Chapter IV: Book II: VIII (1)

“Chris!” she said.

She felt herself trembling all over; then, abruptly, mysteriously, and in the very act of uttering his name, she ceased to tremble, and it came flooding in on her with a shock of wonder that the worst was already over--that at last she was going to be free.

“Well, well,” she heard him saying, in that round full voice which always became fuller and more melodious when it had any inner uncertainty to mask; and “If only,” she thought, “it doesn’t all come back when he laughs!”

He laughed. “I’m so glad ... _glad_,” he reiterated, as if explaining; and with the laugh in her ears she still felt herself as lucidly, as incredibly remote from him.

“Glad?” she echoed, a little less sure of her speech than of her thoughts, and remembering how sometimes the smile in his eyes used to break up her words into little meaningless splinters that she could never put together again till he was gone.

“Of your good luck, I mean.... I’ve heard, of course.” And now she had him, for the first time, actually reddening and stammering as she herself used to do, and catching at the splinters of his own words! Ah, the trick was done--she could even see, as they continued to face each other in the searching spring light, that he had reddened, thickened, hardened--as if the old Chris had been walled into this new one, and were not even looking at her out of the windows of his prison.

“My good luck?” she echoed again, while the truth still danced in her ears: the truth that she was free, free, free--away from him at last, far enough off to see him and judge him!

It must have been his bad taste--the bad taste that could lead him into such an opening as that--which, from the very first, she had felt in him, and tried not to feel, even when she was worshipping him most blindly.

But, after all, if she felt so free, why be so cruel? Ah, because the terror was still there--it had only shifted its ground. What frightened her now was not the thought of their past but of their future. And she must not let him see that it frightened her. What had his last words been? Ah, yes--. She answered: “Of course I’m very happy to be at home again.”

He lowered his voice to murmur: “And I’m happy _for_ you.”

Yes; she remembered now; it was always in emotional moments that his tact failed him, his subtlety vanished, and he seemed to be reciting speeches learned by heart out of some sentimental novel--the very kind he was so clever at ridiculing.

They continued to stand facing each other, their inspiration spent, as if waiting for the accident that had swept them together to whirl them apart again.

Suddenly she risked (since it was better to know): “So you’re living now in New York?”

He shook his head with an air of melancholy. “No such luck. I’m back in Baltimore again. Come full circle. For a time, after the war, I was on a newspaper there; interviewing film-stars and base-ball fans and female prohibitionists. Then I tried to run a Country Club--awful job! All book-keeping, and rows between members. Now Horace Maclew has taken pity on me; I’m what I suppose you’d call his private secretary. No eight-hour day: he keeps me pretty close. It’s only once in a blue moon I can get away.”

She felt her tightened heart dilating. Baltimore wasn’t very far away; but it was far enough as long as he had anything to keep him there. She knew about Horace Maclew, an elderly wealthy bibliophile and philanthropist, with countless municipal and social interests in his own town, and a big country-place just outside it. No; Mr. Maclew’s private secretary was not likely to have many holidays. But how long would Chris resign himself to such drudgery? She wanted to be kind and say: “And your painting? Your writing?” but she didn’t dare. Besides, he had probably left both phases far behind him, and there was no need, really, for her to concern herself with his new hobbies, whatever they might be. Of course she knew that he and she would have to stand there staring at one another till she made a gesture of dismissal; but on what note was she to make it? The natural thing (since she felt so safe and easy with him) would have been to say: “The next time you’re in town you must be sure to look me up--”. But, with him, how could one be certain of not having such a suggestion taken literally? Now that he had seen she was not afraid of him he would probably not be afraid of _her_; if he wanted a good dinner, or an evening at the Opera, he’d be as likely as not to call her up and ask for it.

And suddenly, as they hung there, she caught, over his shoulder, a glimpse of another figure just turning into the Park from the same direction; Anne, with her quick step, her intent inward air, as she always moved and looked when she had just left her easel. In another moment Anne would be upon them.

Mrs. Clephane held out her hand: for a fraction of a second it lay in his. “Well, goodbye; I’m glad to know you’ve got a job that must be so interesting.”

“Oh--interesting!” He dismissed it with a gesture. “But I’m glad to see you,” he added; “just to _see_ you,” with a clever shifting of the emphasis. He paused a moment, and then risked a smile. “You don’t look a day older, you know.”

She threw her head back with an answering smile. “Why should I, when I feel years younger?”

Thank heaven, an approaching group of people must have obstructed her daughter’s view! Mrs. Clephane hurried on, wanting to put as much distance as she could between herself and Chris’s retreating figure before she came up with her daughter. When she did, she plunged straight into the girl’s eyes, and saw that they were still turned on her inward vision. “Dearest,” she cried gaily, “I can see by your look that you’ve been doing a good day’s work.”

Anne’s soul rose slowly to the surface, shining out between deep lashes. “How do you know, I wonder? I suppose you must have been a great deal with somebody who painted. For a long time afterward one carries the thing about with one wherever one goes.” She slipped her arm in Kate’s, and turned unresistingly as the latter guided her back toward Fifth Avenue.

“It’s dusty in the Park, and I feel as if I wanted a quick walk home. I like Fifth Avenue when the lights are just coming out,” Mrs. Clephane explained.

* * * * *

All night long she lay awake in the great bed of the Clephane spare-room, and stared at Chris. While they still faced each other--and after her first confused impression of his having thickened and reddened--she had seen him only through the blur of her fears and tremors. Even after they had parted, and she was walking home with Anne, the shock of the encounter still tingling in her, he remained far off, almost imponderable, less close and importunate than her memories of him. It was as if his actual presence had exorcised his ghost. But now--

He had not vanished; he had only been waiting. Waiting till she was alone in her room in the sleeping house, in the unheeding city. How alone, she had never more acutely felt. Who on earth was there to intervene between them, when there was not a soul to whom she could even breathe that she had met him? She lay in the darkness with terrified staring eyes, and there he stood, his smile deriding her--a strange composite figure, made equally of the old Chris and the new....

It was of no use to shut her eyes; he was between lid and ball. It was of no use to murmur disjointed phrases to herself, conjure him away with the language of her new life, with allusions and incantations unknown to him; he just stood there and waited. Well, then--she would face it out now, would deal with him! But how? What was he to her, and what did he want of her?

Yes: it all came to the question of what he wanted; it always had. When had there ever been a question of what _she_ wanted? He took what he chose from life, gathered and let drop and went on: it was the artist’s way, he told her. But what could he possibly want of her now, and why did she imagine that he wanted anything, when by his own showing he was so busy and so provided for?

She pulled herself together, suddenly ashamed of her own thoughts. In pity for herself she would have liked to draw the old tattered glamour over him; but there must always have been rents and cracks in it, and now it couldn’t by any tugging be made to cover him. No; she didn’t love him any longer; she was sure of that. Like a traveller who has just skirted an abyss, she could lean over without dizziness and measure the depth into which she had not fallen. But if that were so, why was she so afraid of him? If it were a mere question of her own social safety, a mean dread of having her past suspected, why, she was more ashamed of that than of having loved him. She would almost rather have endured the misery of still loving him than of seeing what he and she looked like, now that the tide had ebbed from them. She had been a coward; she had been stiff and frightened and conventional, when, from the vantage-ground of her new security, she could so easily have been friendly and generous; she felt like rushing out into the streets to find him, to speak to him as she ought to have spoken, to tell him that she was not in the least afraid of him.

And yet she _was_! She supposed it was the old incalculable element in him, that profound fundamental difference in their natures which used to make their closest nearness seem more like a spell than a reality. She understood now that if she had always been afraid of him it was just because she could never tell what she was afraid of....

If only there had been some one to whom she could confess herself, some one who would laugh away her terrors! Fred Landers? But she would frighten him more than he reassured her. And the others--the kindly approving family? What would they do but avert their eyes and beg her to be reasonable and remember her daughter? Well--and her daughter, then? And Anne? Was there any one on earth but Anne who would understand her?

The oppression of the night and the silence, and the rumour of her own fears, were becoming intolerable. She could not endure them any longer. She jumped up, flung on her dressing-gown, and stole out of her room. The corridor was empty and obscure; only a faint light from the lower hall cast its reflection upward on the ceiling of the stairs. From below came the pompous tick of the hall clock, as loud as a knocking in the silence.

She stole to her daughter’s door, and kneeling down laid her ear against the crack. Presently, through the hush, she caught the soft rhythmic breath of youthful sleep, and pictured Anne, slim and motionless, her dark hair in orderly braids along the pillow. The vision startled the mother back to sanity. She got up stiffly and stood looking about her with dazed eyes.

Suddenly the light on the stairs, the nocturnal ticking, swept another vision through her throbbing brain. In just such a silence, before the first cold sounds of the winter daylight, she had crept down those very stairs, unchained the front door, slipped back one after another of John Clephane’s patent bolts, and let herself out of his house for the last time. Ah, what business had she in it now, her hand on her daughter’s door? She dragged herself back to her own room, switched on the light, and sat hunched up in the great bed, mechanically turning over the pages of a fashion-paper she had picked up on her sitting-room table. Skirts were certainly going to be narrower that spring....

IX.

“Lilla--but of course he comes for Lilla!” she exclaimed.

She raised herself on her elbow, saw the bed-lamp still burning, and the fashion-paper on the floor beside the bed. The night was not over; there was no grayness yet between the curtains. She must have dropped into a short uneasy sleep, from which Lilla’s loitering expectant figure, floating away from her down an alley of the Park, had detached itself with such emphasis that the shock awoke her.

Lilla and Chris ... but of course they had gone to the Park to meet each other! Why should he have happened to turn in at that particular gate, at that particular hour, unless to find some one who, a few yards off, careless and unconcerned, was so obviously lingering there to be found?

The discovery gave Kate Clephane a sensation of actual physical nausea. She sat up in bed, pushed her hair back from her damp forehead, and repeated the two names slowly, as if trying from those conjoined syllables to disentangle the clue to the mystery. For mystery there was; she was sure of it now! People like Lilla Gates and Chris did not wander aimlessly through Central Park at the secret hour when the winter dusk begins to blur its paths. Every moment of such purposeless lives was portioned out, packed with futilities. Kate had seen enough of that in her enforced association with the idlers of a dozen watering-places, her dreary participation in their idling.

And how the clue, now she held it, explained everything! Explained, first of all, why Chris, the ready, the resourceful, had been so tongue-tied and halting when they met. Why had she not been struck by that before? She saw now that, if she was afraid of him, he was a thousand times more afraid of her! And how could she have imagined that, to a man like Chris, the mere fact of running across a discarded mistress would be disconcerting, or even wholly unpleasant? Who better than he should know how to deal with such emergencies? His past must be strewn with precedents. As her memory travelled back over their life together she recalled their having met, one day at Hadrian’s Villa, a little woman, a Mrs. Guy So-and-so--she had even forgotten the name! She and Chris had been wandering, close-linked--for the tourist season was over, and besides, they cared so little who saw them--through the rich garlanded ruins, all perfume and enchantment; and there, in their path, had stood a solitary figure, the figure of a young woman, pretty, well-dressed, with a hungry melancholy face. A little way behind her, a heavy elderly gentleman in blue goggles and an overcoat was having archæological explanations shouted into his deaf ear and curved hand by a guide with a rasping German accent--and Chris, exclaiming: “By Jove, there are the So-and-sos!” had advanced with outstretched hand, introduced the two women, and poured out upon the melancholy newcomer a flood of laughing allusive talk, half chaff, half sentiment, and all as easily, as unconcernedly as if her great eyes had not, all the while, been pleading, pleading with him to remember.

And then, afterward, when Kate had said to him: “But wasn’t that the woman you told me about once, who was so desperately unhappy, and wanted to run away with you?” he had merely answered: “Oh, not particularly with _me_, as far as I remember--” and she had hugged his arm closer, and thought how funny he was, and luxuriously pitied the other woman.

Yes; that was the real Chris; always on the spot, easy-going and gay. The stammering evasive apparition in the Park had no resemblance to that Chris; Kate knew instinctively that it was not the fact of meeting her that had so disturbed him, but the fact that, for some reason, the meeting might interfere with his plans. But what plans? Why, his plans with Lilla--which would necessarily bring him in contact with the clan, since they so resolutely backed Lilla up, and thus expose him to--to what? To Kate’s betraying him? For a moment she half-laughed at the idea.

For what could she do to injure him, after all? And, whatever his plans were, how could he ever imagine her interfering with them, when to do so would be to betray her own secret? She lay there in the dreary dawn and tried to work her way through the labyrinth. And then, all at once, it came to her: what if he wanted to marry Lilla? And what more probable than that he did? It was evident that living with his people and administering Mr. Maclew’s philanthropies was not a life that he would have called “fit for a dog”. He liked money, she knew, for all his careless way; he wanted to have it, but he hated to earn it. And if he married Lilla there would be plenty of money. The Drovers would see to that--Kate could imagine nothing more likely to unloose their purse-strings than the possibility of “settling” Lilla, and getting rid of the perpetual menace that her roving fancies hung over her mother’s neatly-waved head. Chris, of course, was far too clever not to have seen that, and worked out the consequences in his own mind. If Lilla had been plain and dowdy he wouldn’t even have considered it--Kate did him that justice. If he liked money he liked it in a large lordly way, and only as one among several things which it was convenient but not essential to have. He would never do a base thing for money; but, after all, there was nothing base in marrying Lilla if he liked her looks and was amused by her talk, as he probably was. There was one side of Chris, the side Kate Clephane had least explored, and was least capable of understanding, which might very well find its complement in Lilla....

Kate’s aching eyes continued to strain into the future. If that were really his plan, of course he would be afraid of her! For he knew her too, knew her ever so much better than she did him, and would be sure to guess that, much as she would want to cover up their past, she would not hesitate a moment between revealing it and doing what she called her duty. Her duty--how he used to laugh at the phrase! He told her she had run away from her real duties only for the pleasure of inventing new ones, and that to her they were none the less duties because she imagined them to be defiances. It was one of the paradoxes that most amused him: the picture of her flying from her conscience and always meeting it again in her path, barely disguised by the audacities she had dressed it up in.

Yes; evidently he had asked himself, on the instant, what she would do about Lilla; and the mere fact made her feel, with a fierce desperation, that she must do something. Not that she cared a straw about Lilla, or felt the least “call” to save her--but to have Chris in the family, in the group, to have to smile at him across the Clephane dinner-table, the Drover dinner-table, all the family dinner-tables, to have to keep up, for all the rest of her life, the double pretence of never having liked him too much, and of now liking him enough to gratify the pride and allay the suspicions of the family--no, she could not imagine herself doing it! She was right to be afraid of him; he was right to be afraid of her.

* * * * *

The return to daylight made her nocturnal logic seem absurd; but several days passed before her agitation subsided. It was only when she found life continuing undisturbed about her, Anne painting for long rapturous hours, Lilla following her same bored round of pleasure, the others placidly engaged in their usual pursuits, and no one mentioning Chris’s name, or apparently aware of his existence, that the shadow of her midnight imaginings was lifted.

Once or twice, as the sense of security returned, she thought of letting Chris’s name fall, ever so casually, in Fred Landers’s hearing. She never got as far as that; but one day she contrived, in speaking of some famous collection of books just coming into the market, to mention Horace Maclew.

Landers’s eye kindled. “Ah, what books! His Italian antiphonals are probably the best in the world.”

“You know him, then? How--is it long since you last saw his library?” she stammered.

He considered. “Oh, years; not since before the war.”

Her heart rose on the mounting hope. “Oh, not since then?... I suppose he must have a very good librarian?”

“Used to have; the poor chap was killed in the war, I believe. That reminds me that I heard the other day he was looking for some one.”

“Looking for a librarian?” She heard her voice shake. “Not for a private secretary?”

She thought he looked surprised. “I don’t think so; but I really don’t remember. I know he always has a lot of scribes about him; naturally, with so many irons in the fire. Did you happen to hear of any one who was looking for that sort of job? It might be a kindness to let Maclew know.”

She drew her brows together, affecting to consider. “Where did I hear of some one? I can’t remember either. One is always hearing nowadays of people looking for something to do.”

“Yes; but of few who can do anything. And Maclew’s the last man to put up with incompetence. You must come and see him with me. He’s not an easy customer, but he and I are old members of the Grolier Club and he lets me bring a friend to see his library occasionally. I’ve always promised to take Anne, some day when she’s going on to Washington.”

Kate’s heart gave a sharp downward plunge. That “Take Anne” reverberated in her like a knell. What a fool she had been to bring the subject up! If she had not mentioned Horace Maclew’s name Landers might never have thought of his library again; at least not of the promise to take Anne there. Well, it was a lesson to hold her tongue, to let things follow their course without fearing or interfering. Happily Anne, more and more absorbed in her painting, seemed to have no idea of a visit to Washington; she had never mentioned such a plan, beyond once casually saying: “Oh, the Washington magnolias ... some spring I must go there and paint them.”

Some spring ... well, that was pleasantly indefinite. For Chris was not likely to remain long with Horace Maclew. Where had Chris ever remained long? Kate Clephane did not know, now, whether to tremble at that impermanence or be glad of it. She did not know what to think about anything, now that the thought of Chris had suddenly re-introduced itself into the smooth-running wheels of her existence.

Then, as the days passed, her reassurance returned again, and it was with a stupefied start that one afternoon, crossing the Park on her way to the studio, she once more caught sight of Lilla Gates. This time the person for whom she had presumably been waiting was with her, and the two stood in close communion. The man’s back was turned, but his figure, his attitude, were so familiar to Kate that she stopped short, trembling lest she should see his face.

She did not see it. He and Mrs. Gates were in the act of leave-taking. Their hands met, they lingered for a last word, and then separated, each hastening away in a direction other than Kate’s. She continued to stand motionless after they had vanished, uncertain yet certain. It was Chris--but of course it was Chris! He came often to New York, then, in spite of what he had said about the difficulty of getting away. If he had said that, it was probably just because he wanted to keep his comings and goings from Mrs. Clephane’s knowledge. And that again would tally with what she suspected as to his motives. She turned sick, and stood with compressed lips and lowered head, as if to close her senses against what was coming. At length she roused herself and walked on.

Lilla.... Lilla.... Chris and Lilla!

She kept on her way northward, following the less frequented by-ways of the Park. It was early yet, and she wanted to walk off her agitation before joining Anne at the studio.

Lilla.... Lilla.... Chris and Lilla!

Something must be done about it, something must be said--it was impossible that this affair, whatever it was, should go on unchecked. But had she, Kate Clephane, any power to prevent it? Probably not--her intervention might serve only to precipitate events. Well, at least she must know what was coming--must find out what the others knew.... Her excitement increased instead of subsiding: as she walked on she felt the tears running down her face. Life had seemed, at last, so simple, so merciful, so soothing; and here were all the old mysteries and duplicities pressing on her again. She stopped, out of breath, and finding herself at the extreme northern end of the Park, with the first street-lights beginning to gem the bare trees. The need to be with Anne suddenly seized her. Perhaps, by dropping a careless word or two, she might learn something from her daughter--learn at least if the baleful Lilla were using the girl as a confidant, as that brief scene in the studio had once suggested. On that point, at any rate, it was the mother’s right, her duty even, to be informed. She had made no appointment to meet Anne that afternoon; and she hastened her pace, fearing to find that her daughter had already left the studio....

A light through the transom reassured her. She put her key in the lock, threw off her cloak in the little entrance-hall, and pushed open the door beyond. The studio was unlit except by the city’s constellated lamps, hung like a golden vintage from an invisible trellising of towers and poles, and by the rosy gleam of the hearth. Anne’s easel had been pushed aside, and Anne and another person were sitting near each other in low chairs, duskily outlined against the fire. As Mrs. Clephane crossed the threshold a man’s voice was saying gaily: “What I want is a rhyme for _astrolabe_. I must have it! And apparently there is none; at least none except _babe_. And so there won’t be any poem. That’s always my luck. I find something ... or somebody ... who’s just what I want, and then....”

Kate Clephane stood still, enveloped by the voice. It was the first time she had heard those laughing confiding inflexions addressed to any ear but hers. Southern sunshine scorched her; the air seemed full of flowers. She hung there for a moment, netted in tightening memories; then she loosed her hold on the door-handle and advanced a few steps into the room. Her heels clicked on the bare floor, and the two by the fire rose and turned to her. She fancied her daughter’s glance conveyed a faint surprise--was it even a faint annoyance at her intrusion?

“Mother, this is Major Fenno. I think you know him,” the girl said.

Chris came forward, simple, natural, unembarrassed. There was no trace of constraint in his glance or tone; he looked at Mrs. Clephane almost fraternally.

“Dear Mrs. Clephane--a rhyme for _astrolabe_!” he entreated, with that half-humorous way he had of flinging the lasso of his own thought over anybody who happened to stray within range; and then, with one of his usual quick transitions: “I got a chance to run over to New York unexpectedly, and I heard you were in town, and went to see you. At your house they told me you might be here, so I came, and Miss Clephane was kind enough to let me wait.”

“I was afraid you weren’t coming,” the girl added, looking gravely at her mother.

In spite of the blood drumming in her head, and the way his airy fib about having heard she was in town had drawn her again into the old net of their complicities, Kate was steadied by his composure. She looked from him to Anne; and Anne’s face was also composed.

“I had the luck,” Chris added, “to meet Miss Clephane after I was invalided home. She took pity on me when I was in hospital on Long Island, and I’ve wanted to thank her ever since. But my boss keeps me on a pretty short chain, and I can’t often get away.”

“It’s wonderful,” said the girl, with her quiet smile, “how you’ve got over your lameness.”

“Oh, well--” he had one of his easy gestures--“lameness isn’t the hardest thing in the world to get over. Especially not with the care I had.”

Silence fell. Kate struggled to break it, feeling that she was expected to speak, to say something, anything; but there was an obstruction in her throat, as if her voice were a ghost vainly struggling to raise its own grave-stone.

Their visitor made the automatic motion of consulting his wrist-watch. “Jove! I hadn’t an idea it was so late. I’ve got barely time to dash for my train!” He stood looking in his easy way from mother to daughter; then he turned once more to Kate.

“Aren’t you coming over to see the great Maclew library one of these days? I was just telling Miss Clephane--”

“Uncle Fred has always promised to take me,” the girl threw in.

“Well, that settles it; doesn’t it, Mrs. Clephane?” This time he wavered a second before the “Mrs.”, and then carried it off triumphantly. “As soon as you can make a date, will you wire me? Good!” He was holding out his hand. Kate put hers in it; she did not mind. It was as if she had laid a stone in his palm.

“It’s a go, then?” he repeated gaily, as he shook hands with Anne; and the door closed on him.

“Major Fenno”--. Kate repeated the name slowly as she turned back toward the fire. She had never heard of his military rank. “Was he wounded?” she asked her daughter suddenly.

“At Belleau Wood--didn’t you know? I thought you might have--he was mentioned in despatches. He has the Legion of Honour and the D.S.M.” Anne’s voice had an unwonted vibration. “But he never talks of all that; all he cares about is his writing,” she added.

She was gathering up her brushes, rubbing her pallet with a rag, going through all the habitual last gestures with her usual somewhat pedantic precision. She found something wrong with one of the brushes, and bent over the lamp with it, her black brows jutting. At that moment she reminded her mother of old Mrs. Clephane; somehow, there was an odd solace in the likeness.

“If he comes for anybody it’s for Lilla,” the mother thought, as her eyes rested on her daughter’s stern young profile; and again she felt the necessity of clearing up the mystery. On the whole, it might be easier to question Anne, now that the name had been pronounced between them.

Major Fenno--and he had been wounded.... And all he cared about was his writing.

X.

After all, she was not going to be able to question Anne about Lilla. As she faced the situation the next day--as she faced the new Chris in her path--Kate Clephane saw the impossibility of using him as a key to her daughter’s confidence. There was one thing much closer to her now than any conceivable act of Chris’s could ever be; and that was her own relation to Anne. She simply could not talk to Anne about Chris--not yet. It was not that she regarded that episode in her life as a thing to be in itself ashamed of. She was not going, even now, to deny or disown it; she wanted only to deny and disown Chris. Quite conceivably, she might have said to her daughter: “Yes, I loved once--and the man I loved was not your father.” But to say it about Chris! To see the slow look of wonder in those inscrutable depths of Anne’s eyes: a look that said, not “I blame you”, or even “I disapprove you”, but, so much more scathingly, just: “You, mother--and _Chris_?”

Yes; that was it. It was necessary for her pride and dignity, for her moral safety almost, that what people like Enid Drover would have called her “past” should remain unidentified, unembodied--or at least not embodied in Chris Fenno. Yet to know--to know!

There were, of course, other sources of enlightenment; if there were anything in her theory of a love-affair between Lilla and Chris, the family were probably not unaware of it. Kate had the sense that they never had their eyes off Lilla for long. But it was all very well to plan to talk to them--the question remained, how to begin? Before trying to find out about Lilla she would first have to find out about them. What did she know of any one of them? Nothing more, she now understood, than their glazed and impenetrable surfaces.

She was still a guest among them; she was a guest even in her daughter’s house. It was the character she had herself chosen; in her dread of seeming to assert rights she had forfeited, to thrust herself into a place she had deserted, she had perhaps erred in the other sense, held back too much, been too readily content with the easy part of the week-end visitor.

Well--it had all grown out of the other choice she had made when, years ago, she had said: “Thy gods shall _not_ be my gods.” And now she but dimly guessed who their gods were. At the moment when her very life depended on her knowing their passwords, holding the clue to their labyrinth, she stood outside the mysterious circle and vainly groped for a way in.

Nollie Tresselton, of course, could have put the clue in her hand; but to speak to Nollie was too nearly like speaking to Anne. Not that Nollie would betray a confidence; but to be divined and judged by her would be almost as searing an experience as being divined and judged by Anne. And so Kate Clephane continued to sit there between them, hugging her new self in her anxious arms, turning its smooth face toward them, and furtively regulating its non-committal gestures and the sounds that issued from its lips.

Only the long nights of dreamless sleep were gone; and her heart stood still each time she slipped the key into the studio door.

* * * * *

“Mother, Uncle Fred wants to take us to Baltimore next week to see the Maclew library; you and Lilla and me.”

Anne threw it over her shoulder as she stood before her easel, frowning and narrowing her lips at the difficulty of a branch of red pyrus japonica in a brass pot, haloed with the light of the sunlit window.

Kate, behind her, was leaning back indolently in a deep wicker armchair. She started, and echoed in a blank voice: “Next week?”

“Well, you see, I’ve promised to spend a few days in Washington with Madge Glenver, who has taken a house at Rock Creek for the spring. This is just the moment for the magnolias; and I thought we might stop at Baltimore on the way, and Uncle Fred could bring you and Lilla back from there.”

It sounded perfectly simple and sensible; Anne spoke of it in her usual matter-of-course tone. Her mother tried for the same intonation in answering, with a faint touch of surprise: “Lilla too?”

Anne turned around completely and smiled. “Oh, Lilla particularly! You mustn’t speak of it yet, please--not even to Aunt Enid--but there’s a chance ... a chance of Lilla’s marrying.”

Kate’s heart gave a great bound of relief or resentment--which? Why, relief, she instantly assured herself. She had been right then--that was the key to the mystery! And why not? After all, what did it matter to her? Had she, Kate, ever imagined that Chris’s love-affairs would cease when she passed from his life? Wasn’t it most probably in pursuit of a new one that he had left her? To think so had been, at any rate, in spite of the torturing images evoked, more bearable than believing he had gone because he was tired of her. For years, as she now saw, she had been sustained by her belief in that “other woman”; only, that she should take shape in Lilla was unbelievably humiliating.

Anne continued to smile softly down on her mother. In her smile there was something veiled and tender, as faint as sunlight refracted from water--a radiance striking up from those mysterious depths that Kate had never yet reached. “We should all be so glad if it happened,” the girl continued; and Kate said to herself: “What she’s really thinking of when she smiles in that way is her own marriage....” She remembered the cryptic allusion of the football-faced youth at the Opera, and the way those vigilant lids of Anne’s had shut down on her vision.

“Of course--poor Lilla!” Mrs. Clephane absently assented. Inwardly she was saying to herself that it would be impossible for her to go to Baltimore on that particular errand. Chris and Lilla--Chris and Lilla! The coupled names began again to jangle maddeningly through her brain. She stood up and moved away to the window. No, she couldn’t!

“Next week, dear? It doesn’t matter--but I think you’ll have to go without me.” She spoke from the window, without turning her head toward her daughter, who had gone back to the easel.

“Oh--.” There was distinct disappointment in Anne’s voice.

“The fact is I’ve made two or three dinner engagements; I don’t think I can very well break them, do you? People have been so awfully kind--all my old friends,” Kate stammered, while the “couldn’t, couldn’t” kept booming on in her ears. “Besides,” she added, “why not take Nollie instead? A young party will be more amusing for Mr. Maclew.”

Anne laughed. “Oh, I don’t believe he’ll notice Nollie and me,” she said with a gay significance; but added at once: “Of course you must do exactly as you please. That’s the foundation of our agreement, isn’t it?”

“Our agreement?”

“To be the two most perfect pals that ever were.”

Mrs. Clephane sprang up impulsively and moved toward her daughter. “We _are_ that, aren’t we, Anne?”

Anne’s lips dropped; she nodded, screwed her mouth up, and opened her other eyes--her painter’s eyes--on the branch of pyrus with its coral-like studding of red cups. “From the very first,” she agreed.

* * * * *

The young party went, Fred Landers beaming in attendance. The family thought it a pity that Mrs. Clephane should miss such a chance, for Horace Maclew was chary of exhibiting his books. But there was something absent-minded and perfunctory in the tone of these regrets; Kate could see that the family interest was passionately centred in Lilla. And she felt, more and more, that in the circumstances she herself was better out of the way. For, at the last moment, the party had been invited to stay at Horace Maclew’s; and to have assisted, in an almost official capacity, at the betrothal of Chris and Lilla, with all the solemnity and champagne likely to ensue in such a setting, was more than her newly healed nerves could have endured. It was easier to sit at home and wait, and try to prepare herself for this new and unbelievable situation. Chris and Lilla--!

It was on the third day that Aline, bringing in the breakfast-tray with a bunch of violets (Anne’s daily attention since she had been gone), produced also a telegram; as on that far-off morning, four months ago, when the girl’s first message had come to her mother with the same flowers.

Kate held the envelope for a moment before opening it, as she had done on that other occasion--but not because she wanted to prolong her illusion. This time there was no illusion in the thin envelope between her fingers; she could feel through it the hard knife-edge of reality. If she delayed she did so from cowardice. Chris and Lilla--

She tore open the envelope and read: “Engaged to Horace Maclew madly happy Lilla.”

The telegram fluttered to the floor, and Kate Clephane leaned back on her pillows, feeling a little light-headed.

“Is Madame not well?” Aline sharply questioned.

“Oh, yes; perfectly well. Perfectly well!” Kate repeated joyously. But she continued to lean back, staring vacantly ahead of her, till Aline admonished her, as she had done when the other message came, that the chocolate would be getting cold.

A respite--a respite. Oh, yes, it was at least a respite!

XI.

There was something so established and reassuring in the mere look of Enid Drover’s drawing-room that Kate Clephane, waiting there that afternoon for her sister-in-law to come in, felt a distinct renewal of confidence.

The house was old Mrs. Clephane’s wedding gift to her daughter, and everything in it had obviously been selected by some one whose first thought concerning any work of art was to ask if it would chip or fade. Nothing in the solid and costly drawing-room had chipped or faded; it had retained something of Enid’s invulnerable youthfulness, and, like herself, had looked as primly old-fashioned in its first bloom as in its well-kept maturity.

It was odd that so stable a setting should have produced that hurricane of a Lilla; and Kate smiled at the thought of the satisfaction with which the very armchairs, in their cushioned permanence, would welcome her back to domesticity.

But Mrs. Drover, when she appeared, took it on a higher plane. Had Lilla ever been unstable, or in any way failed to excel? If so, her mother, and her mother’s background, showed no signs of remembering. The armchairs stood there stolidly, as if asking what you meant by such ideas. Enid was a little troubled--she confessed--by the fact that Horace Maclew was a widower, and so much older than her child. “I’m not sure if such a difference of age is not always a risk.... But then Mr. Maclew is a man of such strong character, and has behaved so generously.... There will be such opportunities for doing good....”

Opportunities for doing good! It was on the tip of Kate’s tongue to say: “Ah, that must have been Lilla’s reason for accepting him!”; but Mrs. Drover was serenely continuing: “He has given her all the pearls already. She’s bringing them back tomorrow to be restrung.” And Kate understood that, for the present, the opportunities for doing good lay rather with the bridegroom than the bride.

“Of course,” Mrs. Drover went on, “it will be a great sacrifice for her father and me to let her go; though luckily Baltimore is not far off. And it will be a serious kind of life; a life full of responsibilities. Hendrik is afraid that, just at first, Lilla may miss the excitements of New York; but I think I know my child better. When Lilla is _really happy_ no one cares less than she does for excitement.”

The phrase gave Kate’s nerves a sudden twist. It was just what Chris used to say when she urged him to settle down to his painting--at least on the days when he didn’t say that excitement was necessary to the artist.... She looked at her sister-in-law’s impenetrable pinkness, and thought: “It might be Mrs. Minity speaking.”

Fred Landers had telephoned that he had got back and was coming to dine; she fancied he had it on his mind not to let her feel her solitude while Anne was away; and she said to herself that from him at least she would get a glimpse of the truth.

Fred Landers, as became a friend of the family, was also beaming; but he called Lilla’s engagement a “solution” and not a “sacrifice”; and this made it easier for Kate at last to put her question: “How did it happen?”

He leaned back, pulling placidly at his after-dinner cigar, his old-fashioned square-toed pumps comfortably stretched to the fire; and for an instant Kate thought: “It might be pleasant to have him in that armchair every evening.” It was the first time such a possibility had occurred to her.

“How did she pull it off, you mean?” He screwed up his friendly blue eyes in a confidential grin. “Well, I’m naturally not initiated; but I suppose in one of the good old ways, Lilla probably knows most of the tricks--and I rather think Nollie Tresselton’s been aiding and abetting her. It’s been going on for the last six months, I know, and a shooting-box in South Carolina is mixed up with it. Of course they all have a theory that Lilla need only be happy to be good.”

“And what do you think about it?”

He shrugged. “Why, I think it’s an experiment for which Maclew is to furnish the _corpus vile_. But he’s a thick-skinned subject, and it may not hurt him much, and may help Lilla. We can only look on and hope.”

Kate sat pondering her next question. At length she said: “Was Mr. Maclew’s private secretary there?”

“That fellow Fenno? Yes; he was on duty.” She fancied he frowned a little.

“Why do you call him ‘that fellow’?”

He turned toward her, and she saw that his friendly brows were beetling. “Is it necessary to speak of him more respectfully? The fact is, I don’t fancy him--never did.”

“You knew him before, then?” She felt the blood creeping to her forehead, and reached out for a painted hand-screen that she might seem to hold between her eyes and the fire.

Landers reflected. “Oh, yes. I’ve run across him now and then. I rather fancy he’s been mixed up in this too; stirring the brew with the others. That’s my impression.”

“Yes.--I wonder why,” said Kate suddenly.

Landers smiled a little, though his brows continued to jut. “To please Anne, perhaps.”

“Anne--_Anne_?”

The name, after she had uttered it, continued to ring on between them, and she leaned back, pressing the screen against her closed lids. “Why?” she managed to question.

“Well--a good many people have wanted to please Anne, first and last. I simply conjectured that Fenno might be among them.”

“Oh, no; I’m sure you’re quite wrong. I wonder--.” She hesitated, and then went on with a rush: “The fact is, I wonder you haven’t noticed that he and Lilla--”

Landers sat up and flung his cigar-end into the embers. “Fenno and Lilla? By Jove--you might be right. I hadn’t thought of it--”

“Well, I have; I’ve met them together; when they didn’t expect to be met--.” She hurried it out with a kind of violence. Her heart was beating to suffocation; she had to utter her suspicion, to give it life and substance.

“The idea sheds floods of light--no doubt of that. Poor Maclew! I’m beginning to be sorry for him. But I think the lot of them are capable of taking pretty good care of themselves. On the whole,” Landers added with a sudden sigh of relief, “I’m jolly glad it’s Lilla--if it’s anybody.”

“I _know_ it’s Lilla.” Kate spoke with a passionate emphasis. She had to prove to some one that Chris was Lilla’s lover in order to believe it herself, and she had to believe it herself in order to dispel the dreadful supposition raised by Landers’s words. She found herself, now, able to smile away his suggestion quite easily, to understand that he had meant it only as a random joke. People in America were always making jokes of that kind, juvenile jokes about flirtations and engagements; they were the staple topic of the comic papers. But the shock of finding herself for a second over that abyss sent her stumbling back half-dazed to the safe footing of reality. If she were going to let her imagination run away at any chance word, what peace would there ever be for her?

The next day Nollie Tresselton reappeared, smiling and fresh, like a sick-nurse whose patient has “turned the corner”. With Lilla off her hands her keen boyish face had lost its expression of premature vigilance, and she looked positively rejuvenated. She was more outspoken than Landers.

“At last we can talk about it--thank goodness!” And she began. Horace Maclew and Lilla had met the previous autumn, duck-shooting in South Carolina. Lilla was a wonderful shot when she wasn’t ... well, when she was in training ... and Maclew, like most heavy solemn men of his type, who theoretically admire helpless feminine women, had been bowled over by the sight of this bold huntress, who damned up and down the birds she missed, smoked and drank with the men, and in the evening lay back silent, with lids half-dropped over smouldering sullen eyes, and didn’t bore one with sporting chatter or sentimental airs. It had been a revelation, the traditional thunderbolt; only, once back in Baltimore, Maclew had been caught in the usual network of habits and associations; or perhaps other influences had intervened. No doubt, with a man like that, there would be a “settled attachment” in the background. Then Lilla, for a while, was more outrageous than ever, and when he came to New York to see her, dragged him to one of her rowdiest parties, and went away from it in the small hours with another man, leaving Maclew and his super-Rolls to find their way home uncompanioned. After that the suitor had vanished, and it had taken the combined efforts of all the family, and the family’s friends, to draw him back. (“And no one helped us more than Major Fenno,” Nollie added with a grateful sigh.)

The name, dropping suddenly into their talk, made Lilla and her wooer and all the other figures in the tale shrivel up like toy balloons. Kate Clephane felt her blood rising again; would she never be able to hear Chris mentioned without this rush of the pulses?

“He was so clever and tactful about it,” Nollie was going on. “And he really _believes_ in Lilla, just as I do. Otherwise, of course, he couldn’t have done what he did--when Horace Maclew has been such a friend to him. He believes she’ll keep straight, and that they’ll be awfully happy. I fancy he knows a good deal about women, don’t you?”

“About women like Lilla, perhaps.” The words had flashed out before Kate even knew the thought had formed itself. It must have welled up from some depth of bitterness she had long thought dry.

Nollie’s eyes looked grieved. “Oh--you don’t like him?”

“I haven’t seen him for years,” Kate answered lifelessly.

“He admires you so much; he says he used to look up to you so when he was a boy. But I daresay he wasn’t half as interesting then; he says himself he was a sort of intellectual rolling stone, never sure of what he wanted to be or to do, and always hurting and offending people in his perpetual efforts to find himself. That’s how he puts it.”

Look up to her when he was a boy! Yes; that’s how he _would_ put it. And the rest too; how often she had heard that old analogy of the rolling stone and its victims!

“I think the war transformed him; made a man of him. He says so himself. And now he believes he’s really found his vocation; he doesn’t think of anything but his writing, and some of his poetry seems to me very beautiful. I’m only sorry,” Nollie continued thoughtfully, “that he feels obliged to give up his present job. It seems a pity, when he has so little money, and has been looking so long for a post of the sort--”

“Ah ... he’s giving it up?”

“Well, yes; he says he must have more mental elbow-room; for his writing, I mean. He can’t be tied down to hours and places.”

“Ah, no; he never could--” Again the words had nearly slipped out. The effort to suppress them left Kate dumb for a moment, though she felt that Nollie was waiting for her to speak.

“Then of course he must go,” she assented. Inwardly she was thinking: “After all, if I’m right--and this seems to prove I’m right--about him and Lilla, it’s only decent of him to give up his job.” And her eyes suddenly filled with tears at the thought of his making a sacrifice, behaving at a crucial moment as her old ideal of him would have had him behave. After all, he was perhaps right in saying that the war had made a man of him.