Chapter XXIX

One Hour, in which she apologizes twice for her Self, her
Life and Works; and once she is beautifully forgiven, and
once she never will be, this Side of the Last Trump.

The Cooneys' door was opened, after the delay usual with the poor, by Henrietta herself, this moment returned from the bookstore. Hen wore her hat, but not her coat, and it was to be observed that one hand held a hot-water bottle, imperfectly concealed behind her back.

"Hurrah!--Cally!" cried she. "We were talking of you at dinner to-day, wondering what had become of you. Come into the house, and don't mind a bit if this bottle leaks all over you. Such troubles!"

"How is Chas to-day? I just heard that he hadn't been at work for a week."

"Chas?... Chas is better--Cousin Martha's worse--father's just the same--Looloo's dancing the floor with a toothache." Hen recited this in the manner of a chant, and added, as she ushered her Washington Street cousin into the little parlor: "But for that, we're all doing nicely--thank you!"

"Gracious, Hen! I'd no idea you had such a hospital. Why, what's the matter with Uncle John?"

"Oh, just his lumbago. He's complaining, but out and about--fighting over the Seven Days around Richmond with an old comrade somewhere, I doubt not.... Sit down, my dear," added Hen, who had been looking at Cally just a little curiously, "and excuse me while I run upstairs. I forgot to explain that this bottle is for mother, who's down with a splitting headache. Back in a jiffy...."

Thus Miss Cooney, not knowing that for one moment, at least, her society had been preferred above that of a Canning. Such was the odd little development. Carlisle, having been more with Henrietta in the past five weeks than she had commonly been in a year, had discovered her as undoubtedly a person you could talk things over with--the only person in the world, perhaps, that you could talk _this_ over with....

Possibly Hen, being a lynx-eyed Cooney, had somehow gathered that her lovely cousin had not dropped in merely to "inquire"; for when she returned to the parlor, having doubtless put her hot-water bottle where it would do the most good, she did not expend much time on reporting upon her invalids, or become involved in the minor doings of the day. Very soon she deflected, saying:

"But you don't look particularly fit yourself, Cally. What's wrong with the world?"

Cally, being still uncertain how far she cared to confide in Hen, met the direct question with a tentative lightness.

"Oh!... Well, I _did_ just have a rather unpleasant experience, though I didn't know I showed it in my face!... We happened to look in at the Works for a few minutes--Mr. Canning and I--and I certainly didn't _enjoy_ it much ..." And then, the inner pressure overcoming her natural bent toward reserve, she spoke with a little burst: "Oh, Hen, it was the most horrible place I ever saw in my life!"

The little confidence spoke straight to the heart, as a touch of genuine feeling always will. Quite unconsciously, Henrietta took her cousin's hand, saying, "You poor dear ..." And within a minute or two Cally was eagerly pouring out all that she had seen in the bunching-room, with at least a part of how it had made her feel.

Hen listened sympathetically, and spoke reassuringly. If her "arguments" followed close in the footsteps of Hugo,--for Hen was surprisingly well-informed in unexpected ways,--it must have been some quality in her, something or other in her underlying "attitude," that invested her words with a new horsepower of solace. And Saltman's best stenographer actually produced an argument that Hugo had altogether passed by. She thought it worth while to point out that these things were not a question of abstract morals at all, but only of changing points of view....

"When Uncle Thornton learned business," declared Hen, "there wasn't a labor law in the country--no law but supply and demand--pay your work-people as little as you could, and squeeze them all they'd stand for. Nobody ever _thought_ of anything different. In those days the Works would have been a model plant--nine-hour day, high wages, no women working at night, no children...."

If Cally was not wholly heartened by words like these, she knew where the lack was. And perhaps Hen herself was conscious of something missing. For, having defended her uncle's Works at least as loyally as she honestly could, she gave the talk a more personal tone, skirting those phases of the matter so new-thoughty that they had never even occurred to Hugo Canning.

"Cally, are you going to speak to Uncle Thornton about it--about your going there, I mean?"

"No, no!" cried Cally, hastily. "How could I? Of course I--realize that that's the way business must be--as you say. What right have I, an ignorant little fool, to set up as papa's critic?"

"Not at all--of course," said Hen, giving her hand a little squeeze. "What I--"

"You surely can't think that I ought to go and reprove papa for the way he runs his business--do you, Hen?... That I--I'm _responsible_ in any way!"

Hen noted her cousin's unexplained nervousness, and it may be she divined a little further. She answered no, not a bit of it. She said she meant to speak to him, not as a business expert, but only as his daughter. It was always a mistake to have secrets in a family, said Hen.

Good advice, undoubtedly. Only Hen didn't happen to know the most peculiar circumstances....

The two girls sat side by side on a sofa that sorely needed the ministrations of an upholsterer. Hen was sweet-faced, but habitually pale, usually a little worn. Her eyes and expression saved her from total eclipse in whatever company; otherwise she would have been annihilated now by the juxtaposition of her cousin. Cally's face was framed in an engaging little turn-down hat of gold-brown and yellow, about which was carelessly festooned a long and fine brown veil. Hen, gazing rather wistfully, thought that Cally grew lovelier every year.

"I'll tell you, Cally!" she said, suddenly. "Do you know what you ought to do? Talk to V.V. about all this!"

Cally repressed a little start; though the thought, to speak truth, was far from being a new one. But how could she possibly talk to V.V. without the ultimate disloyalty to papa?...

"No," she said, quietly, after a brief pause. "I could hardly do that."

"Why not? He's thought out all these things further than anybody I know. And he'll--"

"Hen, have you forgotten what he wrote in the paper about papa last year--what he's going to write next month. Don't you see my position?"

"I don't care what he writes in the papers!... When it comes to people, there's nobody so kind--and wise. And--"

"He's the one person," said Cally, resolutely, "I could not possibly talk to about it."

Henrietta, falling back on the thought she had set out with, laughed good-naturedly.

"Then, I suppose, you'll want to fly at once. He's due here at any minute, you know--in fact, he's half an hour late now--"

"Here!... Is he coming here this afternoon?"

This time her start was without concealment. Hen looked genuinely surprised.

"He's our doctor--I told you the other day ... But he doesn't bite, my dear! You look as if I'd said that a grizzly bear and three mad ogres were loping down the steps."

"I never think of him as a doctor somehow," said Cally, recovering, with a little laugh. "So I couldn't imagine--"

"Second largest practice in town--only I'll admit that his not charging any fees has something to do with it. In fact V.V.'s patients usually borrow anything that's loose, including his hats, suits, and shoes ... Cally, it's like a play, for I believe there he is now ..."

True enough, a firm but unequal footstep just then sounded on the Cooneys' wooden steps outside. But Hen sat still, a far-away look in her eyes.

"Did you hear what Pond said, Cally, the first time he saw V.V.?--'Who's that man with the face like a bishop that never grew up?'... Do you know, I never look at him without remembering mean things I've done and said, and wishing I hadn't ..."

She rose as the bell rang, started toward the door, hesitated, turned in the middle of the floor.

"I'd naturally ask him in here, Cally, while I went up to see if things are ready for him upstairs. Of course, if you'd rather not see him ..."

Cally had risen too. The two girls stood looking at each other.

"No," said Cally, "I'd like to see him. Only I can't speak to him about the Works. I cannot."

"No, no--of course not, dear, if you don't feel like it."

Hen went out to open the door. Greetings floated in....

Cally stood at the parlor window, staring out into the shabby street. Over the way was the flaring sign of an unpained dentist, making promises never to be redeemed, and two doors away the old stand of the artificial limb-maker. Cally looked full at a show-window full of shiny new legs; but she did not see the grisly spectacle, so it did not matter.

The unexpected encounter was deeply disturbing to her. There stirred in her the memory of another night when she had similarly met the slum doctor in this room, between engagements with Hugo Canning. That night he had asked her forgiveness for calling her a poor little thing, which she was, and she had charged him with wicked untruthfulness for calling the Works homicidal, which--she said it in her secret heart--they were.... How history repeats itself, how time brought changed angles! Strange, strange, that in the revolving months it had now come her turn to apologize to Mr. V.V. in the Cooney parlor. Only she could not make her apology, no matter how much she might want to....

"... Stop a minute," Hen was heard to say, "and pass the time of day ..."

Unintelligible murmuring, and then: "D'you know who it was that invented stopping and passing the time of day?" said the nearing voice of Mr. V.V., gayer than Cally Heth had ever heard it. "Take my word, 't was a woman."

"To make things pleasant for some man!--and we've been doing it ever since.... Cally Heth's here ..."

The two came in. Cally, turning, held out her hand to the Cooneys' physician, with a sufficiently natural air and greeting....

They had not met since the afternoon at the Woman's Club, a day which had brought a strange change in their relations. But then, each of their meetings seemed marked by some such realignment, and always to his advantage. Again and again she had put this man down, at first with all her strength; and each time when she turned and looked at him again, behold he had shot up higher than ever.

So Cally had just been thinking. But now that V. Vivian stood in the room, and she looked at him, she was suddenly reminded that he was her good friend nevertheless. And something like ease came back to her.

When Hen had disappeared to make the sick-room ready (or for whatever purpose she went), Cally said:

"I hope Chas isn't really going to be ill?"

"Oh, there's no trouble at all with him," replied the young man, "but to make him stay in bed. It's all come down to a touch of sore throat, a little sort of quinsy. We were rather afraid of diphtheria, the other night."

"My cousins are having more than their share, just now. So many, many invalids.... I hope you've been well, since I saw you last?"

"Oh, thank you!--I've the health of a letter-carrier. At least, I assume they're naturally healthy, though as a matter of fact I've had three or four postmen on my list ... I'm afraid I interrupted you and Henrietta?"

"Oh, no!--Or rather, I imagine she was only too glad to be interrupted.... I was telling her all my troubles, you see."

"Have you troubles? I'm sorry."

The man spoke in a light tone, such as is suitable for friendships. Yet he must have felt a throe then, remembering his articles: now so soon to go to the "Chronicle" office and the print that cried aloud. And the girl's case, had he but known it, was like his own, only more so. Beneath the cover of her casual talk, she was aware of thought coursing like a palpitating vein under a fine skin, threatening to break through at any minute....

"Oh, so many," said Cally.

They had remained standing, for to ask the doctor to sit down had not occurred to her. The girl glanced toward the window.

"And what do you suppose Hen's prescription was?... That I should take them all to you."

There was the briefest silence.

"But, of course, you didn't want to do that?"

She hesitated, and said: "Yes, I do want to ... But I can't."

That was the utmost that she meant to say. But then, as she glanced again at the lame alien whom time had so beautifully justified, more of her inner tide overflowed suddenly into speech.

"Do you know--I feel that I could tell you almost anything--things I wouldn't tell Hen, or anybody.... Oh, I could, I don't know why. You don't know for what a long time I've thought of you as my confidant, my friend.... Only, you see--these troubles aren't all my own...."

She stopped rather precipitately, turned away a little; stood twisting a glove between her fingers, and doing her best to show by her look that she had not said anything in particular....

The thoughts of these two were over hills and dales apart; and yet, by the nature of what was between them, they followed hard on the same trail. V.V. was far from possessing the Cooneys' detective gift. He saw only that this girl was troubled about something; and if his own thought never left the Heth Works, it was only because this was the point where his connection with her troubles cut him deep.

So in his ears chirped the voice of his now familiar: "Who appointed _you_ a judge of people like this? Who knows better than you that they're doing the best they can? Tear up that stuff!..."

But aloud he said only: "I understand that, of course. And I'm grateful for the rest you say."

And Cally, five feet away from him, was learning that in some matters the business logic of it didn't help very much, that what counted was how you felt about them in your heart. If something terrible should happen at the Works _now_, if the building did fall down some day, collapsing with all those girls--did she think she could look again into this man's eyes and say: "Well, _I_ had nothing to do with it?..."

But neither were her thoughts for publication; and she bridged the brief gap in the conversation with a not particularly successful smile, designed to show that of course nobody was taking all this very seriously.

"But why expect to do what we want? No one can," said she. "You don't mind my fidgeting about the room this way, do you? I seem a little out of humor to-day--not myself at all, as I was told just now...."

V.V. said that he did not mind.

"I wonder," she went on, "if you remember something you said in your speech the other day?--about being free.... It seemed strange to me then, that you should have happened to say just that, for I--I've come to realize that, in a kind of way, that's always been a wild dream of my own.... Don't you think--where there are so many things to think about, things and people--that it's pretty hard to be free?"

"Hard?... There's nothing else like it on earth for hardness."

V.V. stood grasping the back of an ancient walnut chair. It was seen that he belonged in this room, simple home of poverty; different from the girl, who was so obviously the rich exotic, the transient angel in the house.

He added: "But it's always seemed to me worth all the price of trying."

"Oh, it is--I'm sure. And yet.... It seems to me--I've thought," said Cally, somewhat less conversationally, "that life, for a woman, especially, is something like one of those little toy theatres--you've seen them?--where pasteboard actors slide along in little grooves when you pull their strings. They move along very nicely, and you--you might think they were going in that direction just because they wanted to. But they never get out of their grooves.... I know you'll think that a--a weak theory."

"No, I know it's a true theory."

Surely the girl could not have been thinking only of her father's business as she went on, more and more troubled in voice:

"So much seems to be all fixed and settled, before one's old enough to know anything about it--and then there's a great deal of pressure--and a great deal of restraint--in so many different ways.... Don't you think it's hard ever to get out of one's groove?"

"It's heroic."

She put back her trailing motor-veil, and said: "And for a woman especially?"

"It would take the strength of all the gods!... I mean, of course--as women are placed, to-day. Perhaps in some other day--perhaps to-morrow--"

He broke off suddenly; a change passed over his face.

"And yet," he added, in a voice gentle and full of feeling--"some of them are doing it to-day."

What his thought might be, she had no idea; but his personal implication was not to be mistaken. The man from the slums, who had mistakenly put his faith in her once before in the Cooneys' parlor, conceived that she was or might be one of these strong he spoke of; little suspecting her present unconquerable weakness.

Cally was startled into looking at him, a thing she had been rather avoiding; and looking, she looked instantly away. In Mr. V.V.'s eyes, that strange trusting look, which had not been frequently observable there of late, had saluted her like a banner of stars....

"Certainly I was not meant to be one of them," said she, rather faintly.

He must have meant only a general expression of confidence, she was sure of that; only to be kind and comforting. But to her, grappling with new hard problems, that strange gaze came like a torch lit in a cave at night. Much she had wondered how Vivian could possibly hold her responsible for what her father did, or left undone. And now in a flash it was all quite clear, and she saw that he had not been holding her responsible at all. No, this simple and good man, who let the crows bring his raiment, or not, as they preferred, had only reposed a trust in her--in Cally Heth. It was as if, that day at the Settlement, he had said to her, by his eyes: "I know _you_. Once _you_ go to the Works, you won't rest till you've made things better...."

But instead of this making things better for Cally Heth now, it seemed to make them worse at once. She became considerably agitated; knew that he must see her agitation, and did not mind at all. And suddenly she sat down on the sway-backed sofa between the windows....

"I'm the last woman in the world ever to think of getting out of my groove," said Cally, her cheek upon her hand.

And then, with no premeditation at all, there came strange words from her, words clothing with unlessoned ease thoughts that certainly she had never formulated for Hugo Canning.

"And yet I feel that it might have been different. I've felt--lately--as if I haven't had much of a chance.... I think I have a mind, or had one ... some--some spirit and independence, too. But I wasn't trained to express myself that way; that was all ironed down flat in me. I never had any education, except what was superficial--showy. I was never taught to think, or to _do_ anything--or to have any part in serious things. No one ever told me that I ought to justify my existence, to pay my way. Nobody ever thought of me as fit to have any share in anything useful or important--fit for any responsibility.... No, life for me was to be like butterflies flying, and my part was only to make myself as ornamental as I could...."

V. Vivian, who wrote articles about the Huns in newspapers, stood at the Cooney mantel. He did not move at all; the man's gaze upon her half-averted face did not wink once. His own face, this girl had thought, was one for strange expressions; but she might have thought the look it wore now stranger than any she had ever seen there....

"Maybe, it's that way with all women, more or less--only it seems to have been always more with me.... Money!" said the low hurried voice--"how I've breathed it in from the first moment I can remember. Money, money, money!... Has it been altogether my fault if I've measured everything by it, supposed that it was the other name for happiness--taken all of it I could get? I've always taken, you see--never given. I never gave anything to anybody in my life. I never did anything for anybody in my life. I'm a grown woman--an adult human being--but I'm not of the slightest use to anybody. I've held out both hands to life, expecting them to be filled, kept full...."

She paused and was deflected by a fleeting memory, something heard in a church, perhaps, long ago....

"Isn't there," she asked, "something in the Bible about that?--horse-leech's daughters--or something?--always crying '_Give, give_'?..."

There was a perceptible pause.

"Well--something of the sort, I believe...."

She had seemed to have the greatest confidence that, if anything of the sort was in the Bible, this man would know it instantly. However, his tone caught her attention, and she raised her eyes. Mr. V.V.'s face was scarlet.

"I see," said Cally, colorlessly, out of the silence, "you had already thought of me as one of those daughters.... Why not?"

"Of you! Not in my life," cried V.V.... "I ... it's--"

"Why shouldn't you? I know that's what I am. You're--"

"_Don't_.... I can't let things be put upside down like that."

His difficulties, in the unhappy moment, were serious. His skin had turned traitor to him, sold out his heart. And now, if he had the necessity of saying something, his was also the fear lest he might say too much....

"If I ... I appeared to look--conscious, when you asked me that, it was only because of the--the strange coincidence. I--you compel me to tell you--though it's like something from another life."

He paused briefly; and when he went on, his voice had acquired something of that light hardness which Cally had heard in it before now.

"Once, a year ago, when I had never so much as heard your name, Commissioner O'Neill and I happened to be talking about the local factory situation, about the point of view of the owners or,--to be exactly honest,--the owners' families. By chance--I did use those words. And O'Neill said I was a wild man to talk so, that if I knew any of these people, personally, I'd never judge them so--so unkindly.... It was a long time before I saw ... how right he might be.... And that's what I tried to say to you the other day--when I spoke of _knowing the people_. I--"

"Yes, sometimes that makes a difference, I know." Had she not felt it only this afternoon? "But I'm afraid this isn't one of the times ..."

Cally rose, feeling that she desired to go. Nevertheless, glancing at his troubled face, she was suddenly moved by perhaps the most selfless impulse she had ever felt in her life.

"Please," she said, gently, "don't mind about that. I liked you better for it. I like people to say what they think. I've--"

"Do you? Then allow me to say that I'm not quite a bitter fool...."

The young man was advancing toward her, throwing out his hands in a quaint sort of gesture which seemed to say that he had had about as much of this as he could stand.

"For surely I don't think I am--I don't think I'm quite so dumb and blind as you must think me...." His repressed air was breaking up rapidly, and now he flung out with unmistakable feeling: "Do you suppose I could ever forget what you did last May! Not if I tried a thousand years!" said Mr. V.V.... "How could I possibly think anything of you, after that, but all that is brave and beautiful?..."

The two stood looking at each other. Color came into Cally's cheek; came but soon departed. The long gold-and-black lashes, which surely had been made for ornaments, fluttered and fell.

Out of the dead silence she said, with some difficulty:

"It's very sweet of you to say that."

Cally moved away from him, toward the door, deeply touched. She had wanted to hear such words as these, make no doubt of that. Among all her meetings with this man last year, she had only that May morning to remember without a stinging sense of her inferiority. And she supposed that he had forgotten....

"You see," she said, not without an effort, "I have been telling you my troubles, after all.... I--I'm afraid I've kept them waiting for you upstairs. I must go."

But she did not leave the parlor at once, even when Hen, hearing the door creak open, cried down that the infirmary was ready....

If Cally felt that she had somehow confessed her weakness to Mr. V.V.--about the Works, about life--and been forgiven by him, it seemed that even that did not quite settle it all. It must have been that one small corner of her mind refused to consider that all this was a closed episode.

She turned, with her hand on the knob.

"Shall you go to that meeting of Mr. Pond's next Wednesday--his meeting for workers? He has asked me to go."

The young man said that he would be at the meeting; that he hoped to see her there.

Cally hesitated again. Perhaps she thought of Hugo then; of perhaps the small unreconstructed corner of her mind grew more unrestful.

"I'm not sure that I'll be able to go," she said, slowly.... "Dr. Vivian--is your telephone number still the same--Meeghan's Grocery? I--I may want to speak to you some time."

Yes, it was just the same. Meeghan's Grocery.

V.V. stood looking at her from the middle of the floor, one hand raised to his hair in his characteristic gesture. His old-fashioned sort of face wore a faraway look, not so much hopeful now as wistful; a look which had been moving to Cally Heth, even in the days when she had tried to dislike him. But of this, the young man from the lonely outskirts was not aware; of the nature of his replies he had taken no note. In his ears whispered the subtlest of all his many voices: "She'll never speak to you, once that's printed. Tear it up. You've a right to your youth...."

"Good-bye," said Cally, "and thank you."

"Miss Heth," said Vivian, starting, hurriedly--"I--if I--if it should ever happen that I could _help_ you in any way--it's not likely, of course, I understand that--but if it _should_ ever happen so--_promise_ me that you'll send for me."

But the girl did not make that promise then, her reply being: "You _have_ helped me--you _must_ know that.... You're the one person in the world who has."

* * * * *

Cally walked home alone, in the dying effects of a lovely afternoon.

She had left the Cooney parlor in the vein of one emerging from strange adventures in undiscovered countries. This queer feeling would hardly last over the solid threshold of Home, whose atmosphere was almost notoriously uncongenial to eccentricities of that sort. But it did linger now, as Cally trod somewhat dreamily over streets that she had long known by heart. Four blocks there were; and the half-lights flickering between sky and sidewalk were of the color of the girl's own mood.

In this moment she was not troubled with thought, with the drawing of moral lessons concerning duty or otherwise. Now Mr. V.V.'s unexpected last speeches to her seemed wholly to possess her mind. She was aware that they had left her curiously humbled.... Strange it seemed, that this man could be so unconscious of the influence he had upon her, had clearly had even last year. Stranger yet that he, whom only the other day she had thought of as so narrow, so religiously hard, should prove himself absurdly over-generous in his estimate of her.... Or no, not that exactly. But, at least, it would have been absurd, if it had not been so sweet....

The revolting corner of her mind seemed now to have laid down arms. Perhaps the girl's vague thought was that the feelings roused in her in the bunching-room had, after all, been unreasonable, even hysterical, as Hugo had plainly enough stated, as Hen herself had partly argued. Perhaps it was merely that all that trouble would keep, to be quietly pondered over at a later time. But rather, it seemed as if a mist had settled down over the regions of practical thought, hiding problems from view. The Works had somehow been swallowed up in that apologia she had made, Cally Heth's strange apology to Mr. V.V. for herself and her life.

Cally walked slowly along the familiar street, her thoughts a thousand miles in the blue. If the words of the good young man had humbled her, they had also mysteriously stirred and uplifted. She thought of his too trusting tribute, she thought of what they had said about women, their strength and their hope of freedom; and the misty pictures in her mind were not of herself--for well she had felt her weaknesses this day--but rather they were of a dim emerging ideal, of herself as she might some day hope to be. Vague aspirations were moving in her; new reachings of the spirit; dreams that spoke with strange voices....

And, companied by these ethereal fancies, she came, before she was aware of it, to the substantial steps of Home, where began the snuggest of all snug grooves....

She arrived with the intention, already well formed, of retiring forthwith to her room, and--probably--spending the whole evening there. But here, as it chanced, interruption fell across her thought. Just at her own door, Cally almost ran into a man who was standing still upon the sidewalk, as if waiting for some one: a tall old gentleman standing and leaning upon his cane. Cally came out of her absorption just in time to escape collision.

"I beg your pardon!..." she began, with manner, stepping back.

But then her feet faltered, and her voice died suddenly away, as she saw that this silent old man was her neighbor, Colonel John B. Dalhousie, whom she had never spoken to in her life.

The Colonel was regarding her with frightening fixity. The girl's descent from the empyrean to reality had the stunning suddenness of a fall: she showed it in her blanching face. Now, as the two thus stood, the old man raised a hand and swept off his military hat in a bow of elaborate courtesy.

"An apology from Miss Heth," said he, in a purring voice, "is the last thing on earth one of my name would have ventured to expect."

Doubtless the meeting had been obliged to come some day: Cally had often thought of it with dread, once escaped it by a narrow margin. That it should have come now, in the gentler afterglow of this curiously disturbing day, seemed like the grimness of destiny.... No fear of over-generosity here; no gleam in these eyes of brave and beautiful things....

"But you ask my pardon," the smooth-cutting voice went on. "It is granted, of course, my dear. You took my son's heart, and broke it, but that's a bauble. You took his honor, and I kicked him out, but honor's a name in a printed book. You took his life, and I buried him, but sons, we know, cannot live forever. What is there here to make a father's heart grow hard?"

Cally raised her hand to her throat. She felt suffocating, or else a little faint. From life she seemed to have stepped into the house of dead men's bones; and here she could see at play old emotions not met before in her guarded life: shrivelling contempt, undying hatred, immortal unforgiveness. Nevertheless, the subtlest stroke in the naked confrontation was that something in the father's expression, distorted though it was, reminded her of the son, whose face in this world she should see no more.

She tried to move past the face of her Nemesis, appeared physically incapable of motion; tried to speak, and had little more success.

"I--I'm--very sorry--for--" she said, indistinctly, and her ears were mocked with her ghastly inadequacy. "I--I've--"

"Sorry? Why, of course you are. Doubtless the little unpleasantness has marred your happiness at times. But I am gratified to know that you have other young men for your amusement, now that my son has withdrawn himself from your reach."

The old Colonel stooped further, brought his stabbing gaze nearer her. There were heavy yellow pouches under his eyes; his lower lip, not hidden by the stained white mustaches, twitched spasmodically.

"God looked and repented him that he had made man. I might wish that he'd made you a man--for just five minutes. But what do you imagine he thinks when he contemplates you and your work, my dear? Eh?... little she-devil, pretty little hell-cat!..."

Cally smothered a little noise between a cry and a sob. She started away, by sheer strength of horror; somehow got away from the terrible old face, ran up her own steps. Glancing whitely over her shoulder from this secure coign, she saw that Jack Dalhousie's father still stood unmoving on her sidewalk, staring and leaning on his cane....

She closed the door quickly, shutting out the sight.