to pictures of his wife remembered from his previous visit home; one, and then another, they kept haunting him. His heart would burn in a dull way, and his body tremble at the thoughts of her that began to creep in and endure.

Foremost was the belief that soon Elsie would leave him. As they lived now, he was sure she saw herself a detached and parenthetical thing in his home, something that daily became more irrelevant. She would decide to go. And he would have to keep himself from one prayer. She would vanish out of his life—this woman, so dear to him, from whose fragility there came to him now hints of deeply hidden fervor, something sensitively unquiet, a likeness to it in the effect of the hair that made a wavering light about her intensely white face where her eyes were pools of shadow.

She would go, uniquely unarmed against new and difficult issues, with no close ties waiting to enfold her, no wiser brain to help. And he would have to endure it. There would be silence and emptiness afterward—as if she had died!—yet worse, since there would continue with him to be savagely lived down the hideously belittling hurt that belongs to failure.

So these two, confused, uncomprehending, would meet and part every few days,—Robert's eyes on Elsie's face, watching for a sign that did not come; and hers fixed on the void in which their lives spun and where, distant or near there might be eddying, to come at last into Robert's hands, her own renegade words of abjuration and farewell that would send her value crashing into the splinters made easily by the fall of a damaged thing.

Elsie brought her car to a stop. Before she could step from the satin interior where mirrors reflected the bouquets in hanging vases, the stable-like front doors of the hacienda were rolled to each side from within by one of the mestizos, while another ran out to help her alight and take charge of her many packages.

She had been in the town since the morning; had spent hours at the sale of a library by an Englishman who was scattering his belongings before returning home; had almuerzo with one of her neighbors; and had stopped at the post-office twice,—the visits having resulted in only a few local letters, as the foreign mail, on the boat that had reached La Guaira the day before, was not expected until some time that night.

It was late March now, and the land was exotically splendid. Easter was just over, its joyousness lingering on in the festas of this "month of Mary." Church processions were met constantly, mostly of white-veiled little girls carrying lighted candles through the full sunshine; after dark there was a flash of lanterns from groves on the town's edge, where the natives danced; all day long until late at night, from houses and street bands music came,—heady, richly sweet, of uneven twisting tempo, a provocation to the body to sway, while burning the heart with the trouble that belongs to love.

Elsie's imagination had given quick response to these notes of passionate life, finding something exquisitely sensuous even in the religious ecstacy that was like the flinging up of the arms of the sad world toward the sky in freshened hope of happiness, keener worship of the beautiful and good. She had gone about her projects through the day in the dreaminess that the springtime, even in bare, northern latitudes, can give,—a sense of budding in the root of one's spirit; a something that enkindles, so that the saddest can know briefly the ghost of old desires. And this delicately-sparked languor was with her as she stepped into the flagged entrance hall that, after the outside brilliance, seemed as black as a crypt.

Instantly she found that the shadow was the only likeness to a crypt. The place rang with the clash of angry voices crossing each other in dispute. As she paused, both tense and quivering, she realized there were two speakers—Miss Maury and Candida—and they were in her room. The upper part of the door that led to it from the hall was made of stained glass, one of the panes lifted on a catch for air, so that sound travelled clearly. Before turning the knob she stood listening.

"Don't try to defend yourself any further, you horrible girl. I have told you what you are to do," came stridently from Selena.

"I won't do it!" This as a dolorous shriek from Candida. "You will see! I shall go to the festa! You will see! When my señora comes!—"

"You will do as I say. Stand on your feet. Get up at once!"

"No! I shall die here first. I shall never get up!" Candida wailed. "I will go to the festa!"

"You shall not move out of the house for a whole week!"

"The señora will let me! I do not care for you or what you say!"

Elsie opened the door. From what she had heard she was prepared to find Candida, with the native floridity of expression, crouching on the floor, Selena standing above her. The added touches to the scene took her breath. Candida was indeed on the floor, but fairly spilled on it and garbed so that at first she gave the impression of something between an attendant in a Turkish bath and a hula-hula dancer.

She had on one of Elsie's filmiest nightgowns; this was dropped far down from her shoulders and fastened under the armpits with a blue and white towel as a sash; every ornament of Elsie's, including a mass of native bead and metal necklaces chromatic in color, bought by Robert as curiosities, clanked on her bared bosom; the claret-red bougainvillea made into huge rosettes were back of each ear; and she had used the scent bottles so lavishly, that gusts of mixed fragrance came upward with her every lurch.

All this, barbaric with her tawny flesh, suggested some jungle orgy; her face, dumbfounding, marked its crescendo, as a long screech might, for it was plastered with white and red, changed by crayon daubing from every vestige of its own expression, her full lips under a coat of scarlet paste seeming of negroid thickness. As tears ran in cross streams over this mixture, a painter's pallette rag could not have been more splashed.

Elsie's eyes took in these startling notes and, seeking explanation, looked across at her toilet table. She found it there in the sight of her old Paris box of cosmetics which stood open, its contents scattered. As it was very pretty—a novelty of imported suede, shaped like a valise—she had kept it in the bottom of a trunk, and had not seen it since unpacking on her arrival at El Iris. That it had made its impression on Candida's memory was evident to-day.

After a hopeless look at it, then at the girl who was now lying on her back, her hands holding her head as if to keep it from flying off, then at Selena who somehow gave the impression of a gray yarn stocking standing in judgment over an artificial rose whose colors had run in the rain, Elsie dropped into a chair, unable to keep back an abrupt peal of laughter.

"Candida! You—you—!" She tried to find Spanish for a severe reproof, failed, and broke into English. "You silly, silly creature! How—how dared you?"

These words and the twist of fun that went with them acted like electricity on Selena. Before Candida could do more than turn over to crawl—hopefully, yet with the humility of a worm—toward her young mistress, she changed from a yarn stocking to a crowbar. Her face settled into grimness as she swept a look of wrath over Elsie.

"You can laugh at her! This girl is bad—bad—and you know it. I find her here, half-naked this way, painted like a savage, twisting and turning before that mirror, ogling herself over her shoulder, and at last kissing—do you hear?—kissing her own arm in a disgusting admiration. And you laugh at her! Are you aware that you're making yourself an ally of this creature's against me?"

Elsie had quickly sobered, her eyes very dark and with their still look. Through the first words there had come to her nothing less than the cold breath of hatred. She waited until Selena's question died on a rasping note before she stood up.

"Aren't you exciting yourself without reason?" she said quietly. "The girl hasn't committed a crime, you know." Without waiting for a reply she looked down at Candida. "Are your clothes here?" she asked.

"Si, señora," Candida quavered. She had not understood a word of the English and had kept looking from one to the other of the speakers in the most racking anxiety.

"Go over there by the bed and put them on. Wash your face, too—at once!"

Still Candida remained kneeling, trying miserably to read Elsie's face for the one thing that was of moment to her.

"Señora, señora," she bleated and thumped her head with fists as hard as door knobs, "pardon me! I am sorry that I touched your things. Do anything to me for that—to-morrow—only say that I can go to the festa with Domingo after dinner to-night!" She crawled sinuously to where she could lay her cheek on Elsie's foot. "Only say that, señora! Oh, say it, for the love of God, or I shall die! I shall die here this minute—without a priest—if I cannot go!"

"You can't go!" Miss Maury interposed in her close-lipped voice and painfully distinct Spanish. "I have told you so."

"Don't listen to her!" Candida shrieked and pressed rapid kisses on the slipper's buckle. "She has no heart! She is made of stone, that one! She is an old maid!"

Selena drew her breath through her nose with a hissing sound and squared her shoulders. "You have heard me insulted," she said, and fixed a waiting look on Elsie.

"Get up, Candida. You must ask Señorita Maury's pardon for what you have said."

"I will! I will! Forgive me, señorita!" She swung about, tried to embrace Selena's knees and, after getting a futile kick, swung back to pray again to Elsie's foot. "But only say that I can go to the festa to-night with Domingo! Only say it!"

"Yes, you may go," Elsie said with almost a sorrowful kindness.

Selena's mouth opened with a snap. It stayed open. She grew ghastly, and during the time that Candida laughed and cried and called down blessings from heaven on her señora while hurrying to the corner to change to workday clothes, she remained looking at Elsie with an icy rage that had an enduring quality.

"You mean what you said to her?" she demanded at last, not above a breath.

"Yes, I mean it!"

"After you heard me tell her she could not go?"

"Even after that."

"Are you not going to punish her?" Her eyes with some envenomed meaning remained fixed on Elsie's face that seemed as quiet as it was deadly pale.

Inwardly she was far from quiet. Unrest, whose root was in her own sense of guilt, made her draw back from those cold eyes that seemed reading the secrets of her heart across the gulf between them. With this the throb of wilfulness natural to her could not be kept down and broke into words.

"I think she has been punished enough. You frightened her almost to death at the thought of losing her night's dancing. She's young. She's full of the love of life, the desire to be happy. Unlike you, I don't believe she means any harm. You merely saw a dress rehearsal of her idea of gorgeousness. As for using that cosmetic stuff of mine? Well, of course, she made herself utterly absurd—poor Candida! In the first place nature has made her almost too vivid and she did not need it; besides, she used too much!"

"So that's the way you look at it." The grim meaning of her look intensified. "You don't denounce her for this gross exhibition, for making herself look like—well, like something I won't even name. You'll find the word in the Old Testament!" she flung out.

"I'm not as well acquainted with the Bible as you are, Selena," Elsie answered, and managed a smile. "But isn't the New Testament kinder? Isn't there something very beautiful about charity and not judging?"

Candida had placed the borrowed clothes, folded, on the bed, and called out, while wildly flickering her dark, fine fingers: "Gracias, señora! Ah, gracias, gracias," as she made an emotional exit.

A silence followed. It seemed to Elsie to hold the menace of poised vitriol. Her nerves grew rigid in a way that called for some sort of violence as relief. It would have soothed her to have taken Selena by the shoulders and thrust her from the room. She stifled this feeling under her still seeming calm, took off her hat, and unfastened her gown.

"No time now to rest before dinner," she said, sitting before the mirror while drawing the pins from her hair. "Robert'll be along very soon. He said he'd surely get here to-night, and it's almost seven. Hadn't you better get ready?"

Selena presented a strange picture. She remained very stiff in the center of the bedroom, her dry mouth working in the fumbling way of the old when excited. Some imp seemed possessing her, urging her to speak while she struggled to be wise and resist.

Elsie's bare shoulders and arms, over which the wheat-colored hair had come glistening down, decided her. To half-undress before her like that!—It was something she would never, even if ill, have thought of doing herself! It was of a part with the sort of underwear that was disclosed,—scarcely more than gauze; of a part with the paints and powders in that French box; of the sinful and passionate account in the newspaper months ago, and that she was sure had not been shown to Robert; a part too of Candida's shamelessness and this young woman's easy and cynical amusement at it! Her prejudices boiled to white heat and a sour froth. Silence became impossible.

"I have a few words to say to you before I go," shot breathlessly from her. Her voice, though tense and clipped, was far-carrying.

"Yes?" and Elsie began combing her hair. She expected some questions or information about household affairs, and from the tone something of a fault-finding nature.

"You may as well know what I honestly think of the whole situation in this house," were Selena's first surprising words. "That girl was able to gratify her evil instincts—through you. Here in your room she found all that she needed in that disgusting French box—oh, I looked at the name on it! Besides, one glance would show that it could only have come out of Paris. It's easy to see, too, that the contents were often used before—often! So it's no wonder you'd laugh at her and send her away rejoicing in her vicious inclinations. Why not? Why should I expect you to do anything else? Except that in her silly masquerade she was a caricature, I'm sure she was much what you were in Paris," she sneered slowly.

"If one could only know all the truth of that time it would be interesting, I've no doubt—though hardly improving."

Elsie's hand with the comb had dropped, her attention changing to a stare of dumb bewilderment at Selena. The attack, unbelievably daring, had so startled her she felt as if a metallic clang had struck upon her brain, for a moment paralyzing it.

"You must remember that I have been in Paris. Only once—and that was enough. One glimpse of the night life there sent Mrs. Hoskins and me flying from it in disgust. But I know the place, you see. I also know the meaning of your cosmetics, for I caught sight of a flashlight photograph among your things—a crowd of masqueraders, you among them in a rag of black gauze above your ankles, your face all made up with that mess and a lot of black patches. You never use the stuff now—too cautious?—And what of that newspaper clipping you got in February? You left it behind you in the patio, and I glanced at it. Your mother sent it—and a nice account!" Her pause here was expressive before she added with edged slowness: "Was the society woman mentioned in it—a friend?—Oh, I know you don't think me worth your attention," she continued complacently, "—think me old and dull! But you're mistaken. I can put two and two together as quickly as you can! I've watched your inspection of every letter that comes to this house and ahead of any one else!" Spurred to more vigor by the dazed guilt Elsie could not keep out of her face, she became coarse under her attenuated refinement. "I've seen my poor brother fooled by you while all the time he's of no value to you except as a check book! But let me tell you that even without these facts I'd see through you by instinct! There are things that good women feel. There are things that the wrong sort of women can't hide from them. After your treatment of me here to-day before that horrible girl, I made up my mind to let you know just what I think. But I've no fear that you'll dare to complain of me to my brother—you'd be afraid that he—"

The door to the hall came inward sharply and Robert stood there. He remained in the opening, his hand pressed down on the knob. A sick, white look to his face showed as grayness through its brown; his eyes were as sad as they were stern; yet they were stern in a way to inspire fear, the pupils so spread there was almost no ring of blue around them.

After the briefest glance, all sorrow and an angry sort of tenderness at Elsie, he spoke to his sister, whose head had jolted up in defiance, though her look was as frightened as that of a horse balking at a precipice.

"I heard some of what you said, Selena—not much—but enough!" He pushed the door wider. "I want to speak to you."

"Well—speak!" Selena cried, trembling.

"Outside," said Robert, and added bitterly, "where you belong."

He did not look again at Elsie, who had turned away, her elbows on the toilet table, her hair cloaking her shoulders. As Selena still fluttered obstinately without moving from where she stood, he came to her and in a quietly authoritative way that counted out discussion, led her by the arm until close to the threshold. There she shook herself free.

"Don't imagine I'll stay in this house another hour—not one!" she said to him in a storm of cold rage.

"Excellent." Robert ran this in, an approving comment, a likeness in it to the thud of a rubber stamp affixing a signature.

"I can see just what you'll do and say—just the sort of fool you'll continue to be!—There's a boat for the States on Wednesday. The Suttons are going on it.—I'll get to Valencia to-night. I'll stay at a hotel and take the morning train to Caracas and join the Suttons there. As fast as I can throw my things into a trunk I'll go.—Someone's got to drive me to Valencia in half an hour.—Nothing will induce me to spend another night in this house!"

"Your decision couldn't be improved on, and I'll drive you in, myself," Robert said in a new and peaceful tone. "I'll see you made comfortable there. I'll see, too, that you are comfortable as long as you live. But not in my house. Never with me again! What else I have to say to you won't be said here."

Elsie heard the door close. She remained just as she was, gazing in a dull way into the glass. All of her quivered in restrained excitement after the whole disrupting scene from which two things separated, grew sharpened—Robert's weary yet flashing face with almost an anguish of protectiveness in his one look toward her, and two phrases of Selena's that had a lash's sting: "There are things that good women feel. There are things that the wrong sort of woman can't hide from them."

Was this true? In dreary desperation she studied her face. Often she had felt it strange that no mark of the heart-shaking passion and grief suffered at El Miradero had fixed itself outwardly upon her, that she should have remained so ingenuously fair. She had been wrong? That she was a woman who had, in effect, become a man's mistress and as a result had quickly known horror, terror, the brackish taste of brutal disrespect, the present sense of day by day deceit were all there, somewhere?—in some faint, betraying mark, like the covert speck of blight in a fair fruit?

Deep sadness went over her. Without moving, in a trance of heaviness, her thoughts began a requiem for all her failings, for her ill fortune and for loss. If, long ago, she had insisted on going to Burmah with Robert!—If she had never spun in the Paris danse macabre.—Or, going there, had held fast to gravity, strength; had struggled harder against Arturo's seductive power, killed her infatuation for him at the beginning!—If she had but gone to England with Robert that night in June!—If she had parted from Serafin in time—had not gone up the mountain with him!—If her eyes had never rested on El Miradero!—If she could go back and be no more committed to the wrong than was the foolish mondaine who had alighted at Bilbao packed full of good intentions, with no memory now of one black and galling night to bruise her and no record of her madness there, written by herself and floating somewhere in the world, to fear!

Still motionless, her thoughts slipped to an earlier block of her life and she saw herself as a very young mother in grief over an adored child who would never speak to her again. That pain had not died. The pang of loss where there has been deep love cannot die. Years pass above it only as snow falls on a garden, cloaking its form but with the living seed underneath, so that memories doing the work of the warm spring rains will bring the flower of pain magically to life over and over.

With this thought the cry that had silently crept through her in the bedroom at El Miradero, before beginning her letter, rose with unbearable sadness within Elsie—Ah, had her darling lived! ... And on this another longing pressed—Ah, had she then loved Robert as she knew, to-night, that she had surely come to love him!

Her head sank lower, her eyes closed, she felt half-swooning in regret. And then, far down in the blackness back of her shut eyelids into which her knuckles were dug with unconscious force, there floated before her sight the face of another little child with much of the irresistible beauty of the one she had lost. From a vast distance it glimmered, ghostlike—came nearer—smiled at her—a faint smile at first that changed slowly to a very wistful appeal for welcome. "Don't you want me?" the look said. "Wouldn't I comfort you? Wouldn't you love me?" ...

Elsie's breath broke. She kept yearning watch upon the small wide-eyed face, so like a blossom and a star. When it would drift from her, almost sink back into the shadows from which it had stolen, her will recalled it, held it before her with tenacity and adoration. She shivered, her heart seemed breaking, her throat was thick with pain. She was in the throe of the most ancient ache of woman since the beginning of the world. Ah, here was her need! This, and this alone, could make true happiness for her. She was that sort of woman—needing love and loving motherhood. The little cajoling face, with shy eyes and a mouth like an opening bud, made her know this now. Now!—In the confusion of her life, in the turmoil of regrets, and the dread.

A clicking sound, with subservience in it, pierced the deep stillness. Elsie recognized it as the tapping of Candida's long nails on the stained glass of the door into the hall. At a call to enter, she came bearing a letter.

A very different Candida this, from the one that had brought judgment clattering on her head. Her drenched and plastered hair, sleek as a skullcap, was dragged so tightly into a door-knob knot, the strain must have hurt her face; her skin glistened like brown earthenware from a harsh scrubbing with soap; her gown was her plainest butcher-blue nankeen. With these notes she had taken on the mild stare of a cow and the deference of an undertaker. She was, in fact, so unnaturally sedate, counterfeit was written upon her from crown to toe.

After Elsie gave a look at the letter that showed her Robert's writing, her attention came back to Candida. Her thoughts of the regrettable in her own life had softened and enriched her sympathy for the young girl who, in her elemental way, was struggling in the grasp of the furies that make for discontent in women and plan their mistakes.

"Wait a moment, Candida, I want to ask you something," she said with great kindness, looking seriously into the black eyes that sprang suddenly wide with an inquiry in which there was fear. "Miss Maury says that you are not a good girl. Tell me the truth. Are you?"

Candida tried to speak, choked, and after a silence her face gave a twist of misery.

"Is Domingo a good man? Does he want to marry you?" Elsie's labored Spanish gave the words peculiar impressiveness. "Is it marriage for you, Candida?"

"He says so, señora. And oh—I am good!" She grew suddenly wild, flung both arms across her eyes and rocked as if to solemn music. "I am—still—good! But Domingo tries to make me not care to stay good." Her arms dropped. A distraught look had come to her eyes. "He says we are fools to waste our lives without love, I know he will say that again at the festa to-night. Oh, it is so long to wait to marry! One gets old so soon! Why, look—I am almost—twenty!"

Elsie lifted one of the beautiful citron-colored hands, icy cold in the fingers, the palm burning—and held it in a friend's way.

"Why can't you marry—if he is good—wants you for his wife?"

"He has no money now, señora."

"He has his wages and you have yours. You could both still live here, together. Wouldn't this be enough for a beginning?"

"Ah, no, señora," Candida said sadly, torso, head, lips and brows all fluttering in a negation that had a breeze's sweep. "You see he had saved two thousand pesetas—but he had to send it all to his sister in Bolivia. His old mother and father live with her, and they were very sick. As for me, to work here after I marry—how could that be? How could I wait upon you, señora, when I would be having a baby? You would not want me—that way!"

Elsie smiled at the barbarous simplicity of the words. "That might not happen at once"—

"Oh, yes, it would! Si! Si! My mother—very quickly—she had sixteen," Candida sighed, nodding briskly.

"Very well. Now listen to me." Elsie patted her hand and in her slow Spanish spoke earnestly, as if to a child. "Domingo will marry you without delay, and I will get another maid when it is necessary. To-morrow the señor will give him the two thousand pesetas. I will ask him to do this. Then there will be no more unhappiness for you. What do you say, Candida?"

It would be impossible to translate what Candida said. In a whirl of broken cries she dropped to her knees and, as before, laid her cheek on Elsie's slipper.

"Don't talk to my foot!" Elsie smiled and gave a little push to the prostrate shoulder. "Come, come! Look at me, my dear."

"Madre mia!" Candida, in an ecstacy of tears, was now risen to her knees and addressing the raftered ceiling. "Ah, mira! See!—see an angel is standing here who turns all poor Candida's sorrow to joy! Ah, mira!—so beautiful, so excellent, so wonderful, so perfect, so—"

"That's enough, Candida," Elsie laughed. "Now stand up." And as she did so, breathless, shining, still muttering enthusiasms, her young mistress gazed into her eyes with a sadness that enveloped her, made a deep quiet fill her. "I will do this for you. What will you do for me?"

"Anything, señora! Whatever the señora wants is hers!"

"Buéno! Here, then is what I want—that, for me, you give up the festa, that you do not go to the dance in the woods with Domingo to-night."

For a few seconds Candida was sheer blankness,—her look almost idiotic from disappointment.

"Domingo must go," said Elsie, "but alone. You will be at home with me—safe! Do you understand, my dear?"

Candida lifted her brows. One index finger shot to her lips, remained pressed there, conveying caution. She suddenly twinkled into a smile of the most hardened guile. "Yes, I understand. He to go and be sorry—so he could die!—that I am not there with him. And I to be happy here, alone—since marriage is so near. Ah! how wise my young señora is— And may I tell him now?"

"In a moment. Wait outside the door while I read my letter. There may be an answer."

"But the señor has gone," Candida cried.

"Gone!" Elsie said this in her thoughts.

"Yes, he was a long time in his room, then brought out the letter, then took Señorita Maury and her trunks off in the big car. He drove it himself."

Elsie waited until the girl, with a rocking sort of rapture, had hurried away, before she opened the envelope:

"My dear Elsie—I don't want to see you until I've seen the last of Selena. I can't explain her atrocious conduct except as a sort of insanity that sometimes attacks the old. People grow old in many ways, but there are two that stand out prominently, I've often noticed. They grow tender and dim like sweet lavender, long faded, as it steals from an old-time trunk; or they grow rank and bitter like wine that changes to vinegar, and this generally when they have kept themselves separate from the things that make living a real and unselfish thing, as Selena has. She is the result of a stonily detached life—one without a high heartbeat or a missed beat—centralized in a dry, bleached way. So make what allowances you can for her.

"I shall take her away without having you go through the formality of leave-taking with her. In your kindness probably you would want this. I do not. She does not deserve it.

"I'll stay with her until she is satisfactorily settled for the night, and I won't be back till late. Please forget as soon as you can, her hideous and outrageous insults. Eat your dinner, rest, try to sleep. I will see you in the morning when we will not speak of this thing at all. Let us never speak of it! You know all that I feel and must not say.

"As always, yours—ROBERT."

The pages fluttered to Elsie's knees. She sat very still, turned sideways in the chair, her elbow on top of it. Out of all the words that set forth Robert's allegiance to her, she was intensely conscious of one short phrase: "She does not deserve it." Ah, there was the judgment that was in him under all his generosity! She saw it as a steel bar, hidden under a cloak of kind leaves, even of flowers.

Following the consciousness of the words, others came out of herself—thin, apprehensive, sick—and joined them, trailing after them: "He will meet Domingo on the road, coming back with the evening mail—with the foreign letters. He will stop and take his own.—He will take his own!" ...

It was nearly eleven when Robert said good-by to Selena. During the time spent together Elsie's name had not been mentioned between them, though thought of her was very present back of their new formality and during the businesslike arrangement of Selena's future and income. She refused to eat and he dined alone in the public room of the hotel, taking her afterward to talk to relatives of the people she was to join in Caracas the next day, and even waiting there until she was ready to leave, so that he might return with her to see her comfortably settled for the night.

"I hope that when we meet, Selena, time will have softened what is so cruel in you now," were Robert's last words as, after the parting, he gave a fling to his sharply level shoulders and turned again to gaze earnestly and kindly at her.

"I don't want to be softened!" Selena rapped back with fierce coldness, her drawn-in body looking more than usually bony. "And I guess time is about through with me. It won't bother trying any more hemstitching or embroidery on me. The pattern I am—I stay. You don't like it. Well, you needn't. I do! Good-by."

As he drove back in the radiance of big stars that showed the land in velvet-black outlines, and the mountains ahead of him as wraiths of snow in jagged drifts, he felt relief that the chapter with Selena was closed; that in the home he was nearing no one waited for him but a woman infinitely dear.

The night was hot and dry. Small winds made by the motion of the car beat upon his face with the effect of a child's blows given in play; they were rich in perfume, mostly the luring mixture of the rose's sweetness with the carnation's spice. Music swept to him in cross currents along his way,—Spanish music that is metrical love.

These impressions of warmth, fragrance and melody crept through his senses, fretted them to rebellious pain, while lulling them to the exquisite sort of helplessness that the sick can know even when conscious of losing blood that takes life with it. Glad to be returning to Elsie, his thoughts of her had roots in sadness.

Selena's continued suspicions of her interest in another man he dwelt upon with the ironic smile of the analyst who knows the core of a subject that superficial observers take at some chance value. Even so, while he dismissed this possibility, his fancy knew a crushing feeling,—the drag-down of jealousy, its humbling sickness.

Another man in his wife's life? A lover, waiting somewhere? He let himself consider this, and the answer was swift. No, no! Elsie was not false. While he felt that her years in Paris—a heady drink for her ignorance—had damaged her transiently in taste and in point of view, he did not believe they had corrupted her. She had been born candid to bluntness,—a certain volatile wilfulness natural to her when she was happy, but always open; no duplicity in her. If what he felt underlay Selena's insinuations were true, she would have told him so straightly at their meeting in New York. She could not have been persuaded to come back to him even in a half sense. Nor would he have wanted this.

Certain of her honesty, his mind swung back to the questions that went with him day by day: Why had she changed to him so completely? Why had the years apart taken from her all need of him except as a friend for an occasional hour? By degrees he believed he read the answer: It could only be that from the beginning she had given him no more than a child's fondness mixed with gratitude for his wanting her since she had suffered for so long as an encumbrance in her mother's life. Yes, there lay the answer to the failure he faced now; she had never loved him; he had not made her love him.

For a long time knowledge of a change in himself had been deepening. He was piercingly conscious of it to-night. Selena had been a special illumination; she had poured light into the corners of his soul. That day, as they stood at issue in Elsie's doorway, there had been, faintly, in the intolerance and austerity of her older face with eyes the color of his own, just enough of the mystery of family likeness to startle him. In it he had seen himself. At the thought his face flushed; he flinched, hating it, while in his unsparing way he continued to face it. It was true. The prudery that had made of Selena a warped celibate had likeness to a certain precisianism and asceticism in himself that in earlier years had mastered him; had made him know almost a sensuous joy in the pain he had to endure to acquire a perfection of self-control.

He scrutinized this strata of character as he would a vein in a mine, searching for its source. Looking far back, he saw it emanate from the first Christians who in the frenzy of conversion had labelled all sex feeling weakness of the flesh, even sin; saw it pass on to the stern, self-punishing Puritans—a strong strain of whose blood was in him—people self-mesmerized into an hypocrisy that had made life as ugly as a stone.

When bone-paring economy had enabled him to go through college, it was with aloofness to the subjects that he studied the classics. He had despised the suave and tolerant philosophers, had steeled himself against the whole pagan cult that had made human love and the beauty of the human body natural blessings of which to be joyously unashamed, the very sun being called to witness the wonder.

And he remembered how this fixed strength had remained with him when college was past and his hard struggle toward success was begun, doing good in keeping his life pure, doing harm in taking the red corpuscles from imagination, limiting its color wholly to the gray of self-denial.

After his marriage there had been no marked change. He had loved Elsie in a big way with his lucid and kindly mind; affection for her was as natural to his heart as to a child's; but in the house of his spirit, passion had been a visitor on sufferance who had sidled in with an apologetic air, willing to hide on back stairs and in secret closets, to wait for moments when it would be permitted to break from obscurity and restraint, fling open doors and declare itself owner; and always after this brief assertion of power—still with its apologizing smirk—again be shut away.

He was different now, because he was older, and the years—in sevens, like a series of waves—had brought new flotsam to character. He had quickened from informing experiences in strange, remote lands. And with substantial success, his senses, taking on softness and color, had become assertive. For a long time now the purism that had ordered repression of his physical side, while giving wrong names to the simple and natural forces of life, had disintegrated, and so thoroughly that he had often laughed at that other Robert Maury as a sanctimonious precieux. He did not laugh to-night,—not when, with hopelessness, he remembered that the man he used to be was the one Elsie had known as a husband and from whom her heart had easily slipped away, very likely forever. A sad fever filled him.

In the shadow of the gates of his home a servant was lounging, waiting to take charge of the car. Robert entered silently. It was close to midnight, and he felt sure that Elsie would be asleep. The glass of her door was dark. Only a lantern, hanging from the high ceiling, burned in the center of the hall, its light through stained slides seeming a crimson star in mid-air. The place was so solemnly still he could hear a clock ticking in the heart of the house.

He drew off his driving coat and the cap that was pulled over his eyes, passed Elsie's room with careful quiet, and going through the arch crossed the starlit patio to where the chairs were grouped. It was silent there, too, with nothing heard but the fountain's chime, and the impulse to smoke for a while in the freshness before turning in became stronger. He would dismiss the thoughts that had been tormenting him to no hopeful end and consider in detail a situation at the mine that must quickly be brought to a conclusion, one way or the other.

Olazaba, the Venezuelan, and the native landowners back of him had refused to abide by his refusal of their proposition, and after more than a month's silence had begun again with what seemed an accumulation of fresh, sound facts, to try to convince him of the value of their desire to amalgamate with him. They had impressed him, and yet to-night, with enthusiasm fading, the inclination to agree was retreating from him.

What, after all, did he positively know of Olazaba or his backers? And what of this instinct that, when he seemed near a decision to present their proposal to his New York principals, made him shy from the ultimate step? While the Venezuelans talked, the thing would seem plausible and right. As soon as he was alone he could not keep from seeing, as a sort of persistent vision, the huge blocks of the old stock in their dead half of the mine that, after the fusion with him had gone quietly through, they would buy back from the many small and hopeless holders of it at what would seem a good price, though in reality—when the market value was published—a very poor one. His far-seeing, shadowless, Scotch mind could not escape the picture of his company committed to the enormous expense of tunnelling through the mountain while the listed stock rose steadily in value, and then just before the failure of the undertaking became public—if failure came—all these men, with the persuasive Olazaba well in the foreground, unloading their worthless holdings at the top price; a thing which his people's money and their high repute had made possible.

Moreover, when he was away from Olazaba with his almost perfect English, he felt distrust of him,—though mixed with an inclination to resist the feeling. The man's personality was the most puzzling he had ever met; it drew one to belief with a tidelike suction, flung one back from it as if on the next incoming wave. Robert received from association with him a restful sort of fascination on which would trail an amused questioning as to just what price Olazaba could be made to quote to sell his dearest friend? When the man would declare, on the many highly colored oaths that a Spaniard can pour out with staggering richness and naïveté, that he did not, himself, own one peseta's worth of the earlier stock, that he was merely spokesman for those who had much of it, Robert did not believe him at all, knew from one or two items of information that had come his way, that Olazaba had been crippled by the collapse of the old mine.

Nevertheless, childish liar though the man was about his own affairs, what he advocated for the New York company might be the giant's league boots to great fortune, and if it were—

The thought broke. The match that he had struck dropped from Robert's fingers. His eyes were used now to the soft yet clear light from the stars, hanging low in the southern sky like heavenly lanterns, and they rested upon Elsie. She was lying there in one of the long chairs. She was wrapped to the chin, like a big papoose, in a velvet motor rug and fast asleep in the starry night.

This coming to the patio had been the result of a mood with her. After hearing from Domingo that the foreign mail would not arrive until the morning, her mind had been relieved. Nevertheless, as she made ready for bed, the silence of the house, accented by distant chatter from the servants' quarters, had produced a petrifying feeling of loneliness; much like the dissociation she had felt as a child in the crowded New York hotels when, after Aunt Esther had left her with admonitions to go to sleep instantly, she had lain with tight little fists and eyes rigidly open upon the darkness, listening to the many sorts of life that whispered and rustled past her door.

She had looked at the huge foreign bed under the pagoda-like netting and had seen it as a rock on which she would be sure to toss, her brain more alive than in the daytime. In contrast to this, the air that came in at the window when she rested her cheek against the iron bars was as cool, friendly fingers on her face, cajoling her to come out. And the fountain's tinkling splash had called to her.

She had obeyed. Over one of the inconsiderable gowns on which Selena's disapproval had fallen, she had put a coat-shaped garment of a silken Eastern fibre, an iridescent lilac in color, had snatched up the velvet rug from a chair in the hall and with a pair of mules on, had gone to find peace under the sky.

Robert moved but a few cautious steps to stand beside her where he could see her face plainly. It was turned only slightly sideways and glimmered up at him, an oval of ivory, yet with a living glow about it as she slept there in the blue bloom of the night. Something that hurt him spoke wistfully from it,—the Madonna clearness of the brow with the pale, plaited hair falling away with gravity and simplicity on each side; the full lids exactly like lustrous white tulip leaves laid upon her sight; a patience, rightfully belonging to an older face, that showed in the droop of the lips. She made him remember a picture of the dead Elaine in her barge, going "upward with the flood." He yearned over her.

And as with folded arms he remained there so close to her, he was acutely conscious of how far away he was in all that meant living. The two agonies of passion and renunciation filled him,—their flavors of lost happiness, self-disgust at failure. His eyes closed heavily.

Though only a moment, it seemed to Robert a long time that he stood so. When he looked at Elsie again he saw that she had awakened.

She was lying in strained stillness, watching him. Some direct meaning in her unmoving gaze was like the heat of the sun, a pulling power in it. He could not stir or speak. A look of suffering stole into his face as he remained entranced, the muscles of his folded arms controlled to the rigor of iron. Through the increasing pain he was sure of his strength.

And then, quick on the wake of this confidence, he found himself on his knees beside her.

"Elsie!" The one word told all, desperation and torture in it. He drew the velvet rug sharply from her lowered chin, pulled it down far, and on the long splash of her throat pressed his burning face. "Are you angry?" He asked this over and over, trembling. "Do you send me away? Must I go away?" he implored, his voice so husky she could scarcely hear him.

When her answer came it was an impact upon sensation. A suggestion of the ineffable in her yearning movement, she turned fully to him. Her face was sultry, convulsed. Her arms went about his head, wrapping him as if sheltering him from some hurt that threatened, and in a blaze she gave her lips generously to him, clung to him with them, breathless, relaxed.

The delight of the deep kiss was anguish to Robert, while it remade the world. A lambent rapture swept over him unlike anything he had ever felt before. It was almost a moment before he could speak. When he did, and faintly, the words came with conviction through wonder and distraught joy: "You love me! Elsie, you love me! Oh, you love me!"

She drew away. Her parted lips had a look of thirst, and he knew they were burning; yet in her eyes, through the radiance, there was a sorrow that confused him,—heavy sorrow, much like what he had watched there years before when, grieving for the child, she had sat apart, tearless and tragic in a loneliness that a million clamoring to engage her could not have filled. Her reply, given slowly, matched this dark memory, full of some meaning he could not grasp.

"I love you so much my heart is breaking." And with this clear, straight statement, she sank down, turned her face from him. "Go away," he heard her whisper. "Go, please."

"Go?" he mocked. He even laughed. His arms went avidly around her body, her smoothness and slenderness thrilling every nerve. "Look at me!" he commanded. She did and met his ravenous lips that went over every little bit of her face, while frayed whispers came,—nothing too wild nor too violent to say; nor too pleading, too abject, too foolish.

Filled with a weakening joy, Elsie lay against him, tasting in that strange, mixed moment a strong draught of life. Deep, sweet love was there, and delight that ran high, and regret profoundly black curdling it.

Her mind had a vision apart from the real, magical though it was. She knew that the time had come when choice must be made,—confession or a final silence. And through this grinding realization she retained the appearance of love, of surrender.

"I believe now," she heard Robert say in a tone of intolerable delight, "that you have loved me all the time—all the time, my sweet, and did not know it yourself. Oh, you are just the same Elsie that I have loved from the beginning, with a wild heart in you that I never knew of till to-night—mad, sweet, passionate, wonderful darling!—Oh, why did you leave me so long alone? How I have missed you! I have been so wretched! To-night, driving home, I knew all that a homesick exile suffers. And more than this—my fancies carried me into hell in imagining that I might have to lose you, sooner or later, to some man that you'd love. I was jealous—but that word tells nothing!—I didn't know there could be such a killing pain on earth as what I felt for a while as I drove home. And now?—You love me. You do. Oh, you love me!"

There was something uncanny, almost dreadful to her in the fact that as Robert caressed her, drunk with her, and while with lips and eyes and the touches of her small, alluring hands she responded to him, there were equally clear to her mind such grimly dissimilar pictures and the questions they created.

Could she not by this time count herself free from danger? The letter had not come, and every day that would pass without bringing it—days in which now as independent mistress of her home she could watch for it at her ease—would be as another stone laid upon the house of security. This suspense over, what else had she to fear?

The published account of Arturo's death had been and gone without reaching Robert's eyes; as a newspaper sensation it had had its turn, to be swamped by fresher happenings, and most surely by the tragedies of the war.

No one of her Paris friends except Paula Vrain knew that she had been the only guest at El Miradero that night; and doubtless Arturo's death had softened her enough to keep her tongue from gossip of the dupe on whom her trap had closed more cruelly than she had meant, for bad as she was—and she was a thoroughly bad woman in being a malicious one—she had, in her way, loved Arturo.

There was left Serafin, the servant, who hated her. She hardened herself to view him from every point as a possible danger. He was her enemy, a lasting one, implacable,—but he was distant, in Spain or Paris; in all likelihood she would never see him again. Still if from the unlooked-for chance that happens once in a thousand times he should cross her path, perhaps in New York, he would feel himself powerless to do her harm. He would not know that Robert had not received the letter, and learning that she was with her husband, he would assume that its confession had not been allowed to end their marriage; so as there would seem to be no chink in her armor through which a knife-thrust from him could pierce, he would be uninterested. No, she need not fear Serafin.

These thoughts made their revolutions in Elsie's mind during a few seconds. Side by side with Robert's ignorance, they made a terrible impression on her imagination. The tremendous, nailed-down solitude and secrecy of the mind! Two to be face to face, even in such moments as was this, and with chasms between them in thought! He did not dream! If he knew, if he knew! If he could see what was so plain to her! ...

She could endure no more. Her arms closed frantically about Robert, almost a panic in her half-closed eyes. She must hold him. Now that she loved him, she must keep him. There would be things of which she would never speak. He must never know of the night that had been to all other nights of her life as a searing burn on cool and smooth flesh.

"I will never cause you pain again," she said. "You'll see. I'll live only to make you happy. Only that!"

"And I will never fail you."

What followed was wonderful, the mystic in it. Elsie, blanched, except for the agate-black pupils and the bright stain of her mouth, was the ghost of a woman in the starlight, yet one on fire. And Robert, with the accent of confident, enraptured possession in the embrace, drew her up to him, quite over the couch's edge, and clasped her as if they were alone on some small bit of land, one in being, clinging fast to each other for safety against the sea that swirled in great rises and threatened them. Elsie felt exalted in another way—that made her want to kneel, her heart a welter of humility—unimportant, except as she responded to this conquering emotion.

It held something greater than their passion and love; separated from self. It was a mighty force that owned them. It was a call to life—to her, to him—but far more to those others to come after them. It was not a passive thing, submitted for their choosing or rejection. It was singularly, impressively Nature's; the omnipotent in it; both of them as seeds beneath it, to be used and spent at its supreme Will.

Robert lifted her up as if she were a child. Standing straight, and holding her to him so that her face was against his throat, he studied her with a sacred sort of tenderness.

"Do you remember, my darling, years ago—after Letty died—when you were so sick, and you wandered off, and I found you alone in the woods face down on the wet ground, crying your heart out—and how I carried you home for more than a mile just this way? Do you remember it?"

"None of the things of that time are clear to me, Robert—only that I seemed alone in a world that frightened me—a gray world," she said, the tremble of sad memory in it. She smiled up at him then, and sighed. "You are carrying me home to-night. And I love you now. Oh, I love you now!"

Held so—she glowing weakness resting in his strength—Robert, for the first time, went up the gallery steps to his wife's room.

A spirit of gayety had come to El Iris. For six weeks Elsie had been mistress of the house. The servants responded with delight to her new authority, persuasive and confiding where Miss Maury's had been fear-compelling. Quick to see the reunion of master and mistress, they would nudge each other and smile as they watched them meeting and parting with every sign of sympathetic intimacy. More than ever they hated their former tyrant's memory; came to see her as the evil eye doing the devil's work in keeping apart two beings who really loved. If Miss Maury could have heard the now married Domingo and Candida openly discussing her with the other servants in the leisure generously allowed them all, as "the sour old cat", "the bag of bones", and always pictorially consigning her to a place of flames where she would "eternally fry", she would have collapsed in horror.

Elsie's morning walks to meet Domingo ceased, and she was easily able to supervise the mails at home, without appearing to do so. The waiting and listening torture was over; the cold pause whenever a door was opened suddenly; the second's icy relief when, leaving her still secure, it would close. While she continued to interpose herself between Robert and the chance of the letter's arrival, she no longer actively feared this.

Often now her murmuring song filled the house; from the big parlor where the spinet was—a place kept in deep shadow with jalousies closed the day long against the sun—it would steal through the opened doors, across the patio, giving the impression of a sweet-voiced spirit secluded in some twilit garden.

These were cloudless days. For the first time in her life Elsie was truly happy. When her lips were not singing, the hidden choristers in her soul whose music—choked all through childhood and made halting in the Paris days from the discords of guilt—now rapturously free, sang full-throated.

As was her way, her passionate heart with its bent toward idealization gave Robert even more of worship than she dared express. The feeling had the magic and blood strength that belong to all high things of the soul as well as many heretofore unvalued, small and individual reasons for loving him—for the slouching, straight-shouldered ease of his long-limbed body whose grace was curiously its own; the northern energy flashing through the brown of his face where the eyes were like the deepest turquoises against it; for his gentle yet subduing decisions; his warm, sharply interested smile.

More than these she loved, as women will, and while it piqued her, the sure knowledge that after the manner of ambitious men of mind, there were times when she had nothing of him; times of every day when she was only a shadow in his life, he all shrewd, absorbed action, concerned with calculations in which, except as a distant background, she had no part.

She accepted this, yet sometimes it brought questions: Had she become indispensable to Robert? Could a woman ever mean such vital need to a man like him so that however she disappointed his belief in her, he would hold to her—for her sake let the hunger of the senses impinge upon his code? How far in the white honesty of his nature would she fall if he discovered her lie—ever knew that with defiance and recklessness, another man had been her passionate lover for a long time in one sense, and apparently in the final sense? Would this not be decided for him imperiously, by something separate from his inclination?

One day as they both sat by the table in the patio, the apricot of late afternoon creeping under the huge umbrella that hid them from the house, he writing, she embroidering, these doubts came as if the shadow of some on-coming trouble, as yet veiled, had fallen with suddenness upon her. She felt a shiver as she shrugged them off, put down her work and went to Robert's side. As he continued bent over the page, she forcibly tilted up his chin with one finger and looked steadily into his eyes.

He had to wink a few times before his blue gaze quite cleared of his reflections to take her in as she wished. When he did, he drew down the hand showing pink and white against his coffee-colored fingers with toil marks on them, bent it back, and after an amused study of the satiny palm, pressed his lips deeply into it.

"I've never seen on a woman in all my life such a little paw. It's a baby's!" He looked up to say this and kissed it again.

It went through him then how delicately youthful in type Elsie was. She seemed a schoolgirl as she stood beside him, faintly smiling. The day had been very hot, and she wore white cotton net as simply made as a graduating frock, no color about her but the straw-colored feathery hair and its tint repeated exactly in the sash that hung to the skirt's hem.

She drew his arms tightly about her as she slipped to a seat on his knee.

"Don't establish yourself permanently there," Robert frowned, a note of laughter in the words, "as I must get on with this statement—"

"What is it?"

"An account for Olazaba about what I mean to do in regard to the other half of the mine. He says I dodge him, evade the issue." Robert's eyes gave a cold flash. "No one ever before said that of me, and after these Venezuelans read this above my signature they won't say it again."

Elsie's false steps and bruises in the whirlwind of life had made her wise. Robert saw her give a keen almost alarmed look toward the paper which he had been rapidly covering with his fine and forceful writing.

"From what you told me yesterday, you are not agreeing to do what they want."

"I am agreeing to speak of their proposition when I go to New York, as one having no opinion about it, good or bad." He seized Elsie in a boyish clutch. "Think of it!—in about two weeks more we'll be in New York's springtime and out of this heat. Only for that I'd have made you—obstinate little devil though you are—get away to Macuto for the sea breeze."

Elsie did not reply to this, and he went on dreamily: "I've been thinking of what you said of our going to France into war work of some sort. A bully way to spend some of the money I've earned. You couldn't nurse, of course—"

"Lots of other things to be done. And I'd scrub hospital floors—for France! Then I keep thinking of my dear Julie," she went on, a pang in her voice. "I must find her. It chills me not to have had one line to all the letters I've sent her. If I could only hear that she's alive.

"It's hard to get news from the wilderness and maelstrom that France is now. One has to go—to know."

While Elsie was sincerely interested in this latest project her attention was divided. Her gaze wavered around the papers on the table.

"Robert," she said slowly, "don't write anything for these men. I wish you wouldn't."

"But I'd rather. They've got to know just what to expect from me."

"Don't write it," Elsie repeated, the advice with a shade of appeal in it that puzzled him. "Something might be read into it that you don't quite mean, or there might be a few words left in it that you'd wish you hadn't said. From what you've told me, I feel sure you are dealing with a desperate and determined lot of speculators. Any signed agreement of yours might be turned and twisted into some irritation for you that you never counted upon. Tear it up, dearest?" she asked, bending toward the table, while in fancy she saw all that had followed in her own life after the writing of a regretted letter.

Robert looked as amused as if a white kitten with a ribbon about its neck had opened its coral-pink mouth to give him counsel. "Then what would you have me do?" he asked.

"I'll tell you," Elsie said with soft, clear force. "Olazaba comes here to dinner to-morrow night, you say—"

"He didn't want to come—tried hard to get me to go to him in Puerto Cabello where he's been stopping with some others of the clan. We left it this way: If he did not hear from me that I would do that, he was to come here. This is to be our final talk, for he sails almost at once for a Chilean port and new copper fields there."

"And he was to leave, carrying all that writing signed by you!" she cried, in a sort of exultant wrath. "Instead—why not talk to this subtle, perhaps tricky Venezuelan—for I know you don't trust him—and do it before a witness? Me voilá!" She pointed gaily to herself while her face flushed to the opal-pink that lurks in the core of a white rose.

"All right. But I've never known such a quietly dogged, tireless, oily pleader. And he won't take positive defeat well. I've often seen him looking at me with something very like a threat—as if, providing I failed to meet his backers' wishes, he'd start some sort of retaliation."

"That's the way with money-mad men," Elsie cried. "You have it in your power to make a fortune pour into their hands. If because you keep to the straight truth this does not happen—of course they'll hate you." She bent across him and lifted the papers on which his fountain pen lay. "Let me tear them up?" she begged.

"You've got me out of the mood for writing another word. So—go ahead!"

As she obeyed, flinging the fragments into the basket, Robert laughed. "You'll have more than you bargained for. The clap-trap of printing presses at full speed is a trifle to Juan Olazaba when he gets going."

Elsie touched her lips to his dark cheek in the lightest kiss and leaned her elbow on his shoulder.

"I'm glad you let me help you," she whispered. "It's a lovely feeling!"

He studied her whimsically, his glance brilliant, caressing.

"You bewilder me, Elsie," he sighed.

"That's better than boring you."

"You're new wine in the old bottle of my life, and you go to my head. I'm afraid I'm getting uxorious."

"I've forgotten what that means, but it has a dreadful sound."

"Uxoriousness is love of a wife," said Robert, his brows up. "Or, rather, too much love of a wife."

"That's impossible!" Elsie was imperial, blithe and dry. "No, that couldn't be."

After a pause she asked with droll seriousness: "Do you love me as well to-day as you did yesterday?"

"Better."

"But how could you? You said then you couldn't love me more."

"I was mistaken."

"And to-morrow—better still?"

"Without a doubt!"

"And this will never change?" she asked, sitting back a little, her gaze amusedly astounded. "More and more love from you all the time?"

"More and more," he said with drowsy eyes and a clipped, low-noted laugh, "until I am for the most part one big, human exclamation of adoration for you, with every other feeling mere little futile dots and dashes around it. So, if this is my state of mind to-day—Wednesday—you can faintly imagine its intensity by Saturday!"

She bent to touch his cheek briefly with hers as she said: "You are adorable. Only—it happens to be Thursday, you know."

At the words he straightened and held her off sharply. "This is Wednesday!"

"No, it is not," she said, and ticked off on her fingers the various happenings of the three days since Sunday.

"Good Heavens!" Robert lifted her lightly from his knee and stood up. "Then Olazaba is coming to dinner to-night. Didn't I tell you that?"

She looked aghast after the manner of a good housekeeper taken by surprise and clasped her small hands distractedly.

"Robert!—You said nothing about it at all until this morning, and then only that he was coming to dinner to-morrow."

"I thought to-morrow Thursday, you see. This is the second time in a month that I've got twisted this way and lost a day. It's about time I took a rest."

"Oh, dear, what a mistake! What can we do?"

"Why, do with what we have," he said easily. "I'll make a corking Moselle cup that will cover up all deficiencies."

"Nothing of the sort," Elsie retorted, hex fine brows quaintly severe. "Our dinner to-night was to be of the simplest. I take a pride in my house. I'll get Gil started on something more—oh, I know!—his wonderful cheese soufflé will help—and fortunately there's lots of caviare.

"Splendid. Hurry it along, dear." Robert looked at his watch. "There's not much time. Olazaba will be here in twenty minutes. He'll be sure to wear a dinner jacket, so I must change. You needn't. You're sweet as you are."

"Oh, indeed?" She looked up at him in gay commiseration of his need of enlightenment, as she started off. "Not dress? Not put on that silver tissue that's just come home?—as lovely as anything to be found in Paris? Wait!" and she blew him a light kiss as she ran toward the kitchen quarters, calling: "Gil! Domingo! Venga V. acá!"

The time raced. Instead of twenty, it was scarcely fifteen minutes later when Elsie heard Olazaba arriving at the front of the house and Robert's voice from the entrance hall, greeting him.

Candida was fastening for her the last snaps of the ductile tissue into which she had been rushed and in which she gave the effect of a flexibly bending blade throwing off coruscations of moonlight, when Robert stopped to thrust in his head between the gallery doors. He had on a lounging coat and slippers.

"Olazaba's come. I went out only half ready to meet him. He's been hit a bit by the sun and is in there sitting quietly with the shutters closed. I gave him some aromatic ammonia, and he'll be all right. I'll be along in five minutes. You go in when you're ready."

While speaking he was obviously conscious of the cold blaze from Elsie's gown framing her curd-white flesh and glimmering head, her darkly languid eyes making a splash of softness against all the brightness.

"Jove," he murmured. "You're too—too wonderful, darling! Too wonderful!" he sighed helplessly and went away.

"What did the señor say about you, señora?" Candida asked with her lovely simplicity, as she rose from her knees and stood away from her mistress, her eyes absorbed, her delicate fingers lightly interlaced.

"He said I was too wonderful," Elsie answered in Spanish, her lip lifted in a gay smile.

"Ah, how the señor knows all things!" Candida replied with an august gravity. "The señor is wise like God—and what he says is always true."

Elsie gave joyous assent to this, and slightly drooping with laughter, went from Candida's roundly solemn gaze into the hall. The parlor was but a few steps away. It was a sedately stiff room, after the Latin-American manner: A dozen rockers were ranged around the walls; in the big central space there was a table with a chair on each side of it; the spinet's white keyboard yawned from one corner. All of this lay in deep shadow, as a balm against the lingering heat of the western sun, except at one spot beside the table, where from slightly parted jalousies behind it thin rays crept in that made a gridiron-like oblong of flickering gray upon the surrounding dusk.

And as Elsie made her radiant pause in the doorway, she saw a man sitting on one of the central chairs, his head lowered, his arms folded. She had floated out of the gloom, had reached the table before he seemed aware of her entrance and rose slowly. His back was toward what little light there was. As he stood up she had only sense of length, slenderness, and of a mixed odor,—a scent sweeter than any ever used by Anglo-Saxon men and the pungency of Spanish tobacco.

"Señor Olazaba?" she said graciously.

He bowed low.

"My husband tells me you speak English. I am very glad—" Her extended arm fell at sight of the fingers that came to meet hers. A jaundiced brown they were, stained bistre at the tips from nicotine, thin, strong, with tendons like cords at the knuckles, the nail on the smallest a cruel-looking quill.

In all the world there could only be one hand like that!

An icy current of air seemed to close around Elsie; as if, against an iron bar that had replaced her neck, she lifted her terrified face.

The man had turned sideways a little, and one of the pencil strokes of light lay straight across a pair of sunken, oblique and glistening eyes. The fox eyes of Serafin. They were upon her, an electric force in them that locked her own, held her up, rigid before him, when she felt she would have fallen.

Imagination halted; grew stark. For an instant, through blankness and darkness, Elsie was only aware of a disorganizing pang. This was protest from mortal dread against the belief that it was actually Serafin at whom she looked.

His voice carried reality to her. Thin of sound, metallic, rapid, and a shade too high for a man, it brought to her inward sight, on a rising and falling splash, all the happenings of the tragic night where he had moved, the most sinister figure.

"Control yourself! Madame—do you hear me? Control yourself!"

As his face with swiftly moving lips darkened down upon her, Elsie choked, holding by her fingers, and feebly, to the edge of the table. Balance left her completely. Her mouth opened for a scream; it ended abortively on a breath.

Joining the threat that intensified in his eyes, Serafin's hand fastened on her bare arm—as it had before—oh, as it had before. How she remembered! How exactly it repeated the repulsion felt then, gave her flesh the same furred feeling as if from a worm moving over her. This brought strength that made her recoil from it, jerk it off.

"Get hold of yourself, madame." And now his tone, small, succinct, expressed the most dire need of her obedience. "We have only a moment before your husband comes back. Do you hear me? He will be with us in a moment—your husband!"

With sickness cold upon her, Elsie struggled to heed this warning. Her nerves were stretched to their hardest.

"What is it? What?" she implored and dragged a hand across her wet forehead. Growing a little stronger, though the words came weakly still, as if she were at the end of an exhausting race: "Why—have you come here?"

"You'll know all that, later. Just now get one thing clearly into your mind, or you will regret it! When your husband returns, you are not to let him know that you have ever seen me before. Remember!"

Strengthening still more, though her face was as a dead woman's, Elsie fixed a steady gaze on him. "You're to keep—pretending—to be some one you're not? And I'm to help you do it? That's what you mean?"

"You have never seen me before," Serafin repeated.

"No!" burst from her.

"What do you mean by 'no'?"

"I won't do this," was whispered through her teeth that shook a little, piteously. "My husband thinks you're a man named Olazaba. You're not—and I won't say that you are. I won't—"

"That is my name," he broke in on a crisp note. "You never supposed that I had any other than Serafin—did you? Of course not! It's so usual to forget that—servants—have family names. Is it not, madame?" and the question was insensate resentment. "I am Juan Serafin Olazaba. I was that in Paris. I was that in Spain. It is my name."

"Posing as a Venezuelan," she said feebly.

"To your husband only. I thought it wise, fearing that if he mentioned that I came from Spain and perhaps described me to you, you might suspect. Except for him, every one that I know knows what I am—a Basque!" The passionate nationalism of the diminished yet persistently unconquered race flamed in the words. "Let all that rest for the present," he continued even more hurriedly, "there is only one thing we can decide at this moment."

While she could see he was listening, his eyes upon the door—not upon her who, defiant, wretched, and astray in mind, swayed before him—he continued in the unaccented recitative of the Spaniard when speaking at length and in haste. It was a series of small hammer taps that touched every needed spot of a spread surface, and they ran around the circle of Elsie's intelligence with assurance and emphasis, making plain every phase of the situation:

"Will you be silent about having known me before? I am not asking from your husband anything that could possibly injure him. He decides nothing to-night.—I did not want to come here. He has asked me to do so over and over, and for weeks I have been evading it.—While it is not by chance that I am here in Venezuela, as I will later explain, I never wanted to see you again. I have no desire to renew anything from the past—not the slightest desire to disturb your life! It was necessary for me to accept Maury's invitation to-night or antagonize him, lose what ground I have gained with him in a perfectly straight business acquaintance. Of this I assure you.—It is a misfortune that you hate me for what has already occurred. I ask you to forget that. Treat me as a stranger—give me my chance as a stranger, this one night. Do what you will afterward—to-night I ask you to be silent. If you tell your husband, I will be shown the door. What good will that do you? I am not aiming to hurt him nor you. Consider what I say. It will be to your advantage! I have something of the greatest importance to say to you, but there is not time now. Keep quiet to-night. See me to-morrow morning—for ten minutes—and I will explain."

She heard him to the end in silence. She wanted to be brave, she was sick of deceit. Here was her chance to be defiant of consequences for the sake of truth. If straightly and simply she unmasked Serafin, no matter what resulted, it would be such clean and fitting tribute to her love for Robert. And, moreover, what need had she of subterfuge even to save herself? Serafin could not hurt her. He had no proof that would convince her husband of her lie. She knew that Robert would not let him speak against her,—would silence and dismiss him. And if he managed to say enough to plant the need of her explanation, later, what power would his word have against hers,—if she denied his accusation?

By the time she had reached this question, a sick dismay came with the knowledge that she was again relying on deceit, that an unburdened heart and conscience still had no place in her scheme. Helplessly, in that distraught moment, she accepted this as needful, found exculpation for herself as something weak in the hands of a too powerful fate and that had to use any weapon for salvation.

Besides, she so hated this man! He was loathsome to her. It was an insatiate repulsion that could not help seizing any chance to trouble or defeat him.

"My mind is made up," came from her on a hard sigh.

She felt strong now. Her eyes were black in her face that the moment's shock had left wan.

There was a pause. Serafin gave her a probing glance.

"What do you mean?" His voice had thinned to a new desperation. "Quickly, please!"

"I'll not let you pretend to be what you are not to my husband,—no, not for one moment after he enters this room," she said steadily.

In the dusk that with little lingering was rushing toward the night, the room had grown rapidly darker. Serafin went to the window near him and peremptorily pulled the shutters open to their widest, letting a deep grayness sweep in. He came back to face Elsie.

"Exactly—what will you tell him?" he insisted.

"He thinks you are a Venezuelan—a man of importance. He shall know from me that I knew you in Paris—the Basque valet of the Marqués de Burgos—"

"And that I knew you there, from the first sight of you," he broke in, "as the mistress of the same man."

A sound of protest on a breath came from her, her look that of one staggered. She seemed at first unable to speak. When she did, her voice came with unexpected strength: "My mind is made up. You had better leave before Señor Maury comes. Nothing you can say—not this last lie nor any other—can keep me from telling him who you are."

"Nothing?" he asked.

His eyes narrowed so they fairly disappeared in the bony sockets. And this very nullity of face became the more menacing; made it seem to Elsie as if his spirit had, furtively, gone out of him to find and bring back that which could not help but crush her; made of him something less and more terrible than a man, however bad—something unnatural, monstrously significant, that awoke dread in her for which there were no words.

His eyes came back. Now he was listening with intense suspense for Robert's step. While he was speaking he kept watch on the door: "You are not afraid of me, then?"

"No, I am not." Her lips formed the words almost without sound.

Chill and luminous and tremulously fragile, she recalled to him a rough yet luxurious room in the mountains, a dinner table with candlelight through white—he even saw the gold of the dish of apricots—and she there exultantly happy, with Don Arturo, the passionate lover and suavely naughty aristocrat, beside her; he the servant. The picture brought heat.

"I will say," Elsie rushed on, more clearly, "that you are attacking me falsely because I resented your insult in Paris.—No one but you knows that I was the only guest at El Miradero that night—or that I was anything but a guest in the ordinary way. I shall deny all you say."

"Deny?" His high brows crept up eerily into a point of surprise. "But, your letter, madame? Your letter to your husband? He knows. Without what I should add as elaboration, you, yourself, wrote him all the facts."

With his first question she saw her mistake. Incomprehensibly, she had for a moment forgotten what had been lodged in her thoughts every day for close to a year; had forgotten, too, what she had often clearly realized—that if Serafin should cross her path she must make him believe that the letter had reached Robert. It was not too late to remedy her blunder. No! He must be made to feel that his information was already discounted. She struggled to get back her poise, spoke with an affectation of relief, her throat dry and stiff:

"Oh, yes, oh, yes—I—that—I'd forgotten—"

Far off a door closed. Far off she heard Robert speak with the carrying sound that came to voices in the stone-enclosed patio.

"You'd better go—that way—there—through the front—before it's too late," she implored in stumbling haste.

Nervous though Serafin must have been, his outward calm intensified.

"But I must have this clear. You forgot that your husband already knew of your affaire with the marqués. This is what you mean?"

"Yes!"

"And that he has forgiven you?"

"Yes! Yes!"

"This happened—after he received the letter?"

"I told you so!" She swept him with a look of frantic rage.

"Marvellous," said Serafin thoughtfully. The one word, as he spoke it, had a curious effect on Elsie. It was as if, on a wild run, she had been brought up short, made suddenly aware of a gulf before her. "Miraculous," he added with a note of laughter grim and sour, his eyes brilliant. "That could not be, madame, unless the law in physics is wrong and an object can occupy two places at one and the same time."

While saying the last words, he whipped a flat black wallet from an inside coat pocket. His strong yet delicate hand, so cruelly nailed, drew from it a glazed wrapping. With a finical precision he lifted this back, took out what reposed within, and held it up.

Elsie saw the keenly remembered gray-blue square of paper, stamped, sealed. Her own letter,—fresh as at the moment of writing.

Though conscious that Robert was speaking again, and a little nearer, she could only stare at it. It was a thing of doom; and doom was in her stricken face.

"Look at this quickly, while there is a chance, señora," Serafin said, and came closer to her, turning it slowly in his dark fingers, his voice once more desperate. "You see your own writing—the stamp—the De Burgos crest on the seal?—Exactly as you handed it to me!—It was not given to Eduardo to take down the mountain. It did not leave El Miradero. It never left my wallet. So—how could your very estimable husband have read it, madame?"

In a flash he replaced it. Elsie stood inert. Everything within her seemed to have dissolved to a rising flood, icy cold.

Robert's step was near.

"Will you be silent—until to-morrow?" she heard Serafin say.

Answering this with a slack nod, she went wildly to the branch of candles in a corner and was lighting them when Robert entered, her back to him.

As she heard his voice with its usual tone saying that she and his visitor had had time to get well acquainted, a second self seemed to come to her; a self of wisdom, advising, helping her. How she managed a smooth, amused reply she could not tell; she had a sense of wonder as she heard herself say the words. It was easier, then, to add a murmur of excuse for going, and while keeping her face in shadow, start across the spacious bareness.

Her knees felt sinking, so that she had to call on every nerve and set her teeth to control them. She really made a natural progress, but to herself she seemed to crawl over an interminable distance. She was so small; the room so big; the door affrightingly far off. And the feeling made her live again through a similar experience,—when, playing at composure, as Arturo had implored her, she had walked toward the curtains in the room at El Miradero, with the implacable gaze of the pale stranger upon her.

At last she was outside, could let the trembling have its way with her and send her, jolting, befogged, against the wall. Everything grew dim. A moment passed so before she was able to take hold on her will. Yet she could not stir, though her eyes were now open, watching.

They were frantic like those of some small thing that stops stock-still only because there is no place to run, every path blocked.

Courage may follow directly on despair; a deep, still recklessness that counts out consequences. When results cannot, from any point of view, be speculated upon for assistance, they lose force as hindrance or threat. After the agony of the first moments of Elsie's frustration, in which fear had been a swollen flood pouring into every niche of her consciousness, an ebb came, and while leaving her hopeless, it made her brave. As she stood before the mirror in her room and pressed color back into her bloodless face, the wildness went out of it.

She knew that she could make no bargain with Serafin. Even the passing thought of such a possibility brought self-contempt. Her chance of escape was gone. Her defeat was certain. Yet two purposes pulled indomitably at her sad heart: For as long as might be to prevent the letter from reaching Robert,—this as one would keep creeping from the sweep of an advancing fire though knowing death, ultimately, to be sure; and to prevent any further talk between him and Serafin by which the Basque's adroitness might gain some helpful concession.

During the dinner she was a surprise to the flickering, slanted eyes that watched her. Serafin read her tense stillness as promise of her immediate silence without giving him security. He was sharply intuitive, and he felt her peace a waiting one. His hopes of money, the only thing he loved in life and had most dire need of now, he could feel tottering on the edge of this woman's deep-laid hatred of him and one accompanying danger,—whether this would make her more desperate than afraid.

The scene was lovely. The table, placed on the gallery that jutted from the broad part of the house, stood in the center of a grayish-mauve netting; stretched over a roof of bamboo sticks, this enclosed the entire space and against it, from without, mosquitoes hummed venomously and large spotted moths catapulted in vain. A golden haze from lamps under straw-colored shades encircled the chairs, in and out of which Domingo and another serving man, all snowy white save their brown faces and oiled black hair, moved soft-footed as ghosts. The darkness and solitude of the night were suggested with lush softness through the veil as was the spark-blue glory of big stars and the glinting of a sliver of moon that seemed a lantern hung in a distant cedar. The fountain's fall stole in, desultory, whimpering.

Serafin talked almost incessantly of war, politics, business, dreading a pause that might lead to the danger he was combating, and ate nervously; Robert, with a pleasant hunger, as he listened; Elsie, while keeping a fork moving, tasted little, though she constantly drank both wine and water to soothe the spasm that, like a spring broken loose, would at odd moments close up her throat.

And as for the most part she sat looking down, though managing a slack nod at times to Serafin's: "You agree with me, señora?" a confounding realization came to her as it had before, of the inviolable privacy of thought: There was no outward sign of Serafin's suspense that must be churning about her, nothing of Robert's doubts of his guest—only his desire to know him better—nothing of the many things that, missing her surroundings during fitful seconds, she saw; things not of this moment, or night, or indeed of this land at all; instead, all the events that had followed her luckless entrance of the mule coach that had taken her up the Spanish mountain with Serafin,—the deus ex machina who had planned disaster for her and who was beside her now, seemingly her welcome guest. Yes, the phantom-filled hinterland of thought could be an awesome mystery. Without visible life, how authoritatively alive it was!—the voices from it a multitude's, yet only heard clandestinely by each; immutably separate.

"Is it not so, madame?" Serafin's voice on a suave note broke again on Elsie's absorption.

"You say 'madame' sometimes, instead of 'señora'," Robert remarked casually before she felt the need of answering. "You say it as a Frenchman would."

"I have lived much in France," he nodded.

Robert looked at him in candid astonishment. "I had no idea of that. I'd supposed you such a bred-in-the-bone product of this Latin-America that it consumed all your energy, kept you rooted, except for visits to the States. Like so many South Americans, have you a certain pride in feeling that you are, if anything, an improvement on your ancestry—on Spain?"

The crafty eyes met Elsie's dark, judging gaze and in the swiftest way evaded it. A shade of hesitation was visible before he decided that for him in her presence to be as honest as was possible, would be the best policy.

"My ancestry in Spain is not remote; in fact it is here, in my very own self. I am a Basque by birth," he said clearly, his chin irresistibly lifting at the words.

Robert's interest intensified. "Ah!—now I understand the difference between you and Rodriguez and Monsaldo that often confused me. I detected it at times in your Spanish, badly as I speak the language. But I supposed you Venezuelan. I thought you gave me to understand that. No?—Odd that you did not tell me this interesting fact about yourself before, Olazaba, in our many talks."

Serafin gave a dry smile and a shoulder twist, his hand spread fan-wise and moving like a dark wing, first toward himself and then toward Robert,—all of this a wordless exclamation at his own incomprehension of himself.

"I touch very little on my personality, you see. I don't know why—except—well, that we Basques are rather taciturn. We can talk as volubly as the Spanish, to whom in one way we belong and in another way feel separate from, but we do not open our hearts about our intimacies in their childish way, once they are familiar with you. As the rugged, silent Bretons are different from the rest of mercurial France,—so we are different from Spain."

The moment for which Serafin waited came when at the close of the dinner he told Robert that he was an enthusiastic lover of bridge.

"I hadn't thought of that," Robert said. "I'll send Domingo down the road to see if the Morenos will come in for a rubber—no, as they are rather ceremonious and a bit touchy, I'll run the car down and fetch them myself."

Keeping to her resolve, Elsie had not left the men alone to talk over cigars. With her own cigarette she had withdrawn to a long chair, a little way from the table. While Serafin, smoking, strolled into the patio, toward the fountain, Robert stopped beside her here, bent over her.

"You've been very silent to-night, darling," he whispered; "and you seem—sad. Aren't you well?"

"Oh, yes," she murmured, her eyes faltering, all of her sick with a sense of doom, of herself rushing to some finality that was confused, only the pain of it clear.

"You don't like my friend," Robert whispered with one of his scant, droll smiles.

"Don't call him that!"

"You like him less than you thought you would?"

"Far less! He's—horrible," she said in a fierce whisper of pain.

"You're an unjust child. I found him attractive to-night. I think the man's had a hard and interesting fight with life. And then—he's a Basque! I was amazed. I've read a lot about that little-known race—poor, but in their own estimation noble, and arrogant as the devil. Now I'm sure it's this queer, Basque streak in Olazaba—secretive, reticent—that has always kept me miles from understanding him. The man might do—anything! He might surprise with the most staggering extremes, either good or bad. That's my feeling, somehow. Draw him out a bit while I'm away. I'll be back in ten minutes."

As he said the last words he put his hand on hers. Elsie lifted it and with a look of dumb love, kissed it. She wanted to say: "Don't bring the people back. Keep strangers away to-night." But she knew if she did he would not leave her, and there would be no chance for conclusive words with Serafin.

This thought, as she watched Robert hurry away and immediately saw Serafin coming back to her through the crossed shadows of the patio, made her aware that deeply within her the hope she had thought slain had lifted its head for a death struggle, and that it had been revived by Robert's words about the mystery of the Basque people: "The man might do—anything. He might surprise with the most staggering extremes, either good or bad."

Cruel and unspeakably petty as Serafin had proved to her in the past, she had never fathomed him and could not now,—only sure that he was filled to the lips with some curious, twisted sort of pride belonging to his race. With this thought went memory of the belief, often heard, in the persistence of some idealism even in the most seemingly irreclaimable criminals. Might there not be, then, woven with baseness and inexplicability, an unconformable bit of honor lurking in this enemy, something that in spite of her refusal of his appeal might induce him to withhold his retaliation?

For as the decisive moment neared, disclosure a poised sword above her, Elsie was filled with insurgent prayer—raw agony in it not known before—for the destruction of the letter without Robert having knowledge of it. Never had it seemed so dreadful; never so ruthlessly cruel. That uncompromising relinquishment of him and the passionate words that declared her love for Arturo were with her, unwinding before her memory like the distortions of some grotesque dream.

It would be one thing to tell him the truth—all the truth—of her folly's transient life during a few hours of the June night that had ended in a crash from the havoc of which she had crawled to find she could hold on to the thread of his belief and so manage to live again. Another and a hideous thing to have his eyes rest on the actual words written then, their hot livingness changing her into the woman who had set them down,—though she knew how briefly that woman had lived, how thoroughly she had been the creation of self-delusion, what regret went side by side with memory of her.

Serafin, in the swift, muted way, so remembered, came up the gallery steps and while he drew back the panel of stiffened netting that gave entrance as a door, she was holding to the hope that in the chemistry of this strange man some drop of unalloyed justice would make her suffering at his hands not the heaviest.

The light of enterprise was frankly in Serafin's eyes. Now that he was alone with Elsie, her dread showed so plainly in her watch of him, in the appealing yet frozen look across the space between them, he felt a foretaste of accomplishment. Her spoken ratification—one word—was the only thing needed to turn this to a settled content.

Having earlier seen her panic at sight of the letter that like a relentless footstep, following, had at last overtaken her; and having during the night studied the lovely peace and richness of her life, grasped fully that her love for her husband was as deep as it was tender, he could not believe that she would ultimately refuse to meet his terms.

He said this in effect in his first guarded words when, after a look about to see that the servants were not within hearing, he lighted a fresh cigarette: "You are prepared to be sensible I am sure, madame. You will not refuse the little I ask in order to gain for yourself—so very much."

When he was about to seat himself the first discord in his scale of values was struck. Elsie rose sharply from the long chair, and coming to the table, stood there with that haunted, wavering gaze, yet straight, her head well up. Words were not necessary for him to understand the meaning of her action. He was intelligent and sensitive and knew that she was repudiating the intimacy implied in their association as hostess and guest that night. She was not to talk to him as Olazaba; he was to her the Serafin she had known, and as such she would not tolerate him seated familiarly in her presence. The only way to prevent it was for herself to remain standing.

This opposition sent savage annoyance through him. He was to have a hard struggle after all, and there was little time in which to manage her. Besides he was tired, irritated about many things, while about one—the immediate need of money to stave off ruin—he was ravaged at times by a sadness that had the tooth of insanity.

"Let us sit down while we talk," he said, an angry thrust in the clipped tone. "That will seem more—usual—if we are interrupted."

She remained as she was.

"To rush on without giving me a hearing," Serafin insisted, "is a senseless thing. Let me explain how the position we find ourselves in has come about—"

"What does that matter?" broke from her on a frantic note. "It matters that it has happened—that's all! I am willing," her faint, excited words hurried on, "to say nothing to my husband until you've gone. As soon as you're out of the house I'll tell him that I knew you, and where, and how. But although I do this—and I shall as surely as I stand here!—are you fair enough to give me that letter without any conditions attached to it?"

"But why?" Serafin demanded crisply, with a cool stare.

"Because it's mine! You stole it," came chokingly, "just as much as if you were to put those spoons in your pocket. Are you clean enough—man enough—to hand it over to me?"

His look changed to sly, feline amusement. "You know that you have no more right to the letter than I have. Once you gave it to be posted it passed out of your possession. It became your husband's. In your heart you see how fair I really am, since it is to him I mean to deliver it—that is, unless you give me what I want—must have!—to make me keep it in my pocket to-night and, later on, hand it over to you."

His eyes, constantly like banked fires that could send out unexpected gleams, came to a steady blaze in the deep sockets. Curiously with this his manner quieted. Dignified, vehement sentences came from his closely folded lips:

"Madame, why should we clash this way? I want to hold you back from rashness. All can be circumspectly arranged. You misinterpret how I came to keep the letter. Let me make that clear to you and you will surely see the whole matter differently."

He said this as an elder brother might. Elsie knew how quickly that gravity could change to brutality. Every separate phase of the night that had been her Gethsemane rose before her with sickening distinctness. The memory brought one of those gusts of killing hate that can come at extreme moments to the gentlest heart. To see him was unbearable. She looked away.

"I've told you—" was all she could say.

While it was plain to her that she had spoken the words, they seemed to travel to her from some other, over space and through a thickness. With this queerness a draining, deathly feeling came as if the material part of her were melting, as if she had become a sad shape of mist that had to drop to a chair beside the table and feel its support under her elusive arms. She kept her face turned from Serafin. Her heaving gaze held for help to the picture of the night beyond the gauze, though this was as unreal as herself; the dim mountains, like wraiths awesomely watching the slanted rising moon, were attached to a dream wheel on which the tilted world sank and rose.

"We have only a few moments," reached her from Serafin on a rushing tone, though guardedly hushed. "Please try to take in what I say!—You think I held your letter back from the first to cause you trouble, and that is why you will not be reasonable now.—This is not so! I did it to save the marqués from what I considered silly madness on your part. I felt sure from what I knew of it that it was one which later might be of great disadvantage to him.—You thought the affaire with him a most serious thing—one to endure indefinitely. I knew this to be your folly. And I knew the marqués would bitterly repent of having in a moment of weakness for you allowed you to send such a letter to your husband—one to be proof for a divorce where he would be named as the cause—you see? The devotion of my whole life had been his. And it was for his sake I took it, madame; not to have a hold upon you that I might at some time turn to my advantage. This is the truth!"

Elsie turned; she gave him a long, still look. El Miradero was so resurrected by his words she almost seemed there, instead of in her home with a long year of suspense and Arturo's grave between.

"It is not the truth," she said slowly with the unaccented smoothness of coldest contempt.

His face grew fiercely dark; one of his fists doubled. "What do you mean?"

"If you kept my letter for the reason you give, you'd have torn it up. Or you'd have given it to me—later." A look of the most desolate wistfulness deepened with her words. "You could have, you know—so easily! In the commonest kindness you could have done this soon after—when Arturo was dead. No," came somberly, wildly, "not a trace of compunction from you! You kept it."

"Ah, now you have touched on other moods, other points of view—"

Domingo appeared here to remove the linen and what was left of the silver, clearing the table for the cards. They had to pause, appear tranquil as if he had interrupted only the usual desultory after-dinner talk. When he had left them, Serafin gave a startled look at his watch. More than ten minutes had gone. His eyes met Elsie's and held them, an agony of eagerness in his.

"Scarcely any time is left, madame. Listen—please! Recall that night at El Miradero. I kept the letter, meaning later on to earn the marqués's gratitude—it was to be an evidence of my fidelity. That was my first intention. Fate put it out of my power.—Recall the cruel shock his murder was to me!—Very well. This grief—because where I love I am a violent man—became suddenly a fearful rage against you who, already, I had little cause to like. I believed you to blame for Don Arturo's death. I was sure he would have kept away from the mountains that year had his unhappiness about you not made him reckless, blind to danger. Thinking you had gone back to America he went away to this solitude—to brood over his failure with you. I felt that you had put the weapon into the hand of the Fate waiting up there for him.—It was this that first made me see the letter to your husband as something by which I might annoy you—not seriously—keep you perplexed—you understand? And the more so because your manner to me then, as always, made my blood boil.—It was not until weeks later that this idea took on a serious side, when I recalled clearly one very important thing—"

He stopped. An on-coming motor was pouring its resonant buzz over the roofs from the street. He saw Elsie's fingers fasten on the edge of the table, apprehension sharpen in her already rigid body and face. When he went near the house door, his head up, he had the stillness of an animal listening through every sense,—the fox he so resembled, when the hunt for him is on.

As the sound remained continuous, faded, then died, Elsie's head sank in relief, though her fingers, trembling, remained where they had clung. She knew that Serafin had come back, was leaning over her, his palms spread on the table. She winced from his nearness—the rush of his breath, his loathsome sweetness made of perfume and strong tobacco, the violent gaze that she could feel on her lowered face matching the passionate, clearly separated words that followed:

"I told you as soon as I saw you that it was not a coincidence that brought me to Venezuela, madame. It was not!—When I was in America, years ago, I lived here. I had shares in the old Logrono mine that failed. Therefore—after the marqués was dead, and you were gone, I saw you suddenly as a possible chance in my future—the letter as an asset in my speculation. And the reason is this: that just a little while before leaving for the mountains to join Don Arturo, I had read in the Paris Herald that your husband, representing an American company, was to go in the autumn to Venezuela to report on the advisability of re-opening the old mine, or part of it, in which my money had been sunk. As I came to think this over carefully I felt sure that you and he would eventually meet and—as he had not had the letter—almost without doubt resume your life together. There was nothing holding me in Europe any more, nothing to keep me from coming back to Venezuela and to the others who were in the old deal with me. Once there I felt I might be able to turn this American interest to our gain. 'And suppose,' I thought, 'I might get the friendship of the wife of the American engineer as a help—if I need her help?' So I reasoned. And at last what has happened came about. We had to meet." Sorrow, a dark wave, went through Elsie with his next words: "I had little hope, however, as I came to this house to-night. If already you had told your husband about the letter, it would not have been of the slightest advantage to me. You see?"

Oh, yes, she saw. She answered him with a look, morbidly acute, and with a sense of inner collapse. The difference to-night, had she been truthful with Robert that day in the dingy hotel room in New York!

"Well, madame? I have told you the facts. What is your answer?" He stood away and felt desperation as he looked at her. Her earlier fright had wholly disappeared. After that one, piercing look, she seemed stone again, staring eternally into space. Sad through and through; hopeless; past fear. "You know by my unwillingness to come here that I tried to succeed without seeing you or using the letter for persuasion. Indeed, I did not want to use it. Time had softened me. And—you may not believe it!—I meant when all was well with me, and you had left here, to send it to you with a line of explanation, and so relieve your mind of it forever."

At these last words, the hope that, even yet, he might allow her to escape, came wanly back to Elsie. The authority of need in her eyes, she lifted them to him.

"Then give it to me now! Not as something for something—just because you can be generous. You've said that folly made me write it. I've known for months how great that folly was—why Arturo was killed. I found out about Ascuncion and her father." His surprise at this statement while sharp was brief, dismissed as unimportant against the pressure of the moment. "So keep me from suffering for my mistakes—more—than I can bear—"

"You but have to promise what I ask!" he cried, mad exasperation in the tone while his voluble hands went wide and stiff in finality. "Do that!"

"Never." This was dull and slow. Her eyes still besought him. "In spite of this—give me my letter."

Serafin's long nose lengthened in ironic consideration of her. "You must see that nothing could so please my pride as putting you under this obligation to me. Alas, I cannot so indulge myself—you will have to suffer because of your importance. We have a proverb in Spain: "A quien se hace de miel las moscas se lo comen." That is; "Smear yourself with honey and you will be devoured by flies." You see? You are smeared with the honey that means prosperity for me—I am a very hungry and determined fly. There you have my unchangeable answer."

The words infuriated her. A flash of the wildness in her leaped up. "Let me tell you that you are overestimating your chances with my husband! Even if I said nothing of your real history, he would not take a step to help your schemes. Not one! From his own judgment he is not inclined to support you by so much as a finger!"

"Ah, but you are wrong," Serafin declared suavely. "When you left us alone before dinner, Señor Maury, in answer to my request, said he saw no harm in my going with you both to New York. He will say nothing—but is willing to present me to the men with whom he is associated and give me a chance to outline my claims to them, myself."

This brought Elsie to her feet. Red spots had started out on her cheeks. Her mouth quivered like a child's in trouble.

"You managed that much," she said on a breath. "Instead of going on to Chile—"

"I shall never go to Chile," he broke in with defiance and misery. "The only thing—the thing that has to be—is New York! New York, with influence to help me, is—life." His force suddenly collapsed. He trembled. His hands made futile, imploring dashes toward her. "You did not understand this—that I am facing ruin—or you would not deliberately set out to destroy me. No, you would not do that."

"Why not?" came with the stifled stillness that so often is the cup for a storm.

"Because I have never injured you—as yet."

"Never injured me?" He felt the dark look impale him.

"What happened to distress you came from destiny—not my doing—not my fault—"

"All your fault!" Her voice, controlled with difficulty, had the thickness of a sob. "Didn't you persuade me to go to El Miradero with you, knowing what I did not know—that I could not come down the mountain till the next morning—that unless Mrs. Vrain came, I would be alone there—all night—with Don Arturo? That was the beginning.—You saw my agony at his death.—And at once didn't you use me vilely?—Put me out when his people were coming—as if I were—oh, what you called me afterward—and not fit to breathe the same air with them! Didn't you make me feel vile—lost—when—you kissed me—You!" she said on a long shudder. "Do you think I have, or ever can, forget that?—Or what you said to me at the last—after you had flung me out at daybreak—and made me go down that strange mountain—alone—distracted—not fit to take care of myself?"

Wild tears came. She could not keep them back. Her face lost its lines, went into a piteous muddle of pain. Holding to the chair's back she shook as if a storm had entered her. Serafin had grown very still. As Elsie by a violent effort steadied herself, her eyes, though wet, saw clearly again, and watched in his tobacco-brown throat, left long and bare above a low collar, two tendons jerk like a pulley. While he was listening with every nerve, his eyes were fixed as if on some one, or something, beyond her,—far beyond.

"You want my promise to keep your real history from my husband so that through him you'll make money. That you'll not get." Her breath was heavily uneven, her eyes jet-black in her now drained face. "And yet, if you had a drop of humanity in you, you'd give me the letter. I'll tell my husband the whole story—all that I should have told him before. But that letter I don't want him to read!—I'll die!—for something in my heart will die—if he ever reads—those words! Oh, if you were the worst sort of an American, you'd hand it over. No man of my race, no matter how low he might be and though he had done all you've already done to me, would refuse it!—You've talked of your pride.—You have no pride! None—if you do this. No decency—if you do it. If you finish with me as you say—ill-treat to the end a woman you've already treated so cruelly, because she won't let you take away the last bit of her self-respect, then with all your pride—your Basque pride of which I heard so much even as far back as Paris—you're not a man at all! You're something in the scrap heap. I can't name you. There is no name for you—no place!"

In all her life Elsie had not been capable of a denunciation like this. Expression in words had always been repressed with her. She had blazed as never before. And when she had poured out in broken frenzy all that had wounded and goaded her in memory, reaction came; faintness. She tried to reach the opening in the netting that led to the house, swayed beside a chair and sat down, bent over, her face in her hands.

The silence seemed to her to have the heave of a profound sea, she a cork on the waves. Through soundless turmoil one thought beat on her: All that she wanted in life she was to lose in the next few moments. Robert would come and for the last time would look at her with the limpid, restful gaze belonging to love and faith. For the last time and for just a breath, she would be the self of tenderness and peace that in their reunion she had become. Then all would change. The sun would go out upon her world, leaving her in the dark, in the pulling and discarding sea where she seemed gasping now. Yes, the sun would go out upon her world. It would crash into space.

Something soft, falling, fluttering first upon her head and then brushing her propped arms, made her drop her hands from her eyes. Still bent over, her glance moved downward. The strife within her and the pressure of her convulsed fingers upon her lids had blurred her sight to a haze of dancing colors, yet through it she saw what was unbelievable: Her letter—the fresh, gray-blue square, face upward, with Robert's name and New York address in her writing—lying at her feet, against her skirt.

Her stare remained on it, refusing to take it in. She gave a jolting look up at Serafin. He was changed. His arms were stiff, pressed against his sides, the hands doubled into fists. Something that evaded her was in his face, so dead, that a glaze seemed to have crept over it,—just as she had often seen the roofs' red tiles take on what seemed a cloak of cobwebs under the cold glamour of dawn. While her eyes were held by him, she was overpoweringly conscious of the letter within reach of her hand, yet could not stoop for it. The something about him that had eluded her was changing to the appalling. She felt the recoil that strikes warm blood at the sight of sudden death.

"Yours. Pick it up." The words mild, cool, had the remotest detachment in them. "I don't know why I've given it to you—" He paused, turned his head slowly as if forced to look at some passer-by, moved it in an uncertain way from side to side—blank amazement in it, helplessness. "And yet—yet I do—yes, I do know" ... he said after a long pause, the tone without body; void and thin as the crash of empty eggshells. "Pick it up."

She obeyed. When she felt her fingers close about the letter as they had so often in her imaginings, and when she saw it in her grasp, the chilling incomprehensibility of Serafin went away. Strength came, a tingling fire. And the solid earth was back under her feet.

"I—I—!" She looked up to say something—she had no idea what—something inarticulate, some wild sound of relief and gratitude—and Serafin was not there.

He had vanished with the stealth and silence that had always characterized him. No one else that she had ever known could have so flashed away with no more sound than a shadow, although the panel of netting on the house side resting unfastened against its bamboo jamb, showed that he had crossed in front of her to leave in the ordinary way.

Elsie started up, had taken a few steps toward this opening when the small sound of the street door shutting carefully reached her. He was gone, then. He was really gone,—out of the house, out of her life. And the letter was hers!

Here it was in her hand. No, in her two hands, crushed between them in a silent, racking sort of thanksgiving, pressed to her heart, to her shaking lips. It was hers to destroy. Her many prayers were answered. Robert would never read what had been for so long her secret torment and through it suffer what she felt to be unbearable. God had helped her. At the last moment He had softened her enemy's enigmatic heart, poured His mercy upon her even through the medium that had seemed all hardness and menace and hatred. This letter had been the wake of fear following her for so long! It never would again. No eye but hers would see those stabbing words now. Serafin had gone, defeated; finished. He would appear in her life no more.

She suddenly stood very still, listening. The effort to hear was projected so violently, all her muscles down to the tips of her fingers took on the density of iron. She had the look of a bird that through full-throated singing has heard the stealthy on-coming of a cat in the branches and grows mute, yet too palsied by shock to stir.

If Serafin were gone, then who had again shut the street door? Who was moving in the shadows,—and coming toward her now with sounds of confusion and haste, yet without a word? The steps were not those of the linen-soled servants. It was not Robert, or she would have heard the gay, Spanish voices of his friends with him. It must mean that Serafin had come back. He had only softened and surrendered transiently. He was returning!

These thoughts fell from her as a heavy cloak, suddenly loosened, drops from the shoulders. Beyond the screen, and in the soft light of the nearer hall, Robert was outlined to her. He came quickly, his head thrust forward in the alert way of one who having been awakened by a puzzling sound, seeks its meaning. He pushed the frail door open with an uneasy sharpness and stepped to where the yellow lamplight shone fully on him,—showed his eyes riveted on her, mystified, a rigid furrow pointing his brows.

"What happened?" he asked. The distressful picture Elsie made fitted to what had already startled him and brought panic to his mind.

Her luminous hair, that had been loosened by the thrusts of her distraught fingers, had slipped down and clung in wisps to her damp cheeks and forehead. This was a frame for a terrifying pallor, the wild, fumbling gaze of eyes grown slightly bloodshot, telling of some agitation as yet unexplained.

She had stepped away from him, backward. The letter, crumpled into a stiff strip, was held in both tense hands clasped before her. She had the wish to answer, to arrange herself, to prepare him for what she had to tell, but not the power. The sickness that earlier had heaved over her returned, this time with ferocious force. As she fought it, havoc within and without, Robert's voice kept reaching her. Sometimes it sounded assailingly near—then far away. And when the qualms that she resisted seemed to pull her under water, blind and deaden her, she did not hear it at all.

Enough reached her to make her know that something—she did not understand what—had prevented the Morenos from returning with him. After a delay caused by his taking—some one—somewhere—he had hurried home. He was bringing the car to a stop at the door when he saw Olazaba come out—slip out in a curious way that had alarmed him. They had met on the house path. Olazaba had pushed past him violently:

"... looked queer—infuriated ... pain ... I rushed after and got hold of him ... not a word ... got away ... a ghost—a madman!"...

Robert had come closer to Elsie, fiery anxiety in his eyes. She was aware of this through a murk; knew that his hands were held out to her; knew, too, that if she gave him her own the letter must go with them. She could not stir; she tried to hold to him with her desperate gaze, back of which the sickness was now like a giant trying to throw her.

"You so silent all night—as if trouble ... something ... I felt, seemed to know ... What happened after I left?—Elsie! My God—what? ... Olazaba? ... Ill, dear?—You can't tell me now?"

The air seemed to crash on Elsie, take her down with it, as if she had been standing in a house that had suddenly caved in. In the débâcle the letter left her hold. She felt it go. Robert had her hands, her fingers, deathly cold, fastening on his like claws. In a last effort at retrieval she tore them from him, crushed them, empty, against her heart, put them out again to him—blindly now—for his face had changed to a far, far speck—and the letter, lying on the floor beside him, to a pale splash that grew and grew monstrously until it rose to the height of a tidal wave and surged over everything.

"No use, no use—" he heard her sigh, her sight going into eclipse while fumbling, with saddest longing in it, for his face.

"Elsie—Elsie—!" came to her faintly,—the call over a mountain of one coming to help.

She had sense that his arms swept around her, dragged her up. They had seemed to come at the very last second to save her from unplumbed blackness into which she had begun to fall.

On her bed, where Robert had placed her, Elsie lay, unconscious. His strong fingers on her pulse could find no beat at first, then a very faint fluttering. Her flesh was like damp marble to his touch. He had hurried Domingo with the car to Valencia to bring back the best doctor in the place; and Candida had come on a rush—silent, all eyes and quiverings—to help him undress her beloved mistress.

As they lifted the unresponsive body, saw the loosened hair, a length of silvery floss, flash backward like a flag in calm air, the face sculptured in a look of weary negation—a terribly finished look—Elsie's likeness to death drove a pang through Robert's heart, seemed to take his eyes, leaving only hot rims around two spots of mist.—Elsie dead? If Elsie should die! Elsie—dead? ...

When she was resting between the sheets, the stupor enduring against all efforts to revive her, Robert left her with Candida. His step as unsteady as a man's touched by liquor, he went out to the gallery where they had dined. As soon as he passed through the screen door the thought that had been holding with strength back of all his trouble shot up into a question,—a driving one: What had taken place on this spot during his absence? He faced some unintelligible, confounding thing. There was Olazaba's sudden going; his surprising repulse on their meeting; the dementia of his look when on being overtaken he had torn away and darted into the darkness. Joining this was Elsie's mute despair; the something she had seemed trying to tell him; the sickness that had followed her dumb and pitiful struggle as if agitation in a torrent had swept her down.

He was motionless on the spot where he had stood before, when his eyes were caught by the folded piece of paper that had fallen from her hands when he had taken them. What was it that she had held so?—Would this explain?—Why had she not given it to him?—Had she meant not to give it?—The pervading question had split to these quick and short ones, hurtling one over the other in his mind, while he had picked the small thing up, flattened it, thrust it under the shade of one of the lamps to the full light, stared at it.

He could only stare. The longer he did this the more unreal what he saw became. After a pause, during which he was conscious of a feeling of suspension as if held in space on his own halted breath, he turned the letter over, looked at the seal of solid wax with the indent of a crest where the words "lealdad ... amor de Dios ..." came out indistinctly, turned it again, and again studied the address upon it.

Candida had come to his side. When she found it necessary to speak to him twice before he heard her, her eyes had flashed in alarm from the letter to his face:

"The doctor has come, señor. He is with the señora."

It was a little more than an hour later. After arousing Elsie from insensibility, the doctor had strengthened her heart, and from this she had lapsed into natural sleep. His smile and shrug on leaving as he talked confidentially with Robert had been contented, approving:

"Nothing serious—nothing but what I tell you," he had said, with suave pats on his patron's arm. "You will see that I am right in my surmise. Scarcely any two women are alike under these circumstances. There is frequently from the beginning a disposition to weakness like this, particularly when as now—from what you say—something has happened to unnerve, perhaps frighten—you understand? Quiet alone is needed. Yet should you wish me to come in the morning, let me know."

The big bedroom was as still as a church. Elsie slept with light, soft breathing. Candida was under the netting, on a low seat beside the bed; her arm rested on it; a fan was motionless in her limp hand as she half-slumbered. The colored lantern suspended on a chain from the dimness of the ribbed ceiling was the only light. Most of the place was in shadow.

Like the sweep of small, brown wings, Elsie's lids came up. A wavering look about, and they closed again in the sensuously grateful way that belongs to the coming of desired sleep. This lasted a few seconds, and the eyes opened, this time sharply, and remained fixed. She rose with careful quiet to her elbow. Peering dread through the curtains which showed her the empty room changed to manifest relief, and she looked at the mestizo's drooped head.

There was a hushed "Candida!" and the girl felt cold fingers brush her wrist.

"Señora!" She sprang up with her sweeping grace, took the expectant hand and waited, her face bright with inquiring tenderness.

"Where is the—?" Elsie began, and paused with fluttering throat.

"The señor? He is in his own room, dear señora. He said I must tell him when you awakened."

"Don't tell him!" came with a clutch on Candida's fingers. Elsie fell back on the pillows. "I remember the doctor.—Was the señor here, then—all the time? Come closer. Tell me how the señor seemed—what he said?"

Candida knelt beside the pillow, all willing secrecy. "The señor was here part of the time. When the doctor left, he came back. He seemed sad, señora, but glad to see you sleeping, and he went away—oh, taking much care to make no sound."

She saw Elsie tremble. The next words were very faint, of prodding earnestness: "Go out to the gallery, Candida. Look on the floor for a letter—close to the table—a small letter—"

"It's not there, dear señora—"

"You know! You have it!" came with joy.

"No—" She broke off, almost silenced by the dread in the unmoving eyes. "The señor must have found it, because when I went out there to say that the doctor had come, it was already in his hand."

The rigid eyes seemed to say: "Go on. What else?"

"He was turning it around, looking at the envelope as if he did not understand it, señora. When I told him the doctor was here, he came in with me."

There was a pause, then a heavy question: "Was that long ago?"

"At about half-past ten, señora. It is nearly twelve now."

Elsie sank into profound stillness. There was nothing more to be said or learned. Robert had the letter. Without a word from her ahead of that disclosure—one word to soften it and help her with him—he had read what she had come to view as abominable. Lines from it seemed to split into black grimacing atoms before her: "... I could not keep faith with you ... I would endure any hardships for his sake ... I am in love—madly in love!" ... Following this she had a picture of Robert, at that moment, in his room. The letter was at his feet. He had dropped it there as one would something that was soiled, or that scorched the fingers. He was facing what he believed was her real self, deceitfully hidden from him. The thought was tearing him that she had been to Arturo all that a woman could be to a man. Tearing him, too, and humiliating him was the conclusion that, instead of love, world wisdom and self-interest had brought her back to him.

A dislocating sort of suffering sent heat over Elsie's brain. She could not face what was ahead of her. The determination to escape it took on a rocklike strength—not to see Robert again; not to plead; not to fight. Nothing could ever be as it had been. There was nothing left of their life together but torn ends and blots,—only things for which to be sorry. The letter had done this, as she had for so long dreaded. The blazing words, extolling a delirium believed in when written as the invincible truth, had blotted and scorched the thought of her to Robert, forever.

As she flung back the bedclothes and the cloud of netting, she was a little wild. Yet standing up straight in her nightgown she looked much like a human lily, swaying on its long stalk.

"Get my clothes," she directed on an uneven breath and began to twist up her hair.

She made it plain as well as she could—for the Spanish kept slipping from her hurried need of it—that she was going to leave the house quietly at once and get to Valencia. In the morning she would take an early train to Caracas and then the first boat from La Guaira to the States. She did not want the señor to know. She would manage to hide somewhere in Valencia.

"Señora!" The girl's eyes, widening in a paling face, had the effect of splashes of black ink. "You must not go!" came from her on a cry of warning. "Dios—no! What would happen to you far away from this house and from your husband when your trouble comes upon you?"

Elsie's shoulders gave a sharp twist upward. "What do you mean?"

"The child—señora. Ah, when the doctor told me and said I must take good care of you, I was so happy. And you—you?—you are not happy?"

For Elsie's arms had dropped. With taut brows and mouth fallen she stood inert in Candida's embrace.

"Oh," came from her, almost without sound, and then faint and dragging: "Oh—oh, no!"

The girl's heart grew very sad. What she had felt would be a crowning argument for steadfastness and security had failed. Her mistress, with a new sort of strength and a dangerous quiet, had pushed her away and begun to dress.

Very soon afterwards Candida was beating a faint tattoo with her nails on Robert's door. It was quickly opened. Her master had changed from his dinner jacket to a loosely open corduroy house coat, though otherwise dressed as he had been. The room beyond him, hazy with tobacco, was brightly lit. She could see that his eyes, whose blueness she admired, had the look often noticed on the faces of peddlers, when fagged from body-racking trudges over the mountains, they would drop to rest in a shady part of the servants' courtyard.

"Go to the señora, please," she prayed. "She seems a little out of her head!—She has sent me to get out her car—and steal away with her to Valencia—to-night, señor. And after that she is to get to the coast, to some boat.—Oh, go to her—but do not say I told you—or my dear señora will be angry with me!" With this desolate finish and big sobs, Candida flung her apron over her face and swayed off hopelessly toward her own quarters.

Elsie was sitting on the edge of the bed when, after a touch upon the glass panels, Robert stepped in. She was tense, her hands clasped and pressed down hard between her knees. She had heard his step, seen his shadow on the panes, and she was the image of fear. There was, too, something almost grotesquely ineffectual about her awed and watching face surmounted by the traveling turban and veil, much as if a staring doll, bent and placed at a right angle, were trying to be the miracle of a woman.

She did not stir while Robert sat down beside her, treating her exactly as he would a sick child whose fancies were freakish. She heard him say he had seen Candida scurrying along the hall and had come in, hoping to find her awake. After one look at him she turned her head away sharply. She could not understand his repose and tenderness; they added confusion to her trouble. In body she remained like an automaton, let him take off her hat, lift her stiff hands and gently draw off the gloves, finger by finger, but when he would have kissed her cheek, her uneasy heart made her flinch as if he had tried to strike her. She sprang up. A despairing declaration was in her look as it wavered over him, and it burst from her in a wrung, unwilling way:

"You found—and read—my letter to you."

"I haven't read it, Elsie," Robert said,—a rational, quieting tone. "Not yet."

Her throat filled. Her hand went up to it. "Why?" she stammered.

"Well, I felt that you didn't want me to read it. Instinct, I suppose. And you didn't?"

"No!"

"Ah, I was sure of that. Come here, Elsie."

He made her sit in an armchair and sat facing her, bending forward in a familiar way. His face was pale and very tired, destitute of every active emotion. And yet its deep calm came to Elsie as sorrow in a prophetic way; it was as if stillness had suddenly fallen on a stone place that had just been filled with outcry and tumult. The roar had been in herself. And this peace from Robert in which she could rest, get breath, and think, would hold only briefly. It was there because he had not read the letter—not yet; because they were still as they had been. A longing shot through her. If she could hold that moment stationary, forever!

"You had a shock of some sort to-night," Robert said, as she sat back, her eyes closed, listening with steady prescience of pain ahead to every clear word, "and you're still very weak, my darling. Now I don't want you to talk at all—no explanation to distress you. You are to listen to me. And after that you're to go to bed again and try to sleep."

She could feel him bend a little nearer, but he did not touch her fingers that were close to him, clasped about the thin bamboo arm of the chair.

"I'm going to tell you my impressions about what I feel is troubling you.—When I picked up the paper that fell from your hand as you fainted and found it a letter written by you to me, with a Spanish stamp on it and sealed with a Spanish crest, I was astounded. I'd have opened it on impulse, I'm quite sure, if I'd not been called away to see Doctor De Lima, who was with you. Well," the voice throbbed on reflectively, "all the while he was here I'd been piecing things about it together in the back of my mind. First I realized that you must have written it last summer, as that was the only time you'd been in Spain, and from the crest no doubt in the house you were visiting there—El Miradero, the place that my letter went to and that you told me you'd never received. When I felt sure of this, the memory dug in that you had gone there directly after our unsatisfactory meeting in Paris. And then—" After a pause he spoke with slow emphasis: "—then, of course, I remembered that in New York, last September, you told me that you had not written to me—not once—after leaving me."

Glancing at him, Elsie saw that he had propped his head on his hands, the fingers outspread and further ruffling the rippling hair.

"The mind is a mine of many crisscross veins, Elsie. One deduction after another can strike on them like spades, disclosing them. It became obvious that you had some strong reason for telling me a falsehood in New York. You had written me from Spain—and here was the letter in my hand! ... After this I recalled a number of things. They came in a jumble—most clearly things Selena had complained of when we first came to El Iris, of your secretly watching the mails ahead of any one else, to get letters for yourself. Was it, instead, I asked myself, this letter of your own to me that you had tried to intercept? Each time the question came I felt more surely that the answer was 'yes.' Was I right in thinking this?" he asked, as he looked up.

Without meeting his eyes, and pale-lipped, she nodded an affirmative.

"Then of course you must have believed it had been mailed. Also, of course, your attempts to intercept it could only mean that you did not want me ever to know of it." He gave a sigh here. "Things got very muddled after that. How did the letter get into your possession to-night, without having come through the mail? Where had it come from? This thought brought me up, face front, to the thought of Olazaba. What had he to do with the whole business? And what about several things that had vaguely puzzled me from the moment of his arrival here—your sadness and silence all the evening; his admission for the first time that he was a Basque; the way he ran from this house before my return, and with the look of a man chased by the furies? The meaning of it all—this old letter from Spain—this man, a native of Spain—and all the rest?"

He bent over and put his hands on Elsie's arms. She did not respond. When, instead, she drew away and a look of panic scudded over her shrouded face, Robert's heart contracted.

"Elsie," he cried out, "you are not afraid of me! Why don't you look at me? How much of what I've reasoned out is true, dear? What had Olazaba to do with this letter?—or had he anything to with it?"

Her eyes, dark and weary, faltered before his as she forced her stiff lips to speech: "Yes, he brought it."

"Brought it?" Robert demanded. "Where did he get it? How—?"

"He stole it—long ago—the night I wrote it—"

"In Spain!" Robert exclaimed, as she paused.

"At the Marqués de Burgos's house—last June." She drew in a long breath. "It was given to him to be posted. Instead, he kept it. He was a valet—there."

"Olazaba!"

"Yes, he was Don Arturo's foster brother, and he was also—as needed—his confidential man, courier, valet, butler, or cook. He attended to everything for his employer. Juan Serafin Olazaba. That's his name. I only knew him as Serafin until he came to-night."

In the silence that followed each felt illimitable emptiness, loneliness. The earth seemed to have grown very still and they suddenly miles apart.

"I see."

Robert's dull and wandering tone was at sharp variance with the words, though he asked no question, and sat back with the look of one who is willing to wait. He could not understand the sudden despondency that went over him at the picture Elsie's words conveyed—his wife's letter going into the hands of a Spanish valet in Spain, and that valet the man known to him here for months as a Venezuelan speculator. Nor could he tell why with the same shadowy sort of pain, the Marqués de Burgos, his employer, who was also Don Arturo, the friend of his wife, should for the first time emerge from the cloudland of non-acquaintance and become significant as a man; cease to be only a name as heretofore.

Something of this was showing in his face when Elsie started up with the fling of the head that tells of the unbearable. She walked quickly into the shadows and came back to look down at him. Her gaze with bitter resolution in it bathed him before she spoke:

"Robert," and the tone suggested a missile flung from a distance by wild hands, "I want you to sit there and let me walk about—as I talk. I can't be still! If I keep walking—and thinking—and I don't see you—I can tell you—what I have to tell you!"

Robert had conquered his incomprehensible foreboding. Fancies had transient life in the clarity of his mind.

"Is it," he smiled, "as bad as that? I don't think it is, Elsie. What more you have to say can wait until morning, when you're stronger after a good sleep. This is what I wish."

"I shall never sleep until I've told you."

"In the morning—"

"I'll tell you now!"

"But you've already explained the only thing that upset me—Olazaba's part in this trouble to-night," he urged. "The rest—all about the letter—I know. No need of another word from you."

"Know?—how can you? You said you hadn't read it!"

"I haven't. I meant to give it to you as soon as I saw you. I will in a moment. It's in my dinner coat. Ah, Elsie—!" and the broken phrase of comprehensive love had the sun in it.

She had flung out one hand excitedly. He had taken it and was holding it with warmth and strength, so cosily, so carefully, he seemed drawing into a sheltering embrace all her sad and shaken self. His next words swept clean away this flickering rapture—made her change before her inner knowledge into something small and contemptible, sick, cold and guilty.

"I can see the salient things, dear—through feeling. See if I'm not right!—When you got to Spain you wrote me a letter in which you poured out all that was in your dissatisfied heart—dwelt on the disillusionment you had felt during that miserable meeting in Paris. You said you were not happy. You reproached me. Perhaps you said you were not coming home—for I remember that in New York you told me you had not meant to come back, and that except for the war you would not have come. This letter, born of an unhappy mood, maybe bitter in its reproaches, you thought was mailed. And by and by you were sorry you'd written it. You regretted it so much that when, in New York, you found it had not reached me, you determined it never should. Isn't that it? And do you suppose if I read it," came glowingly, "it could have mattered—now? Though you wrote it, you loved me! Probably you wrote it, hurt and angry, only because you loved me. Ah, dearest! Never think of it again!"

Elsie's eyes were wet as she drew her hand slowly from him. She was saying good-by to the trust that was in his gaze—that was to go and never come back.

"It isn't like that. Oh, I wish it were!" The most desolate longing was in her voice that seemed a small thing and far away. "It's a different story you're going to hear, Robert. Oh, let me tell you from the very beginning—please!—for that's the only way you'll be able to understand at all!"

Serafin's progress was that of a rapidly moving shadow against deeper shadows. He went in his swift light way, seeming to be hurried without any will of his own,—in the grip of the Fate in which he believed and with nothing in himself by which he could oppose it or struggle from it.

He was headed for the hotel in Valencia where that morning he had put up, yet felt no surety of reaching it; felt instead that he would have to pause when so directed by the power driving him on, even though it were on the roadside to lie like a vagrant in the ditch.

Serafin had had moments like this before in his life. Under the flow of smooth and usual conditions he had been clear-sighted and had held to arranged plans with the precision of a machine,—one moving consciously to the value of money. For the possession of it had always been to him a cogent reason for self-respect; the lack of it a descent into a pitying sort of self-contempt. After the failure of the Logrono mine, years before, he had been reduced, as now, to the feeling of having become a human rag, yet—since Arturo, Marqués de Burgos, lived—a rag that might be found efficient to the one being who had meant to him even more than self. And he had proved this true. He had gone back to Paris to the man he loved and had felt his need like the tug of hands upon him, so that by degrees he had again become a factor in living, though humbled in personal ambition.

It was different now. No place awaited him. No tug of hands drew him on. Instead,—a new name had been added to those on an ancient tomb in Spain.

Sensitive, confused, filled with a wish to reach a quiet spot where he might settle accounts with his soul, Serafin rushed on.

The lights of the town were showing in the distance, a sparkling haze, when he became aware of other lights, dim ones, near-by, and realized that he had reached a familiar spot. This was a roadside fonda, painted the harsh, medium-toned blue so loved of Spain. An electric light in the front garden showed the color plainly and the stiff-capitalled sign over the doorway: "Los Dos Hermanos."

The sight was like a friend coming to him with a familiar hooking of the arm. Serafin knew this little fonda of "The Two Brothers" well. During his previous life in the neighborhood he had made it a sort of half-way house for coffee; sometimes for green-milk cocoanuts; sometimes for guarapo,—the raw sugar and water with aguardiente. He recalled an old waiter, name Mateo, inclined to be talkative, and who used to come forward in a shambling, gracious way to serve him. He had a sagging throat, sad, dark eyes and always, no matter how hot the weather, had worn an old, swallow-tailed coat too large for him, evidently a second-hand gift from some portly patron. Of course he was gone, probably dead—No!—there he was.

For Serafin had crossed the garden and was at the open door of the fonda, though not conscious of clear intention to enter it; and the old waiter who had been placing one bared table on top of another in a corner because it was almost closing time, had turned, was coming toward him in the remembered shambling and gracious way.

"It is too late, perhaps?" Serafin asked.

"It is never too late, señor," the old man crooned, "if there is a customer."

Serafin sat at a table near the door, one not yet divested of its cloth and facing the dark-blue shining of the night. He took off his Panama hat and passed his hands over his face that was hot and damp.

"I'll have some brandy—and coffee."

"Do you wish the coffee in a glass, and black, señor? Or with milk?"

"Black and very strong," he said.

As he spoke he turned his face to the waiter. The old man with the habitual, self-effacing smile that had become a label, paused as he was about to turn away.

"Do you remember me, Mateo?" Serafin asked.

And after a thoughtful look into the stranger's eyes—such odd, oblique eyes; so hollowed, driven, sad—the waiter nodded. "Surely you are the gentleman who years ago—five, six—I do not know, they go so fast," he purred, "used to come here so often? Did you not tell me you were from the Basque country, señor? Oh, yes, I do remember you—well."

"Buéno! It is nice to be remembered," Serafin said, "but when I entered I had no idea you would be here—and the same, indeed the very same. To be truthful, you were old then—but you are no older now. I congratulate you, Mateo."

"Many thanks, excellent señor. I am much the same. A door on broken hinges can hang long, it is said."

Left to himself, Serafin sat over the table in a crumpled way and scarcely moved until Mateo returned with a tray bearing glasses small and large and a plate with one of the huge, thin cassava cakes of the country. Even then, his air was so absent the old waiter, used to acting on whatever hints a patron's manner conveyed, drew away from him without a word and took a seat in a remote corner until the repast would be finished. He was very tired and hoped he might be able to close the fonda soon,—so tired, that as the stillness in the place continued he dozed without intention.

When he came out of the slumber and shook himself, giving a glance of alarm about, he saw the latecomer still at the table, in exactly the same position. A glance at the clock showed that a full hour had passed, the striking of eleven no doubt having been the sound that had awakened him.

He went toward Serafin, standing subserviently at one side where he could see the table. The glasses were emptied; at least twenty brown cigarette ends lay on a saucer; and the tray was strewn with what had been the cassava cake—crumbled to fine powder by the greenish-brown fingers that still crushed it.

Mateo deliberately coughed. The man paid no attention to him. He seemed obsessed in expending on the crumbs some fierce desire working in him to break or assault. The fingers kept grinding the bread particles that were already dust, after which they brushed it into small separate mounds, swept these all together, scattered this again, and were once more beginning on the separating and heaping when the waiter ventured nearer.

"If you do not wish anything more, señor—it is very late," he said.

Serafin's hand grew still but he gave no other evidence of having heard.

"The owner will not like my keeping the fonda open as late as this—" he had begun again, when Serafin turned to him. Mateo stepped back, chilled. The face he could not take his eyes from scarcely seemed the one seen before, so changed was it in some confounding way; the parchment-like skin, tightened on the cheek bones, had a waxen glitter; the upward slanted eyes, blinking as from pain, were violently bloodshot.

"Have you been sick, señor?" broke from the waiter. "You look—"

He stopped as a galled sort of humor showed around the close-set lips.

"I have merely been thinking," Serafin replied almost curtly. "Yet you are right—I am sick. You never have such thoughts, I suppose—the sort," he said fiercely, "that makes your soul—retch? Eh?"

"No, señor," the old man whispered, and drew away a little, as from something repulsive.

"You are lucky," was Serafin's dry answer. "Well—what do I owe you?"

The sum was named; a small one. Mateo looked hopelessly at the size of the banknote that Serafin pushed toward him. "I could not get change for that, señor, without disturbing the owner, who has gone to bed."

"You need not disturb him. To-morrow pay him out of it for what I've had. What is left, keep for yourself. And—here's another."

"Señor—so much!"

Serafin had risen. He drew out a suede coin purse and emptied it on the table of all it contained; shook it to be sure that nothing was left. "This is yours, too—now you have all, to the last peseta."

The waiter was looking into the hollow, thirsting eyes with open alarm.

"You have use for the money, haven't you?" Serafin demanded impatiently, his gaze grimly upon the soiled celluloid collar and shirt front.

"Oh, si, señor——but—why?"

"Good, then—for I have not!" came quickly in answer, with a simplicity that was conclusive, as he picked up his hat. His tall, thin body, stiffly erect, he went with an impressive directness from the room into the darkness.

Mateo remained inept and unhappy. Anything that varied from the day's routine had a tendency to addle his spongy brain. Here was something very different. And he did not like it. The stranger's eyes, congested with blood and in the stillness of his livid face, the heap of flour dust on the tray evidence of an impulse to freakish disorder, the money given him—a larger sum than he had ever seen at one time before—the last words: "You have use for the money—I have not!"—he liked none of these.

Without touching anything on the table, he shuffled timidly to the open door, expecting to make out, perhaps, the figure of the unsettling visitor on the road and headed for the town. When, instead, he saw him going up a near path and then, as one familiar with the place, open the gate that led into the large garden running from the side of the house to the back, his earlier disquiet returned with force.

Few people were privileged to enter the garden that it was Mateo's duty to keep locked because of its money value from the owner's collection of animals and birds. These were in cages at distances among the trees: specimens of the black, thumbless, spider monkey,—gorgeous beasts with black back, white cheeks and a band of reddish-yellow across the forehead; a jaguar with rosette-like spots, and a tawny puma; aviaries among the vine-hung trees filled with beautifully-colored cassiques with their hanging nests, starlings, scarlet tanagers, gay manikens, bell birds, many parrakeets and macaws colored like equatorial sunsets. Few even knew of the gate, as it was fashioned to seem a part of the high railing. This man, of course, remembered it from his previous acquaintance. If he should walk about there and awaken the birds and beasts in their cages, the noise on the night might disturb the owner!

With the slack surrender to events that characterizes the very old when the day has been overlong and a weight on the tired heart, Mateo made a renunciatory gesture, picked up the money with hands that shook as if working under a current of electricity, finished settling the place, put out the lights, and shuffled to his own room under the eaves.

But as he took off the stale, daytime clothes, he could not resist looking from the window that gave on the garden at the back. It did not promise him contentment to make out in the starlight the thin, sloping shoulders of the unwelcome one, and that he was seated on one of the central benches, his head bowed in a contemplation that suggested permanence.

"Santisima Maria, he will stay there till morning—be seen—and I will be blamed for not locking the gate!"

In a flurry of helpless dismay Mateo crossed himself, crept into his cot bed and drew the quilt over his head.

Serafin, as motionless as one of the trees about him, saw nothing of the garden while seeing much of other things. Over and over the pyramidal events of the night kept climbing before him: First, his joy on finding that Maury's wife was with her husband under false pretenses, having relied on the letter failing to reach him. How keenly and revivingly had this fact come to him as the bridge to success through Maury's favor,—a bridge to be builded on the wife's need of consideration from the man who had the letter and who would not give it up to her until he stood securely in the lush pasture of the promised land to which the bridge was to lead.

Blackmail?—The word leaped into his thoughts; an ugly thing and new to him. He sneered at his innate shrinking from it. What matter? Had it been successful, how easily the milk and honey of satisfied money-lust would have removed its bitter taste.

But he had failed. After all his shrewd planning—failed! As realization of this drove like the blows of a handspike through the foundation of his revery, he lifted his head and looked straight before him with the fatuous, incredulous questioning that had shown in his face during Elsie's denunciation of him. He had found it impossible to carry out his intention, not because of what she had said; no, not in the least. His war with life had hardened his spirit so that in most issues it had the comfortable callousness of a shell. Her raging accusation had passed over him without penetrating; dismissed as he listened. Not so the something that had come out of her words—separate from her—that had first unsettled and then defeated him. He had no name for the experience except one that his reason denied, even mocked,—the entrance of a spiritual force into the struggle between them, and on her side,—for although from instinctive, unshakable reverence he frequently observed the outer forms of his religion, he had been a sceptic for many years, had believed himself no different from the animals that, while their hearts beat, lived, and when they ceased to beat, died forever.

And yet, this overwhelming thing, to-night!

He sat with disturbed brows, steeped in the gentle silence through which the stars watched, and tried to remember it all. There had been no misty apparition from the Unknown, nor had his ears in the natural way heard any one speak save Maury's wife and himself. Still Don Arturo had been there—had owned him, bent him, made him obey.

"Cease torturing her. Give her the letter and put her mind at peace. I tell you to give it to her. Give it—now!" Don Arturo had said this.

Heard by an inner, unseen self, how his heart had leaped to it! For the first time he had realized that nothing so dies with the dead as the voice. So many things can linger and be met: a song that had been loved, a perfume, the individuality of handwriting, a portrait in which a smile can seem to quiver,—but the voice, that of all things holds the magic of personality, passes utterly, can scarcely be remembered, rarely becomes real in the dreams that in other ways can be heart-stirring revivals of the lost. But to-night the miracle had happened. Mystically, in every varying cadence of the once familiar speech—warm-noted and impatient, urbane yet disdainful—the young marqués had been alive to him. In the familiar way, too, he had obeyed him, had gone from Elsie's presence empty-handed, and with no more personal assertiveness than a fallen leaf has in a squall.

The native melancholy of Spain intensified upon Serafin. He invited memories,—scenes far from this garden of a Venezuelan fonda, and of other times, times far back.

He was a child in the old Basque farm on a mountain top; a place of carved beams, of balconies and overhanging roof; with cattle on the ground floor; the first story, where the family lived and his mother sewed, reached by an outside staircase. His mother!—strong and fierce and true, with bared arms like a smithy's and black eyes with the steadiness of watch fires! Sewing had been the smallest part of her work. She had walked beside his father as a lioness beside her mate. She had toiled with him, digging in the fields, bearing an equal burden of the harvest; and often, alone, she had taken cattle to market at daybreak over twenty miles of mountain road, returning at night without a sign of fatigue on her calm, brown face. She could not write her name, yet as he had hung about her knees, she had told him stories, handed down by tradition, of his ancestry founded far back amongst the ancient Libyans. And always she had spoken the pure Basque, so proud of her race she treasured its spirit against modern Spanish confusions and corruptions as a mother eagle with domed wings and open beak guards her nest from attack.

One Spaniard, at least, she had violently loved,—the child she had nursed, the foster brother she had given to her son. The difference made by class had hardly existed between this boy and himself in childhood during the vacations when Arturo had come on long visits to his ama. What comrades they two had been!—climbing together, fishing, giggling secretly as they knelt closely side by side during the solemn masses they had been forced to attend, going mad with boys' joy in the primitive dances of the mountains during the sowing and vintage festas.

One memory came with such clearness of characteristic detail his soul grew sick with a craving to go back. This showed him an autumn and winter when Arturo was fourteen. He had not been strong for months previous, and the marquésa, his mother, terrified by the cough that had troubled her idol, had sent him away from Burgos and tutors to the dry, fine air of his ama's farm and a long playtime outdoors with his foster brother. In the gayest way Arturo had tried to become a Basque peasant; had worn a red boina like Serafin's own and, when frost came, a veritable mountaineer's zamarra—the full, loose jacket made of curly astrachan from year-old lambs reared in Andalusia, the black wool on the outside. But the clothes could not make him a rustic. The rakish scarlet cap had only intensified the exquisite chiselling of his face; nor could the bulky zamarra alter in the slightest the distinction and delicacy of his bearing. "Beautiful as an angel," the nurse-mother had said when she saw these for the first time on the luminous-eyed, pale boy from the city palace that even then knew the pinch of poverty, was never heated enough, always damp.

Serafin lifted his head a little. He did not look at the ghostly pattern of the mountains, or the host of stars. He was still racing with Arturo up the breeze-blown heights though the while with dual sense he stood beside the mildewed tomb in the crypt that held his body, a bullet in the heart.—And he saw his mother, young, swift-moving, with sheaves of wheat heaped on her powerful shoulders, looking like Ruth the gleaner—yet side by side with the picture, saw her as she was now, a widow and very old, knitting before his sister's fire, her grand-children listening as he had done to tales of the times when to be a Basque was to be authoritative and noble, clean and true in the fierce way of the noonday sun.

He would never see his mother again. And Arturo was dead.

Still he looked into the darkness. Suppose this life were not the end of life? To him, an unbeliever, Arturo had spoken that night. And yet—was this possible? If he could be sure, what a difference this might make, what strength might come of it to him with which to begin again—even now—and this time his fight to live be the simple and honorable thing that his mother had tried to make a part of him.... If he could be sure! ... He sat intensely still for hours, waiting for a sign.

The air, heavy and warm all night, was freshening toward morning when he became conscious of the most intense fatigue and with it a disinclination to take one step into any sort of future. Hearts can wear out except as machines, though bodies move normally through the day's work. What place was there for a lonely penniless man—with a dead heart—one who had been evil-living while recognizing in himself many qualities that should have made for good? If he could be sure that life—some sort of life—something—endured, even when worn-out hearts had changed to ice-cold weights! His lips moved without sound a few times. At last he spoke:

"Tell me!" he said in an imploring whisper. "Speak to me again, and I will know,—señor! ..."

He waited a long while. There was only the stillness.

"Some sign!" he prayed. "If I were not made fanciful by desperation and disappointment, and you were with me to-night, come to me again. Renew my strength. Speak to me!"

The stillness seemed to grow deeper; grew so impact he felt it press against him as an obstacle. The first edge of what was to be daylight showed in the east—drab, dour, hopeless. He waited until where he sat became the ghost of a garden, the heavy-headed trees creeping into sight as a solid black without branch filigree, the plants a smoked-green bulk with the bars of the metal cages upon them like flickering ribbons of silver.

A sigh went heavily through Serafin. He drew something from his pocket.

Later—perhaps five minutes—Mateo's sparsely-haired head jolted up from its pillow. The gloom outside the open window, faintly curdled with a leaden tone, was full of affrighting noise—whining howls from the jaguars, a crepitation of monkey barks and screams, a flapping of imprisoned wings joined to frantic croakings, squawks, trills and chirpings. Even through his sleep of sodden fatigue these animal sounds—a charivari of terror—had reached him.

"The pests have awakened me," Mateo thought, when, after hearing the owner stirring in alarm below, he began rapidly to put some clothes on, "but—merciful Dios—Cristo!—what was it that awakened them?"

He knew the reason darkly, within himself, before he joined his half-dressed, snarling employer who carried a lantern and stepped with him into the garden. His expectation became certainty as he came down the path and saw the strange man still on the central bench, still with his sloping shoulders bent, but with a stiffness and stillness about them now that made him seem an effigy. He could not touch him.

It was the owner who went to face the intruder, grasped his arm in frenzy, gave the pendent head a rough push upward,—and then crossed himself.

The animals and birds had quieted, and the hum of a heavy touring car was heard in the distance, coming toward the fonda from the direction that would take it on to the town. Both men rushed out by the gate and into the middle of the road. Here Mateo gave quivering cries of distress and his master kept waving the light in a circle about his head.

The motor, coming on at a crashing speed, was jerked to a stop a few feet from them. It held Robert and Domingo, the mestizo driving.

"Señor!—Señor!" the owner of the fonda chattered, and then with recognition: "Oh, Señor Maury, help me in this trouble. A man has shot himself in my garden. If this becomes known, no one will come to my house for months. It will be a curse! I will be ruined. Help me to settle this quietly, señor! You are going to the town. Will you take me with you, so that I can get the police back with me and move the body before the morning? Oh, señor, I am mad, mad! Twice the fellow shot, my wife says, and all my creatures made a noise like Hell broken loose—"

Robert had stepped out. In the lantern light and the feeble grayness his face looked drawn and deathly. Under the peak of his cap his eyes had lightened as he followed the man's chattering rush of words. He wore a big yellow coat, heavy enough for winter, the collar drawn up high, yet gave the impression of still being cold; his right hand was thrust into one of its pockets.

"Show me the man," he said.

When he stood before Olazaba, whose head was uplifted and bent far back just as the owner had run from it, and saw the contemptuous weariness carved into the face, a strange change came to his own,—as of one suddenly disarmed by Authority, chastened out of his own burning judgment to the acceptance of a verdict including truths whose majesty belittled conditions that but a moment before he had felt to be so momentous.

The hand in his pocket had the thong of an old slave whip wound about it. This curio of other days had been nailed on the wall of his room and he had torn it down on leaving El Iris. His fingers loosened on it; left it. They came out tremblingly and curved about his chin as he stood, hushed, and gazed at the dead.

There was no need of Robert's continuing to Valencia. With the finding of Olazaba in the garden of the fonda his quest was ended. He sent the tallow-faced and hastily-dressed proprietor on with Domingo in the car to the town. It was not his intention to wait for its return. He would walk back to El Iris.

Before starting he went into the dishevelled public room and poured himself some brandy. Old Mateo, too distressed to stir, sat bent forward in a corner, his mouth moving in a fumbling way, his long arms sagging between his legs.

"You need a drink yourself," Robert said and brought him a small glass of liquor. "Take this."

"Thank you, señor," he stuttered.

After gulping it down, he gained enough assurance to utter what was in his thoughts: "I cannot go out yet, señor——and I do not like to leave the body alone. He was kind to me, poor man—very kind! Could you stay near him, señor, until I feel better and have dressed? You see," he went on with an upward, sick look, "this is not the first dead man I have seen—left out in the open. I was through several revolutions here, señor, in my youth, and saw some killing.—So I do not like to leave the body out there—alone. The birds and insects know at once—they are not afraid—they hurry to the dead."

A grue went over Robert as he took the glass from the fingers whose under trembling was incessant. "Don't distress yourself, Mateo. I'll wait out there for you. Come when you are ready."

He walked with inner unwillingness to the spot. There the repulsiveness of the thought put into his mind by the old man deepened into a sickening sort of self-diminution. The swiftness with which the living creature, arrogant with personality, electric with the mysterious forces of the brain and the energies of the blood, can become waste material with corruption imminent! The birds in clusters were already on the lower branches, peering down and chirping familiarly at the rigid bulk upon the bench, a lizard was moving with a leisureliness that was horribly informing across the dead man's knee.

Moisture stood on Robert's forehead as with his handkerchief he flicked away the thing that was like a crawling gray tongue and forced his fingers to draw the hat over the lifted face, a flare in the gray. As he did this, and began smoking and pacing on the path, he heard above him the commotion of a flight of departing birds.

It was a chilling thing to be wide awake and alone in the dawn. He saw the hour as grim, disquieting, deeply sad; an anomalous thing, like a body with empty veins into which at last the sun would pour as the gift of blood. To this came the remembrance of that part of Elsie's story whose force upon him had left a scar—this same deathly hour on the mountain in Spain, and she there, frightened, heartsick and astray, sent on her forlorn way with insult—cast out with insult! ...

He paused in his pacing to look steadily at the frozen burden on the bench. It seemed to him justice—Mosaic justice—that it was in the dawn Olazaba had pronounced life unbearable. His hour of Calvary, too.

After this, with blood drumming in his temples, he was flung back in spirit to the hours just passed with Elsie. He had been a silent listener to her story, as she had made him see into every corner of that secret house from whose windows her spirit had for so long kept peering out in fear. She had been brutal in truthfulness. Without an excuse for herself she had shown one picture after another of her life during the years separate from him. While moving in and out of the shadows of the big room at El Iris, he for the most part sitting with his elbows on his knees, and his hands spread above his eyes, they had been like people between whom no veil of reticence had been left lowered, their stark selves face to face.

With energy and exactness she had painted in words the man who had first made her aware of the sense thirst in herself, remade her to her own eyes. As reckless and impassioned the confession had rushed on, this man was before her again—alive—and she called him familiarly Arturo.

In the still room in the dead hours of the night she had shown him El Miradero, a splash of brilliant color hanging against the wall of drab mountain, and Arturo coming on a boyish run to meet the mule coach, his velveteen jacket slung hussar-fashion over one shoulder,—while without one word of self-excuse she had told how she had loved him then. In fact, she had poured out these details in an absorbed way as if she had no listener and were talking to herself.

As she described Arturo's unusualness in sheer beauty, his distinction and grace, of all of which he had appeared wholly unconscious, a memory had swept against Robert. It had been like the brush of a curtain lifting to disclose a small incident on the day he had sought Elsie at the Countess Longueval's tea. As he entered the house, he had passed a young man on the steps who was leaving it. A casual glance at him had instantly become speculative interest. The stranger had been looking backward with a smile that had made his dark face flash through a melancholy that was like mist upon it,—a wonderful smile it had been, a blend of charmingly cut mobile lips lifted challengingly, of glowing yet languid eyes; and with it he had called back to some one a good-by in Spanish. This Spaniard, so clearly recalled from the one meeting, was no other than Don Arturo, Marqués de Burgos. Without speaking of the memory to Elsie, Robert knew this had been the man.

He did not interrupt Elsie once. As she had said, she could not bear to look at him and had progressed with her story almost without pause, while pacing in the shadows, her head for the most part hanging, her hands sometimes coming together and sometimes flung wide.

In and out of the pictures that she made live, the man known to him as Olazaba had moved with subtlety and menace. She told of the storm that had seemed rending the mountains, her loneliness and fright, her sense of fate in the strange place, her surrender to Arturo's pleading. He saw her, as her first step on the new path, writing the letter of farewell. He saw Serafin receiving this from his master to be given to Eduardo to carry down the mountain; saw her stand in silence until the ring of the donkey's hoofs from the stony road had made her sure that he had gone,—and with him her old life.

Of the murder she said little. A few shuddering phrases were enough to show him herself, an alien, understanding little of the storm of words between her lover and the man who had come to make him pay,—then the demolition of her world. And after the shock, the grief. Here, too, she had almost no words.

And the sequel to El Miradero: Julie's home in Paris where Elsie had crept back to consider the fading negative of her future; the war that had made her one of the demented crowds speeding homeward; the lie to him in New York made possible by opportunity. He saw all this.

"I did not deceive you in New York about the letter in order to make life easy for myself," she had said with a straight sort of simplicity and without force. "I was not as cheap as that. I came away with you to accomplish just one thing—to get the letter and so keep you from pain and shock that had become needless. I did not love you then, I thought I never would. Once I had the letter, I meant to go away, making the terms of our agreement the excuse. My inner life here was hideous—oh, one long dread! No wonder Selena suspected me. I lived in security only from hour to hour. I hated the day. All the day I would feel myself a hypocrite, goaded by the fear that by some chance outside my control the letter would reach you, that at any moment I might see it come into your hands, see you open it, and have to endure your—well, perhaps your contempt. I loved the nights—there was no danger in the nights. With the first rays of morning through the slits of the shutters, my torture began again—constant, unrelenting apprehension!"

There had been a long pause after this.

"Although I made this struggle to keep you from ever knowing how I had given you up, I did not think that I loved you at all in those first months. I kept dreaming of Arturo. Life was a cloud and I moved in it, seeing him. He had worn a beautiful, ancient ring with his family's crest on it—it had sealed my letter to you. Afterward he gave it to me as a pledge, and until one day last February I wore it inside my dress.—A revelation about him reached me then—all about his sort of life and why he was killed. It came in a newspaper account that my mother sent. It changed me!"

In a few phrases she had given him the story of Ascuncion with the corroding knowledge it had brought of Arturo.

"And I saw that instead of having been the one woman to him, loved deeply, I had only been one in a procession of women."

There was a frozen sort of stillness. She broke it with a low yet piercing question: "There isn't any need for the rest—is there?" Before he could look up or answer she had continued: "I'm different to you, forever. That's only what I can expect.—Well, I thought that after all these months the letter had been lost in some way. I told myself this every day. At last I felt absolutely sure of it.—And then to-night—when I looked into Olazaba's face—a stranger's face—I was looking at Serafin.... I almost died.... He showed me the letter before dinner. He threatened to hand it to you at once unless I kept quiet about him and gave him a chance to explain.... The chance came when you went to the Morenos.... He said then that unless I kept silent about having known him in Europe in the way I did and would let him go to New York with us to be introduced by you to your business people, he would hand you the letter while saying that in Paris I had been—the mistress of the marqués—though he must have known, from having to cheat me to get me alone at El Miradero with his master, that this was a lie!—Well, I refused—and felt that nothing would save me—that you would read the letter I had come to hate, before I could tell you all this in my own way, as I meant surely to do..."

Her voice had trailed off here, had become thin and wondering: "It was a strange experience. I will never understand it—suddenly he gave me the letter and rushed out. He gave it," she said in a thrilling sort of whisper. "What I had prayed for so hopelessly was—mine."

Robert recalled that after this his consciousness had suddenly concentrated upon one picture. With it, the entrance into him of a longing at white heat was like that of an animal with claws, seizing only the memory of Elsie's hours at El Miradero after the murder, where Olazaba with the letter secretly in his possession had put the consummate edge to her pain. When to this was added thought of him as a buzzard who having long ago prepared his chance had come to-night to take advantage of it, the whole made an offense so beyond the pale of the most ordinary decency, it had swept him to his feet—wild—compelled to one sort of action.

How he had gone from Elsie with only a blurted phrase that he would soon be back, and how he had left the house with Domingo, he did not remember clearly. The rage to kill was upon him and he hurried to satisfy it. The obsession had been frightful. And yet—! As he walked the path before Olazaba's dead body, a new knowledge of himself grew as he realized the care with which his mind had kept him from a crime; how reason, lucid and cold through all his turmoil, had made him leave his pistol behind him, and instead had put into his hand the slave whip. To wound and hurt, to abase this man that he had suddenly come to loathe with a fury he had not dreamed possible to his nature, to make him cringe on the ground with cries of pain as victims had often done under this lash, whose history as he knew had been a frightful one,—this had promised primitive satisfaction side by side with an under determination not to wreck himself for the creature he held in contempt.

And even what he had planned had been needless. His hands were empty and his soul lightened.

There was a look of age on Robert's face. A transient blight from the years ahead had picked out hollows in his cheeks, given his eyes emptiness with the bright weariness that comes of lack of sleep. And now, on the leap of a second, remembrance of Elsie began to prod him. He wanted Mateo to appear so that he could start for El Iris and finish with her. Finish?— The word was a crooked pull upon his nerves. Finish? ... How—since he had not previsaged at all in what words he would meet the issue in their lives?

From the time he had left home his rage against Olazaba had blurred everything else. When he tried to realize that but for a fortuitous tragedy Elsie would have left him for another man and without ever another sight of him, he could not make himself know it. He could not even become familiar with it in trying to know it. The thought was in him, stupidly, rubbed in with the most intense sadness and with the shudder that goes into a look back at some mortal danger barely escaped. And yet—how could it be true?

He was only a few yards from Olazaba's body, and at the top of the path in view of the gate that in the excitement of his entrance had been left open. He was standing with the look of a jaded man, his back to a tree, his chin buried in the high coat collar, his eyes on the ground. While he waited so for Mateo the dull drumming of the one thought did not stop in his aching brain: It was true. He knew it was true. He must get used to it. Once he could grasp himself as the man, Elsie the woman, in the group of pictures melting one into the other before memory, the matter would simplify and he could deal with it sanely,—oh, very sanely and generously. He knew he would do this when he could really take it in as the truth that he knew it was.

The rush of a light car past the open garden gate in the direction of Valencia made him look up, too late to see it. And then, his aroused attention drawn to another descent of the audacious birds to points near the bench with the body, he returned to it with a deliberately disturbing trudge that brought alarmed chirps and a fluttering retreat.

From this he went on in the direction he faced until the house was reached, its door flung back. And here he called for Mateo.

The old man's voice came feebly and desolately in answer: "I cannot go yet, señor—the señora is much upset and needs me here. Ay-é! Dios— But please do not wait any longer. The others will come soon now."

"Very good. Then I will go," Robert called.

He turned from the house to see Elsie, not twenty yards from him. With Candida beside her she was almost directly in front of Olazaba's body.

She was different from the memory he had of her where she moved nervously at one side of the ineffectively lighted room and in the severe gown she had put on for traveling. An unfamiliar cloak of cobweb gray and a black mantilla brought almost an alien impression with which the pallid light, the fantastic garden and the look on her face were rightfully a part. Most of all her face,—so bloodless it was more ashen than white, her mouth open in a look of sickness. The first glance showed him that but for Candida's arms about her she would have sunk to her knees.

As he hurried to her, her gaze seemed to seize him, left it to move stiffly to Olazaba's copper-hued left hand lying palm upward on his knee with the curved fingers open and more than ever like claws in their rigor, then back again to him.

"You—?" quivered on a breath as he reached her, the most deadly fear in it.

"No, my dear, no," Robert said and took her from Candida, feeling the upheaving shudder from her body dart through his own. "He shot himself. He was here—alone."

In the relief her head sank against him, the eyes closed as if she had fallen suddenly into sleep. He led her down a path out of sight of the body to a bench there, and sat beside her. She was watching him now; waiting.

"I was passing in the car, going to find Olazaba in Valencia," Robert said in answer to the look, "when the man who owns this place called me in from the road to help. I found Olazaba as you saw him.—You are sick with fright!"

"Oh, yes! When I was told that you'd gone," she stuttered, "I went to your room and looked for your pistol. I couldn't find it—and so—I thought—!—Oh, I couldn't bear what I thought—it made me insane. I had to come out, follow you, try to find you in time—I was terrified!"

"I'm sorry. I should have gone to you before I left and told you that I was taking only that old whip that was on my wall."

As she fumblingly lifted her handkerchief, he took it from her and with careful touches wiped her face that had the look of marble sweating.

"Don't be frightened," he urged. "There's nothing to fear. You understand?—there's nothing to connect me—us—with this at all. I was passing, called in, and recognized the suicide as an acquaintance. That's all. It's finished." He looked at his watch and stood up. "You came in your car?"

"Yes."

"We'll go back now. The police will be here in a few moments. I'd rather they didn't see you. I'll drive you home. Candida can walk. No one need know you came here with her. Come, Elsie."

Robert had done these things in a comforting way, said these words in tones that were deeply kind. This quality reached through Elsie's numbness, made its impression on her,—his kindness.

During the almost silent return to the house and to her bedroom, where he lighted a heap of dry bark on the hearth, she was still quietly, resignedly aware of his compassionate consideration. She had sense of nothing but this from him. Nothing less nor more. She acknowledged it as she sat before the blaze, her chilled hands held out to it.

"You are very kind," she said in a soft, drifting way and without looking at him.

Robert winced from the word. It set the situation between them jangling like a damaged clock trying to strike. The need of decision came throbbing out of the confusion in him. Still, knowing this, a longing persisted to postpone any further consideration of their new attitude. It was the weariness of a man recovering from sickness to whom the thought of resumption of initiative is dreary.

He bent over Elsie, smoothed her hair. "Will you try to sleep now?" As instead of replying, her face went down into her open hands, he spoke again persuasively: "We are both so tired. After a rest we can—"

She shook her head, lifted it sharply and turned sideways to look up at him. "I want to say one thing to you first. One thing must be settled before there's any rest for me." She pointed to a chair facing her.

Robert sat down willingly but with a sensation as if his heart were only half alive. He had a desire to speak, without clear knowledge of how to begin; a consciousness of the something vital needing to be said that yet kept slipping from him and that his lassitude shirked from following. Elsie, instead, had become suddenly vibrant. Childish in look and air, weak and pale, a purpose had appeared in her that was like the electric spark he had often seen run along exposed wires.

The instant's silence between them had the weightiness that precedes the passing of a sentence. The house was absolutely still, filled with a great loneliness. From the patio the early morning glamour came; it was changing to a tawny glitter on the red roofs, to gold glints in the trees, and seemed a fresh-faced, inquisitive new-comer looking in at them.

"I want to get away, Robert," Elsie said, her voice hard, yet with a quiver through it. "I don't want to wait to go home with you. I want to be by myself—go to-morrow."

He frowned moodily, as if trying to take in her words.

"It's the only thing possible. I don't want to stay here—not for another day!"

"Why not?" This was honest, dull wonder.

"Can't—that's all."

She stood up, went to the window and looked out. After a silence she turned, remaining standing with her back to the light.

"This is a trouble," she said passionately, "where all the blame rests on one—on me. I can't endure the weight of it—and be with you."

"This is foolish, Elsie," he said very wistfully, though still in the voice that told of his tired heart. "Your place is with me. I want you with me."

A flash of misery went over her face. "I know. You are thinking of what the doctor told you. You are being—merciful—to a woman you no longer care about." At his startled look and attempt to speak she made a desperate gesture with her clasped hands, silencing him. "This is what I felt sure would happen if you ever found out about El Miradero—what I had meant to do. I would become different—as I have. You can't help this. You think that in the first place I proved I was the wrong sort of woman—one of the fools weak and unmoral who are useless, just cumber the earth—the sort that by your nature is offensive to you. And all the contemptible things that had to go into my struggle to keep what I had done a secret from you—these, too, you detest. You are that sort of man."

She came a little nearer to him, her head bent back, her drooped eyes studying him, and he saw the same twilight sort of sadness about her that had been there during the first months of their life at El Iris. It was clear that her calm edged wild tears, and though the torpor within him was relaxing, the nerves that had seemed sucked dry beginning to quicken again, he let her pour out the thoughts choking her. An instinct came to him that through Elsie's vision he might come clearly to see his own.

She misinterpreted his look of waiting. She had expected to fight some opposition from him because of the impassioned fatherhood that was in his feeling for her. She had been wrong. He would easily let her slip away.

A freakish memory assailed her of frocks that in the past had been spoiled; not those whose stains had easily been washed out and rents mended,—but others that from unexpected nails protruding, or sudden fire, had gone beyond reconstruction. The future with Robert appeared much like those burned and torn little frocks, jaggedly uneven and charred beyond remedy.

"I can tell that you are ready to make what excuse you can for me," she said, her lips cinder-dry. "I know you pity me, and I don't want pity. You forgive me. That helps me, but it isn't what I want. I can never have what I want any more. I know this, and I've accepted it.—I'll telegraph my mother," she added with decision. "She can meet me."

"And after that?" Robert asked, almost, it seemed to her, in the tone of a bystander. His chin was resting on his clasped hands, his eyes lowered.

"I don't know. We—can see." She paused and spoke more decidedly. "This has really changed everything. Don't let us keep making the best of a failure! Somehow I could manage to set you free."

He looked up at her then, a restrained though violent look. It rested on her for a long pause, took in her fragility that had likeness to a lamp, luminous from a flame within; her desperate desire to be self-sufficient; her ineffectualness. The deadness went out of him, his sinews hardened. He stood up, went straight to her and took her into his arms.

"How could you set me free?" he asked.

She held back from him. "I could—if you couldn't care for me. Don't be sorry for me! See what's right for yourself!"

"But I love you," said Robert simply.

"Don't—lie!" she begged and still drew away from him.

"I love you, and you couldn't set me free. You might leave me, and I might never see you again. And you would always be with me—a thirst." He held her to him frantically, bent her head back and kissed her on the mouth, long, enervating kisses. "I not only cherish you with sweetness," he said, his tone wrung, "as my wife who is to give me a child—I am on fire with love for you!"

She had no words then; could only keep looking into his eyes with their burning and tenderness.

"Life without you? As you spoke I saw it—parched, famished, dreadful. Now listen to me.—I lost you once. I lost your love when you were in Paris because I hadn't known how to keep it. But tell me—from your soul—one thing: If you had loved me then as you have these months here—could you have forgotten me?" His lips were close to hers again. "Could you?"

"Robert—" she faltered. Her eyes were wild and soft, her slender arms around his neck, as she held to him, had a cable's strength. "Oh, Robert—no!"

"The blame is mine," he said.

"You trusted me," Elsie found strength to say with self-reproach. "You trusted me so absolutely!"

"To the trust of a man there should always be added the pull on a woman's heart-strings. I was as far from your heart as I was from your life."

"But I should have told you—I should have been frank with you before I went back to you, Robert. I tried to—and I couldn't. I have lived with you here—thinking of this secret all the time."

"Perfect frankness is a lovely thing because it's brave. Still, I've never thought confession always necessary. Often it's a mistake. I understand how you shrank from it and felt that your sincerity for what lay ahead of us justified you in hiding it in your own self."

As with deepening consciousness of her charm for him and his need of her, he again flooded her with caresses, he kept whispering with a sort of anguish: "My loved one—my very breath! Oh, Elsie, without you?—Dearest!"

She drew him back to the chair, made him sit down and knelt beside him. For a little while she remained with her elbows on his knees, looking into his eyes whose heaviness had been replaced by a glitter like that from the sea.

"Well?" he asked. The something so young in him laughed out. "What's put a tuck in your forehead now? What's bothering you?"

"It's—the letter." She looked anxiously at him.

He frowned with a remembering look and drew it from the pocket of his dinner coat. "I forgot that I had it," and he put it into her hand. "Burn it."

Reminiscence, a shadow, had fallen on Elsie's face as she studied the writing on the gray-blue envelope. When she looked up, still leaning against Robert, she searched his eyes, her own limpid, honest.

"I want to be so square with you," she cried, almost an angry enthusiasm sweeping over her. "I'm wondering if you quite realize that if you'd read this you'd have believed I'd been really unfaithful—that it was Fate that changed all—no credit to me?" The words were hurting her, she had to force them from her lips. "Robert, if Arturo had not been killed I'd have been with him now. Or if not—" and she looked past him with a desolate wideness of gaze, "and I'd left him, where would I have drifted?—what would I have been to-day? ... How often of late I've asked myself that! The intention—the whole thing I planned to do—that's what really matters. I know enough about the logic of men to be sure that back of all you've said, you think that."

Robert had kept urgent hold of her hands with the letter pressed between them as she spoke, while his face grew deeply thoughtful.

"If you knew men better," he said quietly, "you'd know we are utterly illogical, perhaps fools, about one thing—the physical sacredness of the one woman.—And there's something else: Have you ever thought of the potency of—memory? Had chance not lifted you out of the danger you were in, what soiling memories you'd have now. What we are emotionally depends so much upon the life of our minds. So I say to you—thank God that you were kept from what would have been degradation—that there's no memory of it burned into you."

They remained quiet a moment after this. A glowing silence.

When Elsie's voice stole through it, Robert felt it the most moving thing he had ever heard: "I can bear to have you read it now," and she forced the paper into his hold.

He made an almost angry movement as if to tear it. She clung to his hand.

"Think how I tried to keep it from reaching you, how I'd seem to die at the thought of your seeing these words. And now—! Oh, isn't it wonderful not to care?—to feel so sure?"

His look was still unwilling. "This thing has scourged you enough—"

"But it will satisfy me to have you know everything about me, as I know myself!—The perfect frankness that is brave!"

"Well—if you want it so much," he said amiably.

Elsie half turned away, her cheek against his arm. She heard him open the envelope, heard a slurring sound as he drew out the enclosure. There was a rustle of paper. Silence. The incongruous thing following made her doubt the wisdom of having forced him to read what she hated—he had given a breathless exclamation of amazement, and it seemed to jerk her to face him.

"Nothing!" he said in hushed excitement. "Look—nothing at all! It's blank paper!"

He was holding the letter toward her. She tried to take it. Her hand dropped, her gaze as empty as the sheet spread out—for it was empty—no mark on it except the engraved El Miradero at the top.

Robert had begun to scrutinize the envelope. "Olazaba—! Did he open it—change it? Did he play this in his game as a gold brick, with the original safe in his possession?" He stood up, his look changed. "Why didn't I search his body? I had the chance. And I thought of it—I was too decent. The letter may be found on him!"

Elsie had stood up too. She had drawn the envelope from Robert's hand. A still look of uncanny knowledge was spreading slowly in her face.

"Isn't this absolutely unbroken?" she asked, and pointed to the seal.

"Yes. But the original wax might have been picked off and a fresh splash put over the spot."

She shook her head slowly. "Impossible!" When after a pause she spoke again, an odd deadness had come to her voice. "There was only one ring on earth that could have put that crest there, and I had it. Olazaba thought this held my letter to you. It never did. It was changed—in the very beginning."

The room where she stood faded for Elsie, and Robert with it. She was back in El Miradero. She had given her unsealed letter to Arturo and had asked him to read it. He had refused; had turned away from her to bend over the high-backed desk as he had appeared only to seal and stamp it. He had faced her again, the letter ready in his hand—and this empty sheet was in the envelope in place of her own!

She heard his words: "Think—are you sure you wish to send it? Wouldn't later do?"

And when she knew Serafin was coming for it, her reply: "Oh, maybe I ought to say something more in it.— Send word for Eduardo to wait. I could say—"

How full of meaning now was his remembered answer: "No! Send it—or destroy it. Shall I fling it in the fire?"

Ah, she might send it as it was! Or she might burn it as it was! She might not open it.

Her mind worked so alertly, speculation as to the fate of the pages that had been so nimbly stolen charged through it. Had Serafin the real letter, after all? Had he come upon it among Arturo's papers after his death? The answer overlapped the thought—No! Serafin had not found it, for Arturo had burned it when he had thrown what he had called his old love letters on the last flare of the fire,—and he had thrown them on only that he might destroy the one he feared. In the hour that had been supreme and magical to her, he had been cautious, circumspect.

As she relived this scene, she told it in patches, and trembling, sat down again. Her shoulders were bent. She had thought she knew humiliation at its heaviest on the day she read of Ascuncion and had come to see back of Arturo's gentleness and gravity a sort of self-sanctioned license to passionate lawlessness and double-dealing with women. Even that had held something of strength, something ruthlessly primitive. His precisely careful cheating of her when their happiness had seemed at its loveliest was—cheap. She could not look at her husband.

The subsiding crackle of the fire put an edge on the stillness that hung for moments. And then Robert said her name.

"Don't feel so badly," he went on. "You shine by contrast. Don't you see that? Poor Elsie—you were in bad hands that night! The master tricked you so that when time for payment came there would be nothing in black and white against him. And the servant tricked you, if only from a bargain hunting sense to have an advantage of you that might some day be of some sort of value to him."

She heard him turn away and lifted her head. Wistfulness replaced the darkness of self-repugnance as she watched him throw the blank paper and its envelope into the fire, press them down with his boot heel until the flame had made ashes of them.

"There!" he said, and turning, drew her up. A hand vigorously on each of her shoulders, he gave her a hardy shake. His familiar smile, where drollery showed subtly though his lips scarcely moved, considered her. "That's over. No, my dear—it never was. Like the letter that haunted you, tortured you—nothing—nothing at all!—And here's Candida with coffee—God bless her."

He opened the gallery doors and the smiling girl, carrying a big tray, came through them, the blue-pink luster of the morning in its full glory behind her.

THE END