Chapter II

We drift along the placid stream of Time, complaining of the monotony of the voyage, when already the murmur of rapids which are to try every muscle and thrill every nerve might be heard if we but stilled our peevish notes long enough to listen. A week after the above events a party of four ladies from central Kentucky arrived one evening at the Bluegrass. The register showed them to be mother and daughters; and their gentle manners and soft voices, added to the beauty of the girls, had put the clerk on his mettle, spurring him to an exhibition of his choicest Kentucky gallantry. He had just promised them a large, cool room on the second floor, containing two beds, and, in answer to their laughing, half-ironical request that they might be shown the Congo King, he had assured them that they should be seated at that royal scion's table.

"You certainly are entitled to the privilege," he added blandly, "for his real name is the same as yours."

"Harper?" queried the mother of the pretty trio, with some surprise.

"Yes; Moss Harper."

The four ladies exchanged quick glances.

"Why, our carriage-driver, long before the War, was an old negro named Moss. He had a son named Benjy, who ran away during the War. I don't want to impeach the genealogy of your King, but I wonder--" She stopped, as if recalling that her auditor was a stranger, then added, with a smile: "Anyhow, we _must_ be waited on by him, now."

* * * * *

Moss was aware that the ladies at his table were scanning him with more interest than even his size and legendary history usually evoked, and he was not much surprised, therefore, when the eldest of them said: "Excuse me, please, but is your real name Moss Harper?"

"Yassum," he answered, halting instantly in his employment, as old Benjy had taught him to do, and dumbly waiting the lady's further pleasure.

"Do you know your father's name?"

"Yassum. Ole Benjy."

"Is he still living?"

"Yassum; livin' with me."

The lady's small white hand closed rather quickly on the table-cloth.

"Do you know what county he came from?"

"Yassum. Ole Bubbon; he done live at Hahpeh Hall." Then the lady's lighting eyes encouraged him to volunteer a word or two, contrary to his habit. "The Hahpehs all daid and gone now, though. All killed in the Wah."

One of the girls shot her sisters an amused glance, but Penelope Harper's lips quivered. In a voice which struck Moss as the sweetest he had ever heard, she continued: "I think I shall ask you to come to our room--No. 120--as soon as you are through with your duties here. I have something of interest to tell you."

To Moss, with the childish impatience of his race, it seemed as if he would never escape from the dining-room that night; for when he was on the point of leaving, at a little after nine, he was detailed to help take care of a party of a dozen or more that had just come in. It was, therefore, after ten when he gently tapped on the door of No. 120.

He had been too well bred by his father to sit down; and Mrs. Harper, not wishing to disturb his conception of propriety, though some laxity on the present occasion would have been permissible, let him stand just inside the door, with his greasy old hat clutched awkwardly between his hands and the shrunken sleeves of his butternut suit exposing four or five inches of muscular black wrist.

"In the first place, Moss," she began, after ascertaining a little more of his history, "I want to tell you that the Harpers are not all dead. I am a Harper myself. I am the Miss Pen that old Benjy must have often told you about."

"Not Miss Pen!" exclaimed Moss, with starting eyes, as if beholding an apparition. "Not the one that mah'd Marse Willie Hahpeh?"

"The very same," she assured him, smiling. "And these are my daughters. But Marse Willie is dead; he died a long time ago, during the War."

Verily, it was as if some magician had rung up the curtain on the past--that beautiful past of which his father had told him so much. He listened to Mrs. Harper's story in something like a trance, with his blue-black eyes half lost in reverie. And, thus forgetting himself, his awkwardness passed; his hands fell naturally by his side, his chest came out, his head rose, and he stood before the ladies in all the splendor of physique which Nature had invested him with.

"Now, Moss," Mrs. Harper concluded, "no Harper could ever neglect a descendant of our faithful old Moss, even though his son did run away during the War. We want to take care of you and Benjy. We'll give him a cabin by himself, and we'll give you and your wife another cabin. As fast as you learn the plantation work, you shall be advanced. With your strength and intelligence, I am sure that you can soon be earning good wages, and you will be much happier and better off than you are here. To-morrow afternoon, when you are at home, we'll drive out to see old Benjy, as he is probably too feeble to come here, and you can then tell us what you have decided to do. Meanwhile, to relieve any immediate needs, accept this." And she handed him a ten-dollar bill.

Just how he expressed his thanks, or how he got out of the room, Moss never clearly recalled, for his brain was whirling. But when he found himself in the street, with the cool evening air on his heated brow, he started for home on a run. It was a rather dangerous thing for a black man to do, too, at that hour of the night, in a Southern city, since a policeman was likely to stop him with a tap on the head from a "billy."

But the first thing that stopped Moss was the glowing front of a pawnshop, near the head of Goosefoot Lane. In the window was a brooch which Estelle had paused to gaze at, with covetous eyes, every day for weeks. Moss had looked at it himself a good many times, dreaming rather than hoping to carry it home some day as a surprise for Estelle. Now he had the money, and, without a thought of the prodigality of his course, he entered the shop.

His heavy breathing did not escape the sharp eyes of the Hebrew proprietor, who would not have been at all surprised to see a pursuing policeman heave in sight. But when Moss showed his bill and asked for the brooch, the pawnbroker quickly went forward for the article, and, after taking into consideration his customer's evident hurry, he set a price of five dollars on it. Estelle would have got it for half that sum, but Moss paid the price without a murmur, and then sped on down the Lane, leaving the Hebrew well pleased with the transaction and fully convinced that his customer was a thief.

Estelle was not at home, to Moss' keen disappointment, and, though he took it that she was at the laundry, he woke his father to make sure. Old Benjy, as torpid as a woodchuck in January, was not easily roused; but Moss' repeated shouts and by no means gentle thumps finally brought him to his elbow, blinking dazedly.

"Daddy, Miss Pen's alive! She's at the hotel, and she's foun' us out, and gwine to teck us all back to Hahpeh Hall!"

Old Benjy continued to blink silently, and was evidently of the opinion that he had been dreaming. But when Moss had repeated the news twice or thrice, and the facts had finally filtered through Benjy's thick skull, he let out a yelp that would have shamed a coyote.

"Halleluyer! Halleluyer! Glory to Gawd! Bress de Lam'! Bress de Lam'!"

Moss, after confirming his supposition as to Estelle's whereabouts, did not wait for the broadside of questions which his father was sure to fire at him, but ran out to the stoop. Should he wait for her? Should he pin the brooch on her night-dress, and then, when she discovered it, overwhelm her with the good news? That would be fine, but it was far too severe a tax upon his patience. The next moment he was on the wing again.

No negroes were allowed to enter the laundry by the front door, or, indeed, by any door, unless employed about the place. But Moss stole in through the engine-room at the rear, and managed to make his way as far as the ironing-machines without challenge. Estelle was nowhere in sight, however; and, raising his voice above the clatter, he inquired as to where she was of a mulatto girl whom he had often seen with his wife.

"She done gone to git some medicine fur a haidache," answered the girl.

"How long 'go?"

"Juss li'l' while--not ten minutes."

At this, a wrinkled old negress, who had bent her head forward to catch the colloquy, showed her half-dozen yellow teeth in an evil grin.

"Sonny," she volunteered maliciously, "she been gone two hou's by the clock. The medicine that gull gwine arfter don' come fum no drug-sto'."

Moss had no time for further parley, for the threatening voice of the foreman warned him to depart without loss of time, and he glided swiftly out again; but in the starlight outside he paused, with the mist from the exhaust-pipe drifting into his upturned face.

Some of the joy had gone out of his eyes. Did the old woman mean that Estelle drank? Once or twice, recently, he thought he had detected liquor on her breath, but he had immediately dismissed the suspicion. Drinking, of course, was no heinous offense in his eyes; he daily saw too many white women drinking to hold such an opinion as that. Nevertheless, he himself had forgone liquor for years--old Benjy had preached him many a temperance sermon; and Estelle had allowed him to believe that she, too, never drank.

But now that the accursed maggot of doubt was in his brain, he could not cast it out, and its foul progeny multiplied thick and fast. With feverish haste he made the round of all the drug-stores in the vicinity; but Estelle was not to be seen. Twice he returned to the cabin; but the measured snoring of old Benjy, who had swallowed the good news as a child would a sugar-plum, and then calmly fallen asleep again, was the only sound that greeted his ears.

How quiet the cabin was! A chill solitude already seemed brooding over it, and the familiar objects of the room had taken on a strange appearance. With an unnamed, unnamable fear compressing his heart and making breathing difficult, he took his way back to the head of the Lane. After standing there a moment, straining his eyes in either direction, he began to wander slowly and a little wearily up and down the avenue, scrutinizing every woman who came within his range of vision.

He finally found himself, by mere chance, in front of his landlord's saloon. A passing thought brought his leaden feet to a stand-still. If Estelle _should_ have gone out for a drink, and had had no money,--as he believed to be the case,--would she not have come to Fitzpatrick's? It would have been the last place to which he would have gone to ask credit for a drink, for, in the first place, no negroes were allowed to drink at Fitzpatrick's bar; in the second place, Fitzpatrick was no friend of his. Yet Estelle had gone there once with the rent! Maybe she had gone more than once; maybe----

A sound in the gloomy hallway along one side of the saloon suddenly made his steady-going heart give one great bound. It was Estelle's voice in silly, tipsy laughter, followed by a profane admonition, in a masculine voice, to keep still. Next came the cautious closing of a door and guarded footsteps. As rigid as iron, with his great fists clenched and his nostrils spread like an angry bull's, Moss waited for the pair to appear. But, instead of coming nearer, their footsteps receded until he heard them ascending the stairs at the other end of the hall; then they ceased.

One--two--three--four--five minutes Moss stood there, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, a film over his eyes, a noise like rushing waters in his ears. His sensations were very similar to those he had felt when a careless carpenter had once dropped an oak two-by-four on his head from the second story of a building; and now, as then, he automatically raised his hand to his scalp.

But at last he came out of the curious obsession; he saw the twinkling arc-lights, heard the humming of the trolley-cars, and was conscious of people passing to and fro. With a strange smile, he took the packet containing the brooch from his pocket, slowly unwrapped it, and dropped the trinket to the sidewalk, after which he ground it under his heel. Then he crossed the street to a negro saloon--that is, a saloon for negroes, run by a white man. He poured himself a big drink. The villainous liquor trickled pleasantly through his interior, and he immediately ordered a second drink--then a third--then a fourth. This time the bartender, after an uneasy glance at the herculean shoulders and muddy eyes of his patron, substituted a weaker mixture for the fiery stuff he had been setting out. He also shifted a revolver beneath the bar into a slightly handier position.

But Moss walked quietly out and recrossed the street, with no hint of unsteadiness in his gait, in spite of his unusual potations. He softly entered Fitzpatrick's hallway, and in the dark recess behind the stairs he took his stand--a silent, grim, fearsome statue of obsidian hue and almost heroic size.

He waited for what seemed hours; but, queerly enough, he was not impatient, nor was he in the least excited. Occasionally a policeman sauntered past the entrance; at intervals a trolley-car thundered by; the bartender of the saloon slammed and locked the back door. Finally, a tower clock began to boom out the hour, and Moss, in the absence of anything else to do, counted the strokes.

Only twelve! He would have guessed that it was at least two o'clock. Then, having counted to twelve without much effort, he began to count his fingers over and over, to see how far he could go. At thirty-nine, being a little uncertain of the next number, he paused. During the pause he heard the swish of a skirt in the hall above. They were coming!

A woman's agonized shriek, a man's curse, a chance shot into the dark from his ever-ready revolver, a scuffle,--a very brief scuffle,--and then all was as still as before. Estelle had told her last lie; Fitzpatrick had dispensed his last drink.

Moss walked forward to the doorway, waited quietly until an officer who had heard the report of the revolver came running up, and then surrendered himself.

"I done kill 'em," he explained laconically.

Ten minutes later, in heavy manacles, he stepped down from the police ambulance at the entrance to the jail--a huge brick building, covering an entire block, with its barred windows rising story on story, a somber architectural jest at Civilization.

* * * * *

Some two months later, the governor of Kentucky was standing with his hands in his pockets at the window of his office, in the quaint capitol building at Frankfort, and gazing idly at the tablet in the sidewalk which marks the spot where William Goebel fell, the victim of an assassin's ball. He turned, at the rustle of a lady's skirts.

"Why, Pen! What angel sent you?" he exclaimed, pushing forward his easiest chair. "Pen, do you know you're just in time to save the gov'neh of Kentucky from a spell of the blues? It's a fact. I read a book last night, by a man named Buckle, about civilization and that sawt of thing, and the pesky thoughts stick to me like a nightmare. I was standin' by that window theh, just reviewin' the events which have taken place in our deah old State in the past quarter of a century, and I was askin' myself which way we were headed--up or down."

"Up, surely," answered Mrs. Harper. She looked at him with that candor and seriousness which is permitted only between old friends, and then continued: "Wilbur, I have a problem, too, and I want you to help me solve it. I want you to pardon a negro who was convicted last June in Louisville of a double murder, and who is now here in the penitentiary. He is the son of that Benjy of ours that ran off during the War, and the grandson of our old Moss. You remember them both. I never knew either of them to be guilty of a vicious act, and this boy--he's only twenty-five--killed his wife and the white man who had debauched her."

The governor sat playing with his pen-knife for some time after she had finished her story.

"I wish this Moss of yours had killed only the man, Pen," he observed. "That's what a white man would have done, and everybody would have applauded. But, then, a niggeh ain't a white man--never will be a white man. Pen, being gov'neh is a terribly responsible job. Now, you, for instance, ask me, one man, to set aside the findings of twelve men appointed by the people to determine this niggeh's guilt. Yet the pahdoning power was certainly given me for a purpose, and I intend to use it when I see fit. I'll take your word for it, Pen, that Moss is a good niggeh; I'll look into his case, and if you are not mistaken as to the facts, and will take him out to the Hall and keep him theh, I'll pahdon him. But I can't do it right away. In the fust place, a little punishment will do him good. In the second place, theh's politics. Politics, Pen! To pahdon that niggeh now, my dear Pen, while the events are still so fresh, would make an awful row. The press would froth at the mouth. But in a year, mind you, or eighteen months at the most, I'll turn him loose."

"Oh, Wilbur, a year is such a long time!" exclaimed Mrs. Harper plaintively.

"Is it, Pen,--to you--at fifty-five?" he asked whimsically.

"Alas, no, not to _me_! I'm not in a cell. But I understand your position, Wilbur, and I'll submit to the inevitable. It is so much better than it might have been, and I am very, very grateful. But can I not intimate the good news to him, just to keep up his courage?"

"If you do it very diplomatically, Pen, and do not mention me."

Then, after she had left, he sat chuckling in his chair at the idea of asking a woman to be diplomatic under such circumstances.

The warden, after reading the Governor's note, turned to a guard. "Put a coat on 1610 and bring him to the reception-room."

"If you please," interposed Mrs. Harper, "I should like to see him just as he is, at his work."

She followed her conductor through the stifling prison-yard, cut off by the encircling hills from every current of air. On the hill-side, where the convicts were breaking stone, it seemed even hotter, the oven-like breath of the dog-day sun rebounding into one's face in almost palpable pulsations. Moss was one of a gang of fifty. He was naked to the waist, and his broad, sweaty back glistened in the sunlight like the skin of a porpoise; yet, in spite of the heat, his sledge rose and fell with the regularity of machinery.

"Has he given you any trouble?" asked Mrs. Harper of the guard.

"No'm. He ain't that kind. He's the kind that gits gloomy and either dies or goes nutty. But after a year or two we'll probably make a trusty of him, and then he'll be happier. Murderers generally make the best trusties."

When Mrs. Harper, after going forward a few steps alone, with a quickened pulse, spoke his name, Moss' sledge hung in mid-air, and he hearkened without looking up, as if doubting his ears. It was not until she repeated his name that he turned toward her. His face was neither bitter nor vindictive, but dull, oh, unutterably dull, as if he had said farewell forever to hope. He did not speak--to speak was against the rules. He did not even smile, but simply touched the brim of his wool hat.

Mrs. Harper, with a catch in her breath, stepped still nearer.

"Moss, I remain your friend," she began tremulously. "Benjy is with us, and we are taking the best care of him. And, listen, Moss! This is what I came to tell you. I am authorized to say, positively, by a power that is supreme, that, if your behavior is good, your detention here will not be more than eighteen months, and I hope only twelve. You can stand the work that long, can't you, knowing that we are waiting for you, ready to give you a home?"

Still his expression did not change, and still he did not speak.

"Don't you--don't you understand, Moss?" she asked, with quivering lips, fearful that his mind had already been shocked.

His slow words then came:

"Yassum, I kin stan' it. I could stan' it foreveh. But _she's_ daid," he cried hoarsely. "I kill her--I choke her--with that han'!" thrusting out the member. "The same han' she used to put her li'l' han's roun' and hole so tight--same han' I used to pat her cheek with--same han'--" A shudder passed over his huge form until his teeth chattered.

"Oh, I know it's hard!" exclaimed the tender woman, suffering only less than he. "You have sinned, and you must do penance. But we've all sinned, and all done penance, and yet happiness comes again. Believe me, Moss, some day you'll be happy again. Be brave, and one month from to-day I'll be here to see you again. Meanwhile, can I do anything for you--take any word to Benjy?"

His lusterless eyes seemed to brighten a little.

"Mis' Pen, will you sot up a li'l' tombstone on her grave? Juss a li'l' one, so I kin fine it some day, when I gits out?"

And Penelope, with blinding eyes, promised.

AN AMERICAN MASTER OF LANDSCAPE

BY

T. M. CLELAND

A striking reversal of attitude may be noticed to-day toward innovations in the field of art. Time was, we are told by the biographers of the Old Masters, when the painter who dared to step beyond the pale of conventions current in his day, suffered the neglect and bitter scorn of his contemporaries. From the earliest period of artistic endeavor, the innovator has been on the defensive; whereas the cardinal sin in the modern artist is rather the _failure_ to innovate or to startle us by some new form of disregard for the principles established by tradition. In the place of knowledge and patient scholarship, we find sophistication and a restless, conscious craving to produce an effect sufficiently startling to command the instant attention of a busy world. In the art of landscape painting particularly this desire to be effective at any cost has led many of the younger generation of artists to adopt for themselves hastily formed theories regarding the phenomena of light and air and to devote their lives to these, forgetting all else.

The result of all this is a modern school of landscape, the aims of which seem strangely more allied to scientific investigation than to artistic study, and a class of pictures which expound, frequently with great skill, the theories upon which they are accomplished; but which are rarely intelligible to any one not directly concerned with the study of art.

So it is with some sense of relief that we may turn our attention upon the achievements of an artist like Thomas R. Manley, whose drawings are reproduced here, not that they may be the subject of a written discourse, but that of themselves they may give pleasure to a wider public than it has hitherto been their fortune to command. They are the product of a quiet and orderly development carried on outside the clamor of the modern movement, simple masterpieces of landscape drawing as it has been practised since the days of Claude Lorrain. They present no "theory" upon which we may base a philosophical discussion, and there is nothing "new" about them at all beyond a simple technical invention of the artist's, whereby his line is rendered more soft and pliable than by the ordinary mediums of crayon or pencil. What they do possess, however, and to a high degree, is the evidence of a mastery of the technique of design plus a finely trained intelligence and feeling. This technical mastery of design is perhaps the rarest of accomplishments at the present day, because it is the most difficult to acquire and makes too great a demand upon patience. And yet it is this which should and does satisfy most directly the unconscious esthetic sense in us all; for who cannot experience some inward pleasure in the form and movement of the hills and trees as they are expressed to us in these drawings? It is not essential to our enjoyment of these things that we should ourselves have knowledge of the technical means whereby they are conveyed; but it is these studied accomplishments which we are enjoying nevertheless; because through them our own sense of harmony is aroused. Let us note, for instance, the character of the lines used to represent the foliage in the first drawing reproduced, and see with what beautiful, rythmic precision they produce at one and the same time the required tone and the movement of the thing represented. And again, in the trunks of the trees how fully the firm lines record the upward growth and the vicissitudes of weather suffered in their struggles to attain the majestic heights to which they rise. This method of drawing, in which light and shade is produced by lines which at the same time follow the form and movement of the objects represented, is perhaps the oldest and most conventional; but in the hands of a master like Mr. Manley it is more fully expressive and beautiful in its results than any other.

OF

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

BY

THOMAS R. MANLEY]

If to dwell upon points as technical as this seems a contradiction to the statement already made, to the effect that these reproductions are presented for what pleasure they may give the layman, it should be said that it is for the reason that such technicalities as are pointed out may well be within the understanding of all intelligent persons and that their elucidation may assist greatly toward a fuller appreciation of the more intellectual merits. And if we fail to consider sufficiently here those more poetic qualities and to attempt some description of the meanings and sensations conveyed to us by the pictures themselves, it will be because it seems that these are matters best left to the individual observer. This is what might be called the "literary" side of pictures, and one upon which art criticism has come too largely to dwell. If, on the other hand, the discussion of pictures were content to confine itself to the pointing out of what constitutes the "art" of the work, might we not derive each for himself a more intimate pleasure in undisturbed enjoyment of those intellectual conceptions, which, though produced by the same picture, are, in no two of us, precisely alike?

There are represented in the four drawings here selected (from a collection so interesting that any selection at all was difficult) several phases of the artist's ability, each so well demonstrated that it is scarcely possible to choose between them. This versatility of mood is a noteworthy evidence in itself of the well grounded mastery of the artist and of his ability to deal with nature at all points. It is, in other words, no mere trick or specialty which he has learned as one might pick out note for note and learn by heart a tune upon the piano; but the work of a hand and eye and mind turned in perfect accord, like a single instrument capable of an infinite range of expression.

In the first of the drawings, that of the piece of woodland through which a path winds off to where it is lost to view among the trees, carrying our imagination with it to the contemplation of scenes still farther on, we find virtues of a more uncommon type than in the others. The large nobility--the _monumental_ quality--is an aspect of nature wholly out of fashion in our day. The firm bed of earth we can feel under our feet with a sense that it is good to stand upon, and the fine pattern of trees and clouds swayed in common movement stirs one with that martial sense of activity, that vitality of impulse which recalls the memory of some high-winded, keen-aired autumn day. We have considered already the spirited and skilful drawing of the trees in this picture; but it is difficult to turn from it without again noting some of those qualities of line which are particularly well displayed in these parts of the composition. To render those long, bare, sinuous stems, growing upward with their roots unmistakably planted in the ground and not so that they have the appearance of hanging down from the clouds, is a feat of no small difficulty, to judge from the frequent instances one meets with of failure in this regard. This well established feeling of the growth from the ground upward of the trunks of the trees and the springing from the branches outward of the foliage, this complete and harmonious development of the whole structure from the seed, as it were, is the product of an exhaustive study, in all of its stages, of the life and characteristics of the tree itself.

We are confronted in the second drawing with a striking contrast to the first, in that the merits of vigorous and harmoniously balanced line and form are supplanted by the more tender effects of atmosphere, and the vigorous stroke becomes gentle in its handling of the delicate trees worn by the winds and but half seen through the uncertain twilight. Here, perhaps, the man is more in evidence than the draftsman, and the sensitive and sympathetic spirit of the artist seems abstracted for a time from the more tangible qualities which are the chief glory of the former work. But like the first drawing it possesses a carefully built up unity of sentiment and notes no point in the scene not concerned with the impression of loneliness and neglect it seems intended to convey.

The third and fourth drawings are more remarkable for skilled and accomplished draftsmanship than for the expression of any distinctive feature in the varying moods of nature. Our delight in them comes more from the beautiful precision of aim whereby a single stroke is made to record a number of interesting facts at the same time. In the drawing of the barn and shed over-topped by a rugged tree and with a middle ground filled by lively detail, we are reminded of the great masters of etching in the clever abbreviation of each of those details and the manner in which they are grouped or merged one into the other. And then, in the last one, note the contour of the earth, how well it is rendered by that cleverly foreshortened winding line of half obliterated roadway leading up the hill and into the fresh mass of foliage which crowns it. This ability to draw the solid ground so that it appears solid is a rare gift in any draftsman, and it may well be taken as an evidence of the fullness of his talent and training.

Like Constable, Mr. Manley has been content to draw his inspiration from the small section of the world in which circumstances have placed him, the quiet New Jersey country where Inness worked out for himself the distinguished place his name holds among American landscape painters. These drawings by no means represent the full range of Mr. Manley's activities, for he has won high esteem as a painter and an etcher and holds a position of importance as a miniaturist; but they are, perhaps, the things in which his rarest talents are displayed, as they are also the closest to his own pleasure in his art. They are the pastimes of an uncommonly sincere and scholarly master who shows integrity in play as well as in work, and who has carried on his career with an earnestness and a humility and modesty of character which all but deprived us of any sight of his achievements at all.

THE HOUSE OF MUSIC

BY

GERTRUDE HALL

One elating, blue and white April morning saw a cheerful company of six assembling in a railroad-station waiting-room. There were the manager of the tour, Duprez--gray-haired in comparative youth, at once care-worn and accommodating looking--the foreign stamp on him not entirely obliterated by the stamp of the country; and his wife, the popular Pearl Wharton-Duprez, whose habit of facing the world as an audience must have found its way into her features; she was recognizable at sight for a singer. Her brilliant face, while not precluding the possibility of a heart, suggested less remotely a temper.

There was one Milen Odiesky, gripping a black violin-box; who listened to a hilarious conversation he but half understood, with a fixed smile, revealing a marked division between his two broad, white front teeth,--disagreeable, for some reason, though he might pass for handsome in a dark, hairy, Oriental way.

Then there was one who at first glance looked in the group as if he must be an acquaintance come to see them off. He was tall and proportionately broad, with stalwart shoulders, a deep chest, and a big neck; superlatively well groomed and dressed. The gloss of his silk hat was not broken by the wilfulness of one hair. He carried himself a trifle more than erect, and swept his limited horizon with a calm, kingly eye. His face was close-shaven, a smooth coppery rose, shading easily into the color of his close-cropped hair. His features were of the rather thick, round, good-natured type, and time was beginning to divide up his face into heavier masses than occur in the forties; but these facts did not prevent his presence on the whole from impressing an observer with the sense that he looked at something really very fine. This was Bronson, whose name on the program would occupy the most room: the great Bronson, Anthony, the tenor of long sustained fame--sustained, indeed, so long that these appearances in parts that knew him only by that fame had now been projected.

Then there was a little plump woman, the one who kept the others laughing; and she carried, besides what one is accustomed to see on the arms of travelers, all the things she had forgotten to put into her trunk; among which were an alarm-clock, a sponge-bag, a pink flannel dressing-sacque, and a little image of the Virgin. She bubbled on, in a voice as impossible to forget or mistake for another's as her face; which face, however, was not pretty, but so faithfully reflected a nature as to be memorable for its want of all malice, concealment, or suspicion. It was not that her features were child-like which accounted for her face bringing to mind a child's, but that it shared some quality inclining one on shortest acquaintance, without fear of rebuff, to treat its winsome, unsevere, uncritical owner familiarly and affectionately. She was not pretty, but certainly her dark-edged, misty, pale blue eyes, with their capacity in the same measure for humor and sentiment, under eyebrows sympathetically working with her thoughts, and lids stained a tender bistre, had an attaching sweetness; and the clear spaces of her face, the forehead and temples, something cool and rare, like the stamp of talent; while just beside her ear, where a faint lock of silken black hung an inch or so down a soft, sallow cheek, was a spot creating an instant desire to kiss it. This was Miss Nevers, the pianiste; Nevers, they briefly called her in speaking of her, pronouncing the name like an English one; Marie-Aimée they called her in speaking to her, all excepting Odiesky, who did not yet know her well enough; except, too, the sixth member of the party, who could never take it into his head to do so. The latter was a homely, thin man, neither young nor old, of the name of Snell, who was engaged to play common accompaniments, and tune the pianos. He stood near the others, but only ventured a smile where they laughed.

Yet he with the rest, as they trooped to the train, was conscious of a lift to his spirits. The tour was a turning the back upon the old and known. It had the charm of beginnings; it opened to life, with this new combination, new possibilities. Hard work and wearing travel were a certainty in the prospect, but it showed nevertheless like a holiday, enlivened by daily change of scene, faces, food.

Beside these general justifications of a reasonable elation on starting, there was excuse for the festive jollity which made people turn to look after our friends as they progressed down the platform--the stately Bronson now carrying a bulging rubber sponge-bag, impossible to conceal--in the brilliant artistic auspices under which these musical peregrinations were undertaken, and the discovery, now that the artists were come together _en troupe_, that they severally brought elements promising uncommon liveliness and fun.

* * * * *

About five years had passed since the laurel-laden return of the Duprez Concert Company, when Marie-Aimée one morning, rather earlier than it is customary to make a call, rang the door-bell of a certain large impressive house.

Whether the explanations were hurry in dressing or absence of mind, she looked, on this occasion, somewhat as if her clothes, as the saying is, had been thrown at her. The velvet of her little bonnet needed brushing; and her little gloves, alas, mending. She wore no veil, and wisps of her hair had been blown on end. But this effect of disorder culminated in her face itself, where the colors were out of their places; her cheeks being pale, her poor small nose and her eyelids red. She had grown stouter since our last sight of her, and on this day was carrying herself so without pride or heed as to look fairly round-shouldered.

As she stood waiting, she must have forgotten that she was in a public street, or else felt bad beyond caring; two or three times she openly mopped her eyes. When, however, she faced the tall butler who opened the door, she appeared to have nothing worse the matter with her than a bad head-cold. She asked if Miss Cheriton were in, gave her card, and was shown into a vast hushed drawing-room. There, as soon as she had been left alone, she looked at herself in the mirror; after which she chose a seat with its back to the windows. She had occupied this but a moment, when, lest the thoughts stealing back upon her should drive her again to tears, she crossed over to the grand-piano glimmering in the half-light with liquid reflections of gilt moldings, brocade, and palms. She lifted the lid to peer at the name of the maker, and tried its tone with a scarce audible chord. Then she took up piece after piece of the music in the rack, questioning it as to Miss Cheriton's title to her high reputation as an amateur pianist.

On hearing a rustle, she hurriedly laid down the music, and got up, her heart rushing. Miss Cheriton had shaken hands, with expressions of pleasure in making her acquaintance, had offered her a seat, and taken one, before Marie-Aimée had been able to do more than clear her throat.

Miss Cheriton had allotted her a seat well in the lights; her curiosity about this caller could do no less; wherefore Marie-Aimée's reddened eyes at first refused a square encounter. But shortly, while Miss Cheriton was forcing a dullish conversation, Marie-Aimée forgot herself, and looked Miss Cheriton in the face; full as interested as she in the looks of the other at close range.

Marie-Aimée saw a well-grown young woman of eight or nine and twenty; faultlessly dressed in a fawn colored cloth matching her perfectly arranged abundant hair. Her face was entirely fine, if a little cold. She gave an impression of great self-poise; she could be imagined to have always thought and decided for herself, and had the fortune to see everything go as she wished, which no doubt she laid to the firm and just management she looked so capable of exercising. She had a beautiful calm complexion and calm dark-blue eyes, which weighed you thoughtfully, and would with difficulty, you fancied, alter their conclusions about you. But at least, Marie-Aimée felt with relief and hope, they were windows into a mind where there was room to breathe.

She began abruptly, in a suggestive pause occurring in Miss Cheriton's small talk, "You must be wondering what brought me."

The expression of Miss Cheriton's face, her only answer to this, signified that though she hoped she had not seemed to be wondering rudely, she would in effect be pleased to know.

Marie-Aimée picked at her glove. "It is this. I was told that I had been making mischief. And I came, wishing if possible to remedy it."

Miss Cheriton's eyebrows moved upward just enough to start a ripple in the beautiful smoothness of her forehead, and she waited, her eyes inquiring of Miss Nevers' troubled face; in their depths had flashed a prevision of what might be coming.

"I know I talk a dreadful lot," Marie-Aimée burst forth in disgust, "I tell everything I know. I can't keep to myself even stories that are against myself. Whatever is on my heart, I say it. I have been making a dreadful fool of myself--which is bad enough, but I feel worse about having given annoyance to others.... Mr. Bronson came to see me yesterday evening."

She paused, as after a piece of news. Miss Cheriton waited in silence, her face expressing nothing beyond polite attention.

"And he said that my doing as I have been doing made a lot of gossip, which inevitably reached you, and was calculated to give you a mistaken impression of our relations in the past----" Marie-Aimée's voice stuck.

After a moment, "Please, please, don't be distressed," murmured Miss Cheriton; and as if her uneasiness at the sight of tears had made her restless, left her seat, and went to stand beside the mantle-piece, leaning on it with one elbow, ornaments at choice within reach, to pick up and play with.

Marie-Aimée laughed through a sob. "You see? Was there ever such a fool? And this is the way I have been ever since I heard of his engagement. But I want you to understand, Miss Cheriton, that _that's just me_. How can he help it, unhappy man, if I am made this way? I have cried like a pump. I have cried upon the shoulder of every one who would stand it. But I had no right, no possible right, to lament in the highways like that. It was only--when my heart was full, I let it run over. But I never in the least meant it as a reproach to anyone,--any more, put it this way, than a sunflower going draggled and crazy at sunset. But he told me last night I made him ridiculous. Oh, he was gentle. For all that, the things he said troubled me horribly; and I made up my mind, after he had left, to come directly to you and explain, so that if reports have vexed you, you should not mind them after this."

Miss Cheriton said quietly, not looking at Marie-Aimée, but at an ivory Chinaman she held: "It is not necessary, Miss Nevers. I did indeed hear something, but I did not give it much thought."

Upon which Marie-Aimée, as if these words had contained all the encouragement necessary, proceeded eagerly, "We never, never were engaged. You will believe me, whatever you may hear. We merely have been friends for years. I had known him slightly a long time already, when we went on a tour together, with Madame Wharton-Duprez. It was then we became such chums.... Mercy on me, that tour! Shall I ever forget it? Will any of us?" She smiled, with a sudden drenched reflection of sunshine on her tear-bedabbled face.

"I know!" Miss Cheriton smiled too. "Mr. Bronson has spoken of it to me."

"Has he?" asked Marie-Aimée, brightening still further, rainbow-like, and immediately at greater ease with Miss Cheriton, from a responsiveness she felt in her smile when the ever fertile subject of the tour was broached, dear in its time to Anthony Bronson's heart. "That's good. For it will in part explain.... Don't you agree with me that laughing together makes a stronger bond than even weeping? Well, on that tour, what we did best and chiefly, was to laugh. Did he ever tell you----" She dropped her voice like a person having something good to relate, and fun played over her face in ripples, "the adventure of the water-melon? Yes, of course! I suppose he has told you everything. And the adventure of the face-wash and the curling-irons? And the night of the great thunderstorm? Oh, make him tell you that one. It is incredible, the number of things, and the description of things, that happened to us in those six months. It was as if we had been a sort of lightening-rod attracting all the incongruous, ludicrous, delicious happenings that should have been distributed over the country. Or else, it is that we were in a disposition of mind to find everything funny. Of course, it may have been that. But still--imagine our arriving once at a little place where we had never been heard of. There is a mistake. And no one expects us. And there is no hotel. And it ends in our being obliged to sleep in the empty jail, we women, a dovecote of a jail, with just two wee cells; oh, slumbers of sweetness and safety, after our many nights in strange hostelries. No need for once to look under the bed for burglars; and the men in a barn. Odiesky didn't get the hayseed out of his hair that season. And imagine--imagine having along with you a man who has a nightmare every time he drops off to sleep. A poor Mr. Snell who went with us was like that, and we used to run into one another in the lobbies, in curl-papers, at dead of night, flying to knock him up, he made such awful, such blood-curdling sounds, which could be heard all over the hotel. It is unkind to laugh at an infirmity, but the sounds he made, could you have heard them, would excuse me to you. And imagine--but try to--imagine the six of us, six people who feel themselves not a little famous, going fourteen miles in a single-seated wagon, that, or miss our connection, and complications without end. I don't believe I stopped laughing the whole way. You see it? We two, the grace and beauty of the party, enthroned upon the laps of _ces messieurs_--no other way, no other way possible, none. Wharton-Duprez in the arms of her own husband; and Odiesky astride the horse, postilion, having to drive; and poor little Snell on the floor with his knees over the dash-board; and the danger at any moment of the wagon breaking down----" She pieced out that fourteen-mile long ecstasy of merriment with more of a singularly rich, unaffected laugh, in the midst of which her face fell blankly serious, and she held up, as if she had never seen it before, the hand which in the heat of her description she had been waving.

"Will you look at my glove?" she said; promptly closing which parenthesis she continued, "As I was saying, it may have been that circumstances really justified us, or our mood, which was exceptional. For myself, I never enjoyed myself so much. Oh, I was impressionable then, and ready to be pleased. Every day a new place, every night a new triumph. It was Mr. Bronson's triumph, but his glory fell upon us all. We lived in an atmosphere of success; and people were so nice to us, we were entertained everywhere like king and court. It was then, you see, when we were together from morning until night, we grew to know each other so well. And, you know him, you know how kind he would be to a little person traveling as I was doing; kind does not express it, and thoughtful and considerate. And you know the charming companion that he is, even-tempered, easy-going, good fellow. And in traveling like that you know the thousand little services a man can render you, and, among artists, the good turns. He, you will have discovered, has not a touch of that queer jealousy so common among artists.

"But there was even more than all that. Before the end of our engagement, Wharton-Duprez had taken the most cattish dislike to me; I have never known why. And everything that woman could do to make things uncomfortable for me she took pains to do, even, will you believe it, contriving that my luggage should be left behind, and I forced to appear on the stage in the filthiest little coal-begrimed traveling-suit--at the fag end of the season, you understand. Ferdinand, her husband, did not dare to say a word. It would have been past endurance for me then, had it not been for Mr. Bronson's invariably showing himself my friend, and keeping her within limits. I had reason to be grateful to him, you see. I should have had to be a monster not to become devoted to him. You can put yourself in my place, can't you? And then, add to everything else his singing. Never, never, never, to me, has there been anything like it."

Miss Cheriton bowed her head, slowly, in agreement.

"_If with all your heart ye truly seek me_," murmured Marie-Aimée, looking as if she listened to a voice singing in her memory.

"_In manly worth and honor clad_," murmured the other, likewise.

"It opens a door, doesn't it," Marie-Aimée spoke low, as if they had entered a church, "into a world where it is all beautiful, calm, eternal--the only world--where whoever breathes its air must worship and must love; just his mere voice, when it is what I call his ballad-voice, doesn't it contain all romance? Moonlight, boats on lonely seas, lattices with roses; and when it is his anthem-voice, it contains, doesn't it, all aspiration, cathedrals, matin-bells, archangel's choirs----"

Again Miss Cheriton nodded dreamily; then, raising her eyes, which in listening she had dropped, forgot the one of whom they were speaking for interest in the face of the speaker, who looked ahead with eyes which clearly did not see what was before them, but the cloudy white pillars, one might have surmised, and dim glimmering splendors of some temple of Music and Love.

Marie-Aimée swept her hand across her forehead. "And I," she continued, raising her voice in a tone of plaintive exculpation, "I was born mad for music! A voice has power over me like a spell. And I am flesh and blood! And so----" she ended feebly, "do you wonder?"

Silence, while Marie-Aimée turned her face wholly from the light. But even while she made application of her little damp pocket-handkerchief, a stealing sense warmed her in all her woe that she had somehow made a friend of Miss Cheriton. The exemplary piece of tranquility there felt drawn to her; something communicated this unimaginable fact directly to her heart; and it melted her, as the hint of kindness always did, and inclined her now verily to make no more circumstances about it, but show her whole heart in abandoned frankness, repeating just once more the fault she was here to confess. But simultaneously with gratitude for that liking, rose in Marie-Aimée the need to repay it greatly; whence a caution to herself to proceed more than ever guardedly with the truth.

"And after we were come back," she took up again, "we naturally continued seeing a great deal of each other. I won't say we would not have done so from choice, but it was inevitable, too. Our profession threw us together, concerts, rehearsals; he used, besides, to bring every bit of new music to learn at my house, with me to play it over for him. And so on, for years; and to me, I tell it frankly, that light-hearted, unconventional comradeship of ours gave its principal charm to life. In the last year I have seen less of him, and latterly very much less. He was not singing much, he was under treatment for his throat, and often out of town by his doctor's directions. I missed him, but I am busy from morning until night, the week round, work and a thousand things. I thought nothing of it. Do old friends need to see each other constantly to be assured nothing is changed? Then I hear of his engagement to you. I am thunderstruck! For never, never, never, had I dreamed of such a possibility. You see my folly? He was not bound to me by any promise, or by what you would call a moral obligation. There never had been any question of our marrying, not even at the beginning when we first got home, not even in my own mind--" Native honesty and poor human nature would not permit but that she should add, though in a tone that made little of it--"any definite, immediate, formulated idea of it. My poor sweet mother was living then, a sufficient reason against it. And when she was no longer there, all had got into a groove, and remained as it had been. And it seemed natural. I have nothing but what I earn. He was having bothers about money. He put all his in a mine, you know. We called ourselves poor working-people. But still! There it is! That's where you discover my bird's brain. That's me! The way I am! I flatly refused to believe it, and when I saw him again, I did not even ask. But I daresay I looked as he had never seen me look. Then he himself told me of it, as one tells such a thing to an old friend. And the past stood suddenly in a new light; and I saw clearly, in a flash, that just this and nothing else was to have been expected. And I knew that it was altogether the most fortunate thing that could happen to him; and, after the first, I acquiesced.

"Only, I followed my nature in making the outcry of one who has received a wound and is bleeding dreadfully. I have no dignity, Miss Cheriton. Discretion and I have never so much as been acquainted. I go around with my heart in my face, I forget my face, you see, in thinking of what has befallen me. And I run into some sympathetic woman who is fond of me, and she cries out 'Marie-Aimée, my poor child, what is the matter with you?' and I bend feebly upon her shoulder, and tell. And then I suppose she goes off and tells too. Hence, you see, the ground of Mr. Bronson's remonstrances with me yesterday evening. And in consequence of them I am here. I didn't know what else to do, Miss Cheriton. I hope it was best. And you do see, don't you? I have made the whole thing plain? I have made it all right? You know how he is, and now you have seen how I am, the inference will be simple! And I beg both your pardons. Oh, he is right, he is quite right, to feel put out with me, but not--" she forced a little watery smile, as she rose to take her leave--"not because it has ever seemed so terribly to a great singer's discredit that, when the whole world goes after him, among them should be a silly woman who does not manage to conceal her _grande passion_. It only makes him like Mario and others; you must not let it trouble you, Miss Cheriton. You must think of me in a thought of the same strain you bestow upon the thousands of photographs of him that have been sold in the course of his career, and are cherished and given places of honor in young ladies' rooms; and the sentimental follies school girls have committed in the way of sending him flowers and notes. Let these tributes to him merely increase your pride of possession. He is free from all blame, all, that is what I have wished you to feel assured of, or all--" she put out her hand in farewell--"except just a little, little bit. You don't mind? A little bit he certainly was to blame, though I suppose it can be laid to the account of his modesty, in not taking it home to himself that he could not be so nice, so consistently, persistently dear and nice to a person, without her falling to stupidly adoring him."

She stopped, and stood, vaguely shaking her head, prolonging her faint, watery, bitter-sweet smile; and would have withdrawn her hand, but Miss Cheriton retained it, by a firmer pressure, in the warm, kind clasp of hers. Marie-Aimée lifted her eyes, touched and full of thanks, to the fine calm eyes above her; and in their unclouded light read Anthony Bronson's unqualified exoneration, and that she herself had been impartially examined, and now stood classed, past appeal, among those soft, sweet, idiotic women who will fall into unwarranted love with any man of whom they see much, and are by their own passion made incapable of discerning the fact that he is not in love with them. The glance was full of honest sympathy for a sorrow so real; but it was not untinged with as much contempt as would be implied in the prayer, "I thank thee, my God, I am not as these women are!" Under which Marie-Aimée humbly bowed her head and waited but for the release of her hand to go. But Miss Cheriton, whom stiffness or delicacy kept from saying a word in reference to what she had heard, yet found herself utterly unwilling that her visitor should leave so uncheered. Still holding her hand, she told her, in a voice full of the suggestion of sincerity, the deep pleasure she had always had in hearing her; she amplified, tactfully, understandingly, upon all she had discovered of exquisite in her playing.

Marie-Aimée's face lightened a little; she had never become callous to praise. Miss Cheriton spoke of friends they had in common, from whom she had heard so much of her, of a sort that had long made it one of her most eager wishes to know her. Whereupon Marie-Aimée, as ever responsive, gave herself into Miss Cheriton's hands, to be known. And the two were shortly making acquaintance as they might have done had they been presented to each other at the house of those mutual friends. One could not have dreamed, to hear them, what had gone before. They talked of music mostly, and musicians, wholly forgetful of time. To illustrate some point, Marie-Aimée went to the piano and played a bar or two; after which, as she would have risen, Miss Cheriton entreated against it; and when Marie-Aimée, who never resisted, asked what she should play, suggested a composition of Miss Nevers' own, which the latter had imagined so obscure, she said, as to be almost her only secret. And she found, to her astonishment, that Miss Cheriton, whether moved by genuine musical congeniality, or a vulgarer curiosity, had procured everything ever published of Marie-Aimée's. Afterwards, Miss Cheriton took the place at the piano of Marie-Aimée urgent. Then Marie-Aimée begged leave, and supplanted her, to show how a different sequence of chords would be better; and the woman of talent and the woman of cultivation spent a long hour, delightful to both; in the course of which Miss Cheriton found the quaint enthusiasm for Marie-Aimée felt by her innumerable friends accounted for; and Marie-Aimée came to disdain, as paltry praise, the definition "very fine girl" which one was accustomed to hear joined to the name of Kate Cheriton.

Smiting her brow, aghast, at the recollection of an appointment missed, Marie-Aimée jumped to her feet. By running she might still be in time to apologize. They shook hands again, warmly; and Marie-Aimée said, all her heart in her voice, "I hope you will be very happy."

In the street, Marie-Aimée, as she hurried along, could think of nothing but Miss Cheriton. She would send her as a wedding-gift the French great-grandmother's rococo cross, the choicest bit of jewelry she owned.

Her heart might have been so much dusty, worm-eaten wood; remarking its astonishing lightness and insensibility, she reverted in thought, almost flippantly, to the horrors besetting her when she left home that morning. Surely, if it were possible that with Tony's marriage brought as close as a visit to his intended brought it, she should feel as she felt, she might still hope to put on a good face about it to the world.

In this mood she went about a good part of that day; and talked to some with so much of a return to her old spirit that they disguised their surprise by a greater cheerfulness than really their mystification allowed them to feel. Meeting an old acquaintance who put on the face of a sympathizer to say, "My dear, I _did_ feel for you when I heard of his engagement, you know whose I mean," she looked as if not sure she understood; and the old aquaintance, after a searching look at her, dropped her mournfulness, to proceed, "It seems to be a fine thing for Bronson, this marriage. I hear that Miss Cheriton will be a millionaire. People exaggerate, you think? But she _has_ bought a superb place out of town?"

By the late afternoon, that curious, unseasonable, baseless good cheer was wearing off, like the effects of wine, and the world, through its fading fumes, was returning to look like the world of yesterday. Weariness was overtaking her; but her heart had not recommenced its clamorous aching; it was only a little sick, when she went into a music-store for a score she needed. She was looking this over, with her eyes rather than her mind, when her attention became fixed in memory upon that expression of Miss Cheriton's face from which she had judged her mission successful--Tony cleared. Suddenly, as in the middle of the night she had sometimes known that in a letter sent off there was a word misspelled, she felt that triumph of confidence in Miss Cheriton's eyes not to have been the work of her own explanations. She herself had been fully explained to Miss Cheriton before ever she set foot in her house. How could it have been otherwise?

Marie-Aimée's ghost-seeing eyes became fixed upon nothingness. She sat so a long time, her chin dropped in dolorous absorption; a figure which struck discomfort in the beholder. Another woman buying music bent over the counter and whispered to the clerk, who whispered back, and both stole glances at the unconscious, rigid, dumpy profile, stamped with tragedy, of the well-known pianiste, whose most intimate sorrow had become town-talk.

She went out at last into the hubbub of the streets, which seemed a cruelty of men, under the gorgeous sunset sky, which seemed a cruelty of Heaven's, and, as much as a great heaviness would allow, hurried home and to bed and the dark. It was no use! no use! Though Tony's conduct to her admitted of the face she had put on it to Miss Cheriton, and though the world's jury, upon full evidence, might have acquitted him, he not being the last shade of black, she herself knew, and something of incorruptible justice in the bottom of her heart would not let her blink it, that she had been badly, badly treated. But that was not the most woeful, that she should have been badly treated, or that she must live her days hereafter without him; but that he, Tony, should have been capable of doing this thing to her, to her, who would have shed her blood for him, and he knew it.

In the days following, as she went about her crowded occupations, she did not, as she had allowed herself to do before, seek relief in speaking of what weighed upon her heart. But human strength did not suffice to keep the matter out of her face; her cheek was leaden, her eyes were in a fog.

But it was useless now, her avoiding Anthony Bronson's name. She had spoken too much before. Besides, too many remembered the soft, radiant, enamored face with which she had been used to beam up at him in those earliest days after their return from touring, and down upon which he had benignantly beamed, like a big, gratified idol. Furthermore, this gossip concerning persons so well known had too many of the elements which ensure a thing being repeated till everyone knows. Reports of "scenes" made by Marie-Aimée were still spreading after she had placed the seal upon her lips; and those who got them last did not know that they were old news; and as it was the least interested in her personally who last became _au fait_ of her affairs, some among them took the view that little Nevers was disgracing herself; which sentiment once in the air, certain of Marie-Aimée's closer friends saw the matter more nearly in that light, experienced a reaction from too complete sympathy with her. One heard it said with a touch of impatience, "Some one ought to talk to Marie-Aimée!" Even those who loved her most, this, as it seemed, insistent and protracted harping upon an unfortunate attachment at last came near disgusting. And she did receive scoldings and lectures, of which she abjectly owned the justice; and she tried to keep herself more out of sight. Only so far as the necessity to earn a living made it imperative did she go about. Wherefore some whose invitations she refused said, "Nevers is moping. It is a pity she can't behave like the rest who have to suffer from the fickleness of man!"

A critical, less friendly attitude of the world toward her was beginning at last, through her dismal preoccupation, to penetrate her heart with its novel chill, and make the city where she had always lived seem not like home any more. She looked about, bewildered, for escape. The day of the Bronson-Cheriton wedding, too, was close at hand; but before it had arrived, there descended upon her from a distance a stern older married sister, whom rumors at last had aroused.

No one saw Marie-Aimée after the coming of this sister. To everyone's astonishment, in the busiest time of the season, Marie-Aimée's rooms were empty of her. It was thought that the sister had carried her off to keep her under surveillance: till it became known from Marie-Aimée herself, writing to her old friends, that she was in a convent of the Sacred Heart, hundreds of miles removed, and there proposed to remain until she had become free from the faintest taint of the folly that had made her a scandal and a laughing-stock,--yes, if she remained there until she died. Her time was profitably spent in study, and the giving of piano-lessons to the young girls receiving their education in the holy house. And she enjoyed the inestimable privilege, accorded to her by the Mother Superior, of weeping as much as she pleased.