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The Flirt

by Booth Tarkington · English · Gutenberg #297 · 425,972 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Flirt

Author: Booth Tarkington


        
Release date: July 1, 1995 [eBook #297]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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THE FLIRT

BY
BOOTH TARKINGTON



To
SUSANAH


THE FLIRT

CHAPTER ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh!" she said impulsively; "I _beg_ your pardon. I didn't know
there was---- I was looking for a book I thought I----"

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

"I see," she faltered, turning to leave the room; "it isn't
here--the book."

"There's something else of yours here," said Corliss.

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

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

"I?"

"Yes. You lost it. It belongs to you."

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

"How did you know it was _my_ rose?"

"Any one would know!"

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

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

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

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

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

"Run along, little girl," said the fat father.

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



CHAPTER TWO

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

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

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

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

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

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

"_Those_ roses," said Cora sharply. "He _will_ hang around the
neighbours' stables. I think you ought to do something about it,
mother."

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

"`Galloping'?" said Mrs. Madison gravely.

"It was a pretty bum excuse," continued the unaffected youth, "but
you bet your life you'll never beat our Cora-_lee_ when there's a
person in pants on the premises! It's sickening." He rose, and
performed something like a toe-dance, a supposed imitation of his
sister's mincing approach to the visitor. "Oh, dear, I am such a
little sweety! Here I am all alone just reeking with
Browning-and-Tennyson and thinking to myself about such lovely
things, and walking around looking for my nice, pretty rose. Where
can it be? Oh heavens, Mister, are _you_ here? Oh my, I never,
never thought that there was a _man_ here! How you frighten me!
See what a shy little thing I am? You _do see, don't_ you, old
sweeticums? Ta, ta, here's papa. Remember me by that rose, 'cause
it's just like me. Me and it's twins, you see, cutie-sugar!" The
diabolical boy then concluded with a reversion to the severity of
his own manner: "If she was _my_ daughter I'd whip her!"

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

"They were all rather queer, the Corlisses."

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

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

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

"He might want to live here himself."

"He!" Cora emitted a derisive outcry.

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

"Awfully foreign and distinguished!"

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

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

"Princely," moaned Hedrick. "Pe-rin-sley!"

"Hedrick!" Mrs. Madison reproved him automatically. "In what way
is he `foreign,' Cora?"

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

"_Torso_!" Hedrick whispered hoarsely.

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

Hedrick exploded. "`_Bel air_'!" he screamed, and began to jump up
and down, tossing his arms frantically, and gasping with emotion.
"Oh, bel air! Oh, blah! `Henry Esmond!' Been readin' `Henry
Esmond!' Oh, you be-yoo-tiful Cora-Beatrix-a-_lee_! Magganifisent
torso! Gull_o_-rious figgi-your! Bel air! Oh, slush! Oh, luv-a-ly
slush!" He cast himself convulsively upon the floor, full length.
"Luv-a-ly, _luv_-a-ly slush!"

"He is thirty, I should say," continued Cora, thoughtfully.
"Yes--about thirty. A strong, keen face, rather tanned. He's
between fair and dark----"

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

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

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

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

"And he wears his clothes so well--so differently! You feel at
once that he's not a person, but a personage."

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

    "Slush, slush, luv-a-ly, slush!
    Le'ss all go a-swimmin' in a dollar's worth o' mush.
    Slush in the morning, slush at night,
    If I don't get my slush I'm bound to get tight!"

"Hedrick!" said his mother.

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

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

"Ray Vilas."

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

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

"_Poor_ old Dick Lindley!"

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

"Hedrick, Hedrick!" said Mrs. Madison sadly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mentioning Ray Vilas, you mean?" he demanded.

"You weren't kind."

"She deserves it. Look at her! _You_ know why she's got Laura at
the piano now."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hedrick!"

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

"Oh, no----"

"Didn't she do that with Ray Vilas?" he demanded quickly. "Wasn't
that exactly what she did the first time he ever came here--got
Laura to play and made him think it was _her_? Didn't she?"

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

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

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

"Did he use to live in this house?"

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

"You think this Corliss wants to sell it?"

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

"Is he rich?"

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

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

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

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

"_Hedrick_!"

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

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

"You'll see!"

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

Her son looked pityingly upon her. "She ought to be _my _
daughter," he said, the sinister implication all too plain;--"just
about five minutes!"

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

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

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

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

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

There was a moment's silence.

"Shan't I fasten that in your buttonhole for you," said Cora.

"You see how patiently I've been awaiting the offer!"

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

"Yes, one has moods," she said, dreamily. "I am _all_ moods. I
think you are too, Mr. Corliss. You _look_ moody. Aren't you?"

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



CHAPTER THREE

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

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

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

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

    "In the evening, by the moonlight, you could hear
      those banjos ringing;
    In the evening, by the moonlight, you could hear
      those darkies singing.
    How the ole folks would injoy it; they would sit
      all night an' lis-sun,
    As we sang I-I-N the evening BY-Y-Y the moonlight.'

"Ah, _that_ takes me back!" exclaimed Corliss. "That's as it used
to be. I might be a boy again."

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

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

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

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

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

"A great friend of yours, I suppose."

"He ain't a boy," said Hedrick, and returned to silence without
further explanation.

"How cool and kind the stars are to-night," said Cora, very
gently.

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

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

She leaned a very little closer to him.

"Have you iron in you, Mr. Corliss?" she asked.

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

"If I have not," answered Corliss in a low voice, "I will
have--now!"

"Tell me about yourself," she said.

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

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

"This town, you mean?"

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

"What makes you think I can?"

"I don't need to answer that. You understand perfectly."

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

"Yes," he said, finally, "I think I do."

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

"And sometimes they find that they speak the same language?"

His answer came, almost in a whisper:

"`Even as you and I.'"

"`Even as you and I,'" she echoed, even more faintly.

"Yes."

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

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

"You have lived in the Orient, haven't you, Mr. Corliss?" she said
in an ordinary tone.

"Not lived. I've been East once or twice. I spend a greater part
of the year at Posilipo."

"Where is that?"

"On the fringe of Naples."

"Do you live in a hotel?"

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

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

"Yes, it is beautiful," he said.

"Then tell me: What do you do there?"

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

"Sailing?"

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

"And you go yachting over that glory?"

"Fishing with my crew--and loafing."

"But your boat is really a yacht, isn't it?"

"Oh, it might be called anything," he laughed.

"And your sailors are Italian fishermen?"

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

"They're Neapolitans," said Corliss.

"Do they wear red sashes and earrings?" asked Cora.

"One of them wears earrings and a derby hat!"

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

"They fade early."

She leaned closer to him. "Before the fading have you--have you
loved--many?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Madison countered diplomacy with gloom.

"I don't know what to do with you. Why can't you let your sister
alone?"

"Has Laura been complaining of me?"

"Oh, Hedrick!" said Mrs. Madison.

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

"Well, what'd Cora say I been doing to her?"

"You know perfectly well what you've been doing," said Mr. Madison
sharply.

"Nothing at all; just sitting on the steps. What'd she _say_?"

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

"Oho!" Hedrick's eyes became severe, and his sire's evasively
shifted from them.

"You keep away from the porch," said the father, uneasily.

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

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

"That's what you mean," said the boy accusingly. "Ray Vilas!"

"Just you keep away from that porch."

"Because I happened to mention Ray Vilas?" demanded Hedrick.

"You let your sister alone."

"I got a right to know what she said, haven't I?"

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

"I wish she was _my_ daughter--about five minutes!"

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

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

The wary Huguenot remained in the shadow and observed her.

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

    "Love came to me to-day."

Nothing more was written upon that page.



CHAPTER FOUR

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

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

"Whatch' writin'?" he asked in simple carelessness.

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

"What is it, Hedrick?" she asked, breathlessly.

"What's the padlock for?"

"Nothing," she panted. "What is it you want?"

"You writin' poetry?"

Laura's eyes dilated; she looked dangerous.

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

"Who sent you?"

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

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

"Richard Lindley and that Wade Trumble."

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

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

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

"You don't know that she is engaged to Mr. Lindley, Hedrick."

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

"Hedrick, won't you please run along? I want to change my dress."

"What for? There was company for dinner and you didn't change
then."

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

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

"_Please_ run along, Hedrick," she pleaded.

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

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

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

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

He returned wearily to the porch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To-morrow?"

"To-morrow."

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

"Do you still live where you did--just below here?"

"Yes."

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

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

"Yes," said the other quietly. "You whipped me."

"Did I so?" Corliss laughed gayly. "We mustn't let it happen
again!"

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

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

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

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

"Nothing," said Lindley.

"You said you remembered."

"Oh, I remember a lot of useless things."

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

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

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

"Well--it was about a `show.' We were only boys, you know--younger
than you, perhaps."

"A circus?"

"A boy-circus he and my brother got up in our yard. I wasn't in
it."

"Well, what did you fight about?"

"I thought Val Corliss wasn't quite fair to my brother. That's
all."

"No, it isn't! How wasn't he fair?"

"They sold tickets to the other boys; and I thought my brother
didn't get his share."

"This Corliss kept it all?"

"Oh, something like that," said Lindley, laughing.

"Probably I was in the wrong."

"And he licked you?"

"All over the place!"

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

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

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

"Why, Laura!" said Lindley, wondering.

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

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

"You see, Richard, it's so--it's so hot, to-night."




CHAPTER FIVE

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

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

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

"He's a strong man," observed Laura. "A remarkable throat."

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

"He doesn't get very near the light he wants," said Laura.

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

"Yes," said Laura gently, "I've always thought so."

"Now what's the use of that?" asked Cora peevishly, "with _me_? I
didn't mean Richard Lindley. You _know_ what I mean."

"Yes--of course--I do," Laura said.

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

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

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

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

"He is insane!" said Laura, aghast.

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

"Ah, don't say that," protested Laura.

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

"Was he cross about Mr. Corliss monopolizing you?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Cora!"

"Oh, I suppose you mean that's the reason _I_ went in for him?"

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

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

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

Cora smiled lovingly. "You good old thing," she said. "You looked
pretty to-night."

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

"You really do look ever so pretty," asserted Cora.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You _darling_!" she cried. Cora's christening had been
unimaginative, for the name means only, "maiden." She should
have been called Narcissa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    "I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie.
    She's as pure as the lily in the dell----"

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

    "Then slowly, slowly rase she up
    And slowly she came nigh him,
    And when she drew the curtain by--
    `Young man I think you're dyin'.'"

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

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

"They're nearly all away," whispered Laura. "You needn't fear----"

"Hark!"

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

"Oh, God of the fallen, be Thou merciful to me! Be Thou
merciful--merciful--_merciful_" . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER SIX

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

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

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

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

"I suppose this is very clandestine," she said, after a deep
breath. "I don't think I care, though."

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

"Then I'll care," she said, and looked at him again.

"You dear!" he exclaimed deliberately.

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

"I'll throw it away, then. Tell me."

"Your house. I don't like living in it, very much. I'm sorry you
_can't_ throw it away."

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

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

"You don't look it, Miss Madison!"

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

"Go on with you!" he said.

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

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

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

"With a guitar?"

"No." She laughed a little. "Just singing."

"But it rained last night," said Corliss, puzzled.

"Oh, _he_ wouldn't mind that!"

"How stupid of me! Of course, he wouldn't. Was it Richard
Lindley?"

"Never!"

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

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

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

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

"So it was Mr. Vilas," he said. "He's one of the jilted, of
course."

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

"I believe I should say--yes," he returned. "Yes, in this
instance, just about all of them."

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

"I didn't miss that time," he laughed. "Don't you ever miss?"

He leaned quickly toward her and answered in a low voice: "You can
be sure I'm not going to miss anything about _you_."

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

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

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

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

"For your villa and your yacht?"

"No; I'm a magician, dear lady----"

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

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

"Then I'm sorry papa hasn't anything to put in," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thanks," he said, very softly.

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

"I'm glad to hear he's been so successful," returned Corliss.

"He might like a share in your gold-mine."

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

"Do you?"

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

"Ruined? You don't mean it literally?"

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

Her eyes became even more eager. "You think I--I _might_ be a
woman who could?"

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

"Yes," she answered slowly; "it does."

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

"Yes," she repeated; "it does."

He let a pause follow, and then said huskily:

"How far are we going?"

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

"How far do _you_ think?"

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

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

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

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

"Who was that man?" said Cora with some curiosity.

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

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

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

"What was the thought?"

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

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

"Do you think it was a prophecy?" he asked.

"What do _you_ think?" she breathed. "That was really what I asked
you before."

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

"In great danger?" The words were not vocal.

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

"Isn't any man in great danger," he said, "if he falls in love
with you?"

"Well?"



CHAPTER SEVEN

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

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

"Julip, Mist' Vilas?" he said sympathetically.

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

"And I wonder," he added, "if you can tell me----"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, you was all _right_," Joe hastened to reassure him. "You was
jes' on'y a little bit tight."

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

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

"What?"

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

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

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

"Joe!"

"Yessuh."

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

"Mist' Richard say to give you one drink ef you ask' for it, suh,"
answered Joe, looking troubled.

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

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

"Joe!"

"Yessuh."

"I want three more juleps and I want them right away."

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

"Joe."

"Yessuh."

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

"Yessuh," returned Joe humbly. "I heerd so."

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

"Yessuh."

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

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

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

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

"Hadn't you better let me get Joe to bring you something to eat?"
asked Richard.

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

"I wish you'd let Joe take you back to bed," said Richard.

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

Lindley's back stiffened. "Vilas!"

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

"It's a subject we'll omit," said Richard.

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

"I beg your pardon," said Richard quickly.

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

"Oh, all right," muttered Richard, much annoyed.

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

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

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

He finished his drink and lifted his voice hilariously:

    "The heavenly stars far above her,
      The wind of the infinite sea,
    Who know all her perfidy, love her,
      So why call it madness in me?
      Ah, why call it madness----"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course," said Richard.

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

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

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

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

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

"Olives?" asked Richard, puzzled.

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

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

"It isn't a case of not daring on account of any bodily danger,"
explained Corliss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How did you happen to come here to finance it?"

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

The other nodded. "I understand."

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, indeed. I'll look them over carefully and have another talk
with you about it."

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

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

"It is a pity."

"Why?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's that?" asked Corliss, amused.

"`The Funeral March of a Marionette!'"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You good old fool," he cried. "_You'll_ never play Don Jose!"



CHAPTER EIGHT

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

"Oh, no; _our_ cat only eats _soft_ meat!"

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

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

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

"_Little boy_!"

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

"Oh, little boy!"

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

"Little boy!"

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

"Little boy!"

Hedrick grunted unencouragingly. "Who you callin' `little boy'?"

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

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

"Kiss me, little boy!" she said.

"I won't!" exclaimed the shocked and indignant Hedrick, edging
uneasily away from her.

"Let's play," she said cheerfully.

"Play what?"

"I like chickens. Did you know I like chickens?"

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

"You're having lots of fun with me, aren't you?" he growled.

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

"Kiss me, darling little boy!" she said.

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

"Kiss me, darling little boy!" she repeated.

His head whirled; for the moment she seemed divine.

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

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

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

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

Hedrick was first upon his feet. "Haven't you got _any_ sense?"
he demanded.

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

"No, I won't! I wouldn't for a thousand dollars!"

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

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

"Kiss me some more, darling lit----"

"I won't!" he bellowed. "And if you say that again I'll----"

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

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

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

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

"Kiss me some more, darling little boy!"

"_Hedrick_!"

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

"Kiss me some more, darling little boy!"

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

Hedrick made a piteous effort to increase his speed.

"It's Lolita Martin," called Laura. "She must have her way or
nothing can be done with her. Stand _still_!"

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

"Stand still!" she cried to the wretched quarry. "She's run away.
She must be taken home. Stop, Hedrick! You _must_ stop!"

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

"Lemme go!" shuddered Hedrick. "Lemme go!"

"Kiss me again, darl----"

"I--woof!" He became inarticulate.

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

"`_Only_'!" he echoed hoarsely. "I won't ki----" He was unable to
finish the word.

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

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

"Shut up, you parrot!" hissed the goaded boy.

"Perhaps she'll go if you let her walk with her arms round your
neck," suggested Laura.

"If I _what_?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Ain't he the spooner!" remarked this unknown with hideous
admiration.

"I'll thank you," returned Hedrick haughtily, "to go on about your
own business."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hedrick stopped short.

"`_Flirted_'!" His voice was beginning to show symptoms of
changing, this year; it rose to a falsetto wail, flickered and
went out.

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

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

"Look here," he said miserably, "are you--you aren't--you don't
have to go and--and _talk_ about this, do you?"

"No, Hedrick," she responded, rising and controlling herself
somewhat. "Not so long as you're good."

This was no reassuring answer.

"And politer to Cora," she added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes. Pretty slack, these days."

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

"Let's see--I've forgotten," said Madison ruminatively. "You
travel, don't you?"

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

"Three," said Madison. "Two girls and a boy."

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

"Yes, right here at home."

"Let's see: neither of 'em's married, I believe?"

"No; not yet."

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

"No," said Madison. "Not that I know of."

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

"You mean in Paris?" asked Madison, slightly surprised at this
allusion. "You've been over there, Pryor?"

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

"Yes, that's Cora, I guess."

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

"Oh," said Madison, "young Corliss."

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, I think so."

"Pretty name, `Cora'," said Pryor.

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

"Lottie, for her mother. She's a good little girl."

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

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

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

"Hedrick!"

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

"Hed-_rick_!"

Silence.

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

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

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

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

"Ah, kiss me! Kiss me!" she whispered.

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



CHAPTER NINE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cora turned to her mother, appalled. "He'll be sick!" she said.

Mrs. Madison shook her head and smiled sadly.

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

"More likely he wants permission to do something awful."

Laura looked out of the window.

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

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

"I don't want to get out of going to church," he said. He gulped
slightly. "I like church."

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

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

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

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

"Haven't I?" she smiled enigmatically. "I don't think you've tried
very hard."

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

"I don't know."

"I see. Perhaps it's this new chap, Corliss? Has he left?"

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

"Don't you ever be nice to me unless you mean it," he said feebly.

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

"Cora----" he began, breathlessly.

"There!" she exclaimed, shifting on the instant to a lively
brusqueness. "That's enough for you just _now_. We're on our way
to church!"

Trumble felt almost that she had accepted him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why is it `too thin'?" she asked carelessly.

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

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

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

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

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

"He did?" Cora stiffened perceptibly and bit her lip.

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

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

"You'll find neither Lindley nor your father are going to think
so," he returned skeptically.

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

"I'll take your advice in anything but business." He shook his
head ominously.

"And wouldn't you take my advice in business,"--she asked very
slowly and significantly--"under _any_ circumstances?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER TEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?" he returned, blankly. "I beg your pardon----"

"Let's go out on the porch with the others."

"No, I----" He got to his feet confusedly. "I was thinking---- I
believe I'd best be going home."

"Not `best,' I think," she said. "Not even better!"

"I don't see," he said, his perplexity only increased.

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

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

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

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

"What did you say?" he asked vacantly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why do you let her, then?"

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

"Invest with Mr. Corliss?" asked Laura quickly.

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

"`Us'?" repeated Laura gently. "You mean for you and her? When
you're----"

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

"Don't do it!" said Laura decidedly.

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

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

"It would please her, of course--thinking I deferred so much to
her judgment."

"Don't do it!" she said again, impulsively.

"I don't see how I can," he returned sorrowfully.

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

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

"I see," she said. "Perhaps she might not."

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

Laura glanced at him, but did not speak.

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

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

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

"You've rather taken Ray Vilas under your wing, haven't you?"
asked Laura.

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

"Does he talk much of Cora?"

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

"Isn't that rather--rather queer for you?"

"`Queer'?" he repeated.

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

"But I don't `let' him, Laura," he protested.

"No, he just does it!"

"Well," he smiled, "you must admit my efforts to supplant him
haven't----"

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

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

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

"I got you in the park," he said; and it is to be deduced that
"got" was argot. "You're not _doing_ anything here, are you?"

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

"Your coast is cleared," said Laura, "since you wouldn't clear it
yourself."

"Wish me luck," said Richard as he left her.

She nodded brightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura hurried down to the library.



CHAPTER ELEVEN

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

"`Insult'?" repeated her father, in angry astonishment.

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

"Don't touch me!" screamed Cora, repulsing her. "Listen, if you've
got to, but let me alone. He did too! He did! He _knows_ what he
said!"

"I do not!"

"He does! He does!" cried Cora. "He said that I was--I was too
much `interested' in Mr. Corliss."

"Is that an `insult'?" the father demanded sharply.

"It was the way he said it," Cora protested, sobbing. "He meant
something he didn't _say_. He did! He did! He _meant_ to insult
me!"

"I did nothing of the kind," shouted the old man.

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

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

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

She seemed to leap at him. "You _don't_? You _don't_?"

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

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

"I'm not keeping him from anything. He didn't say----"

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

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

Cora stamped her foot again in frantic exasperation. "I'm talking
about this afternoon!"

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

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

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

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

"That's why I can't do it," he interrupted.

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

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

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

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

"They've got her to bed," announced the boy. "The doctor's up
there."

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

"You sick, too?" asked Hedrick.

"No. Run along with that ammonia."

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

"And you're _sure_ her heart trouble isn't organic?" she asked.

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

"Ye-es--she----"

"Ah! A little upset on account of opposition to a plan she'd
formed, perhaps?"

"Well--partly," assented the mother.

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

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

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

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

"I'm all--right."

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

"Doctor!" exclaimed Mrs. Madison. "_He_ isn't going to be sick, is
he? You don't think he's sick _now_?"

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

"I'm all right now," panted Madison, drinking the water Hedrick
brought him.

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

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

"What's the matter?"

"I want," said Madison thickly--"I want--to speak to Cora."

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

"Do you--think I'm a---a pretty sick man, Sloane?" asked Madison
after a long silence, speaking with difficulty.

"Oh, you're sick, all right," the doctor conceded.

"I--I want to speak to Jennie."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No `immediate' danger," corrected Laura. "And besides, Doctor
Sloane said you were to stay in bed until to-morrow."

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

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

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

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

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

Laura stared at the suddenly vacated space where they had been. At
a thought she started. Then she rushed upstairs to her mother, who
was sitting in the hall near her husband's door.

"Mamma," whispered Laura, flinging herself upon her knees beside
her, "when papa wanted to speak to you, was it a message to Cora?"

"Yes, dear. He told me to tell her he was sorry he'd made her
sick, and that if he got well he'd try to do what she asked him
to."

Laura nodded cheerfully. "And he _will_ get well, darling mother,"
she said, as she rose. "I'll come back in a minute and sit with
you."

Her return was not so quick as she promised, for she lay a long
time weeping upon her pillow, whispering over and over:

"Oh, poor, poor papa! Oh, poor, poor Richard!"



CHAPTER TWELVE

Within a week Mr. Madison's illness was a settled institution in
the household; the presence of the nurse lost novelty, even to
Hedrick, and became a part of life; the day was measured by the
three regular visits of the doctor. To the younger members of the
family it seemed already that their father had always been sick,
and that he always would be; indeed, to Cora and Hedrick he had
become only a weak and querulous voice beyond a closed door.
Doctor Sloane was serious but reassuring, his daily announcement
being that his patient was in "no immediate danger."

Mrs. Madison did not share her children's sanguine adaptability;
and, of the three, Cora was the greatest solace to the mother's
troubled heart, though Mrs. Madison never recognized this without
a sense of injustice to Laura, for Laura now was housewife and
housekeeper--that is, she did all the work except the cooking, and
on "wash-day" she did that. But Cora's help was to the very spirit
itself, for she was sprightly in these hours of trial: with
indomitable gayety she cheered her mother, inspiring in her a
firmer confidence, and, most stimulating of all, Cora steadfastly
refused to consider her father's condition as serious, or its
outcome as doubtful.

Old Sloane exaggerated, she said; and she made fun of his gravity,
his clothes and his walk, which she mimicked till she drew a
reluctant and protesting laugh from even her mother. Mrs. Madison
was sure she "couldn't get through" this experience save for Cora,
who was indeed the light of the threatened house.

Strange perversities of this world: Cora's gayety was almost
unbearable to her brother. Not because he thought it either
unfeeling or out of place under the circumstances (an aspect he
failed to consider), but because years of warfare had so
frequently made him connect cheerfulness on her part with some
unworthily won triumph over himself that habit prevailed, and he
could not be a witness of her high spirits without a strong sense
of injury. Additionally, he was subject to a deeply implanted
suspicion of any appearance of unusual happiness in her as having
source, if not in his own defeat, then in something vaguely "soft"
and wholly distasteful. She grated upon him; he chafed, and his
sufferings reached the surface. Finally, in a reckless moment, one
evening at dinner, he broke out with a shout and hurled a newly
devised couplet concerning luv-a-ly slush at his, sister's head.
The nurse was present: Cora left the table; and Hedrick later
received a serious warning from Laura. She suggested that it might
become expedient to place him in Cora's power.

"Cora knows perfectly well that something peculiar happened to
you," she advised him. "And she knows that I know what it was; and
she says it isn't very sisterly of me not to tell her. Now,
Hedrick, there was no secret about it; you didn't _confide_
your--your trouble to me, and it would be perfectly honourable of
me to tell it. I wont{sic} unless you make me, but if you can't be
polite and keep peace with Cora--at least while papa is sick I
think it may be necessary. I believe," she finished with imperfect
gravity, "that it--it would keep things quieter."

The thoughts of a boy may be long, long thoughts, but he cannot
persistently remember to fear a threatened catastrophe. Youth is
too quickly intimate with peril. Hedrick had become familiar with
his own, had grown so accustomed to it he was in danger of
forgetting it altogether; therefore it was out of perspective. The
episode of Lolita had begun to appear as a thing of the distant
and clouded past: time is so long at thirteen. Added to this, his
late immaculate deportment had been, as Laura suggested, a severe
strain; the machinery of his nature was out of adjustment and
demanded a violent reaction before it could get to running again
at average speed. Also, it is evident that his destruction had
been planned on high, for he was mad enough to answer flippantly:

"Tell her! Go on and tell her--_I_ give you leaf! _that_ wasn't
anything anyway--just helped you get a little idiot girl home.
What is there to that? I never saw her before; never saw her
again; didn't have half as much to do with her as you did
yourself. She was a lot more _your_ friend than mine; I didn't
even know her. I guess you'll have to get something better on me
than that, before you try to boss _this_ ranch, Laura Madison!"

That night, in bed, he wondered if he had not been perhaps a
trifle rash; but the day was bright when he awoke, and no
apprehension shadowed his morning face as he appeared at the
breakfast table. On the contrary, a great weight had lifted from
him; clearly his defiance had been the proper thing; he had shown
Laura that her power over him was but imaginary. Hypnotized by his
own words to her, he believed them; and his previous terrors
became gossamer; nay, they were now merely laughable. His own
remorse and shame were wholly blotted from memory, and he could
not understand why in the world he had been so afraid, nor why he
had felt it so necessary to placate Laura. She looked very meek
this morning. _That_ showed! The strong hand was the right policy
in dealing with women. He was tempted to insane daring: the rash,
unfortunate child waltzed on the lip of the crater.

"Told Cora yet?" he asked, with scornful laughter.

"Told me what?" Cora looked quickly up from her plate.

"Oh, nothing about this Corliss," he returned scathingly. "Don't
get excited."

"Hedrick!" remonstrated his mother, out of habit.

"She never thinks of anything else these days," he retorted.
"Rides with him every evening in his pe-rin-sley hired machine,
doesn't she?"

"Really, you should be more careful about the way you handle a
spoon, Hedrick," said Cora languidly, and with at least a
foundation of fact. "It is not the proper implement for decorating
the cheeks. We all need nourishment, but it is _so_ difficult
when one sees a deposit of breakfast-food in the ear of one's
vis-a-vis."

Hedrick too impulsively felt of his ears and was but the worse
stung to find them immaculate and the latter half of the
indictment unjustified.

"Spoon!" he cried. "I wouldn't talk about spoons if I were you,
Cora-lee! After what I saw in the library the other night, believe
_me_, you're the one of this family that better be careful how you
`handle a spoon'!"

Cora had a moment of panic. She let the cup she was lifting drop
noisily upon its saucer, and gazed whitely at the boy, her mouth
opening wide.

"Oh, no!" he went on, with a dreadful laugh. "I didn't hear you
asking this Corliss to kiss you! Oh, no!"

At this, though her mother and Laura both started, a faint, odd
relief showed itself in Cora's expression. She recovered herself.

"You little liar!" she flashed, and, with a single quick look at
her mother, as of one too proud to appeal, left the room.

"Hedrick, Hedrick, Hedrick!" wailed Mrs. Madison. "And she told me
you drove her from the table last night too, right before Miss
Peirce!" Miss Peirce was the nurse, fortunately at this moment in
the sick-room.

"I _did_ hear her ask him that," he insisted, sullenly. "Don't you
believe it?"

"Certainly not!"

Burning with outrage, he also left his meal unfinished and
departed in high dignity. He passed through the kitchen, however,
on his way out of the house; but, finding an unusual politeness to
the cook nothing except its own reward, went on his way with a
bitter perception of the emptiness of the world and other places.

"Your father managed to talk more last night," said Mrs. Madison
pathetically to Laura. "He made me understand that he was fretting
about how little we'd been able to give our children; so few
advantages; it's always troubled him terribly. But sometimes I
wonder if we've done right: we've neither of us ever exercised any
discipline. We just couldn't bear to. You see, not having any
money, or the things money could buy, to give, I think we've
instinctively tried to make up for it by indulgence in other ways,
and perhaps it's been a bad thing. Not," she added hastily, "not
that you aren't all three the best children any mother and father
ever had! _He_ said so. He said the only trouble was that our
children were too good for us." She shook her head remorsefully
throughout Laura's natural reply to this; was silent a while;
then, as she rose, she said timidly, not looking at her daughter:
"Of course Hedrick didn't mean to tell an outright lie. They were
just talking, and perhaps he--perhaps he heard something that made
him think what he _did_. People are so often mistaken in what they
hear, even when they're talking right to each other, and----"

"Isn't it more likely," said Laura, gravely, "that Cora was
telling some story or incident, and that Hedrick overheard that
part of it, and thought she was speaking directly to Mr. Corliss?"

"Of course!" cried the mother with instant and buoyant relief; and
when the three ladies convened, a little later, Cora
(unquestioned) not only confirmed this explanation, but repeated
in detail the story she had related to Mr. Corliss. Laura had been
quick.

Hedrick passed a variegated morning among comrades. He obtained
prestige as having a father like-to-die, but another boy turned up
who had learned to chew tobacco. Then Hedrick was pronounced
inferior to others in turning "cartwheels," but succeeded in a
wrestling match for an apple, which he needed. Later, he was
chased empty-handed from the rear of an ice-wagon, but greatly
admired for his retorts to the vociferous chaser: the other boys
rightly considered that what he said to the ice-man was much more
horrible than what the ice-man said to him. The ice-man had a fair
vocabulary, but it lacked pliancy; seemed stiff and fastidious
compared with the flexible Saxon in which Hedrick sketched a
family tree lacking, perhaps, some plausibility as having produced
even an ice-man, but curiously interesting zoologically.

He came home at noon with the flush of this victory new upon his
brow. He felt equal to anything, and upon Cora's appearing at
lunch with a blithe, bright air and a new arrangement of her hair,
he opened a fresh campaign with ill-omened bravado.

"Ear-muffs in style for September, are they?" he inquired in
allusion to a symmetrical and becoming undulation upon each side
of her head. "Too bad Ray Vilas can't come any more; he'd like
those, I know he would."

Cora, who was talking jauntily to her mother, went on without
heeding. She affected her enunciation at times with a slight lisp;
spoke preciously and over-exquisitely, purposely mincing the
letter R, at the same time assuming a manner of artificial
distinction and conscious elegance which ne

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