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The Eddy: A Novel of To-day

by Clarence Louis Cullen · English · Gutenberg #43508 · 464,251 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Eddy: A Novel of To-day

Author: Clarence Louis Cullen

Illustrator: Charlotte Weber-Ditzler


        
Release date: August 19, 2013 [eBook #43508]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43508

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EDDY: A NOVEL OF TO-DAY ***

                       THE EDDY

                   A Novel of Today

                 BY CLARENCE L. CULLEN


    Illustrations by
    CH. WEBER DITZLER

    G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY
    PUBLISHERS      NEW YORK

    _Copyright, 1910, By_
    G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY

    _The Eddy_




[Illustration: LOUISE]




CONTENTS


    CHAPTER               PAGE

         I.                  7

        II.                 31

       III.                 55

        IV.                 77

         V.                102

        VI.                125

       VII.                145

      VIII.                169

        IX.                195

         X.                218

        XI.                237

       XII.                257

      XIII.                281

       XIV.                305

        XV.                326

       XVI.                348




ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                  PAGE

    Louise                                              _Frontispiece_

    Laura, a woman of thirty-five, had the slender
    yet well-rounded structural sinuosities of a girl
    of twenty                                                       20

    He'd go over to the house on the drive and get the
    thing over with                                                182

    "But, why did you never tell me, mother?"                      192

    He squeaked like a rat; then he went down like a log           324




THE EDDY




CHAPTER I


"If only she were a boy!"

Mrs. Treharne almost moaned the words.

She tugged nervously at her absurdly diaphanous boudoir jacket, vainly
attempting to fasten it with fluttering, uncontrolled fingers; and she
shuddered, though her dressing-room was over-warm.

Heloise, who was doing her hair, juggled and then dropped a flaming red
coronet braid upon the rug. The maid, a thin-lipped young woman with a
jutting jaw and an implacable eye, pantomimed her annoyance. Before
picking up the braid she glued the backs of her hands to her
smoothly-lathed hips. Mrs. Treharne, in the glass, could see Heloise's
drab-filmed grey-blue eyes darting sparks.

"I shall resume," croaked the maid in raucous French, "when Madame is
through writhing and wriggling and squirming."

Laura Stedham--she was relaxing luxuriously in the depths of a chair
that fitted her almost as perfectly as her gown--smiled a bit wickedly.

"Forgive me if I seem catty, Tony," said Laura in her assuaging
contralto, "but it is such a delight to find that there is some one else
who is bullied by her maid. Mine positively tyrannizes over me."

"Oh, everybody bullies me," said Mrs. Treharne, querulously, holding
herself rigid in order not to again draw Heloise's wrath. "Everybody
seems to find it a sort of diversion, a game, to browbeat and hector and
bully-rag me."

"Surely I don't, afflicted one--do I?" Laura tacked a little rippling
laugh to the question.

"You do worse, my dear--you laugh at me," plaintively replied the fading
woman huddled before the glass. She was haggard as from a trouble that
has been unsuccessfully slept upon, and her mouth--not yet made into a
crimson bow through Heloise's deft artistry--was drawn with discontent.
"Heaven on high, if only she were a boy!" she broke out petulantly
again, after a little pause.

This time there was genuine enjoyment in Laura's laugh.

"Don't scowl, Antoinette--I know I am a beast for laughing," she said,
abandoning her chair and lissomely crossing the room to glance at some
new photographs on a mantel. "But, really, you say that so often that it
sounds like the refrain to a topical song. 'If only she were a boy--If
only she were a boy!'--don't you catch the rhythm of it? I wonder,
Tony, how many times I have heard you give utterance to that phrase
during the past few years--just?"

"You haven't heard me say it any oftener than I've meant it, my dear--be
very sure of that," said Mrs. Treharne, without a symptom of a smile.
Her sense of humor was embryonic, and Laura's laughter and words,
obviously meant merely in mitigation, jarred upon her. "And a remark is
none the less true for being repeated, is it?" she went on in her
plaintive monotone. "I _do_ wish Louise had been born a boy. You would,
too, if you were in my place. You know you would."

"But, dear Tony, it is such a futile, such a dreadfully childish wish,"
said Laura, striving to erase the smile from her face. "It is like
wishing for the fairy prince, or the magic carpet, or the end of the
rainbow. Worry makes wrinkles, dear. That may sound bromidic, but it's
true. Why worry yourself through all the years with wishing so
impossible--I was going to say so insane--a wish? Not only that--forgive
me for saying it, dear, won't you?--but it is rather a grisly wish, too;
and so unfair to the girl, really. Don't you think--don't you know--that
it is?"

"Don't scold, Laura--please," said Mrs. Treharne, almost in a whimper.
"You don't know what a miserable mess I am in. You haven't given me
time to tell you. Louise is coming home immediately."

"For the holidays, naturally," said Laura. "Why shouldn't the poor child
come home for the holidays? It will be the first time she has had her
holidays at home since she went away to school--nearly four years, I
think--isn't it?"

"I hope you are not meaning that for a reproach," accused the haggard
lady, now being corseted by the lusty-armed Heloise. "You are in a
shocking humor today; and I did so depend upon you for advice and
comfort, if not consolation, when I 'phoned you to come over."

"Oh, I am in a lark's humor," protested Laura, smiling as she rested a
gloved hand upon one of the milky shoulders of her troubled friend. "But
you puzzle me. Why should you make such a catastrophe of it, such a
veritable cataclysm, because your pretty and agreeable and, as I recall
her, quite lovable daughter announces that she is coming home for the
holidays? Enlighten me, dear. I seem not to discern the point of your
problem."

"Problem isn't the word for it!" repined the unhappy lady, upon whose
nearly knee-length stays Heloise now was tugging like a sailor at a
capstan. "Louise coolly announces--I had her letter yesterday--that she
is not returning to Miss Mayhew's school; that she is coming to remain
with me for good."

"Well?" said Laura, murdering the smile that strove to break through her
visible mask.

"'Well?'" wailed Mrs. Treharne. "Is that all you have to say--'well'?
Can't you see how impossible, how utterly out of the question, how----"

"Her quitting school now, you mean?" said Laura. "Really, I think you
should be pleased. Her announcement shows that Louise is a woman--a girl
of nineteen who has spent nearly four years at a modern finishing school
no longer is a young person, but a woman--that she is a woman with a
sense of humor. It is very human, very indicative of the possession of
the humorous sense, to tire of school. I did that, myself, a full year
before I was through. All of the king's horses could not have dragged me
back, either. I hated the thought of graduation day--the foolish,
fluttery white frocks, the platitudes of visitors, the moisty weepiness
of one's women relatives, the sophomoric speechifying of girls who were
hoydens the day before and would be worse hoydens the day after, the
showing off of one's petty, inconsequential 'accomplishments'--I loathed
the thought of the whole fatuous performance. And so I packed and left a
full year in advance of it, resolved not to be involuntarily drawn into
the solemn extravaganza of 'being graduated.' That, no doubt, is
Louise's idea. She is a girl with a merry heart. You should be glad of
that, Antoinette."

Laura was simply sparring with the hope of getting her friend's mind off
her problem. She knew very well the nature of the problem; none better.
The idea of a girl just out of school being plumped into such an
environment as that enveloping the Treharne household perhaps was even
more unthinkable to Laura that it was to the girl's mother, a woman who
had permitted her sensibilities to become grievously blunted with what
she termed the "widening of her horizon." But Laura, not yet ready with
advice to meet so ticklish a situation, sought, woman-like, to divert
the point of the problem by seizing upon one of its quite minor
ramifications. Of course it was not her fault that she failed.

"Laura," said Mrs. Treharne, dismissing her maid with a gesture and
fumblingly assembling the materials on her dressing table wherewith to
accomplish an unassisted facial make-up, "your occasional assumption of
stupidity is the least becoming thing you do. Why fence with me? It is
ridiculous, unfriendly, irritating." She daubed at her pale wispy
eyebrows with a smeary pencil and added with a certain hardness: "You
know perfectly well why I dread the thought of Louise coming here."

Laura, at bay, unready for a pronouncement, took another ditch of
evasiveness.

"I wonder," she said in an intended tone of detachment, "if you are
afraid she has become a bluestocking? Or maybe a frump? Or, worse still,
what you call one of the anointed smugs? Such things--one or other of
them, at any rate--are to be expected of girls just out of school, my
dear. Louise will conquer her disqualification, if she have one. Her
imagination will do that much for her. And of course she has
imagination."

"She has eyes, too, no doubt," said Mrs. Treharne, drily. "And you know
how prying, penetrating the eyes of a girl of nineteen are. You know
still better how poorly this--this ménage of mine can stand such
inspection; the snooping--wholly natural snooping, I grant you--of a
daughter nearly a head taller than I am, whom, nevertheless, I scarcely
know. Frankly, I don't know Louise at all. I should be properly ashamed
to acknowledge that; possibly I am. Moreover, I believe I am a bit
afraid of her."

Laura assumed a musing posture and thus had an excuse for remaining
silent.

"Additionally," went on Mrs. Treharne, a little hoarsely, "a woman, in
considering her daughter's welfare, must become a trifle smug herself,
no matter how much she may despise smugness in its general use and
application. What sort of a place is this as a home for Louise? I am
speaking to you as an old friend. I am in a fiendish predicament. Of
course you see that. And I can't see the first step of a way out of it.
Can you?"

"For one thing," said Laura, mischievously and with eyes a-twinkle, "you
might permanently disperse your zoo."

Mrs. Treharne laughed harshly.

"One must know somebody," she said, deftly applying the rouge
rabbit's-foot. "One can't live in a cave. My own sort banished me. I am
_declassée_. Shall I sit and twiddle my thumbs? At least the people of
my 'zoo,' as you call it, are clever. You'll own that."

"They are freaks--impossible, buffoonish, baboonish freaks," replied
Laura, more earnestly than she had yet spoken. "You know I am not
finical; but if this raffish crew of yours are 'Bohemians,' as they
declare themselves to be--which in itself is _banal_ enough, isn't
it?--then give me the sleek, smug inhabitants of Spotless Town!"

"You rave," said Mrs. Treharne, drearily. "Let my zoo-crew alone. We
don't agree upon the point."

"I thought you had your queer people--your extraordinary Sunday evening
parties--I came perilously near saying rough-houses, Tony--in mind in
bemoaning Louise's return home," said Laura, yawning ever so slightly.

"Oh, I'd thought of that, of course," said Mrs. Treharne, artistically
adding a sixteenth of an inch of length to the corners of her eyes with
the pencil. "But my raffish crew, as you call them, wouldn't harm her.
She might even become used to them in time. She hasn't had time to form
prejudices yet, it is to be hoped. You purposely hit all around the real
mark. Louise is nineteen. And you know the uncanny side-lines of wisdom
girls pick up at finishing schools nowadays. Since you maliciously force
me to mention it point-blank, in Heaven's name what will this daughter
of mine think of--of Mr. Judd?"

"Now we are at the heart of the matter," answered Laura. "Heart, did I
say? Fancy 'Pudge' with a heart!" There was little mirth in her laugh.

"You must not call him that, even when you are alone with me, Laura,"
said Mrs. Treharne, petulantly. "I am in deadly fear that some time or
other he will catch you calling him that. You know how mortally
sensitive he is about his--his bulk."

"Well might he be," said Laura, drily enough. "Is there any particular
reason why your daughter should have to meet Judd? Except very
occasionally, I mean?"

"How can it be avoided?" asked Mrs. Treharne, helplessly. "Hasn't he the
run of the house? You don't for an instant suppose that, even if I
implored him, he would forego any of his--his privileges here?"

"I am not so imbecile as to suppose any such a thing," said Laura, with
a certain asperity. "But the man might exhibit a bit of common decency.
He knows that Louise is coming?"

"I haven't told him," said Mrs. Treharne, fluttering to her feet from
the dressing table. "You will hook me, Laura? I don't want to call
Heloise. She only pretends that she doesn't understand English, and she
knows too much already. No, I haven't told him yet. He resents the idea
of my having a daughter, you know. He will be here directly to take me
out in the car. I shall tell him when we are going through the Park.
Then nobody but the chauffeur and I will hear him growl. I know in
advance every word that he will say," and the distraught woman looked
wan even under her liberal rouge.

Laura impulsively placed an arm around her friend's shoulder.

"Tony," she said, gravely, "why don't you show the brute the door?"

"Because it is his own door--you know that," said Mrs. Treharne, her
eyes a little misty.

"Then walk out of it," said Laura. "This isn't the right sort of thing.
I don't pose as a saint. But I could not endure this. Come with me. Let
Louise join you with me. You know how welcome you are. I have
plenty--more than plenty. You shouldn't have permitted Judd to refuse to
let you continue to receive the allowance George Treharne provided for
Louise. That wasn't fair to yourself. It was more unfair to your
daughter. You shouldn't have allowed her to get her education with
Judd's money. She is bound to find it out. She would be no woman at all
if that knowledge doesn't cut her to the quick. But this is beside the
mark. I have plenty. She is a dear, sweet, honest girl, and she is
entitled to her chance in the world. I am sure I don't need to tell you
that. What chance has she in this house? The doors that are worth while
are closed to you, my dear. You know I say that with no unkind intent.
It is something you yourself acknowledge. The same doors would be closed
to your daughter if she came here. She could and would do so much better
with me. Neither you nor she would be dependent. We are too old friends
for that. And I know George Treharne. He would renew the allowance that
you permitted Judd to thrust back at him through yourself and his
lawyer. Leave this place, this sort of thing, once and forever. I want
you to--for your own sake and your daughter's."

Mrs. Treharne wept dismally, to the sad derangement of her
elaborately-applied make-up. But she wept the tears of self-pity, than
which there are none more pitiful. The reins of a great chance, for
herself and her daughter, were in her hands. Perhaps it was the
intensity of her perturbation that did not permit her to hold them. Very
likely it was something else. But, at any rate, hold them she did not.

"You are a dear, Laura," she said, fighting back her tears for the sake
of her make-up. "It was what I might have expected of you. Of all the
friends I used to have, you are the only one who never has gone back on
me. But you must see how impossible it all is. I am in over my head. So
what would be the use?"

"You speak for yourself only, Antoinette," said Laura, a little coldly.
"What of your daughter?"

"Oh, if only she were a boy!" the wretched woman harped again.

Laura Stedham removed her arm from her friend's shoulder and shrugged a
bit impatiently.

"That refrain again?" she said, the warmth departing from her tone. "I
must be going before I become vexed with you, Tony. Your own position
would be quite the same in any case--if you had a son instead of a
daughter, I mean. For my part, I fail to perceive any choice between
being shamed in the eyes of a son of in the eyes of a daughter. True, a
son would not have to tolerate so humiliating a situation. A son could,
and unquestionably would, clap on his hat the moment he became aware of
the state of things here, and stamp out, leaving it all behind him. A
son could and would shift for himself. But a girl--a girl just out of
school--can't do that. She is helpless. She is at the mercy of the
situation you have made for her. I fear you are completely losing your
moorings, Tony. When is Louise arriving?"

"Tonight," replied Mrs. Treharne, who had subsided into a sort of apathy
of self-pity. "At nine something or other. I shall meet her at the
station in the car."

Laura turned a quizzical, slitted pair of eyes upon her friend, now busy
again with her tear-smudged make-up.

"Not in Judd's car, surely, Tony?" she said, in earnest expostulation.
"Why do that? Why not let the girl in upon your--your tangled affairs a
little more gradually? How could she help wondering at the extravagant,
vulgar ornateness of Judd's car? For of course she knows perfectly well
that your own finances are not equal to such a whale of a machine as
that."

"It will not take her long to find out everything," said Mrs. Treharne,
a little sullenly. "She need not be uncommonly observant to do that.
And you remember how embarrassingly observant she was even as a child."

"Give her a chance to observe piecemeal, then," said Laura, laconically.
"I shall be with you at the station. One of my poor accomplishments, you
know, is the knack of ameliorating difficult situations. And I was
always so fond of the child. I am stark curious to see how she has
developed. She was a starchy Miss of fifteen when last I saw her. We'll
fetch her home in a taxicab. That will be better. It is arranged, then?"

"Everything that you suggest is as good as arranged,' Laura," replied
Mrs. Treharne, with a wan smile. "Your gift of persuasion is
irresistible--I wish I knew the secret of it. It is extremely good of
you to want to meet the child. If I could only meet her with--with such
clean hands as--well, as I should have!"

"Never mind--there'll be a way out of it," said Laura, cheerily. "I am
off."

She grazed the adeptly-applied artificial bloom of the other woman's
cheek with her lips.

As they stood side by side in the juxtaposition of a caress--they were
friends from girlhood--the contrast between the two women was
sufficiently striking. Laura Stedham, a woman of thirty-five, had the
slender yet well-rounded structural sinuosities of a girl of twenty who
passes all her days in the open air--minus the indubitable blowsiness
which some open-air young women can't help but reveal to the dissecting
eye. Unusually tall, she had the gliding grace of movement which so many
women of uncommon stature lack. Even in the cluttered dressing room of
her friend she made nothing of the obstacles that barred her path, but,
walking always with a sort of nervous swiftness, passed around them to
her point of destination--a mantel, a table, a hanging picture--with a
threading ease of locomotion that made it seem oddly doubtful if she
were dependent upon the ground at all for a base. There are tall women
who, if they do not collide with stationary objects when they undertake
a tour of a room, at least arouse the fear that they will infallibly do
so. Laura possessed an eye for the measurement of distances, and the
litheness perfectly to follow her measurement. Her complexion was that
of a woman to whom a long tramp, even in the city, in the mist or in the
blinding rain, was not a task, but a delight. Her hair, all her own, yet
worn in the final perverse mood of exaggeration of the coiffure
"artist," was of an incredible burnished black, in unusual contrast with
her full, kindling, Celtic-grey eyes. A certain irregularity in the
outline of her features--especially of her nose, which, far from being
aquiline, was too short by the merest fraction--lent a certain piquancy
to her expression, even when her face was in repose. She had the habit,
growing rare in a world of social avoidances and white lies, of looking
the person addressing her straight in the eye. It was not an impaling,
disquieting gaze, but one that fairly demanded truthfulness and candor;
a gaze unconsciously calculated to cause the liar to stutter in the
manufacture of his lie.

[Illustration: LAURA, A WOMAN OF THIRTY-FIVE, HAD THE SLENDER YET
WELL-ROUNDED STRUCTURAL SINUOSITIES OF A GIRL OF TWENTY.]

Mrs. Treharne, four years older than Laura, had the somewhat hollow-eyed
plumpness of an indoor woman who wars fiercely but hopelessly and
unequally upon ever-threatening _embonpoint_. Her triumphs over the
enemy never were better than drawn battles; she was compelled to devote
at least three hours a day to her determined, almost hysterical warfare
upon the natural process of accretion, solely that she might not gain;
long before she had abandoned hope of achieving the fragility of outline
she pined for. The nostrums she employed in this incessant conflict had
made her fragile, however, in at least one respect: her health; besides
imparting a certain greenish-yellow tint to her skin which made her
make-up box almost as necessary a part of her equipment as the hands
wherewith she applied the mitigating tints. Five years before she had
been a fresh-skinned, clear-eyed, naturally pretty woman of a somewhat
inconsequential type; but the necessity--the hideous duty, as she
deemed it--of banting without cessation or intermission had left her
merely her regular features upon which artificially to create the
illusion of a youthfulness she was far from feeling. With the final
touch added for an appearance in a company, she still looked dainty,
certainly of impeccable grooming. But she had learned to be uneasy under
the scrutiny of eyes that she felt to be unfriendly, and she had become
exceptionally partial to veils. Her hair, originally a light,
unaggressive red, had been "done over" into a sort of vivid, brittle
"Titian." There were occasional reddish gleams in her slightly furtive,
small eyes of hazel. She had a child's foot, and she was inordinately
proud of her tiny, waxy, too-white hands. In a company she smiled
continuously in order to display her teeth, which were perfectly
assembled and of an almost porcelain whiteness. Mrs. Treharne was called
a pretty woman even by those who perhaps entertained unexpressed
misgivings as to how she might look at her rising hour.

After Laura had gone Mrs. Treharne tried, before her glass, the effect
of a smile--somewhat frozen and quickly obliterated--upon her carefully
studied and artfully executed make-up mask; then sighed drearily as she
sank into a chair and began polishing her nails upon her palms.

"Of course Laura is right, as usual--it wouldn't help matters
particularly if Louise were a boy," she mused with puckered brows. "A
boy might be longer in finding out how affairs stood here; but when he
did find out--what a storm, what heroics, what juvenile reproaches, what
a stagey to-do there would be! Perhaps, after all, it is as well that
Louise is--Louise. She can adapt herself to--to things as they are. She
must. There's no other way. She can't have lost the tact she possessed
as a child. I wish I knew her better, so that I could have some sort of
an idea just what to expect from her. I hope she understands the good
sense of closing one's eyes to things that can't be improved by looking
at them. Perhaps I shall be lucky enough to marry her off quickly. That
would be almost too easy a solution for me, with my vile luck, to
expect."

She rang for Heloise to have her furs in readiness.

"It was thoroughly decent of Laura," she thought on, finger at lip, "to
advise me to bolt all this and take refuge with her. But I haven't the
nerve--that's the plain truth of it. How could I ask Treharne to renew
the allowance? What a triumph it would be for him if I were to do that!
He would be too Quixotic to view it as a triumph, but that wouldn't
alleviate my humiliation in asking him. And what would the three or four
thousand a year be in comparison with--"

"The car is at the door, Madame," announced Heloise, appearing with the
sables. Mrs. Treharne smiled at herself before the glass to smooth out
the wrinkles of her musing, tripped lightly down the stairs, and was
humming blithely when she nodded indulgently at the ponderous,
shaggy-furred man who was waiting to help her into the huge,
over-lavish, pulsing car.

"You take your time, don't you?" grumbled Judd, his breath vaporing into
broken clouds in the raw December air. "Does that monkey-chattering maid
of yours sleep all the time, or has she a case on with the butler? I've
been tooting here for ten minutes."

His tone was snarling, and his thin lips were drawn away from gnarled
teeth. Judd was one of those physical anomalies, a man of Falstaffian
girth with sharp, peaked, predatory features. He pulled off his fur cap
to readjust it before stepping into the car, showing a head wholly bald
except for crinkly wisps of mixed red and gray hair at the sides and
back. There was a deep crease at the back of his neck where the scant
hair left off, and his deep-set, red-rimmed little watery-blue eyes were
alert and suspicious.

Mrs. Treharne laughed so carelessly that it almost seemed as if she
deliberately sought to intensify his irritation.

"Still in your villanous humor?" she asked him, a taunt in her tone. "I
believe this is one of the days--they grow rather frequent--when you
should be allowed--required, I should say--to ride alone."

"Well, that's easy enough to do," grumbled Judd in a voice curiously
high-pitched for so vast a man. "See here, perhaps you are conceited
enough to think--"

Very deliberately, and still smiling, Mrs. Treharne rose to leave the
car. Judd looked blankly nonplussed.

"Oh, stop this infernal nonsense, Tony," he said in a tone tinged with
alarm. Then his ruddy face expanded into a grin behind which there
seemed to be little mirth. "D'ye know, I believe you would be cat enough
to step out, before we start, and--"

"No names, if you please," Mrs. Treharne interrupted, choppily.
"Decidedly I shall leave the car if you feel that it is impossible for
you to behave yourself like a human being. I have ceased to extract
enjoyment from your growling humors."

It was a tone she might have taken in addressing a menial. Obviously,
however, it was the tone required for the proper subjugation of Judd. He
exuded a falsetto laugh and patted her hand, at the same time motioning
the chauffeur to start.

"I don't complain of your hellish moods, do I, Tony?" he asked her,
still chuckling unpleasantly. "In fact, I believe I rather like the feel
of your claws. All the same, there may come a day when--"

"When I shall enjoy the sight of your back," calmly interrupted the
apparently complaisant woman at his side. "Speed the day!"

Judd's face took on a half-chagrined, half-worried look. It generally
did when Mrs. Treharne was operating upon him what she privately called
her "system." This "system," in essence, consisted in her invariable
habit of quarreling with him and reducing him to abjectness by more or
less veiled threats of abandoning him to a lonesome fate whenever she
had something to ask of him, or to tell him, that she knew quite well
would arouse his surliness. It was a neatly-devised balancing method,
and Mrs. Treharne as well understood the vital advantage of striking the
first blow as she apprehended the extent of her power over him.

"I say, Tony," said Judd, patting her gloved hands again, "you wouldn't
really cut and run just because--"

"Spare me your elephantine sentimentalities, please," she put in, a
little less indifferently. "You were never ordained for that sort of
thing. Anyhow, I would like a sane word or two with you. I've something
to tell you."

"It's money, of course," said Judd, sulkily, leaving off patting her
hands with ludicrous suddenness. "More damned extravagance, eh?"

"No, it's neither money nor extravagance, beautifully as those two words
trot in tandem," she said, airily, yet with a new soothing note in her
tone. "It is this: Louise is coming home. At once. Tonight."

"The devil she is!" blurted Judd. "What for? Who sent for her? How long
is she going to stay? What's it all about?"

"One question at a time, please," Mrs. Treharne replied, looking
indifferently out toward the bleak river as they shot by Claremont. It
was a palpably assumed air of indifference; but Judd, unskilled at
penetrating feminine subtlety, did not discern the nervousness
underlying her careless manner. "My daughter is coming home because she
wants to. Nobody sent for her. She is not going back to school. She
announces that in her letter to me; and she is old enough to know her
mind and to be entitled to freedom of action. She is remaining
permanently with me."

She had expected him to storm upon hearing the news in full. Judd,
however, was an individual who owed a considerable part of his immense
success as a man of affairs to his studied and carefully-elaborated
habit of never doing the obvious.

He leaned back in the car and half-screened his turkey-like eyes with
their small, veinous lids. Mrs. Treharne, surprised at his silence, went
on hastily:

"I am wretchedly disturbed over it. I know that I have no fit home to
offer her. I know that I have completely undermined her chance in life.
But what can I do? She can't live alone. And she merely brings the
difficulty to a head by coming now. She must come home some time, of
course. The child has not spent her holidays or her summer vacations
with me for four years. Always she has been pushed about among school
friends, who, glad as they and their people may have been to have her,
surely must have wondered why she did not come home."

Judd fluttered his eyelids and leaned forward in his seat.

"I understand perfectly, of course," he said with a sort of leer. "I
understand, you understand, we understand, they understand, everybody
understands. Then what are you making such a devil of a rumpus about it
for?"

"Well," said Mrs. Treharne, making the mistake, in dealing with Judd, of
falling into a slightly apologetic tone, "I thought that perhaps you
might----"

"Wait a minute, Antoinette," interrupted Judd with suave brutality,
leaning back again among the cushions and once more half-closing his
eyes. "It doesn't matter a damn what I think. I can stand it if you can.
She isn't my daughter, you know. She's your daughter. I suppose she has
been taught to mind her own business? Very well. I can stand the
situation if you can."

The slur cut like a rattan, as Judd, perceiving a rare advantage,
thoroughly intended that it should. He made it worse by patting her
hands as he spoke. She hated him with an almost virtuous intensity as he
uttered the sneer. But she said no more about her daughter's impending
arrival during the remainder of the ride.




CHAPTER II


The chair car was well filled when Louise somewhat misty-eyed from
parting with the doleful group of school intimates who convoyed her to
the little station, walked down the aisle just as the train began to
move. Not in the least sorry because she was finally leaving school, she
was affected by the glumness of the girls who had insisted upon bidding
her goodbye at the train; but she had not actually wept at any stage of
the parting. Perhaps the tear-reddened eyes and noses of her school
friends had slightly touched her risibles; for her by no means latent
sense of humor invariably struggled to the surface when she found
herself figuring in anything of the nature of a "scene." She was not
lacking in what the iron-jowled dowagers call "becoming sensibilities;"
but she was habitually self-contained, and tears were unusual with her.
Nevertheless, she found difficulty in properly discerning objects, even
at close range, as she searched for her place; and it was due to her
filmed vision that she took a chair that did not correspond to the
number on her Pullman ticket.

Women as well as men pivoted about in their chairs for a second glance
at Louise. Her unusual height was emphasized by the loose-fitting
fur-lined cloth coat which fell straight from her shoulders to her
skirt's hem. When she removed the coat her simple one-piece gown of blue
cloth caused cogitating men in surrounding chairs to marvel as to how
she had ever contrived to get into it, and, worse, how she would
possibly manage to get out of it. The guimpe of the dress was of a
creamy embroidery that dissolved bafflingly into the whiteness of her
neck.

Louise might have reminded an imaginative traveler, had there been such
in the car, of a freshly-blown, firm-petalled chrysanthemum. There are
women in whom you first discern an utter, convincing wholesomeness;
later you become aware of their beauty. Their wholesomeness, you think
upon your first comprehensive glance, is like that of an early vernal
breeze, of dew upon clean grass; then the contributing elements of their
beauty emerge upon your consciousness as through a succession of lifted
veils. Louise Treharne was of this type. Unusually tall, she had none of
the raw-boned angularities of the over-trained young woman who makes a
fad of gymnasium or out-of-doors activities and who thoughtlessly
sacrifices the beauty of contour on the profitless altar of
over-athleticism. Slender, yet well rounded, the fine amplitude of her
proportions caused her to look several years older than her age. Her
face contributed to this effect. It was a face such as the imaginary
imaginative traveller might vaguely have associated with the faces of
women stamped upon Roman coins. There is a sort of creamy, vivid pallor
that, equally with ruddiness, denotes perfect health and vigor. This was
Louise's; and the uncommon regularity of her features was tempered and
softened by varying phases of expression that spoke of an habitual
serenity and a searching common sense. Her hair, of the darkest shade of
lustrous auburn, waved back loosely and often a bit rebelliously to the
great knotted coil in which it was caught at the back of her
finely-lathed head. Her eyes, the corners of which had an almost
indistinguishable slant that only became agreeably noticeable when she
smiled, were wide and full, and of so dark a brown that, at night or in
shadowed rooms, they were often supposed to be black.

She had barely settled herself, chin in palm, to gaze out of the window
at the blurred landscape of ice-crusted snow, before she became somewhat
confusedly conscious of a loomful figure standing patiently in the aisle
beside her. When she suddenly turned her head and surveyed him with
calm, questioning eyes, he pulled off his cap of plaid a bit awkwardly
and smiled. She mentally observed that his mouth was a trifle
over-large; but his smile, for all of that, she thought, was the smile
of a man. With the woman's mystifying ability mentally to absorb
innumerable details at a mere glance, she noticed (without in the least
seeming to notice) that he was of unusual stature and of the type called
by women, in their between-themselves appraisals, "delightfully
scrubbed-looking;" that he was perhaps a little above thirty; that he
had a closely-shaven rugged jaw and somewhat jutting chin, huge,
well-cared-for hands, rather closely-cropped brown hair slightly greying
at the sides, candid grey eyes with tiny lines of humor and experience
running away from their corners. She noticed, too, that he was not
wearing gloves, which was satisfying. All of the other men in the
over-warm car were wearing their heavy cold-weather gloves, and she was
slightly contemptuous of this as an unmasculine affectation. Finally, in
the same single glance, she perceived his visible embarrassment....

"Pray don't disturb yourself," he said, fumbling his cap with both
hands. ("Why don't all men talk basso?" thought Louise.) "I can reach it
without your moving at all, if you will permit me. My bag, you know.
There are some papers in it that I want to go over, and----"

He stopped dead and looked quite wretched when Louise came to her feet.

"I am in your chair," she said, as he stooped to pick up a bag that,
she now noticed for the first time, was wedged by the seat she had
unwittingly taken. She was about to remove her coat to the back of the
chair in front--her rightful place, as she quickly remembered when she
saw the number on the panel--when he put out a determinedly detaining
hand.

"Don't make me feel such a disgraceful nuisance, I beg of you," he said
with an earnestness that was out of keeping with his twinkling eyes.
"One chair is as good as another--better, in fact, when one already has
possession of it. This bag is my only gear. You'll keep the seat, won't
you? That's immensely kind of you," as Louise resumed the chair. "I
wouldn't have had you move for----"

"Of course," she interrupted him with a quietly frank laugh, "I hadn't
the slightest intention of moving. It is more than good of you to
suppose that I meant to be so agreeable."

"That," he pronounced, again with his liberal smile, "is probably a
neat, quickly-conceived way of letting me down easily, for which I am
nevertheless grateful;" and, bowing, he took the chair in front of her,
dug into his bag and quickly became immersed in a batch of formidable
looking documents. Louise, again leaning back in her chair, decided that
the rear of his head was decidedly shapely.

The excessive warmth of the car was making her sleepy, and she closed
her eyes and surrendered herself to dozing reflections. She was dubious
as to the reception her mother would give her. She had not heard from
her mother since writing the letter in which she had calmly announced,
as something settled and therefore not open to debate, that she was
through with school and would not return to Miss Mayhew's after the
holidays. Laura had been only partly right as to Louise's reason for
quitting school. Louise, it was true, was glad enough to escape the
nightmare of "commencement exercises" by leaving half a year in advance
of her graduation. But she had a far deeper reason for quitting the
school without consultation with her mother. She wanted to be at home;
any sort of a home. She had no very pleasurable recollections of the
places--there had been many of them, and they had not been homes--in
which she had lived with her mother before being sent to the finishing
school in central New York. Her young girlhood had been a period of
aimless drifting, at seashore and mountain resorts in summer, and in
tiny but by no means snug apartments in New York in the winter; her
mother's restlessness and her frequently expressed dislike of "smug
domesticity" had combined against her ever establishing anything even
approximating a genuine home for herself and her daughter. Louise only
vaguely remembered her father; the separation, followed by a divorce,
had taken place when she was only nine years old. At fifteen she had
been trundled off to the up-State finishing school; and the school had
been the only home she had known for close upon four years. Her mother
had visited her twice a year, taking her to the seaside for a week or so
during the summer vacation and to Lakewood for a brief stay during the
holidays. Her mother had always been provided with some sort of an
excuse for not taking Louise to her home--Louise knew that she must have
some sort of a home--in New York. The place was being overhauled, guests
had unexpectedly swooped upon her, she was about to start upon a
journey; Louise had listened, mystified, so often to these reasons her
mother gave for not having her daughter with her in the city at times
when nearly all the other girls were leaving the school for home visits
that she at length came to believe that her mother was treating her with
somewhat humiliating disingenuousness. This feeling, however, aroused
less resentment in the girl than it did a feeling of distress; she could
not avoid, as she grew older, the conviction that she was being
neglected. The feeling became intensified when, year after year, she was
shunted, as she considered, on visits to the homes of her schoolgirl
friends. It was natural enough, when she observed how cherished the
other girls were in their homes, how the arms of strong affection
constantly were thrown around them, that she should compare her own
thrust-aside state with theirs and that she should develop the intense
longing of a normal, affectionate young woman for similar love and
protection.

She had no sense of resentment against her mother; it was rather a
feeling of regret that the curious aloofness between them, which she had
no possible way of understanding, had ever risen. She hoped that
perhaps, after all, her mother might really need her as sorely as she
felt that she herself needed a mother and a home. She was returning to
her mother with an open mind; no longer a child to be shunted and
evaded, but a woman to be treated with frankness. There were some points
in connection with her mother's affairs that she did not understand but
as to which she had no undue curiosity. But she was intensely glad to be
at least on her way home--on her way to her mother, at any rate--for
good and all; and she formed plans for drawing nearer to her mother,
wistfully hoping that the plans would have the fruition she longed for.

Louise's reflections gradually, with the purring movement of the train,
became merged into dreams. She awoke with a start when the train came to
a grinding stop at a station. She began cutting the pages of a magazine
when, glancing up, she saw the man with whom she had held the little
colloquy a while before striding down the aisle of the car. In his hand
was an unopened telegram. She noticed that he was looking at her as he
approached her seat, and that he was knitting his brow in a puzzled,
serious sort of way.

He stopped when he came to her chair and held out the telegram.

"The boy paged the dining car, where I happened to be," he said to her,
"and, thinking that you might still be asleep, I took the liberty of
signing for your telegram."

The telegram was addressed to "Miss Louise Treharne." It was from one of
Louise's girl friends at the school, telling her that a piece of
hand-baggage that Louise had absent-mindedly left at the station was
being forwarded.

Louise scarcely glanced at the contents of the telegram, so great was
her astonishment over its method of reaching her.

"You grant, of course, that I have reason to be puzzled," she said to
him, unconstrainedly but entirely in earnest. She noticed that he was
far from being unconstrained, and that a certain seriousness sat upon
his strong features which she had not before observed. "It is plain that
you knew this telegram was for me."

"Otherwise, of course," he replied, a little huskily, "I should not
have presumed to sign for it. I should not have signed for it in any
case had I not supposed you to be asleep. I feared, you see, that you
might miss it."

"But you do not in the least appease my curiosity," said Louise, smiling
somewhat nervously. "If you knew me--as it seems of course you do--I
cannot understand why you did not reveal yourself when we had our little
conversation a while ago."

"But I did not know--I should say I did not recall you then," he said,
plainly flustered.

"You only add to the mystery," said Louise. "You will enlighten me, of
course?"

He whirled his chair about so that, sitting back on the arm of it, he
could face her.

"It is simple enough," he explained, with a hesitancy which Louise did
not fail to note. "When the lad with the telegram came through the
dining car, calling out your name, I could not fail, with that startling
reminder, to remember----" He broke off as if reluctant to proceed.

"Yes?" put in Louise, a bit proddingly.

"Well, I could not fail to remember your father's daughter," he said in
a low tone, obviously striving to regain some ease of manner.

"You know my father?" said Louise, her sense of the mystery of it all
increasing rather than abating.

"Yes," he replied, still struggling, as Louise could see, to conquer a
trouble that was visible on his features. "I am your father's attorney.
I know your mother quite well, too. But this is the first time I have
seen you since you were a little girl in pigtails and highly-starched
skirts." He strove to make his laugh sound natural and easy, but it was
a failure. Some worry, as to the nature of which Louise could of course
not even guess, was in his voice as well as on his face.

Louise impulsively held out her hand.

"The mystery is cleared," she said, brightly, "and it is delightful to
meet so old a friend, no matter how oddly. Won't you sit down and tell
me all about my father and my mother and myself and yourself and--and
everybody? Or is it permissible for one to cross-examine so solemn and
cautious a person as an attorney?"

He sat down in the chair facing hers and studied, constrainedly, the
pattern of the cap which he held out before him. Then he glanced at his
watch.

"I am leaving the train at Peekskill," he said, "so there is not much
time. You are to be home for the holidays?"

"For the holidays and for all time," she replied with a certain
eagerness. "You have visited my mother's home? Because, you know, I
never have." She had not meant to say that so baldly, and she was sorry
for the slip as soon as the words were out. "It is on Riverside Drive.
Therefore it must be lovely; the view, at any rate. It is lovely, isn't
it?"

He deliberately evaded the question.

"You are not returning to school at all?" he pointedly
counter-questioned her instead. "Does your mother know this? I hope I
don't seem inquisitive. But I am really interested in knowing."

"You trap me into a confession," replied Louise, smiling. "I simply
announced to my mother that I was through with school, and here I am on
my way home. I am hoping that she will not be excessively angry with me.
Do you think she will be?"

Louise was finding him decidedly difficult, in spite of her efforts to
put him at his ease. He became so immersed in cogitations which Louise
could see were of the troubled sort that he seemed scarcely to listen to
what she was saying.

"You have not answered my question, you know, Mr.--Mr.--you see I do not
even know your name," said Louise, after a pause, pretending to be
aggrieved.

"Oh, pardon the rudeness, won't you?" he said, hastily. "Blythe is my
name--John Blythe. And forgive me for not having caught your question,
Miss Treharne. You don't mind asking it again?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Louise, appeased, but still curious as to
the cause of the perturbation he had exhibited ever since he had brought
her the telegram, and which had become more pronounced since she had
told him that she was on her way to her mother's home to remain there.
She had not failed to notice his quite manifest unwillingness to speak
of her mother. Not of a prying nature, she concluded, without framing
the thought in words, that, if he had a reason for that unwillingness,
it was decidedly his privilege to keep the reason to himself. But her
curiosity as to her father was not so easily repressed. She had not
heard him spoken of--her mother forbade the subject--for many years, nor
had he ever communicated with her directly; but her childish
recollections of him were very sweet. She could not resist the
temptation to speak of him to this newly-revealed friend. Why should she
not, she thought, since he seemed to be so well acquainted with her
parents--and was her father's attorney besides?

"Mr. Blythe," she found herself saying in a tone of unusual hesitation
for her, a young woman of perfect frankness, "I feel that I may ask you
about my father, seeing that you know--well, everything concerning him
and my mother and--myself. It has been so many, many years since I have
even heard him mentioned. Where is he? When did you see him last?"

"He lives in Hawaii, Miss Treharne--I saw him in Honolulu a few years
ago," replied Blythe, promptly enough.

Louise pondered. There was nothing specific she wanted to ask about her
father. But she considered that Blythe had not told her very much.

"Is he--well, nice?" she asked him.

Blythe, disturbed as he was, could not help but smile at the naïve
question. But he sobered before he replied.

"He is almost, if not quite, the finest man I ever knew," he said. "I
hope to be allowed to tell you all about him some time. I shall be
writing to him presently. Tut! Here is Peekskill. I am dropping off here
for a few hours," and he thrust his arms into his overcoat.

"You will send my love to my father in your letter?" said Louise, her
eyes slightly filmed, touching him upon the sleeve. He looked gravely
down upon her; her words touched him keenly.

"I am glad you have asked me to do that, Miss Treharne," he said. "And
he will be more than glad--depend upon that. Goodbye--not for very long,
I hope. I am overjoyed to have come upon you again--especially at this
time," and he took her two hands in his huge palms for an instant and
was gone.

"'Especially at this time'--I wonder what he meant by that?" thought
Louise. He waved at her as he passed beneath her car window. She was
conscious that his smile in doing so was slightly forced; an instant
before he caught sight of her through the window she had noticed that
his face was clouded with worry.

       *       *       *       *       *

An hour later Louise was weaving her way through the rushing,
holiday-chattering crowd toward the exit gate at the Grand Central
station. Peering toward the gate, and able, with her unusual height, to
see over the heads of the hurrying women and most of the men, she espied
her mother, looking somewhat petitely stodgy beside the stately Laura,
gazing rather wearily through the iron lattice. "I think I see myself
being sent to bed without any supper," whimsically thought Louise,
considering, as she drew nearer, her mother's bored expression. Louise
was glad Laura was with her mother; when a mere growing girl she had
become gratefully familiar with Laura's self-styled "ameliorating
knack." She had become very fond of her mother's handsome,
superbly-capricious but sunny-natured friend before being packed off to
school; and now her eyes became slightly blurred at the thought that
Laura had remembered her and had thought enough of her to be with her
mother at her home-coming.

"Here is our blossomy, bronze-haired Boadicea!" Louise heard Laura say
as she was taken into the older woman's arms and heartily kissed. Then
Laura thrust her away with assumed annoyance. "But, minx, you are taller
than I am; a full inch, maybe two, taller! How do you ever expect me to
forgive you that, child?" and she smiled, drawing Louise toward her
again, and hugged her once more.

Louise's mother brushed the girl's cheek with her lips, her daughter
bending toward her.

"You _are_ grotesquely tall, aren't you, dear?" said Mrs. Treharne, not
very good-naturedly. Her petulance over Louise's return was by no means
allayed; and her masseuse had told her that evening that she had gained
two pounds in a week! "You will have to get clothes that will reduce
your shocking stature." Then, swept by a momentary compunction, "You are
well, dear? You are looking excessively well."

Louise was not hurt by the tone of her mother's greeting. She was well
acquainted with her parent's irritableness, and even more familiar with
her indurated indifference. The main thing was that she was back with
her mother, and with a chance to strive for a better understanding.

"But aren't you a mite thinner, mother?" Louise asked, thoroughly
meaning it; for there wasn't an ounce of sycophancy in Louise's make-up,
and she noticed her mother's hollowness of eye and generally distraught
air and so concluded that she was losing in weight.

Mrs. Treharne flared instantly.

"You are not to make game of me, my dear, whatever else you do," she
said, icily, to her astonished daughter. Laura laughed outright and
caught Louise's arm in her own as they started through the station.

"Don't be absurd, Antoinette--the dear is not making game of you, as you
call it," said Laura. "You know she is incapable of that."

"But I am all at sea," said Louise, still mystified over her mother's
inexplicable outbreak. "What is it? What did I say that was wrong?"

Her mother looked at her and saw that the girl was wholly innocent of
the sarcasm she had hastily attributed to her.

"You know very well, Louise," she said, in a tone meant to be appeasing,
"that I am hideously, scandalously, shockingly fat; and you cannot
expect me to be cheerful when you begin to taunt me with it before you
have had more than one glance at me."

"But you are anything but stout, mother dear, and I really meant what I
said," put in Louise. "Why, it perfectly stuns me to think you could
suppose that I----"

"Tut-tut--can't we find something more engaging to talk about than what
the weighing scales do or do not tell us?" broke in Laura, gaily.
"Antoinette, dear, won't you see if you can attract that taxicab man's
attention?"

When Mrs. Treharne walked over to the curb to summon the chauffeur of
the taxicab Laura seized the moment to say to Louise in a low tone.

"Some things have occurred to disturb your mother, dear; so don't mind
if she seems a bit _difficile_ tonight, will you? She is a little
annoyed over your intention not to return to the school; but I shall
help you out there. I am going home with you now for a little while.
You'll depend upon your old friend Laura?"

Louise, watching her mother, furtively pressed Laura's hand.

"You know how I always loved you as a little girl?" she said simply.
Laura's eyes became suddenly suffused with tears. She knew the girl's
need of affection; and she vowed in her heart, then and there, crowding
back the tears when she saw Mrs. Treharne beckoning to them, that she
would stand in the place of the girl's mother if the time ever came--and
she more than dimly apprehended that come it would--when such a thing
need be.

Laura forced the conversation and strove to give to it a note of gayety
as the taxicab sped through the icy streets. Once, in addressing her,
Louise called her "Mrs. Stedham." Instantly Laura assumed a mighty
pretence of annoyed hostility.

"Mrs. Hoity-Toity, child," she said, severely, to Louise. "You are not
supposing, I hope, that I shall permit a woman a full two inches taller
than I am to call me any such an outlandish name as 'Mrs. Stedham'?
Great heaven, am I not old enough as it is? I am Laura to you, dear;
flatter me at least, by making me believe that you consider me young
enough to be called by my christened name; the aged have so few
compensations, you know," and Louise, not without initial difficulty,
however--for Laura had always been a woman to her--called her Laura
thenceforth and was pleased to imagine that the elder woman was her
"big, grown-up" sister.

On the ride to the Riverside Drive house Louise, suddenly remembering,
mentioned Blythe. She described the incident through which he had made
himself known to her, but forbore, out of a certain diffidence which she
always felt in her mother's presence, saying anything about Blythe's
allusions to her father. She omitted that part altogether.

"How extraordinary!" commented Laura. "But John Blythe's practice is
always sending him prowling about the country on trains. Everybody who
knows about such things tells me what an enormously important personage
he is becoming in the dry-as-dust legal world. I am sure he does
astonishingly well with my hideously complicated affairs--you know he is
my legal man, Louise. Isn't it odd that you should have met him in such
a way? Didn't you find him rather--well, _distingué_, we'll say,
Louise?"

"I thought him very fine and----" Louise strove for a word haltingly.

"And with an air about him--of course you did, my dear; everybody does,"
Laura aided her. "If he wasn't such a perfectly wrong-headed,
wrapped-up-in-the-law sort of a person he would have fallen in love with
me long ago, even if I am old enough to be his grandmother; he is
thirty-two, I believe, and I am bordering upon thirty-six; but he barely
notices me in that way," with an acute emphasis on the "that," "though
we are no end of first-rate friends; pals, I was going to say; for I've
known him ever since----"

Laura came to a sudden stop. She had been upon the brink of saying "ever
since Blythe had helped her to get her divorce from Rodney Stedham;" but
she recollected in time that that was not exactly the sort of a
chronological milestone that should be reverted to in the presence of a
girl just that day out of school.

"Louise, did you tell Mr. Blythe that you were to remain with
me--permanently?" asked Mrs. Treharne, constrainedly, suddenly joining
in the conversation.

Louise reflected a moment before replying.

"Why, yes, mother, I did; he asked me about it, I recall now," she said.

"Did he have any comment to make?" asked her mother in a reduced tone.

"Why, no, dear," said Louise. "In fact, he appeared to be considerably
worried about something, and so----" Louise felt herself being furtively
prodded by Laura, and she left off suddenly.

Opportunely, the taxicab drew up in front of an ornate house on the
Drive.

"Do you live here, mother?" Louise inquired, innocently. "I wonder how I
managed to form the impression that you were living in an apartment?"

Mrs. Treharne pretended not to have heard her. The door was silently
opened by a man in livery. Laura was watching Louise keenly as the
girl's eyes took in the splendor of the foyer and hall. The magnificence
was of a Pittsburgesque sort, in which beauty is sacrificed to a mere
overwhelming extravagance; but, for its extravagance alone, not less
than for its astonishing ornateness, it had a sort of impressiveness.

"Why, how dazzling!" Louise could not refrain from commenting. "How
delightfully different from what I expected! I am so glad that I am
home--home!" She lingered lovingly upon the word.

It was a difficult moment for Laura. But she was prepared for it. In
addition to the "ameliorating knack" she had a way of being ready for
contingencies.

"Antoinette," she said, mainly to stop Louise, "I have one of my
headaches coming on. Can't we have some tea in your rooms?"

"I was just about to suggest that," said Mrs. Treharne, drily, and
presently the three women were in her sumptuous sitting room,
overlooking the twinkling lights of the Hudson. A butler spread the
cloth and brought a fowl and salad and jams, while Louise roamed about
exclaiming over the beauty of the rooms, and Laura fought desperately
against her inclination to brood.

Laura contributed whatever of merriness there was to the home-coming
feast. Mrs. Treharne confined herself to occasional questions directed
at Louise, and the girl saw that her mother was tired and out of sorts;
she remembered what Laura had told her at the station of her mother's
state of mind "over matters," and she made the allowances that she had
been accustomed to make for her mother since her earliest years.

The three women were still at the table, beginning to make allusions to
bed--Laura had summoned her car by 'phone, for it was close upon
eleven--when a great-girthed man, in a sealskin coat that fell almost to
his heels, an opera hat set rakishly on one side of his bald head, and
his turkey-like eyes still more reddened with the libations that his
lurching gait made still more obvious, lumbered into the room without
the least attempt at knocking on the door.

"Hay-o, folks--having a little party?" said Judd, lurching toward the
table. "Am I in on it?" and he plumped himself drunkenly into a chair.

Laura rose at the first sight of him. Mrs. Treharne kept her seat but
gazed at him vitriolically. Louise looked at him quietly enough. She was
intensely mystified, but quite willing to wait for any information as to
the intrusion. No information, however, was forthcoming.

"Your mother will show you to your room, dear," said Laura, placing an
arm around Louise's waist and guiding her to the door. Under her breath
she said: "No questions, dear heart. He is an--an adviser of your
mother. We are going to be great cronies, are we not?" She kissed Louise
and went. Her mother conducted Louise to a sleeping room done in white
and silver, and kissed the girl good night with a sort of belated rush
of affection. But she said nothing to her in explanation of Judd.

Toward midnight John Blythe, after striding up and down his solitary
bachelor apartment for two hours in lounging robe and slippers, went to
the telephone in his study and called up Laura.

"Is that you, Laura?" he said, quietly, into the transmitter when she
answered the call. "What time tomorrow forenoon will you be fit to be
seen?"

"By noon," Laura's voice came back to him quietly. "I know what you want
to see me about, John."

"Do you? I doubt that."

"It is about Louise Treharne."

"I'll be there by noon. Goodnight."

"Goodnight."




CHAPTER III


Heloise's intentional noisiness in rearranging the toilet articles on
the dressing table aroused Louise. The brilliant sunlight of a sparkling
winter morning was pouring into the room. Half-awake and the brightness
of the room filtering through her still-closed eyelids, she was obsessed
for an instant with the fear that, over-sleeping, she was late for the
exercises attending the beginning of a day at Miss Mayhew's school. She
smiled at the thought, in spite of a brooding, indefinable trouble that
had burdened her sleep, when, with wide eyes, she quickly sensed the
lavishness of the room and saw the invincibly trig Heloise moving about.

"Mademoiselle is awake at last?" said Heloise in French, a trace of
irritation in her tone. "One considered that Mademoiselle contemplated
sleeping until the end of time."

Louise disarmed her with a laugh.

"Perhaps I should have," she said, lightly, but on her guard with her
French in the presence of so meticulous a critic, "had I not just this
moment dreamt of coffee. Am I too late for breakfast?"

Of course Mademoiselle should have her coffee instantly, said the
appeased Heloise, ringing. The maid mentally pronounced that Louise's
finishing-school French was almost intelligible to one understanding
that language.

Mrs. Treharne had sent Heloise to look after Louise until a maid should
be obtained for her. Louise, sitting up in bed, her fresh, clear-colored
face aureoled by her agreeably awry mass of bronzed hair, the nocturnal
braids of which she already had begun to unplait, laughed again at the
thought of being attended by a maid.

"I shall have to be trained for that," she said to the mollified
Heloise. "I never had a maid. I doubt if I should know how to behave
with a maid doing my hair. I think I should find myself tempted to do
the maid's instead; especially if her hair were as pretty as yours."

Heloise was Louise's sworn, voluble, tooth-and-nail, right-or-wrong,
everlasting friend from that moment. She 'phoned to the butler,
demanding to know why Mademoiselle's coffee had not been sent, although
she had only called for it three minutes before, and she buzzed about
the tractable Louise, arranging her hair with expert fingers, cheerful
and chirpful, nothing whatever like the austere, croaking Heloise who
scowled so threateningly over the slightest unruliness of her actual
mistress. Heloise was prepared to give an enthusiastic recommendation of
Louise to the maid who should be engaged to attend her mistress's
daughter. And she began already to be envious of Louise's unobtained
maid.

When Heloise had finished with her Louise, inspecting herself in the
glass with frank approval, decided that never before had she looked so
astonishingly well at that hour of the morning. But, when the garrulous
maid had gone, Louise, sipping her coffee, sat in the streaming sunlight
of the bowed window, watching the sparkling ice floes drift down the
bleak Hudson, and the trouble that had weighted her sleep returned upon
her, slowly taking shape with her consciousness. She had been too tired
the night before to engage in much reflection, before losing herself in
sleep, upon the incidents--one incident particularly--of the previous
night. Now she was face to face with the gravamen of her depression,
with an alert morning mind to sift over its elements. It was
characteristic of her that she did not seek to thrust aside her
consciousness of conditions which she imperfectly understood. She
understood them, however, sufficiently to grasp at least the essentials
of the situation.

Louise, whose native shrewdness was tempered by an innate and
unconquerable tendency to look upon the bright side of the world and of
such of the world's people as she came into contact with, was far better
acquainted with her mother than her mother was with her; which was
natural enough, considering that she had the receptive mind of youth,
and that her mother's major trait was a sort of all-inclusive
indifference. Many things in connection with her mother's manner of
life, her almost hysterical love of admiration, her restlessness and her
habitual secretiveness with Louise during the girl's early girlhood
years, had become all too plain to the daughter as she developed into
womanhood at the finishing school. Perhaps it may be added that a
twentieth century finishing school for young women commonly is an
institution wherein all of the pupils' deductions are not made from
their text books nor from the eminently safe premises laid down by their
instructors. The young woman who has spent four years at such a school
does not step through a nimbus of juvenile dreams when she enters into
the world that is waiting for her. It is true that, when she takes her
place in the uncloistered world, she has a great deal to unlearn; but
this is balanced by the indubitable fact she has not very much to learn.
Those who expect her to be utterly surprised over the departures that
she sees from the rules of the social game are merely wasting their
surprise. It is mere futility to suppose that several hundreds of young
women of the highly intelligent and eager type who attend exclusive
schools of the so-termed finishing kind, thrust constantly upon each
other for companionship and the comparison of notes, are going to occupy
all of their leisure in discussing the return of Halley's comet, or the
profounder meaning of Wagner, or even the relative starchiness of their
hair ribbons.

Louise, participating in the whispered precocities of the school, had
often caught herself on the defensive in her mother's behalf. To seek to
brush away imputations that seemed to fit her mother's personality and
way of life had become almost a habit with her.

The habit, however, was availing her little on this her first morning
after leaving school in her mother's sumptuous home--"that is, if it is
mother's home." She flushed when she found herself saying that. But the
doubt propelled itself through her consciousness, and she resolutely
refused to expel it, once it had found lodgment in her mind, merely
because it caused her cheeks to burn. Her mother's favorite word, in
contemptuously denominating people who lived in accordance with
convention, was "smug;" Mrs. Treharne considered that she had pilloried,
for the world's derision, persons to whom she had adverted as "smug." Of
the smugness of the kind Mrs. Treharne meant when she employed the word,
there was not an atom in Louise's composition. Her nature, her
upbringing, were opposed to the thought of a narrow, restrained,
buckram social rule.

But here was a situation--the investiture of almost garish splendor in
which she found her mother living, considered in connection with
subconscious doubts as to certain quite visible flaws in her mother's
character which had been forming themselves in the girl's mind for
years--here, indeed, was a situation with respect to which Louise's
unquietude had no need of being based upon mere smugness.

The girl knew quite well that, up to the time of her going away to
school at any rate, her mother's income had been a limited one--some
three thousand a year voluntarily contributed by the father for his
daughter's support and education. It had not been, in fact, her mother's
income at all, but Louise's; and it had been voluntarily contributed by
the father because, as he had been the plaintiff in the divorce suit,
the decree had not required him to aid his detached wife or his daughter
at all; the court had given him the custody of the child, and he had
surrendered that custody to the mother out of sheer pity for her.

How, then, had her mother provided herself, on an income which, with a
daughter to educate, called for frugality, if not positive scrimping,
with such a sheerly extravagant setting?

And Judd! Louise flushed again when she remembered Judd. She did not
know his name. She had never seen or even heard of him before. She only
remembered him--and the thought caused her to draw her negligée more
closely about her, for she experienced a sudden chill--as the girthy,
red-eyed individual who, with the proprietary arrogance of an
intoxicated man who seemed perfectly to know his position under that
roof, had lurched into her mother's apartments on the previous night
without the least attempt at announcing himself.

How would her mother explain these things? Would she, indeed, explain to
her daughter at all? In any case, Louise formed the resolve not to
question her mother. She possessed, what is unusual in woman, an
instinctive appreciation of the rights of others, even when such rights
are perversely altered to wrongs. She considered that her mother's
affairs were her own, in so far as they did not involve herself, Louise
Treharne, in any tacit copartnership; and as to this point she purposed
ascertaining, before very long, to just what extent she had become or
was expected to become involved. For the rest, she was conscious of a
distinct sympathy for and a yearning toward her mother. In her
reflections she gave her mother the benefit of every mitigating
circumstance.

Turning from the window, Louise saw her mother standing before the
dresser glass studying her haggard morning face, now lacking all of the
sorely-required aids to the merely pretty regularity of her features,
with a head-shaking lugubriousness that might have had its comic appeal
to an unconcerned onlooker. Louise, however, was scarcely in a mood of
mirth.

"I knocked, my dear, but you were too much absorbed," said Mrs.
Treharne, offering her daughter her cheek. "You were in a veritable
trance. Did you get enough sleep, child? Was Heloise in a scolding
humor? She makes my life a misery to me with her tongue. What beautiful
hair you have! And what a perfect skin! A powder puff would mar that
wonderful pallor. Yet you are not too white. It becomes you, with your
hair. Appreciate these things while you have them, dear; look at your
mother, a hag, a witch, at thirty-nine! But, then, you will keep your
looks longer than I; you pattern after the women of your----"

She came perilously close to saying "your father's family," but adroitly
turned the phrase when she caught herself in time. Louise, putting on a
cheerful mask, replied to her mother's trivialities and devised some of
her own. Her mother had not lost her banting-killed bloom when Louise
had last seen her at such an hour in the morning; and the girl was
inwardly pained to note how all but the mere vestiges of her remembered
prettiness had disappeared. Mrs. Treharne caught her looking at her with
a certain scrutinizing reflectiveness, and she broke out petulantly:

"Don't pick me apart with your eyes in that way, Louise! I know that I
am hideous, but for heaven's sake don't remind me of it with your
criticizing, transfixing gazes!"

She was of the increasing type of women who, long after they have the
natural right to expect adulation on account of their looks, still hate
to surrender. Louise quickly perceived this and provided unguents for
her mother's sensitiveness.

They chatted upon little matters, Mrs. Treharne so ill at ease (yet
striving to hide her restlessness) that she found it impossible to sit
still for more than a minute; she fluttered incessantly about the room,
her wonderful negligée of embroidered turquoise sailing after her like
the outspread wings of a moth. After many pantheress-like rounds of the
room, during which Louise somehow felt her old diffidence in her
mother's presence returning upon her, Mrs. Treharne, after her evident
casting about for an opening, stopped before Louise and pinched her
cheek between dry fingers.

"At any rate, my dear," she said with a trace of her old amiability and
animation, "you are not a frump or a bluestocking! There was a time
when I had two fears: that you would not grow up pretty and that you
would become bookish. And here I find myself towered over by a young
princess, and you don't talk in the least like a girl with crazy notions
of keeping up her inane school studies." Then, after a slight pause:
"Are you religious, my dear, or--er--well, broad-minded?"

Louise smothered her mounting laugh, for fear of offending her mother in
her mood of amiability; but her smile was eloquent enough.

"Is there any incompatibility between those two states of mind, mother?"
she asked.

"Don't dissect my words, child; you quite understand what I mean," said
the mother, with a slight reversion to peevishness. "Your father, you
know, was--no doubt still is--shockingly narrow; he hadn't the slightest
conception of the broad, big view; he belonged in this respect, I think,
in the Middle Ages; and I have been tortured by the fear that you
might--might--"

She hesitated. She had not meant to mention Louise's father, much less
to speak of him even in mild derogation; and she suddenly recalled how,
years before, there had been a tacit agreement between them that
Louise's father was not to be mentioned. The agreement had been entered
into after an occasion when Louise, then a child of eleven, with the
memory of her vanished father still very keen in her mind, had rushed
from the room, in blinding tears, upon hearing her mother speak of him
in terms of dispraise.

"I did not have much time at school for self-analysis, mother," said
Louise, coming to her mother's aid. "I suppose I am normal and neutral
enough. I am not conscious of any particular leaning." She flushed,
swept by a sudden sense of the difficulty, the incongruity, of such a
conversation with her mother amid such surroundings. "Mother," she
resumed, hastily, "I am so keen to see New York again that I am hardly
capable of thinking of anything else just now. Are we to go out?"

"The car is yours when you wish it, Louise," said Mrs. Treharne,
absently. "I rarely go out until late in the afternoon."

"The car?" said Louise. "You have a car, then?"

Her mother glanced at her sharply. It was sufficiently obvious that she
was on the lookout for symptoms of inquisitiveness on Louise's part;
though Louise had not meant her question to be in the least inquisitive.

"I have the use of a car," said Mrs. Treharne, a little frigidly. "It
belongs to Mr. Judd."

Instinctively Louise felt that "Mr. Judd" was the sealskinned Falstaff
whose unceremonious appearance the night before had startled her. But
she remained silent. Nothing could have induced her to ask her mother
about Mr. Judd. Her mother did not fail to notice her silence, which of
course put her on the defensive.

"Mr. Judd," she said, "is--a--" she hesitated painfully--"my business
adviser. He has been very good and kind in making some investments
in--in mining stocks for me; investments that have proved very
profitable. He is alert in my interest. It was Mr. Judd, my dear, whom
you saw last night. He was not quite himself, I fear, or he would not
have made his appearance as he did. He has helped me so much that of
course it would be ungrateful of me not to permit him the run of the
place." She rambled on, as persons will who feel themselves to be on the
defensive. "In fact, he--he--But of course, if you have formed a
prejudice against him on account of last night, there will be no
occasion for you to meet him except occasionally."

Louise caught the hollowness, the evasiveness, of the explanation. Not
one word of it had rung true. Louise had never felt sorrier for her
mother than she did at that moment. She noticed a certain hunted
expression in her mother's face, and it cut her to the quick. She placed
a long, finely-chiselled arm, from which the sleeve of the negligée had
slipped back to the shoulder, around her mother's neck.

"But I haven't the least use for a car, dearie," she said. It was not
with deliberation that she ignored altogether what her mother had been
saying as to Judd; it was simply that she could not bring herself to
offer any comment on that subject. "I am a walker; every day at Miss
Mayhew's I did ten miles--even in rain and snow, and it is clouding for
snow now, I think. You will not mind my going out for a long walk? I am
wild for air and exercise."

Mrs. Treharne was grateful to the girl for turning it off in that way
even if, by so doing, Louise indicated that she was of more than one
mind with respect to what had been told her regarding Judd. And Mrs.
Treharne, careless and indifferent as she was, could not visualize her
daughter in the gigantic yellow-bodied Judd car without being swept by a
feeling that was distinctly to her credit.

       *       *       *       *       *

Laura Stedham, over her cocoa, was weaving with careless rapidity
through her morning mail when John Blythe arrived shortly before noon.
Laura's apartment overlooked the west side of the Park. Its dominant
color scheme now was based upon a robin's egg blue; but there was a jest
among Laura's friends that they never had seen her apartment look the
same on two visits running; they declared that every time Laura left the
city for as long a period as a fortnight, she left orders with her
decorator to have her apartment completely done over so that even she
herself quite failed to recognize it when she returned.

Blythe, throwing his snow-sprinkled stormcoat over the extended arm of
Laura's brisk maid, strolled over to a window and watched the still,
unflurried flakes sift through the bare branches of the Park trees. His
hands were thrust deep into his pockets and his eyes were so unusually
meditative that Laura, used to his absorption as she was, laughed
quietly as she turned from her escritoire.

"Yes, John, it is snowing," she said, thrusting away a heap of
still-unopened letters.

Blythe turned to her with a twinkling look of inquiry.

"I thought perhaps you might not have noticed it," chaffed Laura,
"seeing that you were looking right at it. You require an excessive
amount of forgiveness from your friends. I believe you have not even
seen me yet, although I've employed a good hour that I might have spent
in bed in devising additional fascinations in anticipation of your
coming."

"Meaning, for one thing, I suppose," said Blythe with rather an absorbed
smile, "that--that--"

"Don't you dare call it a kimono," interrupted Laura. "It's a mandarin's
coat--a part of the Peking loot. Of course you are crazy over it?"

It was a magnificent pale blue, ermine-padded garment, with a dragon of
heavy gold embroidery extending from nape to hem down the loose back.

Blythe studied it for a moment and then glanced significantly at the
faint-blue walls and ceiling of the room.

"I presume," he said, solemnly, "you had your rooms done this last time
to match the Mother Hub--I mean the mandarin's coat?"

They did not need thus to spar, for they were (what, unhappily, is so
unusual between men and women in a world devoid of mid-paths) close
friends; even comrades, in so far as Blythe's hard work permitted him to
assume his share of such a relationship; and they understood each other
thoroughly, with no complication differing from a genuine mutual esteem
to mar their understanding. Nevertheless, both of them found it a trifle
difficult to undertake the lead on the subject that was uppermost in
their minds and the occasion of Blythe's forenoon visit.

Laura with her customary helpfulness, finally gave him an opening.

"She told us of having met you on the train," said Laura, as if in
continuation of a conversation already begun on the theme. "An odd
chance, wasn't it? I wonder if you were so enormously struck with her as
I was?"

"You met her at the station, did you not?" said Blythe, quietly. "That
was like you; like your all-around fineness."

"Thanks," said Laura, appreciatively. "But you evade my question. Isn't
she a perfect apparition of loveliness?"

"I wish she were less so," said Blythe, not convincingly.

"No, you don't wish that," said Laura. "I know what you wish; but it is
not that."

Blythe was silent for a space and then he fell to striding up and down
the room.

"Did you ever come upon such an unspeakable situation, Laura?" he broke
out, stopping to face her. "What is Antoinette Treharne thinking of? Is
she utterly lost to any sense of--"

"I wouldn't say that, John," put in Laura, holding up a staying hand.
"It is natural enough, I know, for you to reach such a conclusion; on a
cursory view the case seems to be against her; but you must remember
that Louise came home without warning. Antoinette had no opportunity to
devise a plan. She is horribly humiliated. I know that."

"Your usual method of defending everybody--and you know how I like you
for that as for so many other things," said Blythe. "But, Laura,
Louise's mother knew that the girl must leave school in half a year at
all events. She must have considered some way out of the hideous mess?"

"None that she ever mentioned to me," said Laura. "You know her habit of
procrastination. I grazed the subject two or three times in talking with
her. She dodged, or was downright brusque. She has no plan, I am sure.
But she is sorely distressed over it all, now that the situation has
come to a head. I am very sorry for her."

"But the girl?" said Blythe, a slight note of irritation in his tone.
"How about her?"

"I should be more worried if I were not so entirely confident that
Louise is amply competent to take care of herself," said Laura. "She is
no longer a girl, John. She is a woman, and a woman with more than her
share of plain sense. Her position, of course, is positively outrageous,
heartrending. But I am at a loss to suggest a single thing that her
friends--that you or I, or both of us--could do just now to better it."

"That," said Blythe, a little hoarsely, "is just the devil of it."

"I should like to have Louise with me," Laura went on, "but I doubt if
she would come, although I believe she is fond of me. Not just yet, at
any rate. She would not care to leave her mother after her long
separation from her. Louise will find out the situation herself. No
doubt she already has sensed a part of its sinister aspect. I am
horribly sorry for her. But, as I say, she is a woman of character. She
will know what to do. All that we can do, for the present at any rate,
is to be on guard for her, without seeming to be. Of course she shall
know that we are her friends. She already knows that I am her friend.
Did you, on the train--"

"Yes," put in Blythe, apprehending what Laura was going to ask. "I told
her that I knew her father. The matter came about in an odd way. I wish,
Laura, that you'd make it clear to her, if you have the chance, that
she--that I--"

He halted embarrassedly.

"I quite understand," Laura aided him, smiling. "That you mean to be her
friend, too--of course I shall tell her that," and Laura looked
reflective when she observed how Blythe's face brightened. It soon
clouded again, however, when he broke out:

"She will find out, of course, sooner or later, that she has been taken
care of and educated for the past five years and odd with Judd's money,"
he said, worriedly. "You can imagine how intense her mortification will
be over that discovery. Judd, you know, in contempt of George Treharne,
forced Mrs. Treharne to return to me the quarterly checks that Treharne
sent me from Hawaii for Louise--for of course I sent the checks to
Antoinette. I explained this to Treharne when I saw him in Honolulu a
few years ago. He was badly cut up over it But of course he was
powerless to do anything about it. He refused to take the checks back,
though, and directed me to deposit the money to Louise's account. I have
nearly fifteen thousand dollars--five years' accrued checks, for
Treharne has never stopped sending them--on deposit for Louise now.
Don't you think she had better be told this?"

"Wait a while," advised Laura. "Wait until she discovers how the land
lies. Then she will be coming to you. If you told her now it would
involve your telling her also that she had been educated with Judd's
money. I think it better that she discover that for herself--if she must
discover it. Then she will know what to do. She will be seeking you out
then," and Laura smiled inwardly when again she noted how Blythe's face
cleared at her last words.

"There is only one thing to do, of course, and that is to follow your
advice and let the matter stand as it is for the present," said Blythe,
preparing to go. "But the thing is going to sit pretty heavily upon me.
I have been Treharne's legal man ever since my senior partner died, as
you know, and, although it isn't of course expected of me, I can't help
but feel a certain responsibility for his daughter when she is thrust
into such a miserable situation as this. I wonder," catching at a new
and disturbing idea, "if her mother will expect Louise to meet
the wretched crew of near-poets, maybe-musicians and other
rag-tag-and-bobtail that assemble at what Antoinette calls her Sunday
evening 'salon?'"

"Antoinette's 'zoo,' I call it," laughed Laura. "What if Louise does
meet them? They can't harm her. They, the unfortunate make-believes,
will only appeal to her risibles, if I mistake not. Louise must have got
her sense of humor from her father. Antoinette hasn't a particle of
humor in her composition. If she had how long do you suppose she would
continue her absurd 'salon?"

Laura, in extending her hand to Blythe, who had resumed his stormcoat,
gazed quizzically into his rugged face.

"John," she said, "is your solicitude for Louise solely on account of
the--er--sense of responsibility you feel toward her father?"

Blythe caught the twinkle in her eyes.

"Humbug!" he ejaculated, striding out to the obligato of Laura's laugh.

       *       *       *       *       *

When they were settled in the car for their snowy ride that afternoon,
Mrs. Treharne turned in her seat to face Judd.

"You will understand," she said in a tone quite as hard as it was meant
to be, "that I am not wasting words. If you repeat your grossness of
last night in my daughter's presence, our--our friendship is at an end.
That is understood?"

"Now, now, shush, shush, Tony," said the Gargantuan Judd, soothingly,
and resorting to his habit of patting her hands, "not so severe, not so
terrifically severe, you know. How did I know that your daughter would
be there? Didn't know the least thing about it--forgot, I mean, that she
was coming. Got a bit screwed at the club, and--"

"I don't elect to listen to that sort of an explanation," interrupted
Mrs. Treharne, with cold deliberation. "I am unutterably weary of your
porcine manners. It is bad enough that I have permitted myself to endure
them. You are not imbecile enough to suppose that my daughter is to
endure them, too? You are to meet her only when it is absolutely
necessary; be good enough to remember that. While she is with me--I
don't now know how long that is to be--you are to curtail your visits;
and if you come even once again in the sodden condition that you were in
last night, I am done with you from that instant. I make myself plain, I
hope?"

"'Pon honor, Tony, you are horribly severe," blurted Judd, whiningly.
"You know very well that if you were to cut and run I'd blow my head
off." He felt that he meant it, too; for Judd was tremendously fond of
the fading woman seated beside him, as he had been for years. He was
blind to her departing prettiness; to him she was the one woman in the
world--his prim, elderly wife, the mother of his family of grown
children, being utterly negligible in his view; and Mrs. Treharne knew
her complete power over him as well as she knew the lines of her face.

"I wish," she said, with a cutting way of dwelling upon each word, "that
you had blown your head off before ever I met you. I might then have
been able to cling to at least the shreds of self-respect."

Judd had no reply to make to that, and they rode the rest of the way in
silence.




CHAPTER IV


By mid-January Louise had completed her inventory of the situation. She
faced her position without flinching and with no visible sign of the
distress the gradually unfolding picture caused her, save a certain
silent preoccupation from which Laura vainly sought to rouse her by
taking her on incessant rounds of the theatres, whisking her off on
short up-State and Long Island motor tours, and providing other means of
distraction and excitement. Laura's heart ached for Louise. Her own
girlhood had been clouded by trouble. Orphaned at sixteen, an heiress
with no disinterested advisors save those who were the legal guardians
of her person and estate, she had yielded shortly after leaving school
to a girlish infatuation and entered upon a surreptitious marriage with
a man who, with his child-wife's large wealth at his disposal, had
surrendered to one dissipation after another until, eventually becoming
a drug fiend, he had, in his treatment of her, developed into such an
utterly savage and irresponsible brute that she was compelled to divorce
him, after which he had been put under permanent restraint. It had taken
Laura long years to recover her natural equipoise after her bitter
disillusionment. Louise's trouble, Laura could not help apprehending,
was even more grievous than her own had been, intensified as she knew it
must be by the girl's carefully-screened feeling of humiliation.

Laura admired Louise beyond words for her uncomplaining acceptance of
her bitter bolus.

"I never saw such pluck," she told John Blythe time and again. "It is
the pluck of a thoroughbred. I believe she thoroughly understands
everything now, except that she is in Judd's debt for her education. Her
loyalty to her mother is wonderful, beautiful; far greater than
Antoinette really deserves. I don't remember ever meeting a girl or
woman whom I admired so much as I do Louise Treharne."

Laura could not fail to note how Blythe's clear grey eyes would glisten
when thus she praised the girl.

"Louise is like her father," he would say in reply to Laura's
enthusiasm. "You know what a fine, game man George Treharne was and is.
I'll never forget how generous he was in his treatment of me--and he
tried to prevent me from knowing it, too--when, as a cub lawyer, I was
first starting out on my own hook; and there wasn't the least reason in
life why he should have been so decent to me, either. You remember how
he never whimpered when Antoinette dragged his--Oh, well, no use in
referring to that. But, when I first met the grown-up Louise on the
train--after I accidentally discovered her identity, I mean--I couldn't
help but observe how her resemblance to her father--"

"To whom," Laura watched him with twinkling eyes, "your sense of
responsibility is so great that--er--that--"

Whereupon Blythe would flush hotly and proceed to shrivel Laura with
whatever in the way of polite invective occurred to him in his
confusion.

The thought of leaving her mother for the sake of extricating herself
from a difficult and taxing situation never entered Louise's mind. Her
mother, she felt, needed her. It was not, she considered, a problem for
her interposition; she shrank from the thought of even mentioning it.
She knew that it was an utterly impossible situation; she had a profound
belief that it was not, from its very nature, destined to last; but she
preferred that her mother should take the initiative in casting off the
evil. She clearly saw how, from day to day, her mother was becoming
increasingly conscious of the grave trouble she was heaping upon her
daughter's young shoulders; she perceived how her mother, not inherently
vicious, simply was in the bondage of an ingrained, luxury-loving
selfishness, and that, having been cast out of the social realm in which
she formerly had moved, she was now possessed by a sort of despair
which, more than anything else, prevented her from making the attempt to
extricate herself from the slough.

Louise, then, schooled herself to wait. It was a sort of waiting that
drew heavily upon her natural store of equanimity. But she could see no
other course, and hopefulness is the tandem mate of youth.

"I have lived long enough," Laura said to her one afternoon, when they
were driving, during this trying period when Louise was testing her
adaptability to the utmost, "to have discovered that nothing matters
very much except one's own peace of mind. If one have that, the rest is
all a mirage. I don't mean the peace of mind that proceeds from a
priggish sense of superiority to human weaknesses. That, I am pleased to
say, is a sort of mental peace that I haven't yet experienced, and I
hope I never shall. But when one's hands are just decently clean, and
one at least has tried to shake off the shackles forged by one's own
little meannesses, a sort of satisfying mental quiet ensues that is
worth, I think, more than anything else one finds in life."

"But one's worry for others?" quietly suggested Louise, putting it in
the form of a question.

Laura pressed the girl's hands between her own.

"All of us, dear, must know the meaning of solicitude--often painful
solicitude--for others at some period of our lives," she said, tenderly.
"I know what you mean. You are carrying yourself nobly through a
difficult ordeal. Let that consciousness suffice. You will have the
right to feel proud, in the coming time, to remember that you stood the
test--as we are proud of you now."

"'We?'" said Louise, puzzling.

"We," repeated Laura, steadfastly. "I think you scarcely understand,
dear, how profoundly interested--yes, and chivalrously interested,
too--John Blythe is in your--your problem."

Louise felt the blood rushing to her face.

"Does Mr. Blythe know?" she asked, her cheeks tingling.

"How could he avoid knowing, dear?" rejoined Laura, gently. "He is your
father's lawyer. He is an occasional visitor at your--" she hesitated;
"--visitor on Riverside Drive," she resumed. "And so of course he
knows--everything. You may be glad of that, dear. There is no man in the
world whose friendship I value more highly than that of John Blythe. I
think he would like to have you feel--I know, in fact, that he
would--that he is interested in your--your concerns; that, indeed, in a
way, he is standing guard for you."

Louise studied for a little while.

"I should have understood, of course, that he knew," she said,
hesitatingly. "But it did not occur to me. I am afraid that I should
have been a little reluctant to meet him on those two or three occasions
at your home if I had known that he--" She paused.

"Why, dear child, should you have such a feeling when a man of innate
nobility, who knew you when you were a little girl----"

"It is wrong, I know," put in Louise, hastily. "But I find it so hard to
regard him as--as just a lawyer, you know, Laura. He is not like a
lawyer at all--at least I have not found him so. He is----"

Laura pointed a teasing finger at her, which caused the color to
reappear on Louise's face.

"Don't try to tell me what he is, Louise," said Laura, smiling. "Don't
you suppose I know? But you don't know how intensely glad I am to hear
that you can't regard Mr. Blythe as--as 'just a lawyer.' I shall tell
him that you are going about criticizing his professional ability."

"Don't do that--please!" said Louise in such an obvious panic that Laura
pinched her cheek reassuringly.

The meetings with Blythe to which Louise referred were casual ones in
Laura's apartment. Blythe was in the habit of dropping in occasionally
for coffee--he abominated tea--and a chat at Laura's tea hour in the
late afternoon; and Laura duly noted, not without slyly chaffing him
over it, that he had made this an almost daily habit since his discovery
that he stood a pretty fair gambling chance of finding Louise there
almost any afternoon. Once, when Laura and Louise came in from a drive
which had been prolonged rather later than usual, they entered the
library quietly, to find Blythe, looking decidedly glum, browsing among
the books without the least seeming of being interested in any of them,
for his hands were thrust deep into his pockets and they caught him
yawning most deplorably. But at sight of the two women--one woman, Laura
said, accusingly, to him after Louise had gone home in Laura's car--he
had brightened so suddenly and visibly that Laura had to profess that
her rippling laugh was occasioned by something she had seen during her
drive.

On these occasions Laura had found it imperatively necessary to leave
them together in order to confer with her servants. Louise and Blythe
had talked easily on detached, somewhat light matters, finding an
agreeable mutual plane without effort. Louise, remembering his somewhat
sober preoccupation on the train, had been surprised and pleased--though
she could not have told why--to note his possession of a rather unusual
social charm. She was pleased, too, that, except in the matter of a
remarkable physique, he was not to be rated as a handsome man. His
features were too rugged for that. Strength, keenness and kindliness
shone from his masterful countenance; but he was anything but handsome
judged from the magazine-cover standard. Louise had amused Laura one day
by saying that she found Blythe's face "restful." She had not the least
partiality for men of the generally-accepted straightout handsome type
of features; she was, in truth, a little inclined to be contemptuous of
an excessive facial pulchritude in men. But--again for a reason which
she could scarcely have explained--she was glad that Blythe was perhaps
two inches more than six feet in height, that he was as straight as a
lance, and that he found it necessary to walk sidewise in order to get
his shoulders through some of Laura's lesser doors.

On her last meeting with Blythe Louise had asked him, with a certain
hesitancy which he noticed, if he had written to her father.

"Yes," Blythe had replied, simply, "and I sent him your love." He had
not offered to become more communicative; and Louise, concluding that
his reticence on the subject might be based on a considerateness for her
which it might be unfair for her to seek to fathom, did not mention the
matter to him again. She had an oddly resolute confidence in him,
considering how short the time had been since he had come into her life;
and she felt that, if he now exhibited a taciturnity which puzzled her,
it would be explained in due time.

Louise Treharne belonged to that rare (and therefore radiant) type of
women who know how to wait.

       *       *       *       *       *

Louise's life at the house on the Drive quickly resolved itself into a
daily programme tinctured with a monotony that could not but wear upon
the spirits of a young woman of a naturally cheerful and gregarious
temperament.

Her mother, generally in a state of feverish unrest that marked her
strained incertitude over a situation which, in a way, was more
intolerable to her than to her daughter because she was guiltily
conscious that she was the maker of it, usually dropped into Louise's
room for an hour's chat during the forenoon. She was alternately
affectionate, stilted, indifferent and petulant in her attitude toward
her daughter. She did not seek, in her brooding self-communings, to
thrust aside the keen consciousness that she was utterly and hopelessly
in the wrong; but this consciousness did not serve to allay her
irritation, even if it was directed against herself. Like most women,
she hated to be in the wrong; and she particularly loathed the thought
of confessing herself in the wrong. She was less immoral than unmoral;
her descent had been due to a sort of warped view as to forbidden
relationships, nourished by an inborn and intense dislike for the
sovereignty of convention--"the tyranny of the smug," she habitually
called it--and based essentially upon her love of luxurious and
extravagant living. But a consciousness of these facts only made her
self-contempt the more keen. She measured and despised her sordidness.
She was not, she fell into the habit of reflecting after her daughter's
return, the victim of anybody but herself; her days of ardor had slipped
away; she well knew that she had not even the excuse of a fondness for
the man who had made her a social pariah. If she had ever experienced
any such a fondness that fact might have mitigated, at least in her own
self-view, the rawness of her course. But she cared nothing for Judd,
which made her case abominable, and she knew it.

Yet her weakened will, her character rendered flaccid by years of
careless self-indulgence, made it acutely difficult for her to
contemplate the thought of abandoning her way of living, even for the
sake of her daughter. Her prettiness was now purely a matter of
meretricious building up; she would soon be forty; she fumed inwardly at
the thought of middle age, which now, for her, was only around the
corner, so to speak; she had been cast off by her own kind; and the
terminal idea of her self-communings always was that, since there was no
hope for her in any event, no matter what she might do, she might as
well finish the scroll. She pushed aside Louise's involvement in the
difficulty as something that would--that would have to--adjust itself. A
way out for Louise must present itself sooner or later; but the way out
for her daughter must be one that would not demand too great a
sacrifice--if any sacrifice at all--on her own part. Perhaps a good
marriage could be contrived for Louise; that would be the easiest and
most natural solution; and she would cast about in her mind for
eligibles on whose sensitive social concepts perhaps her own method of
life would not grate. Her dreary meditations usually terminated with
futilities of this sort.

Louise, fighting back the oppressiveness that had clutched her ever
since her return from school, was cheerful and sunny when her mother was
with her. She made no allusion of any sort to the conditions of her
environment. Her mother, noticing this, was grateful for it, and she was
conscious of a genuine and growing admiration for the mingled dignity
and delicacy of her daughter's behavior. On one of her forenoon visits
to Louise's dressing room the mother herself, swept by a feeling of
remorse in the contemplation of the girl's fragrant, pure-eyed beauty,
could not refrain from touching impulsively upon the nub of her own
unrest.

"My dear," she said to Louise, passing a white and still prettily
rounded arm around her daughter, "do you hate your little mother?"

Louise fought back the tears that suffused her eyes.

"Why do you ask such a thing, dear?" she asked in a voice the hoarseness
of which she strove to disguise.

Her mother did not reply to the question, but went on, turning her head
away:

"Because there are circumstances, conditions that you can't have failed
to notice here that maybe--" She struggled for words. "It has never been
in my heart to do anything except what was right and fair by you, child,
but one drifts, drifts, always drifts----"

She could not proceed.

Louise wrapped her arms about her mother. Neither spoke for a space.

"Nothing can ever change me, dear," said Louise then in her quiet tone.
"It is not for me to judge or condemn. I can--wait. We shall not speak
of it again, shall we, mother?"

Her mother, haggard and with pain-drawn features, smoothed Louise's face
with her hand for a little while and went away without another word. The
girl's eyes were swollen when Laura came for her in her car an hour
later. But Laura did not ask her why.

Louise went nowhere with her mother. Mrs. Treharne made it plain from
the beginning that this was her intention. Louise, for her part,
required no reason. She understood. Nor did Louise seek to re-establish
the friendships she had formed with girls at Miss Mayhew's school, many
of whom now were living in New York or visiting their homes there during
the holiday vacation.

One afternoon, at an opera matinée, Louise, strolling out the entr'acte
in the foyer with Laura, came face to face with Bella Peyton, a girl who
had been graduated from the finishing school with the class ahead of
Louise's. Miss Peyton was with her mother, a stony-eyed,
granite-featured dowager who had often met Louise on her frequent visits
at the school; for her daughter and Louise had been school inseparables.

Bella rushed up cordially to Louise and kissed her enthusiastically.

"You darling!" she exclaimed in the abandonment of her delight at coming
upon the chum of her school days so unexpectedly. "When did you reach
town? And why didn't you come to see me the very instant you returned?"

Mrs. Peyton, who, at sight of Louise, had purposely lagged in the rear,
and whose adamantine countenance reflected intensifying degrees of
frozenness with each word that her daughter was saying to Louise, drew
her adipose person into a posture of icy rigidity, and croaked:

"Bella!"

Mrs. Peyton had not so much as nodded to Louise.

"Why, mamma," Bella broke out, "don't you remember Louise Treharne, my
sworn and subscribed and vowed and vummed chum at Miss Mayhew's?"

"Bella!"

This time it was not merely an adjuration, it was a command.

Bella, perceiving then that something was wrong, flushed. But she was
loyal to her friend.

"You are coming to see me immediately, dear?" she said, hurriedly
shaking hands with Louise in order to obey her mother's command.

"Bella! Come to me at once!" Mrs. Peyton croaked with cutting,
unconscionable rudeness, seizing her daughter by the arm and
incontinently marching her off.

Louise, crimsoning, took the stab without a word.

"The tabby!" broke out Laura, her eyes flashing with indignation.
"Gracious heaven, is it any wonder that men privately sneer at the way
women treat each other? Don't you mind the shocking old cat, Louise;
she'll tear herself to pieces with her own claws some day;" and Laura
was unusually tender and kind in her treatment of Louise for the
remainder of the afternoon. But, after that encounter, Louise learned to
avoid meeting her school friends when, as occasionally happened, she saw
them before they caught sight of her. She felt that they all "knew" or
"would know," and she did not elect to take chances on additional snubs.

Her first formal meeting with Judd had been a trial. It had been an
accidental encounter, happening about a week after Louise's return from
school, and at a time when Mrs. Treharne was in more than one mind as to
whether she would permit Louise to meet Judd at all. Mrs. Treharne and
Judd were stepping out of the huge yellow car at the close of their late
afternoon ride just at the moment when Louise, alone, was returning in
Laura's car. Their meeting on the pavement was inevitable. For a moment
Louise hoped that her mother would permit her to lag behind on pretense
of returning to Laura's car to find some imaginary forgotten article;
but Mrs. Treharne, suddenly deciding that the meeting had best be over
with, since no way of avoiding it, sooner or later, had suggested
itself, called to her; and Louise, very beautiful with her cold-ruddied
cheeks nimbussed by her breeze-blown hair of bronze, walked erect to
where her mother stood with the bulky, red-eyed Judd, who regarded
Louise with a stare of disconcerting admiration.

"My dear Louise," said Mrs. Treharne, obviously quelling a certain
tremulousness in her tone, "permit me to present Mr. Judd; Mr. Judd, my
daughter Louise."

Judd, his mouth still unpleasantly agape, started the preliminary
gesture toward extending his hand. But he made no further progress with
the hand, for he was quick to notice that Louise, at that very instant,
was inserting her loose right hand in her muff. Louise bowed and then
returned to Laura's car in quest of the imaginary article; she desired
to give Judd time to resume his place in his car before she joined her
mother on the steps.

"Demmed handsome, that daughter of yours," Judd commented on Louise to
Mrs. Treharne when he saw her the next afternoon, "but--er--uppish,
what?"

"I can dispense with your generalities on that subject," Mrs. Treharne
had replied.

After that Louise had met Judd casually in the wide, fire-lit
down-stairs hall on two or three occasions, and once at the only one of
her mother's extraordinary Sunday night receptions--the "salon" which at
once provoked and amused Laura--which she attended; but she had
exchanged no word with him. She was not lacking in diplomacy, but there
were some stultifications that she found to be wholly beyond her; and
she was conscious of a certain previously unexperienced difficulty with
her neck when she even inclined her head to Judd.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Would you care to meet some of my Sunday night people, Louise?" her
mother had asked her. "I dare say Laura has told you they are freaks.
Perhaps some of them are. But there are clever ones among them, and one
must take the gifted with the mediocre. It would not harm you to meet a
few of them. They are not wicked. They only think they are; some of
them, that is. Their wickedness is an amiable abstraction. Shall you be
down?"

It was on a Sunday morning, in Louise's apartments, that Mrs. Treharne
made the suggestion. Louise was conscious of the need of a laugh, even
if it were a politely smothered one; and Laura had comically depicted
her mother's "salon" to her. She told her mother that she had been
waiting for that invitation, which caused Mrs. Treharne to glance
sharply at her to ascertain if Louise already had adopted Laura's point
of view as to the Sunday evening gatherings.

"Do you entertain your people yourself, mother, or is there a--" Louise
stumbled on the word "host."

But her mother was quick to catch her meaning.

"I should not ask you down, else, my dear--you should credit me that
far," she had replied, a tinge of reproach in her tone. And so, an hour
or so after dinner on Sunday night, Louise, willowy yet full-blossomed
and splendid in a simple princesse dress of white broadcloth, a gardenia
nestling in an embrasure of her velvety auburn hair, and a tiny-linked
chain of gold, with aquamarine pendants--a gift from Laura--around her
firm white neck, went, for the first time since she had been in the
house, to the already crowded main floor.

Louise, in her inexperience, could not know that the gathering really
was little less than an apotheosis of the _declasée_; she merely found
some of the people agreeable, others of them unconsciously naïve in
their ebullient enthusiasm over their imaginary achievements or
accomplishments, still others frankly laughable for their indurated
habit of self laudation.

It was in the main, so far as its social side went, an assemblage of
persons, men and women, who, thrust outside the genuine social
breastworks for various and more or less highly-tinctured lapses, thus
foregathered in response to an instinct of gregariousness--an instinct
around which the "birds of a feather" aphorism no doubt was framed.
Having no choice in the matter, these persons were willing to accept the
shadow for the reality. It might almost be said that on every uptown
square of New York there is at least one common meeting point for
similar assemblages of social exiles. Nearly all of the figurantes in
Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening affairs were _divorcées_ of more or less
note; the "cases" of some of whom had been blazoned in huge red block
type in the yellow newspapers, and "illustrated," in default of genuine
portraits, with blurred "cuts" of no less benevolent or redoubtable
females than the late Mrs. Pinkham or Carrie Nation. The men in the
company who had not already rocketed through the divorce court were
willing, it appeared from their frank method of expressing themselves,
to make that by no means perilous passage; though there was a sprinkling
of younger men, still factors in a social world from which there are no
voluntary expatriates, who attended Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening
affairs in a spirit of larkishness and glad of the chance to forsake,
for a little while, regions more austere and still under the domination
of at least a tacit repression.

For the rest, there were poetasters who fidgetted until they were called
upon, out of pure sympathy, to read their own verse--some of the latter
obviously "lifted;" temperamental musicians, male and female, who
preferred to sway at or with their instruments with the rooms darkened
while they performed; manufacturers and proselytizers of
personally-conducted and generally quite unintelligible cults, physical,
moral or ethical, all of the cults extending a maximum of "freedom of
action" to the individual; devisers of impromptu or extemporaneous
religions or near-religions, none of which boasted so inconvenient a
restriction as a Decalogue; fashionable or striving-to-be-fashionable
palmists and chiromancers, "swamis," "yogis;" burnoosed, sullen,
white-robed exploiters, from the Near or Far East, of women who mistook
their advanced symptoms of neuresthenia for a hankering for the occult;
and the other unclassified, sycophantic factors of a "Bohemianism" whose
seams were perfectly visible to the naked eye and whose sawdust was only
held in place with the all-together co-operation of the whole artificial
assemblage.

Louise's entrance upon the scene created a stir which caused her to feel
distinctly uncomfortable. She longed for Laura; but Laura had "sworn
off" attending Mrs. Treharne's Sunday evening parties; not from any
selfish motives of caution--for Laura was in keen demand in the social
circle in which she had been born and reared; but simply because she had
at length ceased to extract amusement from the self-idolizing vagaries
of Mrs. Treharne's crew; more briefly still, because they bored her to
extinction.

When the word was buzzed around among the slowly-moving, chattering
assemblage to whom the entire lower floor of the house, including the
conservatory, had been thrown open--that "the tall girl with the air and
the hair" was Mrs. Treharne's daughter--the more privileged ones
adverted to their hostess as Tony--there was a sudden cluttering of the
passageways leading to the room in which Louise was standing with her
mother. In their keenness to catch a glimpse of the "just-bloomed
daughter of Tony" many of them even forsook the long and
generously-provided buffet, than which no greater sign of a consuming
interest or curiosity could be given; for not a few of the raffish
guests appeared to be so patently in need of nourishment--and
stimulant--that they spent the major portion of the evening at the
buffet.

A woman whose vision seemed to be slightly filmed from her inordinate
devotion to the punch lifted her glass, after studying Louise in a sort
of open-mouthed daze for a moment or so, and sang out, in a tone that
she apparently had some difficulty in controlling:

"To Tony's daughter--the Empress Louise!"

The men and women in her neighborhood grabbed for glasses to fill from
the punchbowls and took up the refrain:

"The Empress Louise!"

Louise felt the blood swirling to her head, but she braced herself to
stand the volleying of eyes. Her mother was intensely annoyed and made
not the least effort to conceal her annoyance. When the incident had
been merged in a diversion afforded by a recitation of a Portuguese
madrigal in another room by a man with unkempt hair and untidy
fingernails, Mrs. Treharne glided away from Louise's side for a moment
and found the woman who had proposed the toast. She was still absorbedly
busy at the buffet.

"You are to leave at once, Ethel," she said in a low but determined tone
to the toast-proposer, a woman whose divorce story in the newspapers had
been remarkable for the detailed account of liquid refreshments she had
consumed up and down the world, at foreign hotels and on board yachts,
for a number of years at a stretch. "I shall never forgive you if you
make another scene here."

"All right, Tony," the woman replied, with a vacuous smile. "Not angry
at me, are you, for wishing luck to your little girl--your big girl, I
mean; she _is_ an empress, you know, and--"

Mrs. Treharne guided her to the cloak room and stayed by her side until
she bade her goodnight at the door.

Louise, in the meantime, had been approached by a man whose eyes, she
had noticed with a certain vague disquietude, had been following her
about since her entrance upon the scene.

He was a handsome man of the florid type, with a sweeping blonde
mustache and oddly-restless light brown eyes in which Louise, catching
him devouring her with his gaze at frequent intervals, nervously thought
that she detected certain felinely-topaz glints. He was tall and a
trifle over-heavy; but there was a certain slow-moving, easy air of
adventitious distinction about him which might have been in part lent by
the immaculateness of his evening clothes and his facile way of
disposing of his hands without requiring any article to give them
employment; an art in which even practiced courtiers and carpet knights
occasionally are deficient. Louise did not like his face; she observed,
when she saw, not without a certain vague trepidation, that he was
approaching her, that his over-red and over-full lips, from which the
sweeping mustache was brushed away, were curved in a sort of habitual
sneer which by no stretch of charity could be called a smile; though
that, no doubt, was the desired intent of it.

He bowed low, keeping his eyes upraised on Louise's face, when he
reached her side, and said:

"Miss Treharne?"

Louise, used to more formal methods of meeting new men, inclined her
head.

"You will condone, I hope, Miss Treharne, my seeming breach of formality
in presuming to address you without a presentation," he said, even his
intensified smile failing to efface the sneering curve from his too
visible lips. "But your mother is generous enough to permit her guests
at times--on such occasions as these, for example--to forego formality.
I have been ineffectually trying to reach her for an hour in order to--"

"In order to ask me to do that which you have already done," said Mrs.
Treharne, with quite unusual affability, coming up at that moment and
catching his final words. "Louise, dear, permit me--Mr. Langdon Jesse.
Don't expect her to know, Mr. Jesse, that you are a cotton king. I doubt
if her routine at school permitted her to read the newspapers, even if
they interested her; which I sincerely hope they did not and will not."

Louise had not often seen her mother in so gracious a humor toward any
man; but this fact did not in any sense serve to quell the instinctive
dislike which she immediately felt for Jesse, the "cotton king" of her
mother's somewhat too purposely-significant introduction. She noticed
that his hands were small and obtrusively white; that there was a wave
in his burnished blonde hair; that his large clear-cut features were of
a chiselled regularity; and her natural aversion to the merely handsome
man promptly asserted itself. The sneer of his mouth, and his fixed way
of gazing squarely into her eyes as if his own eyes were forming a
question, disquieted her. She replied in purposed monosyllables to his
rather trivial yet studied questions about her school life. She knew
perfectly well that he was in no wise interested in her school life, but
that he merely was seeking what he considered might be the most engaging
method of capturing her attention. Five minutes after his meeting with
her she devised an excuse and went to her apartments. She threw her
windows wide and let the wintry air bulge the curtains when she reached
her sleeping room; perhaps it was her subconsciousness that told her
that she needed some such a bath of purifying air to obliterate what
intangible traces there might remain of her brief contact with Langdon
Jesse. That night she dreamt persistently of a leopard with large,
blazing eyes of topaz; and an hour after she awoke a large basket of
superb orchids, with Langdon Jesse's card attached, was brought to her.
Laura was with her at the time.

"From Langdon Jesse?" said Laura, knitting her brow. "Did you meet him
last night, Louise?"

"Yes. I disliked him intensely."

"If I were you, dear," suggested Laura, "I should send these orchids to
a hospital. They can of course have no sinister effect upon those who
have not met their donor. But I should be afraid to have you keep any
flowers sent you by Langdon Jesse. They might poison the air. The bald
impudence of him in sending you flowers at all!"

A footman was carrying the orchids to a nearby hospital five minutes
later.




CHAPTER V


Langdon Jesse and his one-time associate and co-partner in lamb-shearing
"deals," Frederick Judd, met at luncheon in a restaurant in the
financial district a few days later.

Judd, one of the powers of "the Street," was past fifty-five, and he had
no great toleration for the vacuities of young men. This fact, however,
placed no inhibition on the admiration--it could scarcely be called a
liking--which he felt for Langdon Jesse; for Jesse, whatever else he may
have been, certainly was not vacuous in the matter of business; and it
was from the angle of their success in business that Judd exclusively
judged men. Jesse, well under forty, already was a veteran of the stock
market; and on at least one occasion he had deftly "trimmed" no less a
person than his former associate, Mr. Judd; wherefore Judd, with the
breadth of vision of the financial general in considering the strategy
of the general who has beaten him, admired Jesse, who had been
virtually his pupil, all the more; resolving, at the same time, not to
permit his quondam pupil to "trim" him again.

Jesse, accepting the nodded invitation, took a seat at the table at
which Judd, alone, was eating his heavy luncheon. They exchanged market
talk in brief, brittle phrases, for a while. Then Jesse, his
too-prominent lips curving, and seeming to be gazing over the top of
Judd's bare poll, said:

"Sumptious, isn't she?"

Judd, used to Jesse's adversions to the sumptuosity of women--many
women--went on doggedly eating. After a space he replied with a
monosyllable:

"Who?"

Jesse did not answer for a moment; nor did Judd seem to be particularly
worried over that fact.

"I dropped into your--er--your place on the Drive on Sunday night," said
Jesse, fastening an abnormally long cigarette into a remarkably long
cigarette holder of amber and gold.

Judd, his fork poised in the air, looked up at Jesse. There was a
question in his red-rimmed eyes; but Judd made it a point not to submit
questions of any consequence until he had turned them over in his mind
several times.

"So I heard," said Judd, with no obvious interest, pronging away again
with his fork.

"Who told you," asked Jesse, with a sharp glance at Judd. "Not----"

"How the devil should I remember who told me?" replied Judd in a
matter-of-fact tone. "What's the difference who told me, anyhow?"

But it made considerable difference, as a matter of fact, to Jesse; his
self-satisfaction and his serene belief in his ability to make an
immediate "impression" were very great; and when Judd told him he had
"heard" he had been at the Riverside Drive house he took it for granted
that Judd had "heard" it from the person on whom his thoughts were
dwelling; Louise Treharne, that is to say.

"Oh, no particular difference," said Jesse, blowing a cloud of acrid
Turkish cigarette smoke at Judd, which caused Judd to scowl. "I thought
perhaps----"

Judd knew perfectly well what he thought; but Judd often failed even to
mention things that he knew perfectly well.

"You take in those bear-garden affairs at Tony's--at Mrs. Treharne's,"
catching himself, "right along, don't you?" said Judd. "How the devil
you can endure that pack of imbecile, loquacious what-are-theys is more
than I can make out. One of those Sundays nights cured me."

Jesse, however, had not the least intention of being side-tracked.

"Well, she is--er--well, ripping; isn't she?" he said, after a pause.

Judd, perceiving the futility of evasion, gave way.

"Yes--if that's what you want me to say--and all ice, besides," said
Judd. "You're up against it there, son," he went on, judicially. "Or are
you looking for a death by freezing? Why, I'm afraid that she's going to
fracture one of her upper vertebrae even when she nods to me! And that's
all the recognition she ever gives me--a nod."

"She doesn't strike me as being so hopelessly Arctic as all that," said
Jesse, inordinately proud of what he considered his keen judgment of
women. "Did you ever happen to meet a woman with auburn hair who
possessed a--er--a frozen or freezing temperament? And, by the way, why
do you dwell upon her rigidity, so to speak, when she nods 'even to
you?' Why 'even to you?'"

Judd, a little choler showing in his purpling face, broke out:

"Because a man naturally expects a little manners, a little common
politeness, from people he's taking care of, doesn't he? She's living in
my house, by God!"

"That," said Jesse, quietly, "is precisely what I am getting at: since
she is living in your house--if she knows it is your house--she can't be
so--er--well, stupendously straight-laced, can she? And, by frozen, of
course you meant straight-laced."

"I meant exactly what I said," replied Judd, sulkily. "Stop twisting my
words around, will you? I said that she was ice, and that is what I
meant to say. You're on a blind trail, Jesse, if that's what you're
getting at. Take it from me. You're a hit with 'em, I know, and all that
sort of rot. But this one is more than your match. She'll shrivel you
good and plenty if you try anything on with her. At that, why can't you
let her alone? There are plenty of the other kind--your kind. What's the
matter, anyhow? Have all the show girls moved out of New York?"

Jesse didn't relish the slap. It was not exactly a truthful slap,
moreover. Jesse had withdrawn his devotions to "show girls" several
years before; since doing which he had quarried in entirely different
quarters.

"Let the girl alone--that's my advice," went on Judd, seized for the
moment by a flickering sense of fairness. "I don't fancy her
particularly--because she's so damned haughty with me, I suppose, and
looks down upon me from a mountain. But she's all right. I know that,
and I'm telling it to you for your information. Better forget it. There
isn't a chance on earth for you, anyhow."

Jesse didn't appear to be in the least thrown off the quest by the
advice.

"Are you sure," he inquired of Judd after a short silence, "that she
knows just where you figure in the Riverside Drive establishment?"

"Well, you could see for yourself that she is more than seven years of
age, couldn't you?" briefly replied Judd.

"But," observed Jesse, obviously seeking to get hold of all of the
threads of the situation, "she is only recently out of school, I
understand, and perhaps she hasn't yet fully grasped----"

"I don't know what she has grasped, and I don't care a damn," thrust in
Judd, tired of the colloquy. "She must know a good deal about the way
things stand or she wouldn't treat me as if I were rubbish. I can see
how I stick in her throat. When it comes to that, why shouldn't I? She's
only a schoolgirl, if she is a head taller than I am. Her mother made an
idiotic mistake in having the girl around the place. But that's none of
my affair. I take the game as it stands. Only I advise you to stand
clear. You might as well be decent for once in your life. Unless, of
course," and Judd shot a glance of inquiry at Jesse, "you mean to turn
respectable--it's about time--and go in for the marrying idea?"

Jesse's somewhat waxy, excessively smooth face flushed at Judd's
afterthought.

"I marry?" he said, with a distinctly disagreeable laugh. "Well, it may
come to that, some day or other. But can you see me marrying the
daughter of your acknowledged----" He fumbled for the word; "mistress"
was what he wanted to say, but he discarded it out of sheer timidity;
"--your acknowledged companion?" he finished.

"Be good enough to keep out of my personal affairs, Jesse," said Judd,
coldly. "I don't dip into your private concerns. You may take my advice
or leave it. But you want to go pretty slow, if you're asking me. Nobody
has yet forgotten that West Indian affair of yours; just remember that."

With Judd, one shot called for another. Jesse gave a start and paled
slightly at Judd's allusion to "the West Indian affair." Judd waited
only long enough to see that the shot found its mark; then, with an
amused leer, he rose from the table, his luncheon finished, and lumbered
away with a nod.

Jesse, discarding his cigarette, bit off the end of a cigar and fumed.
The "West Indian affair" was a sore subject with him solely because the
world knew all about it. He had not the least feeling of
self-condemnation over it; it was the thought that, for once, he had
been found out that caused him to rage internally when the matter was
adverted to; for the newspapers had been full of it at the time of the
occurrence.

"The West Indian affair," Jesse well knew, had not been forgotten, as
Judd had said, nor was it likely to be forgotten. It threw a raking
light upon his general attitude toward and his treatment of women. A
year before, after one of his periodical triumphs in the cotton market,
in which, to quote the newspapers' way of putting it, he had "cleaned up
millions," Jesse had made a midwinter cruise of the West Indies on his
yacht. A girl of unusual beauty, whom he had met by accident on an
automobile tour on Long Island, had been his companion on the cruise.
She was inexperienced, of humble parentage, and he had overborne her
objections by vaguely intimating something as to a marriage when they
should arrive in the West Indies. She had protested when, upon the
yacht's touching at many ports, he had of course shown not the least
inclination to make good his merely intimated promise; and, in his wrath
over her attitude, he had not only committed the indefensible crime, but
he had made the stupendous mistake, viewed from the politic point of
view, of deserting the girl in a West Indian city, without money or
resources, without even her clothing, and sailing back to New York
alone.

The girl, thus stranded amid new and unfriendly surroundings, had but
one resource--the American consul. The consul provided for her passage
back to New York. The correspondents of the New York newspapers in the
West Indian city had got hold of the details, adding a few neatly
whimsical touches of their own, and for days the newspapers had reeked
with the story. There had been talk of prosecuting Jesse for abduction,
but he had employed the underground method, rendered easily available to
him owing to his wealth, to smother that suggestion. But the grisly
affair had thrown a cloud over Jesse from which he knew, raging as he
knew it, there was no emerging. Several of his clubs--the good ones--had
dropped him; men and women of the world to which he aspired, and in
which he had been making progress, cut him right and left; his name had
been erased from most of the worth-while invitation lists; and the hole
in his armor was wide open to the shafts of the kind Judd had just
discharged at him.

Jesse sat at the table and gnawed angrily at his unlighted cigar for a
long time after Judd had gone; it was characteristic of him that his
compunction was all for himself. He had been found out and pilloried.
That was what cut him. He never gave a thought to the young woman whose
life he had destroyed.

Jesse had been instantly struck by the beauty of Louise Treharne. He
surmised that it was through no complaisance on her part, but purely
because she had been helpless in the matter, that she had found herself
living with her ostracised mother in the house on the Drive. That
situation, he was confident, had been thrust upon her. But this
consideration, and the additional one that she was, as he could not have
failed to note, nobly undergoing the ordeal, which might have aroused
the admiration and excited the sympathy of a man of merely average
fairness, had touched no compassionate chord in Langdon Jesse. Adopting
the trivial and far-fetched methods of analysis which are employed by
men who consider themselves expert in their knowledge of women, he had
calmly concluded that in all likelihood Louise Treharne's manner was a
skillfully-studied pose. At any rate he meant to find out. He meant to
"know her better." It was thus that his determination framed itself in
his mind; he would "know her better."

In gaining the attention of women, he believed in the gentle siege and
then the grand assault; it was, in truth, the only "system" with which
he had any familiarity, and it had generally proved successful.

Jesse returned to his office, summoned his car, went to his suite at the
Plaza, gave himself over to the grooming activities of his man for an
hour; then, resuming his car, he went to the house on Riverside Drive.

       *       *       *       *       *

Louise, in brown walking suit and brown turban, her cheeks ruddy from a
long and rapid walk from one end of the Park to the other, had just
returned when Jesse's card was brought up. She was studying the card,
trying to devise an excuse--for she shrank from the thought of seeing
him--when her mother, ready for her motor airing, entered the room.

"I just caught sight of Mr. Jesse's car from my window," said Mrs.
Treharne to Louise. Louise observed that her mother was in the same
fluttered state that she had been in when she had found Jesse talking to
her on the previous Sunday night. "He has sent his card to you? Of
course you are going to see him?"

"I think I shall not see him, mother," said Louise, ringing for Heloise
with the purpose of sending word that she was indisposed, not at
home--anything.

Mrs. Treharne looked annoyed and there was irritation in her question:

"Why not, my dear?"

"I don't care for him, mother," said Louise, frankly. "In fact, I
believe I rather dislike him. Do you think he is the sort of man I
should meet?"

Louise was intensely disappointed that her mother should care to have
her meet Jesse. She tried to assure herself that her mother did not know
or realize the character of the man as she herself had heard it briefly
described by Laura; but she found that a bit difficult to believe.

"Tell me, please, Louise, why you ask me such a question as that," said
Mrs. Treharne, irritatedly. "What do you know about Mr. Jesse? Who has
been telling you things about him?"

Louise, remaining silent, plainly showed that she did not care to answer
her mother's question.

"It was Laura, no doubt," went on Mrs. Treharne. "Laura, I begin to
fear, is growing garrulous. You must not permit her to put absurd ideas
into your head, my dear. I must speak to her about it."

"Pray do not, mother," said Louise, earnestly. "She is one of the
dearest women in the world, and everything that she tells me, I know, is
not only perfectly true, but for my good. It is not anything said to me
by Laura that makes me dislike the idea of receiving Mr. Jesse. It is
simply that I don't like him. There is a boldness, an effrontery, a
cynicism, about him that make me distrust him. I don't care for his type
of man. That is all."

"You must not fall into the habit of forming sudden prejudices, my
dear," said her mother, diplomatically assuming an air of grave
persuasiveness. "Mr. Jesse no doubt has had his fling at life. What
worth-while man of his age hasn't? But he is a man of mark. He has made
his way as few men have. Of course you found him handsome, _distingué_?
Most women do, my dear. And I could see that he was greatly struck with
you. You will soon be twenty, Louise; and Mr. Jesse, perhaps I should
remind you, is a great _parti_."

Louise felt herself crimsoning. Her mother did know Jesse's record,
then. That was manifest from her words. And yet she was calmly exalting
him as an "eligible!"

The girl so shrank from having any further conversation with her mother
on the subject just then that she turned to her and said:

"I would not see him of my own volition, mother; but if you very much
wish it, I shall see him."

"For heaven's sake, Louise, don't look so terribly austere and crushed
over it!" broke out Mrs. Treharne. "The man will not kidnap you! I very
much wish that you should be sensible and receive eligible men, of
course. Isn't that a perfectly natural wish?"

Louise, without another word, not stopping to remove her turban or even
glance in the glass, went down-stairs to receive Jesse. Her mother
fluttered past the drawing-room door a moment later, merely stopping
for a word of over-effusive greeting to Jesse before joining the waiting
Judd in his car. Jesse, whether by accident or from foreknowledge, had
timed his visit well. He was quite alone on the floor with Louise
Treharne. She caught the gleam of his upraised eyes and noted the bold
persistence of the question in them when, still in his fur overcoat, he
turned from the contemplation of a picture to greet her.

"Ah," he said with an attempt at airiness, slipping out of the overcoat
and extending his hand, "our Empress already has been out?" glancing at
her turban and her wind-freshened cheeks. "That is unfortunate. I was
about to place my car at her disposal----"

He withdrew his hand, not seeming to notice that Louise had failed to
see it.

"Yes, I have been walking," put in Louise, in no wise stiffly, but with
an air of preoccupied withdrawal which she genuinely felt. "As to what
you call me, I believe I should prefer to be known by my name."

Jesse, remembering what Judd had said as to the likelihood of his being
frozen or shrivelled, laughed inwardly. He rather enjoyed being rebuffed
by women--at first. It made the game keener. None of them, he remembered
now with complaisancy, continued to rebuff him for very long.

"Pardon me, Miss Treharne," he said, with a certain languishing air
which Louise found even more offensive than his initial familiarity. "I
thought, when the title was so spontaneously applied to you on Sunday
night, that perhaps you found it agreeable. But it is difficult to
gauge--women." He dwelt upon the word "women," thinking that,
considering how recently she had left school, it might flatter her.

Louise chose to talk commonplaces. Her bed-rock genuineness made it
impossible for her to affect an interest in a visitor which she did not
feel. And her lack of interest in Jesse was complicated by her growing
dislike for him.

"I am doubly disappointed," said Jesse after a pause which he did not
find embarrassing. Nothing embarrassed Jesse when he had his mind
definitely set upon a purpose. "First, I had hoped, as I say, that, not
having been out, you would honor me by accepting the use of my car.
Second, I am desolated because you are wearing a hat. I had been
promising myself another glimpse of your superb hair. Is it _banal_ to
put it that way? I am afraid so. But consider the temptation! Was it
Aspasia or Cleopatra whose hair was of the glorious shade of yours--or
both?"

"Mr. Jesse," said Louise, now quite _dégagé_, facing him squarely and
speaking with the greatest deliberation, "I seem to find, from my two
limited conversations with you, that you are suffering under some sort
of a misapprehension as to me. You will discover that yourself, I think,
if you will take the trouble to recur to several things you already have
said to me after an acquaintanceship, all told, of perhaps ten minutes.
Suppose we seek a less personal plane? I am too familiar with my hair to
care to have it made a subject of extended remarks on the part of men
whom I scarcely know. There are less pointed themes. Permit me to
suggest that we occupy ourselves in finding them."

"By God, a broadside!" said Jesse to himself, not in the least abashed;
his admiration always grew for women who trounced him--at first. "I
didn't think she had it in her! And Judd, the fat imbecile, called her
an iceberg! She is a volcano!"

Aloud, he said, with a neatly-assumed air of subjection and penitence:

"Well delivered, Miss Treharne. But I merit it. I have made the error of
supposing--"

"That my comparatively recent return from school, and the
open-mindedness naturally associated with that," Louise quietly
interrupted, "made me a fair target for your somewhat labored and not
particularly apt compliments. Yes, you erred decisively there."

"Again!" thought Jesse, bubbling with finely-concealed delight. "She
_is_ an empress right enough, whether she likes to be called that or
not! What a prize!"

Aloud, he said with an air of chastened gravity:

"You do me scant justice there, Miss Treharne, but that is easily
passed, seeing how chagrinedly conscious I am that I deserved your
rebuke in the first instance. You are fond of motoring?" changing the
subject with no great deftness.

"No," replied Louise, sufficiently out of hand. "I don't in the least
care for it." The conversation was irksome to her and she would not
pretend that it was not.

"I inquired," said Jesse, looking chapfallen though he did not in the
least feel so, "because I had been hoping you might do me the honor to
accept the use--the steady use--of one of my cars. I have several," this
last with an ostentation that rather sickened Louise. But she could not
allow the carefully veiled suggestion in his words to pass.

"Mr. Jesse," she said, reverting to her tone of deliberation and again
gazing straight at him, "aside from the fact that, as I have told you, I
don't in the least care for motoring, will you be good enough to suggest
to me just one fairly intelligible reason why I should accept your
proffer of the use--'the steady use'--of one of your cars? It may be
that you will have some reason to offer for what, otherwise, I should
deem a distinct impertinence."

Jesse's eyes gleamed with the joy of it. "What a prize!" he thought
again.

"I seem, Miss Treharne," he said with a laugh which he purposely made
uneasy, "to be stumbling upon one blunder after another. There is no
reason for my having offered you the use of one of my cars--and I hasten
to withdraw the offer, since it seems to offend you--other than my
friendship of long standing with your mother and my desire--my hope, I
was about to say--that you, too, might consider me worthy of your
friendship."

It was rather adroitly turned, but it completely missed fire.

"I don't seem to recall that it is necessary for one to adopt one's
mother's friends as one's own," said Louise, without the least
hesitancy. His assumption of an easily-penetrated ingratiating manner
had thoroughly disgusted her; she wanted him to take his departure; and
she chose the most straightout means to that end. There was no possible
way for her to know that Jesse enjoyed the early taunts of some women
much as he relished the cocktails with which he preceded his dinners,
and for very much the same reason--they were appetizers.

He rose with an air of irresolution which he was far from feeling.

"I fear," he said, resignedly, "that something has happened--or perhaps
that something has been said--to predispose or prejudice you against me,
Miss Treharne. It is a conclusion to which I am driven."

He paused, then faced her with an appearance of frankness which he was
adept at assuming.

"Miss Treharne," he went on, cleverly adopting a tone with a tremolo
note in it, "you will grant, I think, that men--men, that is to say, who
cut any sort of figure in affairs"--a flourish here--"often are
misjudged. Without in the least desiring to pose as one who has been a
victim of such misjudgment, I feel, nevertheless----" Here he stopped,
having carefully calculated his stopping point, and, with impulsively
extended hands, he went on with a beautifully acted semblance of real
feeling: "Miss Treharne, I merely ask you to give me a chance to prove
myself; a chance at least to wear the candidate's stripes for your
friendship."

Despite her youthfulness and her utter inexperience with men of Jesse's
type, Louise, aided by an unusually subtle intuition, and mindful of
what she had heard of Jesse, caught the hollow ring in his tone,
detected the false shifty light in his now furtive, eager eyes.

She rose.

"You are quite overpoweringly in earnest over what seems to me a very
trivial matter, Mr. Jesse," she said with a little laugh that sounded
harsh even to her own ears.

"You gravely underestimate the value of your friendship in calling it
trivial, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, rising also; for at length he was
ready to accept the dismissal which a less thick-skinned man, even of
his type, would have taken long before.

"I have not been in the habit of placing any sort of an appraisal upon
the value of my friendship," she replied, succinctly.

He thrust his arms into the sleeves of his greatcoat of fur and
strolled, with a downcast air, to the drawing-room door.

"This is not your normal mood, Miss Treharne," he said, turning upon her
a smile that he meant to be wan. "You see what unresentful justice I do
you. There are to be other days. I shall find you in a humor less
inclined to magnify my candidly professed demerits. I hope to have an
opportunity to prove to you that I have at least a few merits to balance
the faults."

The hint was sufficiently broad, but Louise appeared to be momentarily
obtuse. At any rate she did not extend the invitation he too patently
fished for. Her reticence in that respect, however, did not in the least
abash Jesse.

"At least I have the cheering knowledge that this door is open to me,"
he said, entering the foyer on his way out. "Have I not?"

Unavailingly Louise strove to steady herself in order to thrust back the
color which she felt mounting to her face.

"It is not my door," she said in a low tone; and instantly was keenly
sorry for having said it.

"Oh, I quite understand that," he said, with an air of lightness, though
at the moment he did not dare to turn and look at her. "But it is all
the same, since it is your mother's, is it not?"

She made no reply. She felt that she deserved the barb for having given
him the opportunity to discharge it. He bowed low, essayed the smile
that he considered his most engaging one, and went out to his waiting
car.

For the second time after having been in the presence of Langdon Jesse,
Louise went to her rooms and threw all the windows wide; then stood in
the wintry eddies and permitted the cold, sweet air to enwrap and purify
her.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Mrs. Treharne, after leaving Louise and Jesse together, stepped
into the car with Judd, she found that adipose man of finance chuckling
softly to himself. She deigned not to inquire of him the reason for his
chuckling--knowing, of course, that presently he would be volunteering
that information himself.

"That was Jesse's car in front of the house, wasn't it, Tony?" he asked
her, still chuckling unpleasantly as the car pulled away from the curb.

"Yes," she replied, alert of a sudden, but disdaining to appear so.

"Jesse is calling to see--er--your daughter, eh?" Judd asked, continuing
his rumbling manifestations of joviality.

"He is," replied Mrs. Treharne, carefully screening her impatience to
catch Judd's drift. "But I fail to see why that fact should incite you
to give vent to such a harrowing series of low comedy chuckles."

"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, soothingly, but not
in the least diminishing his choppy cachinnatory performance.

Mrs. Treharne, with an air of disgust which merely screened her worried
curiosity, permitted him to continue for a while. Then she said, with an
air of gravity intended to drag him back to his naturally sullen state,
but assumed also for the purpose of sounding him:

"Jesse was plainly struck with Louise on Sunday night last. Her position
now, of course, is hideous. Jesse may be the solution."

Judd straightened himself in his seat and suddenly stopped chuckling.
Then he glanced with quizzical keenness out of slitted eyes at his
companion.

"Meaning, I suppose," he said, "that you have an idea that Jesse might
take it into his head to marry her?"

"What else could I mean?" she asked him huskily.

"Quite so, quite so, my dear Antoinette," said Judd, leaning back in his
seat again. "Of course. Certainly. I fully understand you," and he
closed his eyes as if about to lapse into a refreshing nap.

Mrs. Treharne, distinctly wrought up, grasped one of the lapels of his
seal-lined greatcoat and shook him determinedly.

"Be good enough to explain to me, and at once, precisely what you mean,"
she said rapidly, a growing hoarseness in her tone.

Judd, for his part, promptly relapsed into his chuckling.

"It is nothing, my dear--nothing at all, I assure you," he said, between
wheezes. "Only it strikes me as rather diverting that anybody should
consider Jesse in the light of a matrimonial eligible. When, by the way,
did you gather the idea that Jesse was a marrying man? Since
that--er--somewhat widely-exploited little affair of his in the West
Indies last year? Or more recently?"

Judd generally won in the little skirmishes they had in the motor car.
The fact that he had won again was plainly indicated by the fact that
she remained silent for the remainder of the ride.




CHAPTER VI


Louise, still bound by the discipline of school, was not a late sleeper.
As early as seven o'clock on the morning following Langdon Jesse's call
she was lying awake, striving to dispel, by the process of optimistic
reasoning, the sinister nimbus that seemed to be enshrouding her, when
the telephone bell in her dressing room began to ring persistently.
Louise sprang up to answer the call.

"I know it is a barbarous hour, dear," Laura's cheerful contralto came
over the wire, "but I've just been aroused from my juvenile slumbers by
the telephone, and of course I must have revenge upon somebody. Listen,
dear: I know that it only takes you about fifteen minutes to dress--of
course you are not dressed yet? Well, begin this instant. Put on
something for tramping and fussing around in the country. You must be
over here by eight o'clock. We are going to have a romping day in the
country. Now, hurry, won't you?"

"Just you and I, Laura?" asked Louise, delighted. A day in the country!
Open fields to dispel vapors! The thought of it made her eager and
excited.

"No, there'll be another," replied Laura. "I disregard the axiom, you
know, that 'Three is a crowd.' Three needn't be a crowd if one of the
three has a little tact and--and the knack of opportunely vanishing,"
and Louise heard her soft laughter. "A man I know has what he calls a
little tumbledown place, with some ground around it, over in Jersey. He
calls it Sullen Manor, because he says he always goes over there, in
preference to all other places, when he feels the imperative need to
sulk. Now, there is not another moment to be wasted in 'phoning. Start
to dress this very instant! Will you solemnly promise me to be here on
the stroke of eight? Very well. I shall be waiting. Goodbye."

Louise, "very trig and complete," as Laura remarked, in a suit of grey
with a matching fur-trimmed grey toque, was with the astonished Laura a
good quarter of an hour before eight.

"Heaven knows how you do it," said Laura, still in the hands of her
maid. "Go into the dining-room and have some coffee, dear. I shall be
with you directly."

Louise, humming happily at the thought of the care-free day ahead of
her, sped into the bright dining room. John Blythe, sipping coffee at
the table, rose to meet her. He looked fine and upstanding in his fresh,
rough tweeds, his close-shaven face ruddy and his clear grey eyes
showing an agate sparkle from the brisk walk to Laura's apartment from
his own.

Louise halted abruptly in her astonishment when she saw him. But she was
extremely glad to see him and said so frankly, resting her hand in his
muscular but gentle clasp for a moment.

"Laura packed me off here to take some coffee," she said. "Does she know
you are here? And how early you are abroad in the world. We are stirring
about at this sunrise hour because we are going for a day in the
country--and I am mad to get there! In my previous incarnation I must
have been a milkmaid, for I dearly love the country." Then she added,
with a little air of disappointment: "I do wish you were coming with
us!"

"That," replied Blythe, smiling his wide smile as he poured coffee for
her, "is precisely what I am going to do."

Louise, in the act of taking the cup from him, looked into his face with
an expression of pleased mystification on her own.

"Why, what is--how can--" She broke off suddenly and rose from her chair
in the intensity of a pleasure which she herself, at that moment, could
scarcely have analyzed. "Surely," she went on in a lower tone, her face
irradiated by a smile which it thrilled him to observe, "Surely you are
not the man who sulks?"

"One of Laura's agreeable fictions," he pronounced. "She calls my little
place Sullen Manor, and declares that it is my sulking cave, because
I've not had her over there to see it. I've had no chance to ask her
until now. Do you mean to say she did not tell you that I was the
organizer of this expedition?"

"The secretive creature did not even hint at such a thing," declared
Louise, not very successfully pretending to be miffed.

"Now I call that downright neglect of orders," said Blythe, also
striving to show a serious face. "I particularly charged Laura to tell
you who the party of the third part was to be in order that you might
have the privilege of refusing to accompany the expedition in case you
so desired. A shocking departure from discipline on Laura's part."

"Then it was you," said Louise, lighter in spirits than she had been for
a long time, "who invited me?"

"My dear, don't you know he would say so to you no matter whether it
were true or not?" said Laura, who had caught Louise's question,
breezing into the dining-room at that moment. "Come on, children. Your
antique chaperone is impatient to be on her disregarded way. Louise,
have you had your coffee? And some toast? Finish them this instant! Even
so ascetic and imaginative a person as Mr. Blythe knows that a girl
must have a little breakfast before venturing upon an expedition into
the jungles of Jersey."

Laura, perfect in a walking suit of shepherd's plaid and tan walking
shoes, had, on this morning, the animation as well as the beauty of a
girl. Blythe compared the two as they stood side by side, hastily
sipping coffee. Laura, with her Judith-black, glossy hair and fresh,
youthful color, and Louise with her thick coils of vivid, velvety auburn
and glowing ivory pallor--Blythe thought, studying them for a moment
over the rim of his cup, that he had never seen so splendid a contrast.

"_Allons!_" Laura broke in upon his reflection. "Are we to dawdle here
until luncheon time? Already it is," looking at her watch, "twenty-four
seconds past eight!"

Blythe, slipping into his greatcoat, turned a solemn face upon Laura
when they had reached the hall, outward-bound.

"There is one thing, Laura, in connection with this expedition, that I
am keenly sorry for," he said, assuming a sepulchral tone.

"Why, what is that?" asked Laura, a little alarmedly, taken off her
guard.

"Well," replied Blythe, still solemn, "you'll only be away from here for
about fifteen hours, and how are you possibly going to have your
apartment completely redecorated, from forepeak to mizzen, alow and
aloft, in that space of time?"

"Tush!" laughed Laura. "There will be plenty of time to have the place
done over--and it really does sorely need it, now doesn't it?" this with
a wistfulness at which Blythe and Louise laughed, "--when I take Louise
to Europe with me in May--less than three months off."

"Am I to go to Europe with you, dear--really?" asked Louise, surprised
and pleased; for Laura had said nothing about it before.

"Most assuredly you are," replied Laura, entirely in earnest. "If, that
is, you can make up your mind to be burdened by the companionship of one
so aged."

The topic was lost in the excitation of their arranging themselves in
Laura's car, which was to take them to the ferry. But the thought of it
recurred to Louise several times during the ride to the ferry. It was an
alluring prospect, barring the obstacles. How could she leave her
mother, even for a short time, now that she had rejoined her after a
separation of years? Finally she was able to dismiss such cogitations
and yield herself to the enjoyment of the day ahead.

It was one of those unseasonably mild days in late February that
occasionally "drop in" to point an accusing finger at the harshness of
winter. A brilliant sun swam in a cloudless sky, and the soft yet
invigorating balminess of late April was, as they noticed when they
sped by the Park, deluding the buds of tree and hedge into swelling
prematurely and even seducing the willows into a vague, timidly
displayed elusive green. Hardy, pioneering robins, advance couriers sent
forth to investigate the senile endurance of winter, hopped about the
Park sward. School-ward bound boys, out of sight of their homes, were
doffing their irksome overcoats, and thrusting them, blanket-wise, at
demure little schoolgirls who, in turn, were carrying their stuffy
jackets over their arms. Motormen and truckmen were smothering yawns
that denoted a premature spring fever. Business-bound men, going more
slowly than usual, glancing occasionally at the sky of sapphire, and
feeling on their cheeks gusty little zephyrs from the South, thought of
fishing "where the wild stream sings." Belated shopgirls, sensing the
morning's benign balm as they hurried through crowds, thought of hats
and furbelows for the season that, they surmised, was almost upon them.

In the ferry-bound automobile, John Blythe was thinking about a letter
hid in the pocket of his coat and wondering how the person whom the
letter most concerned would regard its contents. Louise was wondering if
her mother would be annoyed over the word she had left with her maid
that she would be with Laura for the entire day and part of the evening;
occasionally she glanced sidelongwise at John Blythe, when there was no
possibility of his catching her at it, and strove vaguely to analyze the
sense of power, mingled with kindliness, which his presence diffused.
Laura, leaning back, emitting an occasional absurdity, studied them both
and wondered, her eyes a little dreamy, if matters ever actually turned
out in real life as they did in novels.

They stood on the ferryboat's prow, bathing in the sun's relenting glow
and blinking at the gold-tipped river crests; and it was only ten
o'clock when, after half an hour's ride on the slam-bang little
accommodation train, they debarked at the spick-and-span little station,
at the side of which Blythe's care-taker, a grinning but stolid German,
had drawn up a fine and comfortable, if old-fashioned, surrey to which
was hitched a pair of glossy, mettlesome sorrels.

Louise and Laura felt like clapping their hands when, after the two-mile
drive through woodlands and past neat, well-cared-for little farms the
clean, sweet-smelling soil of which already was being turned up, they
drove on a firm, natural road through a wide wooden gate and came in
sight of the pretty Colonial house, with four bright yellow pillars,
topped by a balcony of snowy white, with wide-open shutters of an
intense green, and a big white double door at the sides of which were
little grooved columns surmounted by the inevitable Corinthian
capitals. The house, fresh and smart in its old-fashioned way, was
roomier than it looked from the front. It was divided by a wide hall
which ran its entire length on the ground floor; and a wide stairway ran
from the hall in front to the second floor, where, after the Colonial
fashion, the balcony gave upon sleeping rooms.

"Sullen Manor," announced Laura, assuming the megaphonic utterance of
the sight-seeing car's expounder. "But doesn't it beautifully belie its
name and its owner's doldrumish use of it? Why, it is as pretty and
cheerful as a pigeon-cote snuggling under sifting cherry blossoms! How
much ground is there around the place, John?"

"Twenty acres," replied Blythe, smiling a little gravely. "I suppose I
know every foot of the twenty acres, too, though I left here--it is
where I was born, you know--when I was seven years old. My father lost
the place, you see, through bad investments and what not, when I was at
that age. We moved to New Orleans, and a year later both my father and
mother were swept off by yellow fever. I only remember them in a shadowy
way. Oddly enough, I remember this old place much better than I do my
parents; its corners, clumps of trees, and that sort of thing. I had a
chance to get the place back a couple of years ago, and I seized it. A
good deal of the gear that was here when I was a tyke is still here,
stowed in the attic; for the place has not been often occupied since we
left it. I've refurnished it in a sort of a way. I hope you'll not find
it so bad, Laura; but I'm prepared right now to wilt under your
superior, and, I might say, your inveterate knowledge of interior
decoration."

Blythe looked a bit self-disdainful over what had been rather a long
speech for him, particularly when he observed that Louise had been
waiting to ask him something.

"You will not think me inquisitive, Mr. Blythe?" she prefaced. "But what
you said about the--the carrying away of your people by yellow fever not
only touched me but aroused my curiosity. You were only a child then, of
course. What did you do then? Were you taken in hand by relatives? You
are not annoyed because I ask?"

"Why should I be?" Blythe laughed. "Particularly when the reply is so
simple. I have no relatives--had none then. When my people died I was on
the streets. I believe I hold the record yet for the number of _New
Orleans Picayunes_ and _Times-Democrats_ sold in a given time. Whatever
else I became later, I certainly was a hustling newsboy. Then I came up
here and I've been working ever since. My annals, you see, Miss
Treharne, are distinctly dry."

"But your education?" Louise asked, her eyes alight with an interest
which caused Laura to smile.

"Well," said Blythe, "there are plenty of people living in Princeton
yet, I think, who will tell you, if ever you take the pains to inquire,
that I was an exceptionally successful furnace-tender, tinker,
chore-doer, and all-round roustabout. Oh, yes, I forget. I was a
persuasive peddler of soap and starch before the Lord, too. Likewise, I
acquired the knack of mending umbrellas. Not to overlook the fact that,
odd times, I drove a village hack. At Princeton, in short, I was
virtually everything and anything you can think of except a barber and a
policeman. I shied at those two occupations."

"And you took your degree?" inquired Louise.

"Just squeezed through," replied Blythe.

"Don't you believe anything of the sort, Louise," put in Laura. "He was
valedictorian of his class, and, worse than that, he played full-back
with his eleven, and a sensational full-back too. I ought to know. I am
old enough, woe is me, to have been a woman grown the year John Blythe
contributed a good three-fifths to the Tigers' victory over Yale."

Blythe, flushing embarrassedly, was holding up a protesting hand when
the surrey drew up in front of the clean, scrubbed porch and the
care-taker's wife, a freshly-ginghamed, bright-eyed German woman of
middle age, appeared to receive them. Then, from around the left side of
the house, a terrific yipping began. Two hysterically joyous fox
terriers, scenting their master, came tearing around the porch and
literally leaped upon Blythe. Then they "side-wheeled" in circles over
the lawn, first listing precariously over on starboard legs and then on
port, whimpering in their sheer delight as they tore around. A huge
Angora cat, as they entered the hall, made two bounds of it from the
huge fireplace, from which a pair of smouldering logs diffused a red
glow that contrasted oddly with the streaming sunlight, to rub her
sides, purring almost vociferously as she did so, against Blythe's
trousers legs. Later in the day, she was solemnly to conduct Blythe and
his guests to the cellar for the purpose of exhibiting a litter which
kept the women chained around the basket for nearly an hour.

In the lives of most men and women there are days--usually unanticipated
days--so encompassed, aureoled, by a memorable happiness that, ever
afterward, in hours of retrospection, they mark the beginning or denote
the closing of the eventful periods.

This was such a day for Blythe and Louise and Laura. They rambled
through miles of field and forest, chattering and laughing like children
a-berrying; the women's hair blowing free or tumbling down altogether,
their skirts caught by brambles, their deadliest fears aroused by the
inevitable ruminative cow. They climbed fences, while Blythe pretended
that something had just dropped out of his pocket back of him. They
romped with the dogs, they tossed pebbles at a mark in a garrulous
little just-thawed stream, they even sat down on an inviting little
mound, beneath an old elm, and played at mumblety-peg with Blythe's
jack-knife and quarrelled laughingly over the score of the game.

When they returned to the house in mid-afternoon, they found the German
woman preparing a meal for them. Laura and Louise insisted upon helping
her. In fact, they banished her from the kitchen altogether and did it
all themselves. Louise announced, her features set rather determinedly,
that she was going to make some biscuits, whereupon Blythe, asking her
if she'd learned that in the cooking class at Miss Mayhew's school,
incontinently fled in well-simulated alarm. But he came back to the
spotless kitchen to watch the two women, aproned to the neck, and their
arms bared to the shoulders, breeze about with their preparations. He
was repaid for his inquisitiveness by being swaddled in an apron and set
to peel the potatoes.

The meal was an unqualified success, including the biscuits, which, to
Louise's intense surprise, were superb, although Blythe impertinently
maintained that the German woman really had made them and that Louise
had merely heated them over. The light began to fall as they chatted
around the table, and Blythe, having no great liking for oil lamps,
tossed logs on to the dining-room fireplace for the flickering glow of
their light. Blythe lighted a cigar with his coffee and fell into a
silence of content when Louise and Laura began to hum, very low,
snatches of old songs in unison; Laura in her deep, moving contralto,
with an appealing little "break" in it, and Louise in a clear, sweet
soprano--she had been the honor girl of her school for her singing.

"More," Blythe would give the repressed command when they ceased; and
they would willingly obey. After a while, darkness having quite fallen,
Laura went to another part of the house for her after-dinner cigarette.
She made it a practice not to take her cigarettes in the presence of
quite young women.

Blythe, silent enough now, and his silence tacitly concurred in by
Louise, who also had become preoccupied, under the spell of the
flickering fire-light and her nearness, alone, to a man who made a
strong appeal to her imagination, brought up a deep leather chair before
the logs and motioned to Louise to take it. But she pulled an
old-fashioned three-legged footstool before the fire, and Blythe
himself had to take the chair. Thus they sat silent for a while,
listening to the sputtering of the green logs.

"Louise."

It was the first time he had called her that. But she did not even turn
her head. She was sitting near him on the low stool, chin in palm, her
face illumined by the fire's glow. It was agreeable to hear him call her
Louise. He knew her father. She had been thinking of her father while
she and Laura were singing softly.

"Yes," she said, quietly.

"I am to be your guardian, Louise. Does that please you?"

Blythe, leaning back in the deep chair, did not take his eyes from the
murmuring logs. Louise, chin still in palm, turned to look at him
calmly. Then she gazed back into the fire.

"Yes," she replied, no surprise in her tone. Perhaps, she thought
whimsically, the dancing, leaping flames had hypnotized her. But she was
not surprised. She was, instead, swept by a surge of deep gladness. "You
have a letter from my father?"

"Two," said Blythe. "One of them is for you."

She moved her little stool close to his chair and he handed her the
packet. The letter for her was under cover of the letter addressed to
Blythe. Louise studied, in the fire's glow, the bold, clear address on
the envelope. It was the first time she had ever seen her father's
handwriting. Her eyes became slightly suffused at that thought. Her
letter dropped out of the larger envelope.

"If you care to, read the one addressed to me first, Louise," said
Blythe.

Louise, turning a bit the better to catch the fire's glow, read her
father's letter addressed to Blythe--as far as she could read it. She
was nearly at the end when her unshed tears blinded her. Blythe's hand,
which she then felt, without surprise, softly clasping both of her own
as they rested in her lap, felt very cool and soothing to her.

After a while, nothing having been said by either, she broke the
envelope and read her father's letter to her. It was not a long letter,
but it took her a long time to read it; the tears would blot out the
words, try as she would to crowd them back.

Her father's letter to Blythe was couched in the tone a man assumes in
addressing his lawyer who also is his friend. It bore the postmark of
Lahaina, Island of Maui, Hawaii--George Treharne's sugar plantations
were on that island of the Hawaiian group. The letter concerned Louise
wholly. He was tied to his plantations, owing to labor troubles with
the Japanese, and there was no possibility of his visiting the States
for some time. He had been surprised to hear that Louise had left
school. She was now a woman grown. He had looked forward to the time
when, he hoped, she might feel an impulse to come to him. If that time
had not yet come he trusted implicitly to Blythe to see that she should
be properly bestowed, placed in a fitting environment, and shielded from
baneful influences. He knew that Blythe, the young partner of his old
lawyer, now dead, would not fail him in this. He desired that Blythe
should apply immediately for a court order appointing him his daughter's
legal guardian. He inclosed the necessary papers for the accomplishment
of that purpose. He was eager to see his daughter, and hoped to see her
within a year. In the meantime he confidently committed her to Blythe's
watchful guardianship.

His letter to Louise bespoke a deep and solicitous affection. He told
her of Blythe, adverting to him in terms of praise as a man of exalted
honor ("Poor father! as if I did not know that," thought Louise, when
she came to that passage), and beseeching her to follow Blythe's advice
in all matters in which his large experience would be invaluable to her.
He added that he felt that she would not find Blythe's suggestions
irksome. He inclosed a draft on a Honolulu bank for five thousand
dollars, which would suffice for her needs until she heard from him
again. He hoped to see her within a year. And he was hoping that she
would be glad to see her "always-affectionate father, George Treharne."

At length Louise conquered her tears and turned a fire-illumined smile
upon Blythe.

"I am glad," she said simply. "Even before you told me, this had been
the happiest day of my life. Now it is beautiful. I cannot even begin to
tell you how beautiful it is."

"Then I shall apply for the guardianship, Louise," said Blythe. "I wish
I could say how it pleases me to know you are willing that I should."

"Willing?" said Louise. "Do you know that, aside from Laura, you are the
only--" She had been close to saying "friend;" but she could not leave
her mother out in that way;--"the only adviser I have?"

Blythe, glancing from the logs into her eyes as she said that, longed to
take her in his arms.

Laura, at the piano in the music room on the other side of the hall,
began softly to play the barcarole from "The Tales of Hoffmann." They
listened for a little while, and then Blythe said, smiling gravely:

"As your father says, I shall not be, I hope, an exacting guardian.
There are many things upon which I shall not touch at all. I shall not
affect to believe that you do not know what I mean."

"I know," said Louise.

"Your duty is that to which your heart prompts you--I know that," said
Blythe. "It is not for me, nor for anyone else, to seek to alter your
conception of your duty. All that I ask is that you call upon me in your
time of need, if that time should ever come; and I hope it never shall.
For the rest, nothing is to be changed at my suggestion. The scroll is
in your hands, Louise. Only when you need me--I shall not fail you
then."

"Would it be unworthy," she asked him after a pause, "if I were not to
tell my father--just yet--that I am living with my mother?"

Blythe knew what a hard question that had been for her to ask.

"Not unworthy, or anything like it, I think," he replied promptly, "when
the motive is so pure and fine."

Impulsively she rose and held out both of her hands and he took them in
his.

"Call Laura," she said. "I want to tell her. I want my guardian angel to
meet my guardian."

Laura came into the room as she spoke. She walked over to Louise and
placed an arm around her.

"I knew it, dear," she said to Louise. "John told me last night. That is
why we are over here. He thought, and I agreed with him, that it would
be better to tell you at the close of a happy day. And was there _ever_
such a happy day since the world began?"

Blythe looked at his watch and whistled.

"We've half an hour to make the last New York train tonight, and a
two-mile drive to the station," he said. "If we miss the train we'll
have to stay here all night."

Laura gathered up her skirts and raced for her hat, Louise after her.

"Stay here all night!" gasped Laura. "You are making a glorious
beginning as a guardian, aren't you!"

It was past ten o'clock when Louise, in Laura's car, which had been
waiting at the ferry, reached the house on the Drive, Laura having been
dropped at her apartment. The sheer happiness of the day still absorbed
her. Up to the moment when the car pulled up at the curb she had been
going over and over, since parting with Blythe and Laura, the incidents
of the day that had made it such an oasis of happiness.

But it all disappeared like a suddenly-vanishing mirage when, upon
stepping to the pavement, she saw Langdon Jesse's car drawn up at the
curb.




CHAPTER VII


Jesse's car looming suddenly upon her, instantly dissolved Louise's
happy absorption and aroused within her the foreboding that she was upon
the threshold of something sinister; and the premonition caused her to
become physically and mentally tense as she ascended the steps.

The impact of the hall's stream of light slightly blinded and confused
her as she entered; but she very soon discerned Jesse and Judd standing
before the wide, brassy fireplace. Both were in shaggy automobile coats
and plainly were about to leave the house. Judd, his burnished bald pate
mottledly rosy from the heat of the blazing logs, was standing with his
back to the fire, his hands thrust in the greatcoat pockets, his heavy
under-shot jaw working upon an imaginary cud. Jesse, towering over the
other man, but his own increasing over-bulkiness made more manifest by
his bulging coat of fur, was the first to see Louise, who, with an
inclination of the head, was for passing them to gain the stairs.
Neither Jesse nor Judd intended that this should be. The two had dined
together. The blitheness of their humor, therefore, contained also a
seasoning of carelessness.

Without the least movement of his grotesquely-paunched body, Judd turned
his head sidewise and viewed Louise quizzically through his sharp,
red-rimmed, oddly small eyes.

"Evening--er--daughter," he said to her in an experimental but
sufficiently matter-of-fact tone.

The greeting sounded so incredible that Louise, coming to a sudden halt,
rested her hands on the back of a chair and stared curiously at him
without a word. She felt very cold, in spite of the excessive heat of
the hall; but she was amazed quite beyond the power of speech. While
thus she stood, staring puzzledly at Judd, Jesse faced her, and,
bringing his heels together with a click, made her a low bow accompanied
by a sweeping cross-wise gesture with his cap of fur. It is a dangerous
thing for a man to attempt the grand manner unless he is very sure of
his practice or at least of the indulgence of his gallery. Louise,
startled as she was, could not fail to notice the inadequacy of his
attempt.

"Glad I haven't missed you, after all, Lou--Miss Treharne," said Jesse,
catching himself before he had quite finished addressing her by her
first name. His tone was grossly familiar; and Louise, merely glancing
at him, saw that the question that was always in his eyes when he
looked at her now was made more searching and persistent by his
potations. "I've been dallying a-purpose. I came to offer you the use of
my box for 'Pelleas and Melisande'--it's being done at the Manhattan
tonight for the first time here, of course you know. They're repeating
it Friday night, though. Mary Garden's a dream in it, they say--she's a
dream in any old thing--or hardly anything, when it comes to that," and
he laughed boldly at the suggestiveness of the remark. "The box is yours
for Friday night. May I hope to join----"

Louise, as he spoke, had been steadying herself to make reply. Now she
raised a hand for him to desist. The gesture was simple, but he obeyed
the implied command. Perhaps it was the picture that she made in her
anger that warned him. She stood straight, shoulders back, head up, eyes
gazing unflinchingly into his; a moving figure of womanly dauntlessness,
had there been eyes there thus to appraise her attitude.

"Mr. Jesse," she said in a clear tone, picking her words with a cutting
deliberation, "you are not, I have heard, deficient in intelligence. A
very short time ago you had the hardihood to proffer me the use of one
of your cars. I declined for the same reason that I now repeat in
refusing your proffer of the use of your opera box. There is no
imaginable reason why I should accept such favors at your hands. I told
you that before. And you knew it before I told you. My acquaintanceship
with you is merely casual. But, since you force me to it by disregarding
what I said before, permit me to say now, explicitly and I hope finally,
that I am not conscious of the least desire to become further acquainted
with you."

Judd choked on a gloatful cough. While Louise had been speaking he had
been grinning malevolently at Jesse, the grin saying, as plainly as
words: "Well, I was right, wasn't I? You're properly shrivelled, aren't
you?"

Jesse smiled chagrinedly and, as he imagined, conciliatingly. But he
evaded her direct gaze, and his wholly unconvincing assumption of the
grand manner had quite departed. He was not, however, appreciably
disturbed. Jesse had a habit of discounting such setbacks in advance.
The stock market and women required deft manipulation, he considered,
and his fame as a manipulator was established. The citadel, finally
scaled, would be the more inviting for the difficulty of the
besiegement. He entertained no doubts as to the outcome. In the meantime
Louise could enjoy her schoolgirl heroics. He was not unfamiliar with
that sort of thing. But in time they all sensed the glamour of the
advantages he so well knew how to dangle before them. These thoughts
danced agreeably before Jesse's mental vision even at the moment when
he felt himself, with no sense of degradation, to be the target of
Louise's scorn.

"Well, I am sorry, Miss Treharne, that you still seem to misunderstand
me," said Jesse, attempting the tone of one whose sorrow overtops his
mortification.

"It is because I do understand you that I speak as I do," replied Louise
with perfect self-possession. Judd choked again in the gleefulness of
his vindication and Jesse shot him a malignant glance. Then and there
Jesse began to outline a little plan whereby, by means of "market"
pressure, he calculated that he could promptly and effectually change
Judd's attitude.

"I prefer to believe, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, "that you are
indisposed and that upon reflection you will be sorry that----"

"I am perfectly well," interposed Louise in a tone of cold finality,
"and I shall not be sorry." Then she passed up the stairs to her
mother's apartments.

"Now will you be good!" broke out Judd, chuckling vindictively, when she
had gone. "Say, Jesse, I wonder if you feel so much like a clipped and
trimmed Lothario as you look?"

Jesse, his mask off, growled something inarticulate by way of reply.
Then: "Are you for the club?" he asked Judd. He decided that he might
as well test the strength of the screws upon Judd at once. They went out
together.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Treharne, dressed for a restaurant supper party that was to
assemble at midnight, was reading, with the wistfulness of one debarred,
the "society news" in a chattery and generally wrong weekly publication
when Louise entered her sitting room. She was wonderfully coiffured, and
encased in a _décolletté_ dress that somewhat too liberately exploited
the chisellings of her still milky arms and shoulders. She stiffened
slightly in her chair at the sight of Louise; and the dimplings which
had been creasing her plastic face in her enjoyment of the publication's
malevolent gossip gave way to the expression of peevishness with which
her daughter was becoming all too well acquainted.

"Well, my dear," she started to say as Louise, in whose eyes the embers
of the wrath Jesse's words had aroused still slumbered, "I must say that
you have a cool way of walking off and----"

"No reproaches just now, mother, please," interposed Louise, sinking
wearily into a chair. "I never had a happier day until, returning
here----"

She paused, passing a hand before her eyes. She was loth to enter upon
the topic of Judd and Jesse with her mother. But Mrs. Treharne, looking
at her more closely, saw her perturbation.

"Oh, you met Mr. Judd and Mr. Jesse as you came in?" she asked, a note
of slightly worried curiosity in her tone. "Were they----?" She broke
off. "Men are men, my dear," she resumed, placatingly. "They had been
dining--I noticed that. But of course they said nothing to----"

"Your business adviser," said Louise--she could not bring herself to
mention Judd's name--"greeted me as 'daughter.' I remember now that I
was too much startled to tell him that he must not repeat that."

"Tush, Louise--a slip of the tongue, of course," said Mrs. Treharne,
appeasingly. Privately, however, she already began to contrive the
things she intended to say to Judd on the morrow. "And Mr. Jesse--did
he----"

"Mr. Jesse," interposed Louise, "caught himself as he was about to
address me as Louise. He offered me the use of his box at the opera.
Several days ago--I was too chagrined to tell you--he insisted upon my
accepting the use of one of his automobiles. I hope I made it plain to
him tonight--and I tried hard enough to make it plain to him
before--that there is not the remotest chance that I shall ever accept
his sinister civilities."

"Why 'sinister,' Louise?" put Mrs. Treharne, bridling. "How can you
possibly put such a construction upon it when one of my friends
generously extends to you courtesies that are commonly and with perfect
propriety accepted by----"

Louise sighed wearily and held up a pleading hand.

"Don't ask me such a question--please, mother," she entreated. "You
don't know how the subject revolts me."

"But, my dear," her mother persisted, "what is it that you have against
Mr. Jesse? I am entitled to know."

"I am not sufficiently interested in the man to have anything against
him," replied Louise. "Is it not enough that I loathe him?"

"No, Louise, it is not enough," pronounced her mother, plainly ready for
argument on the subject. "You are too young a woman to be forming
prejudices or leaping to conclusions. What do you know about Mr. Jesse
that has caused you to form such an opinion of him?"

Louise hesitated. Her intimacy with her mother had never been very
great. There had never been any plain talk, or even mother-and-daughter
confidences, between them. The theme as she had said, was revolting to
her. But her mother deliberately chose to remain on that ground. There
was no path around the point her mother dwelt upon. Louise entertained
no thought of evading it.

"Mother," she said, leaning forward in her earnestness, "it is natural
enough, I know, that you still regard me as a child. But, before I
answer your question, are you willing to grant, at least for the time,
that I am a woman?"

"Don't be so unmitigatedly solemn about it, Louise," demurred her
mother, evasively. "My question was simple enough."

"Simple enough to put, but not so simple for me to answer," was Louise's
quiet reply. "But I shall answer it nevertheless. The reason, then, why
I do not intend to have any further contact with Langdon Jesse is that
he is one of the most notorious libertines in New York; a man who
regards women from a single angle--as his prey. Everybody seems to know
that, mother, except you: and you don't know it, do you?" There was a
pathos in the eagerness with which the girl asked the question; it spoke
of a dim hope she yet had that perhaps, after all, her mother did not
know about Langdon Jesse. Her mother's harsh, dodging reply quickly
dashed that hope.

"Who has been telling you such scandalous things, child?" Mrs. Treharne
demanded. "Laura Stedham?"

"You must not ask me that question," replied Louise, quietly firm. "But
if nobody had told me about Langdon Jesse--and I shall not deny that I
was told--I am sure my instinct would have taught me to suspect him of
being--precisely what he is."

Mrs. Treharne shook her head dismally.

"It is exactly as I feared it would be, Louise," she said, sighing
drearily. "You are narrow, restricted, pent-in; you haven't even a
symptom of bigness of view; your horizon is no wider than the room in
which you happen to be. I always feared they would make a prude of you.
Now I see that my forebodings were right."

Louise, very much wrought upon, rose rather unsteadily and walked over
to her mother's chair.

"You repel me a little, mother," she said in a low tone. "It hurts me to
say that: but it is the truth. If I am a prude, then I am unconscious of
it. It may be that I don't know your definition of the word." She paused
and gazed about the room wearily. "If to be a prude," she resumed, "is
to be conscious of the desire and the intention to be an honest woman,
then, mother, I am a prude," her voice breaking a little. "And if one
must be a prude to recoil from the hideous advances of a man like
Langdon Jesse, then again I am a prude."

She had been unfairly placed on the defensive. She had not meant to
wound. But, while her words cut her mother like the impact of thongs,
they did not arouse within her a sense of the humiliation of her
position.

"Louise," she asked, hoarsely, moistening her dry lips, "are you saying
these--these stinging things with the deliberate purpose of reflecting
upon your mother?"

Addressed to anybody else but Louise, the question would have been
absurd in the opening it afforded.

"I should hate to have you think that," replied Louise, flushing hotly
and taking her mother's hands. "You don't think such a thing, do you?"

"I don't know what to think," said her mother, taking the martyred tone,
"when you say such horrid things. I never heard you say such--such
flaying things before. I can't think what is coming over you."

"I am very lonesome, for one thing," said Louise, looking at her mother
through suffused eyes. "I see so little of you. Perhaps I become moody.
But I never mean, never meant, to say anything to hurt you, dear."

"But you see enough, if not too much, of--of others, Louise," put in her
mother, slightly mollified. "You have been with Laura ever since early
this morning?"

"Yes; with Laura--and another," replied Louise, unfailingly candid.

"Another?" said Mrs. Treharne, querulously. "Whom do you mean?"

"Mr. John Blythe," replied Louise, coloring.

"John Blythe?" said her mother, wonderingly. "You were with Laura and
John Blythe? So that is the direction of the wind? Laura is trying
to----" She broke off when she saw the expression of pain on her
daughter's face.

"Please don't say that," said Louise, her face and forehead a vivid
crimson. "I have often met Mr. Blythe at Laura's. I couldn't begin to
tell you how I esteem him. And, mother, he is to be my guardian." She
had meant to tell her mother that at a more fitting time; but, since
Blythe's name had come up, she discerned that there could be no excuse
for a postponement of the revelation.

Mrs. Treharne gazed at her daughter with mouth agape. When she finally
spoke her words were almost inarticulate.

"Your guardian?" she gasped. "John Blythe is to be your guardian? At
whose direction? Upon whose application?"

"My father's, mother."

"But are you sure that you are not being tricked--that----"

"John Blythe is not the man to trick anybody, dear--everybody, of
course, knows that," said Louise, very prompt to a defense in that
quarter. "Moreover, I saw the letters from my father. One of them is to
me. So there is no mistake about it."

"What does your father say in his letter?" asked Mrs. Treharne,
suspiciously. "Does he mention me? say anything to my detriment?"

"Nothing of that sort, mother," replied Louise, disliking exceedingly
the drift of the conversation. "Mr. Blythe's guardianship is to be
largely a matter of form. I--I am glad the arrangement has been made.
There are times when I feel that I need guidance. You are so busy and I
so much dislike to worry you. Often, since I came home, I've found
myself wishing that I had a brother." She stopped, her voice faltering.

Mrs. Treharne started slightly, swept by the thought of how often she
had wished that Louise herself had been a son. Now, for the moment, she
repented that thought; the dignity and strength of her daughter were
making their appeal to her. She had her periods of fairness, and she
could not throttle her consciousness of the wretchedness of Louise's
position under that roof nor subdue the accusing inner voice that held
her solely responsible for it. She trembled with indignation when she
remembered that Judd had dared to address Louise as "daughter." She
raged at herself for not possessing the strength to cast the Judd
incubus from her once and forever. And she ended, as usual, by giving
way to an effusion of dismal tears and by promising herself that "some
time--some day----"

Louise went to bed with a disturbed mind. She was trying not to face
the indubitable fact that her mother was proving herself but a reed to
lean upon. Then her drowsy thoughts wandered to the fire-lit dining-room
of the serene old house in the country in and around which she had spent
a day marked by a sort of placid happiness which she could not quite
analyze; and her last thought, before succumbing to unquiet dreams based
upon the events at the end of the day, were of a rugged, kindly-faced
man quietly watching her as she read her father's letter by the
flickering light of the droning logs.

       *       *       *       *       *

Judd, still chuckling viciously, continued to taunt the rebuked but by
no means cast-down Jesse after the two had got into Jesse's car.

"Not saying much, are you, old top?" he gurgled joyously as the car
throbbed away from the curb. "Well, I don't blame you. Not, of course,
that I didn't give you fair warning. I told you you'd be frozen stiff if
you tried on any of your Don Juanish airs and graces in that quarter.
But don't take it to heart--don't grieve over it. You'll thaw out again
in time. Right now I wouldn't dare take a chance on touching you for
fear one of your arms or something'd drop off. But you'll thaw--you'll
thaw," and he squirmed and wabbled around in his seat in the excess of
his mirth.

Jesse, gnawing on an unlighted cigar as was his wont when temporarily
eclipsed or engaged in blocking out a campaign, listened in silence.
When it becomes the unfailing habit of a man to enjoy the last laugh he
learns to pay little heed to the too-previous chirrupings of those over
whom he feels confident of eventually triumphing. So he permitted Judd
to enjoy himself. When the chuckles of his companion gradually ceased,
however, he said, drily enough:

"To all intents and purposes she's a dependent of yours, isn't she?"

Judd parried the question. He was indifferent enough as to what might
happen to Louise Treharne: he regarded her as an interloper, and he was
disgruntled over her studiously aloof treatment of him. But it had
become a habit with him to parry Jesse's questions since the occasion
when his over-expansiveness in replying to a few seemingly innocent and
unmeditated questions from Jesse had resulted in the sound "market"
trouncing which his one-time pupil had inflicted upon him.

"What the devil difference does it make?" was Judd's reply. "She has
your number all right, and that's all you need to know, isn't it?" and
he chuckled again.

Jesse waited again until Judd's glee had subsided, then resumed.

"She has to look to you to make provision for her needs--clothes, hats,
ribbons, furbelows, that sort of thing--doesn't she?" he inquired with
the coolness of one who does not mean to be rebuffed.

"Oh, forget it," said Judd, a little grumpily now. "Don't try to pin me,
Jesse. I don't spout about these things. She's living under one of my
roofs, is a member of one of my households. And she regards you
as--well, as a considerably-drowned water-bug. Why don't you let it go
at that? There are more women in the world than there are red ants or
railroad ties. Can't you take your medicine--stand for the defeat?"

"Not in this particular case," was Jesse's perfectly frank reply; he
could be frank when there was no possibility of a "come-back." "What's
more, I don't intend to. Just make up your mind to that, will you?"

"Oho!" said Judd, struck by the intentional rawness which Jesse had put
into his last phrase. "That's the tune, is it?"

"That house of yours on the Drive isn't the place for the young woman,"
said Jesse. Judd knew that he wasn't assuming any virtuous strain, but
merely leading up to a point. "You ought to know that--as the father of
a family."

"You're becoming confoundedly erect in your ideas, aren't you?" snorted
Judd. "And I've told you before that I won't have you dabbling in my
private affairs. Just cut out your harpings, in this connection, upon
my family and all of that sort of thing, understand?"

"Damn your private affairs," said Jesse, quietly, but with a note of
meaningfulness in his tone that caused Judd to sit up and take immediate
notice. "I am no more interested in your private affairs than I am in
the transactions of the Congo Missionary Society. But I repeat that
your--er--that Mrs. Treharne's daughter doesn't belong under that
Riverside Drive roof. Do you understand me?"

"No," said Judd, "I don't," nor did he. But he no longer chuckled.

"I think you've told me several times," Jesse went on calmly, "that the
young woman flaunts you?"

Judd made some inarticulate reply which Jesse took for an affirmative.

"That being the case," inquired Jesse, "why do you keep her around the
place?"

"What's your idea--that I should turn her into the street?" asked Judd,
gradually getting a hold on Jesse's thread.

"Oh, she wouldn't be in the street very long," said Jesse with
significant emphasis. "But, since on your own say-so she scarcely even
nods to you, and you are paying the freight, what's the answer? Doesn't
she know that she's dependent upon you?"

"How the devil could she help knowing it?" broke out Judd impatiently.
"She has eyes and what belongs to her by way of brains, I suppose."

"Well," said Jesse, "if she cuts in on your--your game, and is such a
nuisance to you, why don't you exert your authority--the authority of
the provider--and----" He hesitated.

"And what?" inquired Judd, proddingly.

"Make provision for her--not necessarily luxurious provision--under some
other roof?" said Jesse. "In a modest little apartment, for example,
with just the necessaries and that sort of thing. That would alter her
demeanor toward you--and toward others. Once they've enjoyed the gewgaws
of life the other thing is a come-down and they feel the sordid misery
of it."

Judd studied.

"You're a deep sort of a reprobate, Jesse," he said, musingly, after a
pause. "I don't profess to be able to plumb some features of your
scoundrelism, and yet I've never been accused of being uncommonly dense.
How the devil would my planting the young woman in a miserable little
six-by-eight flat help your case?"

"That," coolly replied Jesse, "is my affair; but you exhibit your
denseness, at that, in asking such a fool question. It wouldn't take her
long to begin to pine for the light and laughter and lavishness of life
after she'd had a taste of the miserable little six-by-eight flat as
you call it, wo

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