Chapter VIII: Part 8

Perhaps it was to react against this and to assert myself a little that I ventured once to cross swords with him. We had exhausted the movements of troops on the Rhine, the possible reception of the President in Pans, and he had given the Peace Conference six months in which to prepare the treaty for signature.

"Then we shall see," he laughed, in his rich, velvety bass.

He brought out the statement so emphatically that I was moved to ask:

"What shall we see?"

"What Mrs. Harrowby and I have been talking about, the end of all this rot as to the war having created a new world."

"That's putting the cart before the horse, isn't it?" I asked, maliciously. "The war didn't create the new world; the new world created the war."

Vio's exquisite eyebrows went up a shade.

"Does that mean anything?"

"Only that the volcano creates the explosion; not the explosion the volcano. Given all the repressions and suppressions and injustices, the eruption had to come."

"The eruption had to come," the colonel declared, hotly, "because the Germans planned it."

"Oh, that was only a detail."

"You might call the whole war only a detail--"

"I do."

"I don't get you," he said, stiffly, leaning forward to place an empty cup on the table in front of Vio.

In her I read something surprised that didn't, however, disapprove of me. Thus encouraged, I went on. If I hadn't thought these things out in the monotonous, unoccupied hours at Creed & Creed's, my stunned brain would not have been master of them now.

"I only meant that the war was but one of the forces, one of the innumerable forces, which the new world in the making--it isn't made yet by any means--has put into operation. If a house collapses it shatters all the windows; but you can't say that the shattering of the windows made the house collapse."

I could see by his stare he was literally minded.

"But what--what house is collapsing?"

"The house all round us, the house of this particular form of civilization. It's sliding down. It's been sliding down for years. You might say that it began to slide down as soon as it was put up, because it was wrongly constructed. A building full of flaws begins to settle before they get the roof on, and though it may stand for years the ultimate crash is only a question of time. War came as soon as our building began to split; the building didn't begin to split because the war came. It was splitting anyhow."

"That seems to me--" he sought for a sufficiently condemnatory word--"that seems to me sheer socialism."

"Oh, I don't think it is. The Socialists wouldn't say so. It isn't anything in particular. It's just--just fact."

"Only?" Vio smiled, with her delicate, penetrating sarcasm.

"Only," I echoed. "But as we belong to a world that doesn't like fact it isn't of much importance."

Bewilderment brought a pained expression to the handsome, rather stupid, countenance.

"What the--what on earth do you mean by that?"

"Only that we've a genius for dodging issues and shutting our eyes to what's straight before us."

"Do you mean the ruin straight before us?"

"Not necessarily, Vio. The collapse of this particular form of civilization wouldn't mean ruin, because we'd get a better form. I suppose it's coming into existence now."

"I don't know about that," the colonel objected. "As far as I see, things are pretty much the same as they've always been, and they're getting more so."

"I suppose none of us sees more than we have our eyes open to. Things of the greatest importance to us happen, and we don't know that they're going on."

"I hope that that kind of song and dance isn't going on--the breakdown of our civilization. It wasn't for that we gave 'em hell at Chateau-Thierry."

"Oh, none of us knows what anything is for, except in the vaguest way. All we can do is to plod ahead and follow the thread of flame."

"Follow the thread of what?"

I was sufficiently master of myself to indulge in a mild laugh.

"That's just an expression that's been in my mind during the time when I've been--been floundering about. Name I invented for--for a principle."

In this, however, he was not interested.

"Yes, but your collapsing house--"

"It may not come down altogether. I'm neither a prophet nor a prophet's son. All I can see is what I suppose everybody sees, that our civilization has been rotten. It couldn't hold together. It hadn't the cohesive strength. Perhaps I was wrong in saying that it was falling down; it's more as if we were pulling it down, to build up something better. It's our blind instinct toward perfection--"

But refusing to listen to any more, he got up to go. A brave man in the presence of enemies of flesh and blood, intellectual foes frightened him. At the first sound of their shells he rushed for his mental dugout which he burrowed in the ground of denial. "I don't believe that" and "All tommyrot" seemed to him shelters from any kind of danger.

But the main point to me was that I had in a measure not only held my own but got on to superior ground. I had been able to talk; in doing so I had got him at a slight disadvantage. The bit of self-respect inspired by this achievement enabled me to play the host and accompany him to the door with the kind of informal formality to which I had been so long unaccustomed.

And in performing this small duty I made a discovery. As he preceded me down-stairs I remembered seeing the back of his head once before. It was the kind of head not easily forgotten. Moreover, I had seen it in circumstances that had caused me to note it in particular. Where and when and how were details that did not at once return to me; but I knew that the association was sinister.

As I returned from my mission in showing him to the door I heard Vio speaking.

"Come in here, Billy. There's something I want to say."

She was still behind the tea-table, pensive rather than subdued, resolute rather than unhappy.

"I liked your talking like that," she began at once, without looking up at me. "It's--it's the way we shall have to play the game."

A box of cigarettes stood on the tea-table. I took one and struck a match, the usual stage-trick for gaining a little time.

"What game do you mean?" I asked, when I had carefully blown out the match and deposited it in an ash-tray.

"What game can I mean but--but that of your coming back?"

"Oh, is that a game?"

"Only in the sense of giving us something to play. We can't just--just live it."

"Why can't we?"

With a quick movement she was on her feet, flinging out her hands.

"For all the reasons that I should think you'd see." She came and stood on the hearth-rug, confronting me. "Billy, I wonder if you have the faintest idea of what I'm doing for your sake?"

"I've more than the faintest idea, Vio. Some day, when we're able to talk more easily than we are as yet, I shall tell you how grateful I am. Just now I'm--I'm rather dazed. I have to get my bearings--"

She, too, had taken a cigarette, lighting it nervously, carelessly, puffing rapidly at the thing and moving about the room.

"And there's another thing," she began, taking no notice of what I was trying to say; "I don't mind your talking as you did just now, so long as it's--as it's through your hat; but if it isn't--"

"I can't say that it is."

"That's just what I was afraid of. In the places where you've been--I don't want to know anything about them," she interjected, with a passionate gesture of the hand that held the cigarette, "but in such places men do pick up revolutionary ideas, just as they do in prisons!"

"I don't know that it's a question of getting revolutionary ideas, Vio, so much as it's one of living in a revolutionary world."

"And that's what I want to warn you against. It won't go down, Billy, not from you."

"Why not from me, in particular?"

"Oh, why do you make me explain things? Isn't it perfectly clear? If you're coming back among your old friends you'll have to be, after what's happened, more--how shall I put it?--more conservative, more like everybody else--than any one. _You_ can't afford to have wild ideas, because people will only say that you re trying to drag us along the way you went yourself."

I renounced this discussion to ask the question that was chiefly on my mind.

"Vio, who's that man that just went out?"

She threw me a look from the other side of the room.

"You heard. He's--where can you catch on? He's Emmy Fairborough's brother."

"Wasn't there--wasn't there a divorce?"

"Emmy's? Yes; Lord Fairborough and she are divorced, but what difference does that make?"

"I wasn't thinking of Lady Fairborough. I forgot she had been a Stroud. I meant--I meant him."

"Oh, he? Yes, I think he was."

"Divorced?"

"Yes, divorced. What of it?"

"To whom had he been married?"

"How should I know? It was to--to some low creature, an actress or something, the sort of thing men do when they're young and--and--"

"And wild?"

"Wild, if you like. Why are you asking?"

But I was not sure of being ready to tell her, so many things had to be formulated first. To gain more time I lighted another cigarette, and she spoke while I was doing it. Holding her own cigarette delicately, as if examining its spark, she said, with a staccato intonation that emphasized each word:

"Billy, you remember what I said earlier this afternoon? I can go back to our past and try to pick it up. I can't go back to anything that comes after that past and--and before to-day. Do you understand? It's more than three years since they told me your section was blown to pieces at Bourg-la-Comtesse. Most of your comrades were found---and buried. You were missing; but missing with very little hope. As the weeks went by that little hope dwindled till there was none. Then came the news that--that all that time you had been--alive."

"And I suppose that Wolf told you..."

"He told me a story, or as much of it as I could listen to. But that's not what I meant to speak about now. I want to say that--that I bury all that, deep, deep; only that I can't do it unless you consent to bury--"

"Everything there's been on your side. Is that it, Vio?"

"I shall ask no questions."

"Not even if I'm ready to answer them?"

"Not even if you're ready to answer them; but I shall expect you not to ask questions of me."

"So that between us there will be a gulf of silence."

She inclined her head without speaking.

"But why, Vio? Why?"

She swept up to me, throwing away her cigarette, and laying both her hands on my shoulders.

"Because, old boy, I'm your wife, and I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to help you because--because--"

Her nearness, the scent of her person, the black-opal mystery and fire were like hypnotic enchantment.

"Because you used to--to care for me a little, Vio? Is it possible that--that I can think that?"

She nodded.

"That's part of it, of course. I don't forget it. But what I remember more is what I've told you already, that, whatever you did, I sent you to do it. Now, if there's expiation to be made, I come in for that as well as you."

"So that we make it together?"

"So that we make it together."

Having already been bold I grew bolder. Lifting my hands to my shoulders I laid them on hers.

"And will you--will you let me kiss you on that, Vio?"

"Once," she consented; "but--but don't--don't touch me."

*PART III*

*CHAPTER I*

So we began what Vio called the expiation, and what to me was no more than the attempt to persuade our friends that they didn't know what they knew. This, according to Vio's calculations, could be best achieved by never for an instant showing the white feather of an uncomfortable conscience. Our assurance was to be something like the Stroud aplomb on emerging from the courts of bankruptcy or divorce. To be unaware of anything odd in one's conduct helped others to be unaware of it, too. A high spirit, a high head, a high hand carried one through difficult situations regardless of the strife of tongues.

I didn't think it necessary to remind Vio that the strife of tongues could go on even if we didn't hear it. Nothing else was possible when Wolf's fatuity blew the trumpet and beat the drum if the clamor showed signs of dying down. It wasn't that he told the truth, but that he told lies so easy of detection. Alice Mountney did tell the truth as far as she knew it; but where she didn't know it she supplied the deficiency by invention. That those so near us should be in conflict naturally called for comment, especially when Vio refused to let me speak.

For the first few weeks I was too busily occupied to think of what any one was saying, seeing that the details I had to arrange were so unusual. Of the steps taken to become a living citizen again, and get back my property from my heirs, I give no account further than to say that they absorbed my attention. My standing in the community I was thus unable to compute till we were into the new year.

By this time I had taken part in a number of family events on which I shall touch briefly. At Christmas we had gone to Washington to spend the festival with Minna and Tom Cantley. There we had met Ernestine, in one of the intervals of her flag-raising, and on the way back to Boston my brother Dan's ship had unexpectedly arrived in New York. A series of domestic gatherings had therefore taken place, at all of which Vio had worked heroically. As she had generally hitherto ignored my family's existence this graciousness was not without its effect. Where she did so much for my rehabilitation, those close to me in blood could hardly do less than follow her example.

They followed it almost to the letter. That is to say, none of them asked me any questions, presumably wishing to spare both themselves and me embarrassment. Once or twice, when I attempted to speak of my experiences, the readiest plunged in with some topic that would lead us away from dangerous ground. If I yielded to this it was because speaking of myself at all was the deliberate exposure of nerves still raw and quivering. I could do it, but I couldn't do it willingly.

Between Minna and myself there had never been much sympathy, largely because I was of the dreamy temperament and she of the sharp and practical. That I should make beauty a career in life, and take advantage of the fact that our father had left me a modest sufficiency to give my services to a museum of fine arts, shocked her to the heart. A man should do a man's work, she said, not that of an old Miss Nancy. When I pointed out that many of the manufacturers in New England, whose work had to do with textiles, came to me for advice, she replied that she didn't believe it. Her attitude now was that I had done no worse than she had always foretold and any one might have expected.

Ernestine, to do her justice, was as tolerant of me as she was of any one who wasn't a flag. The Flag having become her idol and she its high-priestess, she could talk of nothing else. The nation had apparently gone to war in order that the cult of the Flag should be the more firmly established; and all other matters passed outside the circle of her consideration. She knew I had been dead and had somehow become alive again; but as the detail didn't call for the raising of a flag she couldn't give her mind to it. As she could give her mind in no greater measure to Minna's canteen-work or Vio's clothes, I profited by the generous nature of her exclusions.

For Dan, when I met him, I hardly existed, but that might have been so in any case, as we had never been really intimate. Recently he had been working with English naval officers and had taken on their manners and form of speech.

"Hello, old dear. Top-hole to see you looking so fit. I say, where can I find a barber? Got a mane on me like a lion."

That was our greeting, and the extent to which our confidences went. He sailed for Hampton Roads without a word as to my adventures.

This he did, I am sure, in a spirit of kindness. They were all moved by the spirit of kindness, and the axiom of the less said the better. I confess that I was mystified by this forbearance, and a little hurt. Though I had been a fool, I had not been a traitor; yet every one treated me as one. I should never have spoken of my two years of aberration of my own accord; yet when all avoided the subject, as if it opened the cupboard of the family dishonor, I resented the implication.

It was Tom Cantley with whom I was most at ease, perhaps because he was not a blood relation. A big, genial, boresome fellow, he found me useful as a listener. His rambling accounts of the doings and shortcomings of the War Trade Board, and what he would have accomplished there if given a free hand, I pretended to follow, because it left me free to pursue my own thoughts. As he never asked for comments on my part, being content when he could dribble out his own, the plan worked well.

And yet it was Tom who awakened me to the true meaning of my situation. That was on the day we left Washington, in the station, as Vio and I were about to take our train. Vio was ahead with Minna, when Tom suddenly clutched me by the arm.

"Say, old sport; what about clubs? Boston clubs I mean. I suppose you're a member of the Shawmut and the Beacon Hill just as before you went away. No action has ever been taken in the matter as far as I've heard. But I wouldn't press the point, if I were you, not for a while yet. Later ... when everything blows over ... we can ... we can see."

I nodded speechlessly. It was the most significant thing that had been said to me yet.

"Yes," I assented, weakly. "When everything blows over we can see."

What I saw at the minute was that if I attempted to resume my membership in either of my clubs there would be opposition. My case was as grave as that; though why it should be I hadn't an adequate idea. Annoyed hitherto, I became deeply troubled and perplexed.

Nevertheless, when we arrived in Boston again it was to experience nothing but the same widespread kindness. True, it was largely from relatives or from friends of Vio's as admired her pluck. The tragedy of her life being plain, those who appreciated it were eager to stand by her; and to stand by her meant courtesy to me. I could be invited to a dinner to which I went under my wife's banner; but I couldn't be admitted to a club where I should stand on my merit as a man. The distinction was galling.

Equally so I found my position with regard to Colonel Stroud. He made himself our social protector, filling in what might be considered unoccupied ground and defending anything open to attack. He did this even in our house. Without usurping my place as host, he fulfilled those duties which a companion performs for an invalid lady, passing the cigars and cigarettes after dinner, and seeing that our guests had their favorite liqueurs. Though our friends came nominally to lunch or dine with Vio and me, it seemed in effect to be with Vio and him. Every one knew, apparently, that he and she had been on the eve of a romantic act, which my coming back had frustrated. Something was due them, therefore, in the way of compensation; and considering what I had done they had the public sympathy.

That my mind was chiefly on this situation, however, I cannot truthfully say. I thought of it more than incidentally, and yet not so much as to make it a sole preoccupation. More engrossing than anything personal to myself was the plight of the world and the future immediately before us. With the gathering of the Conference round the table of the Quai d'Orsay, the new world, of which one of the phases had been war, was entering on still another phase even more momentous. To the mere onlooker, supposing oneself to be an onlooker and no more, it would be an exhibition of the grandeur and impotence of man on a scale of spectacular magnificence. The January of the armistice will be remembered as a month of dramatic occurrences illustrating the yearnings, passions, and fatalities of the human race with an almost theatrical vividness. In its very first days the old era sighed itself out in the death of Theodore Roosevelt, while on the soil over which the Caesars had ridden in their Triumphs, a New World citizen and President was hailed as the herald of an epoch altogether new. Almost at the same moment, blood was flowing in the streets of Berlin, working up about the middle of the month to the assassination of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. The Americans in Paris, having secured on one day the right of way for their League of Nations, the antiphon of opposition burst forth from Washington on the next.

Events like these, and they were many, were as geysers springing from a caldron in which the passions and ideals of mankind were seething incoherently. The geysers naturally caught the eye, but if there had been no boiling sea they would not have spouted up. More than the geysers I watched the boiling sea, and that I saw all around me.

That others didn't see it, or saw it as less ebullient, made no difference to me, for the reason that I had been in its depths. Vio didn't see it; Wolf didn't see it; Stroud didn't see it. Of my family, only Tom Cantley had vague apprehensions of what he called "labor unrest"; but this he regarded as no more than a whirlpool in an ocean relatively smooth. In Boston generally, as probably throughout the Union, the issue was definite and concrete, expressing itself in the question as to whether America would back a league of nations or would not. That was the burning topic of debate; but to me it seemed like concentrating on the relative merits of a raft or a lifeboat when the ship is drifting on the rocks. That our whole system of labor, pleasure, religion, finance, and government was in process of transformation I had many reasons for believing; but I couldn't speak of that without being scouted as a Bolshevist, or laughed down as pessimistic.

I mention these circumstances in order that you may see that nothing personal could be wholly absorbing. His exact social status means little to a man on the deck of a ship that any minute may go down. His chief concern is to save himself and his fellow-passengers, with natural speculation as to the haven they will find when the rescued have scrambled to the shore.

Thus, during that month of January, I saw myself as the victim of circumstances that mattered less than they might have done had we not been on the eve of well-nigh universal change. The life I was leading with Vio was not satisfactory, but even that was not permanent. The thread of flame, I was convinced, had not led thus far without meaning to lead me farther still, and I counted on that to show me the way. I counted on that not merely in my own affairs, but in those of our disintegrating world. We should not be impelled to pull down our present house till the materials were at hand for building up a better one. Vio, Wolf, Stroud, and the bulk of the American people were right in not fearing disaster, though wrong in not anticipating a radical shifting of bases. Their desperate clinging to worn-out phases of existence might be futile; but the futility would become apparent in the ripeness of time. It was not an aspect of the case that troubled me.

What did trouble me was Vio's relation to Stroud. It troubled me the more for the reason that in proportion as the vapors cleared from my intelligence I saw myself with my old rights as her husband. The old passion was back with me, with the old longings and claims, even though she disregarded them. According to the judgment I was beginning to form, she disregarded them the more for seeing that her efforts to re-establish me in Boston hadn't been successful. As far as she could positively carry me, I went; but I could cover no ground by myself. The minute I was alone, I was let alone, simply, courteously, but unanimously dropped. It was the sort of general action it is useless to reason with or fight against; and Vio saw it. There came a day when I drew the conclusion that she was giving up the struggle, and that the offer I had meant to make on the first afternoon of my return would be accepted if renewed. I was not sure; she was not communicative, and the signs were all too obscure to give me more than a vacillating sense of guidance. My general impression was that she didn't know the way she was taking, while Stroud was sure of it. As an adroit player of a game of which she didn't know the elementary principles, he was leading her on to a point at which she would have to acknowledge herself beaten.

This, in the main, I could only stand by and watch, because I was under a cloud. It was a cloud that settled on me heavier and blacker as January passed and February came in. The world-seething had its counterpart in the seething within myself. There were days when my inner anguish was not less frenzied than that of Germany or Russia, in spite of my outward calm. I was still following Vio from house to house, with Stroud as our guide or showman; but the conviction was growing that I must soon have done with it. Not a day nor an hour but seared my consciousness with the fact that he was the man whom Vio loved.

"This is not a life," I began to tell myself, bitterly. It became my favorite comment. I made it when I got up in the morning, and when I went to bed at night. I made it when Vio and I engaged in polite conversation, and when she informed me of our engagements for the day. I made it when I entered other people's drawing-rooms, and when other people entered ours. A life was a reality; a life was work; a life involved above all what Mildred Averill called production. When one didn't produce there was no place for one. There was no place for me here. With Pelly, Bridget, and the Finn I had touched the genuine, the foundational; in lugging carpets I had done work of which the usefulness was in no wise diminished by the fact that any other man could have done it just as well. In my room with the fungi, on my eighteen dollars a week, I had slept soundly and lived complacently, in harmony with whatever was basic and elemental. It began to dawn in me as a hope that perhaps the windings of the thread of flame would lead me back to what was a life, with a new appreciation of its value.

And then one day, when I was on the stairs of our own house, coming down from the third to the second story, I saw Lydia Blair standing on the landing, outside of Vio's door. Boosey was beside her, and she was taking a parcel from his hands.

"Hello, kid," she said, nodding in my direction. "Thought I should see you round here some day. Wonder I didn't do it before." She addressed Boosey, with another nod toward me. "He and me were at school together. Weren't we?" she continued, with her enchanting smile, as I reached the lowest step.

"Yes," I managed to gasp, "the school of adversity."

"And a mighty good school, too, for a sport. Do you know it?"

"But, Lydia," I began, "what in the name of--?"

"Sh-h! Don't swear," was all she said, as taking Boosey's parcel she opened Vio's door. Going in softly she closed it behind her.

Once more Boosey's expression dramatized my situation. That the master of the house in which he exercised his functions--even such a master as I--should be called "kid" by a girl like Lydia created a social topsyturvydom defying all his principles. For perceptible seconds he stared in an astonishment mingled with disdain, after which he turned on his heel to tell the news in the kitchen.

But I was too puzzled by Lydia's reappearance to tear myself away. What had she to do with Vio? How did she get the right to go in and out of Vio's room with this matter-of-course authority?

In a corner of the hall, beside the window looking over the Common, was an armchair in which Vio often sat when taking her breakfast up-stairs and glancing over her correspondence. I sank into it now, and waited. Sooner or later Lydia must come out again.

This she did, some twenty minutes later, dainty and nonchalant.

"Lydia," I cried, springing to my feet, "what in the name of Heaven are you doing here?"

"You see."

The parcel she had taken from Boosey was now undone, revealing some three or four pairs of corsets. Laying the bundle on the table Vio used for her breakfast-tray the girl began to roll the corsets neatly.

There were so many questions I wanted to ask that I hardly knew where to begin.

"How long have you been coming to--to see my wife?"

"Oh, not so very long, a month perhaps."

"Did you know I was here?"

"Why, sure."

"Is that what brought you?"

She glanced up sidewise from her work, with one of those glances she alone could fling.

"Well, you _have_ got a nerve. Suppose I said yes?"

"Who--who told you where to find me?"

"Who do you think?"

"Miss Averill?"

"No; it wasn't Miss Averill. As far as I can make out little old Milly doesn't give you a second thought, now that she knows you're in the bosom of your family."

"Is that true?"

"Why, of course it's true. Did you want to think she was pining away?"

"Well, who did tell you?"

"Why should I want any one to tell me? Ever since I've been with Clotilde I'm always on the lookout for new customers. I get a commission on every pair."

"But it wasn't for the commission you came to see Mrs. Harrowby."

"Well, what was it for then?"

"That's what I want you to tell me."

"How much did you tell me when you disappeared from the Barcelona over two years ago?"

"I told you as much as I could tell any one."

"You didn't tell me your name was Harrowby."

"I didn't know it."

She swung round from her work with the parcel. "You didn't--what?"

I tapped my forehead. "Shell-shock. I'd--I'd forgotten who I was."

A flip of her slender hand dismissed this explanation, as she resumed her task.

"Ah, go on!" And yet she veered back again, with a dash of tears in her blue eyes. "Say, kid, I know all about it. You needn't try to put anything over on me. I know all about it, and I'm sorry for you. That's what I want to say. Do you remember how I used to tell you I was your friend, and that Harry Drinkwater was your friend, too? Well, we are--even now. There's something about you we both--we both kind o' took to. I don't know what it is, but it's there. It was there when I thought you might be a swell crook; and if I didn't mind that I don't mind--this. The only thing I'm thinking is that you're up against it awful thick; and so I told Dick Stroud that whoever shook you the sad hand of farewell I'd be on the spot as the ministering angel."

There were so many points here that I could only seize the one lying, as it were, on top.

"So you--you know Dick Stroud?"

She had gone on with her work again.

"_Know_ him? Well, I should say!"

"Have you known him long?"

"Known him ever since ... Say, I'll tell you when it was. It was after we all came back on that ship together, and I was still doing the stenog act for Boydie Averill, before I got Harry back on the job again. Well, one day _that_ guy floated in, towed by little Lulu. He sure is her style for fair, or he used to be before he went to France."

"Did--did Mrs. Averill introduce him to you?"

"He didn't wait for that. He introduced himself with a look. I didn't need a second one before I'd read him like a headline. When I started to go home that evening he was waiting at the corner to take me in a taxi."

"Did you let him?"

"Sure I let him. It was a ride. When he asked me to dinner at the Blitz I let him do that, too. You saw us. Don't you remember that nut? that's what you called him afterward."

It came to me, that sleek mass of silver, distinguished and sinister at once.

"So that was he!"

"That was Dick, sure thing!"

"You call him Dick?"

"What else would I call him when he wants me to? But that's giving him away."

"Giving whom away?"

Vio had come out of her room without our having heard her. In a tea-gown of black and gold she stood before us in an almost terrifying dignity.

That is, it was almost terrifying to me, though Lydia was equal to the situation.

"Oh, madam, I didn't know you heard. Mr. Harrowby was just kidding me about Colonel Stroud."

"Indeed!" Moving forward with the air of an astonished queen, Vio seated herself in the armchair. "But why should Mr. Harrowby be--what was the word?--kidding you about anything?"

"Oh, we're old friends. Ain't we?" She turned to me for corroboration.

"Very good old friends," I said, with some warmth.

"Really! And you never told me."

"Madam never asked me. She never asked me if I knew Colonel Stroud, either. How could I tell that she wanted to know?"

"Oh, but I don't want to know. I'm only interested--" she looked toward me--"that you and--and this young lady should be so--so intimate."

"I hope madam doesn't mind."

"Let me see," Vio began to calculate. "It's about four or five weeks since Mrs. Mountney sent you to me."

"And Mrs. Averill had sent me to her. You see, madam, I get a commission on every pair, and so--"

"And so it was a good opportunity to--"

"To improve myself. Yes, madam."

Vio's brows came together in a frown. "To ... what? I don't understand you."

"You see, madam, it's this way. I've only taken this corset job to--to get an insight. I'm not really a saleswoman at all. I'm an adventuress."

It was the only moment at which I ever saw Vio nonplussed.

"Oh, you are!" was all she could find to say.

"Well, not exactly yet; but I'm going to be. Only, if you're an adventuress you've got to be a swell adventuress. There's only one kind, and it's that. But you see, madam, I've never had enough to do with ladies to be the real thing; and so when Clotilde put me on to this corset stunt, I thought it 'd give me a chance to study them."

"To study--ladies?"

"Yes, madam. An adventuress has got to be that much of a lady that she can put it over on a duchess or she might just as well stay out of the business. Any boob in the movie line would tell you that."

"You interest me," Vio said, almost beneath her breath.

"I generally interest people, madam, when I get a-going. Colonel Stroud says that if I was to go in for--"

"That's not what I want to hear. Tell me if--if your studies have taught you what you wanted to know."

Having completed her package, Lydia stood in the attitude of a neat French maid in a play.

"It's the model, madam. That's where the trouble is. An adventuress has got to be ... well, just so. Did madam ever see Agnes Dunham as the Russian Countess in 'The Scarlet Sin'? Well, she's it, only she's too old. She must be thirty-five if she's a day. I don't know how many times I didn't go see her; but I couldn't be that old, and then she talked with a French accent, so that settled it. Colonel Stroud said that if I was ever going to do the thing there was only one woman in the world--"

"He took a professional interest in you, then?"

"Oh, my, yes; professional and every other way. Still does. Awful kind he can be when he likes; but when he doesn't like! My!"

I was sorry for Vio. With bloodless lips and strained eyes she sat grasping the arms of her chair in the effort to keep her self-mastery. Had I loved her less I could have been glad of this minute, because it was giving me what might be called my revenge. But I loved her too much. It was clear to me, too, that I loved her more than I ever did. My return had been a shock to her, and she had made a strenuous effort to be game. She _was_ game. She had not fallen short of the most sporting standard, except in matters over which she had no control.

"Stroud is always like that," I endeavored to smile, "giving every one a helping hand. He mayn't be the wisest old dog in the world, but no one can say that he isn't kind and faithful."

As it happened I had better have kept quiet. Vio sat upright, all the force of her anger turned upon me.

"Has this girl been anything to you?"

"Yes, madam; a mother."

In her endeavor to control herself Vio uttered a hard pant, eying the girl up and down.

"Oh? Indeed? You're young to be ... a mother!"

"Only a little younger than you, madam; and not half so beautiful. Madam knows that any woman worth her salt is mother to any man down on his luck. I don't care who he is, or who she is."

"Thank you for the information. I hope Mr. Harrowby has appreciated your maternal care."

"Well, he did and he didn't, madam. Just when I thought he was going to buck up he--he cleared out, and I thought he must be dead. Now, I find that--"

"That he's alive. If you had come to me I could have told you that--that clearing out was his specialty. You might say he had a genius for it, if you weren't compelled to call it by another name."

I took a long stride toward her.

"Vio, do you mean anything by that?"

"What should I mean but--but the fact? You're a mystery to me, Billy, just as you've evidently been to--to this young lady. At the very minute when we hope, as she so picturesquely puts it, that you're going to buck up, you--you clear out. You must have a marvelous eye for your opportunities in that respect. That's why I say it is like genius. No one who didn't have a genius for clearing out, still to call it that, could so neatly have seen his chance at Bourg-la-Comtesse!"

"Vio!"

I don't know what I was about to do, because with my own shout ringing in my ears I became aware that Lydia had caught me by the arm.

"Oh, kid, please don't!"

"Yes; let him." Vio's face was strained upward toward me, but otherwise she hadn't moved. "Men who run away from other men are always quick to strike women."

My arm fell. I bent till my face was close to hers.

"When did I ever run away?"

Her hand was thrown out in the imperious gesture of dismissal I had seen two or three times already.

"Please, Billy! We won't go into that. You'll--you'll spare me."

"Vio, you believe _that_?"

She inclined her head slowly.

"That I was a--a coward--a deserter?"

She inclined her head again.

"And that I--" the whole plan spread itself out before me--"that I pretended to commit suicide in order to cover up my tracks?"

Once more she bowed her head relentlessly.

"You _believe_ that?"

"Billy, I know it. Every one knows it. I've stood by you right up to now. But now--" she rose with a kind of majesty from which I backed away--"now that you've brought this woman here, into my house, where I've been fighting your battles-- Oh, Billy, what kind of a man are you to have--to have a wife like me?"

I made no attempt to respond to this. I could only stand amazed and speechless. Perhaps a minute had gone by, perhaps two or three before I found myself able to say:

"All right, Vio. Since it's--since it's that way, and with all the other things--"

But I couldn't go any farther. There was another speechless passage of time, during which we could only stare at each other, regardless of the white and wide-eyed spectator of the scene. Turning abruptly, I walked down the long hall toward the door of my own room. As I did so Vio said nothing, but Lydia uttered a little broken cry.

"Oh, kid, _I_ don't believe it; Harry Drinkwater doesn't believe it either. Nobody will believe it when they've had a word with me."

But I didn't thank her. I didn't so much as look back. It was only by degrees that I learned, too, what the two women said to each other when I left them alone together.

I was packing in my room when Boosey brought me a letter. As letters had for so long been to me a thing of the past I took it with some curiosity, recognizing at once the hand of my friend Pelly.

DEAR SOAMES,--I suppose I ought to call you Mr. Harrowby now, but it don't somehow come natural. Soames you were to me and Soames you will be till I get used to the other thing, which I don't think I shall. I write you these few lines to let you know that I am well and going just the same as ever, though I miss our old times together something fierce. Would like to know how you are, if you ever get time to write. Expect you are having a swell time with all the gay guys in Boston. Friends say that Boston is some sporty town when you get with the inside gang, which I don't suppose you have any trouble in getting. Miss Smith has no one yet for your old room, which is all repapered and fine with a brand-new set of toadstools, real showy ones. Mrs. Leeming is sure some artist, and a nice old girl besides, when she doesn't cry. Had a very nice time at Jim's the other night; just a quart between him and Bridget and me; nothing rough-house, but all as a gentleman should. Bridget could come, as his wife was away burying an uncle at Bing Hampton. Hope you found your wife going strong as this leaves mine at present. Had a very nice letter from her the other day, and answered it on the spot telling her to be true to me and may God bring her and me together again after this long parting. Now no more from

your friend,
S. PELLY. Write soon.

It is impossible to tell you of the glow that warmed and lighted me on reading these friendly lines. They were all the more grateful owing to the fact that if Pelly believed of me what Vio and every one else believed, as quite possibly he did, it would have made no difference. Of the things taught me in my contact with the less sophisticated walks in life, the beauty of a world in which there is comparatively little judging was the most comforting. There were all kinds of jealousies there, bickerings, sulkings, puerilities, and now and then a glorious free fight; but condemnation was rare. The bruised spirit could be at peace in this large charity, and in the spaciousness of its tolerance the humiliated soul could walk with head erect. Its ideals and pleasures might be crude; but they were not pharisaical.

If I had any doubt as to my plans I had none any longer. The instinct that urged me back to the room with the new set of toadstools was like that of the poor bull baited in the ring to take refuge amid the dumb, sympathetic herd of its own kind. I asked only to be hidden there, to live and work, or, if necessary, die obscurely.

Not that I hadn't had a first impulse to try and clear my name; but the futility of attempting that was soon apparent. I had nothing to offer but my word, and my word had been rejected. In the course of the two or three hours since the scene with Vio and Lydia, while I had gone to the station to secure a berth on a night train for New York and dined at a hotel, I had come to the conclusion that the effort to explain would be folly. The mere fact that my doings between Bourg-la-Comtesse and the _Auvergne_ were still blurred in my memory would make any tale I told incoherent and open to suspicion. In addition to that Vio knew, Wolf knew, and others knew that I had not offered my services to the Ambulance Corps of my own free will, while my letters had painted my horror of the sights I witnessed with no thought of reserve. My supposed suicide being ascribed to remorse, the discovery that I was alive and well and in hiding in New York--

No; the evidence against me was too strong. The one witness who might say something in my favor, Doctor Scattlethwaite, had himself not believed me. He could say that the claim I was putting forth now I had put forth two years previously; but there would be nothing convincing in that.

Besides, and there was much in the fact, I wanted to get away, to get back among those who trusted me, and to whom I felt I belonged. If the thread of flame had led me to my old life it was only to show me once for all that there was no place for me in it. Knowing that, I could take hold of the new life more whole-heartedly and probably do better work there. Already new plans were springing to my mind, plans which I could the more easily put into operation because of having some money at my disposal. Mildred Averill would help me in that and perhaps I could help her. If Vio secured a divorce, and I should put no obstruction in the way of that--

But Vio herself came into my room with the calm manner and easy movement which in no wise surprised me, as she was subject to such reactions after moments of excitement.

"What are you doing, Billy?"

She seated herself quietly.

A coat being spread before me on the bed, I folded the sleeves, and doubled the breasts backward.

"I'm packing."

"What for?"

"Because I'm going away."

"When?"

"To-night; in an hour or so."

"Where to?"

"New York first."

"And then?"

"I don't know yet. Possibly nowhere. I may stay in New York. Probably I shall."

"And not come back here any more?"

"That's my intention."

"What are you doing it for?"

Taking the coat I had folded I laid it in my suit-case.

"I should think you'd see."

"Is it--is it because of--of what was said this afternoon?"

"Partly."

"Not altogether?"

Pulling another coat from the closet I spread it on the bed.

"No; not altogether."

"What else is there?"

"Oh, nothing that you'd be interested in. I--I just want to get away."

"From me?"

"Only in the sense that--that you're part of the whole."

"The whole what?"

"The whole life. It's not a life for me any more."

She did not deny this or protest against it. For a minute or more she said nothing, though as I crossed the room from the bed to the closet for more clothes I saw in the glass that she furtively dashed away a tear. Yesterday I would have been touched by that; but now that I knew what she believed of me, what she had been believing of me during all the weeks since I had come home, my heart was benumbed. Besides, if she was in love with Dick Stroud there was no reason for my feeling pity.

I had begun on collars and neckties when she said:

"What kind of a girl was that who was here this afternoon?"

"You must have seen something of her for yourself. I understood from her that she'd been coming to see you."

"She's been here three times. Alice Mountney sent her, and I believe Lulu Averill sent her to her. I had no idea that she had anything in her mind than just to sell this new kind of corset."

"And had she?"

"Didn't she tell you?"

"She didn't tell me. If she's said anything to you, I don't know what it can be."

"She's not--she's not crazy, is she?"

"I shouldn't think so. Why do you ask?"

"Then she's extremely peculiar."

"We're all that in our different ways, aren't we?"

"I don't know now whether to take her seriously or not."

"What about?"

"About--about--Dick."

I went on with my packing without answering.

"What do _you_ think?" she asked, at last. "I suppose you have an opinion."

"On what point?"

"The point she brought up ... as to her knowing him ... so well."

"I've no opinion about that. I know she knows him ... very well indeed. At least, I take it for granted."

"What makes you do that?"

"Oh, just having seen them together."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Why should I have done that? Men don't--don't give each other away."

"Then in his knowing her there was something to--to give away."

"Evidently."

"Then what about your knowing her yourself?"

"That was different."

"Different? How?"

Since she was pressing the question I decided not to spare her.

"I didn't wait for her at a street corner as a form of introduction."

Expecting the question, "And did he?" I was surprised that she should make it. "And would it be discreet to inquire what your form of introduction was?"

"I was presented to her in all propriety by a blind boy named Drinkwater, you heard her mention him, who was my cabin-mate on the _Auvergne_. He and Miss Blair and I, with some other people, happened to sit at the same table."

"And have you no interest in her besides that?"

"Yes: she's been a very good friend to me. I haven't seen her for two years and more; but that was my fault."

"So I understand."

"What do you mean by that?'

"That if you had no interest in her she had an interest in you, strong enough to--to impel her to make my acquaintance."

"With some good end in view, presumably."

"With the end in view of giving me the information that--that she knew Dick."

"And do you call that taking an interest in me?"

"What do you think yourself?"

Once more I declined to give my impressions. Where Stroud was concerned I had nothing to say. Now that Vio knew something of the truth concerning him I wished not to influence her in any way. The matter seemed oddly far away from me. The tie between Vio and myself being broken in fact, as it soon would be in law, I preferred to leave the subject of my successor where it was.

"Why do you say," she began after a brief pause, "that this is not a life for you any more?"

"Because it isn't."

"But why isn't it?"

"For one reason, because I don't like it."