Chapter VI: A Puppet in Tragedy

When Mary’s year of foreign travel was over she found herself so completely unprepared for the flatness of life at home, that she shipped her uncle off for Boston, and decided to remain abroad another year. She had made many delightful acquaintances during her travels, and had found it easy to map out twelve more months of traveling, visiting, “stopping over,” and “settling down.”

When she considered the loneliness and helplessness of her uncle’s returning to an unkept house, she felt the sense of guilt that accompanies an act of unaccustomed selfishness, but a poor relation had been invoked from the shades of the “unexhausted West,” and Cousin Rebecca had gladly consented to supply creature comforts to Mr. Elton till Mary’s return. “I know I’m selfish,” Mary acquiesced to her accusing conscience, “but I can’t go home and see Philip and Edith yet” (they had been married a month after she left Boston),--“I’m too battered and bruised. My scars must heal, and my wounds grow callous before I can see their happiness. If I had died Uncle Charles would have got on somehow, and this will only be a year of desertion, and perhaps it will be the only vacation in my life.” So she quieted her qualms, and persisted, as usual, in the line of conduct she had laid out for herself.

The second year passed as delightfully as the first, and Mary finally turned her back on the land that had fulfilled her desires and satisfied her senses, with a devout feeling of thankfulness that Europe still existed as a memory and a hope, even though it was rapidly fading from her natural vision. On the steamer that was bearing her too rapidly towards her undesired home, she found various acquaintances, among others an old school friend, Helen White, who was returning from a six weeks’ tour in France. She was familiar with Mary’s immediate circle in Boston, and able to give her much news and gossip that had failed to be recorded in letters from home. Naturally one of Mary’s first inquiries was in regard to the Morleys. How are they getting on together, and in society, and with the world? Mary had had frequent letters from Edith, full of her own peculiar aroma, containing amusing and shrewd observations on the people that formed the background to her new life, speaking often of Philip and his interests with affectionate understanding, but always ending with an appeal to “come home soon to the person who needed her most.” At the mention of Edith Morley’s name, Helen White’s rather inanimate face woke up. “She is a wonderful success in Boston!” she exclaimed. “There is not a more popular woman in society. Every one wants her all the time. She seems to be equally sought after by the smart and the stupid sets, and by all the unlabeled people in between. I declare Philip Morley is a lucky man!”

“I suppose he’s as much pleased with Edith as the rest of the world is,” suggested Mary, as a “leader.”

“How could he be otherwise? She is always perfectly lovely with him, and evidently doesn’t cross his wishes in the least particular. She is a model wife, and I must say--nice as Philip is--I think she deserves some one a little more--more--well, interesting and unusual and stimulating.” Mary grunted: “H’m. Well, if Edith is satisfied, I suppose _we_ must be. What effect has marriage had upon Philip?”

“Between ourselves, I don’t think he has developed and broadened as much as you would expect,” said Miss White, with her confidential manner. “He is a little disappointing. He never seems to arrive anywhere, and at thirty-eight one expects a man to be something more than promising.”

Mary’s heart gave a protesting throb that was a physical pain. She had dreaded to hear exactly what her unsuspecting friend had told her without knowing it,--that Philip had found Edith out, and that his nature, in order to expand to its potential capacities, demanded outside stimulus,--opposition even, and that it had met nothing but enervating echo and reflection.

When Mary was alone her eyes filled with tears of self-reproach and suffering. “It was all my fault,” she accused herself, in her exaggerated consciousness of disaster. “I was fool enough to think that the hardest thing to do must be the right thing. The punishment for stupidity is harder to bear than the punishment for sin,--and it ought to be. The wages of folly is remorse, and that’s a good deal worse than death,” she added, with her usual impersonal relentlessness.

During the thoughtful hours of the next few monotonous days, while Mary’s impatient eyes questioned the horizon line--that symbol of symmetry--for something visible beyond, she tried to persuade herself that she had been over-subtle in her interpretation of Helen White’s indifference towards Philip, and enthusiasm for Edith. Certainly no hint of an unhappy marriage had been put into the words, although it had been taken out of them. But she must possess her soul in patience; she should know enough soon.

She knew two days after her arrival, when she and her uncle went to dine at the Morleys’. Edith was dazzlingly unchanged. Her embrace of Mary was the spontaneous hug of a child, who abandons itself to the present emotion. “You dear old thing!” she exclaimed. “You’ve got a French dress and an English accent, but I know you’re the same old sixpence underneath.”

“Yes, I’m the same old nickel,--put me into American money, please,--for I never was a better Yankee than under this foreign veneer. The accent and the dress both come off, you know,--I only wear them on formal occasions. Hello, Philip!” she broke off suddenly, as he ran downstairs with unwonted speed to greet her. “Well, here we are again,” she rattled on. “Let’s be rude and all stare at each other, and then be polite and say we all look younger and more beautiful than we did two years ago.” Her unflinching gaze met Philip’s,--met it, passed it by, and penetrated to his inner self that lay hidden behind the lazily drooping eyes and the sensitive disillusioned mouth. He looked older, and, if wisdom implies a shattering of youthful ideals, wiser as well. His appearance was by no means unhappy, but his contentment showed too much of resignation, and Mary would have been more pleased to detect a gleam of divine discontent, kindling ambition into action. The pleasant and affectionate smile with which he turned toward his wife had in it the hint of almost pitying tenderness with which a grown person regards a child.

“Well, Edith, what can we say about Mary that she won’t consider fulsome flattery?” he asked. “You are much cleverer than I. Put my feelings into words.”

The girl turned her face--not towards the object of this discussion, but to her husband, as though to read his thoughts; then she slipped her hand through Mary’s arm and said, “You look just the way the real Mary Elton was always meant to look,--not sad but serious, not scoffing at life, but amused by it. You look like an embodiment of strength and sympathy, such as it rests weary eyes to look upon. And besides, Europe--or something--has put a funny little look of sweetness into your face that didn’t use to”--She was interrupted by Mary’s suddenly winding her feather boa around her mouth. “Keep still!” she commanded, with her old-time vigor. “I won’t be insulted. _Sweet_, indeed! Edith, you look thoroughly sour and bitter. You are a peculiarly ugly and disagreeable looking woman. Philip looks meek and henpecked, and as for poor old Uncle Charles,”--pulling her beaming uncle under the electric light,--“he has grown ten years younger since losing his business manager, and being allowed to shift for himself. Come and show me the house,” she went on, leading the way to the parlor with Edith trotting at her heels like a happy dog. “I haven’t seen your wedding presents yet. Oh, there’s the lamp I gave you, and a very decent looking one it is, too. Lamps can be so perfectly terrible when they really make an effort to be ornamental that I try to be guided by their purely utilitarian functions in selecting them. Oh, and there’s the portrait! How I have wanted to see it! I assure you its praises have echoed through Europe?” She paused in front of a picture that would have attracted the attention of any human creature, no matter how ignorant, no matter how wise. It did not need the signature of the greatest living portrait painter to proclaim it as one of the modern masterpieces of the world.

It was Edith’s self--or selves, to be strictly accurate. She was standing with suddenly arrested movement, as though she had started to step out of the frame, a living woman, and then had quickly decided to remain a painted mystery. Firelight played on the rainbow-tinted satins which draped the exquisite figure, and a gleam from a hidden light brightened the gold-streaked hair. The background was a softly blended tapestry, and the general color scheme justified the name of “The Opal” left on it from a recent exhibition. But the woman’s face! In that lay the miracle of the painter’s genius, for never surely was such a marvelous blending of qualities,--such a symphony of harmonies in which discords had their place.

Mary sucked in her breath with the “Oh!” of complete satisfaction. “He will be an old master a few hundred years hence,” she said, “and Edith will be the Mona Lisa of future generations. You have lived sufficiently,” she went on, addressing the portrait’s original, half-banteringly; “you may as well go upstairs and die this minute. Your destiny is completed. To have inspired such a work as that means genius in the subject as well as in the painter.”

“It has been too funny to hear different people’s comments on it,” Edith said. “When it was first exhibited I put on three veils so as not to be recognized; and then I had the greatest fun listening to the criticisms of friends and strangers. I heard one lady say, ‘_There_ is a person capable of any crime!’ Another said, ‘She should have been painted as a Madonna. I have never seen such goodness in any human countenance.’ A man whom I did not know said, ‘There is the only face I have ever seen which expresses Browning’s line, “There’s a woman like a dew-drop, she’s so purer than the purest.”’ And a horrid man whom I _do_ know, said,--excuse my repeating such a remark,--‘What an extraordinary likeness of Mrs. Morley! She looks like a nun turned demi-mondaine!’”

“What do you think of it, Philip,” asked Mary, while Mr. Elton was dryly commenting, “I consider it the portrait of a most intelligent woman.”

Philip looked from the portrait to Mary, with his quiet smile. “When you ask me that, it is like asking what I think of Edith,” he explained. “It has all her moods and all her phases. It shows what she may be, no less than what she has been. It is endlessly suggestive and fascinating.”

“I was almost afraid to be painted by such a mind-reader,” Edith confessed, “but I needn’t have been alarmed. If one has no mind it can’t be read; and it seems to me he has painted nothing. Every one reads something different into it, but the variations are in them, not in me. That is where the painter’s skill comes in. As I look at it myself, it is a mirror’s likeness of a dead face; yet every one else speaks of its marvelous vitality.”

“It is well named,” Mary said softly. “Such changing living beauty belongs only to the opal.”

“And to Edith Morley,” put in Mr. Elton, with a courtly bow.

Dinner was announced, and Edith insisted that the survey of her possessions must be postponed or the soup would grow cold. During the first part of the meal Mary did most of the talking. “What is the use of being a Ulysses,” she protested, “if one can’t recite one’s Odyssey to bored Penelopes? I can see you all gaping internally, but you’ve got to listen to me for a while, and then I’ll give you a chance.” She regaled them with anecdotes of American human nature as revealed on foreign soil, and seemed her old merry self; but while her tongue wagged fast and gayly, her brain was working in opposition to her words. “There’s an immense change in him below the surface,” she said to herself, and the sense of it caused a sudden contraction of the brow which her laughing listeners did not comprehend. “Now _you_ talk,” she said abruptly. “What’s become of the Reverend Sylvester Rogers? How did Milly Lambert’s marriage turn out? Where is Marion Meridith? And what happened to Jack Hudson?”

“Let’s see,” pondered Edith. “Mr. Rogers had a call to Kansas City--also incidentally to marry an heiress. Milly Lambert succeeded in getting a divorce from her wretched husband, though she knew exactly what he was when she married him; Marion Meridith is just the same nice girl that she always was,--too good for any of the men who want to marry her; and Jack Hudson,--well, they say he and his wife want to be separated, but they can’t seem to convince the lawyers that there’s any occasion for it.”

“What do you think of divorce?” questioned Mr. Elton of Edith. It was the kind of direct inquiry she never liked, for no suggestion of the questioner’s opinion was evident, and his face had about as much expression as a brick house in a block. Edith glanced tentatively at her husband and Mary, but they offered her no assistance, so she said lightly, “What do I think of divorce? Why, I never think of it. I don’t have to, you see.”

Mary brought her fist down on the table with one of her unregenerate gestures. “It is one of the greatest crimes of the day,” she exclaimed, “the attitude of Public Opinion on Divorce! I believe some of the churches are trying to do what they can to frown upon it, but till some fixed law is made which applies in every State in the Union, people will get divorced almost as fast as they get married. The trouble is, each couple fancies its own case unique, and women particularly seem to be incapable of giving up their own selfish happiness for the good of humanity or the community.”

“I don’t suppose you’d ever marry a divorced man, Mary,” Edith suggested, and the others all laughed at her characteristically feminine way of turning an abstract argument into a personal question.

“I don’t suppose I should,” Mary replied bluntly. “Nor do I suppose I’d marry a man who was not divorced,--nor do I think I shall ever be the cause of divorce in others. The opinion of an old maid like me is utterly worthless, of course, and I suppose ‘sour grapes’ would be the motive attributed to me by any one who knew my views. It is the pretty and foolish young married women who ought to be converted. I’m ashamed of Milly Lambert.”

The intolerant Mary was speaking, but Edith brought back the new incarnation by introducing the subject of Sydney Eaton’s interest in politics. This gave Mary the chance to find out whether Philip still continued to identify himself with the Municipal Improvement Society and the Civic Club, and the various other reforming bodies in which he had formerly been an active member. Her evident interest in the subject loosened Philip’s tongue, and he began to talk as well as to listen. This was just what Mary had wanted,--to find out whether the new Philip had what was best in the old, and skillfully she cast her line, the hook hidden in good conversational bait.

Mr. Elton unconsciously assisted, by judicious flourishes of the landing net, in the form of questions demanding answers, and statements requiring contradiction. Mary’s smile was that of the successful fisherman when Philip laid down his knife and fork and began to talk. His subject interested him, and Mary’s questions and arguments stimulated him. He threw back his head, and indifference and acquiescence shook off him like drops of water. His eyes lighted with the old fire of enthusiasm, and his voice vibrated with earnestness. A flush of almost triumphant success was reflected in Mary’s face. Edith may have lulled Philip’s spirit to sleep, but she had not killed it. As for Edith herself, she regarded her husband’s transformation with undisguised pleasure. “Now I see what you’ve been wanting these last two years, Philip!” she exclaimed, smiling joyously from him to her friend. “It’s just been Mary! It’s good to see you like your old self. Perhaps if I could only learn to quarrel and argue with you it would goad you into going into politics, as your friends want you to. What you need is a little opposition.”

“He’ll get enough of that if he goes into politics with his present ideas of reform,” Mr. Elton chuckled. But Philip did not seem to heed the comments that were flying round his head. He looked at Mary and talked on, his mind quickened by her interested questions, his intelligence freed by finding its fellow. Edith leaned back in her chair and gave the satisfied sigh of a surfeited child. There was not the smallest tinge of jealousy or of envy in the delight she took in the pleasure of Philip and Mary in being together again. Her nature was light but not petty, and small thoughts were as alien to her as big ones.

When dinner was over, Edith took possession of her friend and carried her off to the other room, calling back, “Now please smoke very long cigars, and pretend you have a great deal to say to each other. Mary and I are going to have a heart to heart talk, and we don’t wish to be disturbed by mere men.”

As Edith stood in the firelight, Mary felt the rush of irresistible admiration that her presence always excited. In all the galleries of Europe, Mary’s eyes had rested on no more beautiful picture than this wonderful woman, dressed in soft shades of varying yellows that seemed to match their golden gleams with her sunshiny hair. Her engagement ring--Philip’s opal--flashed its sympathetic response to every hue of her gown and every variation of light, while a necklace of the same stones--his wedding gift--flashed fire, like a setting of colored lights encircling her exquisite head.

“Now let’s talk, just the way we used to,” she said, settling herself in a corner of the big sofa, “which means that I will lay bare a few hearts and brains and things, and you will dissect them.”

“Well, produce your material,” Mary commanded; “the surgeon’s knife is ready.”

“I’ve got a splendid name for you!” Edith broke in. “It just came to me this minute. You’re the Critic on the Heart! You do so love to analyze emotions and criticise impulses.”

Mary rewarded her friend’s bestowal of the title by flinging a sofa cushion at her, which Edith instantly tucked away behind her shoulders, saying, “My back thanks you,” and leaned forward, looking like a lovely daffodil in a calyx of green pillows.

“_You_ have no heart for me to criticise,” Mary said rather scornfully, “and my own is a fossil. I am not a geologist, so I don’t understand it. Produce another.”

“Philip’s!” Edith replied so promptly that Mary started.

“Thanks. I’d rather not,” she said shortly. “I know nothing of it, and a man’s wife would surely not wish to discuss him in any private or personal way, even with his best friend--and hers.”

“Now, Mary, you know it’s perfectly ridiculous to talk that way to me,” Edith expostulated. “My marriage is your doing. You can’t dismiss it that way with a grandiloquent generality. You’ve got to take the consequences of your own acts.”

“And what are the consequences?” Mary forced herself to ask in a light tone which she felt would not fit the relentlessly frank attitude of the young wife.

“Unhappiness on his side, indifference on mine,” was the laconic answer, that drew from Mary a sharp cry of “_Don’t_, Edith! Don’t say such a thing--in such a way. What are you made of!”

“Sugar and spice and all that’s nice,” the girl sang gayly. “You always knew that was all I was made of, but you thought the power of my husband’s love would convert sugar and spice into heart and soul. I regret to say the strength of Philip’s love was not sufficient to perform that miracle,” she added, with an unusual touch of bitterness. But she instantly laughed it away. “I knew you’d see that Philip had found me out,” she said. “But he’s wonderfully good to me, he never shows that he is disappointed,--but--you know I _have_ intuition, Mary, if I haven’t anything else,--and I knew that he had ceased loving me before we had been married a year. Of course that means that I am adrift again,” and she sighed resignedly.

Rage surged in Mary’s breast, rage against herself and Edith, and a rush of suffocating pity for Philip. But her anger, as usual, had to stand aside for admiration and amazement at Edith’s next words.

“It was so fine in Philip,” the girl said slowly, her rich voice vibrating with feeling, “it was so much nobler of him to cease loving me when he found I was--nothing. Most men would have kept on caring for me. I was always good to him, always sympathetic and affectionate; I did everything he wanted me to, and, as you see,” she added naïvely, “I have not lost my looks nor grown stupid. How many men would feel a lack in such a wife? I have been the envy of débutantes and matrons, the admired and adored of men, yet Philip has proved his fineness by ceasing to love me. His nature is high enough to demand its equal.”

“You are making him out as much of a prig as Tennyson’s King Arthur,” Mary expostulated, but Edith’s childlike laugh interrupted her. “Oh, no! Philip has far too much humor and sense to wave his hands over me, saying, ‘Lo, I forgive thee, even as eternal God forgives.’ Under such provocation I should feel tempted to elope with the nearest Launcelot. No, the good part of Philip is that no one but you and I knows that he is a bitterly disappointed man. _I_ know it because I myself am his disappointment, and you know it because”--

“Oh, I _don’t_ know it!” Mary hastily interposed. “I’m sure he seems quite happy. You have too much intuition. You exaggerate. You may not be just what Philip thought you, but who is what any one thinks them? Besides, if he craves something different, you are surely adaptable enough to give what he wants.”

“No, Mary,” Edith said sadly, “I cannot give leadership, advice, stimulus, incentive. I can give only responsive qualities, as you know. And there is danger ahead, Mary, danger for me as well as for him.” Restlessly she rose from her cushioned corner and walked up and down. “Do you still care for me, Mary?” she demanded earnestly. “I mean enough to make a fight for me? Can you exert a strong enough influence to overthrow a determined will pulling against yours?”

Mary did not trust herself to meet the appealing and appalling clearness of the eyes waiting to disarm her. She was disgusted with the girl’s egotism, angry with the weakness that had disillusioned Philip. She cared too much for the man to feel pity for the woman. “I am afraid I am beginning to lose patience with a clear-sightedness as unavailing as yours,” she said, rather coldly. “If you and Philip are unhappy, I am more so, for I have an added sense of responsibility for your disappointment. I confess I do not feel like entering a tug of war for the prize of your soul. Where everything seems to the onlooker to be peaceful and serene, such strenuousness strikes me as being inappropriate.”

Edith drew back a little, as if her friend’s sarcasm had hit her lightly in the face.

“I have been dreadfully selfish,” she acquiesced with Mary’s thought. “I am going to try never to talk to you about myself again. I think you will make it easy for me to keep that resolution.”

Instantly Mary’s impulsive heart smote her. “Edith, forgive me!” she cried. “I spoke thoughtlessly.”

Edith was by her side at once, radiant and fascinating. “Forgive you? My dear old Mary, that word must never pass between us. I’ll try to be more what you would wish,--but I want to say one thing.” Her fingers twined together nervously. “I think--if I had had--a child--everything might have been different.”

“I have so hoped that you would,” Mary murmured, with the half-abashed embarrassment shown by the unmarried when referring to the subject that is outside of their personal experience or prospects.

“I feel that I shall never have children,” Edith said quietly, “and I am sorry for Philip as well as myself. He must turn to his work and I to”--

“Mr. Grant Lorimer,” said the maid’s voice at the door. Mary started as if the little white-capped servant had fired a pistol at her. But Edith was halfway across the room, shaking hands with Mary’s old enemy and crying out, “You have spoiled everything, Grant! Miss Elton and I were having the first talk we’ve had for two years, and I hadn’t got round to telling her that you are in Boston again. See how surprised she looks!”

Mary tried to assume a cordiality she did not feel. “How do you do, Mr. Lorimer? Yes, I am surprised to find any one drifting back to Boston who does not belong here.”

If there were a dash of venom in her words he did not swallow it. He made a profound bow as he seated himself beside her. “I feel that I do in a measure belong here,” he said quietly. “Mrs. Morley always gives me a sense of being at home, and perhaps an old friend like myself brings with him a little different feeling of old times than comes with new acquaintances, no matter how congenial.” Their foils crossed in their opening greetings, as never failed to happen when these combatants met. Edith rushed in to separate them. “I’m going to treat you like the old friend you are, Grant,” she struck in, “and send you into the dining-room to have a cigar and some coffee with Philip and Mr. Elton. Then Mary and I can finish our feminine confidences and you will have all the charm of novelty when you return with the others fifteen minutes later. I know Philip wants to talk to you about stocks, and I hate the sound of the word. Run along like a good boy.” Her voice had the affectionate cadence of a mother giving wheedling advice to her child. Mary’s suspicious brain wondered what was Edith’s motive in thus summarily dismissing her friend. Was it merely that the electric sparks of discord were disagreeable to one who loved harmony? was it because Edith wished to speak to him alone, and could do it better when her husband was in the room to absorb Mary’s attention? or was it because she did not wish Mary to find out from her Southern admirer how constant had been their companionship of late? In another minute Mary was blaming herself for attributing false motives, for as Grant Lorimer left the room in obsequious obedience to his queen’s command Edith threw her arms around Mary, exclaiming, “I couldn’t have any one come between us this first night. I want to be with you alone. Talk to me, dear. Tell me all about you, what you’ve thought and felt and experienced these two years. I’m sick of myself. I want to get close, close in touch with you to-night. You always help me so much;” and Edith cuddled up to her austere and angular friend like a tired child. Mary never forgave herself for her next words. She gave a little hard laugh and said, “I’ll talk to you as much as you please about what I have seen, heard, and done, but I have happily outgrown the days of immodest exposure of heart and mind and spirit. If you are catering to what you think I want to talk about, you are making a mistake. I don’t wish to talk about either myself or yourself. Let’s compromise on Italy.”

A queer, quiet smile crept into the corners of Edith’s lips, and she gave a little shrug, her frivolous submission to Fate. “Kismet. So be it,” she said lightly, drawing her hand out of Mary’s arm but still smiling with perfect amiability. “Italy is the subject of all others to be discussed by friends who have been separated two years. I hope you enjoyed Giorgione’s ‘Concert’ as much as I did, and felt like slapping the insipid faces of Carlo Dolce’s Madonnas!”

When the men came in a little later, the girls were discussing the relative merits of Perugino and Lippo Lippi with the passionate interest frequently reserved for post-prandial confidences concerning the advantages of rival schools of underwear.

Mr. Elton and Grant Lorimer took instant possession of their hostess, who was laughingly accused by Lorimer of “showing off” about Italian art.

“What a wonderful memory Edith has!” Mary exclaimed to Philip, as he drew a chair up to the corner of her sofa. “It doesn’t seem fair for one person to have so much. All the fairies were present at her christening.”

“Yes, she is wonderfully endowed,” Philip acquiesced. “A good memory knows what to forget as well as what to remember,” he added, and suddenly Mary’s mind flew back to their last interview alone together, when she had poured out the story of her love for him. She flushed scarlet at the thought, and an intolerable sense of embarrassment and shame flooded her. They talked of impersonal things, and no outsider would have been conscious of effort or strain; but while Mary was talking she was telling herself that their intercourse could never be natural or agreeable. Their past yawned between them,--a past too vital to be bridged with the commonplace,--while they chatted of friends, and things that had happened to people in whom they were both interested. Mary found herself watching Philip’s face with all her old affection and belief, but with an added ache of sorrow, not for herself but for him. “If he had only been happy I could have borne my own unhappiness,” she groaned inwardly, “but he is a disappointed man. He was once something, he could have been anything, and now he will be nothing.” Involuntarily she turned towards the cause of his failure. Edith, with her customary skill, was mixing oil and water in the persons of her two guests. Mary remarked on it to Philip, and then, adding abruptly, “A little vinegar has a wonderfully ameliorating effect on two alien liquids; I am going to supply it,” impulsively, almost to the point of rudeness, she quitted her seat and joined the group at the other side of the room. Edith instantly beckoned to Philip to come and sit by her side.

“This is a great deal cosier,” she said comfortably. “There are too few of us to divide into groups. Mary is a wise woman to encourage us to hang together, isn’t she, Philip?” She smiled up at her husband’s rather baffled face with her winning air of confidence, but his answering smile touched his mouth alone, leaving his eyes unresponding. Mary instantly began firing questions at Lorimer, which he, bewildered, answered with the brevity of surprise.

“Are you to be long in Boston?”

“Why, really I don’t know. My plans are quite uncertain.”

“Have you been here much during the last two years?”

“No. At least only recently. My business demands occasional visits to other cities.”

“Where did you spend last summer?”

“At Northeast Harbor.”

“Oh, how pleasant for you to be near the Morleys!”

“Yes, indeed, delightful.” And so it went.

Finally Mary rose to her feet, weighted down by a confused sense of failure, misunderstanding, and disappointment. “Come, Uncle Charles, you must take me home,” she said. “I’m not as young as you, and half past ten is the middle of my night. I haven’t my land legs or my land brain yet, and I feel a little watery at both extremities,” she explained to Edith.

“You must look in to-morrow or the next day and see that all goes well in my absence,” Philip said, as he unfolded Mary’s wrap. “I have to run on to New York for a few days on business, and Edith will think it a good exchange if you will take my place.”

“Oh, why don’t you take her with you!” Mary cried impulsively. He turned towards his wife, saying, “Well, Edith, what do you say,--will you come with me?”

“Why, of course, if you want me,” she replied instantly.

“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” he said. “Good-night, Mary. It is like old times to have you back again. We’ve missed you tremendously. Good-night, Mr. Elton. I congratulate you on your return to slavery.”

Grant Lorimer stood beside the handsome couple, bowing with scrupulous politeness. He looked mysteriously dark and enigmatic in the half light. Mary turned as she went down the steps, fascinated by the picture that Edith made, as she stood between the two men, gleaming like a tongue of flame in her shimmering yellows. Somehow at that moment her radiant beauty stamped itself on Mary’s consciousness more forcibly than ever before. “Good-night, Mary,” called Edith for the last time. “Philip isn’t going to take me to New York. I know him! Don’t desert me. Remember I shall be all alone. I shall depend on you. Don’t forget me.” Her voice vibrated with a tone of earnestness out of keeping with her words, but her pretty inconsequent little laugh trilled out. Mary saw Philip still standing by the open door, as Grant Lorimer turned towards Edith with one of his compelling glances and followed her into the parlor. Then a sudden gust of wind slammed the door, and the vision went out like the picture on a magic lantern slide.

Mary spent the next few hours between the nightmares of waking and sleeping. As usual, she alternately blamed and justified herself for her repellent attitude towards Edith’s confidences and confessions. “If I am a critic on the heart, there is no heart for which I feel greater scorn than my own,” she told herself bitterly. “I don’t know that it’s any better to have a bad heart than none at all. I am blaming Edith for what she can’t help; she was made by her parents and I by myself.” She tossed restlessly on her pillows, jerking impatiently at the blankets. “It’s only the sight of Philip and the thought of him that make me so unjustly angry with poor Edith. If she had married a man whom I could regard simply as her husband, my sympathies would be hers along with my affection and my grudging admiration; but she has taken the will power out of Philip Morley,--she is making him into a mere drifting will-less creature like herself, and I _can’t_ forgive her when I care so much for him. Oh, how absurd,--how _wrong_ it is for me to love him as I do!” Warm tears fell on her pillow, and she turned it over angrily. She tried to look at facts without blinking, and she saw the shadow of something unavoidable darkening the radiance of Edith. “It’s that wretched cad of a Dr. Fell,” she told herself. “He has too much influence over her. I must exert mine in opposition.” Then she drifted into unrestful sleep, clenching her fist at the powers of darkness, vowing that she should save Edith yet, and murmuring “I was ever a fighter,” as her imaginings changed to dreams.

The next day Mary was busied with her unpacking till late afternoon, when she took a breathing space and went to see Edith. The maid told her she had gone out ten minutes before, and that Mr. Morley had gone to New York that morning. Mary left a message of regret which she genuinely felt, and then made a long détour to get home, that she might fill her lungs with fresh air before again attacking the problem of sorting and distributing her spoils of travel.

When she got back she was disappointed to hear that Edith had been to see her, and had waited half an hour in vain for her return. “I wish I had thought to leave word for her to come to dinner to-night. It must be lonely for her with Philip away,” Mary reproved herself, and several times in the course of the evening she exclaimed irrelevantly to her uncle, “I wish Edith were here!” The next morning Mary made amends to her own conscience by going early to the Morleys to try and persuade Edith to come back with her to spend the day. The maid recognized the visitor of the afternoon before and asked her to step in. “Mrs. Morley left a letter for you,” she explained. “Mr. Morley sent for her to join him in New York last night, and Mr. Lorimer saw her off on the midnight train. He told me about it while she was packing up her things.”

Mary’s legs shook under her and she felt herself grow pale and cold. What did it mean? Was Philip ill? Was Grant Lorimer?--Tremblingly she opened the envelope. Between the closely written pages another note fell out addressed simply “To Philip.” Mary’s mind stopped thinking, her heart seemed to cease beating. Automatically she turned the enclosed envelope face down on her knee, and said to the maid in a voice which was not her own, “Very well. You needn’t wait. I will read Mrs. Morley’s letter here.” It ran as follows:--

DEAR MARY,--I am writing this while Grant Lorimer is waiting for me
to go away with him. This is not a letter of justification but of
explanation. I _can’t help it_, Mary, believe me, _I can’t help_
what I am doing. It had to be. It isn’t that I love him. Don’t
think I am just vulgarly bad. It is simply that he loves me more
than Philip, more than you, I am afraid, and that he has strength
to make me do what he wants. Don’t fancy that I do not think of
Philip,--of the disgrace--the humiliation--the bitter grief and
shame I am bringing him. But I cannot act otherwise. Perhaps if you
came in at this moment and defied the man downstairs and carried me
off with you, the battle would be won, for you know your influence
over me is hardly less hypnotic than his. Don’t ever blame
yourself, dear old Mary, for not having understood a little better
what I was going through. It is part of the tragedy that you could
not believe in such--weakness--as mine. Help Philip to understand
that I have never been anything but a puppet,--an irresponsible toy
with tangled strings pulled by many hands. I must write a few words
to Philip, and you must try to make him understand that there are
some events in life that are _inevitable_. I am not carried away by
passion,--I am not unhappy with Philip. I shall not be happy with
the other man. I am simply doing what I must do. Believe that, if
you can, and be good to Philip always, Mary, for my sake,--it is my
last request. I know that you will love me in spite of all I have
done and been, just as I shall always love you because you are your
own fine free self. And sometime, perhaps, I shall come back, and
then I know you will take me in.

EDITH.

Mechanically Mary folded up the letter. Her strained eyes looked like those of a person in a trance. There was no look of comprehension in her face. She laid Philip’s note on the table, propping it up frivolously against a little match safe in the form of a red imp. Then she walked to the window and looked out at the passers-by. “How badly that woman’s skirt hangs!” she inwardly commented with the only part of her mind that was not dead. After a few moments she shivered and glanced at Edith’s letter, which her frozen fingers grasped. “I must go before the maid returns,” she muttered vaguely, feeling as if a body she had murdered lay by her side and would be discovered. She turned towards the door. “Philip must not be told like that!” she exclaimed angrily as she caught sight of the letter she had arranged for him, and she crumpled it into her pocket, with trembling hands. Edith’s portrait smiled at her with bewitching candor. “There’s a woman like a dew-drop, she’s so purer than the purest,” Mary murmured. Then a muffled cry of acute comprehension broke from her tightened throat. “Edith, forgive me!” she cried wildly. “Oh, my God, how shall I tell Philip!” She bent her abashed head, that she might not meet the generous smile of her sinning friend, and when she crept home, hugging her terrible secret to her heart, she looked like a guilty soul fleeing from justice.