Closing Cost

II OLIVIA TO THE RESCUE

III AND SCARBOROUGH

IV A DUMONT TRIUMPH

V FOUR FRIENDS

VI "LIKE HIS FATHER"

VII PAULINE AWAKENS

VIII THE DECISION

IX A THOROUGHBRED RUNS AWAY

X MRS. JOHN DUMONT

XI YOUNG AMERICA

XII AFTER EIGHT YEARS

XIII "MY SISTER IN LAW, GLADYS"

XIV STRAINING AT THE ANCHORS

XV GRADUATED PEARLS

XVI CHOICE AMONG EVILS

XVII TWO AND THE BARRIER

XVIII ON THE FARM

XIX PAULINE GOES INTO POLITICS

XX A MAN IN HIS MIGHT

XXI A COYOTE AT BAY

XXII STORMS IN THE WEST

XXIII A SEA SURPRISE

XXIV DUMONT BETRAYS DUMONT

XXV THE FALLEN KING

XXVI A DESPERATE RALLY

XXVII THE OTHER MAN'S MIGHT

XXVIII AFTER THE LONG WINTER

THE COST

I.

A FATHER INVITES DISASTER

Pauline Gardiner joined us on the day that we, the Second Reader class, moved from the basement to the top story of the old Central Public School. Her mother brought her and, leaving, looked round at us, meeting for an instant each pair of curious eyes with friendly appeal.

We knew well the enchanted house where she lived-stately, retreated far into large grounds in Jefferson Street; a high brick wall all round, and on top of the wall broken glass set in cement. Behind that impassable barrier which so teased our young audacity were flower-beds and "shrub" bushes, whose blossoms were wonderfully sweet if held a while in the closed hand; grape arbors and shade and fruit trees, haunted by bees; winding walks strewn fresh each spring with tan-bark that has such a clean, strong odor, especially just after a rain, and that is at once firm and soft beneath the feet. And in the midst stood the only apricot tree in Saint X. As few of us had tasted apricots, and as those few pronounced them better far than oranges or even bananas, that tree was the climax of tantalization.

The place had belonged to a childless old couple who hated children-or did they bar them out and drive them away because the sight and sound of them quickened the ache of empty old age into a pain too keen to bear? The husband died, the widow went away to her old maid sister at Madison; and the Gardiners, coming from Cincinnati to live in the town where Colonel Gardiner was born and had spent his youth, bought the place. On our way to and from school in the first weeks of that term, pausing as always to gaze in through the iron gates of the drive, we had each day seen Pauline walking alone among the flowers. And she would stop and smile at us; but she was apparently too shy to come to the gates; and we, with the memory of the cross old couple awing us, dared not attempt to make friends with her.

She was eight years old, tall for her age, slender but strong, naturally graceful. Her hazel eyes were always dancing mischievously. She liked boys' games better than girls'. In her second week she induced several of the more daring girls to go with her to the pond below town and there engage in a raft-race with the boys. And when John Dumont, seeing that the girls' raft was about to win, thrust the one he was piloting into it and upset it, she was the only girl who did not scream at the shock of the sudden tumble into the water or rise in tears from the shallow, muddy bottom.

She tried going barefooted; she was always getting bruised or cut in attempts-usually successful-at boys' recklessness; yet her voice was sweet and her manner toward others, gentle. She hid her face when Miss Stone whipped any one-more fearful far than the rise and fall of Miss Stone's ferule was the soaring and sinking of her broad, bristling eyebrows.

From the outset John Dumont took especial delight in teasing her-John Dumont, the roughest boy in the school. He was seven years older than she, but was only in the Fourth Reader-a laggard in his studies because his mind was incurious about books and the like, was absorbed in games, in playing soldier and robber, in swimming and sledding, in orchard-looting and fighting. He was impudent and domineering, a bully but not a coward, good-natured when deferred to, the feared leader of a boisterous, imitative clique. Until Pauline came he had rarely noticed a girl-never except to play her some prank more or less cruel.

After the adventure of the raft he watched Pauline afar off, revolving plans for approaching her without impairing his barbaric dignity, for subduing her without subduing himself to her. But he knew only one way of making friends, the only kind of friends he had or could conceive-loyal subjects, ruled through their weaknesses and fears. And as that way was to give the desired addition to his court a sound thrashing, he felt it must be modified somewhat to help him in his present conquest. He tied her hair to the back of her desk; he snowballed her and his sister Gladys home from school. He raided her playhouse and broke her dishes and-she giving desperate battle-fled with only the parents of her doll family. With Gladys shrieking for their mother, he shook her out of a tree in their yard, and it sprained her ankle so severely that she had to stay away from school for a month. The net result of a year's arduous efforts was that she had singled him out for detestation-this when her conquest of him was complete because she had never told on him, had never in her worst encounters with him shown the white feather.

But he had acted more wisely than he knew, for she had at least singled him out from the crowd of boys. And there was a certain frank good-nature about him, a fearlessness-and she could not help admiring his strength and leadership. Presently she discovered his secret-that his persecutions were not through hatred of her but through anger at her resistance, anger at his own weakness in being fascinated by her. This discovery came while she was shut in the house with her sprained ankle. As she sat at her corner bay-window she saw him hovering in the neighborhood, now in the alley at the side of the house, now hurrying past, whistling loudly as if bent upon some gay and remote errand, now skulking along as if he had stolen something, again seated on the curbstone at the farthest crossing from which he could see her window out of the corner of his eye. She understood-and forthwith forgave the past. She was immensely flattered that this big, audacious creature, so arrogant with the boys, so contemptuous toward the girls, should be her captive.

When she was in her first year at the High School and he in his last he walked home with her every day; and they regarded themselves as engaged. Her once golden hair had darkened now to a beautiful brown with red flashing from its waves; and her skin was a clear olive pallid but healthy. And she had shot up into a tall, slender young woman; her mother yielded to her pleadings, let her put her hair into a long knot at the back of her neck and wear skirts ALMOST to the ground.

When he came from Ann Arbor for his first Christmas holidays each found the other grown into a new person. She thought him a marvel of wisdom and worldly experience. He thought her a marvel of ideal womanhood-gay, lively; not a bit "narrow" in judging him, yet narrow to primness in her ideas of what she herself could do, and withal charming physically. He would not have cared to explain how he came by the capacity for such sophisticated judgment of a young woman. They were to be married as soon as he had his degree; and he was immediately to be admitted to partnership in his father's woolen mills-the largest in the state of Indiana.

He had been home three weeks of the long vacation between his sophomore and junior years. There appeared on the town's big and busy stream of gossip, stories of his life at Ann Arbor-of drinking and gambling and wild "tears" in Detroit. And it was noted that the fast young men of Saint X-so every one called Saint Christopher-were going a more rapid gait. Those turbulent fretters against the dam of dullness and stern repression of even normal and harmless gaiety had long caused scandal. But never before had they been so daring, so defiant.

One night after leaving Pauline he went to play poker in Charley Braddock's rooms. Braddock, only son of the richest banker in Saint X, had furnished the loft of his father's stable as bachelor quarters and entertained his friends there without fear that the noise would break the sleep and rouse the suspicions of his father. That night, besides Braddock and Dumont, there were Jim Cauldwell and his brother Will. As they played they drank; and Dumont, winning steadily, became offensive in his raillery. There was a quarrel, a fight; Will Cauldwell, accidently toppled down a steep stairway by Dumont, was picked up with a broken arm and leg.

By noon the next day the town was boiling with this outbreak of deviltry in the leading young men, the sons and prospective successors of the "bulwarks of religion and morality." The Episcopalian and Methodist ministers preached against Dumont, that "importer of Satan's ways into our peaceful midst," and against Charley Braddock with his "ante-room to Sheol"-the Reverend Sweetser had just learned the distinction between Sheol and Hades. The Presbyterian preacher wrestled spiritually with Will Cauldwell and so wrought upon his depression that he gave out a solemn statement of confession, remorse and reform. In painting himself in dark colors he painted Jack Dumont jet black.

Pauline had known that Dumont was "lively"-he was far too proud of his wild oats wholly to conceal them from her. And she had all the tolerance and fascinated admiration of feminine youth for the friskiness of masculine freedom. Thus, though she did not precisely approve what he and his friends had done, she took no such serious view of it as did her parents and his. The most she could do with her father was to persuade him to suspend sentence pending the conclusion of an investigation into Jack's doings at the University of Michigan and in Detroit. Colonel Gardiner was not so narrow or so severe as Jack said or as Pauline thought. He loved his daughter; so he inquired thoroughly. He knew that his daughter loved Dumont; so he judged liberally. When he had done he ordered the engagement broken and forbade Dumont the house.

"He is not wild merely; he is-worse than you can imagine," said the colonel to his wife, in concluding his account of his discoveries and of Dumont's evasive and reluctant admissions-an account so carefully expurgated that it completely misled her. "Tell Pauline as much as you can-enough to convince her."

This, when Mrs. Gardiner was not herself convinced. She regarded the colonel as too high-minded to be a fit judge of human frailty; and his over-caution in explanation had given her the feeling that he had a standard for a husband for their daughter which only another such rare man as himself could live up to. Further, she had always been extremely reserved in mother-and-daughter talk with Pauline, and thus could not now give her a clear idea of what little she had been able to gather from Colonel Gardiner's half-truths. This typical enacting of a familiar domestic comedy-tragedy had the usual result: the girl was confirmed in her original opinion and stand.

"Jack's been a little too lively," was her unexpressed conclusion from her mother's dilution of her father's dilution of the ugly truth. "He's sorry and won't do it again, and-well, I'd hate a milksop. Father has forgotten that he was young himself once."

Dumont's father and mother charged against Ann Arbor that which they might have charged against their own alternations of tyranny and license, had they not been humanly lenient in self-excuse. "No more college!" said his father.

"The place for you, young man, is my office, where I can keep an eye or two on you."

"That suits me," replied the son, indifferently-he made small pretense of repentance at home.

"I never wanted to go to college."

"Yes, it was your mother's doing," said old Dumont. "Now we'll try MY way of educating a boy."

So Jack entered the service of his father's god-of-the-six-days, and immediately showed astonishing talent and twelve-to-fourteen-hour assiduity. He did not try to talk with Pauline. He went nowhere but to business; he avoided the young men.

"It's a bad idea to let your home town know too much about you," he reflected, and he resolved that his future gambols out of bounds should be in the security of distant and large cities-and they were. Seven months after he went to work he amazed and delighted his father by informing him that he had bought five hundred shares of stock in the mills-he had made the money, fifty-odd thousand dollars, by a speculation in wool. He was completely reestablished with his father and with all Saint X except Colonel Gardiner.

"That young Jack Dumont's a wonder," said everybody. "He'll make the biggest kind of a fortune or the biggest kind of a smash before he gets through."

He felt that he was fully entitled to the rights of the regenerate; he went to Colonel Gardiner's law office boldly to claim them.

At sight of him the colonel's face hardened into an expression as near to hate as its habit of kindliness would concede. "Well, sir!" said he, sharply, eying the young man over the tops of his glasses.

Dumont stiffened his strong, rather stocky figure and said, his face a study of youthful frankness: "You know what I've come for, sir. I want you to give me a trial."

"No!" Colonel Gardiner shut his lips firmly.

"Good morning, sir!" And he was writing again.

"You are very hard," said Dumont, bitterly.

"You are driving me to ruin."

"How DARE you!" The old man rose and went up to him, eyes blazing scorn. "You deceive others, but not me with my daughter's welfare as my first duty. It is an insult to her that you presume to lift your eyes to her."

Dumont colored and haughtily raised his head. He met the colonel's fiery gaze without flinching.

"I was no worse than other young men-"

"It's a slander upon young men for you to say that they-that any of them with a spark of decency-would do as you have done, as you DO! Leave my office at once, sir!"

"I've not only repented-I've shown that I was ashamed of-of that," said Dumont. "Yet you refuse me a chance!"

The colonel was shaking with anger.

"You left here for New York last Thursday night," he said. "Where and how did you spend Saturday night and Sunday and Monday?"

Dumont's eyes shifted and sank.

"It's false," he muttered. "It's lies."

"I expected this call from you," continued Colonel Gardiner, "and I prepared for it so that I could do what was right. I'd rather see my daughter in her shroud than in a wedding-dress for you."

Dumont left without speaking or looking up.

"The old fox!" he said to himself. "Spying on me-what an idiot I was not to look out for that. The narrow old fool! He doesn't know what 'man of the world' means. But I'll marry her in spite of him. I'll let nobody cheat me out of what I want, what belongs to me."

A few nights afterward he went to a dance at Braddock's, hunted out Pauline and seated himself beside her. In a year he had not been so near her, though they had seen each other every few days and he had written her many letters which she had read, had treasured, but had been held from answering by her sense of honor, unless her looks whenever their eyes met could be called answers.

"You mustn't, Jack," she said, her breath coming fast, her eyes fever-bright. "Father has forbidden me-and it'll only make him the harder."

"You, too, Polly? Well, then, I don't care what becomes of me."

He looked so desperate that she was frightened.

"It isn't that, Jack-you KNOW it isn't that."

"I've been to see your father. And he told me he'd never consent-never! I don't deserve that-and I can't stand it to lose you. No matter what I've done, God knows I love you, Polly."

Pauline's face was pale. Her hands, in her lap, were gripping her little handkerchief.

"You don't say that, too-you don't say 'never'?"

She raised her eyes to his and their look thrilled through and through him. "Yes, John, I say 'never'-I'll NEVER give you up."

All the decent instincts in his nature showed in his handsome face, in which time had not as yet had the chance clearly to write character. "No wonder I love you-there never was anybody so brave and so true as you. But you must help me. I must see you and talk to you-once in a while, anyhow."

Pauline flushed painfully.

"Not till-they-let me-or I'm older, John. They've always trusted me and left me free. And I can't deceive them."

He liked this-it was another proof that she was, through and through, the sort of woman who was worthy to be his wife.

"Well-we'll wait," he said. "And if they won't be fair to us, why, we'll have a right to do the best we can." He gave her a tragic look.

"I've set my heart on you, Polly, and I never can stand it not to get what I've set my heart on. If I lost you, I'd go straight to ruin."

She might have been a great deal older and wiser and still not have seen in this a confirmation of her father's judgment of her lover. And her parents had unconsciously driven her into a mental state in which, if he had committed a crime, it would have seemed to her their fault rather than his. The next day she opened the subject with her mother-the subject that was never out of their minds.

"I can't forget him, mother. I CAN'T give him up." With the splendid confidence of youth, "I can save him-he'll do anything for my sake." With the touching ignorance of youth, "He's done nothing so very dreadful, I'm sure-I'd believe him against the whole world."

And in the evening her mother approached her father. She was in sympathy with Pauline, though her loyalty to her husband made her careful not to show it. She had small confidence in a man's judgments of men on their woman-side, great confidence in the power of women to change and uplift men.

"Father," said she, when they were alone on the side porch after supper, "have you noticed how hard Polly is taking IT?"

His eyes and the sudden deepening of the lines in his face answered her.

"Don't you think maybe we've been a little-too-severe?"

"I've tried to think so, but-" He shook his head. "Maggie, he's hopeless, hopeless."

"I don't know much about those things." This was a mere form of speech. She thought she knew all there was to be known; and as she was an intelligent woman who had lived a long time and had a normal human curiosity she did know a great deal. But, after the fashion of many of the women of the older generation, she had left undisturbed his delusion that her goodness was the result not of intelligence but of ignorance. "But I can't help fearing it isn't right to condemn a young man forever because he was led away as a boy."

"I can't discuss it with you, Maggie-it's a degradation even to speak of him before a good woman. You must rely upon my judgment. Polly must put him out of her head."

"But what am I to tell her? You can't make a woman like our Pauline put a man out of her life when she loves him unless you give her a reason that satisfies her. And if you don't give ME a reason that satisfies me how can I give HER a reason that will satisfy her?"

"I'll talk to her," said the colonel, after a long pause. "She must-she shall give him up, mother."

"I've tried to persuade her to go to visit Olivia," continued Mrs. Gardiner. "But she won't. And she doesn't want me to ask Olivia here."

"I'll ask Olivia before I speak to her."

Mrs. Gardiner went up to her daughter's room-it had been her play-room, then her study, and was now graduated into her sitting-room. She was dreaming over a book-Tennyson's poems. She looked up, eyes full of hope.

"He has some good reason, dear," began her mother.

"What is it?" demanded Pauline.

"I can't tell you any more than I've told you already," replied her mother, trying not to show her feelings in her face.

"Why does he treat me-treat you-like two naughty little children?" said Pauline, impatiently tossing the book on the table.

"Pauline!" Her mother's voice was sharp in reproof. "How can you place any one before your father!"

Pauline was silent-she had dropped the veil over herself. "I-I-where did you place father-when-when-" Her eyes were laughing again.

"You know he'd never oppose your happiness, Polly." Mrs. Gardiner was smoothing her daughter's turbulent red-brown hair. "You'll only have to wait under a little more trying circumstances. And if he's right, the truth will come out. And if he's mistaken and John's all you think him, then that will come out."

Pauline knew her father was not opposing her through tyranny or pride of opinion or sheer prejudice; but she felt that this was another case of age's lack of sympathy with youth, felt it with all the intensity of infatuated seventeen made doubly determined by opposition and concealment. The next evening he and she were walking together in the garden. He suddenly put his arm round her and drew her close to him and kissed her.

"You know I shouldn't if I didn't think it the only course-don't you, Pauline?" he said in a broken voice that went straight to her heart.

"Yes, father." Then, after a silence: "But-we-we've been sweethearts since we were children. And-I-father, I MUST stand by him."

"Won't you trust me, child? Won't you believe ME rather than him?"

Pauline's only answer was a sigh. They loved each the other; he adored her, she reverenced him. But between them, thick and high, rose the barrier of custom and training. Comradeship, confidence were impossible.

II.

OLIVIA TO THE RESCUE.

With the first glance into Olivia's dark gray eyes Pauline ceased to resent her as an intruder. And soon she was feeling that some sort of dawn was assailing her night.

Olivia was the older by three years. She seemed-and for her years, was-serious and wise because, as the eldest of a large family, she was lieutenant-general to her mother. Further, she had always had her own way-when it was the right way and did not conflict with justice to her brothers and sisters. And often her parents let her have her own way when it was the wrong way, nor did they spoil the lesson by mitigating disagreeable consequences.

"Do as you please," her mother used to say, when doing as she pleased would involve less of mischief than of valuable experience, "and perhaps you'll learn to please to do sensibly." Again, her father would restrain her mother from interference-"Oh, let the girl alone. She's got to teach herself how to behave, and she can't begin a minute too young." This training had produced a self-reliant and self-governing Olivia.

She wondered at the change in Pauline-Pauline, the light-hearted, the effervescent of laughter and life, now silent and almost somber. It was two weeks before she, not easily won to the confiding mood for all her frankness, let Olivia into her secret. Of course, it was at night; of course, they were in the same bed. And when Olivia had heard she came nearer to the truth about Dumont than had Pauline's mother. But, while she felt sure there was a way to cure Pauline, she knew that way was not the one which had been pursued. "They've only made her obstinate," she thought, as she, lying with hands clasped behind her head, watched Pauline, propped upon an elbow, staring with dreamful determination into the moonlight.

"It'll come out all right," she said; her voice always suggested that she knew what she was talking about. "Your father'll give in sooner or later-if YOU don't change."

"But he's so bitter against Jack," replied Pauline. "He won't listen to his side-to our side-of it."

"Anyhow, what's the use of anticipating trouble? You wouldn't get married yet. And if he's worthwhile he'll wait."

Pauline had been even gentler than her own judgment in painting her lover for her cousin's inspection. So, she could not explain to her why there was necessity for haste, could not confess her conviction that every month he lived away from her was a month of peril to him.

"We want it settled," she said evasively.

"I haven't seen him around anywhere," went on Olivia. "Is he here now?"

"He's in Chicago-in charge of his father's office there. He may stay all winter."

"No, there's no hurry," went on Olivia. "Besides, you ought to meet other men. It isn't a good idea for a girl to marry the man she's been brought up with before she's had a chance to get acquainted with other men." Olivia drew this maxim from experience-she had been engaged to a school-days lover when she went away to Battle Field to college; she broke it off when, going home on vacation, she saw him again from the point of wider view.

But Pauline scorned this theory; if Olivia had confessed the broken engagement she would have thought her shallow and untrustworthy. She was confident, with inexperience's sublime incapacity for self-doubt, that in all the wide world there was only one man whom she could have loved or could love.

"Oh, I shan't change," she said in a tone that warned her cousin against discussion.

"At any rate," replied Olivia, "a little experience would do you no harm." She suddenly sat up in bed. "A splendid idea!" she exclaimed. "Why not come to Battle Field with me?"

"I'd like it," said Pauline, always eager for self-improvement and roused by Olivia's stories of her college experiences. "But father'd never let me go to Battle Field College."

"Battle Field UNIVERSITY," corrected Olivia. "It has classical courses and scientific courses and a preparatory school-and a military department for men and a music department for women. And it's going to have lots and lots of real university schools-when it gets the money. And there's a healthy, middle-aged wagon-maker who's said to be thinking of leaving it a million or so-if he should ever die and if they should change its name to his."

"But it's coeducation, isn't it? Father would never consent. It was all mother could do to persuade him to let me go to public school."

"But maybe he'd let you go with me, where he wouldn't let you go all alone."

And so it turned out. Colonel Gardiner, anxious to get his daughter away from Saint X and into new scenes where Dumont might grow dim, consented as soon as Olivia explained her plan.

Instead of entering "senior prep", Pauline was able to make freshman with only three conditions. In the first week she was initiated into Olivia's fraternity, the Kappa Alpha Kappa, joined the woman's literary and debating society, and was fascinated and absorbed by crowding new events, associations, occupations, thoughts. In spite of herself her old-time high spirits came flooding back. She caught herself humming-and checked herself reproachfully. She caught herself singing-and lowered it to humming. She caught herself whistling-and decided that she might as well be cheerful while she waited for fate to befriend her and Jack. And she found that she thought about him none the less steadfastly for thinking hopefully.

Battle Field put no more restraint upon its young women than it put upon its young men-and it put no restraint upon the young men. In theory and practice it was democratic, American, western-an outgrowth of that pioneer life in which the men and the women had fought and toiled and enjoyed, side by side, in absolute equality, with absolute freedom of association. It recognized that its students had been brought up in the free, simple, frank way, that all came from a region where individualism was a religion, with self-reliance as the cardinal principle of faith and self-development as the goal.

There were no dormitories at Battle Field then. Olivia and Pauline lived in one of the hundred or more boarding-houses-a big, square, white "frame," kept by a Mrs. Trent, the widow of a "hero of two wars."

Her hero had won her with his uniform when he returned from the Mexican War. His conduct was so irregular and his income so uncertain that it had been a relief to her when he departed for his second war. From it he had brought home a broken constitution, a maimed body and confirmed habits of shiftlessness and drunkenness. His country took his character and his health and paid him in exchange a pension which just about kept him in whisky and tobacco. So long as he was alive Mrs. Trent hated him as vigorously as her Christianity permitted. When he was safely in his grave she canonized him; she put his picture and his sword, belt and epaulets in the conspicuous place in the parlor; she used his record for gallantry to get herself social position and a place of honor at public gatherings.

Her house stood back from the highway in a grove of elms and walnuts. Its angularity was relieved by a porch with a flat roof that had a railing about it and served as a balcony for the second-story lodgers. There were broad halls through the middle of the house down-stairs and up. Olivia and Pauline had the three large rooms in the second story on the south side. They used the front room as a study and Pauline's bedroom was next to it.

Late one afternoon she was seated at the study window watching a cherry-red sun drop through the purple haze of the autumn. She became conscious that some one was on the balcony before the window of the front room across the hall. She leaned so that she could see without being seen. Sharp against the darkening sky was the profile of a young man. Olivia joined her and followed her glance. The profile remained fixed and the two girls watched it, fascinated. It certainly was a powerful outline, proud and stern, but with a mouth that was sweet in its kindliness and gentleness.

"I wonder what he's thinking about," said Olivia, in an undertone; he was not fifteen feet from them. "I suppose, some scheme for conquering the world."

Most of Battle Field's youth came from the farms of that western country, the young men with bodies and brains that were strong but awkward. Almost all were working their way through-as were not a few of the women. They felt that life was a large, serious business impatiently waiting for them to come and attend to it in a large, serious way better than it had ever been attended to before. They studied hard; they practised oratory and debating. Their talk was of history and philosophy, religion and politics. They slept little; they thought-or tried to think-even more than they talked.

At a glance this man was one of them, a fine type.

"He's handsome, isn't he?" said Pauline.

"But-" She did not finish; indeed it was not clear to her what the rest of her protest was. He reminded her of Dumont-there was the same look of superiority, of the "born to lead." But his face seemed to, have some quality which Dumont's lacked-or was it only the idealizing effect of the open sky and the evening light?

When the bell rang for supper he apparently did not hear it. The two girls went down and had talked to the others a few minutes and all had seated themselves before he entered. An inch or so above six feet, powerful in the chest and shoulders, he moved with a large grace until he became self-conscious or approached the, by comparison, frail pieces of furniture. He had penetrating, candid eyes that looked dark in the gaslight but were steel-blue. His face now wore the typical western-American expression-shrewd, easy-going good humor. Mrs. Trent, intrenched in state behind a huge, silver-plated coffee-urn with ivory-trimmed faucet, introduced him-Mr. Scarborough-to Olivia, to Pauline, to Sadie McIntosh, to Pierson and Howe and Thiebaud (pronounced Cay-bo). Scarborough sat directly opposite Olivia. But whenever he lifted his eyes from his plate he looked at Pauline, who was next to her. When she caught him he blushed and stirred in his chair so uneasily that it creaked and crackled; and his normal difficulties with his large hands and the small knife and fork were distressingly increased.

Pauline was disappointed in him-his clothes were ill-fitting and gave him the appearance of being in danger of bursting from them; his hair was too long, suggesting a shaggy, tawny mane; though his hands were well-shaped they had the recent scars of hard manual labor. Thus, when Olivia spoke enthusiastically of him after supper, she made no reply. She would have been ashamed to acknowledge the reasons for her lack of admiration, even had she been conscious of them.

But the next morning at breakfast she revised her opinion somewhat. He talked, and he had a remarkable voice-clear, musical, with a quality which made it seem to penetrate through all the nerves instead of through the auditory nerve only. Further, he talked straight to Pauline, without embarrassment and with a quaint, satiric humor. She was forgetting for the moment his almost uncouth hair and dress when, in making a sweeping gesture, he upset a glass of water and sent a plate of hot bread flying from the waitress' hand.

"He'd do well in the open air," thought she, "but he's out of place in a house."

Still, she found him interesting and original. And he persistently sought her-his persistence was little short of heroism in view of the never-wholly-concealed sufferings which the contrast between her grace and style and his lack of both caused him.

"He looks like a king who had been kidnapped as a child and brought up in the wilds," said Olivia. "I wonder who he is."

"I'll ask him," replied Pauline. And Olivia was slyly amused by her cousin's unconscious pride in her power with this large, untamed person.

III.

AND SCARBOROUGH.

His name was Hampden Scarborough and he came from a farm about twenty miles east of Saint X. He was descended from men who had learned to hate kings in Holland in the sixteenth century, had learned to despise them in England in the seventeenth century, had learned to laugh at them in America in the eighteenth century, had learned to exalt themselves into kings-the kings of the new democracy-in the free West in the nineteenth century.

When any one asked his father, Bladen Scarborough, who the family ancestors were, Bladen usually did not answer at all. It was his habit thus to treat a question he did not fancy, and, if the question was repeated, to supplement silence with a piercing look from under his aggressive eyebrows. But sometimes he would answer it. Once, for example, he looked coldly at the man who, with a covert sneer, had asked it, said, "You're impudent, sir. You insinuate I'm not enough by myself to command your consideration," and struck him a staggering blow across the mouth. Again-he was in a playful mood that day and the questioner was a woman-he replied, "I'm descended from murderers, ma'am-murderers."

And in a sense it was the truth.

In 1568 the Scarboroughs were seated obscurely in an east county of England. They were tenant farmers on the estates of the Earl of Ashford and had been strongly infected with "leveling" ideas by the refugees then fleeing to England to escape the fury of continental prince and priest. John Scarborough was trudging along the highway with his sister Kate. On horseback came Aubrey Walton, youngest son of the Earl of Ashford. He admired the rosy, pretty face of Kate Scarborough. He dismounted and, without so much as a glance at her brother, put his arm round her. John snatched her free. Young Walton, all amazement and wrath at the hind who did not appreciate the favor he was condescending to bestow upon a humble maiden, ripped out an insult and drew his sword. John wrenched it from him and ran it through his body.

That night, with four gold pieces in his pocket, John Scarborough left England in a smuggler and was presently fighting Philip of Spain in the army of the Dutch people.

In 1653 Zachariah Scarborough, great grandson of the preceding, was a soldier in Cromwell's army. On the night of April twentieth he was in an ale-house off Fleet Street with three brother officers. That day Cromwell had driven out Parliament and had dissolved the Council of State. Three of the officers were of Cromwell's party; the fourth, Captain Zachariah Scarborough, was a "leveler"-a hater of kings, a Dutch-bred pioneer of Dutch-bred democracy. The discussion began hot-and they poured ale on it.

"He's a tyrant!" shouted Zachariah Scarborough, bringing his huge fist down on the table and upsetting a mug. "He has set up for king. Down with all kings, say I! His head must come off!"

At this knives were drawn, and when Zachariah Scarborough staggered into the darkness of filthy Fleet Street with a cut down his cheek from temple to jaw-bone, his knife was dripping the life of a cousin of Ireton's.

He fled to the Virginia plantations and drifted thence to North Carolina.

His great-grandson, Gaston Scarborough, was one of Marion's men in his boyhood-a fierce spirit made arrogant by isolated freedom, where every man of character owned his land and could conceive of no superior between him and Almighty God. One autumn day in 1794 Gaston was out shooting with his youngest brother, John, their father's favorite. Gaston's gun was caught by a creeper, was torn from him; and his hand, reaching for it, exploded the charge into his brother's neck. His brother fell backward into the swamp and disappeared.

Gaston plunged into the wilderness-to Tennessee, to Kentucky, to Indiana.

"And it's my turn," said Hampden Scarborough as he ended a brief recital of the ancestral murders which Pauline had drawn from him-they were out for a walk together.

"Your turn?" she inquired.

"Yes-I'm the great-grandson-the only one. It's always a great-grandson."

"You DO look dangerous," said Pauline, and the smile and the glance she sent with the words might have been misunderstood by a young man entertaining the ideas which were then filling that young man's brain.

Again, he told her how he had been sent to college-she was always leading him to talk of himself, and her imagination more than supplied that which his unaffected modesty, sometimes deliberately, more often unconsciously, kept out of his stories.

Ever since he could remember, his strongest passion had been for books, for reading. Before he was born the wilderness was subdued and the cruel toil of his parents' early life was mitigated by the growth of towns, the spread of civilization. There was a chance for some leisure, for the higher gratification of the intense American passion for education. A small library had sprung up in one corner of the general room of the old farm-house-from the seeds of a Bible, an almanac, Milton's Paradise Lost, Baxter's Saint's Rest and a Government report on cattle. But the art collection had stood still for years-a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, another of the Emancipation Proclamation, pictures of Washington, Lincoln and Napoleon, the last held in that household second only to Washington in all history as a "leveler."

The only daughter, Arabella, had been sent to boarding-school in Cincinnati. She married a rich man, lived in the city and, under the inspiration of English novels and the tutelage of a woman friend who visited in New York and often went abroad, was developing ideas of family and class and rank. She talked feelingly of the "lower classes" and of the duty of the "upper class" toward them. Her "goings-on" created an acid prejudice against higher education in her father's mind. As she was unfolding to him a plan for sending Hampden to Harvard he interrupted with, "No MORE idiots in my family at my expense," and started out to feed the pigs. The best terms Hampden's mother could make were that he should not be disinherited and cast off if he went to Battle Field and paid his own way.

He did not tell Pauline all of this, nor did he repeat to her the conversation between himself and his father a few days before he left home.

"Is 'Bella going to pay your way through?" asked his father, looking at him severely-but he looked severely at every one except Hampden's gentle-voiced mother.

"No, sir." The son's voice was clear.

"Is your mother?"

"No, sir."

"Have you got money put by?"

"Four hundred dollars."

"Is that enough?"

"It'll give me time for a long look around."

The old man drew a big, rusty pocketbook from the inside pocket of the old-fashioned, flowered-velvet waistcoat he wore even when he fed the pigs. He counted out upon his knee ten one-hundred-dollar bills. He held them toward his son. "That'll have to do you," he said. "That's all you'll get."

"No, thank you," replied Hampden. "I wish no favors from anybody."

"You've earned it over and above your keep," retorted his father. "It belongs to you."

"If I need it I'll send for it," said Hampden, that being the easiest way quickly to end the matter.

But he did tell Pauline that he purposed to pay his own way through college.

"My father has a notion," said he, "that the things one works for and earns are the only things worth having. And I think one can't begin to act on that notion too early. If one is trying to get an education, why not an all-round education, instead of only lessons out of books?"

From that moment Pauline ceased to regard dress or any other external feature as a factor in her estimate of Hampden Scarborough.

"But your plan might make a man too late in getting a start-some men, at least," she suggested.

"A start-for what?" he asked.

"For fame or fortune or success of any kind."

Scarborough's eyes, fixed on the distance, had a curious look in them-he was again exactly like that first view she had had of him.

"But suppose one isn't after any of those things," he said. "Suppose he thinks of life as simply an opportunity for self-development. He starts at it when he's born, and the more of it he does the more he has to do. And-he can't possibly fail, and every moment is a triumph-and--" He came back from his excursion and smiled apologetically at her.

But she was evidently interested.

"Don't you think a man ought to have ambition?" she asked. She was thinking of her lover and his audacious schemes for making himself powerful.

"Oh-a man is what he is. Ambition means so many different things."

"But shouldn't you like to be rich and famous and-all that?"

"It depends--" Scarborough felt that if he said what was in his mind it might sound like cant. So he changed the subject. "Just now my ambition is to get off that zoology condition."

IV.

A DUMONT TRIUMPH.

But in the first week of her second month Pauline's interest in her surroundings vanished. She was corresponding with Jennie Atwater and Jennie began to write of Dumont-he had returned to Saint X; Caroline Sylvester, of Cleveland, was visiting his mother; it was all but certain that Jack and Caroline would marry. "Her people want it," Jennie went on-she pretended to believe that Jack and Pauline had given each the other up-"and Jack's father is determined on it. They're together morning, noon and evening. She's really very swell, though I don't think she's such a raving beauty." Following this came the Saint X News-Bulletin with a broad hint that the engagement was about to be announced.

"It's ridiculously false," said Pauline to herself; but she tossed for hours each night, trying to soothe the sick pain in her heart. And while she scouted the possibility of losing him, she was for the first time entertaining it-a cloud in the great horizon of her faith in the future; a small cloud, but black and bold against the blue. And she had no suspicion that he had returned from Chicago deliberately to raise that cloud.

A few days later another letter from Jennie, full of gossip about Jack and Caroline, a News-Bulletin with a long article about Caroline, ending with an even broader hint of her approaching marriage-and Dumont sent Pauline a note from the hotel in Villeneuve, five miles from Battle Field: "I must see you. Do not deny me. It means everything to both of us-what I want to say to you." And he asked her to meet him in the little park in Battle Field on the bank of the river where no one but the factory hands and their families ever went, and they only in the evenings. The hour he fixed was ten the next morning, and she "cut" ancient history and was there. As he advanced to meet her she thought she had never before appreciated how handsome he was, how distinguished-looking-perfectly her ideal of what a man should be, especially in that important, and at Battle Field neglected, matter, dress.

She was without practice in indirection, but she successfully hid her jealousy and her fears, though his manner was making their taunts and threats desperately real. He seemed depressed and gloomy; he would not look at her; he shook hands with her almost coldly, though they had not seen each other for weeks, had not talked together for months. She felt faint, and her thoughts were like flocks of circling, croaking crows.

"Polly," he began, when they were in the secluded corner of the park, "father wants me to get married. He's in a rage at your father for treating me so harshly. He wants me to marry a girl who's visiting us. He's always at me about it, making all sorts of promises and threats. Her father's in the same business that we are, and--"

He glanced at her to note the effect of his words. She had drawn her tall figure to its full height, and her cheeks were flushed and her eyes curiously bright. He had stabbed straight and deep into the heart of her weakness, but also into the heart of her pride.

The only effect of his thrust that was visible to him put him in a panic. "Don't-PLEASE don't look that way, Polly," he went on hastily. "You don't see what I'm driving at yet. I didn't mean that I'd marry her, or think of it. There isn't anybody but you. There couldn't be, you know that."

"Why did you tell me, then?" she asked haughtily.

"Because-I had to begin somewhere. Polly, I'm going away, going abroad. And I'm not to see you for-for I don't know how long-and-we must be married!"

She looked at him in a daze.

"We can cross on the ferry at half-past ten," he went on. "You see that house-the white one?" He pointed to the other bank of the river where a white cottage shrank among the trees not far from a little church. "Mr. Barker lives there-you must have heard of him. He's married scores and hundreds of couples from this side. And we can be back here at half-past eleven-twelve at the latest."

She shook her head expressed, not determination, only doubt.

"I can't, Jack," she said. "They--"

"Then you aren't certain you're ever going to marry me," he interrupted bitterly. "You don't mean what you promised me. You care more for them than you do for me. You don't really care for me at all."

"You don't believe that," she protested, her eyes and her mind on the little white cottage. "You couldn't-you know me too well."

"Then there's no reason why we shouldn't get married. Don't we belong to each other now? Why should we refuse to stand up and say so?"

That seemed unanswerable-a perfect excuse for doing what she wished to do. For the little white cottage fascinated her-how she did long to be sure of him! And she felt so free, so absolutely her own mistress in these new surroundings, where no one attempted to exercise authority over another.

"I must feel sure of you, Pauline. Sometimes everything seems to be against me, and I even doubt you. And-that's when the temptations pull hardest. If we were married it'd all be different."

Yes, it would be different. And he would be securely hers, with her mind at rest instead of harassed as it would be if she let him go so far away, free. And where was the harm in merely repeating before a preacher the promise that now bound them both? She looked at him and he at her.

"You don't put any others before me, do you, dear?" he asked.

"No, Jack-no one. I belong to you."

"Come!" he pleaded, and they went down to the boat. She seemed to herself to be in a dream-in a trance.

As she walked beside him along the country road on the other shore a voice was ringing in her ears: "Don't! Don't! Ask Olivia's advice first!" But she walked on, her will suspended, substituted for it his will and her jealousy and her fears of his yielding to the urgings of his father and the blandishments of "that Cleveland girl." He said little but kept close to her, watching her narrowly, touching her tenderly now and then.

The Reverend Josiah Barker was waiting for them-an oily smirk on a face smooth save where a thin fringe of white whiskers dangled from his jaw-bone, ear to ear; fat, damp hands rubbing in anticipation of the large fee that was to repay him for celebrating the marriage and for keeping quiet about it afterward. At the proper place in the brief ceremony Dumont, with a sly smile at Pauline which she faintly returned, produced the ring-he had bought it at Saint X a week before and so had started a rumor that he and Caroline Sylvester were to be married in haste. He held Pauline's hand firmly as he put the ring on her finger-he was significantly cool and calm for his age and for the circumstances. She was trembling violently, was pale and wan. The ring burned into her flesh.

"Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder," ended Barker, with pompous solemnity.

Dumont kissed her-her cheek was cold and at the touch of his lips she shuddered.

"Don't be afraid," he said in a low voice that was perfectly steady.

They went out and along the sunny road in silence. "Whom God hath joined," the voice was now dinning into her ears. And she was saying to herself, "Has GOD joined us? If so, why do I feel as if I had committed a crime?" She looked guiltily at him-she felt no thrill of pride or love at the thought that he was her husband, she his wife. And into her mind poured all her father's condemnations of him, with a vague menacing fear riding the crest of the flood.

"You're sorry you've done it?" he said sullenly.

She did not answer.

"Well, it's done," he went on, "and it can't be undone. And I've got you, Polly, in spite of them. They might have known better than to try to keep me from getting what I wanted. I always did, and I always shall!"

She looked at him startled, then hastily looked away. Even more than his words and his tone, she disliked his eyes-gloating, triumphant. But not until she was years more experienced did she study that never-forgotten expression, study it as a whole-words, tone, look. Then, and not until then, did she know that she had instinctively shrunk because he had laid bare his base and all but loveless motive in marrying her.

"And," he added, "I'll force father to give me a big interest in the business very soon. Then-we'll announce it."

Announce IT? Announce WHAT? "Why, I'm a married woman," she thought, and she stumbled and almost fell. The way danced before her eyes, all spotted with black. She was just able to walk aboard the boat and drop into a seat.

He sat beside her, took her hand and bent over it; as he kissed it a tear fell on it. He looked at her and she saw that his eyes were swimming. A sob surged into her throat, but she choked it back. "Jack!" she murmured, and hid her face in her handkerchief.

When they looked each at the other both smiled-her foreboding had retreated to the background. She began to turn the ring round and round upon her finger.

"Mrs. John Dumont," she said. "Doesn't it sound queer?" And she gazed dreamily away toward the ranges of hills between which the river danced and sparkled as it journeyed westward. When she again became conscious of her immediate surroundings-other than Dumont-she saw a deck-hand looking at her with a friendly grin.

Instantly she covered the ring with her hand and handkerchief. "But I mustn't wear it," she said to Dumont.

"No-not on your finger." He laughed and drew from his pocket a slender gold chain. "But you might wear it on this, round your neck. It'll help to remind you that you don't belong to yourself any more, but to me."

She took the chain-she was coloring in a most becoming way-and hid it and the ring in her bosom. Then she drew off a narrow hoop of gold with a small setting and pushed it on his big little finger.

"And THAT, sir," she said, with a bewitching look, "may help you not to forget that YOU belong to me."

She left the ferry in advance of him and faced Olivia just in time for them to go down together to the half-past twelve o'clock dinner.

V.

FOUR FRIENDS.

As Mrs. Trent's was the best board in Battle Field there were more applicants than she could make places for at her one table. In the second week of the term she put a small table in the alcove of the dining-room and gave it to her "star" boarders-Pierson, Olivia and Pauline. They invited Scarborough to take the fourth place. Not only did Pierson sit opposite Olivia and Scarborough opposite Pauline three times a day in circumstances which make for intimacy, but also Olivia and Pierson studied together in his sitting-room and Pauline and Scarborough in her sitting-room for several hours three or four times a week. Olivia and Pierson were sophomores. Pauline and Scarborough were freshmen; also, they happened to have the same three "senior prep" conditions to "work off"-Latin, zoology and mathematics.

Such intimacies as these were the matter-of-course at Battle Field. They were usually brief and strenuous. A young man and a young woman would be seen together constantly, would fall in love, would come to know each the other thoroughly. Then, with the mind and character and looks and moods of each fully revealed to the other, they would drift or fly in opposite directions, wholly disillusioned. Occasionally they found that they were really congenial, and either love remained or a cordial friendship sprang up. The modes of thought, inconceivable to Europeans or Europeanized Americans, made catastrophe all but impossible.

It was through the girls that Scarborough got his invitation to the alcove table. There he came to know Pierson and to like him. One evening he went into Pierson's rooms-the suite under Olivia and Pauline's. He had never seen-but had dreamed of-such a luxurious bachelor interior. Pierson's father had insisted that his son must go to the college where forty years before he had split wood and lighted fires and swept corridors to earn two years of higher education. Pierson's mother, defeated in her wish that her son should go East to college, had tried to mitigate the rigors of Battle Field's primitive simplicity by herself fitting up his quarters. And she made them the show-rooms of the college.

"Now let's see what can be done for you," said Pierson, with the superiority of a whole year's experience where Scarborough was a beginner. "I'll put you in the Sigma Alpha fraternity for one thing. It's the best here."

"I don't know anything about fraternities," Scarborough said. "What are they for?"

"Oh, everybody that is anybody belongs to a fraternity. There are about a dozen of them here, and among them they get all the men with any claim to recognition. Just now, we lean rather toward taking in the fellows who've been well brought up."

"Does everybody belong to a fraternity?"

"Lord, no! Two-thirds don't belong. The fellows outside are called 'barbs'-that is, barbarians; we on the inside are Greeks. Though, I must say, very few of us are Athenians and most of us are the rankest Macedonians. But the worst Greeks are better than the best barbs. They're the rummest lot of scrubs you ever saw-stupid drudges who live round in all sorts of holes and don't amount to anything. The brush of the backwoods."

"Oh, yes-mm-I see." Scarborough was looking uncomfortable.

"The Sigma Alphas'll take you in next Saturday," said Pierson. "They do as I say, between ourselves."

"I'm ever so much obliged, but--" Scarborough was red and began to stammer. "You see-I-it--"

"What's the matter? Expense? Don't let that bother you. The cost's nothing at all, and the membership is absolutely necessary to your position."

"Yes-a matter of expense." Scarborough was in control of himself now. "But not precisely the kind of expense you mean. No-I can't join I'd rather not explain. I'm ever so much obliged, but really I can't."

"As you please." Pierson was offended. "But I warn you, you've got to belong to one or the other of these fraternities or you'll be cut off from everything. And you oughtn't to miss the chance to join the best."

"I see I've offended you." Scarborough spoke regretfully. "Please don't think I'm not appreciating your kindness. But-I've made a sort of agreement with myself never to join anything that isn't organized for a general purpose and that won't admit anybody who has that purpose, too."

Pierson thought on this for a moment. "Pardon me for saying so, but that's nonsense. You can't afford to stand alone. It'll make everything harder for you-many things impossible. You've got to yield to the prejudices of people in these matters. Why, even the barbs have no use for each other and look up to us. When we have an election in the Literary Society I can control more barb votes than any one else in college. And the reason is-well, you can imagine." (Mr. Pierson was only twenty years old when he made that speech.)

"It doesn't disturb me to think of myself as alone." The strong lines in Scarborough's face were in evidence. "But it would disturb me if I were propped up and weren't sure I could stand alone. I'm afraid to lean on any one or anything-my prop might give way. And I don't want any friends or any associates who value me for any other reason than what I myself am. I purpose never to 'belong' to anything or anybody."

Pierson laughed. "Do as you please," he said. "I'd like to myself if it wasn't such an awful lot of trouble!"

"Not in the end," replied Scarborough.

"Oh, bother the end. To-day's good enough for me."

"You'd better not let Miss Shrewsbury hear you say that," said Scarborough, his eyes mocking.

Pierson grew serious at once. "Splendid girl, isn't she?" She happened to be the first he had known at all well who hadn't agreed with him in everything he said, hadn't shown the greatest anxiety to please him and hadn't practically thrown herself at his head. His combination of riches, good looks, an easy-going disposition and cleverness had so agitated those who had interested him theretofore that they had overreached themselves. Besides, his mother had been subtly watchful.

"Indeed, yes," assented Scarborough, heartily but not with enthusiasm-he always thought of Olivia as Pauline's cousin.

The four had arranged to go together to Indian Rock on the following Sunday. When the day came Olivia was not well; Pierson went to a poker game at his fraternity house; Pauline and Scarborough walked alone. As she went through the woods beside him she was thinking so intensely that she could not talk. But he was not disturbed by her silence-was it not enough to be near her, alone with her, free to look at her, so graceful and beautiful, so tasteful in dress, in every outward way what he thought a woman ought to be? Presently she roused herself and began a remark that was obviously mere politeness.

He interrupted her. "Don't mind me. Go on with your thinking-unless it's something you can say."

She gave him a quizzical, baffling smile. "How it would startle you if I did!" she said. "But-I shan't. And"-she frowned impatiently-"there's no use in thinking about it. It's all in the future."

"And one can't control the future."

"Yes, indeed-one can," she protested.

"I wish you'd tell me how. Are you sure you don't mean you could so arrange matters that the future would control you? Anybody can SURRENDER to the future and give it hostages. But that's not controlling, is it?"

"Certainly it is-if you give the hostages in exchange for what you want." And she looked triumphant.

"But how do you know what you'll want in the future? The most I can say is that I know a few things I shan't want."

"I shouldn't like to be of that disposition," she said.

"But I'm afraid you are, whether you like it or not." Scarborough was half-serious, half in jest.

"Are you the same person you were a month ago?"

Pauline glanced away. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean in thought-in feeling."

"Yes-and no," she replied presently, when she had recovered from the shock of his chance knock at the very door of her secret. "My coming here has made a sort of revolution in me already. I believe I've a more-more grown-up way of looking at things. And I've been getting into the habit of thinking-and-and acting-for myself."

"That's a dangerous habit to form-in a hurry," said Scarborough. "One oughtn't to try to swim a wide river just after he's had his first lesson in swimming."

Pauline, for no apparent reason, flushed crimson and gave him a nervous look-it almost seemed a look of fright.

"But," he went on, "we were talking of the change in you. If you've changed so much in, thirty days, or, say, in sixty-seven days-you've been here that long, I believe-think of your whole life. The broader your mind and your life become, the less certain you'll be what sort of person to-morrow will find you. It seems to me-I know that, for myself, I'm determined to keep the future clear. I'll never tie myself to the past."

"But there are some things one MUST anchor fast to." Pauline was looking as if Scarborough were trying to turn her adrift in an open boat on a lonely sea. "There are-friends. You wouldn't desert your friends, would you?"

"I couldn't help it if they insisted on deserting me. I'd keep them if their way was mine. If it wasn't-they'd give me up."

"But if you were-were-married?"

Scarborough became intensely self-conscious.

"Well-I don't know-that is--" He paused, went on: "I shouldn't marry until I was sure-her way and mine were the same."

"The right sort of woman makes her husband's way hers," said she.

"Does she? I don't know much about women. But it has always seemed to me that the kind of woman I'd admire would be one who had her own ideals and ideas of life-and that-if-if she liked me, it would be because we suited each other. You wouldn't want to be-like those princesses that are brought up without any beliefs of any sort so that they can accept the beliefs of the kingdom of the man they happen to marry?"

Pauline laughed. "I couldn't, even if I wished," she said.

"I should say not!" he echoed, as if the idea in connection with such an indelibly distinct young woman were preposterous.

"But you have such a queer way of expressing yourself. At first I thought you were talking of upsetting everything."

"I? Mercy, no. I've no idea of upsetting anything. I'm only hoping I can help straighten a few things that have been tumbled over or turned upside down."

Gradually, as they walked and talked, her own affairs-Dumont's and hers-retreated to the background and she gave Scarborough her whole attention. Even in those days-he was then twenty-three-his personality usually dominated whomever he was with. It was not his size or appearance of strength; it was not any compulsion of manner; it was not even what he said or the way he said it. All of these-and his voice contributed; but the real secret of his power was that subtile magnetic something which we try to fix-and fail-when we say "charm."

He attracted Pauline chiefly because he had a way of noting the little things-matters of dress, the flowers, colors in the sky or the landscape, the uncommon, especially the amusing, details of personality-and of connecting these trifles in unexpected ways with the large aspects of things. He saw the mystery of the universe in the contour of a leaf; he saw the secret of a professor's character in the way he had built out his whiskers to hide an absolute lack of chin and to give the impression that a formidable chin was there. He told her stories of life on his father's farm that made her laugh, other stories that made her feel like crying. And-he brought out the best there was in her. She was presently talking of the things about which she had always been reticent-the real thoughts of her mind, those she had suppressed because she had had no sympathetic listener, those she looked forward to talking over with Dumont in that happy time when they would be together and would renew the intimacy interrupted since their High School days.

When she burst in upon Olivia her eyes were sparkling and her cheeks glowing. "The air was glorious," she said, "and Mr. Scarborough; is SO interesting."

And Olivia said to herself: "In spite of his tight clothes he may cure her of that worthless Dumont."

VI.

"LIKE HIS FATHER."

Scarborough soon lifted himself high above the throng, and was marked by faculty and students as a man worth watching. The manner of this achievement was one of those forecasts of the future with which youth bristles for those who take the trouble to watch it.

Although Pierson was only a sophomore he was the political as well as the social leader of his fraternity. Envy said that the Sigma Alphas truckled to his wealth; perhaps the exacter truth was that his wealth forced an earlier recognition of his real capacity. His position as leader made him manager of the Sigma Alpha combination of fraternities and barbs which for six years had dominated the Washington and Jefferson Literary Society. The barbs had always voted humbly with the aristocratic Sigma Alphas; so Pierson's political leadership apparently had no onerous duties attached to it-and he was not the man to make work for himself.

As the annual election approached he heard rumors of barb disaffection, of threatened barb revolt. Vance, his barb lieutenant, reassured him.

"Always a few kickers," said Vance, "and they make a lot of noise. But they won't draw off twenty votes." Pierson made himself easy-there was no danger of one of those hard-fought contests which in past years had developed at Battle Field many of Indiana's adroit political leaders.

On election night he felt important and powerful as he sat in the front row among the arrogant Sigma Alphas, at the head of his forces massed in the left side of the hall. He had insisted on Scarborough's occupying a seat just behind him. He tilted back in his arm-chair and said, in an undertone: "You're voting with us?"

Scarborough shook his head. "Can't do it. I'm pledged to Adee."

Pierson looked amused. "Who's he? And who's putting him up?"

"I'm nominating him," replied Scarborough, "as the barb candidate."

"Take my advice don't do it, old man," said Pierson in a friendly, somewhat patronizing tone.

"You'll only get our fellows down on you-them and all the fraternity men. And-well, your candidate'll have a dozen votes or so, at most-and there'll be a laugh."

"Yes-I suppose there will be a laugh," said Scarborough, his eyes twinkling.

"Don't do it," urged Pierson. "Be practical."

"No-I leave that to your people."

Just then nominations for president were called for and the candidates of the two factions were proposed and seconded. "The nominations for president are--" began the chairman, but before he could utter the word "closed" Scarborough was on his feet-was saying, "Mr. Chairman!"

Pierson dropped his eyes and grew red with embarrassment for his friend who was thus "rushing on to make a fool of himself."

Scarborough's glance traveled slowly from row to row of expectant young men.

"Mr. Chairman and fellow-members of the Washington and Jefferson Society," he said in a conversational tone. "I have the honor of placing in nomination Frank Adee, of Terre Haute. In addition to other qualifications of which it would be superfluous for me to speak in this presence, he represents the masses of the membership of this society which has been too long dominated by and for its classes. It is time to compel the fraternities to take faction and caste and political wire-pulling away from this hall, and to keep them away. It is time to rededicate our society to equality, to freedom of thought and speech, to the democratic ideas of the plain yet proud builders of this college of ours."

Scarborough made no attempt at oratory, made not a single gesture. It was as though he were talking privately and earnestly with each one there. He sat amid silence; when a few barbs nervously applauded, the fraternity men of both factions, recovering themselves, raised a succession of ironical cheers. A shabby, frightened barb stood awkwardly, and in a trembling, weak voice seconded the nomination. There was an outburst of barb applause-strong, defiant. Pierson was anxiously studying the faces of his barbs.

"By Jove," he muttered, "Vance has been caught napping. I believe Scarborough has put up a job on us. If I can't gain time we're beat." And he sprang to his feet, his face white. In a voice which he struggled in vain to keep to his wonted affected indifferent drawl, he said: "Mr. Chairman, I move you, sir, that we adjourn." As he was bending to sit his ready lieutenant seconded the motion.

"Mr. Chairman!" It was an excited voice from the rear of the hall-the voice of a tall, lank, sallow man of perhaps thirty-five. "What right," he shouted shrilly, "has this Mr. Pierson to come here and make that there motion? He ain't never seen here except on election nights. He--"

The chairman rapped sharply.

"Motion to adjourn not debatable," he said, and then mumbled rapidly: "The question's the motion to adjourn. All in favor say Aye-all opposed, No-the ayes seem to have it-the ayes have--"

"Mr. Chairman; I call for a count of the ayes and noes!" It was Scarborough, standing, completely self-possessed. His voice was not raised but it vibrated through that room, vibrated through those three hundred intensely excited young men.

The chairman-Waller, a Zeta Rho, of the Sigma Alpha combination-knew that Pierson was scowling a command to him to override the rules and adjourn the meeting; but he could not take his eyes from Scarborough's, dared not disobey Scarborough's imperious look. "A count of the ayes and noes is called for," he said. "The secretary will call the roll."

Pierson's motion was lost-one hundred and thirty-two to one hundred and seventy-nine. For the first time in his life he was beaten; and it was an overwhelming, a public defeat that made his leadership ridiculous. His vanity was cut savagely; it was impossible for him to control himself to stay and witness the inevitable rout. He lounged down the wide aisle, his face masked in a supercilious smile, his glance contemptuously upon the jubilant barbs. They were thick about the doors, and as he passed among them he said, addressing no one in particular: "A revolt of the Helots." A barb raised a threatening fist; Pierson sneered, and the fist unclenched and dropped before his fearless eyes.

An hour later Scarborough, his ticket elected and the society adjourned, reached Mrs. Trent's porch. In its darkness he saw the glowing end of a cigarette. "That you, Pierson?" he asked in the tone of one who knows what the answer will be.

"Sit down for a few minutes," came the reply, in a strained voice.

He could not see even the outline of Pierson's face, but with those acute sensibilities which made life alternately a keen pleasure and a pain to him, he felt that his friend was struggling for self-control. He waited in silence.

At last Pierson began: "I owe you an apology. I've been thinking all sorts of things about you. I know they're unjust and-mean, which is worse. But, damn it, Scarborough, I HATE being beaten. And it doesn't make defeat any the easier because YOU did it."

He paused; but Scarborough did not speak.

"I'm going to be frank," Pierson went on with an effort. "I know you had a perfect right to do as you pleased, but-hang it all, old man-you might have warned me."

"But I didn't do as I pleased," said Scarborough. "And as for telling you-" He paused before he interrupted himself with: "But first I want to say that I don't like to give an account of myself to my friends. What does friendship mean if it forbids freedom? I didn't approve or condemn you because you belonged to a fraternity, and because you headed a clique that was destroying the Literary Society by making it a place for petty fraternity politics instead of a place to develop speakers, writers and debaters. Yet now you're bringing me to account because I didn't slavishly accept your ideas as my own. Do you think that's a sound basis for a friendship, Pierson?"

When Scarborough began Pierson was full of a grievance which he thought real and deep. He was proposing to forgive Scarborough, forgive him generously, but not without making him realize that it was an act of generosity. As Scarborough talked he was first irritated, then, and suddenly, convinced that he was himself in the wrong-in the wrong throughout.

"Don't say another word, Scarborough," he replied, impulsively laying his hand on the arm of his friend-how powerful it felt through the sleeve! "I've been spoiled by always having my own way and by people letting me rule them. You gave me my first lesson in defeat. And-I needed it badly. As for your not telling me, you'd have ruined your scheme if you had. Besides, looking back, I see that you did warn me. I know now what you meant by always jumping on the fraternities and the combinations."

"Thank you," said Scarborough, simply. "When I saw you leaving the society hall I feared I'd lost a friend. Instead, I've found what a friend I have." Then after a brief silence he continued: "This little incident up there to-night-this little revolution I took part in-has meant a good deal to me. It was the first chance I'd had to carry out the ideas I've thought over and thought over down there on the farm while I was working in the fields or lying in the hay, staring up at the sky. And I don't suppose in all the future I'll ever have a greater temptation to be false to myself than I had in the dread that's been haunting me-the dread of losing your friendship-and the friendship of-of-some others who might see it as I was afraid you would. There may be lessons in this incident for you, Fred. But the greatest lesson of all is the one you've taught me-NEVER to be afraid to go forward when the Finger points."

Pierson and Olivia walked to chapel together the next morning, and he told her the story of the defeat, putting himself in a worse light than he deserved. But Olivia, who never lost a chance to attack him for his shortcomings, now, to his amazement, burst out against Scarborough.

"It was contemptible," she said hotly. "It was treachery! It was a piece of cold-blooded ambition. He'd sacrifice anything, any one, to ambition. I shall never like him again."

Pierson was puzzled-being in love with her, he had been deceived by her pretense that she had a poor opinion of him; and he did not appreciate that her sense of justice was now clouded by resentment for his sake. At dinner, when the four were together, she attacked Scarborough. Though she did not confess it, he forced her to see that at least his motives were not those she had been attributing to him. When he and Pauline were alone-Olivia and Pierson had to hurry away to a lecture he said: "What do YOU think, Miss Gardiner? You-did you-do you-agree with your cousin?

"I?" Pauline dropped her eyes. "Oh, I--"

She hesitated so long that he said: "Go on-tell me just what you think. I'd rather know than suspect."

"I think you did right. But-I don't see how you had the courage to do it."

"That is, you think I did right-but the sort of right that's worse than wrong."

"No-no!" she protested, putting a good deal of feeling into her voice in the effort to reassure him. "I'd have been ashamed of you if you hadn't done it. And-oh, I despise weakness in a man most of all! And I like to think that if everybody in college had denounced you, you'd have gone straight on. And-you WOULD!"

Within a week after this they were calling each the other by their first names.

For the Christmas holidays she went with her mother from Battle Field direct to Chicago, to her father's sisters Mrs. Hayden-Colonel Gardiner had been called south on business. When she came back she and Scarborough took up their friendship where they had left it. They read the same books, had similar tastes, disagreed sympathetically, agreed with enthusiasm. She saw a great deal of several other men in her class, enough not to make her preference for him significant to the college-or to herself. They went for moonlight straw-rides, on moonlight and starlight skating and ice-boat parties, for long walks over the hills-all invariably with others, but they were often practically alone. He rapidly dropped his rural manners and mannerisms-Fred Pierson's tailor in Indianapolis made the most radical of the surface changes in him.

Late in February his cousin, the superintendent of the farm, telegraphed him to come home. He found his mother ill-plainly dying. And his father-Bladen Scarborough's boast had been that he never took a "dose of drugs" in his life, and for at least seventy of his seventy-nine years he had been "on the jump" daily from long before dawn until long after sundown. Now he was content to sit in his arm-chair and, with no more vigorous protest than a frown and a growl, to swallow the despised drugs.

Each day he made them carry him in his great chair into HER bedroom. And there he sat all day long, his shaggy brows down, his gaze rarely wandering from the little ridge her small body made in the high white bed; and in his stern eyes there was a look of stoic anguish. Each night, as they were carrying him to his own room, they took him near the bed; and he leaned forward, and the voice that in all their years had never been anything but gentle for her said: "Good night, Sallie." And the small form would move slightly, there would be a feeble turning of the head, a wan smile on the little old face, a soft "Good night, Bladen."

It was on Hampden's ninth day at home that the old man said "Good night, Sallie," and there was no answer-not even a stir. They did not offer to carry him in the next morning; nor did he turn his face from the wall. She died that day; he three days later-he had refused food and medicine; he had not shed a tear or made a sound.

Thus the journey side by side for fifty-one years was a journey no longer. They were asleep side by side on the hillside for ever.

Hampden stayed at home only one day after the funeral. He came back to Battle Field apparently unchanged. He was not in black, for Bladen Scarborough abhorred mourning as he abhorred all outward symbols of the things of the heart. But after a week he told Pauline about it; and as he talked she sobbed, though his voice did not break nor his eyes dim.

"He's like his father," she thought.

When Olivia believed that Dumont was safely forgotten she teased her-"Your adoring and adored Scarborough."

Pauline was amused by this. With his unfailing instinct, Scarborough had felt-and had never permitted himself to forget-that there was some sort of wall round her for him. It was in perfect good faith that she answered Olivia: "You don't understand him. He's a queer man-sometimes I wonder myself that he doesn't get just a little sentimental. I suppose I'd find him exasperating-if I weren't otherwise engaged."

Olivia tried not to show irritation at this reference to Dumont. "I think you're mistaken about which of you is queer," she said. "You are the one-not he."

"I?" Pauline laughed-she was thinking of her charm against any love but one man's, the wedding ring she always wore at her neck. "Why, I COULDN'T fall in love with HIM."

"The woman who gets him will do mighty well for herself-in every way," said Olivia.

"Indeed she will. But-I'd as soon think of falling in love with a tree or a mountain."

She liked her phrase; it seemed to her exactly to define her feeling for Scarborough. She liked it so well that she repeated it to herself reassuringly many times in the next few weeks.

VII.

PAULINE AWAKENS.

In the last week of March came a succession of warm rains. The leaves burst from their impatient hiding just within the cracks in the gray bark. And on Monday the unclouded sun was irradiating a pale green world from a pale blue sky. The four windows of Pauline and Olivia's sitting-room were up; a warm, scented wind was blowing this way and that the strays of Pauline's red-brown hair as she sat at the table, her eyes on a book, her thoughts on a letter-Dumont's first letter on landing in America. A knock, and she frowned slightly.

"Come!" she cried, her expression slowly veering toward welcome.

The door swung back and in came Scarborough. Not the awkward youth of last October, but still unable wholly to conceal how much at a disadvantage he felt before the woman he particularly wished to please.

"Yes-I'm ten minutes early," he said, apology in his tone for his instinct told him that he was interrupting, and he had too little vanity to see that the interruption was agreeable. "But I thought you'd be only reading a novel."

For answer she held up the book which lay before her-a solemn volume in light brown calf.

"Analytical geometry," he said; "and on the first day of the finest spring the world ever saw!" He was at the window, looking out longingly-sunshine, and soft air washed clean by the rains; the new-born leaves and buds; the pioneer birds and flowers. "Let's go for a walk. We can do the Vergil to-night."

"YOU-talking of neglecting WORK!" Her smile seemed to him to sparkle as much in the waves of her hair as in her even white teeth and gold-brown eyes. "So you're human, just like the rest of us."

"Human!" He glanced at her and instantly glanced away.

"Do leave that window," she begged. "We must get the Vergil now. I'm reading an essay at the society to-night-they've fined me twice for neglecting it. But if you stand there reminding me of what's going on outside I'll not be able to resist."

"How this would look from Indian Rock!"

She flung open a Vergil text-book with a relentless shake of the head. "I've got the place. Book three, line two forty-five-

"'Una in praecelsa consedit rupe Celaeno--'"

"It doesn't matter what that hideous old Harpy howled at the pious Aeneas," he grumbled. "Let's go out and watch the Great God Pan dedicate his brand-new temple."

"Do sit there!" She pointed a slim white forefinger at the chair at the opposite side of the table-the side nearer him. "I'll be generous and work the dictionary to-day." And she opened a fat, black, dull-looking book beside the Vergil.

"Where's the Johnnie?" he asked, reluctantly dropping into the chair.

She laid Dryden's translation of the Aeneid on his side of the table. They always read the poetical version before they began to translate for the class-room-Dryden was near enough to the original to give them its spirit, far enough to quiet their consciences. "Find the place yourself," said she. "I'm not going to do everything."

He opened the Dryden and languidly turned the pages. "'At length rebuff'd, they leave their mangled--'" he began.

"No-two or three lines farther down," she interrupted. "That was in the last lesson."

He pushed back the rebellious lock that insisted on falling down the middle of his forehead, plunged his elbows fiercely upon the table, put his fists against his temples, and began again:

"'High on a craggy cliff Celaeno sate

And thus her dismal errand did relate-'

Have you got the place in the Latin?" he interrupted himself.

Fortunately he did not look up, for she was watching the waving boughs. "Yes," she replied, hastily returning to the book. "You do your part and I'll do mine."

He read a few lines in an absent-minded sing-song, then interrupted himself once more: "Did you ever smell anything like that breeze?"

"Never. 'Bellum etiam pro caede bovum'-go on-I'm listening-or trying to."

He read:

"'But know that ere your promised walls you build,

My curse shall severely be fulfilled.

Fierce famine is your lot-for this misdeed,

Reduced to grind the plates on which you feed.'"

He glanced at her. She was leaning on her elbow, obviously weaving day-dreams round those boughs as they trembled with the ecstasy of spring.

"You are happy to-day?" he said.

"Yes-happier than I have been for a year." She smiled mysteriously. "I've had good news." She turned abruptly, looked him in the eyes with that frank, clear expression-his favorite among his memory-pictures of her had it. "There's one thing that worries me-it's never off my mind longer than a few minutes. And when I'm blue, as I usually am on rainy days, it makes me-horribly uncomfortable. I've often almost asked your advice about it."

"If you'd be sorry afterward that you told me," said he, "I hope you won't. But if I can help you, you know how glad I'd be."

"It's no use to tell Olivia," Pauline went on. "She's bitterly prejudiced. But ever since the first month I knew you, I felt that I could trust you, that you were a real friend. And you're so fair in judging people and things."

His eyes twinkled.

"I'm afraid I'd tilt the scales-just a little-where you were concerned."

"Oh, I want you to do that," she answered with a smile. "Last fall I did something-well, it was foolish, though I wouldn't admit that to any one else. I was carried away by an impulse. Not that I regret. In the only really important way, I wouldn't undo it if I could-I think." Those last two words came absently, as if she were debating the matter with herself.

"If it's done and can't be undone," he said cheerfully, "I don't see that advice is needed."

"But-you don't understand." She seemed to be casting about for words. "As I said, it was last fall-here. In Saint X there was a man-and he and I-we'd cared for each other ever since we were children. And then he went away to college. He did several things father didn't like. You know how older people are-they don't make allowances. And though father's the gentlest, best-at any rate, he turned against Jack, and-"

Scarborough abruptly went to the window and stood with his back to her.

After a pause Pauline said, in a rush, "And he came here last fall and we got married."

There was a long silence.

"It was DREADFUL, wasn't it?" she said in the tone of one who has just made a shocking discovery.

Scarborough did not answer.

"I never realized till this minute," she went on after a while. "Not that I'm sorry or that I don't-don't CARE-just as I always did. But somehow, telling it out loud to some one else has made me see it in a different light. It didn't seem like treachery to them-to father and mother-then. It hasn't seemed like a-a marriage REALLY marriage-until now."

Another long silence. Then she burst out appealingly: "Oh, I don't see how I'm ever going to tell them!"

Scarborough came back to his chair and seated himself. His face was curiously white. It was in an unnatural voice that he said: "How old is he?"

"Twenty-five," she replied, then instantly flared up, as if he had attacked Dumont: "But it wasn't his fault-not in the least. I knew what I was doing-and I wanted to do it. You mustn't get a false impression of him, Hampden. You'd admire and respect him. You-any one-would have done as he did in the same circumstances." She blushed slightly. "You and he are ever so much alike-even in looks. It was that that made me tell you, that made me like you as I have-and trust you."

Scarborough winced. Presently he began: "Yet you regret--"

"No-no!" she protested-too vehemently. "I do NOT regret marrying him. That was certain to be sooner or later. All I regret is that I did something that seems underhanded. Perhaps I'm really only sorry I didn't tell them as soon as I'd done it."

She waited until she saw he was not going to speak. "And now," she said, "I don't know HOW to tell them." Again she waited, but he did not speak, continued to look steadily out into the sky. "What do you think?" she asked nervously. "But I can see without your saying. Only I-wish you'd SAY it."

"No, I don't condemn you," he said slowly. "I know you. YOU couldn't possibly do anything underhanded. If you'd been where you'd have had to conceal it directly, face to face, from some one who had the right to know-you'd never have done it." He rested his arms on the table and looked straight at her. "I feel I must tell you what I think. And I feel, too, it wouldn't be fair and honest if I didn't let you see why you might not want to take my advice."

She returned his gaze inquiringly.

"I love you," he went on calmly. "I've known it ever since I missed you so at the Christmas holidays. I love you for what you are, and for what you're as certain to be as-as a rosebud is certain to be a full-blown rose. I love you as my father loved my mother. I shall love you always." His manner was calm, matter-of-fact; but there was in his musical, magical voice a certain quality which set her nerves and her blood suddenly to vibrating. She felt as if she were struggling in a great sea-the sea of his love for her-struggling to reach the safety of the shore.

"Oh-I WISH you hadn't told me!" she exclaimed.

"Suppose I hadn't; suppose you had taken my advice? No"-he shook his head slowly-"I couldn't do that, Pauline-not even to win you."

"I'm sorry I said anything to you about it."

"You needn't be. You haven't harmed yourself. And maybe I can help you."

"No-we won't talk of it," she said-she was pressing her hand on her bosom where she could feel her wedding ring. "It wouldn't be right, now. I don't wish your advice."

"But I must give it. I'm years and years older than you-many, many years more than the six between us. And--"

"I don't wish to hear."

"For his sake, for your own sake, Pauline, tell them! And they'll surely help you to wait till you're older before you do anything-irrevocable."

"But I care for him," she said-angrily, though it could not have been what he was saying so gently that angered her. "You forget that I care for him. It IS irrevocable now. And I'm glad it is!"

"You LIKE him. You don't LOVE him. And-he's not worthy of your love. I'm sure it isn't prejudice that makes me say it. If he were, he'd have waited--"

She was on her feet, her eyes blazing.

"I asked for advice, not a lecture. I DESPISE you! Attacking the man I love and behind his back! I wish to be alone."

He rose but met her look without flinching.

"You can send ME away," he said gently, "but you can't send away my words. And if they're true you'll feel them when you get over your anger. You'll do what you think right. But-be SURE, Pauline. Be SURE!" In his eyes there was a look-the secret altar with the never-to-be-extinguished flame upon it. "Be SURE!, Pauline. Be SURE."

Her anger fell; she sank, forlorn, into a chair. For both, the day had shriveled and shadowed. And as he turned and left the room the warmth and joy died from air and sky and earth; both of them felt the latent chill-it seemed not a reminiscence of winter past but the icy foreboding of winter closing in.

When Olivia came back that evening from shopping in Indianapolis she found her cousin packing.

"Is it something from home?" she asked, alarmed.

Pauline did not look up as she answered:

"No-but I'm going home-to stay-going in the morning. I've telegraphed them."

"To stay!"

"Yes-I was married to Jack-here-last fall."

"You-married! To JOHN DUMONT-you, only seventeen-oh, Pauline-" And Olivia gave way to tears for the first time since she was a baby.

Scarborough was neither at supper nor at breakfast-Pauline left without seeing him again.

VIII.

THE DECISION.

When the sign-board on a station platform said "5.2 miles to St. X," Pauline sank back in her chair in the parlor-car with blanched face. And almost immediately, so it seemed to her, Saint X came into view-home! She fancied she could see the very house as she looked down on the mass of green in which the town was embowered. The train slid into the station, slowed down-there were people waiting on the platform-her father! He was glancing from window to window, trying to catch a glimpse of her; and his expression of almost agonized eagerness made her heartsick. She had been away from him for nearly seven months-long enough to break the habit which makes it impossible for members of a family to know how they really look to each other. How gray and thin his beard seemed! What was the meaning of that gaunt look about his shoulders? What was the strange, terrifying shadow over him? "Why, he's OLD!" The tears welled into her eyes-"He's gliding away from me!" She remembered what she had to tell him and her knees almost refused to support her.

He was at the step as she sprang down. She flew into his arms. He held her away from him and scanned her face with anxious eyes.

"Is my little girl ill?" he asked. "The telegram made me uneasy."

"Oh, no!" she said with a reassuring hug. "Where's mother?"

"She-she's got a-a-surprise for you. We must hurry-she'll be impatient, though she's seen you since I have."

At the curbstone stood the familiar surrey, with Mordecai humped upon the front seat. "I don't see how the colonel ever knowed you," said he, as she shook hands with him. "I never seen the like for growin'."

"But YOU look just the same, Mordecai-you and the surrey and the horses. And how's Amanda?"

"Poorly," replied Mordecai-his invariable answer to inquiries about his wife. She patterned after the old school, which held that for a woman to confess to good health was for her to confess to lack of refinement, if not of delicacy.

"You think I've changed, father?" asked Pauline, when the horses were whirling them home. She was so busily greeting the familiar streets and houses and trees and faces that she hardly heard his reply.

"'I never seen the like for growin','" he quoted, his eyes shining with pride in her. He was a reticent man by nature as well as by training; he could not have SAID how beautiful, how wonderful he thought her, or how intensely he loved her. The most he could do to express himself to her was, a little shyly, to pat her hand-and to LOOK it into Mordecai's back.

She was about to snuggle up to him as a wave of delight at being home again swept over her; but her secret rushed from the background of her mind. "How could I have done it? How can I tell them?" Then, the serene and beautiful kindness of her father's face reassured her.

Her mother was waiting in the open front door as the surrey came up the drive-still the same dear old-young mother, with the same sweet dignity and gentleness.

"Oh, mother, mother!" exclaimed Pauline, leaping from the carriage into her arms. And as they closed about her she felt that sorrow and evil could not touch her; felt just as when she, a little girl, fleeing from some frightful phantom of her own imagining, had rushed there for safety. She choked, she sobbed, she led her mother to the big sofa opposite the stairway; and, sitting there, they held each the other tightly, Pauline kissing her, smoothing her hair, she caressing Pauline and crying softly.

"We've got a surprise for you, Polly," said she, when they were calmer.

"I don't want anything but you and father," replied Pauline.

Her father turned away-and so she did not see the shadow deepen in his face. Her mother shook her head, mischief in her eyes that were young as a girl's-younger far than her daughter's at that moment. "Go into the sitting-room and see," she said.

Pauline opened the sitting-room door. John Dumont caught her in his arms. "Polly!" he exclaimed. "It's all right. They've come round and-and-here I am!"

Pauline pushed him away from her and sank to the floor in a faint.

When she came to herself she was lying on the divan in the sitting-room. Her mother was kneeling beside her, bathing her temples with cold water; her father and her husband were standing, helplessly looking at her. "Send him away," she murmured, closing her eyes.

Only her mother heard. She motioned to the two men to leave the room. When the door closed Pauline sat up.

"He said it was all right," she began feverishly. "What did he mean, mother?" She was hoping she was to be spared the worst part of her ordeal.

But her mother's reply dashed her hopes, made her settle back among the cushions and hide her face. "It IS all right, Polly. You're to have your own way, and it's your father's way. John has convinced him that he really has changed. We knew-that is, I suspected why you were coming, and we thought we'd give you a surprise-give you what your heart was set on, before you had to ask for it. I'm so sorry, dear, that the shock was-"

Pauline lay perfectly still, her face hidden. After a pause: "I don't feel well enough to see him now. I want this day with you and father. To-morrow-to-morrow, we'll-to-day I want to be as I was when I was-just you and father, and the house and the garden."

Her mother left her for a moment and, when she came back, said: "He's gone."

Pauline gave a quick sigh of relief. Soon she rose. "I'm going for father, and we'll walk in the garden and forget there's anybody else in the world but just us three."

At half-past eight they had family prayers in the sitting-room; Pauline kneeling near her mother, her father kneeling beside his arm-chair and in a tremulous voice pouring out his gratitude to God for keeping them all "safe from the snares and temptations of the world," for leading them thus far on the journey.

"And, God, our Father, we pray Thee, have this daughter of ours, this handmaiden of Thine, ever in Thy keeping. And these things we ask in the name of Thy Son-Amen." The serene quiet, the beloved old room, the evening scene familiar to her from her earliest childhood, her father's reverent, earnest voice, halting and almost breaking after every word of the petition for her; her mother's soft echo of his "Amen"-Pauline's eyes were swimming as she rose from her knees.

Her mother went with her to her bedroom, hovered about her as she undressed, helped her now and then with fingers that trembled with happiness, and, when she was in bed, put out the light and "tucked her in" and kissed her-as in the old days. "Good night-God bless my little daughter-my HAPPY little daughter."

Pauline waited until she knew that they were sleeping. Then she put on a dressing-gown and went to the open window-how many springtimes had she sat there in the moonlight to watch, as now, the tulips and the hyacinths standing like fairies and bombarding the stars with the most delicious perfumes.

She sat hour after hour, giving no outward sign of battle within. In every lull came Scarborough's "Be SURE, Pauline!" to start the tumult afresh. When the stars began to pale in the dawn she rose-she WAS sure. Far from sure that she was doing the best for herself; but sure, sure without a doubt, that she was doing her duty to her parents.

"I must not punish THEM for MY sin," she said.

Late the next morning she went to the farthest corner of the garden, to the small summer-house where she had played with her dolls and her dishes, where she had worked with slate and spelling-book, where she had read her favorite school-girl romances, where she had dreamed her own school-girl romance. She was waiting under the friendly old canopy of bark-the posts supporting it were bark-clad, too; up and around and between them clambered the morning-glories in whose gorgeous, velvet-soft trumpets the sun-jewels glittered.

And presently he came down the path, his keen face and insolent eyes triumphant. He was too absorbed in his own emotion especially to note hers. Besides, she had always been receptive rather than demonstrative with him.

"We'll be married again, and do the gossips out of a sensation," he said. Though she was not looking at him, his eyes shifted from her face as he added in a voice which at another time she might have thought strained: "Then, too, your father and mother and mine are so strait-laced-it'd give 'em a terrible jar to find out. You're a good deal like them, Polly-only in a modern sort of way."

Pauline flushed scarlet and compressed her lips. She said presently: "You're sure you wish it?"

"Wish what?"

"To marry me. Sometimes I've thought we're both too young, that we might wait--"

He put his arm round her with an air of proud possession. "What'd be the sense in that?" he demanded gaily. "Aren't you MINE?"

And again she flushed and lowered her eyes and compressed her lips. Then she astonished him by flinging her arms round his neck and kissing him hysterically. "But I DO love you!" she exclaimed. "I do! I DO!"

IX.

A THOROUGHBRED RUNS AWAY.

It was midday six weeks later, and Pauline and Dumont were landing at Liverpool, when Scarborough read in the college-news column of the Battle Field Banner that she had "married the only son of Henry Dumont, of Saint Christopher, one of the richest men in our state, and has departed for an extended foreign tour." Olivia-and Pierson naturally-had known, but neither had had the courage to tell him.

Scarborough was in Pierson's room. He lowered the paper from in front of his face after a few minutes.

"I see Pauline has married and gone abroad," he said.

"Yes, so I heard from Olivia," replied Pierson, avoiding Scarborough's eyes.

"Why didn't you tell me?" continued Scarborough, tranquil so far as Pierson could judge. "I'd have liked to send her a note."

Pierson was silent.

"I thought it would cut him horribly," he was thinking. "And he's taking it as if he had only a friendly interest." Scarborough's face was again behind the newspaper. When he had finished it he sauntered toward the door. He paused there to glance idly at the titles of the top row in the book-case. Pierson was watching him. "No-it's all right," he concluded. Scarborough was too straight and calm just to have received such a blow as that news would have been had HE cared for Pauline. Pierson liked his look better than ever before-the tall, powerful figure; the fair hair growing above his wide and lofty brow, with the one defiant lock; and in his aquiline nose and blue-gray eyes and almost perfect mouth and chin the stamp of one who would move forward irresistibly, moving others to his will.

"How old are you, Scarborough?" he asked.

"Twenty-three-nearly twenty-four. I ought to be ashamed to be only a freshman, oughtn't I?" He shrugged his shoulders. "I'm tired of it all." And he strolled out.

He avoided Pierson and Olivia and all his friends for several days, went much into the woods alone, took long walks at night. Olivia would have it that he had been hard hit, and almost convinced Pierson.

"He's the sort of person that suffers the most," she said. "I've a brother like him-won't have sympathy, keeps a wound covered up so that it can't heal."

"But what shall I do for him?" asked Pierson.

"Don't do anything-he'd hate you if you did."

After a week or ten days he called on Pierson and, seating himself at the table, began to shuffle a pack of cards. He looked tired.

"I never saw cards until I was fifteen," he said.

"At home they thought them one of the devil's worst devices-we had a real devil in our house."

"So did we," said Pierson.

"But not a rip-snorter like ours-they don't have him in cities, or even in towns, any more. I've seen ours lots of times after the lights were out-saw him long after I'd convinced myself in daylight that he didn't exist. But I never saw him so close as the night of the day I learned to play casino."

"Did you learn in the stable?" asked Pierson.

"That's where I learned, and mother slipped up behind me-I didn't know what was coming till I saw the look in the other boy's face. Then-" Pierson left the rest to imagination.

"I learned in the hay-loft-my sister and my cousin Ed and I. One of the farm-hands taught us. The cards were so stained we could hardly see the faces. That made them look the more devilish. And a thunder-storm came up and the lightning struck a tree a few rods from the barn."

"Horrible!" exclaimed Pierson. "I'll bet you fell to praying."

"Not I. I'd just finished Tom Paine's Age of Reason-a preacher's son down the pike stole it from a locked closet in his father's library and loaned it to me. But I'll admit the thunderbolt staggered me. I said to them-pretty shakily, I guess: 'Come on, let's begin again.' But the farm-hand said: 'I reckon I'll get on the safe side,' and began to pray-how he roared! And I laughed-how wicked and reckless and brave that laugh did sound to me. 'Bella and Ed didn't know which to be more afraid of-my ridicule or the lightning. They compromised-they didn't pray and they didn't play."

"And so you've never touched a card since."

"We played again the next afternoon-let's have a game of poker. I'm bored to death today."

This was Scarborough's first move toward the fast set of which Pierson was leader. It was a small fast set-there were not many spoiled sons at Battle Field. But its pace was rapid; for every member of it had a constitution that was a huge reservoir of animal spirits and western energy. They "cribbed" their way through recitations and examinations-as the faculty did not put the students on honor but watched them, they reasoned that cribbing was not dishonorable provided one did barely enough of it to pull him through. They drank a great deal-usually whisky, which they disliked but poured down raw, because it was the "manly" drink and to take it undiluted was the "manly" way. They made brief excursions to Indianapolis and Chicago for the sort of carousals that appeal to the strong appetites and undiscriminating tastes of robust and curious youth.

Scarborough at once began to reap the reward of his advantages-a naturally bold spirit, an unnaturally reckless mood. In two weeks he won three hundred dollars, half of it from Pierson. He went to Chicago and in three nights' play increased this to twenty-nine hundred. The noise of the unprecedented achievement echoed through the college. In its constellation of bad examples a new star had blazed out, a star of the first magnitude.

Bladen Scarborough had used his surplus to improve and extend his original farm. But farms were now practically unsalable, and Hampden and Arabella were glad to let their cousin Ed-Ed Warfield-stay on, rent free, because with him there they were certain that the place would be well kept up. Hampden, poor in cash, had intended to spend the summer as a book agent. Instead, he put by a thousand dollars of his winnings to insure next year's expenses and visited Pierson at his family's cottage in the summer colony at Mackinac. He won at poker there and went on East, taking Pierson. He lost all he had with him, all Pierson could lend him, telegraphed to Battle Field for half his thousand dollars, won back all he had lost and two thousand besides.

When he reappeared at Battle Field in September he was dazzling to behold. His clothes were many and had been imported for him by the Chicago agent of a London tailor. His shirts and ties were in patterns and styles that startled Battle Field. He had taken on manners and personal habits befitting a "man of the world"-but he had not lost that simplicity and directness which were as unchangeably a part of him as the outlines of his face or the force which forbade him to be idle for a moment. He and Pierson-Pierson was pupil, now-took a suite of rooms over a shop in the town and furnished them luxuriously. They had brought from New York to look after them and their belongings the first English manservant Battle Field had seen.

Scarborough kept up his college work; he continued regularly to attend the Literary Society and to be its most promising orator and debater; he committed no overt act-others might break the college rules, might be publicly intoxicated and noisy, but he was always master of himself and of the situation. Some of the fanatical among the religious students believed and said that he had sold himself to the devil. He would have been expelled summarily but for Pierson-Pierson's father was one of the two large contributors to the support of the college, and it was expected that he would will it a generous endowment. To entrap Scarborough was to entrap Pierson. To entrap Pierson- The faculty strove to hear and see as little as possible of their doings.

In the college Y.M.C.A. prayers were offered for Scarborough-his name was not spoken, but every one understood. A delegation of the religious among his faithful fellow barbs called upon him to pray and to exhort. They came away more charmed than ever with their champion, and convinced that he was the victim of slander and envy. Not that he had deliberately deceived them, for he hadn't; he was simply courteous and respectful of their sincerity.

"The fraternities are in this somewhere," the barbs decided. "They're trying to destroy him by lying about him." And they liked it that their leader was the brilliant, the talked-about, the sought-after person in the college. When he stood up to speak in the assembly hall or the Literary Society they always greeted him with several rounds of applause.

To the chagrin of the faculty and the irritation of the fraternities a jury of alumni selected him to represent Battle Field at the oratorical contest among the colleges of the state. And he not only won there but also at the interstate contest-a victory over the orators of the colleges of seven western states in which public speaking was, and is, an essential part of higher education. His oratory lacked style, they thought at Battle Field. It was the same then, essentially, as it was a few years later when the whole western country was discussing it. He seemed to depend entirely upon the inherent carrying power of his ably constructed sentences-like so many arrows, some flying gracefully, others straight and swift, all reaching the mark at which they were aimed. In those days, as afterward, he stood upon the platform almost motionless; his voice was clear and sweet, never noisy, but subtly penetrating and, when the sense demanded it, full of that mysterious quality which makes the blood run more swiftly and the nerves tingle. "Merely a talker, not an orator," declared the professor of elocution, and few of those who saw him every day appreciated his genius then. It was on the subject-matter of his oration, not on his "delivery," that the judges decided for him-so they said and thought.

In February of this resplendent sophomore year there came in his mail a letter postmarked Battle Field and addressed in printed handwriting. The envelope contained only a newspaper cutting-from the St. Christopher Republic:

At four o'clock yesterday afternoon a boy was born to Mr. and Mrs. John Dumont. It is their first child, the first grandchild of the Dumont and Gardiner families. Mother and son are reported as doing well.

Scarborough spent little time in the futile effort to guess what coward enemy had sped this anonymous shaft on the chance of its hitting him. His only enemies that interested him were those within himself. He destroyed envelope and clipping, then said to Pierson: "I neglected to celebrate an important event not long ago." He paused to laugh-so queerly that Pierson looked at him uneasily. "We must go to Chicago to celebrate it."

"Very good," said Fred. "We'll get Chalmers to go with us to-morrow."

"No-to-day-the four-o'clock train-we've got an hour and a half. And we'll have four clear days."

"But there's the ball to-night and I'm down for several dances."

"We'll dance them in Chicago. I've never been really free to dance before." He poured out a huge drink. "I'm impatient for the ball to begin." He lifted his glass. "To our ancestors," he said, "who repressed themselves, denied themselves, who hoarded health and strength and capacity for joy, and transmitted them in great oceans to us-to drown our sorrows in!"

He won six hundred dollars at faro in a club not far from the Auditorium, Pierson won two hundred at roulette, Chalmers lost seventy-they had about fourteen hundred dollars for their four days' "dance." When they took the train for Battle Field they had spent all they had with them-had flung it away for dinners, for drives, for theaters, for suppers, for champagne. All the return journey Scarborough stared moodily out of the car window. And at every movement that disturbed his clothing there rose to nauseate him, to fill him with self-loathing, the odors of strong, sickening-sweet perfumes.

The next day but one, as he was in the woods near Indian Rock, he saw Olivia coming toward him. They had hardly spoken for several months. He turned to avoid her but she came on after him.

"I wish to talk with you a few minutes, Mr. Scarborough," she said coldly, storm in her brave eyes.

"At your service," he answered with strained courtesy. And he walked beside her.

"I happen to know," she began, "that they're going to expel you and Fred Pierson the next time you leave here without permission."

"Indeed! You are very kind to warn me of my awful danger." He looked down at her with a quizzical smile.

"And I wish to say I think it's a disgrace that they didn't do it long ago," she went on, her anger rising to the bait of his expression.

"Your opinions are always interesting," he replied. "If you have nothing further I'll ask your permission to relieve you of--"

"No," she interrupted. "I've not said what I wished to say. You're making it hard for me. I can't get accustomed to the change in you since last year. There used to be a good side to you, a side one could appeal to. And I want to talk about-Fred. You're RUINING him."

"You flatter me." He bowed mockingly. "But I doubt if HE'D feel flattered."

"I've told him the same thing, but you're too strong for me." Her voice trembled; she steadied it with a frown. "I can't influence him any longer."

"Really, Miss Shrewsbury--"

"Please!" she said. "Fred and I were engaged. I broke it last night. I broke it because-you know why."

Scarborough flushed crimson.

"Oh," he said. "I didn't know he was engaged."

"I know you, Hampden Scarborough," Olivia continued. "I've understood why you've been degrading yourself. And I haven't blamed you-though I've wondered at your lack of manhood."

"You are imposing on my courtesy," he said haughtily.

"I can't help it. You and I must talk this thing to the end. You're robbing me of the man I love. Worse than that, you're destroying him, dragging him down to a level at which HE may stay, while YOU are sure to rise again. You've got your living to make-I don't agree with those who think you'll become a professional gambler. But he his father's rich and indulgent, and-God only knows how low he'll sink if you keep on pushing him."

"You are excited, hysterical. You misjudge him, believe me," said Scarborough, gently.

"No-I know he's not depraved-yet. Do you think I could care for him if he were?"

"I hope so. That's when he'd need it most."

Olivia grew red. "Well, perhaps I should. I'm a fool, like all women. But I ask you to let him alone, to give his better self a chance."

"Why not ask him to let ME alone-to give MY better nature a chance?"

"You-laughing at me in these circumstances! You who pretended to be a man, pretended to love Pauline Gardiner--"

He started and his eyes blazed, as if she had cut him across the face with a whip. Then he drew himself up with an expression of insolent fury. His lips, his sharp white teeth, were cruel.

She bore his look without flinching.

"Yes," she went on, "you think you love her. Yet you act as if her love were a degrading influence in your life, as if she were a bad woman instead of one who ought to inspire a man to do and be his best. How ashamed she'd be of you, of your love, if she could see you as you are now-the tempter of all the bad impulses in this college."

He could not trust himself to reply. He was suffocating with rage and shame. He lifted his hat, walked rapidly away from her and went home. Pierson had never seen him in an ugly mood before. And he, too, was in an ugly mood-disgusted with his own conduct, angry at Scarborough, whom he held responsible for the unprecedented excesses of this last trip to Chicago and for their consequences.

"What's happened?" he asked sourly. "What's the matter with YOU?"

"Your Olivia," replied Scarborough, with a vicious sneer, "has been insulting me for your sins. She is a shrew! I don't wonder you dropped her."

Pierson rose slowly and faced him.

"You astonish me," he said. "I shouldn't have believed you capable of a speech which no gentleman could possibly utter."

"YOU, sitting as a court of honor to decide what's becoming a gentleman!" Scarborough looked amused contempt. "My dear Pierson, you're worse than offensive-you are ridiculous."

"No man shall say such things to me especially a man who notoriously lives by his wits."

Scarborough caught him up as if he had been a child and pinned him against the wall. "Take that back," he said, "or I'll kill you." His tone was as colorless as his face.

"Kill and be damned," replied Pierson, cool and disdainful. "You're a coward."

Scarborough's fingers closed on Pierson's throat. Then flashed into his mind that warning which demands and gets a hearing in the wildest tempest of passion before an irrevocable act can be done. It came to him in the form of a reminder of his laughing remark to Pauline when he told her of the traditions of murder in his family. He released Pierson and fled from the apartment.

Half an hour later Pierson was reading a note from him:

"I've invited some friends this evening. I trust it will be convenient for you to absent yourself. They'll be out by eleven, and then, if you return, we can decide which is to stay in the apartment and which to leave."

Pierson went away to his fraternity house and at half-past eight Scarborough, Chalmers, Jack Wilton and Brigham sat down to a game of poker. They had played about an hour, the cards steadily against Chalmers and Brigham-the cards were usually against Brigham. He was a mere boy, with passionate aspirations to be considered a sport. He had been going a rapid gait for a year. He had lost to Scarborough alone as much as he had expected to spend on the year's education.

Toward ten o'clock there was a jack-pot with forty-three dollars in it and Brigham was betting wildly, his hands and his voice trembling, his lips shriveled. With a sudden gesture Chalmers caught the ends of the table and jerked it back. There-in Brigham's lap-were two cards.

"I thought so!" exclaimed Chalmers. "You dirty little cheat! I've been watching you."

The boy looked piteously at Chalmers' sneering face, at the faces of the others. The tears rolled down his cheeks. "For God's sake, boys," he moaned, "don't be hard on me. I was desperate. I've lost everything, and my father can't give me any more. He's a poor man, and he and mother have been economizing and sacrificing to send me here. And when I saw I was ruined-God knows, I didn't think what I was doing." He buried his face in his hands. "Don't be hard on me," he sobbed. "Any one of you might have done the same if he was in my fix."

"You sniveling cur," said Chalmers, high and virtuous, "how dare you say such a thing! You forget you're among gentlemen--"

"None of that, Chalmers," interrupted Scarborough. "The boy's telling the truth. And nobody knows it better than YOU." This with a significant look into Chalmers' eyes. They shifted and he colored.

"I agree with Scarborough," said Wilton. "We oughtn't to have let the boy into our games. We must never mention what has happened here this evening."

"But we can't allow a card sharp to masquerade as a gentleman," objected Chalmers. "I confess, Scarborough, I don't understand how you can be so easy-going in a matter of honor."

"You think I must have a fellow-feeling for dishonor, eh?" Scarborough smiled satirically. "I suppose because I was sympathetic enough with you to overlook the fact that you were shy on your share of our Chicago trip."

"What do you mean?"

"The three hundred you borrowed of Pierson when you thought he was too far gone to know what he was doing. My back was turned-but there was the mirror."

Chalmers' sullen, red face confirmed Scarborough's charge.

"No," continued Scarborough, "we GENTLEMEN ought to be charitable toward one another's DISCOVERED lapses." He seated himself at his desk and wrote rapidly:

We, the undersigned, exonerate Edwin Brigham of cheating in the poker game in Hampden Scarborough's rooms on Saturday evening, February 20, 18-. And we pledge ourselves never to speak of the matter either to each other or to any one else.

"I've signed first," said Scarborough, rising and holding the pen toward Chalmers. "Now, you fellows sign. Chalmers!"

Chalmers signed, and then Wilton.

"Take Chalmers away with you," said Scarborough to Wilton in an undertone. "I've something to say to Brigham."

When they were gone he again seated himself at his desk and, taking his check-book, wrote a check and tore it out.

"Now, listen to me, Brig," he said friendlily to Brigham, who seemed to be in a stupor. "I've won about six hundred dollars from you, first and last-more, rather than less. Will that amount put you in the way of getting straight?"

"Yes," said Brigham, dully.

"Then here's a check for it. And here's the paper exonerating you. And-I guess you won't play again soon."

The boy choked back his sobs.

"I don't know how I ever came to do it, Scarborough. Oh, I'm a dog, a dog! When I started to come here my mother took me up to her bedroom and opened the drawer of her bureau and took out a savings-bank book-it had a credit of twelve hundred dollars. 'Do you see that?' she said. 'When you were born I began to put by as soon as I was able-every cent I could from the butter and the eggs-to educate my boy. And now it's all coming true,' she said, Scarborough, and we cried together. And--" Brigham burst into a storm of tears and sobs. "Oh, how could I do it!" he said. "How COULD I!"

"You've done wrong," said Scarborough, shakily, "but I've done much worse, Eddie. And it's over now, and everything'll be all right."

"But I can't take your money, Scarborough. I must pay for what I've done."

"You mean, make your mother pay. No, you must take it back, Brigham. I owe it to you-I owe it to your mother. This, is the butter and egg money that I-I stole from her."

He put the papers into the boy's pocket. "You and I are going to be friends," he went on.

"Come round and see me to-morrow-no, I'll look you up." He put out his hand and held Brigham's hand in a courage-giving grasp. "And-I hope I'll have the honor of meeting your mother some day."

Brigham could only look his feelings. Soon after he left Pierson came. His anger had evaporated and his chief emotion was dread lest Scarborough might still be angry. "I want to take back--" he began eagerly, as soon as his head was inside the door.

"I know you do, but you shan't," replied Scarborough. "What you said was true, what Olivia said was true. I've been acting like a blackguard."

"No," said Pierson, "what I said was a disgraceful lie. Will you try to forget it, Scarborough?"

"FORGET it?" Scarborough looked at his friend with brilliant eyes. "Never! So help me God, never! It's one of three things that have occurred to-day that I must never forget."

"Then we can go on as before. You'll still be my friend?"

"Not STILL, Fred, but for the first time."

He looked round the luxurious study with a laugh and a sigh. "It'll be a ghastly job, getting used to the sort of surroundings I can earn for myself. But I've got to grin and bear it. We'll stay on here together to the end of the term-my share's paid, and besides, I'm not going to do anything sensational. Next year-we'll see."

While Pierson was having his final cigarette before going to bed he looked up from his book to see before him Scarborough, even more tremendous and handsome in his gaudy pajamas.

"I wish to register a solemn vow," said he, with mock solemnity that did not hide the seriousness beneath. "Hear me, ye immortal gods! Never again, never again, will I engage in any game with a friend where there is a stake. I don't wish to tempt. I don't wish to be tempted."

"What nonsense!" said Pierson. "You're simply cutting yourself off from a lot of fun."

"I have spoken," said Scarborough, and he withdrew to his bedroom. When the door was closed and the light out he paused at the edge of the bed and said: "And never again, so long as he wishes to retain his title to the name man, will Hampden Scarborough take from anybody anything which he hasn't honestly earned."

And when he was in bed he muttered: "I shall be alone, and I may stay poor and obscure, but I'll get back my self-respect-and keep it-Pauline!"

X.

MRS. JOHN DUMONT.

And Pauline?-She was now looking back upon the first year of her married life.

She had been so brought up that at seventeen, within a few weeks of eighteen, she had only the vaguest notion of the meaning of the step she was about to take in "really marrying" John Dumont. Also, it had never occurred to her as possible for a properly constituted woman not to love her husband. It was clearly her duty to marry Jack; therefore, the doubting thoughts and the ache at the heart which would not ease were merely more outcroppings of the same evil part of her nature that had tempted her into deceiving her parents, and into entangling herself and Scarborough. She knew that, if she were absolutely free, she would not marry Jack. But she felt that she had bartered away her birthright of freedom; and now, being herself, the daughter of HER father and HER mother, she would honorably keep her bargain, would love where she ought to love-at seventeen "I will" means "I shall." And so-they were "really married."

But the days passed, and there was no sign of the miracle she had confidently expected. The magic of the marriage vow failed to transform her; Pauline Dumont was still Pauline Gardiner in mind and in heart. There was, however, a miracle, undreamed of, mysterious, overwhelming-John Dumont, the lover, became John Dumont, the husband. Beside this transformation, the revelation that the world she loved and lived in did not exist for him, or his world for her, seemed of slight importance. She had not then experience enough to enable her to see that transformation and revelation were as intimately related as a lock and its key.

"It's all my fault," she told herself. "It must be my fault." And Dumont, unanalytic and self-absorbed, was amused whenever Pauline's gentleness reminded him of his mother's half-believed warnings that his wife had "a will of her own, and a mighty strong one."

They were back at Saint X in August and lived at the Frobisher place in Indiana Street-almost as pretentious as the Dumont homestead and in better taste. Old Mrs. Dumont had gone to Chicago alone for the furnishings for her own house; when she went for the furnishings for her son's house, she got Mrs. Gardiner to go along-and Pauline's mother gave another of her many charming illustrations of the valuable truth that tact can always have its own way. Saint X was too keen-eyed and too interested in the new Mrs. Dumont to fail to note a change in her. It was satisfied with the surface explanation that Europe in general and Paris in particular were responsible. And it did not note that, while she had always been full of life and fond of company, she was now feverish in her restlessness, incessantly seeking distraction, never alone when she could either go somewhere or induce some one to come to her.

"You MUST be careful, my dear," said her mother-in-law, as soon as she learned that she had a grandmotherly interest in her daughter-in-law's health. "You'll wear yourself out with all this running about."

Pauline laughed carelessly, recklessly.

"Oh, I'm disgustingly healthy. Nothing hurts me. Besides, if I were quiet, I think I should-EXPLODE!"

Late in September Dumont had to go to New York. He asked her to go with him, assuming that she would decline, as she had visitors coming. But she was only too glad of the chance to give her increasing restlessness wider range. They went to the Waldorf-Scarborough and Pierson had been stopping there not a week before, making ready for that sensational descent upon Battle Field which has already been recorded. The first evening Dumont took her to the play. The next morning he left her early for a busy day down-town-"and I may not be able to return for dinner. I warned you before we left Saint X," he said, as he rose from breakfast in their sitting-room.

"I understand," she answered. "You needn't bother to send word even, if you don't wish. I'll be tired from shopping and shan't care to go out this evening, anyhow."

In the afternoon she drove with Mrs. Fanshaw, wife of one of Jack's business acquaintances-they had dined at the Fanshaws' when they paused in New York on the way home from Europe. Pauline was at the hotel again at five; while she and Mrs. Fanshaw were having tea together in the palm garden a telegram was handed to her. She read it, then said to Mrs. Fanshaw: "I was going to ask you and your husband to dine with us. Jack sends word he can't be here, but-why shouldn't you come just the same?"

"No you must go with us," Mrs. Fanshaw replied. "We've got a box at Weber and Fields', and two men asked, and we need another woman. I'd have asked you before, but there wouldn't be room for any more men."

Mrs. Fanshaw had to insist until she had proved that the invitation was sincere; then, Pauline accepted-a distraction was always agreeable, never so agreeable as when it offered itself unannounced. It was toward the end of the dinner that Mrs. Fanshaw happened to say: "I see your husband's like all of them. I don't believe there ever was a woman an American man wouldn't desert for business."

"Oh, I don't in the least mind," replied Pauline. "I like him to show that he feels free. Why, when we were in Paris on the return trip and had been married only two months, he got tangled up in business and used to leave me for a day-for two days, once."

At Pauline's right sat a carefully dressed young man whose name she had not caught-she learned afterward that he was Mowbray Langdon. He was now giving her a stare of amused mock-admiration. When he saw that he had her attention, he said: "Really, Mrs. Dumont, I can't decide which to admire most-YOUR trust or your husband's."

Pauline laughed-it struck her as ridiculous that either she or Jack should distrust the other. Indeed, she only hazily knew what distrust meant, and hadn't any real belief that "such things" actually existed.

Half an hour later the party was driving up to Weber and Fields'. Pauline, glancing across the thronged sidewalk and along the empty, brilliantly lighted passage leading into the theater, saw a striking, peculiar-looking woman standing at the box-office while her escort parleyed with the clerk within. "How much that man looks like Jack," she said to herself-and then she saw that it was indeed Jack. Not the Jack she thought she knew, but quite another person, the one he tried to hide from her-too carelessly, because he made the common mistake of underestimating the sagacity of simplicity. A glance at the woman, a second glance at Dumont, his flushed, insolent face now turned full front-and she KNEW this unfamiliar and hitherto-only-hinted Jack.

The omnibus was caught in a jam of cars and carriages; there were several moments of confusion and excitement. When the Fanshaw party was finally able to descend, she saw that Jack and his companion were gone-the danger of a scene was over for the moment. She lingered and made the others linger, wishing to give him time to get to his seats. When they entered the theater it was dark and the curtain was up. But her eyes, searching the few boxes visible from the rear aisle, found the woman, or, at least, enough of her for recognition-the huge black hat with its vast pale blue feather. Pauline drew a long breath of relief when the Fanshaws' box proved to be almost directly beneath, the box.

If she had been a few years older, she would have given its proper significance to the curious fact that this sudden revelation of the truth about her husband did not start a tempest of anger or jealousy, but set her instantly to sacrificing at the shrine of the great god Appearances. It is notorious that of all the household gods he alone erects his altar only upon the hearth where the ashes are cold.

As she sat there through the two acts, she seemed to be watching the stage and taking part in the conversation of the Fanshaws and their friends; yet afterward she could not recall a single thing that had occurred, a single word that had been said. At the end of the last act she again made them linger so that they were the last to emerge into the passage. In the outside doorway, she saw the woman-just a glimpse of a pretty, empty, laughing face with a mouth made to utter impertinences and eyes that invited them.

Mrs. Fanshaw was speaking-"You're very tired, aren't you?"

"Very," replied Pauline, with a struggle to smile.

"What a child you look! It seems absurd that you are a married woman. Why, you haven't your full growth yet." And on an impulse of intuitive sympathy Mrs. Fanshaw pressed her arm, and Pauline was suddenly filled with gratitude, and liked her from that moment.

Alone in her sitting-room at the hotel, she went up to the mirror over the mantel, and, staring absently at herself, put her hands up mechanically to take out her hat-pins. "No, I'll keep my hat on," she thought, without knowing why. And she sat, hat and wrap on, and looked at a book. Half an hour, and she took off her hat and wrap, put them in a chair near where she was sitting. The watched hands of the clock crawled wearily round to half-past one, to two, to half-past two, to three-each half-hour an interminable stage. She wandered to the window and looked down into empty Fifth Avenue. When she felt that at least an hour had passed, she turned to look at the clock again-twenty-five minutes to four. Her eyes were heavy.

"He is not coming," she said aloud, and, leaving the lights on in the sitting-room, locked herself in the bedroom.

At five o'clock she started up and seized the dressing-gown on the chair near the head of the bed. She listened-heard him muttering in the sitting-room. She knew now that a crash of some kind had roused her. Several minutes of profound silence, then through the door came a steady, heavy snore.

The dressing-gown dropped from her hand. She slid from the bed, slowly crossed the room, softly opened the door, looked into the sitting-room. A table and a chair lay upset in the middle of the floor. He was on a sofa, sprawling, disheveled, snoring.

Slowly she advanced toward him-she was barefooted, and the white nightgown clinging to her slender figure and the long braid down her back made her look as young as her soul-the soul that gazed from her fixed, fascinated eyes, the soul of a girl of eighteen, full as much child as woman still. She sat down before him in a low chair, her elbows on her knees, her chin supported by her hands, her eyes never leaving his swollen, dark red, brutish face-a cigar stump, much chewed, lay upon his cheek near his open mouth. He was as absurd and as repulsive as a gorged pig asleep in a wallow.

The dawn burst into broad day, but she sat on motionless until the clock struck the half-hour after six. Then she returned to the bedroom and locked herself in again.

Toward noon she dressed and went into the sitting-room. He was gone and it had been put to rights. When he came, at twenty minutes to one, she was standing at the window, but she did not turn.

"Did you get my note?" he asked, in a carefully careless tone. He went on to answer himself: "No, there it is on the floor just where I put it, under the bedroom door. No matter-it was only to say I had to go out but would be back to lunch. Sorry I was kept so late last night. Glad you didn't wait up for me-but you might have left the bedroom door open-it'd have been perfectly safe." He laughed good-naturedly. "As it was, I was so kind-hearted that I didn't disturb you, but slept on the sofa."

As he advanced toward her with the obvious intention of kissing her, she slowly turned and faced him. Their eyes met and he stopped short-her look was like the eternal ice that guards the pole.

"I saw you at the theater last night," she said evenly. "And this morning, I sat and watched you as you lay on the sofa over there."

He was taken completely off his guard. With a gasp that was a kind of groan he dropped into a chair, the surface of his mind strewn with the wreckage of the lying excuses he had got ready.

"Please don't try to explain," she went on in the same even tone. "I understand now about-about Paris and-everything. I know that-father was right."

He gave her a terrified glance-no tears, no trace of excitement, only calmness and all the strength he knew was in her nature and, in addition, a strength he had not dreamed was there.

"What do you intend to do?" he asked after a long silence.

She did not answer immediately. When she did, she was not looking at him.

"When I married you-across the river from Battle Field," she said, "I committed a crime against my father and mother. This is-my punishment-the beginning of it. And now-there'll be the-the-baby-" A pause, then: "I must bear the consequences-if I can. But I shall not be your wife-never-never again. If you wish me to stay on that condition, I'll try. If not-"

"You MUST stay, Pauline," he interrupted. "I don't care what terms you make, you must stay. It's no use for me to try to defend myself when you're in this mood. You wouldn't listen. But you're right about not going. If you did, it'd break your father's and mother's hearts. I admit I did drink too much last night, and made a fool of myself. But if you were more experienced, you'd-"

He thought he had worked his courage up to the point where he could meet her eyes. He tried it. Her look froze his flow of words. "I KNOW that you were false from the beginning," she said.

"The man I thought you were never existed-and I know it. We won't speak of this-ever-after now. Surely you can't wish me to stay?" And into her voice surged all her longing to go, all her hope that he would reject the only terms on which self-respect would let her stay.

"Wish you to stay?" he repeated. And he faced her, looking at her, his chest heaving under the tempest of hate and passion that was raging in him-hate because she was defying and dictating to him, passion because she was so beautiful as she stood there, like a delicate, fine hot-house rose poised on a long, graceful stem. "No wonder I LOVE you!" he exclaimed between his clenched teeth.

A bright spot burned in each of her cheeks and her look made him redden and lower his eyes.

"Now that I understand these last five months," she said, "that from you is an insult."

His veins and muscles swelled with the fury he dared not show; for he saw and felt how dangerous her mood was.

"I'll agree to whatever you like, Pauline," he said humbly. "Only, we mustn't have a flare-up and a scandal. I'll never speak to you again about-about anything you don't want to hear."

She went into her bedroom. When, after half an hour, she reappeared, she was ready to go down to lunch. In the elevator he stole a glance at her-there was no color in her face, not even in her lips. His rage had subsided; he was ashamed of himself-before her. But he felt triumphant too.

"I thought she'd go, sure, in spite of her fear of hurting her father and mother," he said to himself. "A mighty close squeak. I was stepping round in a powder magazine, with every word a lit match."

In January she sank into a profound lassitude. Nothing interested her, everything wearied her. As the time drew near, her mother came to stay with her; and day after day the two women sat silent, Mrs. Gardiner knitting, Pauline motionless, hands idle in her lap, mind vacant. If she had any emotion, it was a hope that she would die and take her child with her.

"That would settle everything, settle it right," she reflected, with youth's morbid fondness for finalities.

When it was all over and she came out from under the opiate, she lay for a while, open-eyed but unseeing, too inert to grope for the lost thread of memory. She felt a stirring in the bed beside her, the movement of some living thing. She looked and there, squeezed into the edge of the pillow was a miniature head of a little old man-wrinkled, copperish. Yet the face was fat-ludicrously fat. A painfully homely face with tears running from the closed eyes, with an open mouth that driveled and drooled.

"What is it?" she thought, looking with faint curiosity. "And why is it here?"

Two small fists now rose aimlessly in the air above the face and flapped about; and a very tempest of noise issued from the sagging mouth.

"A baby," she reflected. Then memory came-"MY baby!"

She put her finger in the way of the wandering fists. First one of them, then the other, awkwardly unclosed and as awkwardly closed upon it. She smiled. The grip tightened and tightened and tightened until she wondered how hands so small and new could cling so close and hard. Then that electric clasp suddenly tightened about her heart. She burst into tears and drew the child against her breast. The pulse of its current of life was beating against her own-and she felt it. She sobbed, laughed softly, sobbed again.

Her mother was bending anxiously over her.

"What's the matter, dearest?" she asked. "What do you wish?"

"Nothing!" Pauline was smiling through her tears. "Oh, mother, I am SO happy!" she murmured.

And her happiness lasted with not a break, with hardly a pause, all that spring and all that summer-or, so long as her baby's helplessness absorbed the whole of her time and thought.

XI.

YOUNG AMERICA.

When Pierson, laggard as usual, returned to Battle Field a week after the end of the long vacation, he found Scarborough just establishing himself. He had taken two small and severely plain rooms in a quaint old frame cottage, one story high, but perched importantly upon a bank at the intersection of two much-traveled streets.

"What luck?" asked Pierson, lounging in on him.

"A hundred days' campaign; a thousand dollars net," replied the book agent. "And I'm hard as oak from tramping those roads, and I've learned-you ought to have been along, Pierson. I know people as I never could have come to know them by any other means-what they think, what they want, how they can be reached."

There was still much of the boy in Pierson's face. But Scarborough looked the man, developed, ready.

Pierson wandered into the bedroom to complete his survey. "I see you're going to live by the clock," he called out presently. He had found, pasted to the wall, Scarborough's schedule of the daily division of his time; just above it, upon a shelf, was a new alarm clock, the bell so big that it overhung like a canopy. "You don't mean you're going to get up at four?"

"Every morning-all winter," replied Scarborough, without stopping his unpacking. "You see, I'm going to finish this year-take the two years in one. Then I've registered in a law office-Judge Holcombe's. And there's my speaking-I must practise that every day."

Pierson came back to the sitting-room and collapsed into a chair. "I see you allow yourself five hours for sleep," he said. "It's too much, old man. You're self-indulgent."

"That's a mistake," replied Scarborough. "Since making out the schedule I've decided to cut sleep down to four hours and a half."

"That's more like it!"

"We all sleep too much," he continued. "And as I shan't smoke, or drink, or worry, I'll need even less than the average man. I'm going to do nothing but work. A man doesn't need much rest from mere work."

"What! No play?"

"Play all the time. I've simply changed my playthings."

Pierson seated himself at the table and stared gloomily at his friend.

"Look here, old man. For heaven's sake, don't let Olivia find out about this program."

But Olivia did hear of it, and Pierson was compelled to leave his luxury in the main street and to take the two remaining available rooms at Scarborough's place. His bed was against the wall of Scarborough's bedroom-the wall where the alarm clock was. At four o'clock on his first morning he started from a profound sleep.

"My bed must be moved into my sitting-room to-day," he said to himself as soon as the clamor of Scarborough's gong died away and he could collect his thoughts. But at four o'clock the next morning the gong penetrated the two walls as if they had not been there. "I see my finish," he groaned, sitting up and tearing at his hair.

He tried to sleep again, but the joint pressure of Olivia's memory-mirrored gray eyes and of disordered nerves from the racking gong forced him to make an effort to bestir himself. Groaning and muttering, he rose and in the starlight looked from his window. Scarborough was going up the deserted street on his way to the woods for his morning exercise. His head was thrown back and his chest extended, and his long legs were covering four feet at a stride. "You old devil!" said Pierson, his tone suggesting admiration and affection rather than anger. "But I'll outwit you."

By a subterfuge in which a sympathetic doctor was the main factor, he had himself permanently excused from chapel. Then he said to Scarborough: "You get up too late, old man. My grandfather used to say that only a drone lies abed after two in the morning, wasting the best part of the day. You ought to turn in, say, at half-past nine and rise in time to get your hardest work out of the way before the college day begins."

"That sounds reasonable," replied Scarborough, after a moment's consideration. "I'll try it."

And so it came to pass that Pierson went to bed at the sound of Scarborough's two-o'clock rising gong and pieced out his sleep with an occasional nap in recitations and lectures and for an hour or two late in the afternoon. He was able once more to play poker as late as he liked, and often had time for reading before the gong sounded. And Scarborough was equally delighted with the new plan. "I gain at least one hour a day, perhaps two," he said. "Your grandfather was a wise man."

Toward spring, Mills, western manager of the publishing house for which Scarborough had sold Peaks of Progress through Michigan, came to Battle Field to see him.

"You were far and away the best man we had out last year," said he. "You're a born book agent."

"Thank you," said Scarborough, sincerely. He appreciated that a man can pay no higher compliment than to say that another is master of his own trade.

"We got about fifty orders from people who thought it over after you'd tried to land them and failed-that shows the impression you made. And you sold as many books as our best agent in our best field."

"I'll never go as agent again," said Scarborough. "The experience was invaluable-but sufficient."

"We don't want you to go as agent. Our proposition is for much easier and more dignified work."

At the word dignified, Scarborough could not restrain a smile. "I've practically made my plans for the summer," he said.

"I think we've got something worth your while, Mr. Scarborough. Our idea is for you to select about a hundred of the young fellows who're working their way through here, and train them in your methods of approaching people. Then you'll take them to Wisconsin and Minnesota and send them out, each man to a district you select for him. In that way you'll help a hundred young men to earn a year at college and you'll make a good sum for yourself-two or three times what you made last summer."

Scarborough had intended to get admitted to the bar in June, to spend the summer at an apprenticeship in a law office and to set up for himself in the fall. But this plan was most attractive-it would give him a new kind of experience and would put him in funds for the wait for clients. The next day he signed an advantageous contract-his expenses for the summer and a guaranty of not less than three thousand dollars clear.

He selected a hundred young men and twelve young women, the most intelligent of the five hundred self-supporting students at Battle Field. Pierson, having promised to behave himself, was permitted to attend the first lesson. The scholars at the Scarborough, School for Book Agents filled his quarters and overflowed in swarms without the windows and the door. The weather was still cool; but all must hear, and the rooms would hold barely half the brigade.

"I assume that you've read the book," began Scarborough. He was standing at the table with the paraphernalia of a book agent spread upon it. "But you must read it again and again, until you know what's on every page, until you have by heart the passages I'll point out to you." He looked at Drexel-a freshman of twenty-two, with earnest, sleepless eyes and a lofty forehead; in the past winter he had become acquainted with hunger and with that cold which creeps into the room, crawls through the thin covers and closes in, icy as death, about the heart. "What do you think of the book, Drexel?"

The young man-he is high in the national administration to-day-flushed and looked uneasy.

"Speak frankly. I want your candid opinion."

"Well, I must say, Mr. Scarborough, I think it's pretty bad."

"Thank you," said Scarborough; and he glanced round. "Does anybody disagree with Mr. Drexel?"

There was not a murmur. Pierson covered his face to hide his smile at this "jolt" for his friend. In the group round one of the windows a laugh started and spread everywhere except to seven of the twelve young women and to those near Scarborough-THEY looked frightened.

"I expected Mr. Drexel's answer," began Scarborough. "Before you can sell Peaks of Progress each of you must be convinced that it's a book he himself would buy. And I see you've not even read it. You've at most glanced at it with unfriendly eyes. This book is not literature, gentlemen. It is a storehouse of facts. It is an educational work so simply written and so brilliantly illustrated that the very children will hang over its pages with delight. If you attend to your training in our coming three months of preliminary work you'll find during the summer that the book's power to attract the children is its strongest point. I made nearly half my sales last summer by turning from the parents to the children and stirring their interest."

Pierson was now no more inclined to smile than were the pupils.

"When I started out," continued Scarborough, "I, too, had just glanced at the book and had learned a few facts from the prospectus. And I failed to sell, except to an occasional fool whom I was able to overpower. Every one instinctively felt the estimate I myself placed upon my goods. But as I went on the book gradually forced itself upon me. And, long before the summer was over, I felt that I was an ambassador of education to those eager people. And I'm proud that I sold as many books as I did. Each book, I know, is a radiating center of pleasure, of thought, of aspiration to higher things. No, ladies and gentlemen, you must first learn that these eight hundred pages crowded with facts of history, these six hundred illustrations taken from the best sources and flooding the text with light, together constitute a work that should be in all humble households."

Scarborough had his audience with him now.

"Never sneer," he said in conclusion. "Sneering will accomplish nothing. Learn your business. Put yourself, your BEST self, into it. And then you may hope to succeed at it."

He divided his pupils into six classes of about twenty each and dismissed them, asking the first class to come at three the next afternoon. The young men and young women went thoughtfully away; they were revolving their initial lesson in the cardinal principle of success-enthusiasm. When the two friends were alone Pierson said: "Do you know, I'm beginning to get a glimpse of you. And I see there isn't anything beyond your reach. You'll get whatever you want."

Scarborough's reply was a sudden look of dejection, an impatient shrug. Then he straightened himself, lifted his head with a lion-like toss that shook back the obstinate lock of hair from his forehead. He laid his hand on his friend's shoulder. "Yes," he said, "because I'm determined to want whatever I get. Good fortune and bad-everything shall be grist for THIS mill."

Pierson attended next day's class and afterward went to Olivia with an account of it.

"You ought to have seen him put those fellows through, one at a time. I tell you, he'll teach them more in the next three months than they'll learn of the whole faculty. And this summer he'll get every man and woman of them enough to pay their way through college next year."

"What did he do to-day?" asked Olivia. Of the many qualities she loved in Pierson, the one she loved most was his unbounded, unselfish admiration for his friend.

"He took each man separately, the others watching and listening. First he'd play the part of book agent with his pupil as a reluctant customer. Then he'd reverse, and the pupil as agent would try to sell him the book, he pretending to be an ignorant, obstinate, ill-natured, close-fisted farmer or farmer's wife. It was a liberal education in the art of persuasion. If his pupils had his brains and his personality, Peaks of Progress would be on the center-table in half the farm parlors of Wisconsin and Minnesota by September."

"IF they had his personality, and IF they had his brains," said Olivia.

"Well, as it is, he'll make the dumbest ass in the lot bray to some purpose."

In September, when Scarborough closed his headquarters at Milwaukee and set out for Indianapolis, he found that the average earnings of his agents were two hundred and seventy-five dollars, and that he himself had made forty-three hundred. Mills came and offered him a place in the publishing house at ten thousand a year and a commission. He instantly rejected it. He had already arranged to spend a year with one of the best law firms in Indianapolis before opening an office in Saint X, the largest town in the congressional district in which his farm lay.

"But there's no hurry about deciding," said Mills. "Remember we'll make you rich in a few years."

"My road happens not to lie in that direction," replied Scarborough, carelessly. "I've no desire to be rich. It's too easy, if one will consent to give money-making his exclusive attention."

Mills looked amused-had he not known Scarborough's ability, he would have felt derisive.

"Money's power," said he. "And there are only two ambitions for a wide-awake man-money and power."

"Money can't buy the kind of power I'd care for," answered Scarborough. "If I were to seek power, it'd be the power that comes through ability to persuade."

"Money talks," said Mills, laughing.

"Money bellows," retorted Scarborough, "and bribes and browbeats, bully and coward that it is. But it never persuades."

"I'll admit it's a coward."

"And I hope I can always frighten enough of it into my service to satisfy my needs. But I'm not spending my life in its service-no, thank you!"

XII.

AFTER EIGHT YEARS.

While Scarborough was serving his clerkship at Indianapolis, Dumont was engaging in ever larger and more daring speculations with New York as his base. Thus it came about that when Scarborough established himself at Saint X, Dumont and Pauline were living in New York, in a big house in East Sixty-first Street.

And Pauline had welcomed the change. In Saint X she was constantly on guard, always afraid her father and mother would see below that smiling surface of her domestic life which made them happy. In New York she was free from the crushing sense of peril and restraint, as their delusions about her were secure. There, after she and he found their living basis of "let alone," they got on smoothly, rarely meeting except in the presence of servants or guests, never inquiring either into the other's life, carrying on all negotiations about money and other household matters through their secretaries. He thought her cold by nature-therefore absolutely to be trusted. And what other man with the pomp and circumstance of a great and growing fortune to maintain had so admirable an instrument? "An ideal wife," he often said to himself. And he was not the man to speculate as to what was going on in her head. He had no interest in what others thought; how they were filling the places he had assigned them-that was his only concern.

In one of those days of pause which come now and then in the busiest lives she chanced upon his letters from Europe in her winter at Battle Field. She took one of them from its envelope and began to read-carelessly, with a languid curiosity to measure thus exactly the change in herself. But soon she was absorbed, her mind groping through letter after letter for the clue to a mystery. The Dumont she now knew stood out so plainly in those letters that she could not understand how she, inexperienced and infatuated though she then was, had failed to see the perfect full-length portrait. How had she read romance and high-mindedness and intellect into the personality so frankly flaunting itself in all its narrow sordidness, in all its poverty of real thought and real feeling?

And there was Hampden Scarborough to contrast him with. With this thought the truth suddenly stared at her, made her drop the letter and visibly shrink. It was just because Scarborough was there that she had been tricked. The slight surface resemblance between the two men, hardly more than the "favor" found in all men of the family of strong and tenacious will, had led her on to deck the absent Dumont with the manhood of the present Scarborough. She had read Scarborough into Dumont's letters. Yes, and-the answers she addressed and mailed to Dumont had really been written to Scarborough.

She tossed the letters back into the box from which they had reappeared after four long years. She seated herself on the white bear-skin before the open fire; and with hands clasped round her knees she rocked herself slowly to and fro like one trying to ease an intolerable pain.

Until custom dulled the edge of that pain, the days and the nights were the cruelest in her apprenticeship up to that time.

When her boy, Gardiner, was five years old, she got her father and mother to keep him at Saint X with them.

"New York's no place, I think, to bring up and educate a boy in the right way," she explained. And it was the truth, though not the whole truth. The concealed part was that she would have made an open break with her husband had there been no other way of safeguarding their all-seeing, all-noting boy from his example.

Before Gardiner went to live with his grandparents she stayed in the East, making six or eight brief visits "home" each year. When he went she resolved to divide her year between her pleasure as a mother and her obligation to her son's father, to her parents' son-in-law-her devotions at the shrine of Appearances.

It was in the fall of the year she was twenty-five-eight years and a half after she left Battle Field-that Hampden Scarborough reappeared upon the surface of her life.

On a September afternoon in that year Olivia, descending from the train at Saint X, was almost as much embarrassed as pleased by her changed young cousin rushing at her with great energy-"Dear, dear Olivia! And hardly any different-how's the baby? No-not Fred, but Fred Junior, I mean. In some ways you positively look younger. You know, you were SO serious at college!"

"But you-I don't quite understand how any one can be so changed, yet-recognizable. I guess it's the plumage. You're in a new edition-an edition deluxe."

Pauline's dressmakers were bringing out the full value of her height and slender, graceful strength. Her eyes, full of the same old frankness and courage, now had experience in them, too. She was wearing her hair so that it fell from her brow in two sweeping curves reflecting the light in sparkles and flashes. Her manner was still simple and genuine-the simplicity and genuineness of knowledge now, not of innocence. Extremes meet-but they remain extremes. Her "plumage" was a fashionable dress of pale blue cloth, a big beplumed hat to match, a chiffon parasol like an azure cloud, at her throat a sapphire pendant, about her neck and swinging far below her waist a chain of sapphires.

"And the plumage just suits her," thought Olivia. For it seemed to her that her cousin had more than ever the quality she most admired-the quality of individuality, of distinction. Even in her way of looking clean and fresh she was different, as if those prime feminine essentials were in her not matters of frequent reacquirement but inherent and inalienable, like her brilliance of eyes and smoothness of skin.

Olivia felt a slight tugging at the bag she was carrying. She looked-an English groom in spotless summer livery was touching his hat in respectful appeal to her to let go. "Give Albert your checks, too," said Pauline, putting her arm around her cousin's waist to escort her down the platform. At the entrance, with a group of station loungers gaping at it, was a phaeton-victoria lined with some cream-colored stuff like silk, the horses and liveried coachman rigid. "She's giving Saint X a good deal to talk about," thought Olivia.

"Home, please, by the long road," said Pauline to the groom, and he sprang to the box beside the coachman, and they were instantly in rapid motion. "That'll let us have twenty minutes more together," she went on to Olivia. "There are several people stopping at the house."

The way led through Munroe Avenue, the main street of Saint X. Olivia was astonished at the changes-the town of nine years before spread and remade into an energetic city of twenty-five thousand.

"Fred told me I'd hardly recognize it," said she, "but I didn't expect this. It's another proof how far-sighted Hampden Scarborough is. Everybody advised him against coming here, but he would come. And the town has grown, and at the same time he's had a clear field to make a big reputation as a lawyer in a few years, not to speak of the power he's got in politics."

"But wouldn't he have won no matter where he was?" suggested Pauline.

"Sooner or later-but not so soon," replied Olivia.

"No-a tree doesn't have to grow so tall among a lot of bushes before it's noticed as it does in a forest."

"And you've never seen him since Battle Field?" As Olivia put this question she watched her cousin narrowly without seeming to do so.

"But," replied Pauline-and Olivia thought that both her face and her tone were a shade off the easy and the natural-"since he came I've been living in New York and haven't stayed here longer than a few days until this summer. And he's been in Europe since April. No," she went on, "I've not seen a soul from Battle Field. It's been like a painting, finished and hanging on the wall one looks toward oftenest, and influencing one's life every day."

They talked on of Battle Field, of the boys and girls they had known-how Thiebaud was dead and Mollie Crittenden had married the man who was governor of California; what Howe was not doing, the novels Chamberlayne was writing; the big women's college in Kansas that Grace Wharton was vice-president of. Then of Pierson-in the state senate and in a fair way to get to Congress the next year. Then Scarborough again-how he had distanced all the others; how he might have the largest practice in the state if he would take the sort of clients most lawyers courted assiduously; how strong he was in politics in spite of the opposition of the professionals-strong because he had a genius for organization and also had the ear and the confidence of the people and the enthusiastic personal devotion of the young men throughout the state. Olivia, more of a politician than Fred even, knew the whole story; and Pauline listened appreciatively. Few indeed are the homes in strenuously political Indiana where politics is not the chief subject of conversation, and Pauline had known about parties and campaigns as early as she had known about dolls and dresses.

"But you must have heard most of this," said Olivia, "from people here in Saint X."

"Some of it-from father and mother," Pauline answered. "They're the only people I've seen really to talk to on my little visits. They know him very well indeed. I think mother admires him almost as much as you do. Here's our place," she added, the warmth fading from her face as from a spring landscape when the shadow of the dusk begins to creep over it.

They were in the grounds of the Eyrie-the elder Dumont was just completing it when he died early in the previous spring. His widow went abroad to live with her daughter and her sister in Paris; so her son and his wife had taken it. It was a great rambling stone house that hung upon and in a lofty bluff. From its windows and verandas and balconies could be seen the panorama of Saint Christopher. To the left lay the town, its ugly part-its factories and railway yards-hidden by the jut of a hill. Beneath and beyond to the right, the shining river wound among fields brown where the harvests had been gathered, green and white where myriads of graceful tassels waved above acres on acres of Indian corn. And the broad leaves sent up through the murmur of the river a rhythmic rustling like a sigh of content. Once in a while a passing steamboat made the sonorous cry of its whistle and the melodious beat of its paddles echo from hill to hill. Between the house and the hilltop, highway lay several hundred acres of lawn and garden and wood.

The rooms of the Eyrie and its well-screened verandas were in a cool twilight, though the September sun was hot.

"They're all out, or asleep," said Pauline, as she and Olivia entered the wide reception hall. "Let's have tea on the east veranda. Its view isn't so good, but we'll be cooler. You'd like to go to your room first?"

Olivia said she was comfortable as she was and needed the tea. So they went on through the splendidly-furnished drawing-room and were going through the library when Olivia paused before a portrait-"Your husband, isn't it?"

"Yes," replied Pauline, standing behind her cousin. "We each had one done in Paris."

"What a masterful face!" said Olivia. "I've never seen a better forehead." And she thought,

"He's of the same type as Scarborough, except-what is it I dislike in his expression?"

"Do you notice a resemblance to any one you know?" asked Pauline.

"Ye-e-s," replied Olivia, coloring. "I think--"

"Scarborough, isn't it?"

"Yes," admitted Olivia.

After a pause Pauline said ambiguously: "The resemblance is stronger there than in life."

Olivia glanced at her and was made vaguely uneasy by the look she was directing at the face of the portrait. But though Pauline must have seen that she was observed, she did not change expression. They went out upon the east veranda and Olivia stood at the railing. She hardly noted the view in the press of thoughts roused by the hints of what was behind the richly embroidered curtain of her cousin's life.

All along the bluff, some exposed, some half hid by dense foliage, were the pretentious houses of the thirty or forty families who had grown rich through the industries developed within the past ten years. Two foreign-looking servants in foreign-looking house-liveries were bringing a table on which was an enormous silver tray with a tea-service of antique silver and artistic china. As Olivia turned to seat herself a young man and a woman of perhaps forty, obviously from the East, came through the doors at the far end of the long porch. Both were in white, carefully dressed and groomed; both suggested a mode of life whose leisure had never been interrupted.

"Who are coming?" asked Olivia. She wished she had gone to her room before tea. These people made her feel dowdy and mussy.

Pauline glanced round, smiled and nodded, turned back to her cousin.

"Mrs. Herron and Mr. Langdon. She's the wife of a New York lawyer, and she takes Mr. Langdon everywhere with her to amuse her, and he goes to amuse himself. He's a socialist, or something like that. He thinks up and says things to shock conservative, conventional people. He's rich and never has worked-couldn't if he would, probably. But he denounces leisure classes and large fortunes and advocates manual labor every day for everybody. He's clever in a queer, cynical way."

A Mrs. Fanshaw, also of New York, came from the library in a tea-gown of chiffon and real lace. All were made acquainted and Pauline poured the tea. As Olivia felt shy and was hungry, she ate the little sandwiches and looked and listened and thought-looked and thought rather than listened. These were certainly well-bred people, yet she did not like them.

"They're in earnest about trifles," she said to herself, "and trifle about earnest things." Yet it irritated her to feel that, though they would care not at all for her low opinion of them, she did care a great deal because they would fail to appreciate her.

"They ought to be jailed," Langdon was drawling with considerable emphasis.

"Who, Mr. Langdon?" inquired Mrs. Fanshaw-she had been as abstracted as Olivia. "You've been filling the jails rapidly to-day, and hanging not a few."

Mrs. Herron laughed. "He says your husband and Mrs. Dumont's and mine should be locked up as conspirators."

"Precisely," said Langdon, tranquilly. "They'll sign a few papers, and when they're done, what'll have happened? Not one more sheep'll be raised. Not one more pound of wool will be shorn. Not one more laborer'll be employed. Not a single improvement in any process of manufacture. But, on the other hand, the farmer'll have to sell his wool cheaper, the consumer'll have to pay a bigger price for blankets and all kinds of clothes, for carpets-for everything wool goes into. And these few men will have trebled their fortunes and at least trebled their incomes. Does anybody deny that such a performance is a crime? Why, in comparison, a burglar is honorable and courageous. HE risks liberty and life."

"Dreadful! Dreadful!" exclaimed Mrs. Fanshaw, in mock horror. "You must go at once, Mowbray, and lead the police in a raid on Jack's office."

"Thanks-it's more comfortable here." Langdon took a piece of a curious-looking kind of hot bread. "Extraordinary good stuff this is," he interjected; then went on: "And I've done my duty when I've stated the facts. Also, I'm taking a little stock in the new trust. But I don't pose as a 'captain of industry' or 'promoter of civilization.' I admit I'm a robber. My point is the rotten hypocrisy of my fellow bandits-no, pickpockets, by gad!"

Olivia looked at him with disapproving interest. It was the first time she had been present at a game of battledore and shuttlecock with what she regarded as fundamental morals. Langdon noted her expression and said to Pauline in a tone of contrition that did not conceal his amusement: "I've shocked your cousin, Mrs. Dumont."

"I hope so," replied Pauline. "I'm sure we all ought to be shocked-and should be, if it weren't you who are trying to do the shocking. She'll soon get used to you."

"Then it was a jest?" said Olivia to Langdon.

"A jest?" He looked serious. "Not at all, my dear Mrs. Pierson. Every word I said was true, and worse. They--"

"Stop your nonsense, Mowbray," interrupted Mrs. Herron, who appreciated that Olivia was an "outsider." "Certainly he was jesting, Mrs. Pierson. Mr. Langdon pretends to have eccentric ideas-one of them is that everybody with brains should be put under the feet of the numskulls; another is that anybody who has anything should be locked up and his property given to those who have nothing."

"Splendid!" exclaimed Langdon. And he took out a gold cigarette case and lighted a large, expensive-looking cigarette with a match from a gold safe. "Go on, dear lady! Herron should get you to write our prospectus when we're ready to unload on the public. The dear public! How it does yearn for a share in any piratical enterprise that flies the snowy flag of respectability." He rose. "Who'll play English billiards?"

"All right," said Mrs. Herron, rising.

"And I, too," said Mrs. Fanshaw.

"Give me one of your cigarettes, Mowbray," said Mrs. Herron. "I left my case in my room."

Pauline, answering Olivia's expression, said as soon as the three had disappeared:

"Why not? Is it any worse for a woman than for a man?"

"I don't know why not," replied Olivia. "There must be another reason than because I don't do it, and didn't think ladies did. But that's the only reason I can give just now."

"What do you think of Langdon?" asked Pauline.

"I guess my sense of humor's defective. I don't like the sort of jest he seems to excel in."

"I fancy it wasn't altogether a jest," said Pauline. "I don't inquire into those matters any more. I used to, but-the more I saw, the worse it was. Tricks and traps and squeezes and-oh, business is all vulgar and low. It's necessary, I suppose, but it's repulsive to me." She paused, then added carelessly, yet with a certain deliberateness, "I never meddle with Mr. Dumont, nor he with me."

Olivia wished to protest against Pauline's view of business. But-how could she without seeming to attack, indeed, without attacking, her cousin's husband?

Dumont brought Fanshaw up in his automobile, Herron remaining at the offices for half an hour to give the newspapers a carefully considered account of the much-discussed "merger" of the manufacturers of low-grade woolens. Herron had objected to any statement. "It's our private business," he said. "Let them howl. The fewer facts they have, the sooner they'll stop howling." But Dumont held firm for publicity. "There's no such thing as a private business nowadays," he replied. "Besides, don't we want the public to take part of our stock? What's the use of acting shady-you've avoided the legal obstacles, haven't you? Let's tell the public frankly all we want it to know, and it'll think it knows all there is to know."

The whole party met in the drawing-room at a quarter-past eight, Langdon the last to come down-Olivia was uncertain whether or not she was unjust to him when she suspected design in his late entrance, the handsomest and the best-dressed man of the company.

He looked cynically at Dumont. "Well, fellow pirate: how go our plans for a merry winter for the poor?"

"Ass!" muttered Herron to Olivia, who happened to, be nearest him. "He fancies impudence is wit. He's devoid of moral sense or even of decency. He's a traitor to his class and shouldn't be tolerated in it."

Dumont was laughingly answering Langdon in his own vein.

"Splendidly," he replied, "thanks to our worthy chaplain, Herron, who secures us the blessing and protection of the law."

"That gives me an appetite!" exclaimed Langdon. "I feared something might miscarry in these last hours of our months of plotting. Heaven be praised, the people won't have so much to waste hereafter. I'm proud to be in one of the many noble bands that are struggling to save them from themselves."

But Dumont had turned away from him; so he dropped into Mrs. Herron's discussion with Mrs. Fanshaw on their proposed trip to the Mediterranean. Dinner was announced and he was put between Mrs. Herron and Olivia, with Dumont on her right. It was a round table and Olivia's eyes lingered upon its details-the embroidered cloth with real lace in the center, the graceful antique silver candlesticks, the tall vases filled with enormous roses-everything exquisitely simple and tasteful.

Langdon talked with her until Mrs. Herron, impatient at his neglect, caught his eye and compelled his attention. Dumont, seeing that Olivia was free, drew her into his conversation with Mrs. Fanshaw; and then Mrs. Fanshaw began to talk with Mr. Herron, who was eating furiously because he had just overheard Langdon say: "That was a great day for pirates when they thought of taking aboard the lawyers as chaplains."

All the men were in high spirits; Dumont was boyish in his exuberance. When he left home that morning he was four times a millionaire; now he was at least twelve times a millionaire, through the magic of the "merger." True, eight of the twelve millions were on paper; but it was paper that would certainly pay dividends, paper that would presently sell at or near its face value. And this success had come when he was only thirty-four. His mind was already projecting greater triumphs in this modern necromancy by which millionaires evoke and materialize millions from the empty air-apparently. He was bubbling over with happiness-in the victory won, in victories to be won.

Olivia tried him on several subjects, but the conversation dragged. Of Pauline he would not talk; of Europe, he was interested only in the comfort of hotels and railway trains, in the comparative merits of the cooking and the wines in London and Paris. But his face-alert, shrewd, aggressive-and his mode of expression made her feel that he was uninteresting because he was thinking of something which he did not care to expose to her and could not take his mind from. And this was the truth. It was not until she adventured upon his business that he became talkative. And soon she had him telling her about his "combine"-frankly, boastfully, his face more and more flushed, for as he talked he drank.

"But," he said presently, "this little matter to-day is only a fair beginning. It seemed big until it was about accomplished. Then I saw it was only a suggestion for a scheme that'd be really worth, while." And he went on to unfold one of those projects of to-day's commerce and finance that were regarded as fantastic, delirious a few years ago. He would reach out and out for hundreds of millions of capital; with his woolens "combine" as a basis he would build an enormous corporation to control the sheep industry of the world-to buy millions of acres of sheep-ranges; to raise scores of millions of sheep; to acquire and to construct hundreds of plants for utilizing every part of the raw product of the ranges; to sell wherever the human race had or could have a market.

Olivia was ambitious herself, usually was delighted by ambition in others. But his exhibit of imagination and energy repelled her, even while it fascinated. Partly through youth, more through that contempt for concealment which characterizes the courageous type of large man, he showed himself to her just as he was. And she saw him not as an ambition but as an appetite, or rather a bundle of appetites.

"He has no ideals," she thought. "He's like a man who wants food merely for itself, not for the strength and the intellect it will build up. And he likes or dislikes human beings only as one likes or dislikes different things to eat."

"It'll take you years and years," she said to him, because she must say something.

"Not at all." He waved his hand-Olivia thought it looked as much like a claw as like a hand. "It's a sky-scraper, but we build sky-scrapers overnight. Time and space used to be the big elements. WE practically disregard them." He followed this with a self-satisfied laugh and an emptying of his champagne glass at a gulp.

The women were rising to withdraw. After half an hour Langdon and Herron joined them. Dumont and Fanshaw did not come until eleven o'clock. Then Dumont was so abrupt and surly that every one was grateful to Mrs. Fanshaw for taking him away to the west veranda. At midnight all went to their rooms, Pauline going with Olivia, "to make sure you haven't been neglected."

She lingered until after one, and when they kissed each the other good night, she said: "It's done me a world of good to see you, 'Livia-more even than I hoped. I knew you'd be sympathetic with me where you understood. Now, I feel that you're sympathetic where you don't understand, too. And it's there that one really needs sympathy."

"That's what friendship means-and-love," said Olivia.

XIII.

"MY SISTER-IN-LAW, GLADYS."

The following afternoon Dumont took the Herrons, the Fanshaws and Langdon back to New York in his private car, and for three days Olivia and Pauline had the Eyrie to themselves. Olivia was about to write to Scarborough, asking him to call, when she saw in the News-Bulletin that he had gone to Denver to speak. A week after she left, Dumont returned, bringing his sister Gladys, just arrived from Europe, and Langdon. He stayed four days, took Langdon away with him and left Gladys.

Thus it came about that Scarborough, riding into Colonel Gardiner's grounds one hot afternoon in mid September, saw a phaeton-victoria with two women in it coming toward him on its way out. He drew his horse aside to make room. He was conscious that there were two women; he saw only one-she who was all in white except the scarlet poppies against the brim of her big white hat.

As he bowed the carriage stopped and Pauline said cordially: "Why, how d'ye do?"

He drew his horse close to the carriage and they shook hands. She introduced the other woman-"My sister-in-law, Gladys Dumont"-then went on: "We've been lunching and spending the afternoon with father and mother. They told us you returned this morning."

"I supposed you were in the East," said Scarborough-the first words he had spoken.

"Oh-I'm living here now-Gladys and I. Father says you never go anywhere, but I hope you'll make an exception for us."

"Thank you-I'll be glad to call."

"Why not dine with us-day after to-morrow night?"

"I'd like that-certainly, I'll come."

"We dine at half-past eight-at least we're supposed to."

Scarborough lifted his hat.

The carriage drove on.

"Why, he's not a bit as I expected," Gladys began at once. "He's much younger. ISN'T he handsome! That's the way a MAN ought to look. He's not married?"

"No," replied Pauline.

"Why did you look so queer when you first caught sight of him?"

"Did I?" Pauline replied tranquilly. "Probably it was because he very suddenly and vividly brought Battle Field back to me-that was the happiest time of my life. But I was too young or too foolish, or both, to know it till long afterward. At seventeen one takes happiness for granted."

"Did he look then as he does now?"

"No-and yes," said Pauline. "He was just from the farm and dressed badly and was awkward at times. But-really he was the same person. I guess it was the little change in him that startled me." And she became absorbed in her thoughts.

"I hope you'll send him in to dinner with me," said Gladys, presently.

"What did you say?" asked Pauline, absently.

"I was talking of Mr. Scarborough. I asked if you wouldn't send him in to dinner with me-unless you want to discuss old times with him."

"Yes-certainly-if you wish."

And Pauline gave Scarborough to Gladys and did her duty as hostess by taking in the dullest man in the party-Newnham. While Newnham droned and prosed, she watched Gladys lay herself out to please the distinguished Mr. Scarborough, successful as a lawyer, famous as an orator, deferred to because of his influence with the rank and file of his party in the middle West.

Gladys had blue-black hair which she wore pulled out into a sort of halo about her small, delicate face. There were points of light in her dark irises, giving them the look of black quartz in the sunshine. She was not tall, but her figure was perfect, and she had her dresses fitted immediately to it. Her appeal was frankly to the senses, the edge taken from its audacity by its artistic effectiveness and by her ingenuous, almost innocent, expression.

Seeing Pauline looking at her, she tilted her head to a graceful angle and sent a radiant glance between two blossom-laden branches of the green and white bush that towered and spread in the center of the table. "Mr. Scarborough says," she called out, "character isn't a development, it's a disclosure. He thinks one is born a certain kind of person and that one's life simply either gives it a chance to show or fails to give it a chance. He says the boy isn't father to the man, but the miniature of the man. What do you think, Pauline?"

"I haven't thought of it," replied Pauline. "But I'm certain it's true. I used to dispute Mr. Scarborough's ideas sometimes, but I learned better."

As she realized the implications of her careless remark, their eyes met squarely for the first time since Battle Field. Both hastily glanced away, and neither looked at the other again. When the men came up to the drawing-room to join the women, Gladys adroitly intercepted him. When he went to Pauline to take leave, their manner each toward the other was formal, strained and even distant.

Dumont came again just after the November election. It had been an unexpected victory for the party which Scarborough advocated, and everywhere the talk was that he had been the chief factor-his skill in defining issues, his eloquence in presenting them, the public confidence in his party through the dominance of a man so obviously free from self-seeking or political trickery of any kind. Dumont, to whom control in both party machines and in the state government was a business necessity, told his political agent, Merriweather, that they had "let Scarborough go about far enough," unless he could be brought into their camp.

"I can't make out what he's looking for," said Merriweather. "One thing's certain-he'll do US no good. There's no way we can get our hooks in him. He don't give a damn for money. And as for power-he can get more of that by fighting us than by falling in line. We ain't exactly popular."

This seemed to Dumont rank ingratitude. Had he not just divided a million dollars among charities and educational institutions in the districts where opposition to his "merger" was strongest?

"Well, we'll see," he said. "If he isn't careful we'll have to kill him off in convention and make the committees stop his mouth."

"The trouble is he's been building up a following of his own-the sort of following that can't be honeyfugled," replied Merriweather. "The committees are afraid of him." Merriweather always took the gloomy view of everything, because he thus discounted his failures in advance and doubled the effect of his successes.

"I'll see-I'll see," said Dumont, impatiently. And he thought he was beginning to "see" when Gladys expanded to him upon the subject of Scarborough-his good looks, his wit, his "distinction."

Scarborough came to dinner a few evenings later and Dumont was particularly cordial to him; and Gladys made the most of the opportunity which Pauline again gave her. That night, when the others had left or had gone to bed, Gladys followed her brother into the smoke-room adjoining the library. They sat in silence drinking a "night-cap." In the dreaminess of her eyes, in the absent smile drifting round the corners of her full red lips, Gladys showed that her thoughts were pleasant and sentimental.

"What do you think of Scarborough?" her brother asked suddenly.

She started but did not flush-in her long European experience she had gained control of that signal of surprise. "How do you mean?" she asked. She rarely answered a question immediately, no matter how simple it was, but usually put another question in reply. Thus she insured herself time to think if time should be necessary.

"I mean, do you like him?"

"Why, certainly. But I've seen him only a few times."

"He's an uncommon man," continued her brother. "He'd make a mighty satisfactory husband for an ambitious woman, especially one with the money to push him fast."

Gladys slowly lifted and slowly lowered her smooth, slender shoulders.

"That sort of thing doesn't interest a woman in a man, unless she's married to him and has got over thinking more about him than about herself."

"It ought to," replied her brother. "A clever woman can always slosh round in sentimental slop with her head above it and cool. If I were a girl I'd make a dead set for that chap."

"If you were a girl," said Gladys, "you'd do nothing of the sort. You'd compel him to make a dead set for you." And as she put down her glass she gave his hair an affectionate pull-which was her way of thanking him for saying what she most wished to hear on the subject she most wished to hear about.

XIV.

STRAINING AT THE ANCHORS.

Gladys was now twenty-four and was even more anxious to marry than is the average unmarried person. She had been eleven years a wanderer; she was tired of it. She had no home; and she wanted a home.

Her aunt-her mother's widowed sister-had taken her abroad when she was thirteen. John was able to defy or to deceive their mother. But she could and did enforce upon Gladys the rigid rules which her fanatical nature had evolved-a minute and crushing tyranny. Therefore Gladys preferred any place to her home. For ten years she had been roaming western Europe, nominally watched by her lazy, selfish, and physically and mentally near-sighted aunt. Actually her only guardian had been her own precocious, curiously prudent, curiously reckless self. She had been free to do as she pleased; and she had pleased to do very free indeed. She had learned all that her intense and catholic curiosity craved to know, had learned it of masters of her own selecting-the men and women who would naturally attract a lively young person, eager to rejoice in an escape from slavery. Her eyes had peered far into the human heart, farthest into the corrupted human heart; yet, with her innocence she had not lost her honesty or her preference for the things she had been brought up to think clean.

But she had at last wearied of a novelty which lay only in changes of scene and of names, without any important change in characters or plot. She began to be bored with the game of baffling the hopes inspired by her beauty and encouraged by her seeming simplicity. And when her mother came-as she said to Pauline, "The only bearable view of mother is a distant view. I had forgot there were such people left on earth-I had thought they'd all gone to their own kind of heaven." So she fled to America, to her brother and his wife.

Dumont stayed eight days at the Eyrie on that trip, then went back to his congenial life in New York-to his business and his dissipation. He tempered his indulgence in both nowadays with some exercise-his stomach, his heart, his nerves and his doctor had together given him a bad fright. The evening before he left he saw Pauline and Gladys sitting apart and joined them.

"Why not invite Scarborough to spend a week up here?" he asked, just glancing at his wife. He never ventured to look at her when there was any danger of their eyes meeting.

Her lips tightened and the color swiftly left her cheeks and swiftly returned.

"Wouldn't you like it, Gladys?" he went on.

"Oh, DO ask him, Pauline," said Gladys, with enthusiasm. Like her brother, she always went straight to the point-she was in the habit of deciding for herself, of thinking what she did was above criticism, and of not especially caring if it was criticised. "Please do!"

Pauline waited long-it seemed to her long enough for time to wrinkle her heart-before answering: "We'll need another man. I'll ask him-if you wish."

Gladys pressed her hand gratefully-she was fond of Pauline, and Pauline was liking her again as she had when they were children and playmates and partners in the woes of John Dumont's raids upon their games. Just then Langdon's sister, Mrs. Barrow, called Gladys to the other end of the drawing-room. Dumont's glance followed her.

"I think it'd be a good match," he said reflectively.

Pauline's heart missed a beat and a suffocating choke contracted her throat.

"What?" she succeeded in saying.

"Gladys and Scarborough," replied Dumont. "She ought to marry-she's got no place to go. And it'd be good business for her-and for him, too, for that matter, if she could land him. Don't you think she's attractive to men?"

"Very," said Pauline, lifelessly.

"Don't you think it would be a good match?" he went on.

"Very," she said, looking round wildly, as her breath came more and more quickly.

Langdon strolled up.

"Am I interrupting a family council?" he asked.

"Oh, no," Dumont replied, rising. "Take my chair." And he was gone.

"This room is too warm," said Pauline. "No, don't open the window. Excuse me a moment." She went into the hall, threw a golf cape round her shoulders and stepped out on the veranda, closing the door-window behind her. It was a moonless, winter night-stars thronging the blue-black sky; the steady lamp of a planet set in the southern horizon.

When she had been walking there for a quarter of an hour the door-window opened and Langdon looked out. "Oh-there you are!" he said.

"Won't you join me?" Her tone assured him that he would not be intruding. He got a hat and overcoat and they walked up and down together.

"Those stars irritate me," he said after a while. "They make me appreciate that this world's a tiny grain of sand adrift in infinity, and that I'm--there's nothing little enough to express the human atom where the earth's only a grain. And then they go on to taunt me with how short-lived I am and how it'll soon be all over for me-for ever. A futile little insect, buzzing about, waiting to be crushed under the heel of the Great Executioner."

"Sometimes I feel that," answered Pauline. "But again-often, as a child-and since, when everything has looked dark and ugly for me, I've gone where I could see them. And they seemed to draw all the fever and the fear out of me, and to put there instead a sort of-not happiness, not even content, but-courage."

They were near the rail now, she gazing into the southern sky, he studying her face. It seemed to him that he had not seen any one so beautiful. She was all in black with a diamond star glittering in her hair high above her forehead. She looked like a splendid plume dropped from the starry wing of night.

"The stars make you feel that way," he said, in the light tone that disguises a compliment as a bit of raillery, "because you're of their family. And I feel as I do because I'm a blood-relation of the earthworms."

Her face changed. "Oh, but so am I!" she exclaimed, with a passion he had never seen or suspected in her before. She drew a long breath, closed her eyes and opened them very wide.

"You don't know, you can't imagine, how I long to LIVE! And KNOW what 'to live' means."

"Then why don't you?" he asked-he liked to catch people in their confidential moods and to peer into the hidden places in their hearts, not impudently but with a sort of scientific curiosity.

"Because I'm a daughter-that's anchor number one. Because I'm a mother-that's anchor number two. Because I'm a wife-that's anchor number three. And anchor number four-because I'm under the spell of inherited instincts that rule me though I don't in the least believe in them. Tied, hands and feet!"

"Inherited instinct." He shook his head sadly. "That's the skeleton at life's banquet. It takes away my appetite."

She laughed without mirth, then sighed with some self-mockery. "It frightens ME away from the table."

XV.

GRADUATED PEARLS.

But Scarborough declined her invitation. However, he did come to dinner ten days later; and Gladys, who had no lack of confidence in her power to charm when and whom she chose, was elated by his friendliness then and when she met him at other houses.

"He's not a bit sentimental," she told Pauline, whose silence whenever she tried to discuss him did not discourage her. "But if he ever does care for a woman he'll care in the same tremendous way that he sweeps things before him in his career. Don't you think so?"

"Yes," said Pauline.

She had now lingered at Saint X two months beyond the time she originally set. She told herself she had reached the limit of endurance, that she must fly from the spectacle of Gladys' growing intimacy with Scarborough; she told Gladys it was impossible for her longer to neglect the new house in Fifth Avenue. With an effort she added: "You'd rather stay on here, wouldn't you?"

"I detest New York," replied Gladys. "And I've never enjoyed myself in my whole life as I'm enjoying it here."

So she went East alone, went direct to Dawn Hill, their country place at Manhasset, Long Island, which Dumont never visited. She invited Leonora Fanshaw down to stand between her thoughts and herself. Only the society of a human being, one who was light-hearted and amusing, could tide her back to any sort of peace in the old life-her books and her dogs, her horseback and her drawing and her gardening. A life so full of events, so empty of event. It left her hardly time for proper sleep, yet it had not a single one of those vivid threads of intense and continuous interest-and one of them is enough to make bright the dullest pattern that issues from the Loom.

In her "splendor" her nearest approach to an intimacy had been with Leonora.

She had no illusions about the company she was keeping in the East. To her these "friends" seemed in no proper sense either her friends or one another's. Drawn together from all parts of America, indeed of the world, by the magnetism of millions, they had known one another not at all or only slightly in the period of life when thorough friendships are made; even where they had been associates as children, the association had rarely been of the kind that creates friendship's democratic intimacy. They had no common traditions, no real class-feeling, no common enthusiasms-unless the passion for keeping rich, for getting richer, for enjoying and displaying riches, could be called enthusiasm. They were mere intimate acquaintances, making small pretense of friendship, having small conception of it or desire for it beyond that surface politeness which enables people whose selfish interests lie in the same direction to get on comfortably together.

She divided them into two classes. There were those who, like herself, kept up great establishments and entertained lavishly and engaged in the courteous but fierce rivalry of fashionable ostentation. Then there were those who hung about the courts of the rich, invited because they filled in the large backgrounds and contributed conversation or ideas for new amusements, accepting because they loved the atmosphere of luxury which they could not afford to create for themselves.

Leonora was undeniably in the latter class. But she was associated in Pauline's mind with the period before her splendor. She had been friendly when Dumont was unknown beyond Saint X. The others sought her-well, for the same reasons of desire for distraction and dread of boredom which made her welcome them. But Leonora, she more than half believed, liked her to a certain extent for herself-"likes me better than I like her." And at times she was self-reproachful for being thus exceeded in self-giving. Leonora, for example, told her her most intimate secrets, some of them far from creditable to her. Pauline told nothing in return. She sometimes longed for a confidant, or, rather, for some person who would understand without being told, some one like Olivia; but her imagination refused to picture Leonora as that kind of friend. Even more pronounced than her frankness, and she was frank to her own hurt, was her biting cynicism-it was undeniably amusing; it did not exactly inspire distrust, but it put Pauline vaguely on guard. Also, she was candidly mercenary, and, in some moods, rapaciously envious. "But no worse," thought Pauline, "than so many of the others here, once one gets below their surface. Besides, it's in a good-natured, good-hearted way."

She wished Fanshaw were as rich as Leonora longed for him to be. She was glad Dumont seemed to be putting him in the way of making a fortune. He was distasteful to her, because she saw that he was an ill-tempered sycophant under a pretense of manliness thick enough to shield him from the unobservant eyes of a world of men and women greedy of flattery and busy each with himself or herself. But for Leonora's sake she invited him. And Leonora was appreciative, was witty, never monotonous or commonplace, most helpful in getting up entertainments, and good to look at-always beautifully dressed and as fresh as if just from a bath; sparkling green eyes, usually with good-humored mockery in them; hard, smooth, glistening shoulders and arms; lips a crimson line, at once cold and sensuous.

On a Friday in December Pauline came up from Dawn Hill and, after two hours at the new house, went to the jeweler's to buy a wedding present for Aurora Galloway. As she was passing the counter where the superintendent had his office, his assistant said: "Beg pardon, Mrs. Dumont. The necklace came in this morning. Would you like to look at it?"

She paused, not clearly hearing him. He took a box from the safe behind him and lifted from it a magnificent necklace of graduated pearls with a huge solitaire diamond clasp. "It's one of the finest we ever got together," he went on. "But you can see for yourself." He was flushing in the excitement of his eagerness to ingratiate himself with such a distinguished customer.

"Beautiful!" said Pauline, taking the necklace as he held it out to her. "May I ask whom it's for?"

The clerk looked puzzled, then frightened, as the implications of her obvious ignorance dawned upon him.

"Oh-I-I--" He almost snatched it from her, dropped it into the box, put on the lid. And he stood with mouth ajar and forehead beaded.

"Please give it to me again," said Pauline, coldly. "I had not finished looking at it."

His uneasy eyes spied the superintendent approaching. He grew scarlet, then white, and in an agony of terror blurted out: "Here comes the superintendent. I beg you, Mrs. Dumont, don't tell him I showed it to you. I've made some sort of a mistake. You'll ruin me if you speak of it to any one. I never thought it might be intended as a surprise to you. Indeed, I wasn't supposed to know anything about it. Maybe I was mistaken--"