Copyright, 1916
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
All rights reserved
Made in U.S.A.

"Stop!" he cried eagerly. "Would you give up everything—everything, mind you,—if I were to ask you to do so?"

Contents

FROM THE HOUSETOPS

CHAPTER I

Mr. Templeton Thorpe was soon to be married for the second time. Back in 1860 he married a girl of twenty-two, and now in the year 1912 he was taking unto himself another girl of twenty-two. In the interim he had achieved a grandson whose years were twenty-nine. In his seventy-seventh year he was worth a great many millions of dollars, and for that and no other reason perhaps, one of the newspapers, in commenting on the approaching nuptials, declared that nobody could now deny that he was a philanthropist.

"I daresay you are right, Mrs. Tresslyn," said old Templeton Thorpe's grandson, bitterly. "He hasn't many more years to live."

The woman in the chair started, her eyes narrowing. The flush deepened in her cheeks. It had been faint before and steady, but now it was ominous.

"I fear you are again putting words into my mouth," she said coldly. "Have I made any such statement?"

"I did not say that you had, Mrs. Tresslyn," said the young man. "I merely observed that you were right. It isn't necessary to put the perfectly obvious into words. He is a very old man, so you are right in believing that he hasn't many years left to live. Nearly four times the age of Anne,—that's how old he is,—and time flies very swiftly for him."

"I must again remind you that you are in danger of becoming offensive, Braden. Be good enough to remember that this interview is not of my choosing. I consented to receive you in—"

"You knew it was inevitable—this interview, as you call it. You knew I would come here to denounce this damnable transaction. I have nothing to apologise for, Mrs. Tresslyn. This is not the time for apologies. You may order me to leave your house, but I don't believe you will find any satisfaction in doing so. You would still know that I have a right to protest against this unspeakable marriage, even though it should mean nothing more to me than the desire to protect a senile old man against the—"

"Your grandfather is the last man in the world to be described as senile," she broke in, with a thin smile.

"I could have agreed with you a month ago, but not now," said he savagely.

"Perhaps you would better go now, Braden," said she, arising. She was a tall, handsome woman, well under fifty. As she faced her visitor, her cold, unfriendly eyes were almost on a level with his own. The look she gave him would have caused a less determined man to quail. It was her way of closing an argument, no matter whether it was with her butcher, her grocer, of the bishop himself. Such a look is best described as imperious, although one less reserved than I but perhaps more potently metaphorical would say that she simply looked a hole through you, seeing beyond you as if you were not there at all. She had found it especially efficacious in dealing with the butcher and even the bishop, to say nothing of the effect it always had upon the commonplace nobodies who go to the butcher and the bishop for the luxuries of both the present and the future life, and it had seldom failed to wither and blight the most hardy of masculine opponents. It was not always so effective in crushing the members of her own sex, for there were women in New York society who could look straight through Mrs. Tresslyn without even appearing to suspect that she was in the range of vision. She had been known, however, to stare an English duke out of countenance, and it was a long time before she forgave herself for doing so. It would appear that it is not the proper thing to do. Crushing the possessor of a title is permissible only among taxi-drivers and gentlemen whose daughters are already married.

Her stony look did not go far toward intimidating young Mr. Thorpe. He was a rather sturdy, athletic looking fellow with a firm chin and a well-set jaw, and a pair of grey eyes that were not in the habit of wavering.

"I came here to see Anne," he said, a stubborn expression settling in his face. "Is she afraid to see me, or is she obeying orders from you, Mrs. Tresslyn?"

"She doesn't care to see you," said Mrs. Tresslyn. "That's all there is to be said about it, Braden."

"So far as I am concerned, she is still engaged to me. She hasn't broken it off by word or letter. If you don't mind, I'd like to have it broken off in the regular way. It doesn't seem quite proper for her to remain engaged to me right up to the instant she marries my grandfather. Or is it possible that she intends to remain bound to me during the lifetime of my grandparent, with the idea of holding me to my bargain when he is gone?"

"Don't be ridiculous," was all that Mrs. Tresslyn said in response to this sarcasm, but she said it scathingly.

For a full minute they stood looking into each other's eyes, each appraising the other, one offensively, the other defensively. She had the advantage of him, for she was prepared to defend herself while he was in the position of one who attacks without strategy and leaps from one exposed spot to another. It was to her advantage that she knew that he despised her; it was to his disadvantage that he knew she had always liked him after a manner of her own, and doubtless liked him now despite the things he had said to her. She had liked him from his boyhood days when report had it that he was to be the sole heir to his grandfather's millions, and she had liked him, no doubt, quite as sincerely, after the old man had declared that he did not intend to ruin a brilliant career by leaving a lot of uninspiring money to his ambitious grandson.

In so many words, old Templeton Thorpe had said, not two months before, that he intended to leave practically all of his money to charity! All except the two millions he stood ready to settle upon his bride the day she married him! Possibly Mrs. Tresslyn liked the grandson all the more for the treasures that he had lost, or was about to lose. It is easy to like a man who will not be pitied. At any rate, she did not consider it worth while to despise him, now that he had only a profession to offer in exchange for her daughter's hand.

"Of course, Mrs. Tresslyn, I know that Anne loves me," he said, with forced calmness. "She doesn't love my grandfather. That isn't even debatable. I fear that I am the only person in the world who does love him. I suspect, too, that if he loves any one, I am that one. If you think that he is fool enough to believe that Anne loves him, you are vastly mistaken. He knows perfectly well that she doesn't, and, by gad, he doesn't blame her. He understands. That's why he sits there at home and chuckles. I hope you will not mind my saying to you that he considers me a very lucky person."

"Lucky?" said she, momentarily off her guard.

"If you care to hear exactly how he puts it, he says I'm damned lucky, Mrs. Tresslyn. Of course, you are not to assume that I agree with him. If I thought all this was Anne's doing and not yours, I should say that I am lucky, but I can't believe—good heavens, I will not believe that she could do such a thing! A young, beautiful, happy girl voluntarily—oh, it is unspeakable! She is being driven into it, she is being sacrificed to—"

"Just one moment, Braden," interrupted Mrs. Tresslyn, curtly. "I may as well set you quite straight in the matter. It will save time and put an end to recriminations. My daughter does not care the snap of her fingers for Mr. Thorpe. I think she loves you quite as dearly now as she ever did. At any rate, she says she does. But that is neither here nor there. She is going to marry Mr. Thorpe, and of her own volition. I have advised her to do so, I will admit, but I have not driven her to it, as you say. No one but a fool would expect her to love that old man. He doesn't ask it of her. He simply asks her to marry him. Nowadays people do not always marry for love. In fact, they frequently marry to avoid it—at least for the time being. Your grandfather has told you of the marriage settlement. It is to be two million dollars, set apart for her, to be hers in full right on the day that he dies. We are far from rich, Anne and I. My husband was a failure—but you know our circumstances quite well enough without my going into them. My daughter is her own mistress. She is twenty-three. She is able to choose for herself. It pleases her to choose the grandfather instead of the grandson. Is that perfectly plain to you? If it is, my boy, then I submit that there is nothing further to be said. The situation is surely clear enough for even you to see. We do not pretend to be doing anything noble. Mr. Thorpe is seventy-seven. That is the long and short of it."

"In plain English, it's the money you are after," said he, with a sneer.

"Obviously," said she, with the utmost candour. "Young women of twenty-three do not marry old men of seventy-seven for love. You may imagine a young girl marrying a penniless youth for love, but can you picture her marrying a penniless octogenarian for the same reason? I fancy not. I speak quite frankly to you, Braden, and without reserve. We have always been friends. It would be folly to attempt to delude you into believing that a sentimental motive is back of our—shall we say enterprise?"

"Yes, that is what I would call it," said he levelly. "It is a more refined word than scheme."

"The world will be grateful for the opportunity to bear me out in all that I have said to you," she went on. "It will cheerfully, even gleefully supply any of the little details I may have considered unnecessary or superfluous in describing the situation. You are at liberty, then, to go forth and assist in the castigation. You have my permission,—and Anne's, I may add,—to say to the world that I have told you plainly why this marriage is to take place. It is no secret. It isn't improbable that your grandfather will consent to back you up in your denunciation. He is that kind of a man. He has no illusions. Permit me to remind you, therefore, that neither you nor the world is to take it for granted that we are hoodwinking Mr. Thorpe. Have I made myself quite clear to you, Braden?"

The young man drew a deep breath. His tense figure relaxed. "I did not know there were such women in the world as you, Mrs. Tresslyn. There were heartless, soulless women among the Borgias and the Medicis, but they lived in an age of intrigue. Their acts were mildly innocuous when compared with—"

"I must ask you to remember that you are in my home, Braden," she interrupted, her eyes ablaze.

"Oh, I remember where I am, perfectly," he cried. "It was in this very room that Anne promised to become my wife. It was here that you gave your consent, less than a year ago."

He had been pacing the floor, back and forth across the space in front of the fireplace, in which logs were blazing on this raw February afternoon. Now he stopped once more to face her resolutely.

"I insist that it is my right to see Anne," he said. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheek pallid. "I must hear from her own lips that she no longer considers herself bound to me by the promise made a year ago. I demand that much of her. She owes it to me, if not to herself, to put an end to the farce before she turns to tragedy. I don't believe she appreciates the wickedness of the thing she is about to do. I insist that it is my right to speak with her, to urge her to reconsider, to point out to her the horrors of—"

"She will not see you, Braden," broke in the mother, finality in her voice.

"She must see me," he shouted. "If not to-day, to-morrow; if not then, some other day, for, by the Eternal, Mrs. Tresslyn, I intend to speak with her if I have to wait until the accursed day you have selected,—at the very altar, if necessary. She shall not go into this thing until she has had the final word with me, and I with her. She does not know what she is doing. She is carried away by the thought of all that money—Money! Good God, Mrs. Tresslyn, she has told me a hundred times that she would marry me if I were as poor as the raggedest beggar in the streets. She loves me, she cannot play this vile trick on me. Her heart is pure. You cannot make me believe that she isn't honest and fair and loyal. I tell you now, once and for all, that I will not stand idly by and see this vile sacrifice made in order to—"

"Rawson," interrupted Mrs. Tresslyn, looking beyond him in the direction of the door, "Doctor Thorpe is going. Will you give him his hat and coat?" She had pressed a button beside the mantelpiece, and in response to the call, the butler stood in the doorway. "Good day, Braden. I am sorry that Anne is unable to see you to-day. She—"

"Good day, Mrs. Tresslyn," he choked out, controlling himself with an effort. "Will you tell her that I shall call to-morrow?"

She smiled. "When do you expect to return to London? I had hoped to have you stay until after the wedding."

His smile was more of an effort than hers. "Thanks. My grandfather has expressed the same hope. He says the affair will not be complete without my presence at the feast. To-morrow, at this hour, I shall come to see Anne. Thank you, Rawson."

CHAPTER II

His gaze swept the long, luxurious drawing-room, now filled with the shadows of late afternoon. A sigh that ended in an unvoiced imprecation escaped him. There was not an object in the room that did not possess for him a peculiar claim of intimacy. Here he had dreamed of paradise with Anne, and here he had built upon his hopes,—a staunch future that demanded little of the imagination. He could never forget this room and all that it had held for him.

But now, in that brief, swift glance, he found himself estimating the cost of all the treasures that it contained, and the price that was to be paid in order that they might not be threatened. These things represented greed. They had always represented greed. They had been saved out of the wreck that befell the Tresslyn fortunes when Anne was a young girl entering her teens, the wreck that destroyed Arthur Tresslyn and left his widow with barely enough to sustain herself and children through the years that intervened between the then and the now.

He recalled that after the wreck had been cleared up, Mrs. Tresslyn had a paltry twenty-five thousand a year on which to maintain the house that, fortuitously, had been in her name at the time of the smash. A paltry sum indeed! Barely enough to feed and clothe one hundred less exacting families for a year; families, however, with wheelbarrows instead of automobiles, and with children instead of servants.

Ten years had elapsed since the death of Arthur Tresslyn, and still the house in the east Seventies held itself above water by means of that meagre two thousand a month! These rare, almost priceless objects upon which he now gazed had weathered the storm, proof against the temptations that beset an owner embarrassed by their richness; they had maintained a smug relationship to harmony in spite of the jangling of discordant instruments, such as writs and attachments and the wails of insufferable creditors who made the usual mistake of thinking that a man's home is his castle and therefore an object of reprisal. The splendid porcelains, the incomparable tapestries and the small but exquisite paintings remained where they had been placed by the amiable but futile Arthur, and all the king's men and all the king's horses could not have removed them without Mrs. Tresslyn's sanction. The mistress of the house subsisted as best she could on the pitiful income from a sequestered half-million, and lived in splendour among objects that deluded even the richest and most arrogant of her friends into believing that nothing was more remote from her understanding than the word poverty, or the equally disgusting word thrift.

Here he had come to children's parties in days when he was a lad and Anne a child of twelve, and here he had always been a welcome visitor and playmate, even to the end of his college years. The motherless, fatherless grandson of old Templeton Thorpe was cherished among heirlooms that never had had a price put upon them. Of all the boys who came to the Tresslyn house, young Braden Thorpe was the heir with the most potent possibility. He did not know it then, but now he knew that on the occasion of his smashing a magnificent porcelain vase the forgiving kiss that Mrs. Tresslyn bestowed upon his flaming cheek was not due to pity but to farsightedness. Somehow he now felt that he could smash every fragile and inanimate thing in sight, and still escape the kiss.

Not the least regal and imposing object in the room was the woman who stood beside the fireplace, smiling as she always smiled when a situation was at its worst and she at her best. Her high-bred, aristocratic face was as insensitive to an inward softness as a chiseled block of marble is to the eye that gazes upon it in rapt admiration. She had trained herself to smile in the face of the disagreeable; she had acquired the art of tranquillity. This long anticipated interview with her daughter's cast-off, bewildered lover was inevitable. They had known that he would come, insistent. She had not kept him waiting. When he came to the house the day after his arrival from England, following close upon a cablegram sent the day after the news of Anne's defection had struck him like a thunderbolt, she was ready to receive him.

And now, quite as calmly and indifferently, she was ready to say good-bye to him forever,—to this man who until a fortnight before had considered himself, and rightly too, to be the affianced husband of her daughter. He meant nothing to her. Her world was complete without him. He possessed her daughter's love,—and all the love she would ever know perhaps,—but even that did not produce within her the slightest qualm. Doubtless Anne would go on loving him to the end of her days. It is the prerogative of women who do not marry for love; it is their right to love the men they do not marry provided they honour the men they do, and keep their skirts clear besides.

Mrs. Tresslyn felt, and honestly too, that her own assurances that Anne loved him would be quite as satisfactory as if Anne were to utter them herself. It all came to the same thing, and she had an idea that she could manage the situation more ably than her daughter.

And Mrs. Tresslyn was quite sure that it would come out all right in the end. She hadn't the remotest doubt that Anne could marry Braden later on, if she cared to do so, and if nothing better offered; so what was there to worry about? Things always shape themselves after the easiest possible fashion. It wasn't as if she was marrying a young man with money. Mrs. Tresslyn had seen things shape themselves before. Moreover, she rather hated the thought of being a grandmother before she was fifty. And so it was really a pleasure to turn this possible son-in-law out of her house just at this time. It would be a very simple matter to open the door to him later on and invite him in.

She stood beside her hearth and watched him go with a calm and far from uneasy eye. He would come again to-morrow, perhaps,—but even at his worst he could not be a dangerous visitor. He was a gentleman. He was a bit distressed. Gentlemen are often put to the test, and they invariably remain gentlemen.

He stopped at the door. "Will you tell Anne that I'll be here to-morrow, Mrs. Tresslyn?"

"I shall tell her, of course," said Mrs. Tresslyn, and lifted her lorgnon.

He went out, filled to the throat with rage and resentment. His strong body was bent as if against a gale, and his hands were tightly clenched in his overcoat pockets. In his haste to get away from the house, he had fairly flung himself into the ulster that Rawson held for him, and the collar of his coat showed high above the collar of the greatcoat,—a most unusual lapse from orderliness on the part of this always careful dresser.

He was returning to his grandfather's house. Old Templeton Thorpe would be waiting there for him, and Mr. Thorpe's man would be standing outside the library door as was his practice when his master was within, and there would be a sly, patient smile on the servant's lips but not in his sombre eyes. He was returning to his grandfather's house because he had promised to come back and tell the old man how he had fared at the home of his betrothed. The old man had said to him earlier in the afternoon that he would know more about women than he'd ever known before by the time his interview was over, and had drily added that the world was full to overflowing of good women who had not married the men they loved,—principally, he was just enough to explain, because the men they loved preferred to marry other women.

Braden had left him seated in the library after a stormy half-hour; and as he rushed from the room, he found Mr. Thorpe's man standing in the hall outside the door, just as he always stood, waiting for orders with the sly, patient smile on his lips.

For sixty years Templeton Thorpe had lived in the house near Washington Square, and for thirty-two of them Wade had been within sound of his voice, no matter how softly he called. The master never rang a bell, night or day. He did not employ Wade to answer bells. The butler could do that, or the parlour-maid, if the former happened to be tipsier than usual. Wade always kept his head cocked a little to one side, in the attitude of one listening, and so long had he been at it that it is doubtful if he could have cocked it the other way without snapping something in his neck. That right ear of his was open for business twenty-four hours out of the day. The rest of his body may have slept as soundly as any man's, but his ear was always awake, on land or sea. It was his boast that he had never had a vacation.

Braden, after his long ride down Fifth Avenue on the stage, found Wade in the hall.

"Is my grandfather in the library, Wade?" he asked, surprised to find the man at the foot of the stairs, quite a distance from his accustomed post.

"He is, sir," said Wade. "He asked me to wait here until you arrived and then to go upstairs for a little while, sir. I fancy he has something to say to you in private." Which was a naïve way of explaining that Mr. Thorpe did not want him to have his ear cocked in the hall during the conversation that was to be resumed after an advisable interval. Observing the strange pallor in the young man's usually ruddy face, he solicitously added: "Shall I get you a glass of—ahem!—spirits, sir? A snack of brandy is a handy thing to—"

"No, thank you, Wade. You forget that I am a doctor. I never take medicine," said Braden, forcing a smile.

"A very good idea, sir," said Wade.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Tresslyn had reported to Anne, in the cosy little boudoir at the top of the house in the Seventies.

"It is just as well that you insisted on me seeing him, dear," she said on entering the room. "He would have said things to you that you could not have forgiven. As it is, you have nothing to forgive, and you have saved yourself a good many tears. He—but, my dear, what's this? Have you been crying?"

Anne, tall and slender, stood with her back to the window, her exquisite face in the shadows. Even in the dim, colourless light of the waning day, she was lovely—lovely even with the wet cheeks and the drooped, whimpering lips.

"What did he say, mother?" she asked, her voice hushed and broken. "How did he look?" Her head was bent and she looked at her mother from beneath pain-contracted brows. "Was he angry? Was he desperate? Did—did he say that he—that he loved me?"

"He looked very well, he was angry, he was desperate and he said that he loved you," replied Mrs. Tresslyn, with the utmost composure. "So dry your eyes. He did just what was to have been expected of him, and just what you counted upon. He—"

"He honestly, truly said that he loved me?" cried the girl, lifting her head and drawing a deep breath.

"Yes,—truly."

Anne dried her eyes with a fresh bit of lace.

"Sit down, mother, and tell me all about it," she said, jerking a small chair around so that it faced the couch. Then she threw herself upon the latter and, reaching out with a slender foot, drew the chair closer. "Sit up close, and let's hear what my future grandson had to say."

CHAPTER III

Braden Thorpe had spent two years in the New York hospitals, after graduation from Johns Hopkins, and had been sent to Germany and Austria by his grandfather when he was twenty-seven, to work under the advanced scientists of Vienna and Berlin. At twenty-nine he came back to New York, a serious-minded, purposeful man, wrapped up in his profession and heterodoxically humane, to use the words of his grandfather. The first day after his return he confided to his grim old relative the somewhat unprofessional opinion that hopelessly afflicted members of the human race should be put out of their misery by attending physicians, operating under the direction of a commission appointed to consider such cases, and that the act should be authorised by law!

His grandfather, being seventy-six and apparently as healthy as any one could hope to be at that age, said that he thought it would be just as well to kill 'em legally as any other way, having no good opinion of doctors, and admitted that his grandson had an exceptionally soft heart in him even though his head was a trifle harder and thicker than was necessary in one so young.

"It's worth thinking about, anyhow, isn't it, granddaddy?" Braden had said, with great earnestness.

"It is, my boy," said Templeton Thorpe; "especially when you haven't got anything serious the matter with you."

"But if you were hopelessly ill and suffering beyond all endurance you'd welcome death, wouldn't you?"

"No, I wouldn't," said Mr. Thorpe promptly. "The only time I ever wanted to shuffle off was when your grandmother first refused to marry me. The second time she refused me I decided to do something almost but not quite so terrible, so I went West. The third time I proposed, she accepted me, and out of sheer joy I very stupidly got drunk. So, you see, there is always something to live for," he concluded, with his driest smile.

"I am quite serious about it, grandfather," said Braden stiffly.

"So I perceive. Well, you are planning to hang out your sign here in New York pretty soon, and you are going to become a licensed physician, the confrère and companion of a lot of distinguished gentlemen who believe just as you do about putting sufferers out of their misery but who wouldn't think of doing it, so I'd advise you to keep your opinions to yourself. What do you suppose I sent you abroad for, and gave you an education that few young men have received? Just to see you kicked out of your profession before you've fairly well put a foot into it, or a knife into a plutocrat, or a pill into a pauper? No, sirree, my boy. You sit tight and let the hangman do all the legal killing that has to be done."

"Oh, I know perfectly well that if I advanced this theory,—or scheme,—at present, I'd be kicked out of the profession, notwithstanding the fact that it has all been discussed a million times by doctors in every part of the world. I can't help having the feeling that it would be a great and humane thing—"

"Quite so," broke in the old man, "but let us talk of something else."

A month later Braden came to him and announced that he and Anne Tresslyn were betrothed. They had known each other for years, and from the time that Anne was seventeen Braden had loved her. He had been a quiet, rather shy boy, and she a gay, self-possessed creature whose outlook upon life was so far advanced beyond his, even in those days of adolescence, that he looked upon her as the eighth wonder of the world. She had poise, manner, worldly wisdom of a pleasantly superficial character that stood for sophistication in his blissful estimate of her advantages over him, and she was so adroit in the art of putting her finger upon the right spot at precisely the right moment that he found himself wondering if he could ever bring himself up to her insuperable level.

And when he came home after the two years in Europe, filled with great thoughts and vast pretentions of a singularly unromantic nature, he found her so much lovelier than before that where once he had shyly coveted he now desired with a fervour that swept him headlong into a panic of dread lest he had waited too long and that he had irretrievably lost her while engaged in the wretchedly mundane and commonplace pursuit of trifles. He was intensely amazed, therefore, to discover that she had loved him ever since she was a child in short frocks. He expected her to believe him when he said to her that she was the loveliest of all God's creatures, but it was more than he could believe when she declared that he was as handsome as a Greek god. That, of course, to him was a ludicrous thing to say, a delusion, a fancy that could not be explained, and yet he had seen himself in a mirror a dozen times a day, perhaps, without even suspecting, in his simplicity, that he was an extremely good-looking chap and well worth a second glance from any one except himself.

The announcement did not come as a surprise to old Mr. Thorpe. He had been expecting it. He realised that Braden's dilatory tactics alone were accountable for the delay in bringing the issue to a head.

"And when do you expect to be married?" he had inquired, squinting at his grandson in a somewhat dubious manner.

"Within the year, I hope," said Braden. "Of course, I shall have to get a bit of a start before we can think of getting married."

"A bit of a start, eh? Expect to get enough of a practice in a year to keep Anne going, do you?"

"We shall live very economically."

"Is that your idea or hers?"

"She knows that I have but little more than two thousand a year, but, of course, it won't take much of a practice to add something to that, you know."

"Besides, you can always depend upon me to help you out, Braden,—that is, within reason," said the other, watching him narrowly out of his shrewd old eyes.

Braden flushed. "You have done more than enough for me already, grandfather. I can't take anything more, you see. I'm going to fight my own way now, sir."

"I see," said Mr. Thorpe. "That's the way to talk, my boy. And what does Anne say to that?"

"She thinks just as I do about it. Oh, she's the right sort, granddaddy, so you needn't worry about us, once we are married."

"Perhaps I should have asked what her mother has to say about it."

"Well, she gave us her blessing," said his grandson, with a happy grin.

"After she had heard about your plan to live on the results of your practice?"

"She said she wasn't going to worry about that, sir. If Anne was willing to wait, so was she."

"Wait for what?"

"My practice to pick up, of course. What do you mean?"

"Just that, of course," said the old man quickly. "Well, my boy, while I daresay it isn't really necessary, I give my consent. I am sure you and Anne will be very happy in your cosy little five-room flat, and that she will be a great help to you. You may even attain to quite a fashionable practice,—or clientele, which is it?—through the Tresslyn position in the city. Thousand dollar appendicitis operations ought to be quite common with you from the outset, with Anne to talk you up a bit among the people who belong to her set and who are always looking for something to keep them from being bored to death. I understand that anybody who has an appendix nowadays is looked upon as exceedingly vulgar and is not even tolerated in good society. As for a man having a sound liver,—well, that kind of a liver is absolutely inexcusable. Nobody has one to-day if he can afford to have the other kind. Good livers always have livers,—and so do bad livers, for that matter. But, now, let us return to the heart. You are quite sure that Anne loves you better than she loves herself? That's quite important, you know. I have found that people who say that they love some one better than anybody else in the world, usually forget themselves,—that is to say, they overlook themselves. How about Anne?"

"Rather epigrammatic, aren't you, granddaddy? I have Anne's word for it, that's all. She wouldn't marry me if she loved any one more than she does me,—not even herself, as you put it. I am sure if I were Anne I should love myself better than all the rest of the world."

"A very pretty speech, my boy. You should make an exceptionally fashionable doctor. You will pardon me for appearing to be cynical, but you see I am a very old man and somewhat warped,—bent, you might say, in my attitude toward the tender passion as it is practised to-day. Still, I shall take your word for it. Anne loves you devotedly, and you love her. The only thing necessary, therefore, is a professional practice, or, in other words, a practical profession. I am sure you will achieve both. You have my best wishes. I love you, my boy. You are the only thing left in life for me to love. Your father was my only son. He would have been a great man, I am sure, if he had not been my son. I spoiled him. I think that is the reason why he died so young. Now, my dear grandson, I am not going to make the mistake with his son that I made with my own. I intend that you shall fight your own battles. Among other things, you will have to fight pretty hard for Anne. That is a mere detail, of course. You are a resolute, determined, sincere fellow, Braden, and you have in you the making of a splendid character. You will succeed in anything you undertake. I like your eye, my boy, and I like the set of your jaw. You have principle and you have a sense of reverence that is quite uncommon in these days of ours. I daresay you have been wicked in an essential sort of way, and I fancy you have been just as necessarily honourable. I don't like a mollycoddle. I don't like anything invertebrate. I despise a Christian who doesn't understand Christ. Christ despised sin but he didn't despise sinners. And that brings us back to Mrs. Tresslyn,—Constance Blair that was. You will have to be exceedingly well fortified, my boy, if you expect to withstand the clever Constance. She is the refinement of maternal ambition. She will not be satisfied to have her daughter married to a mere practice. She didn't bring her up for that. She will ask me to come and see her within the next few days. What am I to say to her when she asks me if I expect you and Anne to live on what you can earn out of your ridiculous profession?"

"I think that's all pretty well understood," said Braden easily. "You do Mrs. Tresslyn an injustice, granddaddy. She says it will be a splendid thing for Anne to struggle along as we shall have to do for a while. Character building, is the way she puts it."

"Just the same, I shall expect a message from her before the engagement is announced," said the old man drily.

A hard glitter had come into his eyes. He loved this good-looking, earnest grandson of his, and he was troubled. He lay awake half the night thinking over this piece of not unexpected news.

The next morning at breakfast he said to Braden: "See here, my boy, you spoke to me recently about your desire to spend a year in and about the London hospitals before settling down to the real business of life. I've been thinking it over. You can't very well afford to pay for these finishing touches after you've begun struggling along on your own hook, and trying to make both ends meet on a slender income, so I'd suggest that you take this next year as a gift from me and spend it on the other side, working with my good friend, Sir George Bascombe, the greatest of all the English surgeons. I don't believe you will ever regret it."

Braden was overjoyed. "I should like nothing better, grandfather. By jove, you are good to me. You—"

"It is only right and just that I should give to the last of my race the chance to be a credit to it." There was something cryptic in the remark, but naturally it escaped Braden's notice. "You are the only one of the Thorpes left, my boy. I was an only son and, strange as it may appear, I was singularly without avuncular relatives. It is not surprising, therefore, that I should desire to make a great man out of you. You shall not be handicapped by any failure on my part to do the right thing by you. If it is in my power to safeguard you, it is my duty to exercise that power. Nothing must be allowed to stand in the way or to obstruct your progress. Nothing must be allowed to check your ambition or destroy your courage. So, if you please, I think you ought to have this chance to work with Bascombe. A year is a short time to a chap of your age and experience, and it may be the most valuable one in a long and successful life."

"If I can ever grow to be half as wise and half as successful as you, grandfather, I shall have achieved more than—"

"My boy, I inherited my success and I've been more of a fool than you suspect. My father left me with two or three millions of dollars, and the little wisdom that I have acquired I would pass on to you instead of money if it were possible to do so. A man cannot bequeath his wisdom. He may inherit it, but he can't give it away, for the simple reason that no one will take it as a gift. It is like advice to the young: something to disregard. My father left me a great deal of money, and I was too much of a coward to become a failure. Only the brave men are failures. They are the ones who take the risks. If you are going to be a surgeon, be a great one. Now, when do you think you can go to London?"

Braden, his face aglow, was not long in answering. "I'll speak to Anne about it to-night. If she is willing to marry me at once, we'll start immediately. By Jove, sir, it is wonderful! It is the greatest thing that ever happened to a fellow. I—"

"Ah, but I'm afraid that doesn't fit in with my plan," interrupted the old man, knitting his brows. "It is my idea that you should devote yourself to observation and not to experimentation,—to study instead of honeymooning. A bride is out of the question, Braden. This is to be my year and not Anne's."

They were a week thrashing it out, and in the end it was Mrs. Tresslyn who settled the matter. She had had her talk with Mr. Templeton Thorpe, and, after hearing all that he had to say, expressed herself in no uncertain terms on the advisability of postponing the wedding for a year if not longer. Something she said in private to Anne appeared to have altered that charming young person's notions in regard to an early wedding, so Braden found himself without an ally. He went to London early in the fall, with Anne's promises safely stowed away in his heart, and he came back in the middle of his year with Sir George, dazed and bewildered by her faithlessness and his grandfather's perfidy.

Out of a clear sky had come the thunderbolt. And then, while he was still dazed and furious, his grandfather had tried to convince him that he had done him a deuce of a good turn in showing up Anne Tresslyn!

In patience the old man had listened to his grandson's tirade, his ravings, his anathemas. He had heard himself called a traitor. He had smiled grimly on being described as a satyr! When words and breath at last failed the stalwart Braden, the old gentleman, looking keenly out from beneath his shaggy brows, and without the slightest trace of resentment in his manner, suggested that they leave the matter to Anne.

"If she really wants you, my boy, she'll chuck me and my two-million-dollar purse out of the window, so to speak, and she'll marry you in spite of your poverty. If she does that, I'll be satisfied. I'll step down and out and I'll praise God for his latest miracle. If she looks at it from the other point of view,—the perfectly safe and secure way, you understand,—and confirms her allegiance to me, I'll still be exceedingly happy in the consciousness that I've done you a good turn. I will enter my extreme old age in the race against your healthy youth. I will proffer my three or four remaining years to her as against the fifty you may be able to give her. Go and see her at once. Then come back here to me and tell me what she says."

And so it was that Braden Thorpe returned, as he had agreed to do, to the home of the man who had robbed him of his greatest possession,—faith in woman. He found his grandfather seated in the library, in front of a half-dead fire. A word, in passing, to describe this remarkable old man. He was tall and thin, and strangely erect for one of his years. His gaunt, seamed face was beardless and almost repellent in its severity. In his deep-set, piercing eyes lurked all the pains of a lifetime. He had been a strong, robust man; the framework was all that remained of the staunch house in which his being had dwelt for so long. His hand shook and his knee rebelled against exertion, but his eye was unwavering, his chin unflinching. White and sparse was the thatch of hair upon his shrunken skull, and harsh was the thin voice that came from his straight, colourless lips. He walked with a cane, and seldom without the patient, much-berated Wade at his elbow, a prop against the dreaded day when his legs would go back on him and the brink would appear abruptly out of nowhere at his very feet. And there were times when he put his hand to his side and held it there till the look of pain softened about his mouth and eyes, though never quite disappeared.

CHAPTER IV

It was Templeton Thorpe's contention that Braden was a family investment, and that a good investment will take care of itself if properly handled. He considered himself quite capable of making a man of Braden, but he did not allow the boy to think that the job was a one-sided undertaking. Braden worked for all that he received. There was no silver platter, no golden spoon in Mr. Thorpe's cupboard. They understood each other perfectly and Templeton Thorpe was satisfied with his investment.

That is why his eyes twinkled when Braden burst into the library after his fruitless appeal to Mrs. Tresslyn. He smiled as one smiles with relief when a craft he is watching glides safely but narrowly past a projecting abutment.

"Calm yourself," he remarked after Braden's somewhat wild and incoherent beginning. "And sit down. You will not get anywhere pacing this twenty by thirty room, and you are liable to run into something immovable if you don't stop glaring at me and watch out where you are going instead."

"Sit down?" shouted Braden, stopping before the old man in the chair, his hands clinched and his teeth showing. "I'll never sit down in your house again! What do you think I am? A snivelling, cringing dog that has to lick your hand for—"

"Now, now!" admonished the old man, without anger. "If you will not sit down, at least be kind enough to stand still. I can't understand half you say while you are stamping around like that. This isn't a china shop. Control yourself. Now, let's have it in so many words and not so many gesticulations. So Anne declined to see you, eh?"

"I don't believe Anne had a voice in the matter. Mrs. Tresslyn is at the back of all this. She is the one who has roped you in,—duped you, or whatever you choose to call it without resorting to profanity. She's forcing Anne into this damnable marriage, and she is making a perfect fool of you. Can't you see it? Can't you see—but, my God, how can I ask that question of you? When a man gets to be as old as you, he—" He broke off abruptly, on the point of uttering the unforgivable.

"Go on, my boy," said Templeton Thorpe quietly. "Say it. I shan't mind."

"Oh, what's the use?" groaned the miserable lover. "I cannot say anything more to you, sir, than I said early this afternoon. I told you then just what I think of your treachery. There isn't anything more for me to say, but I'd like you to know that Anne despises you. Her mother acknowledges that much at least,—and, curse her, without shame!"

"I am quite well aware of the fact, Braden," said the old man. "You couldn't expect her to love me, could you?"

"Then, why in God's name are you marrying her? Why are you spoiling my life? Why are you—"

"Is it spoiling your life to have the girl you love turn to and marry an old wreck such as I am, just because I happen to be willing to pay her two million dollars,—in advance, you might say? Is that spoiling your life or saving it?"

Mr. Thorpe had dropped the cynical, half-amused air, and was now speaking with great intensity. Braden, struck by the change, turned suddenly to regard the old man with a new and puzzled light in his lowering eyes.

"See here, my lad, you've had your chance. I knew what I was about when I sent you to see her. I knew precisely what would happen. She wants to marry you, but she prefers to marry me. That isn't as ambiguous as it sounds. Just think it over,—later on, not now, for I have something else to say to you. Do me the honour to be seated. Thank you. Now, you've got quite a good-sized, respectable nose upon your face. I submit that the situation is quite as plain as that nose, if you look at it in the broad light of understanding. If you think that I am marrying Anne because I love her, or because I am in my dotage and afflicted with senility, you are very much mistaken. If you think I am giving her two million dollars as a wedding gift because I expect it to purchase her love and esteem, you do my intelligence an injustice. If you think that I relish the prospect of having that girl in my house from now till the day I die, worrying the soul out of me, you are too simple for words. I am marrying her, not because I love her, my lad, but—but because I love you. God forbid that I should ever sink so low as to steal from my own flesh and blood. Stealing is one thing, bartering another. I expect to convince you that I have not taken anything from you that is of value, hence I am not a malefactor."

Braden, seated opposite him, his elbows on the arms of the chair, leaned forward and watched the old man curiously. A new light had come into his eyes when Mr. Thorpe uttered those amazing words—"but because I love you." He was beginning to see, he was beginning to analyse the old man's motives, he was groping his way out of the fog.

"You will have hard work to convince me that I have not been treated most unfairly, most vilely," said he, his lips still compressed.

"Many years ago," said Mr. Thorpe, fixing his gaze on the lazy fire, "I asked Anne's grandmother to marry me. I suppose I thought that I was unalterably in love with her. I was the very rich son of a very rich man, and—pardon my conceit—what you would call an exceedingly good catch. Well, in those days things were not as they are now. The young lady, a great beauty and amazingly popular, happened to be in love with Roger Blair, a good-looking chap with no fortune and no prospects. She took the advice of her mother and married the man she loved, disdaining my riches and me as well. Roger wasn't much of a success as a husband, but he was a source of enlightenment and education to his wife. Not in the way you would suspect, however. He managed in very short order to convince her that it is a very ignorant mother who permits her daughter to marry a man without means. They hadn't been married three years when his wife had learned her lesson. It was too late to get rid of Roger, and by that time I was happily married to a girl who was quite as rich as I, and could afford to do as she pleased. So, you see, Anne's grandmother had to leave me out of the case, even though Roger would have been perfectly delighted to have given her sufficient grounds for divorce. I think you knew Anne's grandmother, Braden?" He paused for an answer, a sly, appraising look in his eyes. Receiving no response except a slight nod of the head, he chuckled softly and went on with the history.

"Poor soul, she's gone to her reward. Now we come to Anne's mother. She was an only child,—and one was quite enough, I assure you. No mother ever had greater difficulty in satisfactorily placing a daughter than had Mrs. Blair. There was an army of young but not very dependable gentlemen who would have married her like a flash, notwithstanding her own poverty, had it not been for the fact that Mrs. Blair was so thoroughly educated by this time that she couldn't even contemplate a mistake in her calculations. She had had ample proof that love doesn't keep the wolf from the door, nor does it draw five per cent, as some other bonds do. She brought Constance up in what is now considered to be the most approved fashion in high society. The chap who had nothing but health and ambition and honour and brains to offer, in addition to that unprofitable thing called love, was a viper in Mrs. Blair's estimation. He was very properly and promptly stamped upon by the fond mother and doubtless was very glad to crawl off into the high grass, out of danger. He—"

"What has all this got to do with your present behaviour?" demanded Braden harshly. "Speaking of vipers," he added, by way of comment.

"I am coming to that," said Mr. Thorpe, resenting the interruption but not its sting. "After a careful campaign, Arthur Tresslyn was elected. He had a great deal of money, a kind heart and scarcely any brains. He was an ideal choice, everybody was agreed upon that. The fellow that Constance was really in love with at the time, Jimmy Gordon, was a friend of your father's. Well, the gentle Arthur went to pieces financially a good many years ago. He played hob with all the calculations, and so we find Constance, his wife, lamenting in the graveyard of her hopes and cursing Jimmy Gordon for his unfaithfulness in marrying before he was in a position to do so. If Jimmy had remained single for twelve years longer than he did, I daresay Arthur's widow would have succeeded in nabbing him whether or no. Arthur managed to die very happily, they say, quite well pleased with himself for having squandered the fortune which brought him so much misery. Now we come to Anne, Arthur's daughter. She became deeply enamoured of a splendid, earnest young chap named Braden Thorpe, grandson of the wealthy and doddering Templeton Thorpe, and recognised as his sole heir. Keep your seat, Braden; I am coming to the point. This young Thorpe trusted the fair and beautiful Anne. He set out to make a name and fortune for himself and for her. He sought knowledge and experience in distant lands, leaving his poor old grandfather at home with nothing to amuse himself with except nine millions of dollars and his dread of death. While Braden was experimenting in London, this doddering, senile old gentleman of Washington Square began to experiment a little on his own account. He set out to discover just what sort of stuff this Anne Tresslyn was made of and to prove to himself that she was worthy of his grandson's love. He began with the girl's mother. As soon as possible, he explained to her that money is a curse. She agreed that money is a curse if you haven't got it. In time, he confessed to her that he did not mean to curse his grandson with an unearned fortune, and that he intended to leave him in his will the trifling sum of fifty thousand dollars, thereby endowing him with the ambition and perhaps the energy to earn more and at the same time be of great benefit to the world in which he would have to struggle. Also, he let it be known that he was philanthropically inclined, that he purposed giving a great many millions to science and that his death would be of untold value to the human race. Are you attending, Braden? If you are not, I shall stop talking at once. It is very exhausting and I haven't much breath or time to waste."

"I am listening. Go on," said Braden, suddenly sitting up in his chair and taking a long, deep breath. The angry, antagonistic light was gone from his eyes.

"Well, the clever Mrs. Tresslyn was interested—deeply interested in my disclosures. She did not hesitate to inform me that Anne couldn't begin to live on the income from a miserable fifty thousand, and actually laughed in my face when I reminded her of the young lady's exalted preference for love in a cottage and joy at any price. Biding my time, I permitted the distressing truth to sink in. You will remember that Anne's letters began to come less frequently about four months ago, and—"

"How do you happen to know about that?" broke in the young man, in surprise.

"Where she had been in the habit of writing twice and even three times a week," went on Mr. Thorpe, "she was content to set herself to the task of dropping you a perfunctory letter once in a fortnight. You will also recall that her letters were not so full of intensity—or enthusiasm: they lacked fervour, they fell off considerably in many ways. I happen to know about all this, Braden, because putting two and two together has always been exceedingly simple for me. You see, it was about three months ago that Anne began to reveal more than casual interest in Percy Wintermill. She—"

"Percy Wintermill!" gasped Braden, clutching the arms of his chair. "Why, she has always looked upon him as the stupidest, ugliest man in town. His attentions have been a standing joke between us. He is crazy about her, I know, but—oh, well, go on with the story."

"To be sure he is crazy about her, as you say. That isn't strange. Half the young men in town think they are in love with her, and most of them believe she could make them happy. Now, no one concedes physical beauty or allurement to Percy. He is as ugly as they grow, but he isn't stupid. He is just a nice, amiable, senseless nincompoop with a great deal of money and a tremendous amount of health. He—"

"I like Wintermill. He is one of my best friends. He is as square as any man I know and he would be the last person to try to come between Anne and me. He is too fond of me for that, sir. You—"

"Unfortunately he was not aware of the fact that you and Anne were engaged. You forget that the engagement was to be kept under cover for the time being. But all this is beside the question. Mrs. Tresslyn had looked the field over pretty carefully. No one appeared to be so well qualified to take your place as Percy Wintermill. He had everything that is desirable in a husband except good looks and perhaps good manners. So she began fishing for Percy. Anne was a delightful bait. Of course, Percy's robust health was objectionable, but it wasn't insurmountable. I could see that Anne loathed the thought of having him for a husband for thirty or forty years. Anybody could see that,—even Percy must have possessed intelligence enough to see it for himself. Finally, about six weeks ago, Anne rose above her environment. She allowed Percy to propose, asked for a few days in which to make up her mind, and then came out with a point-blank refusal. She defied her mother, openly declaring that she would marry you in spite of everything."

"And that is just what she shall do, poor girl," cried Braden joyously. "She shall not be driven into—"

"Just a moment, please. When I discovered that young Wintermill couldn't be depended upon to rescue his best friend, I stepped into the arena, so to speak," said Mr. Thorpe with fine irony. "I sensed the situation perfectly. Percy was young and strong and enduring. He would be a long time dying in the natural order of things. What Anne was looking for—now, keep your seat, my boy!—what she wanted was a husband who could be depended upon to leave her a widow before it was too late. Now, I am seventy-seven, and failing pretty rapidly. It occurred to me that I would be just the thing for her. To make the story short, I began to dilate upon my great loneliness, and also hinted that if I could find the right sort of companion I would jump at the chance to get married. That's putting it rather coarsely, my boy, but the whole business is so ugly that it doesn't seem worth while to affect delicacy. Inside of two weeks, we had come to an understanding,—that is, an arrangement had been perfected. I think that everything was agreed upon except the actual day of my demise. As you know, I am to set aside for Anne as an ante-nuptial substitute for all dower rights in my estate, the sum of two million dollars. I may add that the securities guaranteeing this amount have been submitted to Mrs. Tresslyn and she has found them to be gilt-edged. These securities are to be held in trust for her until the day I die, when they go to her at once, according to our contract. She agrees to—"

"By gad, sir, it is infamous! Absolutely infamous!" exclaimed young Thorpe, springing to his feet. "I cannot—I will not believe it of her."

"She agrees to relinquish all claims to my estate," concluded the old man, with a chuckle. "Inasmuch as I have made it quite clear that all of my money is to go to charity,—scientific charity,—I imagine that the Tresslyns feel that they have made a pretty good bargain."

"I still maintain that she will renounce the whole detestable—"

"She would go back on her contract like a shot if she thought that I intended to include you among my scientific charities," interrupted the old man.

"Oh, if I could only have an hour—half an hour with her," groaned Braden. "I could overcome the vile teaching of her mother and bring her to a realisation of what is ahead of her. I—"

"Do you honestly,—in your heart, Braden,—believe that you could do that?" demanded Mr. Thorpe, arising from his chair and laying his hand upon the young man's shoulder. He forced the other's eyes to meet his. "Do you believe that she would be worthy of your love and respect even though she did back out of this arrangement? I want an honest answer."

"God help me, I—I don't know what to think," cried Braden miserably. "I am shocked, bewildered. I can't say what I believe, grandfather. I only know that I have loved her better than my own soul. I don't know what to think now."

"You might also say that she loves herself better than she loves her own soul," said the old man grimly. "She will go on loving you, I've no doubt, in a strictly physical way, but I wouldn't put much dependence in her soulfulness. One of these fine days, she will come to you and say that she has earned two million dollars, and she will ask you if it is too late to start all over again. What will you say to that?"

"Good Lord, sir, what would you expect me to say?" exploded Braden. "I should tell her to—to go to hell!" he grated between his teeth.

"Meanwhile, I want you to understand that I have acted for your best interests, Braden. God knows I am not in love with this girl. I know her kind, I know her breed. I want to save you from—well, I want to give you a fighting chance to be a great, good man. You need the love of a fine, unselfish woman to help you to the heights you aspire to reach. Anne Tresslyn would not have helped you. She cannot see above her own level. There are no heights for her. She belongs to the class that never looks up from the ground. They are always following the easiest path. I am doing you a good turn. Somewhere in this world there is a noble, self-sacrificing woman who will make you happy, who will give strength to you, who will love you for yourself and not for herself. Go out and find her, my boy. You will recognise her the instant you see her."

"But you—what of you?" asked Braden, deeply impressed by the old man's unsuspected sentiment. "Will you go ahead and—and marry her, knowing that she will make your last few years of life unhappy, un—"

"I am under contract," said Templeton Thorpe grimly. "I never go back on a contract."

"I shall see her, nevertheless," said Braden doggedly.

"It is my desire that you should. In fact, I shall make it my business to see that you do. After that, I fancy you will not care to remain here for the wedding. I should advise you to return to London as soon as you have had it out with her."

"I shall remain here until the very hour of the wedding if it is to take place, and up to that very hour I shall do my best to prevent it, grandfather."

"Your failure to do so will make me the happiest man in New York," said Mr. Thorpe, emotion in his voice, "for I love you dearly, Braden."

CHAPTER V

A conspicuous but somewhat unimportant member of the Tresslyn family was a young man of twenty-four. He was Anne's brother, and he had preceded her into the world by the small matter of a year and two months. Mrs. Tresslyn had set great store by him. Being a male child he did not present the grave difficulties that attend the successful launching and disposal of the female of the species to which the Tresslyn family belonged. He was born with the divine right to pick and choose, and that is something that at present appears to be denied the sisters of men. But the amiable George, at the age of one and twenty and while still a freshman in college, picked a girl without consulting his parent and in a jiffy put an end to the theory that man's right is divine.

It took more than half of Mrs. Tresslyn's income for the next two years, the ingenuity of a firm of expensive lawyers, the skill of nearly a dozen private detectives, and no end of sleepless nights to untie the loathsome knot, and even then George's wife had a shade the better of them in that she reserved the right to call herself Mrs. Tresslyn, quite permanently disgracing his family although she was no longer a part of it.

The young woman was employed as a demonstrator for a new brand of mustard when George came into her life. The courtship was brief, for she was a pretty girl and virtuous. She couldn't see why there should be anything wrong in getting married, and therefore was very much surprised, and not a little chagrined, to find out almost immediately after the ceremony that she had committed a heinous and unpardonable sin. She shrank for a while under the lashings, and then, like a beast driven to cover, showed her teeth.

If marriage was not sanctuary, she would know the reason why. With a single unimposing lawyer and not the remotest suggestion of a detective to reinforce her position, she took her stand against the unhappy George and his mother, and so successful were her efforts to make divorce difficult that she came out of chambers with thirty thousand dollars in cash, an aristocratic name, and a valuable claim to theatrical distinction.

All this transpired less than two years prior to the events which were to culminate in the marriage of George's only sister to the Honourable Templeton Thorpe of Washington Square. Needless to say, George was now looked upon in the small family as a liability. He was a never-present help in time of trouble. The worst thing about him was his obstinate regard for the young woman who still bore his name but was no longer his wife. At twenty-four he looked upon himself as a man who had nothing to live for. He spent most of his time gnashing his teeth because the pretty little divorcee was receiving the attentions of young gentlemen in his own set, without the slightest hint of opposition on the part of their parents, while he was obliged to look on from afar off.

It appears that parents do not object to young women of insufficient lineage provided the said young women keep at a safe distance from the marriage altar.

It is interesting to note in this connection, however, that little Mrs. George Tresslyn was a model of propriety despite her sprightly explorations of a world that had been strange to her up to the time she was cast into it by a disgusted mother-in-law, and it is still more interesting to find that she nourished a sly hope that some day George would kick over the traces in a very manly fashion and marry her all over again!

Be that as it may, the bereft and humiliated George favoured his mother and sister with innumerable half-hours in which they had to contend with scornful and exceedingly bitter opinions on the iniquity of marriage as it is practised among the elect. He fairly bawled his disapproval of the sale of Anne to the decrepit Mr. Thorpe, and there was not a day in the week that did not contain at least one unhappy hour for the women in his home, for just so often he held forth on the sanctity of the marriage vows.

He was connected with a down-town brokerage firm and he was as near to being a failure in the business as an intimate and lifelong friend of the family would permit him to be and still allow him to remain in the office. His business was the selling of bonds. The friend of the family was the head of the firm, so no importance should be attached to the fact that George did not earn his salt as a salesman. It is only necessary to report that the young man made frequent and determined efforts to sell his wares, but with so little success that he would have been discouraged had it not been for the fact that he was intimately acquainted with himself. He knew himself too well to expect people to take much stock in the public endeavours of one whose private affairs were so far beneath notice. Men were not likely to overlook the disgraceful treatment of the little "mustard girl," for even the men who have mistreated women in their time overlook their own chicanery in preaching decency over the heads of others who have not played the game fairly. George looked upon himself as a marked man, against whom the scorn of the world was justly directed.

Strange as it may appear, George Tresslyn was a tall, manly looking fellow, and quite handsome. At a glance you would have said that he had a great deal of character in his make-up and would get on in the world. Then you would hear about his matrimonial delinquency and instantly you would take a second glance. The second and more searching look would have revealed him as a herculean light-weight,—a man of strength and beauty and stature spoiled in the making. And you would be sorry that you had made the discovery, for it would take you back to his school days, and then you would encounter the causes.

He had gone to a preparatory school when he was twelve. It was eight years before he got into the freshman class of the college that had been selected as the one best qualified to give him a degree, and there is no telling how long he might have remained there, faculty willing, had it not been for the interfering "mustard girl." He could throw a hammer farther and run the hundred faster than any youth in the freshman class, and he could handle an oar with the best of them, but as he had spent nearly eight years in acquiring this proficiency to the exclusion of anything else it is not surprising that he excelled in these pursuits, nor is it surprising that he possessed a decided aversion for the things that are commonly taught in college by studious-looking gentlemen who do not even belong to the athletic association and have forgotten their college yell.

George boasted, in his freshman year, that if the faculty would let him alone he could easily get through the four years without flunking a single thing in athletics. It was during the hockey season, just after the Christmas holidays, that he married the pretty "mustard girl" and put an abrupt end to what must now be regarded as a superficial education.

He carried his athletic vigour into the brokerage offices, however. No one could accuse him of being lazy, and no one could say that he did not make an effort. He possessed purpose and determination after a fashion, for he was proud and resentful; but he lacked perspective, no matter which way he looked for it. Behind him was a foggy recollection of the things he should have learned, and ahead was the dark realisation that the world is made up principally of men who cannot do the mile under thirty minutes but who possess amazing powers of endurance when it comes to running circles around the man who is trained to do the hundred yard dash in ten seconds flat.

A few minutes after Braden Thorpe's departure from the Tresslyn drawing-room, young George entered the house and stamped upstairs to his combination bed-chamber and sitting-room on the top floor. He always went upstairs three steps at a time, as if in a hurry to have it over with. He had a room at the top of the house because he couldn't afford one lower down. A delayed sense of compunction had ordered Mrs. Tresslyn to insist upon George's paying his own way through life, now that he was of age and working for himself.

When George found it impossible to pay his week's reckoning out of his earnings, he blithely borrowed the requisite amount—and a little over—from friends down-town, and thereby enjoyed the distinction of being uncommonly prompt in paying his landlady on the dot. So much for character-building.

And now one of these "muckers" down-town was annoying him with persistent demands for the return of numerous small loans extending over a period of nineteen months. That sort of thing isn't done among gentlemen, according to George Tresslyn's code. For a month or more he had been in the humiliating position of being obliged to dodge the fellow, and he was getting tired of it. The whole amount was well under six hundred dollars, and as he had made it perfectly plain to the beggar that he was drawing ten per cent. on the loans, he couldn't see what sense there was in being in such a hurry to collect. On the other hand, as the beggar wasn't receiving the interest, it is quite possible that he could not look at the situation from George's point of view.

Young Mr. Tresslyn finally had reached the conclusion that he would have to ask his mother for the money. He knew that the undertaking would prove a trying one, so he dashed up to his room for the purpose of fortifying himself with a stiff drink of benedictine.

Having taken the drink, he sat down for a few minutes to give it a chance to become inspirational. Then he skipped blithely down to his mother's boudoir and rapped on the door,—not timidly or imploringly but with considerable authority. Receiving no response, he moved on to Anne's sitting-room, whence came the subdued sound of voices in conversation. He did not knock at Anne's door, but boldly opened it and advanced into the room.

"Hello! Here you are," said George amiably.

He was met by a cold, disapproving stare from his mother and a little gasp of dismay from Anne. It was quite apparent that he was an intruder.

"I wish you would be good enough to knock before entering, George," said Mrs. Tresslyn severely.

"I did," said George, "but you were not in. I always knock at your door, mother. You can't say that I've ever forgotten to do it." He looked aggrieved. "You surely don't mean that I ought to knock at Anne's door?"

"Certainly. What do you want?"

"Well," he began, depositing his long body on the couch and preparing to stretch out, "I'd like to kiss both of you if you'll let me."

"Don't be silly," said Anne, "and don't put your feet on that clean chintz."

"All right," said he cheerfully. "My, how lovely the bride is looking to-day! I wish old Tempy could see you now. He'd—"

"If you are going to be disagreeable, George, you may get out at once," said Mrs. Tresslyn.

"I never felt less like being objectionable in my life," said he, "so if you don't mind I'll stay awhile. By the way, Anne, speaking of disagreeable things, I am sure I saw Brady Thorpe on the avenue a bit ago. Has your discarded skeleton come back with a key to your closet?"

"Braden is in New York," said his mother acidly. "Is it necessary for you to be vulgar, George?"

"Not at all," said he. "When did he arrive? I hope you don't see anything vulgar in that, mother," he made haste to add.

"He reached New York to-day, I think. He has been here to see me. He has gone away. There is nothing more to be said, so please be good enough to consider the subject—"

"Gee! but I'd like to have heard what he had to say to you!"

"I am glad that you didn't," said Anne, "for if you had you might have been under the painful necessity of calling him to account for it, and I don't believe you'd like that."

"Facetious, eh? Well, my mind is relieved at any rate. He spoke up like a little man, didn't he, mother? I thought he would. And I'll bet you gave him as good as he sent, so he's got his tail between his legs now and yelping for mercy. How does he look, Anne? Handsome as ever?"

"Anne did not see him."

"Of course she didn't. How stupid of me. Where is he stopping?"

"With his grandfather, I suppose," said Mrs. Tresslyn, as tolerant as possible.

"Naturally. I should have known that without asking. Getting the old boy braced up for the wedding, I suppose. Pumping oxygen into him, and all that sort of thing. And that reminds me of something else. I may give myself the pleasure of a personal call upon my prospective brother-in-law to-morrow."

"What?" cried his mother sharply.

"Yep," said George blithely. "I may have to do it. It's purely a business matter, so don't worry. I shan't say a word about the wedding. Far be it from me to distress an old gentleman about—"

"What business can you have with Mr. Thorpe?" demanded his mother.

"Well, as I don't believe in keeping secrets from you, mother, I'll explain. You see, I want to see if I can't negotiate the sale of a thousand dollar note. Mr. Thorpe may be in the market to buy a good, safe, gilt-edge note—"

"Come to the point. Whose note are you trying to sell?"

"My own," said George promptly.

Anne laughed. "You would spell gilt with a letter u inserted before the i, in that case, wouldn't you?"

"I give you my word," said George, "I don't know how to spell it. The two words sound exactly alike and I'm always confusing them."

His mother came and stood over him. "George, you are not to go to Mr. Thorpe with your pecuniary difficulties. I forbid it, do you understand?"

"Forbid it, mother? Great Scot, what's wrong in an honest little business transaction? I shall give him the best of security. If he doesn't care to let me have the money on the note, that's his affair. It's business, not friendship, I assure you. Old Tempy knows a good thing when he sees it. I shall also promise to pay twenty per cent. interest for two years from date. Two years, do you understand? If anything should happen to him before the two years are up, I'd still owe the money to his estate, wouldn't I? You can't deny that—"

"Stop! Not another word, sir! Am I to believe that I have a son who is entirely devoid of principle? Are you so lacking in pride that—"

"It depends entirely on how you spell the word, principal or with a ple. I am entirely devoid of the one ending in pal, and I don't see what pride has to do with it anyway. Ask Anne. She can tell you all that is necessary to know about the Tresslyn pride."

"Shut up!" said Anne languidly.

"It's just this way, mother," said George, sitting up, with a frown. "I've got to have five or six hundred dollars. I'll be honest with you, too. I owe nearly that much to Percy Wintermill, and he is making himself infernally obnoxious about it."

"Percy Wintermill? Have you been borrowing money from him?"

"In a way, yes. That is, I've been asking him for it and he's been lending it to me. I don't think I've ever used the word borrow in a single instance. I hate the word. I simply say: 'Percy, let me take twenty-five for a week or two, will you?' and Percy says, 'All right, old boy,' and that's all there is to it. Percy's been all right up to a few weeks ago. In fact, I don't believe he would have mentioned the matter at all if Anne hadn't turned him down on New Year's Eve. Why the deuce did you refuse him, Anne? He'd always been decent till you did that. Now he's perfectly impossible."

"You know perfectly well why I refused him," said Anne, lifting her eyebrows slightly.

"Right-o! It was because you were engaged to Brady Thorpe. I quite forgot. I apologise. You were quite right in refusing him. Be that as it may, however, Percy is as sore as a crab. I can't go around owing money to a chap who has been refused by my sister, can I? One of the Wintermills, too. By Jove, it's awful!" He looked extremely distressed.

"You are not to go to Mr. Thorpe," said his mother from the chair into which she had sunk in order to preserve a look of steadiness. A fine moisture had come out upon her upper lip. "You must find an honourable way in which to discharge your debts."

"Isn't my note as good as anybody's?" he demanded.

"No. It isn't worth a dollar."

"Ah, but it will be if Mr. Thorpe buys it," said he in triumph. "He could discount it for full value, if he wanted to. That's precisely what makes it good. I'm afraid you don't know very much about high finance, mother dear."

"Please go away, George," complained Anne. "Mother and I have a great deal to talk about, and you are a dreadful nuisance when you discover a reason for coming home so long before dinner-time. Can't you pawn something?"

"Don't be ridiculous," said George.

"Why did you borrow money from Percy Wintermill?" demanded Mrs. Tresslyn.

"There you go, mother, using that word 'borrow' again. I wish you wouldn't. It's a vulgar word. You might as well say, 'Why did you swipe money from Percy Wintermill?' He lent it to me because he realised how darned hard-up we are and felt sorry for me, I suppose."

"For heaven's sake, George, don't tell me that you—"

"Don't look so horrified, mother," he interrupted. "I didn't tell him we were hard-up. I merely said, from time to time, 'Let me take fifty, Percy.' I can't help it if he suspects, can I? And say, Anne, he was so terribly in love with you that he would have let me take a thousand any time I wanted it, if I'd had occasion to ask him for it. You ought to be thankful that I didn't."

"Don't drag me into it," said Anne sharply.

"I admit I was fooled all along," said he, with a rueful sigh. "I had an idea that you'd be tickled to death to marry into the Wintermill family. Position, money, family jewels, and all that sort of thing. Everything desirable except Percy. And then, just when I thought something might come of it, you up and get engaged to Brady Thorpe, keeping it secret from the public into the bargain. Confound it, you didn't even tell me till last fall. Your stupid secretiveness allowed me to go on getting into Percy's debt, when a word from you might have saved me a lot of trouble."

"Will you kindly leave the room, George?" said his mother, arising.

"Percy is making himself fearfully obnoxious," went on George ominously. "For nearly three weeks I've been dodging him, and it can't go on much longer. One of these fine days, mother, a prominent member of the Wintermill family is going to receive a far from exclusive thrashing. That's the only way I can think of to stop him, if I can't raise the money to pay him up. Some day I'm going to refrain from dodging and he is going to run right square into this." He held up a brawny fist. "I'm going to hold it just so, and it won't be too high for his nose, either. Then I'm going to pick him up and turn him around, with his face toward the Battery, and kick just as hard as I know how. I'll bet my head he'll not bother me about money after that—unless, of course, he's cad enough to sue me. I don't think he'll do that, however, being a proud and haughty Wintermill. I suppose we'll all be eliminated from the Wintermill invitation list after that, and it may be that we'll go without a fashionable dinner once in awhile, but what's all that to the preservation of the family dignity?"

Mrs. Tresslyn leaned suddenly against a chair, and even Anne turned to regard her tall brother with a look of real dismay.

"How much do you owe him?" asked the former, controlling her voice with an effort.

"Five hundred and sixty-five dollars, including interest. A pitiful sum to get thrashed for, isn't it?"

"And you were planning to get the money from Mr. Thorpe to pay Percy?"

"To keep Percy from getting licked, would be the better way to put it. I think it's uncommonly decent of me."

"You are—you are a bully, George,—a downright bully," flared Anne, confronting him with blazing eyes. "You have no right to frighten mother in this way. It's cowardly."

"He doesn't frighten me, dear," said Mrs. Tresslyn, but her lips quivered. Turning to her son, she continued: "George, if you will mail a check to Percy this minute, I will draw one for you. A Tresslyn cannot owe money to a Wintermill. We will say no more about it. The subject is closed. Sit down there and draw a check for the amount, and I will sign it. Rawson will post it."

George turned his head away, and lowered his chin. A huskiness came quickly into his voice.

"I'm—I'm ashamed of myself, mother,—I give you my word I am. I came here intending to ask you point-blank to advance me the money. Then the idea came into my head to work the bluff about old Mr. Thorpe. That grew into Percy's prospective thrashing. I'm sorry. It's the first time I've ever tried to put anything over on you."

"Fill in the check, please," she said coldly. "I've just been drawing a few for the dressmakers—a few that Anne has just remembered. I shan't in the least mind adding one for Percy. He isn't a dressmaker but if I were asked to select a suitable occupation for him I don't know of one he'd be better qualified to pursue. Fill it in, please."

Her son looked at her admiringly. "By Jove, mother, you are a wonder. You never miss fire. I'd give a thousand dollars, if I had it, to see old Mrs. Wintermill's face if that remark could be repeated to her."

A faint smile played about his mother's lips. After all, there was honest tribute in the speech of this son of hers.

"It would be worse than a bloody nose for Percy," said Anne, slipping an arm around her mother's waist. "But I don't like what you said about me and the dressmakers. I must have gowns. It isn't quite the same as George's I.O.U. to Percy, you know."

"Don't be selfish, Anne," cried George, jerking a chair up to the escritoire and scrambling among the papers for a pen. "You won't have to worry long. You'll soon be so rich that the dressmakers won't dare to send you a bill."

"Wait a moment, George," said Mrs. Tresslyn abruptly. "If you do not promise to refrain from saying disagreeable things to Anne, I shall withdraw my offer to help you out of this scrape."

George faced her. "Does that mean that I am to put my O.K. upon this wedding of Anne's?" His look of good-nature disappeared.

"It means that you are not to comment upon it, that's all," said his mother. "You have said quite enough. There is nothing more that you can add to an already sufficiently distasteful argument."

George swallowed hard as he bent over the checkbook. "All right, mother, I'll try to keep my trap closed from now on. But I don't want you to think that I'm taking this thing pleasantly. I'll say for the last time,—I hope,—that it's a darned crime, and we'll let it go at that."

"Very well. We will let it go at that."

"Great Scot!" burst from his lips as he whirled in the fragile chair to face the women of the house. "I just can't help feeling as I do about it. I can't bear to think of Anne,—my pretty sister Anne,—married to that old rummy. Why, she's fit to be the wife of a god. She's the prettiest girl in New York and she'd be one of the best if she had half a chance. A fellow like Braden Thorpe would make a queen of her, and that's just what she ought to be. Oh, Lord! To think of her being married to that burnt-out, shrivelled-up—"

"George! That will do, sir!"

His sister was staring at him in utter perplexity. Something like wonder was growing in her lovely, velvety eyes. Never before had she heard such words as these from the lips of her big and hitherto far from considerate brother, the brother who had always begrudged her the slightest sign of favour from their mother, who had blamed her for securing by unfair means more than her share of the maternal peace-offerings.

Suddenly the big boy dug his knuckles into his eyes and turned away, muttering an oath of mortification. Anne sprang to his side. Her hands fell upon his shoulders.

"What are you doing, George? Are—are you crazy?"

"Crazy nothing," he choked out, biting his lip. "Go away, Anne. I'm just a damned fool, that's all. I—"

"Mother, he's—he's crying," whispered Anne, bewildered. "What is it, George?" For the first time in her life she slipped an affectionate arm about him and laid her cheek against his sleek, black hair. "Buck up, little boy; don't take it like this. I'll—I'll be all right. I'll—oh, I'll never forget you for feeling as you do, George. I didn't think you'd really care so much."

"Why,—why, Anne, of course I care," he gulped. "Why shouldn't I care? Aren't you my sister, and I your brother? I'd be a fine mess of a thing if I didn't care. I tell you, mother, it's awful! You know it is! It is a queer thing for a brother to say, I suppose, but—but I do love Anne. All my life I've looked upon her as the finest thing in the world. I've been mean and nasty and all that sort of thing and I'm always saying rotten things to her, but, darn it, I—I do love my pretty sister. I ought to hate you, Anne, for this infernal thing you are determined to do—I ought to, do you understand, but I can't, I just can't. It's the rottenest thing a girl can do, and you're doing it, I—oh, say, what's the matter with me? Sniffling idiot! I say, where the devil do you keep your pen?" Wrathfully he jerked a pile of note paper and blotters off the desk, scattering them on the floor. "I'll write the check, mother, and I'll promise to do my best hereafter about Anne and old Tempy. And what's more, I'll not punch Percy's nose, so you needn't be afraid he'll turn it up at us."

The pen scratched vigorously across the check. His mother was regarding him with a queer expression in her eyes. She had not moved while he was expressing himself so feelingly about Anne. Was it possible that after all there was something fine in this boy of hers? His simple, genuine outburst was a revelation to her.

"I trust this may be the last time that you will come to me for money in this way, George," she said levelly. "You must be made to realise that I cannot afford such luxuries as these. You have made it impossible for me to refuse you this time. I cannot allow a son of mine to be in debt to a Wintermill. You must not borrow money. You—"

He looked up, grinning. "There you go again with that middle-class word, mother. But I'll forgive you this once on condition that you never use it again. People in our walk of life never borrow anything but trouble, you know. We don't borrow money. We arrange for it occasionally, but God forbid that we should ever become so common as to borrow it. There you are, filled in and ready for your autograph—payable to Percy Reginald Van Alstone Wintermill. I put his whole name in so that he'd have to go to the exertion of signing it all on the back. He hates work worse than poison. I'm glad you didn't accept him, Anne. It would be awful to have to look up to a man who is so insignificant that you'd have to look down upon him at the same time."

Mrs. Tresslyn signed the check. "I will have Rawson post it to him at once," she said. "There goes one of your gowns, Anne,—five hundred and sixty-five dollars."

"I shan't miss it, mother dear," said Anne cheerfully. She had linked an arm through one of George's, much to the surprise and embarrassment of the tall young man.

"Bully girl," said he awkwardly. "Just for that I'll kiss the bride next month, and wish her the best of luck. I—I certainly hope you'll have better luck than I had."

"There's still loads of luck ahead for you, George," said she, a little wistfully. "All you've got to do is to keep a sharp lookout and you'll find it some day—sooner than I, I'm sure. You'll find the right girl and—zip! Everything will be rosy, old boy!"

He smiled wryly. "I've lost the right girl, Anne."

"Nonsense!" exclaimed Mrs. Tresslyn sharply. Her eyes narrowed as she looked into his. "You ought to get down on your knees and thank God that you are not married to that—"

"Wait a second, mother," he broke in. "I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to let her alone, now that you're rid of her, just as I'm expected to let old Tempy slide by without noticing him."

"Nonsense," again said Mrs. Tresslyn, but this time with less confidence in her voice. She looked intently into her son's set face and fear was revived in her soul, an ever-present fear that slept and roused itself with sickening persistency.

"We'll hang her up in the family closet, if you don't mind, alongside of Brady Thorpe, and we'll never mention her again if I can help it. I must say, though, that our skeletons are uncommonly attractive, aren't they, Anne? No dry, rattling bones in our closets, are there?" He squeezed her arm playfully, and was amazed when she jerked it away.

"I was nice to you, George, and this is the way you—"

"Forgive me, please. I didn't mean it in an offensive way. I just took it for granted that we'd understand each other. At any rate, we've got one thing to be thankful for. There are no Wintermill skeletons hanging in our closets. We've both succeeded in dodging them, praise the Lord."

It so happened that Percy's excessively homely sister had been considered at one time as a most desirable helpmate for the rapidly developing George, and it is barely possible that the little mustard girl upset a social dynasty.

CHAPTER VI

Mr. Thorpe was as good as his word. He arranged for the meeting between Braden and Anne, but with characteristic astuteness laid his plans so that they were to come upon each other unexpectedly. It happened on the second day after his talk with Braden.

Mr. Thorpe's plan involved other people as well as the two most vitally interested. There was to be a meeting at his house late in the afternoon for the purpose of signing the ante-nuptial contract already agreed upon. Five o'clock was the hour set for the gathering. Lawyers representing both parties were to be there, with Mrs. Tresslyn, George and Anne, and Mr. Thorpe's private secretary, who, with Dr. Bates, was to serve as a witness to the instrument.

At noon Wade delivered a letter to Miss Tresslyn in which Mr. Thorpe said that he would be pleased if she would accompany him to Tiffany's for the purpose of selecting a string of pearls. He made it quite clear that she was to go alone with him, playfully mentioning his desire to be the only witness to her confusion when confronted by the "obsequious salesman and his baubles from the sea." If quite agreeable to her he would make an appointment with the jeweller for 3.30 and would call for her in person. After that, he continued, the signing of a contract for life would not seem such a portentous undertaking, and they could go to the meeting with hearts as light as air. It was a cheerful, even gay little missive, but she was not for an instant blind to the irony that lay between the lines.

Anne selected the pearls that he had chosen in advance of their visit to Tiffany's. He did not tell her that he had instructed the jeweller to make up a string of pearls for her inspection, with the understanding that she was to choose for herself from an assortment of half-a-dozen beautiful offerings, no price to be mentioned. He was quite sure that she would not even consider the cost. He credited her with an honest scorn for sentimentality; she would make no effort to glorify him for an act that was so obviously a part of their unsentimental compact. There would be no gushing over this sardonic tribute to her avarice. She would have herself too well in hand for that.

They were about her neck when she entered the house near Washington Square almost an hour before the time appointed for the conference. In her secret but subdued pleasure over acquiring the costly present, she had lost all count of time. That was a part of Mr. Thorpe's expensive programme.

All the way down in the automobile she had been estimating the value of her new possession. On one point she was satisfied: there were few handsomer strings in New York than hers. She would have to keep them in a safe place,—a vault, no doubt. Nearly every matron of her acquaintance made a great deal of the fact that she had to buy a safe in which to store her treasures. There was something agreeable—subtly agreeable—in owning jewels that would have to be kept in one of those staunch, opulent looking safes. She experienced a thrill of satisfaction by describing herself in advance, as one of the women with pearls. And there was additional gratification in the knowledge that she could hardly be called a matron in the strict sense of the word. She was glad that she was too young for that. She tried to recall the names of all the women who possessed pearls like these, and the apparent though undeclared age of each. There was not one among them who was under forty. Most of them had endured many years of married life before acquiring what she was to have at the outset. Mrs. Wintermill, for instance: she was sixty-two or three, and had but recently come into a string of pearls not a whit more valuable than the one that now adorned her neck and lay hidden beneath the warm fur collar of her coat.

Her calculations suddenly hit upon something that could be used as a basis. Mrs. Wintermill's pearls had cost sixty-five thousand dollars. Sixty-five thousand dollars! She could not resist the impulse to shoot a swift, startled look out of the corners of her eyes at the silent old man beside her. That was a lot of money! And it was money that he was under no obligation to expend upon her. It was quite outside the contract. She was puzzled. Why this uncalled for generosity? A queer, sickening doubt assailed her.

"Are—are these pearls really and truly to be mine?" she asked. "Mine to keep forever?"

"Certainly, my dear," he said, looking at her so oddly that she flushed. He had read the thought that was in her mind. "I give and bequeath them to you this day, to have and to hold forever," he added, with a smile that she could not fail to understand.

"I wanted to be sure," she said, resorting to frankness.

When they entered the Thorpe home, Wade was waiting in the hall with the butler. His patient, set smile did not depart so much as the fraction of an inch from its habitual condition. His head was cocked a little to one side.

"Are we late, Wade?" inquired Mr. Thorpe.

"No, sir," said Wade. "No one has come." He glanced up at the tall clock on the landing. "It is a quarter past four, sir. Mrs. Tresslyn telephoned a few minutes ago, sir."

"Ah! That she would be late?"

"No, sir. To inquire if—ahem!—if Mr. Braden was likely to be here this afternoon."

Anne started violently. A quick, hunted expression leaped into her eyes as she looked about her. Something rushed up into her throat, something that smothered.

"You informed her, of course, that Mr. Braden declines to honour us with his presence," said Mr. Thorpe suavely.

"Yes, sir, in a way."

"Ahem! Well, my dear, make yourself quite at home. Go into the library, do. You'll find a roaring fire there. Murray, take Miss Tresslyn's coat. Make her comfortable. Come, Wade, your arm. Forgive me, Anne, if I leave you to yourself for a few minutes. My joy at having you here is shorn of its keenness by a long-established age that demands house-boots, an eider-down coat and—Murray, what the devil do you mean by letting the house get so cold as all this? It's like a barn. Are the furnaces out. What am I paying that rascally O'Toole for? Tell him to—"

"It is quite comfortable, Mr. Thorpe," said Anne, with a slight shiver that was not to be charged to the defective O'Toole.

The long, wide hall was dark and grim. Wade was dark and grim, and Murray too, despite his rotundity. There were lank shadows at the bottom of the hall, grim projections of objects that stood for ornamentation: a suit of armour, a gloomy candlestick of prodigious stature, and a thin Italian cabinet surmounted by an urn whose unexposed contents might readily have suggested something more sinister than the dust of antiquity. The door to the library was open. Fitful red shadows flashed dully from the fireplace across the room, creeping out into the hall and then darting back again as if afraid to venture. The waning sunlight struggled through a curtained window at the top of the stairs. There was dusk in the house. Evening had fallen there.

Anne stood in the middle of the library, divested of her warm fur coat. Murray was poking the fire, and cheerful flames were leaping upward in response to the call to wake. She had removed one of her gloves. With the slim, bared fingers she fondled the pearls about her neck, but her thoughts were not of baubles. She was thinking of this huge room full of shadows, shadows through which she would have to walk for many a day, where night would always be welcome because of the light it demanded.

It was a man's room. Everything in it was massive, substantial. Big chairs, wide lounges, and a thick soft carpet of dull red that deprived the footfall of its sound. Books mounted high,—almost to the ceiling,—filling all the spaces left unused by the doors and windows. Heavy damask curtains shut out the light of day. She wondered why they had been drawn so early, and whether they were always drawn like this. Near the big fireplace, with its long mantelpiece over which hung suspended the portrait of an early Knickerbocker gentleman with ruddy, even convivial countenance, stood a long table, a reading lamp at the farther end. Books, magazines, papers lay in disorder upon this table.

She recalled something that Braden once had told her: his grandfather always "raised Cain" with any one who happened to be guilty of what he called criminal orderliness in putting the table to rights. He wanted the papers and magazines left just as they were, so that he could put his hand upon them without demanding too much of a servant's powers of divination. More than one parlour-maid had been dismissed for offensive neatness.

She closed her eyes for a second. A faint line, as of pain, appeared between them. In this room Braden Thorpe had been coddled and scolded, in this room he had romped and studied—She opened her eyes quickly.

"Murray," she said, in a low voice; "you are quite sure that Mr. Braden is—is out?"

The old butler straightened up from his task, his hand going to his back as if to keep it from creaking. "Yes, Miss Tresslyn, quite sure." He hesitated for a moment. "I think he said that he intended to give himself the pleasure of a call—ahem! I beg pardon. Yes, he is quite out—I should say, I'm quite sure he is out." He was confused, a most unheard of thing in Murray.

"But he will return—soon?" She took a step or two nearer the door, possessed of a sudden impulse to run,—to run swiftly away.

"I think not, miss," said he. "He is not expected to be here during the—er—you might say, the—ahem!"

"I'll have a look about the room," said Anne softly. She felt that she was going to like Murray. She wanted him to like her. The butler may have caught the queer little note in her voice, or he may have seen the hunted look in her eyes before she turned them away. At any rate, he poked the fire vigorously once more. It was his way of saying that she might depend upon him. Then he went out of the room, closing the door behind him.

She started violently, and put her hand to her heart. She had the queer, uncanny feeling that she was locked in this sombre room, that she would never be free again.

In a room upstairs, Mr. Templeton Thorpe was saying to Wade:

"Is my grandson in his room?"

"Yes, sir. He came in at four and has been waiting for you, as you directed, sir."

"Tell him that I would like to see him at once in the library," said Mr. Thorpe.

"Yes, sir," said Wade, and for the first time in years his patient smile assumed the proportions of a grin. He did not have to be told that Anne's presence in the house was not to be made known to Braden. All that he was expected to do was to inform the young man that his grandfather wanted to see him in the library,—at once.

And so it came to pass that three minutes later, Braden and Anne were face to face with each other, and old Mr. Thorpe had redeemed his promise.

Of the two, Braden was the more surprised. The girl's misgivings had prepared her for just such a crisis as this. Something told her the instant she set foot inside the house that she was to be tricked. In a flash she realised that Mr. Thorpe himself was responsible for the encounter she had dreaded. It was impossible to suspect Braden of being a party to the scheme. He was petrified. There could be no doubt that he had been tricked quite as cleverly as she.

But what could have been in the old man's design? Was it a trap? Did he expect her to rush into Braden's arms? Was he lurking behind some near-by curtain to witness her surrender? Was he putting her to the test, or was it his grandson who was on trial?

Here was the supreme crisis in the life of Anne Tresslyn: the turning point. Her whole being cried out against this crafty trick. One word now from Braden would have altered the whole course of her life. In eager silence she stood on the thin edge of circumstance, ready to fall as the wind blew strongest. She was in revolt. If this stupefied, white-faced young man had but called out to her: "Anne! Anne, my darling! Come!" she would have laughed in triumph over the outcome of the old man's test, and all the years of her life would have been filled with sweetness. She would have gone to him.

But, alas, those were not the words that fell from his lips, and the fate of Anne Tresslyn was sealed as she stood there watching him with wide-spread eyes.

"I prefer to see you in your own home," he said, a flush of anger spreading over his face; "not here in my grandfather's house."

There was no mistaking his meaning. He thought she had come there to see him,—ay, conceivably had planned this very situation! She started. It was like a slap in the face. Then she breathed once more, and realised that she had not drawn a breath since he entered the room. Her life had been standing still, waiting till these few stupendous seconds were over. Now they were gone and she could take up life where it had left off. The tightness in her throat relaxed. The crisis was over, the turning point was behind her. He had failed her, and he would have to pay. He would have to pay with months, even years of waiting. For it had never occurred to Anne Tresslyn to doubt that he would come to her in good and proper time!

She could not speak at once. Her response was not ready. She was collecting herself. Given the time, she would rise above the mischief that confounded her. To have uttered the words that hung unuttered on her lips would have glorified him and brought shame to her pride forever more. Five words trembled there awaiting deliverance and they were good and honest words—"Take me back, Braden darling!" They were never spoken. They were formed to answer a different call from him. She checked them in time.

"I did not come here to see you," she said at last, standing very straight beside the table. He was just inside the door leading to the hall. "Whose trick is this,—yours or Mr. Thorpe's?"

Enlightenment flashed into his eyes. "By Jove!" he exclaimed. "He said he would do it, and he has made good. This is his way of—" He broke off in the middle of the sentence. In an instant he had whirled about and the door was closed with a bang.

She started forward, her hand pressed to her quick-beating heart, real fear in her eyes. What was in his mind? Was this insanity? She had read of men driven mad by disappointment who brutally set upon and killed—But he was facing her now, and she stopped short. His jaw was set but there was no insane light in the eyes that regarded her so steadily. Somehow—and suddenly—her composure was restored. She was not afraid of him. She was not afraid of the hands and arms that had caressed her so tenderly, nor was she afraid of the words that were to fall from the lips that had kissed hers so many times. He was merely going to plead with her, and she was well prepared for that.

For weeks and weeks she had been preparing herself for this unhappy moment. She knew that the time would come when she would have to face him and defend herself. She would have to deny the man she loved. She would have to tell him that she was going for a higher price than he could pay. The time had come and she was ready. The weakness of the minute before had passed—passed with his failure to strike when, with all her heart and soul, she wanted him to strike.

"You need not be frightened," he said, subduing his voice with an effort. "Let us take time to steady ourselves. We have a good deal to say to each other. Let's be careful not to waste words, now that we're face to face at last."

"I am quite calm," she said, stock-still beside the table. "Why should I be frightened? I am the last person in the world that you would strike, Braden." She was that sure of him!

"Strike? Good God, why should that have entered your head?"

"One never knows," she said. "I was startled. I was afraid—at first. You implied a moment ago that I had arranged for this meeting. Surely you understand that I—"

"My grandfather arranged it," he interrupted. "There's no use beating about the bush. I told him that I would not believe this thing of you unless I had it from your own lips. You would not see me. You were not permitted to see me. I told him that you were being forced into this horrible marriage, that your mother was afraid to let me have a single word with you. He laughed at me. He said that you were going into it with your eyes open, that you were obeying your mother willingly, that you—"

"Pardon me," she interrupted coldly. "Is your grandfather secreted somewhere near so that he may be able to enjoy the—"

"I don't know, and I don't care. Let him hear if he wants to. Why should either of us care? He knows all there is to know about you and he certainly appreciates my position. We may as well speak freely. It will not make the slightest difference, one way or the other, so far as he is concerned. He knows perfectly well that you are not marrying him for love, or respect, or even position. So let's speak plainly. I say that he arranged this meeting between us. He brought you here, and he sent upstairs for me to join him in this room. Well, you see he isn't here. We are quite alone. He is fair to both of us. He is giving me my chance and he is giving you yours. It only remains for us to settle the matter here and now. I know all of the details of this disgusting compact. I know that you are to have two million dollars settled upon you the day you are married—oh, I know the whole of it! Now, there's just one thing to be settled between you and me: are you going ahead with it or are you going to be an honest woman and marry the man you love?"

He did not leave her much to stand upon. She had expected him to go about it in an entirely different way. She had counted upon an impassioned plea for himself, not this terse, cold-blooded, almost unemotional summing up of the situation. For an instant she was at a loss. It was hard to look into his honest eyes. A queer, unformed doubt began to torment her, a doubt that grew into a question later on: was he still in love with her?

"And what if I do not care to discuss my private affairs with you?" she said, playing for time.

"Don't fence, Anne," he said sternly. "Answer the question. Wait. I'll put it in another form, and I want the truth. If you say to me that your mother is deliberately forcing you into this marriage I'll believe you, and I'll—I'll fight for you till I get you. I will not stand by and see you sacrificed, even though you may appear to—"

"Stop, please. If you mean to ask that question, I'll answer it in advance. It is I, not my mother, who expects to marry Mr. Thorpe, and I am quite old enough and wise enough to know my own mind. So you need not put the question."

He drew nearer. The table separated them as they looked squarely into each other's eyes through the fire-lit space that lay between.

"Anne, Anne!" he cried hoarsely. "You must not, you shall not do this unspeakable thing! For God's sake, girl, if you have an atom of self-respect, the slightest—"

"Don't begin that, Braden!" she cut in, ominously. "I cannot permit you or any man to say such things to me, no matter what you may think. Bear that in mind."

"Don't you mind what I think about it, Anne?" he cried, his voice breaking.

"See here, Braden," she said, in an abrupt, matter-of-fact manner, "it isn't going to do the least bit of good to argue the point. I am pledged to marry Mr. Thorpe and I shall do so if I live till the twenty-third of next month. Provided, of course, that he lives till that day himself. I have gone into it with my eyes open, as he says, and I am satisfied with my bargain. I suppose you will hate me to the end of your days. But if you think that I expect to hate myself, you are very much mistaken. Look! Do you see these pearls? They were not included in the bargain, and I could have gone on very well without them to the end of my term as the mistress of this house, but I accepted them from my fiancé to-day in precisely the same spirit in which they were given: as alms to the undeserving. Your grandfather did not want me to marry you. He is merely paying me to keep my hands off. That's the long and the short of it. I am not in the least deceived. You will say that I could—and should have told him to go to the devil. Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you that I couldn't see my way clear to doing that. I hope he is listening behind the curtains. We drove a hard bargain. He thought he could get off with a million. You must remember that he had deliberately disinherited you,—that much I know. His will is made. It will not be altered. You will be a poor man as wealth is reckoned in these days. But you will be a great man. You will be famous, distinguished, honoured. That is what he intends. He set out to sacrifice me in order that you might be spared. You were not to have a millstone about your neck in the shape of a selfish, unsacrificing wife. What rot! From the bottom of my heart, Braden,—if you will grant me a heart,—I hope and pray that you may go to the head of your profession, that you may be a great and good man. I do not ask you to believe me when I say that I love you, and always—"

"For God's sake, don't ask me to believe it! Don't add to the degradation you are piling up for yourself. Spare yourself that miserable confession. It is quite unnecessary to lie to me, Anne."

"Lie? I am telling you the truth, Braden. I do love you. I can't help that, can I? You do not for an instant suspect that I love this doddering old man, do you? Well, I must love some one. That's natural, isn't it? Then, why shouldn't it be you? Oh, laugh if you will! It doesn't hurt me in the least. Curse me, if you like. I've made up my mind to go on with this business of marrying. We've had one unsuccessful marriage in our family of late. Love was at the bottom of it. You know how it has turned out, Braden. It—"

"I believe I know how it might have turned out if they had been left to themselves," said he bluntly.

"She would have been a millstone, nevertheless," she argued.

"I don't agree with you. George found his level in that little nobody, as you all have called her. Poor little thing, she was not so lucky as I. She did not have her eyes opened in time. She had no chance to escape. But we're not here to talk about Lutie Carnahan. I have told my grandfather that I intend to break this thing off if it is in my power to do so. I shall not give up until I know that you are actually married. It is a crime that must not—"

"How do you purpose breaking it off?" she inquired shrilly. Visions of a strong figure rising in the middle of the ceremony to cry out against the final words flashed into her mind. Would she have that to look forward to and dread?

"I shall go on appealing to your honour, your decency, your self-respect, if not to the love you say you bear for me."

She breathed easier. "And will you confine your appeals to me?"

"What do you mean?"

"I thought you might take it into your head to appeal to Mr. Thorpe's honour, decency, self-respect and love for you," she said, sullenly. "He is quite as guilty as I, remember."

"He has quite a different object in view. He seems to feel that he is doing me a good turn, not an evil one."

"Bosh!" She was angry. "And what will be your attitude toward me if you do succeed in preventing the marriage? Will you take me back as I was before this thing came up? Will you make me your wife, just as if nothing had happened? In view of my deliberate intention to deny you, will you forget everything and take me back?"

He put his hand to his throat, and for a moment appeared to be struggling against himself. "I will take you back, Anne, as if nothing had happened, if you will say to me here and now that you will marry me to-morrow."

She stared at him, incredulous. Her heart began to beat rapidly once more and the anger died away. "You would do that, knowing me to be what I am?"

"Knowing you to be what you were," he amended eagerly. "Oh, Anne, you are worth loving, you are pure of heart and—"

"If I will marry you to-morrow?" she went on, watching his face closely.

"Yes. But you must say it now—this instant. I will not grant you a moment's respite. If you do not say the word now, your chance is gone forever. It has to be now, Anne."

"And if I refuse—what then?"

"I would not marry you if you were the only woman on earth," he said flatly.

She smiled. "Are you sure that you love me, Braden?"

"I will love you when you become what you were,—a month ago," he said simply. "A girl worth the honour of being loved," he added.

"Men sometimes love those who are not worth the honour," she said, feeling her way. "They cannot help themselves."

"Will you say the word now?" he demanded hoarsely.

She sighed. It was a sigh of relief,—perhaps of triumph. He was safe for all time. He would come to her in the end. She was on solid ground once more.

"I am afraid, Braden, that I cannot play fast and loose with a man as old as Mr. Thorpe," she said lightly.

He muttered an oath. "Don't be a fool! What do you call your treatment of me? Fast and loose! Good Lord, haven't you played fast and loose with me?"

"Ah, but you are young and enduring," she said. "You will get over it. He wouldn't have the time or strength to recover from the shock of—"

"Oh, for God's sake, don't talk like that! What do you call yourself? What—" He checked the angry words and after a moment went on, more quietly: "Now, see here, Anne, I'm through parleying with you. I shall go on trying to prevent this marriage, but succeed or fail, I don't want to see your face again as long as I live. I'm through with you. You are like your mother. You are a damned vampire. God, how I have loved and trusted you, how I have believed in you. I did not believe that the woman lived who could degrade herself as you are about to degrade yourself. I have had my eyes opened. All my life I have loved you without even knowing you. All my life I—"

"All my life I have loved you," she broke in cringingly.

He laughed aloud. "The hell you have!" he cried out. "You have allowed me to hold you in my arms, to kiss you, to fondle you, and you have trembled with joy and passion,—and now you call it love! Love! You have never loved in your life and you never will. You call self-gratification by the name of love. Thank God, I know you at last. I ought to pity you. In all humanity I ought to pity a fellow creature so devoid of—"

"Stop!" she cried, her face flaming red. "Go! Go away! You have said enough. I will hate you if you utter another word, and I don't want to hate you, Braden. I want to go on loving you all my life. I must go on loving you."

"You have my consent," he said, ironically, bowing low before her. "Humanity compels me to grant you all the consolation you can find in deceiving yourself."

"Wait!" she cried out, as he turned toward the door. "I—I am hurt, Braden. Can't you see how you have hurt me? Won't you—"

"Of course, you are hurt!" he shouted. "You squeal when you are hurt. You think only of yourself when you cry 'I am hurt'! Don't you ever think of any one else?" His hand grasped the big silver door-knob.

"I want you to understand, if you can, why I am doing this thing you revile me for."

"I understand," he said curtly.

She hurried her words, fearful that he might rush from the room before she could utter the belated explanation.

"I don't want to be poor. I don't want to go through life as my mother has gone, always fighting for the things she most desired, always being behind the game she was forced to play. You can't understand,—you are too big and fine,—you cannot understand the little things, Braden. I want love and happiness, but I want the other, too. Don't you see that with all this money at my command I can be independent, I can be safe for all time, I can give more than myself in return for the love that I must have? Don't you understand why—"

She was quite close to him when he interrupted the impassioned appeal. His hand shook as he held it up to check her approach.

"It's all over, Anne. There is nothing more to be said. I understand everything now. May God forgive you," he said huskily.

She stopped short. Her head went up and defiance shone in her face.

"I'd rather have your forgiveness than God's," she said distinctly, "and since I may not ask for it now, I will wait for it, my friend. We love each other. Time mends a good many breaks. Good-bye! Some day I hope you'll come to see your poor old granny, and bring—"

"Oh, for the love of heaven, have a little decency, Anne," he cried, his lip curling.

But her pride was roused, it was in revolt against all of the finer instincts that struggled for expression.

"You'd better go now. Run upstairs and tell your grandfather that his scheme worked perfectly. Tell him everything I have said. He will not mind. I am sorry you will not remain to see the contract signed. I should like to have you for a witness. If you—"

"Contract? What contract?"

"Oh," she said lightly, "just a little agreement on his part to make life endurable for me while he continues to live. We are to sign the paper at five o'clock. Yes, you'd better run along, Braden, or you'll find yourself the centre of a perplexed crowd. Before you go, please take a last look at me in my sepulchre. Here I stand! Am I not fair to look upon?"

"God, I'd sooner see you in your grave than here," he grated out. "You'd be better off, a thousand times."

"This is my grave," she said, "or will be soon. I suppose I am not to count you among the mourners?"

He slammed the door behind him, and she was alone.

"How I hate people who slam doors," she said to herself.

CHAPTER VII

A fortnight passed. Preparations for the wedding went on in the Tresslyn home with little or no slackening of the tension that had settled upon the inmates with the advent of the disturber. Anne was now sullenly determined that nothing should intervene to prevent the marriage, unless an unkind Providence ordered the death of Templeton Thorpe. She was bitter toward Braden. Down in her soul, she knew that he was justified in the stand he had taken, and in that knowledge lay the secret of her revolt against one of the commands of Nature. He had treated her with the scorn that she knew she deserved; he had pronounced judgment upon her, and she confessed to herself that she was guilty as charged. That was the worst of it; she could pronounce herself guilty, and yet resent the justice of her own decision.

In her desperation, she tried to hold old Mr. Thorpe responsible for the fresh canker that gnawed at her soul. But for that encounter in his library, she might have proceeded with confidence instead of the uneasiness that now attended her every step. She could not free herself of the fear that Braden might after all succeed in his efforts to persuade the old man to change his mind. True, the contract was signed, but contracts are not always sacred. They are made to be broken. Moreover, by no stretch of the imagination could this contract be looked upon as sacred and it certainly would not look pretty if exposed to a court of law. Her sole thought now was to have it all safely over with. Then perhaps she could smile once more.

In the home of the bridegroom, preparations for the event were scant and of a perfunctory nature. Mr. Templeton Thorpe ordered a new suit of clothes for himself—or, to be quite precise, he instructed Wade to order it. He was in need of a new suit anyway, he said, and he had put off ordering it for a long, long time, not because he was parsimonious but because he did not like going up town for the "try-on." He also had a new silk hat made from his special block, and he would doubtless be compelled to have his hair trimmed up a bit about the nineteenth or twentieth, if the weather turned a trifle warmer. Of course, there would be the trip to City Hall with Anne, for the licence. He would have to attend to that in person. That was one thing that Wade couldn't do for him. Wade bought the wedding-ring and saw to the engraving; he attended to the buying of a gift for the best man,—who under one of the phases of an all-enveloping irony was to be George Dexter Tresslyn!—and in the same expedition to the jewellers' purchased for himself a watch-fob as a self-selected gift from a master who had never given him anything in all his years of service except his monthly wage and a daily malediction.

Braden Thorpe made the supreme effort to save his grandfather. Believing himself to be completely cured of his desire for Anne, he took the stand that there was no longer a necessity for the old gentleman to sacrifice himself to the greed of the Tresslyns. But Mr. Thorpe refused to listen to this new and apparently unprejudiced argument. He was firm in his determination to clip Anne's claws; he would take no chances with youth, ultimate propinquity, and the wiles of a repentant sinner.

"You can guard against anything," said he in his wisdom, "except the beautiful woman who repents. You never can tell what she'll do to make her repentance satisfactory to everybody concerned. So we'll take no chances with Anne. We'll put her in irons, my boy, so to speak."

And so it was that Braden, worn and disspirited, gave up in despair and prepared for his return to London. He went before an examining board in New York first and obtained his licence to become a practising physician and surgeon, and, with a set expression in his disillusioned eyes, peered out into the future in quest of the fame that was to take the place of a young girl's love.

He met his first patient in the Knickerbocker Café. Lunching alone there one day, a week before the date selected for sailing, he was accosted by an extremely gay and pretty young woman who came over from a table of four in a distant corner of the room.

"Is this Dr. Braden Thorpe?" she inquired, placing her hands on the back of the chair opposite and leaning forward with a most agreeable, even inviting smile.

Her face was familiar. "Since day before yesterday," he replied, rising with a self-conscious flush.

"May I sit down? I want to talk to you about myself." She sat down in the chair that an alert waiter pulled out for her.

"I am afraid you are labouring under a misapprehension," he said. "I—I am not what you would call a practising physician as yet."

"Aren't you looking for patients?" she inquired. "Sit down, please."

"I haven't even an office, so why should I feel that I am entitled to a patient?" he said. "You see, I've just got my licence to practice. As things go, I shouldn't have a client for at least two years. Are you looking for a doctor?"

"I saw by the papers this morning that the grandson of Mr. Templeton Thorpe was a regular doctor. One of my friends over there pointed you out to me. What is your fee for an appendicitis operation, Dr. Thorpe?"

"Good—ahem! I beg your pardon. You really startled me. I—"

"Oh, that's all right. I quite understand. Hard to grasp at first, isn't it? Well, I've got to have my appendix out sooner or later. It's been bothering me for a year, off and on. Everybody tells me I ought to have it out sometime when it isn't bothering me and—"

"But, my dear young lady, I'm not the man you want. You ought to go to some—"

"You'll do just as well as any one, I'm sure. It's no trick to take out an appendix in these days. The fewer a doctor has snipped off, the less he charges, don't you know. So why shouldn't I, being quite poor, take advantage of your ignorance? The most intelligent surgeon in New York couldn't do any more than to snip it off, now could he? And he wouldn't be one-tenth as ignorant as you are about prices."

She was so gay and naïve about it that he curbed his amazement, and, to some extent, his embarrassment.

"I suppose that it is also ignorance on my part that supplies me with office hours in a public restaurant from one to three o'clock," he said, with a very unprofessional grin.

"What hospital do you work in?" she demanded, in a business-like tone.

Humouring her, he mentioned one of the big hospitals in which he had served as an interne.

"That suits me," she said. "Can you do it to-morrow?"

"For heaven's sake, madam, I—are you in earnest?"

"Absolutely. I want to have it done right away. You see, I do a good deal of dancing, and—now, listen!" She leaned farther across the table, a serious little line appearing between her brows. "I want you to do it because I've always heard that you are one of the most earnest, capable and ambitious young men in the business. I'd sooner trust you than any one else, Dr. Thorpe. It has to be done by some one, so if I'm willing to take a chance with you, why shouldn't you take one with me?"

"I have been in Europe for nearly three years. How could you possibly have heard all this about me?"

"See that fellow over there facing us? The funny little chap with the baby moustache? He—"

"Why, it's Simmy Dodge," cried Braden. "Are—are you—"

"Just a friend, that's all. He's one of the finest chaps in New York. He's a gentleman. That's Mr. and Mrs. Rumsey Fenn,—the other two, I mean. You can't see them for the florist shop in between. They know you too, so—"

"May I inquire why one of my friends did not bring you over and introduce me to you, Miss—er—"

"Miss, in a sort of way, Doctor, but still a Missus," she said amiably. "Well, I told them that I knew you quite well and I wouldn't let them come over. It's all right, though. We'll be partially related to each other by marriage before long, I understand; so it's all right. You see, I am Mrs. George Dexter Tresslyn."

"You—you are?" he gasped. "By Jove, I thought that your face was familiar. I—"

"One of the best advertised faces in New York about two years ago," she said, and he detected a plaintive note in the flippant remark. "Not so well-known nowadays, thank God. See here, Dr. Thorpe, I hope you won't think it out of place for me to congratulate you."

"Congratulate me? My dear Mrs. Tresslyn, it is not I who am to be married. You confuse me with—"

"I'm congratulating you because you're not the one," said she, her eyes narrowing. "Bless your soul, I know what I'm talking about. But say no more. Let's get back to the appendix. Will you do the job for me?"

"Now that we are acquainted with each other," he said, suppressing a natural excitement, "may we not go over and join Simmy and the Fenns? Don't you think you'd better consult with them before irrevocably committing yourself to me?"

"Fine! We'll talk it over together, the whole lot of us. But, I say, don't forget that I've known you for years—through the family, of course. I want to thank you first for one thing, Dr. Thorpe. George used to tell me how you took my part in the—the smash-up. He said you wrote to him from Europe to be a man and stand by me in spite of everything. That's really what I've been wanting to say to you, more than the other. Still, I've got to have it out, so come on. Let's set a day. Mrs. Fenn will go up to the hospital with me. She's used to hospitals. Says she loves them. She's trying her best to have Mr. Fenn go in next week to have his out. She's had five operations and a baby. I'm awfully glad to know you, Dr. Thorpe. I've always wanted to. I'd like better than anything I know of to be your first regular patient. It will always be something to boast about in years to come. It will be splendid to say to people, 'Oh, yes, I am the first person that ever had her appendix removed by the celebrated Dr. Thorpe.' It will—"

"But I have removed a great many," he said, carried away by her sprightly good humour. "In my training days, so to speak."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that," she cried, disappointed. Then her face brightened: "Still, I suppose you had to learn just where the thing is. It wouldn't do to go about stabbing people in the wrong place, just as if the appendix might be any little old where, would it?"

"I should say not," said he, arising and bowing very profoundly. Then he followed close behind her trim, smart figure as they threaded their way among the tables.

So this was the "pretty little mustard girl" that all fashionable New York had talked about in the past and was dancing with in the present. This was the girl who refused to go to the dogs at the earnest behest of the redoubtable Mrs. Tresslyn. Somehow he felt that Fate had provided him with an unexpected pal!

And, to his utter astonishment, he was prevailed upon to perform the operation! The Fenns and Simeon Dodge decided the matter for him.

"I shall have to give up sailing next week," he said, as pleased as Punch but contriving to project a wry face. "I can't go away and leave my first bona-fide patient until she is entirely out of the woods."

"I have engagements for to-morrow and Wednesday," said Mrs. Rumsey Fenn, after reflection. She was a rather pallid woman of thirty-five who might have been accused of being bored with life if she had not made so many successful efforts to prolong it.

"It doesn't happen to be your appendix, my dear," said her husband.

"Goodness, I wish it were," said she, regretfully. "What I mean is that I can't go to the hospital with Lutie before,—let me see,—before Thursday. Can you wait that long, dear?"

"Ask Dr. Thorpe," said young Mrs. Tresslyn. "He is my doctor, you know."

"Of course, you all understand that I cannot go ahead and perform an operation without first determining—"

"Don't you worry," said the patient. "My physician has been after me for a year to have it out. He'll back me up. I'll telephone him as soon as I get back home, and I'll have him call you up, Dr. Thorpe. Thanks ever so much. And, before I forget it, what is the fee to be? You see, I pay my own bills, so I've got to know the—the worst."

"My fee will be even more reasonable than you hope, Mrs. Tresslyn," said Braden, smiling. "Just guess at the amount you'd feel able to pay and then divide it by two, and you'll have it."

"Dear me," cried Mrs. Fenn, "how perfectly satisfactory! Rumsey, you must have yours out this week. You're always talking about not being able to afford things, and here's a chance to save money in a way you never would have suspected."

"Good Lord, Madge," exclaimed her husband, "I've never had a pain in my life. I wish you wouldn't keep nagging at me all the time to have an operation performed, whether I need it or not. Let my appendix alone. It's always treated me with extreme loyalty and respect, so why the deuce should I turn upon the poor thing and assassinate it?"

"See here, Rumsey," said Simmy Dodge sagely, "if I were in your place I'd have a perfectly sound tooth pulled some time, just to keep it from aching when you're an old man. Or you might have your left leg amputated so that it couldn't be crushed in a railroad accident. You ought to do something to please Madge, old chap. She's been a thoughtful, devoted wife to you for twelve or thirteen years, and what have you ever done to please her? Nothing! You've never so much as had a crick in your neck or a pain that you couldn't account for, so do be generous, Rumsey. Besides, maybe you haven't got an appendix at all. Just think how you could crow over her if they couldn't find one, even after the most careful and relentless search over your entire system."

"She's always wanting me to die or something like that," growled Fenn; "but when I talked of going to the Spanish War she went into hysterics."

"We'd only been married a month, Rumsey," said his wife reproachfully.

"But how could I have known that war was to be declared so soon?" he demanded.

Braden and Simeon Dodge left the restaurant together. They were old friends, college-mates, and of the same age. Dodge had gone into the law-school after his academic course, and Thorpe into the medical college. Their ways did not part, however. Both were looked upon as heirs to huge fortunes, and to both was offered the rather doubtful popularity that usually is granted to affluence. Thorpe accepted his share with the caution of the wise man, while Dodge, not a whit less capable, took his as a philanderer. He now had an office in a big down-town building, but he never went near it except when his partner took it into his head to go away for a month's vacation at the slack season of the year. At such periods Mr. Dodge, being ages younger than the junior member of the firm, made it his practice to go down to the office and attend to the business with an earnestness that surprised every one. He gave over frolicking and stuck resolutely to the "knitting" that Johnson had left behind. Possessed of a natural though thrifty intelligence,—one that wasted little in public,—and a latent energy that could lift him occasionally above a perfectly normal laziness, he made as much of his opportunities as one could expect of a young man who has two hundred thousand a year and an amiable disposition.

No one in the city was more popular than Simmy Dodge, and no one more deservedly so, for his bad qualities were never so bad that one need hesitate about calling him a good fellow. His habits were easy but genteel. When intoxicated he never smashed things, and when sober,—which was his common condition,—he took extremely good care of other people's reputations. Women liked him, which should not be surprising; and men liked him because he was not to be spoiled by the women who liked him, which is saying a great deal for an indolent young man with money. He had a smile that always appeared at its best in the morning, and survived the day with amazing endurance. And that also is saying a great deal for a young man who is favoured by both sexes and a supposedly neutral Dame Fortune at the same time. He had broken many of the laws of man and some of those imposed by God, but he always paid without apology. He was inevitably pardoned by man and paroled by his Maker,—which is as much as to say that he led a pretty decent sort of existence and enjoyed exceedingly good health.

He really wasn't much to look at. Being a trifle under medium height, weighing less than one hundred and twenty pounds stripped, as wiry as a cat and as indefatigable as a Scotch terrier, and with an abnormally large pair of ears that stood out like oyster shells from the sides of a round, sleek head, he made no pretentions to physical splendour,—unless, by chance, you would call the perky little straw-coloured moustache that adorned his long upper lip a tribute to vanity. His eyes were blue and merry and set wide apart under a bulging, intellectual looking forehead, and his teeth were large and as white as snow. When he laughed the world laughed with him, and when he tried to appear downcast the laughter went on just the same, for then he was more amusing than ever.

"I didn't know you were a friend of hers," said he as they stood in front of the hotel waiting for the taxi that was to take Thorpe to a hospital.

Thorpe remembered the admonition. "I tried to put a little back-bone into George Tresslyn at the time of the rumpus, if that's what you'd call being a friend to her," he said evasively.

"She's a nice little girl," said Simmy, "and she's been darned badly treated. Mrs. Tresslyn has never gotten over the fact that Lutie made her pay handsomely to get the noble Georgie back into the smart set. Plucky little beggar, too. Lot of people like the Fenns and the Roush girls have taken her up, primarily, I suppose, because the Tresslyns threw her down. She's making good with them, too, after a fashion all her own. Must be something fine in a girl like that, Brady,—I mean something worth while. Straight as a string, and a long way from being a disgrace to the name of Tresslyn. Quaint, isn't she?"

"Amazingly so. I think George would marry her all over again if she'd have him, mother or no mother."

"Well, she's quaint in another respect," said Dodge. "She still considers herself to be George Tresslyn's wife."

"Religion?"

"Not a bit of it. She just says she is, that's all, and what God joined together no woman can put asunder. She means Mrs. Tresslyn, of course. By the way, Brady, I wonder if I'm still enough of a pal to be allowed to say something to you." The blue eyes were serious and there was a sort of caressing note in his voice.

"We've always been pals, Simmy."

"Well, it's just this: I'm darned sorry things have turned out as they have for you. It's a rotten shame. Why don't you choke that old grandparent of yours? Put him out of his misery. Anne has told me of your diabolical designs upon the hopelessly afflicted. She used to talk about it for hours while you were in London,—and I had to listen with shivers running up and down my back all the time. Nobody on earth could blame you for putting the quietus on old Templeton Thorpe. He is about as hopelessly afflicted as any one I know,—begging your pardon for treading on the family toes."

"He's quite sane, Simmy," said Braden, with a smile that was meant to be pleasant but fell short of the mark.

"He's an infernal old traitor, then," said Simmy hotly. "I wouldn't treat a dog as he has treated you,—no kind of a dog, mind you. Not even a Pekinese, and I hate 'em worse than snakes. What the devil does Anne mean? Lordy, Lordy, man, she's always been in love with you. She—but, forgive me, old chap, I oughtn't to run on like this. I didn't mean to open a sore—"

"It's all right, Simmy. I understand. Thanks, old boy. It was a pretty stiff blow, but—well, I'm still on my pins, as you see."

Dodge was hanging onto the door of the taxi, impeding his friend's departure. "She's too fine a girl to be doing a rotten thing like this. I don't mind telling you I've always been in—er—that is, I've always had a tender spot for Anne. I suppose you know that?"

"I know that, Simmy."

"Hang it all, I never dreamed that she'd look at any one else but you, so I never even peeped a word to her about my own feelings. And here she goes, throwing you over like a shot, and spilling everything. Confound it, man, if I'd thought she could possibly want to marry anybody else but you, I'd have had my try. The good Lord knows I'm not much, but by thunder, I'm not decrepit. I—I suppose it was the money, eh?"

"That's for you to say, Simmy; certainly not for me."

"If it's money she's after and not an Adonis, I don't see why the deuce she didn't advertise. I would have answered in a minute. I can't help saying it, old man, but I feel sorry for Anne, 'pon my soul, I do. I don't think she's doing this of her own free will. See what her mother did to George and that little girl in there? I tell you there's something nasty and—"

"I may as well tell you that Anne is doing this thing of her own free will," said Braden gravely.

"I don't believe it," said Dodge.

"At any rate, Simmy, I'm grateful to you for standing clear while there was still a chance for me. So long! I must be getting up to the hospital, and then around to see her doctor."

"So long, Brady. See you on Thursday." He meant, good soul, that he would be at the hospital on that day.

CHAPTER VIII

An hour later, Mr. Simeon Dodge appeared at the home of Anne Tresslyn. In place of his usual care-free manner there now rested upon him an air of extreme gravity. This late afternoon visit was the result of an inspiration. After leaving Thorpe he found himself deeply buried in reflection which amounted almost to abstraction. He was disturbed by the persistency of the thoughts that nagged at him, no matter whither his aimless footsteps carried him. For the life of him, he could not put from his mind the conviction that Anne Tresslyn was not responsible for her actions.

He was convinced that she had been bullied, cowed, coerced, or whatever you like, into this atrocious marriage, and, of course, there could be no one to blame but her soulless mother. The girl ought to be saved. (These are Simmy's thoughts.) She was being sacrificed to the greed of an unnatural mother. Admitting, for the sake of argument, that she was no longer in love with Braden Thorpe, there still remained the positive conviction that she could not be in love with any one else, and certainly not with that treacherous old man in Washington Square. That, of course, was utterly impossible, so there was but the one alternative: she was being forced into a marriage that would bring the most money into the hands of the designing and, to him, clearly unnatural parent.

He knew nothing of the ante-nuptial settlement, nor was he aware of the old man's quixotic design in coming between Braden and the girl he loved. To Simmy it was nothing short of brigandage, a sort of moral outlawry. Old Templeton Thorpe deserved a coat of tar and feathers, and there was no word for the punishment that ought to be meted out to Mrs. Tresslyn. He tried to think of what ought to be done to her, and, getting as far as boiling oil, gave up in despair, for even that was too much like compassion.

Money! The whole beastly business was money! He thought of his own unestimated wealth. Nothing but money,—horrible, insensate, devastating money! He shuddered as he thought of what his money was likely to bring to him in the end: a loveless wife; avarice in place of respect; misery instead of joy; destruction! How was he ever to know whether a girl was marrying him for himself or for the right to lay hands upon the money his father had left to him when he died? How can any rich man know what he is getting into when he permits a girl to come into his home? To burglarise it with the sanction of State and Church, perhaps, and to escape with the connivance of both after she's got all she wants. That's where the poor man has an advantage over the unprotected rich: he is never confronted by a problem like this. He doesn't have to stop and wonder why the woman marries him. He knows it's love, or stupidity, or morality, but it is never duplicity.

Before he got through with it, Simmy had worked himself into a state of desperation. Regarding himself with unprejudiced eyes he saw that he was not the sort of man a girl would choose for a husband unless he had something besides a happy, loving disposition to offer. She would marry him for his money, of course; certainly he would be the last to suspect her of marrying him for his beauty. He had never thought of it in this light before, and he was wet with the sweat of anguish. He could never be sure! He could love a woman with all his heart and soul, and still never be sure of her! Were all the girls he had loved in his college days—But here he stopped. It was too terrible to even contemplate, this unmerited popularity of his! If only one of them had been honest enough to make fun of his ears, or to snicker when he became impassioned, or to smile contemptuously from her superior height when he asked her to dance,—if only one of them had turned her back upon him, then he would have grasped the unwelcome truth about himself. But, now that he thought of it, not one of them had ever turned a deaf ear to his cajoleries, not one had failed to respond to his blandishments, not one had been sincere enough to frown upon him when he tried to be witty. And that brought him to another sickening standstill: was he as bright and clever and witty as people made him out to be? Wasn't he a dreadful bore, a blithering ass, after all? He felt himself turning cold to the marrow as he thought of the real value that people placed upon him. He even tried to recall a single thing that he had ever said that he could now, in sober judgment, regard as bright or even fairly clever. He couldn't, so then, after all, it was quite clear that he was tolerated because he had nothing but money.

Just as he was about to retire from his club where he had gone for solace, an inspiration was born. It sent him forthwith to Anne Tresslyn's home, dogged, determined and manfully disillusioned.

"Miss Tresslyn is very busy, Mr. Dodge," said Rawson, "but she says she will see you, sir, if you will wait a few moments."

"I'll wait," said Simmy, and sat down.

He had come to the remarkable conclusion that as long as some one had to marry him for his money it might as well be Anne. He was fond of her and he could at least spare her the ignominy and horror of being wedded to old Templeton Thorpe. With his friend Braden admittedly out of the running, there was no just cause why he should not at least have a try at saving Anne. She might jump at the chance. He was already blaming himself for not having recognised her peril, her dire necessity, long before this. And since he had reached the dismal conclusion that no one could possibly love him, it would be the sensible thing on his part to at least marry some one whom he loved, thereby securing, in a way, half of a bargain when he might otherwise have to put up with nothing at all. At any rate, he would be doing Anne a good turn by marrying her, and it was reasonably certain that she would not bring him any more unhappiness than any other woman who might accept him.

As he sat there waiting for her he began to classify his financial holdings, putting certain railroads and industrials into class one, others into class two, and so on to the best of his ability to recollect what really comprised his fortune. It was rather a hopeless task, for to save his life he could not remember whether he had Lake Shore stock or West Shore stock, and he did not know what Standard Oil was selling at, nor any of the bank stocks except the Fifth Avenue, which seldom went below forty-five hundred. There might be a very awkward situation, too, if he couldn't justify his proposal with facts instead of conjectures. Suppose that she came out point blank and asked him what he was worth: what could he say? But then, of course, she wouldn't have to ask such a question. If she considered it possible to marry him, she would know how much he was worth without inquiring. As a matter of fact, she probably knew to a dollar, and that was a great deal more than he knew.

Half an hour passed before she came down. She was wearing her hat and was buttoning her gloves as she came hurriedly into the room. Simmy had a startling impression that he had seen a great many women putting on their gloves as they came into rooms where he was waiting. The significance of this extraordinary custom had never struck him with full force before. In the gloom of his present appraisal of himself, he now realised with shocking distinctness that the women he called upon were always on the point of going somewhere else.

"Hello, Simmy," cried Anne gaily. He had never seen her looking more beautiful. There was real colour in her smooth cheeks and the sparkle of enthusiasm in her big, dark eyes.

He shook hands with her. "Hello," he said.

"I can spare you just twenty minutes, Simmy," she said, peering at the little French clock on the mantelpiece with the frankest sort of calculation. "Going to the dressmaker's at five, you know. It's a great business, this getting married, Simmy. You ought to try it."

"I know I ought," said he, pulling a chair up close to hers. "That's what I came to see you about, Anne."

She gave a little shriek of wonder. "For heaven's sake, Simmy, don't tell me that you are going to be married. I can't believe it."

He made note of the emphasis she put upon the pronoun, and secretly resented it.

"Depends entirely on you, Anne," he said. He looked over his shoulder to see if any one was within the sound of his voice, which he took the precaution to lower to what had always been a successful tone in days when he was considered quite an excellent purveyor of sweet nothings in dim hallways, shady nooks and unpopulated stairways. "I want you to marry me right away," he went on, but not with that amazing confidence of yester-years.

Anne blinked. Then she drew back and stared at him for a moment. A merry smile followed her brief inspection.

"Simmy, you've been drinking."

He scowled, and at that she laughed aloud. "'Pon my soul, not more than three, Anne. I rarely drink in the middle of the day. Almost never, I swear to you. Confound it, why should you say I've been drinking? Can't I be serious without being accused of drunkenness? What the devil do you mean, Anne, by intimating that I—"

"Don't explode, Simmy," she cried. "I wasn't intimating a thing. I was positively asserting it. But go on, please. You interest me. Don't try to look injured, Simmy. You can't manage it at all."

"I didn't come here to be insulted," he growled.

"Did you come here to insult me?" she inquired, the smile suddenly leaving her eyes.

"Good Lord, no!" he gasped. "Only I don't like what you said a minute ago. I never was more serious or more sober in my life. You've been proposed to a hundred times, I suppose, and I'll bet I'm the only one you've ever accused of drinking at the time. It's just my luck. I—"

"What in the world are you trying to get at, Simmy Dodge?" she cried. "Are you really asking me to marry you?"

"Certainly," he said, far from mollified.

She leaned back in the chair and regarded him in silence for a moment. "Is it possible that you have not heard that I am to be married this month?" she asked, and there was something like pity in her manner.

"Heard it? Of course, I've heard it. Everybody's heard it. That's just what I've come to see you about. To talk the whole thing over. To see if we can't do something. Now, there is a way out of it, dear girl. It may not be the best way in the world but it's infinitely—"

"Are you crazy?" she cried, staring at him in alarm.

"See here, Anne," he said gently, "I am your friend. It will not make any difference to you if I tell you that I love you, that I've loved you for years. It's true nevertheless. I'm glad that I've at last had the courage to tell you. Still I suppose it's immaterial. I've come up here this afternoon to ask you to be my wife. I don't ask you to say that you love me. I don't want to put you in such a position as that. I know you don't love me, but—"

"Simmy! Oh, Simmy!" she cried out, a hysterical laugh in her throat that died suddenly in a strange, choking way. She was looking at him now with wide, comprehending eyes.

"I can't bear to see you married to that old man, Anne," he went on. "It is too awful for words. You are one of the most perfect of God's creations. You shall not be sacrificed on this damned altar of—I beg your pardon, I did not mean to begin by accusing any one of deliberately forcing you into—into—" He broke off and pulled fiercely at his little moustache.

"I see now," she said presently. "You are willing to sacrifice yourself in order that I may be spared. Is that it?"

"It isn't precisely a sacrifice. At least, it isn't quite the same sort of sacrifice that goes with your case as it now stands. In this instance, one of us at least is moved by a feeling of love;—in the other, there is no love at all. If you will take me, Anne, you will get a man who adores you for yourself. Isn't there something in that? I can give you everything that old man Thorpe can give, with love thrown in. I understand the situation. You are not marrying that old man because you love him. There's something back of it all that you can't tell me, and I shall not ask you to do so. But listen, dear; I'm decent, I'm honest, I'm young and I'm rich. I can give you everything that money will buy. Good Lord, I wish I could remember just what I've got to offer you in the way of—But, never mind now. If you'd like it, I'll have my secretary make out a complete list of—"

"So you think I am marrying Mr. Thorpe for his money,—is that it, Simmy dear?" she asked.

"I know it," said he promptly. "That is, you are marrying him because some one else—ahem! You can't expect me to believe that you love the old codger."

"No, I can't expect that of any one. Thank you, Simmy. I think I understand. You really want to—to save me. Isn't that so?"

"I do, Anne, God knows I do," he said fervently. "It's the most beastly, diabolical—"

"You have been fair with me, Simmy," she broke in seriously, "so I'll be fair with you. I am marrying Mr. Thorpe for his money. I ought to be ashamed to confess it openly in this way, but I'm not. Every one knows just why I am going into this thing, and every one is putting the blame upon my mother. She is not wholly to blame. I am not being driven into it. It's in the blood of us. We are that kind. We are a bad lot, Simmy, we women of the breed. It goes a long way back, and we're all alike. Don't ask me to say anything more, dear old boy. I'm just a rotter, so let it go at that."

"You're nothing of the sort," he exclaimed, seizing her hand. "You're nothing of the sort!"

"Oh, yes, I am," she said wearily.

"See here, Anne," he said earnestly, "why not take me? If it's a matter of money, and nothing else, why not take me? That's what I mean. That's just what I wanted to explain to you. Think it over, Anne. For heaven's sake, don't go on with the other thing. Chuck it all and—take me. I won't bother you much. You can have all the money you need—and more, if you ask for it. Hang it all, I'll settle a stipulated amount upon you before we take another step. A million, two millions,—I don't care a hang,—only don't spoil this bright, splendid young life of yours by—Oh, Lordy, it's incomprehensible!"

She patted the back of his hand, gently, even tremblingly. Her eyes were very bright and very solemn.

"It has to go on now, Simmy," she said at last.

For a long time they were silent.

"I hope you have got completely over your love for Braden Thorpe," he said. "But, of course, you have. You don't care for him any more. You couldn't care for him and go on with this. It wouldn't be human, you know."

"No, it wouldn't be human," she said, her face rigid.

He was staring intently at the floor. Something vague yet sure was forming in his brain, something that grew to comprehension before he spoke.

"By Jove, Anne," he muttered, "I am beginning to understand. You wouldn't marry a young man for his money. It has to be an old man, an incredibly old man. I see!"

"I would not marry a young man, Simmy, for anything but love," she said simply. "I would not live for years with a man unless I loved him, be he poor or rich. Now you have it, my friend. I'm a pretty bad one, eh?"

"No, siree! I'd say it speaks mighty well for you," he cried enthusiastically. His whimsical smile returned and the points of his little moustache went up once more. "Just think of waiting for a golden wedding anniversary with a duffer like me! By Jove, I can see the horror of that myself. You just couldn't do it. I get your idea perfectly, Anne. Would it interest you if I were to promise to be extremely reckless with my life? You see, I'm always taking chances with my automobiles. Had three or four bad smash-ups already, and one broken arm. I could be a little more reckless and very careless if you think it would help. I've never had typhoid or pneumonia. I could go about exposing myself to all sorts of things after a year or two. Flying machines, too, and long distance swimming. I might even try to swim the English Channel. North Pole expeditions, African wild game hunts,—all that sort of thing, Anne. I'll promise to do everything in my power to make life as short as possible, if you'll only—"

"Oh, Simmy, you are killing," she cried, laughing through her tears. "I shall always adore you."

"That's what they all say. Well, I've done my best, Anne. If you'll run away with me to-night, or to-morrow, or any time before the twenty-third, I'll be the happiest man in the world. You can call me up any time,—at the club or at my apartment. I'll be ready. Think it over. Good-bye. I wish I could wish you good luck in this other—but, of course, you couldn't expect that. We're a queer lot, all of us. I've always had a sneaking suspicion that if my mother had married the man she was truly in love with, I'd be a much better-looking chap than I am to-day."

She was standing beside him at the door, nearly a head taller than he.

"Or," she amended with a dainty grimace, "you might be a very beautiful girl, and that would be dreadful."

CHAPTER IX

The day before the wedding, little Mrs. George Dexter Tresslyn, satisfactorily shorn of her appendix and on the rapid road to recovery that is traveled only by the perfectly healthy of mankind, confided to her doctor that the mystery of the daily bunch of roses was solved. They represented the interest and attention of her ex-husband, and, while they were unaccompanied by a single word from him, they also signified devotion.

"Which means that he is still making love to you?" said Thorpe, with mock severity.

"Clandestinely," said she, with a lovely blush and a curious softening of her eyes. She was wondering how this big, strong friend of hers would take the information, and how far she could go in her confidences without adventuring upon forbidden territory. Would he close the gates in the wall that guarded his own opinions of the common foe, or would he let her inside long enough for a joint discussion of the condition that confronted both of them: the Tresslyn nakedness? "He has been inquiring about me twice a day by telephone, Doctor, and this morning he was down stairs. My night nurse knows him by sight. He was here at half-past seven. That's very early for George, believe me. This hospital is a long way from where he lives. I would say that he got up at six or half-past, wouldn't you?"

"If he went to bed at all," said Thorpe, with a grim smile.

"Anyhow, it proves something, doesn't it?" she persisted.

"Obviously. He is still in love with you, if that's what you want me to say."

"That's just what I wanted you to say," she cried, her eyes sparkling. "Poor George! He's a dear, and I don't care who hears me say it. If he'd had any kind of a chance at all we wouldn't be—Oh, well, what's the use talking about it?" She sighed deeply.

Braden watched her flushed, drawn face with frowning eyes. He realised that she had suffered long in silence, that her heart had been wrung in the bitter stretches of a thousand nights despite the gay indifference of the thousand days that lay between them. For nearly three years she had kept alive the hungry thing that gnawed at her heart and would not be denied. He was sorry for her. She was better than most of the women he knew in one respect if in no other: she was steadfast. She had made a bargain and it was not her fault that it was not binding. He had but little pity for George Tresslyn. The little he had was due to the belief that if the boy had been older he would have fought a better fight for the girl. As she lay there now, propped up against the pillows, he could not help contrasting her with the splendid, high-bred daughter of Constance Tresslyn. That she was a high-minded, honest, God-fearing girl he could not for an instant doubt, but that she lacked the—there is but one word for it—class of the Tresslyn women he could not but feel as well as see. There was a distinct line between them, a line that it would take generations to cross. Still, she was a loyal, warm-hearted enduring creature, and by qualities such as these she mounted to a much higher plane than Anne Tresslyn could ever hope to attain, despite her position on the opposite side of the line. He had never seen George's wife in anything but a blithe, confident mood; she was an unbeaten little warrior who kept her colours flying in the face of a despot called Fate. In fact, she was worthy of a better man than young Tresslyn, worthy of the steel of a nobler foe than his mother.

He was eager to comfort her. "It is pretty fine of George, sending you these flowers every day. I am getting a new light on him. Has he ever suggested to you in any way the possibility of—of—well, you know what I mean?"

"Fixing it up again between us?" she supplied, an eager light in her eyes. "No, never, Dr. Thorpe. He has never spoken to me, never written a line to me. That's fine of him too. He loves me, I'm sure of it, and he wants me, but it is fine of him not to bother me, now isn't it? He knows he could drag me back into the muddle, he knows he could make a fool of me, and yet he will not take that advantage of me."

"Would you go back to him if he asked you to do so?"

"I suppose so," she sighed. Then brightly: "So, you see, I shall refuse to see him if he ever comes to plead. That's the only way. We must go our separate ways, as decreed. I am his wife but I must not so far forget myself as to think that he is my husband. I know, Dr. Thorpe, that if we had been left alone, we could have managed somehow. He was young, but so was I. I am not quite impossible, am I? Don't these friends of yours like me, don't they find something worth while in me? If I were as common, as undesirable as Mrs. Tresslyn would have me to be, why do people of your kind like me,—take me up, as the saying is? I know that I don't really belong, I know I'm not just what they are, but I'm not so awfully hopeless, now am I? Isn't Mrs. Fenn a nice woman? Doesn't she go about in the smart set?"

She appeared to be pleading with him. He smiled.

"Mrs. Fenn is a very nice woman and a very smart one," he said. "You have many exceedingly nice women among your friends. So be of good cheer, if that signifies anything to you." He was chaffing her in his most amiable way.

"It signifies a lot," she said seriously. "By rights, I suppose, I should have gone to the devil. That's what was expected of me, you know. When I took all that money from Mrs. Tresslyn, it wasn't for the purpose of beating my way to the devil as fast as I could. I took it for an entirely different reason: to put myself where I could tell other people to go to him if I felt so inclined. I took it so that I could make of myself, if possible, the sort of woman that George Tresslyn might have married without stirring up a row in the family. I've taken good care of all that money. It is well invested. I manage to live and dress on the income. Rather decent of me, isn't it? Surprisingly decent, you might say, eh?"

"Surprisingly," he agreed, smiling.

"What George Tresslyn needs, Dr. Thorpe, is something to work for, something to make work an object to him. What has he got to work for now? Nothing, absolutely nothing. He's merely keeping up appearances, and he'll never get anywhere in God's world until he finds out that it's a waste of time working for a living that's already provided for him."

Thorpe was impressed by this quaint philosophy. "Would you, in your wisdom, mind telling me just what you think George would be capable of doing in order to earn a living for two people instead of one?"

She looked at him in surprise. "Why, isn't he big and strong and hasn't he a brain and a pair of hands? What more can a man require in this little old age? A big, strapping fellow doesn't have to sit down and say 'What in heaven's name am I to do with these things that God has given me?' Doesn't a blacksmith earn enough for ten sometimes, and how about the carpenter, the joiner and the man who brings the ice? Didn't I earn a living up to the time I burnt my fingers and had to be pensioned for dishonourable service? It didn't take much strength or intelligence to demonstrate mustard, did it? And you sit there and ask me what George is capable of doing! Why, he could do anything if he had to."

"You are really a very wonderful person," said he, with conviction. "I believe you could have made a man of George if you'd had the chance."

She looked down. "I suppose the world thinks I made him what he is now, so what's the use speculating? Let's talk about you for awhile. Miss McKane won't be back for a few minutes, so let's chat some more. Didn't I hear you tell her yesterday that you expect to leave for London about the first?"

"If you are up and about," said he.

She hesitated, a slight frown on her brow. "Do you know that you are pale and tired-looking, Dr. Thorpe? Have you looked in the glass at yourself lately?"

"Regularly," he said, forcing a smile. "I shave once a day, and I—"

"I'm serious. You don't look happy. You may confide in me, Doctor. I think you ought to talk to some one about it. Are you still in love with Miss Tresslyn? Is that what's taking the colour out—"

"I am not in love with Miss Tresslyn," he said, meeting her gaze steadily. "That is all over. I will confess that I have been dreadfully hurt, terribly shocked. A man doesn't get over such things easily or quickly. I will not pretend that I am happy. So, if that explains my appearance to you, Mrs. Tresslyn, we'll say no more about it."

Her eyes filled with tears. "Oh, I'm sorry if I've—if I've meddled,—if I've been too—"

"Don't worry," he broke in quickly. "I don't in the least mind. In fact, I'm glad you gave me the opportunity to say in so many words that I do not love her. I've never said it before. I'm glad that I have said it. It helps, after all."

"You'll be happy yet," she sniffled. "I know you will. The world is full of good, noble women, and there's one somewhere who will make you glad that this thing has happened to you. Now, we'll change the subject. Miss McKane may pop in at any moment, you know. Have you any new patients?"

He smiled again. "No. You are my sole and only, Mrs. Fenn can't persuade Rumsey to have a thing done to him, and Simmy Dodge refuses to break his neck for scientific purposes, so I've given up hope. I shall take no more cases. In a year I may come back from London and then I'll go snooping about for nice little persons like you who—"

"Simmy Dodge says you are not living at your grandfather's house any longer," she broke, irrelevantly.

"I am at a hotel," he said, and no more.

"I see," she said, frowning very darkly for her.

He studied her face for a moment, and then arose from the chair beside her bed. "You may be interested to hear that while I am invited to attend the wedding to-morrow afternoon I shall not be there," he said, divining her thoughts.

"I didn't like to ask," she said. The nurse came into the room. "He says I'm doing as well as could be expected, Miss McKane," she said glibly, "and if nothing unforeseen happens I'll be dodging automobiles in Fifth Avenue inside of two weeks. Good-bye, Doctor."

"Good-bye. I'll look in to-morrow—afternoon," he said.

The marriage of Anne Tresslyn and Templeton Thorpe took place at the home of the bridegroom at four o'clock on the afternoon of the twenty-third. A departure from the original plans was made imperative at the eleventh hour by the fact that Mr. Thorpe had been quite ill during the night. His condition was in no sense alarming, but the doctors announced that a postponement of the wedding was unavoidable unless the ceremony could be held in the Thorpe home instead of at Mrs. Tresslyn's as originally planned. Moreover, the already heavily curtailed list of guests would have to be narrowed to even smaller proportions. The presence of so many as the score of selected guests might prove to be hazardous in view of the old gentleman's state of nerves, not to say health. Mr. Thorpe was able to be up and about with the aid of the imperturbable Wade, but he was exceedingly irascible and hard to manage. He was annoyed with Braden. When the strange illness came early in the night, he sent out for his grandson. He wanted him to be there if anything serious was to result from the stroke,—he persisted in calling it a stroke, scornfully describing his attack as a "rush of blood to the head from a heart that had been squeezed too severely by old Father Time." Braden was not to be found. What annoyed Mr. Thorpe most was the young man's unaccountable disposition to desert him in his hour of need. In his querulous tirade, he described his grandson over and over again as an ingrate, a traitor, a good-for-nothing without the slightest notion of what an obligation means.

He did not know, and was not to know for many days, that his grandson had purposely left town with the determination not to return until the ill-mated couple were well on their way to the Southland, where the ludicrous honeymoon was to be spent. And so it was that the old family doctor had to be called in to take charge of Mr. Thorpe in place of the youngster on whom he had spent so much money and of whom he expected such great and glorious things.

He would not listen to a word concerning a postponement. Miss Tresslyn was called up on the telephone by Wade at eight o'clock in the morning, and notified of the distressing situation. What was to be done? At first no one seemed to know what could be done, and there was a tremendous flurry that for the time being threatened to deprive Mr. Thorpe of a mother-in-law before the time set for her to actually become one. Doctors were summoned to revive the prostrated Mrs. Tresslyn. She went all to pieces, according to reports from the servants' hall. In an hour's time, however, she was herself once more, and then it was discovered that a postponement was the last thing in the world to be considered in a crisis of such magnitude. Hasty notes were despatched hither and thither; caterers and guests alike were shunted off with scant ceremony; chauffeurs were commandeered and motors confiscated; everybody was rushing about in systematic confusion, and no one paused to question the commands of the distracted lady who rose sublimely to the situation. So promptly and effectually was order substituted for chaos that when the clock in Mr. Thorpe's drawing-room struck the hour of four, exactly ten people were there and two of them were facing a minister of the gospel,—one in an arm chair with pillows surrounding him, the other standing tall and slim and as white as the driven snow beside him....

Late that night, Mr. George Tresslyn came upon Simmy Dodge in the buffet at the Plaza.

"Well, you missed it," he said thickly. His high hat was set far back on his head and his face was flushed.

"Come over here in the corner," said Simmy, with discernment, "and for heaven's sake don't talk above a whisper."

"Whisper?" said George, annoyed. "What do I want to whisper for? I don't want to whisper, Simmy. I never whisper. I hate to hear people whisper. I refuse to whisper to anybody."

Simmy took him by the arm and led him to a table in a corner remote from others that were occupied.

"Maybe you'd rather go for a drive in the Park," he said engagingly.

"Nonsense! I've been driven all day, Simmy. I don't want to be driven any more. I'm tired, that's what's the matter with me. Dog-tired, understand? Have a drink? Here, boy!"

"Thanks, George, I don't care for a drink. No, not for me, thank you. Strictly on the wagon, you know. Better let it alone yourself. Take my advice, George. You're not a drinking man and you can't stand it."

George glowered at him for a moment, and then let his eyes fall. "Guess you're right, Simmy. I've had enough. Never mind, waiter. First time I've been like this in a mighty long time, Simmy. But don't think I'm celebrating, because I ain't. I'm drowning something, that's all." He was almost in tears by this time. "I can't help thinking about her standin' there beside that old—Oh, Lord! I can't talk about it."

"That's right," said Simmy, persuasively. "I wouldn't if I were you. Come along with me. I'll walk home with you, George. A good night's rest will put—"

"Rest? My God, Simmy, I'm never going to rest again, not even in my grave. Say, do you know who I blame for all this business? Do you?"

"Sh!"

"I won't shoosh! I blame myself. I am to blame and no one else. If I'd been any kind of a man I'd have put my foot down—just like that—and stopped the thing. That's what I'd have done if I'd been a man, Simmy. And instead of stoppin' it, do you know what I did? I went down there and stood up with old Thorpe as his best man. Can you beat that? His best man! My God! Wait a minute. See, he was sittin' just like you are—lean back a little and drop your chin—and I was standing right here, see—on this side of him. Just like this. And over here was Anne—oh, Lord! And here was Katherine Browne,—best maid, you know,—I mean maid of honour. Standin' just like this, d'you see? And then right in front here was the preacher. Say, where do all these preachers come from? I've never seen that feller in all my life, and still they say he's an old friend of the family. Fine business for a preacher to be in, wasn't it? Fi-ine bus-i-ness! He ought to have been ashamed of himself. By Gosh, come to think of it, I believe he was worse than I. He might have got out of it if he'd tried. He looked like a regular man, and I'm nothing but a fish-worm."

"Not so loud, George, for heaven's sake. You don't want all these men in here to—"

"Right you are, Simmy, right you are. I'm one of the fellers that talks louder than anybody else and thinks he's as big as George Washington because he's got a bass voice." He lowered his voice to a hoarse, raucous whisper and went on. "And mother stood over there, see,—right about where that cuspidor is,—and looked at the preacher all the time. Watchin' to see that he kept his face straight, I suppose. Couple of old rummies standin' back there where that table is, all dressed up in Prince Alberts and shaved within an inch of their lives. Lawyers, I heard afterwards. Old Mrs. Browne and Doc. Bates stood just behind me. Now you have it, just as it was. Curtains all down and electric lights going full blast. It wouldn't have been so bad if the lights had been out. Couldn't have seen old Tempy, for one thing, and Anne's face for another. I'll never forget Anne's face." His own face was now as white as chalk and convulsed with genuine emotion.

Simmy was troubled. There was that about George Tresslyn that suggested a subsequent catastrophe. He was in no mood to be left to himself. There was the despairing look of the man who kills in his eyes, but who kills only himself.

"See here, George, let's drop it now. Don't go on like this. Come along, do. Come to my rooms and I'll make you comfortable for the—"

But George was not through with his account of the wedding. He straightened up and, gritting his teeth, went on with the story. "Then there were the responses, Simmy,—the same that we had, Lutie and I,—just the same, only they sounded queer and awful and strange to-day. Only young people ought to get married, Simmy. It doesn't seem so rotten when young people lie like that to each other. Before I really knew what had happened the preacher had pronounced them husband and wife, and there I stood like a block of marble and held my peace when he asked if any one knew of a just cause why they shouldn't be joined in holy wedlock. I never even opened my lips. Then everybody rushed up and congratulated Anne! And kissed her, and made all sorts of horrible noises over her. And then what do you think happened? Old Tempy up and practically ordered everybody out of the house. Said he was tired and wanted to be left alone. 'Good-bye,' he said, just like that, right in our faces—right in mother's face, and the preacher's, and old Mrs. Browne's. You could have heard a pin drop. 'Good-bye,' that's what he said, and then, will you believe it, he turned to one of the pie-faced lawyers and said to him: 'Will you turn over that package to my wife, Mr. Hollenback?' and then he says to that man of his: 'Wade, be good enough to hand Mr. Tresslyn the little acknowledgment for his services?' Then and there, that lawyer gave Anne a thick envelope and Wade gave me a little box,—a little bit of a box that I wish I'd kept to bury the old skinflint in. It would be just about his size. I had it in my vest pocket for awhile. 'Wade, your arm,' says he, and then with what he probably intended to be a sweet smile for Anne, he got to his feet and went out of the room, holding his side and bending over just as if he was having a devil of time to keep from laughing out loud. I heard the doctor say something about a pain there, but I didn't pay much attention. What do you think of that? Got right up and left his guests, his bride and everybody standing there like a lot of goops. His bride, mind you. I'm dead sure that so-called stroke of his was all a bluff. He just put one over on us, that's all. Wasn't any more sick than I am. Didn't you hear about the stroke? Stroke of luck, I'd call it. And say, what do you think he gave me as a little acknowledgment for my services? Look! Feast your eyes upon it!" He turned back the lapel of his coat and fumbled for a moment before extracting from the cloth a very ordinary looking scarf-pin, a small aqua-marine surrounded by a narrow rim of pearls. "Great, isn't it? Magnificent tribute! You could get a dozen of 'em for fifty dollars. That's what I got for being best man at my sister's funeral, and, by God, it's more than I deserved at that. He had me sized up properly, I'll say that for him."

He bowed his head dejectedly, his lips working in a sort of spasmodic silence. Dodge eyed him with a curious, new-born commiseration. The boy's self-abasement, his misery, his flouting of his own weakness were not altogether the result of maudlin reaction. He presented a combination of manliness and effectiveness that perplexed and irritated Simeon Dodge. He did not want to feel sorry for him and yet he could not help doing so. George's broad shoulders and splendid chest were heaving under the strain of a genuine, real emotion. Drink was not responsible for his present estimate of himself; it had merely opened the gates to expression.

Simmy's scrutiny took in the fine, powerful body of this incompetent giant,—for he was a giant to Simmy,—and out of his appraisal grew a fresh complaint against the Force that fashions men with such cruel inconsistency. What would not he perform if he were fashioned like this splendid being? Why had God given to George Tresslyn all this strength and beauty, to waste and abuse, when He might have divided His gifts with a kindlier hand? To what heights of attainment in all the enterprises of man would not he have mounted if Nature had but given to him the shell that George Tresslyn occupied? And why should Nature have put an incompetent, useless dweller into such a splendid house when he would have got on just as well or better perhaps in an insignificant body like his own? Proportions were wrong, outrageously wrong, grieved Simmy as he studied the man who despised the strength God had given him. And down in his honest, despairing soul, Simmy Dodge was saying to himself that he would cheerfully give all of his wealth, all of his intelligence, all of his prospects, in exchange for a physical body like George Tresslyn's. He would court poverty for the privilege of enjoying other triumphs along the road to happiness.

"Why don't you say something?" demanded George, suddenly looking up. "Call me whatever you please, Simmy; I'll not resent it. Hang it all, I'll let you kick me if you want to. Wouldn't you like to, Simmy?"

"Lord love you, no, my boy," cried the other, reaching out and laying a hand on George's shoulder. "See here, George, there's a great deal more to you than you suspect. You've got everything that a man ought to have except one thing, and you can get that if you make up your mind to go after it."

"What's that?" said George, vaguely interested.

"Independence," said Simmy. "Do you know what I'd do if I had that body and brain of yours?"

"Yes," said George promptly. "You'd go out and lick the world, Simmy, because you're that kind of a feller. You've got character, you have. You've got self-respect, and ideals, and nerve. I ought to have been put into your body and you into mine."

Simmy winced. "Strike out for yourself, George. Be somebody. Buck up, and—"

George sagged back into the chair as he gloomily interrupted the speaker. "That's all very fine, Simmy, that sort of talk, but I'm not in the mood to listen to it now. I wasn't through telling you about the wedding. Where was I when I stopped? Oh, yes, the scarf-pin. Hey, waiter! Come here a second."

A waiter approached. With great solemnity George arose and grasped him by the shoulder, and a moment later had removed the nickel-plated badge from the man's lapel. The waiter was tolerant. He grinned. It was what he was expected to do under the circumstances. But he was astonished by the next act of the tall young man in evening clothes. George proceeded to jam the scarf-pin into the fellow's coat where the badge of service had rested the instant before. Then, with Simmy looking on in disgust, he pinned the waiter's badge upon his own coat. "There!" he said, with a sneer. "That is supposed to make a gentleman of you, and this makes a man of me. On your way, gentleman! I—"

"For heaven's sake, George," cried Simmy, arising. "Don't be an ass." He took the tag from Tresslyn's coat and handed it back to the waiter. "Give him the scarf-pin if you like, old man, but don't rob him of his badge of honour. He earns an honest living with that thing, you know."

George sat down. He was suddenly abashed. "What an awful bounder you must think I am, Simmy."

"Nonsense. You're a bit tight, that's all." He slipped the waiter a bank-note and motioned him away. "Now, let's go home, George."

"Yes, sir; he turned and walked out of the room, leaving all of us standing there," muttered George, with a mental leap backward. "I'll never forget it, long as I live. He simply scorned the whole lot of us. I went away as quickly as I could, but the others beat me to it. I left mother and Anne there all alone, just wandering around the room as if they were half-stunned. Never, never will I forget Anne's white, scared face, and I've never seen mother so helpless, either. Anne gripped, that big envelope so tight that it crumpled up into almost nothing. Mother took it away from her and opened it. Nobody was there but us three. I shan't tell you what was in the envelope. I'm not drunk enough for that."

"Never mind. It's immaterial, in any event." Simmy had called for his check.

George's mind took a new twist. Suddenly he sprang to his feet. "By the way, before I forget it, do you know where I can find Braden Thorpe?"

A black scowl disfigured his face. There was an ugly, ominous glare in his fast clearing eyes. Simmy, coming no higher than his shoulder, linked his arm through one of George's and started toward the door with him. He was headed for the porters' entrance.

"He's out of town, George. Don't bother about Braden."

"I'm going to kill Brady Thorpe, Simmy," said George hoarsely. Simmy felt the big right arm swell and become as rigid as steel.

"Don't talk like a fool," he whispered.

"He didn't act right by Anne," said George. "He's got to account to me. He's—"

They were in the narrow hallway by this time. Simmy called to a porter.

"Get me a taxi, will you?"

"I say he didn't act right by Anne. It's his fault that she—Let go my arm, Simmy!" He gave it a mighty wrench.

"All right," said Simmy, maintaining his equilibrium with some difficulty after the jerk he had received. "Don't you want me to be your friend, George?"

George glared at him, and then broke into a shamed, foolish laugh. "Forgive me, Simmy. Of course, I want you as my friend. I depend upon you."

"Then stop this talk about going after Braden. In heaven's name, you kid, what has he done to you or Anne? He's the one who deserves sympathy and—"

"I've got it in for him because he's a coward and a skunk," explained George, lowering his voice with praiseworthy consideration. "You see, it's just this way, Simmy. He didn't do the right thing by Anne. He ought to have come back here and made her marry him. That's where he's to blame. He ought to have gone right up to the house and grabbed her by the throat and choked her till she gave in and went with him to a justice-of-the-peace or something. He owed it to her, Simmy,—he was in duty bound to save her. If he hadn't been a sneakin' coward, he'd have choked her till she was half-dead and then she would have gone with him gladly. Women like a brave man. They like to be choked and beaten and—"

Simmy laughed. "Do you call it bravery to choke a woman into submission, and drag her off to—"

"I call it cowardice to give up the woman you love if she loves you," said George. "I know what I'm talking about, too, because I'm one of the sneakingest cowards on earth. What do you think of me, Simmy? What does everybody think of me? Wouldn't call me a brave man, would you?"

"The cases are not parallel. Braden's case is different. He couldn't force Anne to—"

"See here, Simmy," broke in George, wonderingly, "I hadn't noticed it before, but, by giminy, I believe you're tipsy. You've been drinking, Simmy. No sober man would talk as you do. When you sober up, you'll think just as I do,—and that is that Brady Thorpe ought to have been a man when he had the chance. He ought to have stuck his fist under Anne's nose and said 'Come on, or I'll smash you,' and she'd have gone with him like a little lamb, and she'd have loved him a hundred times more than she ever loved him before. He didn't do the right thing by her, Simmy. He didn't, curse him, and I'll never forgive him. I'm going to wring his neck, so help me Moses. I've been a coward just as long as I intend to be. Take a good look at me, Simmy. If you watch closely you may see me turning into a man."

"Get in," said Simmy, pushing him toward the door of the taxi-cab. "A little sleep is what you need."

"And say, there's another thing I've got to square up with Brady Thorpe," protested George, holding back. "He took Lutie up there to that beastly hospital and slashed her open, curse him. A poor, helpless little girl like that! Call that brave? Sticking a knife into Lutie? He's got to settle with me for that, too."

And then Simmy understood.

CHAPTER X

Much may happen in a year's time. The history of the few people involved in the making of this narrative presents but few new aspects, and yet there is now to be disclosed an unerring indication of great and perhaps enduring changes in the lives of every one concerned.

To begin with, Templeton Thorpe, at the age of seventy-eight, is lying at the edge of his grave. On the day of his marriage with Anne Tresslyn, he put down his arms in the long and hopeless conflict with an enemy that knows no pity, a foe so supremely confident that man has been powerless to do more than devise a means to temporarily check its relentless fury. The thing in Mr. Thorpe's side was demanding the tolls of victory. There was no curbing its wrath: neither the soft nor the harsh answer of science had served to turn it away. The hand with the gleaming, keen-edged knife had been offered against it again and again, but the stroke had never fallen, for always there stood between it and the surgeon who would slay the ravager, the resolute fear of Templeton Thorpe. Time there was when the keen-edged knife might have vanquished or at least deprived it of its early venom, but the body of a physical coward housed it and denied admittance to all-comers. Templeton Thorpe did not fear death. He wanted to die, he implored his Maker to become his Destroyer. The torture of a slow, inevitable death, however, was as nothing to the horror of the knife that is sharp and cold.

When he went upstairs with Wade on that memorable twenty-third of March, he said to his enemy: "Be quick, that's all I ask of you," and then prepared to wait as patiently as he could for the friendly end.

From that day on, he was to the eyes of the world what he had long been to himself in secret: a sick man without hope. Weeks passed before his bride recognised the revolting truth, and when she came to know that he was doomed her pity was so vast that she sickened under its weight. She had come prepared to see him die, as all men do when they have lived out their time, but she had not counted on seeing him die like this, with suffering in his bleak old eyes and a smile of derision on his pallid lips.

Old Templeton Thorpe's sufferings were for himself, and he guarded them jealously with all the fortitude he could command. His irascibility increased with his determination to fight it out alone. He disdained every move on her part to extend sympathy and help to him. To her credit, be it said, she would have become his nurse and consoler if he had let down the bars,—not willingly, of course, but because there was in Anne Thorpe, after all, the heart of a woman, and of such it must be said there is rarely an instance where its warmth has failed to respond to the call of human suffering. She would have tried to help him, she would have tried to do her part. But he was grim, he was resolute. She could not bridge the gulf that lay between them. His profound tolerance did not deceive her; it was scorn of the most poignant character.

Braden was in Europe. He was expected in New York by the middle of March. His grandfather would not consent to his being sent for, although it was plain to be seen that he lived only for the young man's return.

Anne had once suggested, timorously, that Braden's place was at the sufferer's bedside, but the smile that the old man bestowed upon her was so significant, so full of understanding, that she shrank within herself and said no more. She knew, however, that he longed for the sustaining hand of his only blood relation, that he looked upon himself as utterly alone in these last few weeks of life; and yet he would not send out the appeal that lay uppermost in his thoughts. In his own good time Braden would come back and there would be perhaps' one long, farewell grip of the hand.

After that, ironic peace.

He could not be cured himself, but he wanted to be sure that Braden was cured before he passed away. He knew that his grandson would not come home until the last vestige of love and respect for Anne Tresslyn was gone; not until he was sure that his wound had healed beyond all danger of bleeding again. Mr. Thorpe was satisfied that he had served his grandson well. He was confident that the young man would thank him on his death-bed for turning the hand of fate in the right direction, so that it pointed to contentment and safety. Therefore, he felt himself justified in forbidding any one to acquaint Braden of the desperate condition into which he had fallen. He insisted that no word be sent to him, and, as in all things, the singular power of old Templeton Thorpe prevailed over the forces that were opposed. Letters came to him infrequently from the young man,—considerate, formal letters in which he never failed to find the touch of repressed gratitude that inspired the distant writer. Soon he would be coming home to "set up for himself." Soon he would be fighting the battle of life on the field that no man knew and yet was traversed by all.

Dr. Bates and the eminent surgeons who came to see the important invalid, discussed among themselves, but never in the presence of Mr. Thorpe, the remarkable and revolutionary articles that had been appearing of late in one of the medical journals over the signature of Braden Thorpe. There were two articles, one in answer to a savage, denunciatory communication that had been drawn out by the initial contribution from the pen of young Thorpe.

In his first article, Braden had deliberately taken a stand in favour of the merciful destruction of human life in cases where suffering is unendurable and the last chance for recovery or even relief is lost. He had the courage, the foolhardiness to sign his name to the article, thereby irrevocably committing himself to the propaganda. A storm of sarcasm ensued. The great surgeons of the land ignored the article, amiably attributing it to a "young fool who would come to his senses one day." Young and striving men in the profession rushed into print,—or at least tried to do so,—with the result that Braden was excoriated by a thousand pens. Only one of these efforts was worthy of notice, and it inspired a calm, dispassionate rejoinder from young Thorpe, who merely called attention to the fact that he was not trying to "make murderers out of God's commissioners," but was on the other hand advocating a plan by which they might one day,—a far-off day, no doubt,—extend by Man's law, the same mercy to the human being that is given to the injured beast.

Anne was shocked one day by a callous observation on the lips of old Dr. Bates, a sound practitioner and ordinarily as gentle as the average family doctor one hears so much about. Mr. Thorpe was in greater pain than usual that day. Opiates were of little use in these cruel hours. It was now impossible to give him an amount sufficient to produce relief without endangering the life that hung by so thin a thread.

"I suppose this excellent grandson of his would say that Mr. Thorpe ought to be killed forthwith, and put out of his misery," said the doctor, discussing his patient's condition with the young wife in the library after a long visit upstairs.

Anne started violently. "What do you mean by that, Dr. Bates?" she inquired, after a moment in which she managed to subdue her agitation.

"Perhaps I shouldn't have said it," apologised the old physician, really distressed. "I did it quite thoughtlessly, my dear Mrs. Thorpe. I forgot that you do not read the medical journals."

"Oh, I know what Braden has always preached," she said hurriedly. "But it never—it never occurred to me that—" She did not complete the sentence. A ghastly pallor had settled over her face.

"That his theory might find application to the case upstairs?" supplied the doctor. "Of course it would be unthinkable. Very stupid of me to have spoken of it."

Anne leaned forward in her chair. "Then you regard Mr. Thorpe's case as one that might be included in Braden's—" Again she failed to complete a sentence.

"Yes, Mrs. Thorpe," said Dr. Bates gravely. "If young Braden's pet theory were in practice now, your husband would be entitled to the mercy he prescribes."

"He has no chance?"

"Absolutely no chance."

"All there is left for him is to just go on suffering until—until life wears out?"

"We are doing everything in our power to alleviate the suffering,—everything that is known to science," he vouchsafed. "We can do no more."

"How long will he live, Dr. Bates?" she asked, and instantly shrank from the fear that he would misinterpret her interest.

"No man can answer that question, Mrs. Thorpe. He may live a week, he may live six months. I give him no more than two."

"And if he were to consent to the operation that you once advised, what then?"

"That was a year ago. I would not advise an operation now. It is too late. In fact, I would be opposed to it. There are men in my profession who would take the chance, I've no doubt,—men who would risk all on the millionth part of a chance."

"You think he would die on the operating table?"

"Perhaps,—and perhaps not. That isn't the point. It would be useless, that's all."

"Then why isn't Braden's theory sound and humane?" she demanded sharply.

He frowned. "It is humane, Mrs. Thorpe," said he gravely, "but it isn't sound. I grant you that there is not one of us who would not rejoice in the death of a man in Mr. Thorpe's condition, but there is not one who would deliberately take his life."

"It is all so cruel, so horribly cruel," she said. "The savages in the heart of the jungle can give us lessons in humanity."

"I daresay," said he. "By the same reasoning, is it wise for us to receive lessons in savagery from them?"

Anne was silent for a time. She felt called upon to utter a defence for Braden but hesitated because she could not choose her words. At last she spoke. "I have known Braden Thorpe all my life, Dr. Bates. He is sincere on this question. I think you might grant him that distinction."

"Lord love you, madam, I haven't the faintest doubt as to his sincerity," cried the old doctor. "He is voicing the sentiment of every honest man in my profession, but he overlooks the fact that sentiment has a very small place among the people we serve,—in other words, the people who love life and employ us to preserve it for them, even against the will of God."

"They say that soldiers on the field of battle sometimes mercifully put an end to the lives of their mutilated comrades," she mused aloud.

"And they make it their business to put an end to the lives of the perfectly sound and healthy men who confront them on that same field of battle," he was quick to return. "There is a wide distinction between a weapon and an instrument, Mrs. Thorpe, and there is just as much difference between the inspired soldier and the uninspired doctor, or between impulse and decision."

"I believe that Mr. Thorpe would welcome death," said she.

Dr. Bates shook his head. "My dear, if that were true he could obtain relief from his suffering to-day,—this very hour."

"What do you mean?" she cried, with a swift shudder, as one suddenly assailed by foreboding.

"There is a very sharp razor blade on his dressing-table," said Dr. Bates with curious deliberation. "Besides that, there is sufficient poison in four of those little—But there, I must say no more. You are alarmed,—and needlessly. He will not take his own life, you may be sure of that. By reaching out his hand he can grasp death, and he knows it. A month ago I said this to him: 'Mr. Thorpe, I must ask you to be very careful. If you do not sleep well to-night, take one of these tablets. If one does not give you relief, you may take another, but no more. Four of them would mean certain, almost instant death.' For more than a month that little box of tablets has lain at his elbow, so to speak. Death has been within reach all this time. Those tablets are still there, Mrs. Thorpe, so now you understand."

"Yes," she said, staring at him as if fascinated; "they are still there. I understand."

The thick envelope that Mr. Hollenback handed to Anne on the day of her wedding contained a properly executed assignment of securities amounting to two million dollars, together with an order to the executors under his will to pay in gold to her immediately after his death an amount sufficient to cover any shrinkage that may have occurred in the value of the bonds by reason of market fluctuations. In plain words, she was to have her full two millions. There was also an instrument authorising a certain Trust Company to act as depository for these securities, all of which were carefully enumerated and classified, with instructions to collect and pay to her during his lifetime the interest on said bonds. At his death the securities were to be delivered to her without recourse to the courts, and were to be free of the death tax, which was to be paid from the residue of the estate. There was a provision, however, that she was to pay the state, city and county taxes on the full assessed value of these bonds during his lifetime, and doubtless by premeditation on his part all of them were subject to taxation. This unsuspected "joker" in the arrangements was frequently alluded to by Anne's mother as a "direct slap in the face," for, said she, it was evidently intended as a reflection upon the Tresslyns who, as a family, it appears, were very skilful in avoiding the payment of taxes of any description. (It was a notorious fact that the richest of the Tresslyns was little more than a mendicant when the time came to take his solemn oath concerning taxable possessions.)

Anne took a most amazing stand in respect to the interest on these bonds. Her income from them amounted to something over ninety thousand dollars a year, for Mr. Thorpe's investments were invariably sound and sure. He preferred a safe four or four and a half per cent, bond to an "attractive six." With the coming of each month in the year, Anne was notified by the Trust Company that anywhere from seven to eight thousand dollars had been credited to her account in the bank. She kept her own private account in another bank, and it was against this that she drew her checks. She did not withdraw a dollar of the interest arising from her matrimonial investment!

Mrs. Tresslyn, supremely confident and self-assured, sustained the greatest shock of her life when she found that Anne was behaving in this quixotic manner about the profits of the enterprise. At first she could not believe her ears. But Anne was obdurate, She maintained that her contract called for two million dollars and no more, and she refused to consider this extraneous accumulation as rightfully her own. Her mother berated her without effect. She subjected her to countless attacks from as many angles, but Anne was as "hard as nails."

"I'm not earning this ninety thousand a year, mother," she declared hotly, "and I shall not accept it as a gift. If I were Mr. Thorpe's wife in every sense of the term, it might be different, but as you happen to know I am nothing more than a figure of speech in his household. I am not even his nurse, nor his housekeeper, nor his friend. He despises me. I despise myself, for that matter, so he's not quite alone in his opinion. I've sold myself for a price, mother, but you must at least grant me the privilege of refusing to draw interest on my infamy."

"Infamy!" gasped Mrs. Tresslyn. "Infamy? What rot,—what utter rot!"

"Just the same, I shall confine myself to the original bargain. It is bad enough. I shan't make it any worse by taking money that doesn't belong to me."

"Those bonds are yours," snapped Mrs. Tresslyn. "You are certainly entitled to the interest. You—"

"They are not mine," returned Anne decisively. "Not until Mr. Thorpe is dead, if you please. I am to have my pay after he has passed away, no sooner. That was the bargain."

"You did not hesitate to accept some rather expensive pearls if I remember correctly," said Mrs. Tresslyn bitingly.

"That was his affair, not mine," said Anne coolly. "He despises me so thoroughly that he thought he could go beyond his contract and tempt me with this interest we are quarrelling about, mother. He was sure that I would jump at it as a greedy fish snaps at the bait. But I disappointed him. I shall never forget the look of surprise,—no, it was wonder,—that came into his eyes when I flatly refused to take this interest. That was nearly a year ago. He began to treat me with a little respect after that. There is scarcely a month goes by that he does not bring up the subject. I think he has never abandoned the hope that I may give in, after all. Lately he has taken to chuckling when I make my monthly protest against accepting this money. He can't believe it of me. He thinks there is something amusing about what I have been foolish enough to call my sense of honour. Still, I believe he has a little better opinion of me than he had at first. And now, mother, once and for all, let us consider the matter closed. I will not take the interest until the principal is indisputably mine."

"You are a fool, Anne," said her mother, in her desperation; "a simple, ridiculous fool. Why shouldn't you take it? It is yours. You can't afford to throw away ninety thousand dollars. The bank has orders to pay it over to you, and it is deposited to your account. That ought to settle the matter. If it isn't yours, may I enquire to whom does it belong?"

"Time enough to decide that, mother," said Anne, so composedly that Mrs. Tresslyn writhed with exasperation. "I haven't quite decided who is to have it in the end. You may be sure, however, that I shall give it to some worthy cause. It shan't be wasted."

"Do you mean to say that you will give it away—give it to charity?" groaned her mother.

"Certainly."

Words failed Mrs. Tresslyn. She could only stare in utter astonishment at this incomprehensible creature.

"I may have to ask your advice when the time comes," went on Anne, complacently. "You must assist me in selecting the most worthy charity, mother dear."

"I suppose it has never occurred to you that there is some justice in the much abused axiom that charity begins at home," said Mrs. Tresslyn frigidly.

"Not in our home, however," said Anne. "That's where it ends, if it ends anywhere."

"I have hesitated to speak to you about it, Anne, but I am afraid I shall now have to confess that I am sorely pressed for money," said Mrs. Tresslyn deliberately, and from that moment on she never ceased to employ this argument in her crusade against Anne's ingratitude.

There was no estrangement. Neither of them could afford to go to such lengths. They saw a great deal of each other, and, despite the constant bickerings over the idle money, there was little to indicate that they were at loggerheads. Mrs. Tresslyn was forced at last to recognise the futility of her appeals to Anne's sense of duty, and contented herself with occasional bitter references to her own financial distress. She couldn't understand the girl, and she gave up trying. As a matter of fact, she began to fear that she would never be able to understand either one of her children. She could not even imagine how they could have come by the extraordinary stubbornness with which they appeared to be afflicted.

As for George Tresslyn, he was going to the dogs as rapidly and as accurately as possible. He took to drink, and drink took him to cards. The efforts of Simmy Dodge and other friends, including the despised Percy Wintermill, were of no avail. He developed a pugnacious capacity for resenting advice. It was easy to see what was behind the big boy's behaviour: simple despair. He counted himself among the failures. In due time he lost his position in Wall Street and became a complaining dependent upon his mother's generosity. He met her arguments with the furious and constantly reiterated charge that she had ruined his life. That was another thing that Mrs. Tresslyn could not understand. How, in heaven's name, had she ruined his life?

He took especial delight in directing her attention to the upward progress of the discredited Lutie.

That attractive young person, much to Mrs. Tresslyn's disgust, actually had insinuated her vulgar presence into comparatively good society, and was coming on apace. Blithe, and gay, and discriminating, the former "mustard girl" was making a place for herself among the moderately smart people. Now and then her name appeared in the society columns of the newspapers, where, much to Mrs. Tresslyn's annoyance, she was always spoken of as "Mrs. George Dexter Tresslyn." Moreover, in several instances, George's mother had found her own name printed next to Lutie's in the alphabetical list of guests at rather large entertainments, and once,—heaven forfend that it should happen again!—the former "mustard girl's" picture was published on the same page of a supplement with that of the exclusive Mrs. Tresslyn and her daughter, Mrs. Templeton Thorpe, over the caption: "The Tresslyn Triumvirate," supplied by a subsequently disengaged art editor.

George came near to being turned out into the street one day when he so far forgot himself as to declare that Lutie was worth the whole Tresslyn lot put together, and she ought to be thankful she had had "the can tied to her" in time. His mother was livid with fury.

"If you ever mention that person's name in this house again, you will have to leave it forever. If she's worth anything at all it is because she has appropriated the Tresslyn name that you appear to belittle. You—"

"She didn't appropriate it," flared George. "I remember distinctly of having given it to her. I don't care what you say or do, mother, she deserves a lot of credit. She's made a place for herself, she's decent, she's clever—"

"She hasn't earned a place for herself, let me remind you, sir. She made it out of the proceeds of a sale, the sale of a husband. Don't forget, George, that she sold you for so much cash."

"A darned good bargain," said he, "seeing that she got me at my own value,—which was nothing at all."

Lutie went on her way serenely, securely. If she had a thought for George Tresslyn she succeeded very well in keeping it to herself. Men would have made love to her, but she denied them that exquisite distraction. Back in her mind lurked something that guaranteed immunity.

The year had dealt its changes to Lutie as well as to the others, but they were not important. Discussing herself frankly with Simmy Dodge one evening, she said:

"I'm getting on, am I not, Simmy? But, after all, why shouldn't I? I'm a rather decent sort, and I'm not a real vulgarian, am I? Like those people over there at the next table, I mean. The more I go about, the more I realise that class is a matter of acquaintance. If you know the right sort of people, and have known them long enough, you unconsciously form habits that the other sort of people haven't got, so you're said to have 'class.' Of course, you've got to be imitative, you've got to be able to mimic the real ones, but that isn't difficult if you're half way bright, don't you know."

"Lord love you, Lutie, you don't have to imitate any one," said Simmy. "You're in a class by yourself."

"Thanks, Simmy. Don't let any one else at the table hear you say such things to me, though. They would think that I'd just come in from the country. Why shouldn't I get on? How many of the girls that you meet in your day's walk have graduated from a high-school? How many of the great ladies who rule New York society possess more than a common school education, outside of the tricks they've learned after they put on long frocks? Not many, let me tell you, Simmy. Four-fifths of them can't spell Connecticut, and they don't know how many e's there are in 'separate.' I graduated from a high school in Philadelphia, and my mother did the same thing before me. I also played on the basket-ball team, if that means anything to you. My parents were poor but respectable, God-fearing people, as they say in the novels, and they were quite healthy as parents go in these days, when times are hard and children so cheap that nobody's without a good sized pack of them. I was born with a brain that was meant to be used."

"What are you two talking about so secretively?" demanded Mrs. Rumsey Fenn, across the table from them.

"Ourselves, of course," said Lutie. "Bright people always have something in reserve, my dear. We save the very best for an extremity. Simmy delights in talking about me, and I love to talk about him. It's the simplest kind of small talk and doesn't disturb us in the least if we should happen to be thinking of something else at the time."

"Have you heard when Braden Thorpe is expected home, Simmy?"

"Had a letter from him yesterday. He sails next week. Is there any tinkering to be done for your family this season, Madge? Any little old repairs to be made?"

"I'm afraid not," said Mrs. Fenn desolately, "Rumsey positively refuses to imagine he's got a pain anywhere, and the baby's tonsils are disgustingly healthy."

"Old Templeton Thorpe's in a critical condition, I hear," put in Rumsey Fenn. "There'll be a choice widow in the market before long, I pledge you."

"Can't they operate?" inquired his wife.

"Not for malignant widows," said Mr. Fenn.

"Oh, don't be silly. I should think old Mr. Thorpe would let Braden operate. Just think what a fine boost it would give Braden if the operation was a success."

"And also if it failed," said one of the men, sententiously. "He's the principal heir, isn't he?"

Simmy scowled. "Brady would be the last man in the world to tackle the job," he said, and the subject was dropped at once.

And so the end of the year finds Templeton Thorpe on his death bed, Anne a quixotic ingrate, George among the diligently unemployed, Lutie on the crest of popularity, Braden in contempt of court, and Mrs. Tresslyn sorely tried by the vagaries of each and every one of the aforesaid persons.

Simmy Dodge appears to be the only one among them all who stands just as he did at the beginning of the year. He has neither lost nor gained. He has merely stood still.

CHAPTER XI

When Dr. Braden Thorpe arrived in New York City on the fourteenth of March he was met at the pier by a horde of newspaper men. For the first time, he was made to appreciate "the importance of being earnest." These men, through a frequently prompted spokesman, put questions to him that were so startling in their boldness that he was staggered by the misconception that had preceded him into his home land.

He was asked such questions as these: "But, doctor, would you do that sort of thing to a person who was dear to you,—say a wife, a mother or an only child?" "How could you be sure that a person was hopelessly afflicted?" "Have you ever put this theory of yours into practice on the other side?" "How many lives have you taken in this way, doctor,—if it is a fair question?" "Do you expect to practise openly in New York?" "And if you do practise, how many patients do you imagine would come to you, knowing your views?" "How would you kill 'em,—with poison or what?" And so on, almost without end.

He was to find that a man can become famous and infamous in a single newspaper headline, and as for the accuracy of the interviews there was but one thing to be said: the questions were invariably theirs and the answers also. He did his best to make them understand that he was merely advancing a principle and not practising a crime, that his hand had never been brought down to kill, that his heart was quite as tender as any other man's, and that he certainly was not advocating murder in any degree. Nor was he at present attempting to proselyte.

When he finally escaped the reporters, his brow was wet with the sweat of one who finds himself confronted by a superior force and with no means of defence. He knew that he was to be assailed by every paper in New York. They would tear him to shreds.

Wade was at the pier. He waited patiently in the background while the returned voyager dealt with the reporters, appearing abruptly at Braden's elbow as he was giving his keys to the inspector.

"Good morning, sir," said Wade, in what must be recorded as a confidential tone. He might have been repeating the salutation of yesterday morning for all that his manner betrayed.

"Hello, Wade! Glad to see you." Braden shook hands with the man. "How is my grandfather?"

"Better, sir," said the other, meaning that his master was more comfortable than he had been during the night.

Wade was not as much of an optimist as his reply would seem to indicate. It was his habit to hold bad news in reserve as long as possible, doubtless for the satisfaction it gave him to dribble it out sparingly. He had found it to his advantage to break all sorts of news hesitatingly to his master, for he was never by way of knowing what Mr. Thorpe would regard as bad news. For example, early in his career as valet, he had rushed into Mr. Thorpe's presence with what he had every reason to believe would be good news. He had been sent over to the home of Mr. Thorpe's son for an important bit of information, and he supplied it by almost shouting as he burst into the library: "It's a fine boy, sir,—a splendid ten-pounder, sir." But Mr. Thorpe, instead of accepting the good news gladly, spoiled everything by anxiously inquiring, "And how is the poor little mother getting along?"—a question which caused Wade grave annoyance, for he had to reply: "I'm sorry, sir, but she's not expected to live the hour out."

All of which goes to show that Mr. Thorpe never regarded any news as good without first satisfying himself that it wasn't bad.

"I have the automobile outside, sir," went on Wade, "and I am to look after your luggage."

"Thank you, Wade. If you'll just grab these bags and help the porter out to the car with them, I'll be greatly obliged. And then you may drop me at the Wolcott. I shall stop there for a few days, until I get my bearings."

Wade coughed insinuatingly. "Beg pardon, sir, but I was to fetch you straight home."

"Do you mean to my grandfather's?" demanded the young man sharply.

"Yes, sir. Those were the orders."

"Orders to be disobeyed, I fear, Wade," said Braden darkly. "I am not going to Mr. Thorpe's house."

"I understand, sir," said Wade patiently. "I quite understand. Still it is my duty to report to you that Mr. Thorpe is expecting you."

"Nevertheless, I shall not—"

"Perhaps I should inform you that your grandfather is—er—confined to his bed. As a matter of fact, Mr. Braden, he is confined to his death-bed."

Braden was shocked. Later on, as he was being rushed across town in the car, he drew from Wade all of the distressing details. He had never suspected the truth. Indeed, his grandfather had kept the truth from him so successfully that he had come to look upon him as one of the fortunate few who arrive at death in the full possession of health, those who die because the machinery stops of its own accord. And now the worst possible death was stalking his benefactor, driving,—always driving without pity. Braden's heart was cold, his face pallid with dread as he hurried up the steps to the front door of the familiar old house.

He had forgotten Anne and his vow never to enter the house so long as she was mistress of it. He forgot that her freedom was about to become an accomplished fact, that the thing she had anticipated was now at hand. He had often wondered how long it would be in coming to her, and how she would stand up under the strain of the half score of years or more that conceivably might be left to the man she had married. There had been times when he laughed in secret anticipation of the probabilities that attended her unwholesome adventure. Years of it! Years of bondage before she could lay hands upon the hard-earned fruits of freedom!

As he entered the hall Anne came out of the library to greet him. There was no hesitation on her part, no pretending. She came directly to him, her hand extended. He had stopped stock-still on seeing her.

"I am glad you have come, Braden," she said, letting her hand fall to her side. Either he had ignored it or was too dismayed to notice it at all. "Mr. Thorpe has waited long and patiently for you. I am glad you have come."

He was staring at her, transfixed. There was no change in her appearance. She was just as he had seen her on that last, never-to-be-forgotten day,—the same tall, slender, beautiful Anne. And yet, as he stared, he saw something in her eyes that had not been there before: the shadow of fear.

"I must see him immediately," said he, and was at once conscious of a regret that he had not first said something kind to her. She had the stricken look in her eyes.

"You will find him in his old room," she said quietly. "The nurse is a friend of yours, a Miss McKane."

"Thank you." He turned away, but at the foot of the staircase paused. "Is there no hope?" he inquired. "Is it as bad as Wade—"

"There is only one hope, Braden," she said, "and that is that he may die soon." Curiously, he was not shocked by this remark. He appreciated the depth of feeling behind it. She was thinking of Templeton Thorpe, not of herself.

"I—I can't tell you how shocked, how grieved I am," he said. "It is—terrible."

She drew a few steps nearer. "I want you to feel, Braden, that you are free to come and go—and to stay—in this house. I know that you have said you would not come here while I am its mistress. I am in no sense its mistress. I have no place here. If you prefer not to see me, I shall make it possible by remaining in my room. It is only fair that I should speak to you at once about—about this. That is why I waited here to see you. I may as well tell you that Mr. Thorpe does not expect me to visit his room,—in fact, he undoubtedly prefers that I should not do so. I have tried to help him. I have done my best, Braden. I want you to know that. It is possible that he may tell you as much. Your place is here. You must not regard me an obstacle. It will not be necessary for you to communicate with me. I shall understand. Dr. Bates keeps me fully informed." She spoke without the slightest trace of bitterness.

He heard her to the end without lifting his gaze from the floor. When she was through, he looked at her.

"You are the mistress of the house, Anne. I shall not overlook the fact, even though you may. If my grandfather wishes me to do so, I shall remain here in the house with him—to the end, not simply as his relative, but to do what little I can in a professional way. Why was I not informed of his condition?" His manner was stern.

"You must ask that question of Mr. Thorpe himself," said she. "As I have told you, he is the master of the house. The rules are his, not mine; and, by the same token, the commands are his."

He hesitated for a moment. "You might have sent word to me. Why didn't you?"

"Because I was under orders," she said steadily. "Mr. Thorpe would not allow us to send for you. There was an excellent purpose back of his decision to keep you on the other side of the Atlantic until you were ready to return of your own accord. I daresay, if you reflect for a moment, you will see through his motives."

His eyes narrowed. "There was no cause for apprehension," he said coldly.

"It was something I could not discuss with him, however," she returned, "and so I was hardly in a position to advise him. You must believe me, Braden, when I say that I am glad for his sake that you are here. He will die happily now."

"He has suffered—so terribly?"

"It has been too horrible,—too horrible," she cried, suddenly covering her eyes and shivering as with a great chill.

The tears rushed to Braden's eyes. "Poor old granddaddy," he murmured. Then, after a second's hesitation, he turned and swiftly mounted the stairs.

Anne, watching him from below, was saying to herself, over and over again: "He will never forgive me, he will never forgive me." Later on, alone in the gloomy library, she sat staring at the curtained window through which the daylight came darkly, and passed final judgment upon herself after months of indecision: "I have been too sure of myself, too sure of him. What a fool I've been to count on a thing that is so easily killed. What a fool I've been to go on believing that his love would survive in spite of the blow I've given it. I've lost him. I may as well say farewell to the silly hope I've been coddling all these months." She frowned as she allowed her thoughts to run into another channel. "But they shall not laugh at me. I'll play the game out. No whimpering, old girl. Stand up to it."

Wade was waiting outside his master's door, his ear cocked as of old. The same patient, obsequious smile greeted Braden as he came up.

"He knows you are here, Mr. Braden. I sent in word by the nurse."

"He is conscious?"

"Yes, sir. That's the worst of it. Always conscious, sir."

"Then he can't be as near to death as you think, Wade. He—"

"That's a pity, sir," said Wade frankly. "I was in hopes that it would soon be all over for him."

"Am I to go in at once?"

"May I have a word or two with you first, sir?" said Wade, lowering his voice to a whisper and sending an uneasy glance over his shoulder. "Come this way, sir. It's safer over here. Uncommonly sharp ears he has, sir."

"Well, what is it? I must not be delayed—"

"I shan't keep you a minute, Mr. Braden. It's something I feel I ought to tell you. Mr. Thorpe is quite in his right mind, sir, so you'll appreciate more fully what a shock his proposition was to me. In a word, Mr. Braden, he has offered me a great sum of money if I'll put four of those little pills into a glass of water to-night and give it to him to drink. There's enough poison in them to kill three men in a flash, sir. My God, Mr. Braden, it was—it was terrible!" The man's face was livid.

"A great sum of money—" began Braden dumbly. Then the truth struck him like a blow in the face. "Good God, Wade,—he—he wanted you to kill him!"

"That's it, sir, that's it," whispered Wade jerkily. "He has an envelope up there with fifty thousand dollars in it. He had me count them a week ago, right before his eyes, and hide the envelope in a drawer. You see how he trusts me, sir? He knows that I could rob him to-night if I wanted to do so. Or what's to prevent my making off with the money after he's gone? Nobody would ever know. But he knows me too well. He trusts me. I was to give him the poison the night after you got home, and I would never be suspected of doing it because the pills have been lying on his table for weeks, ready for him to take at any time. Every one might say that he took them himself, don't you see?"

"Then, in God's name, why doesn't he take them,—why does he ask you to give them to him?" cried Braden, an icy perspiration on his brow.

"That's the very point, sir," explained Wade. "He says he has tried to do it, but—well, he just can't, sir. Mr. Thorpe is a God-fearing man. He will not take his own life. He—he says he believes there is a hell, Mr. Braden. I just wanted to tell you that I—I can't do what he asks me to do. Not for all the money in the world. He seems to think that I don't believe there is a hell. Anyhow, sir, he appears to think it would be quite all right for me to kill a fellow man. Beg pardon, sir; I forgot that you have been writing all these articles about—"

"It's all right, Wade," interrupted Braden. "Tell me, has he made this proposition to any one else? To the nurses, to Murray—any one?"

Wade hesitated. "I'm quite sure he hasn't appealed to any one but me, sir, except—that is to say—"

"Who else?"

"He told me plainly that he couldn't ask any of the nurses to do it, because he thought it ought to be done by a friend or a—member of the family. The doctors, of course, might do it unbeknownst to him, but they won't, sir."

"Whom else did he speak to about it?" insisted Braden.

"I can't be sure, but I think he has spoken to Mrs. Thorpe a good many times about it. Every time she is alone with him, in fact, sir. I've heard him pleading with her,—yes, and cursing her, too,—and her voice is always full of horror when she says 'No, no! I will not do it! I cannot!' You see, sir, I always stand here by the door, waiting to be called, so I catch snatches of conversation when their voices are raised. Besides, she's always as white as a sheet when she comes out, and two or three times she has actually run to her room as if she was afraid he was pursuing her. I can't help feeling, Mr. Braden, that he considers her a member of the family, and so long as I won't do it, he—"

"Good God, Wade! Don't say anything more! I—" His knees suddenly seemed about to give way under him. He went on in a hoarse whisper: "Why, I—I am a member of the family. You don't suppose he'll—you don't suppose—"

"I just thought I'd tell you, sir," broke in Wade, "so's you might be prepared. Will you go in now, sir? He is most eager to see you."

Braden entered the room, sick with horror. A member of the family! A member of the family to do the killing!

He was shocked by the appearance of the sick old man. Templeton Thorpe had wasted to a thin, greyish shadow. His lips were as white as his cheek, and that was the colour of chalk. Only his eyes were bright and gleaming with the life that remained to him. The grip of his hand was strong and firm, and his voice, too, was steady.

"I've been waiting for you, Braden, my boy," said Mr. Thorpe, some time after the greetings. He turned himself weakly in the bed and, drawing a little nearer to the edge, lowered his voice to a more confidential tone. His eyes were burning, his lips drawn tightly across his teeth,—for even at his age Templeton Thorpe was not a toothless thing. They were alone in the room. The nurse had seized upon the prospect of a short respite.

"I wish I had known, granddaddy," lamented Braden. "You should have sent for me long ago."

"That is the fifth or sixth time you've made that remark in the last ten minutes," said Mr. Thorpe, a querulous note stealing into his voice. "Don't say it again. By the way, suppose that I had sent for you: what could you have done? What good could you have done? Answer me that."

"There is no telling, sir. At least, I could have done my share of the—that is to say, I might have been useful in a great many ways. You may be sure, sir, that I should have been in constant attendance. I should have been on hand night and day."

"You would have assisted Anne in the death watch, eh?" said Mr. Thorpe, with a ghastly smile.

"Don't say that, sir," cried Braden, flinching.

"I may not have the opportunity to speak with you again, Braden,—privately, I mean,—and, as my time is short, I want to confess to you that I have been agreeably surprised in Anne. She has tried to do her best. She has not neglected me. She regards me as a human being in great pain, and I am beginning to think that she has a heart. There is the bare possibility, my boy, that she might have made you a good wife if I had not put temptation in her way. In any event, she would not have dishonoured you. It goes without saying that she has been wife to me in name only. You may find some comfort in that. In the past few weeks I have laid even greater temptations before her and she has not fallen. I cannot explain further to you, but—" here he smiled wanly—"some day she may tell you in the inevitable attempt to justify herself and win back what she has lost. Don't interrupt me, please. She will try, never fear, and you will have to be strong to resist her. I know what you would say to me, so don't say it. You are horrified by the thought of it, but the day will come when you must again raise your hand against the woman who loves you. Make no mistake, Braden; she loves you."

"I believe I would strike her dead if she made the slightest appeal to—"

"Never mind," snapped the old man. "I know you well enough to credit you with self-respect, if not self-abnegation. What I am trying to get at is this: do you hold a grudge against me for revealing this girl's true character to you?"

"I must ask you to excuse me from answering that question, grandfather," said Braden, compressing his lips.

The old man eyed him closely. "Is that an admission that you think I have wronged you in saving you from the vampires?" he persisted ironically.

"I cannot discuss your wife with you, sir," said the other.

Mr. Thorpe continued to regard his grandson narrowly for a moment or two longer, and then a look of relief came into his eyes. "I see. I shouldn't have asked it of you. Nevertheless, I am satisfied. My experiment is a success. You are qualified to distinguish between the Tresslyn greed and the Tresslyn love, so I have not failed. They put the one above the other and so far they have trusted to luck. If Anne had spurned my money I haven't the slightest doubt that she would have married you and made you a good wife. The fact that she did not spurn my money would seem to prove that she wouldn't make anybody a good wife. I know all this is painful to you, my boy, but I must say it to you before I die. You see I am dying. That's quite apparent, even to the idiots who are trying to keep me alive. They do not fool me with their: 'Aha, Mr. Thorpe, how are we to-day? Better, eh?' I am dying by inches,—fractions of inches, to be precise." He stopped short, out of breath after this long speech.

Braden laid his hand upon the bony fore-arm. "How long have you known, granddaddy, that you had this—this—"

"Cancer? Say it, my boy. I'm not afraid of the word. Most people are. It's a dreadful word. How can I answer your question? Years, no doubt. It became active a year and a half ago. I knew what it was, even then."

"In heaven's name, sir, why did you let it go on? An operation at that time might have—"

"You forget that I could afford to wait. When a man gets to be as old as I am he can philosophise even in the matter of death. What is a year or two, one way or the other, to me? An operation is either an experiment or a last resort, isn't it? Well, my boy, I preferred to look upon it as a last resort, and as such I concluded to put it off until the last minute, when it wouldn't make any difference which way it resulted. If it had resulted fatally a year and a half ago, what would I have gained? If it should take place to-morrow, with the same result, haven't I cheated Time out of eighteen months?"

"But the pain, the suffering," cried Braden. "You might at least have spared yourself the whole lifetime of pain that you have lived in these last few months. You haven't cheated pain out of its year and a half."

"True," said Mr. Thorpe, his lips twitching with the pain he was trying to defy; "I have not been able to laugh at the futility of pain. Ah!" It was almost a scream that issued from between his stretched lips. He began to writhe....

"Come in again to-night," he said half an hour later, whispering the words with difficulty. The two nurses and the doctor's assistant, who had been staying in the house for more than a week, now stood back from the bedside, dripping with perspiration. The paroxysm had been one of the worst he had experienced. They had believed for a time that it was also to be the last. Braden Thorpe, shaking like a leaf because of the very inactivity that was forced upon him by the activity of others, wiped the sweat from his brow, and nodded his head in speechless despair. "Come in to-night, after you've talked with Anne and Dr. Bates. I'm easier now. It can't go on much longer, you see. Bates gives me a couple of weeks. That means a couple of centuries of pain, however. Go now and talk it over with Anne."

With this singular admonition pounding away at his senses, Braden went out of the room. Wade,—the ever-present Wade,—was outside the door. His expression was as calmly attentive as it would have been were his master yawning after a healthy nap instead of screaming with all the tortures of the damned. As Braden hurried by, hardly knowing whither he went, the servant did something he had never done before in his life. He ventured to lay a detaining hand upon the arm of a superior.

"Did he ask you to—to do it, Master Braden?" he whispered hoarsely. The man's eyes were glazed with dread.

Braden stopped. At first he did not comprehend. Then Wade's meaning was suddenly revealed to him. He drew back, aghast.

"Good Lord, no! No, no!" he cried out.

"Well," said Wade deliberately, "he will, mark my words, sir. I don't mind saying to you, Mr. Braden, that he depends upon you."

"Are you crazy, Wade?" gasped Braden, searching the man's face with an intentness that betrayed his own fear that the prophecy would come true. Something had already told him that his grandfather would depend upon him for complete relief,—and it was that something that had gripped his heart when he entered the sick-room, and still gripped it with all the infernal tenacity of inevitableness.

He hurried on, like one hunted and in search of a place in which to hide until the chase had passed. At the foot of the stairs he came upon Murray, the butler.

"Mrs. Thorpe says that you are to go to your old room, Mr. Braden," said the butler. "Will you care for tea, sir, or would you prefer something a little stronger?"

"Nothing, Murray, thank you," replied Braden, cold with a strange new terror. He could not put aside the impression that Murray, the bibulous Murray, was also regarding him in the light of an executioner. Somewhere back in his memory there was aroused an old story about the citizens who sat up all night to watch for the coming of the hangman who was to do a grewsome thing at dawn. He tried to shake off the feeling, he tried to laugh at the fantastic notion that had so swiftly assailed him. "I think I shall go to my room. Call me, if I am needed."

He did not want to see Anne. He shrank from the revelations that were certain to come from the harassed wife of the old man who wanted to die. As he remounted the stairs, he was subtly aware that some one opened a door below and watched him as he fled. He did not look behind, but he knew that the watcher was white-faced and pleading, and that she too was counting on him for support.

An hour later, a servant knocked at his door. The afternoon was far gone and the sky was overcast with sinister streaks of clouds that did not move, but hung like vast Zeppelins over the harbour beyond: long, blue-black clouds with white bellies. Mournful clouds that waited for the time to come when they could burst into tears! He had been watching them as they crept up over the Jersey shores, great stealthy birds of ill-omen, giving out no sound yet ponderous in their flight. He started at the gentle tapping on his door; a strange hope possessed his soul. Was this a friendly hand that knocked? Was its owner bringing him the word that the end had come and that he would not be called upon to deny the great request? He sprang to the door.

"Dr. Bates is below, sir," said the maid. "He would like to see you before he goes."

Braden's heart sank. "I'll come at once, Katie."

There were three doctors in the library. Dr. Bates went straight to the point.

"Your grandfather, Braden, has a very short time to live. He has just dismissed us. Our services are no longer required in this case, if I—"

"Dismissed you?" cried Braden, unbelievingly.

Dr. Bates smiled. "We can do nothing more for him, my boy. It is just as well that we should go. He—"

"But, my God, sir, you cannot leave him to die in—"

"Have patience, my lad. We are not leaving him to die alone. By his express command, we are turning the case over to you. You are to be his sole—"

"I refuse!" shouted Braden.

"You cannot refuse,—you will not, I am sure. For your benefit I may say that the case is absolutely hopeless. Not even a miracle can save him. If you will give me your closest attention, I will, with Dr. Bray's support, describe his condition and all that has led up to this unhappy crisis. Sit down, my boy. I am your good friend. I am not your critic, nor your traducer. Sit down and listen calmly, if you can. You should know just what is before you, and you must also know that every surgeon who has been called in consultation expresses but one opinion. In truth, it is not an opinion that they venture, but an unqualified decision."

For a long time Braden sat as if paralysed and listened to the words of the fine old doctor. At last the three arose and stood over him.

"You understand everything now, Braden," said Dr. Bates, a tremor in his voice. "May God direct your course. We shall not come here again. You are not to feel that we are deserting you, however, for that is not true. We go because you have come, because you have been put in sole charge. And now, my boy, I have something else to say to you as an old friend. I know your views. Not I alone, but Dr. Bray and thousands of others, have felt as you feel about such things. There have been countless instances, like the one at hand, when we have wished that we might be faithless to the tenets of a noble profession. But we have never faltered. It is not our province to be merciful, if I may put it in that way, but to be conscientious. It is our duty to save, not to destroy. That is what binds every doctor to his patient. Take the advice of an old man, Braden, and don't allow your pity to run away with your soul. Take my advice, lad. Let God do the deliberate killing. He will do it in his own good time, for all of us. I speak frankly, for I know you consider me your friend and well-wisher."

"Thank you, Dr. Bates," said Braden, hoarsely. "The advice is not needed, however. I am not a murderer. I could not kill that poor old man upstairs, no matter how dreadfully he suffers. I fear that you have overlooked the fact that I am an advocate, not a performer, of merciful deeds. You should not confuse my views with my practice. I advocate legalising the destruction of the hopelessly afflicted. Inasmuch as it is not a legal thing to do at present, I shall continue to practise my profession as all the rest of you do: conscientiously." He was standing before them. His face was white and his hands were clenched.

"I am glad to hear you say that, Braden," said Dr. Bates gently. "Forgive me. One last word, however. If you need me at any time, I stand ready to come to you. If you conclude to operate, I—I shall advise against it, of course,—you may depend upon me to be with you when you—"

"But you have said, Dr. Bates, that you do not believe an operation would be of—"

"In my opinion it would be fatal. But you must not forget that God rules, not we mortals. We do not know everything. I am frank to confess that there is not one among us who is willing to take the chance, if that is a guide to you. That's all, my boy. Good-bye. God be with you!"

They passed out of and away from the house.

CHAPTER XII

In the course of the evening, desolated by the ugly responsibility that had been thrust upon him, Braden put aside his scruples, his antipathy, and sent word to Anne that he would like to discuss the new situation with her. She had not appeared for dinner, which was a doleful affair; she did not even favour him with an apology for not coming down. Distasteful as the interview promised to be for him, he realised that it should not be postponed. His grandfather's wife would have to be consulted. It was her right to decide who should attend the sick man. While he was acutely confident that she would not oppose his solitary attendance, there still struggled in his soul the hope that she might, for the sake of appearances at least, insist on calling in other physicians. It was a hope that he dared not encourage, however. Fate had settled the matter. It was ordained that he should stand where he now stood in this unhappy hour.

He recalled his grandfather's declaration that she still loved him. The thought turned him sick with loathing, for he believed in his heart that it was true. He knew that Anne loved him, and always would love him. But he also knew that every vestige of love and respect for her had gone out of his heart long ago and that he now felt only the bitterness of disillusionment so far as she was concerned. He was not afraid of her. She had lost all power to move a single drop of blood in his veins. But he was afraid for her.

She came downstairs at nine o'clock. He had not gone near the sick-room since his initial visit, earlier in the day, literally obeying the command of the sick man: to talk matters over with Anne before coming again to see him.

"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," she said simply, as she advanced into the room. "I have been talking over the telephone with my mother. She does not come here any more. It has been nearly three weeks since she last came to see me. The dread of it all, don't you know. She is positive that she has all of the symptoms. I suppose it is a not uncommon fault of the imagination. Of course, I go to see her every afternoon. I see no one else, Braden, except good old Simmy Dodge. He stops in nearly every day to inquire, and to cheer me up if possible."

She was attired in a simple evening gown,—an old one, she hastily would have informed a woman visitor,—and it was hard for him to believe that this was not the lovely, riant Anne Tresslyn of a year ago instead of the hardened mistress of Templeton Thorpe's home. There was no sign of confusion or uncertainty in her manner, and not the remotest indication that her heart still owned love for him. If she retained a spark of the old flame in that beautiful body of hers, it was very carefully secreted behind a mask of indifference. She met his gaze frankly, unswervingly. Her poise was perfect,—marvellously so in the face of his ill-concealed antipathy.

"I suppose you know that I have been left in sole charge of the case," he said, without preface.

"Oh, yes," she replied calmly. "It was Mr. Thorpe's desire."

"And yours?"

"Certainly. Were you hoping that I would interpose an objection?"

"Yes. I am not qualified to take charge of—"

"Pardon me, Braden, if I remind you, that so far as Mr. Thorpe's chances for recovery are concerned, he might safely be attended by the simplest novice. The result would be the same." She spoke without a trace of irony. "Dr. Bates and the others were willing to continue, but what was the use? They do not leave you a thing to stand on, Braden. There is nothing that you can do. I am sorry. It seems a pity for you to have come home to this."

He smiled faintly, whether at her use of the word "home" or the prospect she laid down for him it would be difficult to say.

"Shall we sit down, Anne, and discuss the situation?" he said. "It is one of my grandfather's orders, so I suppose we shall have to obey."

She sank gracefully into a deep chair at the foot of the library table, and motioned for him to take one near-by. The light from the chandelier fell upon her brown hair, and glinted.

"It is very strange, Braden, that we should come into each other's lives again, and in this manner. It seems so long ago—"

"Is it necessary to discuss ourselves, Anne?"

She regarded him steadily. "Yes, I think so," she said. "We must at least convince ourselves that the past has no right to interfere with or overshadow what we may choose to call the present,—or the future, for that matter, if I may look a little farther ahead. The fact remains that we are here together, Braden, in spite of all that has happened, and we must make the best of it. The world,—our own little world, I mean,—will be watching us. We must watch ourselves. Oh, don't misconstrue that remark, please. We must see to it that the world does not judge us entirely by our past." She was very cool about it, he thought,—and confident.

"As I said before, Anne, I see no occasion to—"

"Very well," she interrupted. "I beg your pardon. You asked me to see you to-night. What is it that you wish to say to me?"

He leaned forward in the chair, his elbows on the arms of it, and regarded her fixedly. "Has my grandfather ever appealed to you to—to—" He stopped, for she had turned deathly pale; she closed her eyes tightly as if to shut out some visible horror; a perceptible shudder ran through her slender body. As Braden started to rise, she raised her eye-lids, and in her lovely eyes he saw horror, dread, appeal, all in one. "I'm sorry," he murmured, in distress "I should have been more—"

"It's all right," she said, recovering herself with an effort. "I thought I had prepared myself for the question you were so sure to ask. I have been through hell in the past two weeks, Braden. I have had to listen to the most infamous proposals—but perhaps it would be better for me to repeat them to you just as they were made to me, and let you judge for yourself."

She leaned back in the chair, as if suddenly tired. Her voice was low and tense, and at no time during her recital did she raise it above the level at which she started. Plainly, she was under a severe strain and was afraid that she might lose control of herself.

It appeared that Mr. Thorpe had put her to the supreme test. In brief, he had called upon his young wife to put him out of his misery! Cunningly, he had beset her with the most amazing temptations. Her story was one of those incredible things that one cannot believe because the mind refuses to entertain the utterly revolting. In the beginning the old man, consumed by pain, implored her to perform a simple act of mercy. He told her of the four little pellets and the glass of water. At that time she treated the matter lightly. The next day he began his sly, persistent campaign against what he was pleased to call her inhumanity; he did not credit her with scruples. There was something Machiavellian in the sufferer's scheming. He declared that there could be no criminal intent on her part, therefore her conscience would never be afflicted. The fact that he consented to the act was enough to clear her conscience, if that was all that restrained her. She realised that he was in earnest now, and fled the room in horror.

Then he tried to anger her with abuse and calumny to such an extent that she would be driven to the deed by sheer rage. Failing in this, he resumed his wheedling tactics. It would be impossible, he argued, for any one to know that she had given him the soothing poison. The doctors would always believe that he had overcome his prejudice against self-destruction and had taken the tablets, just as they intended and evidently desired him to do. But he would not take his own life. He would go on suffering for years before he would send his soul to purgatory by such an act. He believed in damnation. He had lived an honourable, upright life and he maintained that his soul was entitled to the salvation his body had earned for it by its resistance to the evils of the flesh. What, said he, could be more incompatible with a lifelong observance of God's laws than the commission of an act for which there could be no forgiveness, what more terrible than going into the presence of his maker with sin as his guide and advocate? His last breath of life drawn in sin!

Day after day he whispered his wily arguments, and always she fled in horror. Her every hour was a nightmare, sleeping or waking. Her strength was shattered, yet she was compelled to withstand his daily attacks. He never failed to send for her to sit with him while the nurse took her exercise. He would have no one else. Ultimately he sought to tempt her with offers of gold! He agreed to add a codicil to his will, giving her an additional million dollars if she would perform a "simple service" for him. That was the way he styled it: a simple service! Merely the dropping of four little tablets into a tumbler of water and holding it to his lips to drain! Suicide with a distinction, murder by obligation! One of his arguments was that she would be free to marry the man she loved if he was out of the way. He did not utter the name of the man, however.

Anne spoke to no one of these shocking encounters in the darkened sick-room. She would not have spoken to Braden but for her husband's command given no later than the hour before that she should do so.

"Twice, Braden, I was tempted to do what he asked of me," she said in conclusion, almost in a whisper. "He was in such fearful agony. You will never know how he has suffered. My heart ached for him. I cannot understand how a good and gentle God can inflict such pain upon one of his creatures. Why should this Christian be crucified? But I must not say such things. Twice I came near to putting those tablets in the glass and giving it to him to drink, but both times I shrank even as I took them up from the table. I shall never forget the look of joy that came into his eyes when he saw me pick them up, nor shall I ever forget the look he gave me when I threw them down and put my fingers to my ears to shut out the sound of his moans. It would have been so easy to end it all for him. No one could have known, and he would have died thanking me for one good deed at least. Yesterday when I failed him for the second time, he made the most horrible confession to me. He said that when he married me a year ago he knew that this very crisis would come and that he had counted on me then as his deliverer! He actually said to me, Braden, that all this was in his mind when he married me. Can't you understand? If the time ever came when he wanted to die, who would be more likely to serve his purpose than the young, avaricious wife who loved another man? Oh, he was not thinking of your good, my friend,—at least, not entirely. He did not want you to throw yourself away on me, that's true, but your preservation was not his sole object, let me assure you. He planned deeper than we knew. He looked ahead for one year and saw what was coming, and he counted on me,—he counted on the wife he had bought. Once he asked me if I had the faintest idea how many wives have killed strong and healthy husbands in order that they might wed the men they loved better. If murderesses can do that, said he, why should I hesitate, when there could be no such thing as murder in my—oh, it was too terrible! Thank God, he thinks better of me now than he did on the day he married me. Even though he is your grandfather, Braden, I can say to you frankly that if taking his own life means going to hell for him, I would see him in hell before I would—"

"Anne, Anne!" cried he, shaken. "Don't say it! It is too horrible. Think of what you were about to say and—"

"Oh, I've thought, my friend," she broke in fiercely. "It is time for you to think of what he would have done for me. He would have sent me to hell in his place. Do you understand? Do you suppose that if I had killed him, even with mercy and kindness in my heart, I could ever have escaped from a hell on earth, no matter what God's judgment may have been hereafter? Would heaven after death affect the hell that came before?"

"Do you believe that there is life beyond the grave?" he demanded. "Do you still believe that there is a heaven and a hell?"

"Yes," she said firmly, "and down in your soul, Braden, you believe it too. We all believe it, even the scientists who scoff. We can't help believing it. It is that which makes good men and women of us, which keeps us as children to the end. It isn't honour or nobility of character that makes us righteous, but the fear of God. It isn't death that we dread. We shrink from the answer to the question we've asked all through life. Can you answer that question now?"

"Of course not," he said, "nor can I solve the riddle of life. That is the great mystery. Death is simple. We know why we die but we don't know why we live."

"The same mystery that precedes life also follows it," she said stubbornly. "The greatest scientist in the world was once a lifeless atom. He acknowledges that, doesn't he? So, my friend, there is something even vaster than the greatest of all intelligences, and that is ignorance. But we are wasting time. I have told you everything. You know just what I've been through. I don't ask for your sympathy, for you would be quite right in refusing to give it me. I made my bed, so there's the end of it. I am glad that you are here. The situation is in your hands, not mine."

"What is there for me to do except to sit down, like you, and wait?" he groaned, in desperation.

She was silent for a long time, evidently weighing her next remark. "What have you to say for your pet theory now, Braden?" she inquired, haltingly.

"You may rest assured, Anne, that even were it legally possible, I should not put it into practice in this instance," he said coldly.

Her face brightened. "Do you really mean it?"

"I wish you and all the rest of them would understand that I am not setting myself up as a butcher—" he began hotly.

"That is all I want to know," she cried, tremulously. "I have been dreading the—I have found myself wondering if you would give him those tablets. Look me straight in the eye, Braden. You will not do that, will you?"

"Never!" he exclaimed.

"You don't know what that means to me," she said in a low voice. Again there was a long silence. He was studying her face, and queer notions were entering his brain. "Another question, please, and that is all. Can his life be prolonged by an operation?"

"I am assured that he could not survive an operation."

"He may ask you to—to perform one," she said, watching him closely.

He hesitated. "You mean that he is willing to take the chance?"

"I mean that he realises it will make no difference, one way or the other. The other doctors have refused to operate."

"He will not ask me to operate," said Braden, but his soul shook within him as he spoke.

"We shall see," said she strangely, and then arose. She came quite close to him. "I do not want you to operate, Braden. Any one but you. You must not take the—the chance. Now you would better go up to him. Tell him you have talked with me. He will understand. He may even speak a good word for me. Good night. Thank you for—for letting me speak with you to-night."

She left the room. He stood quite still for a full minute, staring at the closed door. Then he passed his hand over his eyes as if to shut out the vision that remained. He knew now that his grandfather was right.

In the hall upstairs he found Wade.

"Time you were in bed," said Braden shortly. "Get a little rest, man. I am here now. You needn't worry."

"He's been asking for you, sir. The nurse has been out here twice within the last ten minutes. Excuse me, Mr. Braden; may I have another word with you?" He did not lower his voice. Wade's voice was of a peculiarly unpenetrating character. Unless one observed his speech it was scarcely audible, and yet one had a queer impression, at a glance, that he was speaking a little above the ordinary tone of voice. "Did Mrs. Thorpe tell you that her brother has been here to see Mr. Thorpe three times within a week?"

Braden started. "She did not, Wade."

"Why didn't she tell you, sir?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, sir, it is just this way: Mr. Thorpe sent for young Mr. Tresslyn last Friday afternoon. Considerable difficulty was had in finding him. He was just a wee bit tipsy when he got here at eight o'clock. Mrs. Thorpe did not see him, although Murray went to her room to tell her of his arrival. Young Mr. Tresslyn was in Mr. Thorpe's room for ten or fifteen minutes, and then left the house in a great hurry, sir. He came again on Saturday evening, and acted very queerly. Both times he was alone with Mr. Thorpe. Again he fairly rushed out of the house as if he was pursued by devils. Then he came on Sunday night, and the same thing happened. As he was going out, I spoke to him, and this is what he said to me,—scared-like and shaking all over, sir,—'I'm not coming here again, Wade. No more of it for me. Damn him! You tell my sister that I'm not coming again!' Then he went out, mumbling to himself. Right after that I went up to Mr. Thorpe. He was very angry. He gave orders that Mr. Tresslyn was not to be admitted again. It was then, sir, that he spoke to me about the money in the envelope. I have had a notion, sir, that the money was first intended for Mr. George Tresslyn, but he didn't like that way of earning it any more than I did. Rather strange, too, when you stop to think how badly he needs money and how low he's been getting these past few months. Poor chap, he—"

"Now, Wade, you are guessing," interrupted Braden, with a sinking heart. "You have no right to surmise—"

"Beg pardon, sir; I was only putting two and two together. I'm sorry. I dare say I am entirely wrong, perhaps a little bit out of my head because of the—Please, sir, do not misunderstand me. I would not for the world have you think that I connect Mrs. Thorpe with the business. I am sure that she had nothing whatever to do with her brother's visits here,—nothing at all, sir."

Braden's blood was like ice water as he turned away from the man and entered his grandfather's room. The nurse was reading to the old man. With the young man's entrance, Mr. Thorpe cut her off brusquely and told her to leave the room.

"Come here, Braden," he said, after the door had closed behind the woman. "Have you talked with Anne?"

"Yes, grandfather."

"She told you everything?"

"I suppose so. It is terrible. You should not have made such demands—"

"We won't go into that," said the other harshly, gripping his side with his claw-like hand. His face was contorted by pain. After a moment, he went on: "She's better than I thought, and so is that good-for-nothing brother of hers. I shall never forgive this scoundrel Wade though. He has been my servant, my slave for more than thirty years, and I know that he hasn't a shred of a conscience. While I think of it, I wish you would take this key and unlock the top drawer in my dressing table. See if there is an envelope there, will you? There is, eh? Open it. Count the bills, Braden."

He lay back, with tightly closed eyes, while Braden counted the package of five hundred dollar bank-notes.

"There are fifty thousand dollars here, grandfather," said the young man huskily.

"'Pon my soul, they are more honest than I imagined. Well, well, the world is getting better."

"What shall I do with this money, sir? You shouldn't have it lying around loose with all these—"

"You may deposit it to my account in the Fifth Avenue Bank to-morrow. It is of absolutely no use to me now. Put it in your pocket. It will be quite safe with you, I dare say. You are all so inexcusably honest, confound you. Sit down. I want to tell you what I've finally decided to do. These surgeons say there is about one chance in a million for me, my boy. I've decided to take it."

"Take it?" muttered Braden, knowing full well what was to come.

"I have given you the finest education, the finest training that any young man ever had, Braden. You owe a great deal to me, I think you will admit. Never mind now. Don't thank me. I would not trust my one chance to any of these disinterested butchers. They would not care a rap whether I pulled through or not. With you, it is different. I believe you would—"

"My God, grandfather, you are not going to ask me to—"

"Sit still! Yes, I am going to ask you to give me that one chance in a million. If you fail, I shall not be here to complain. If you succeed,—well, you will have performed a miracle. You—"

"But there is no possible chance,—not the slightest chance of success," cried Braden, the cold sweat running down his face. "I can tell you in advance that it means death to—"

"Nevertheless, it is worth trying, isn't it, my boy?" said Templeton Thorpe softly. "I demand it of you. You are my flesh and blood. You will not let me lie here and suffer like this for weeks and months. It is your duty to do what you can. It is your time to be merciful, my lad."

Braden's face was in his hands. His body was shaking as if in convulsions. He could not look into the old man's eyes.

"Send for Bates and Bray to-morrow. Tell them that you have decided to operate,—with my consent. They will understand. It must be done at once. You will not fail me. You will do this for your poor old granddaddy who has loved you well and who suffers to-day as no man in all this world has ever suffered before. I am in agony. Nothing stops the pain. Everything has failed. You will do this for me, Braden?"

The young man raised his haggard face. Infinite pity had succeeded horror in his eyes.

CHAPTER XIII

Simmy Dodge emerged from Sherry's at nine-thirty. He was leaving Mrs. Fenwick's dinner-dance in response to an appeal from Anne Thorpe, who had sent for him by messenger earlier in the evening. Simmy was reluctant about going down to the house off Washington Square; he was constituted as one of those who shrink from the unwholesomeness of death rather than from its terrors. He was fond of Anne, but in his soul he was abusing her for summoning him to bear witness to the final translation of old Templeton Thorpe from a warm, sensitive body, into a cold, unpleasant hulk. He had no doubt that he had been sent for to see the old man die. While he would not, for the world, have denied Anne in her hour of distress, he could not help wishing that she had put the thing off till to-morrow. Death doesn't appear so ugly in the daytime. One is spared the feeling that it is stealing up through the darkness of night to lay claim to its prey.

Simmy shivered a little as he stood in front of Sherry's waiting for his car to come up. He made up his mind then and there that when it came time for him to die he would see to it that he did not do it in the night. For, despite the gay lights of the city, there were always sombre shadows for one to be jerked into by the relentless hand of death; there was something appalling about being dragged off into a darkness that was to be dissipated at sunrise, instead of lasting forever.

He left behind him in one of the big private diningrooms a brilliant, high-spirited company of revellers. One of Mrs. Fenwick's guests was Lutie Tresslyn. He sat opposite her at one of the big round tables, and for an hour he had watched with moody eyes her charming, vivacious face as she conversed with the men on either side of her. She was as cool, as self-contained as any woman at the table. There was nothing to indicate that she had not been born to this estate of velvet, unless the freshness of her cheek and the brightness of her eye betrayed her by contrast with the unmistakable haggardness of "the real thing."

She was unafraid. All at once Simmy was proud of her. He felt the thrill of something he could not on the moment define, but which he afterwards put down as patriotism! It was just the sort of thrill, he argued, that you have when the band plays at West Point and you see the cadets come marching toward you with their heads up and their chests out,—the thrill that leaves a smothering, unuttered cheer in your throat.

He thought of Anne Tresslyn too, and smiled to himself. This was Anne Tresslyn's set, not Lutie's, and yet here she was, a trim little warrior, inside the walls of a fortified place, hobnobbing with the formidable army of occupation and staring holes through the uniforms of the General Staff! She sat in the Tresslyn camp, and there were no other Tresslyns there. She sat with the Wintermills, and—yes, he had to admit it,—she had winked at him slyly when she caught his eye early in the evening. It was a very small wink to be sure and was not repeated.

The night was cold. His chauffeur was not to be found by the door-men who ran up and down the line from Fifth to Sixth Avenue for ten minutes before Simmy remembered that he had told the man not to come for him until three in the morning, an hour at which one might reasonably expect a dance to show signs of abating.

He was on the point of ordering a taxi-cab when his attention was drawn to a figure that lurked well back in the shadows of the Berkeley Theatre down the street—a tall figure in a long ulster. Despite the darkness, Simmy's intense stare convinced him that it was George Tresslyn who stood over there and gazed from beneath lowered brows at the bright doorway. He experienced a chill that was not due to the raw west wind. There was something sinister about that big, motionless figure, something portentous of disaster. He knew that George had been going down the hill with startling rapidity. On more than one occasion he had tried to stay this downward rush, but without avail. Young Tresslyn was drinking, but he was not carousing. He drank as unhappy men drink, not as the happy ones do. He drank alone.

For a few minutes Simmy watched this dark sentinel, and reflected. What was he doing over there? What was he up to? Was he waiting for Lutie to come forth from the fortified place? Was there murder and self-murder in the heart of this unhappy boy? Simmy was a little man but he was no coward. He did not hesitate long. He would have to act, and act promptly. He did not dare go away while that menacing figure remained on guard. The police, no doubt, would drive him away in time, but he would come back again. So Simmy Dodge squared his shoulders and marched across the street, to face what might turn out to be a ruthless lunatic—the kind one reads about, who kill their best friends, "and all that sort of thing."

It was quite apparent that the watcher had been observing him. As Simmy came briskly across the street, Tresslyn moved out of his position near the awning and started westward, his shoulders hunched upward and his chin lowered with the evident desire to prevent recognition. Simmy called out to him. The other quickened his steps. He slouched but did not stagger, a circumstance which caused Simmy a sharp twinge of uneasiness. He was not intoxicated. Simmy's good sense told him that he would be more dangerous sober than drunk, but he did not falter. At the second shout, young Tresslyn stopped. His hands were thrust deep into his overcoat pockets.

"What do you want?" he demanded thickly, as the dapper little man came up and extended his hand. Simmy was beaming, as if he suddenly had found a long lost friend and comrade. George took no notice of the friendly hand. He was staring hard, almost savagely at the other's face. Simmy was surprised to find that his cheeks, though sunken and haggard, were cleanly shaved, and his general appearance far from unprepossessing. In the light from a near-by window, the face was lowering but not inflamed; the eyes were heavy and tired-looking—but not bloodshot.

"I thought I recognised you," said Simmy glibly.

"Much obliged," said George, without the semblance of a smile.

Simmy hesitated. Then he laid his hand on George's arm. "See here, George, this will not do. I think I know why you are here, and—it won't do, old chap."

"If you were anybody else, Dodge, I'd beat your head off," said George slowly, as if amazed that he had not already done so. "Better go away, Simmy, and let me alone. I'm all right. I'm not doing any harm, am I, standing out here?"

"What do you gain by standing here in the cold and—"

"Never mind what I gain. That's my affair," said George, his voice shaking in spite of its forced gruffness.

Simmy was undaunted. "Have you been drinking to-night?"

"None of your damned business. What do you mean by—"

"I am your friend, George," broke in Simmy earnestly. "I can see now that you've had a drink or two, and you—"

"I'm as sober as you are!"

"More so, I fear. I've had champagne. You—"

"I am not drunk all of the time, you know," snarled George.

"Well, I'm glad to hear it," said Simmy cheerfully.

"I hate the stuff,—hate it worse than anything on earth except being sober. Good night, Simmy," he broke off abruptly.

"That dance in there won't be over before three o'clock," said Simmy shrewdly. "You're in for a long wait, my lad."

George groaned. "Good Lord, is it—is it a dance? The papers said it was a dinner for Lord and Lady—"

"Better come along with me, George," interrupted Simmy quietly. "I'm going down to Anne's. She has sent for me. It's the end, I fancy. That's where you ought to be to-night, Tresslyn. She needs you. Come—"

Young Tresslyn drew back, a look of horror in his eyes. "Not if I know myself," he muttered. "You'll never get me inside that house again. Why,—why, it's more than I could stand, Simmy. That old man tried—but, never mind. I can't talk about it. There's one thing sure, though: I wouldn't go near him again for all the money in New York,—not I."

"I sha'n't insist, of course. But I do insist on your getting away from here. You are not to annoy Lutie. She's had trouble enough and you ought to be man enough to let her alone."

George stared at him as if he had not heard aright. "Annoy her? What the devil are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about. Oh, don't glare at me like that. I'm not afraid of you, big as you are. I'm trying to put sense into your head, that's all, and you'll thank me for it later on, too."

"Why, I—I wouldn't annoy her for all the world, Simmy," said George, jerkily. "What do you take me for? What kind of a—"

"Then, why are you here?" demanded Simmy "It looks bad, George. If it isn't Lutie, who is it you're after?"

The other appeared to be dazed. "I'm not after any one," he mumbled. Suddenly he gripped Simmy by the shoulders and bent a white, scowling face down to the little man's level. "My God, Simmy, I—I can't help it. That's all there is to it. I just want to see her—just want to look at her. Can't you understand? But of course you can't. You couldn't know what it means to love a girl as I love her. It isn't in you. Annoy her? I'd cut my heart out first. What business is it of yours if I choose to stand out here all night just for a glimpse of her in all her happiness, all her triumph, all that she's got because she deserves it? Oh, I'm sober enough, so don't think it's that. Now, you let me alone. Get out of this, Simmy. I know what I'm doing and I don't want any advice from you. She won't know I'm over here when she comes out of that place, and what she doesn't know isn't going to bother her. She doesn't know that I sneak around like this to get a look at her whenever it's possible, and I don't want her to know it. It would worry her. It might—frighten her, Simmy, and God knows I wouldn't harm her by word or deed for anything on earth. Only she wouldn't understand. D'you see?" He shook Simmy as a dog would have shaken a rat, not in anger but to emphasise his seriousness.

"By Jove, George,—I'd like to believe that of you," chattered Simmy.

"Well, you can believe it. I'm not ashamed to confess what I'm doing. You may call me a baby, a fool, a crank or whatever you like,—I don't care. I've just got to see her, and this is the only way. Do you think I'd spoil things for her, now that she's made good? Think I'd butt in and queer it all? I'm no good, I'm a rotter, and I'm going to the devil as fast as I know how, Simmy. That's my affair, too. But I'm not mean enough to begrudge her the happiness she's found in spite of all us damned Tresslyns. Now, run along, Simmy, and don't worry about anything happening to her,—at least, so far as I'm concerned. She'll probably have her work cut out defending herself against some of her fine gentlemen, some of the respectable rotters in there. But she'll manage all right. She's the right sort, and she's had her lesson already. She won't be fooled again."

Simmy's amazement had given way to concern. "Upon my word, George, I'm sorry for you. I had no idea that you felt as you do. It's too darned bad. I wish it could have been different with you two."

"It could have been, as I've said before, if I'd had the back-bone of a caterpillar."

"If you still love her as deeply as all this, why—"

"Love her? Why, if she were to come out here this instant and smile on me, Simmy, I'd—I'd—God, I don't know what I'd do!" He drooped his head dejectedly, and Simmy saw that he was shaking.

"It's too bad," said Simmy again, blinking. For a long time the two of them stood there, side by side, looking at the bright doorway across the street. Simmy was thinking hard. "See here, old fellow," he said at last, profoundly moved, "why don't you buck up and try to make something of yourself? It isn't too late. Do something that will make her proud of you. Do—"

"Proud of me, eh?" sneered George. "The only thing I could do would be to jump into the river with my hands tied. She'd be proud of me for that."

"Nonsense. Now listen to me. You don't want her to know that you've been put in jail, do you?"

"What am I doing that would get me into jail?"

"Loitering. Loafing suspiciously. Drinking. A lot of things, my boy. They'll nab you if you hang around here till three o'clock. You saw her go in, didn't you?"

"Yes. She—she happened to turn her face this way when she got to the top of the steps. Saying something to the people she was with. God, I—she's the loveliest thing in—" He stopped short, and put his hand to his eyes.

Simmy's grip tightened on George's arm, and then for five minutes he argued almost desperately with the younger man. In the end, Tresslyn agreed to go home. He would not go to Anne's.

"And you'll not touch another drop to-night?" said Dodge, as they crossed over to the line of taxi-cabs.

George halted. "Say, what's on your mind, Simmy? Are you afraid I'll go off my nut and create a scene,—perhaps mop up the sidewalk with some one like Percy Wintermill or—well, any one of those nuts in there? That the idea you've got? Well, let me set you right, my boy. If I ever do anything like that it will not be with Lutie as the excuse. I'll not drag her name into it. Mind you, I'm not saying I'll never smash some one's head, but—"

"I didn't mean that, at all," said Simmy.

"And you needn't preach temperance to me," went on George. "I know that liquor isn't good for me. I hate the stuff, as a matter of fact. I know what it does to a man who has been an athlete. It gets him quicker than it gets any one else. But the liquor makes me forget that I'm no good. It makes me think I'm the biggest, bravest and best man in the world, and God knows I'm not. When I get enough of the stuff inside of me, I imagine that I'm good enough for Lutie. It's the only joy I have, this thinking that I'm as decent as anybody, and the only time I think I'm decent is when I'm so damned drunk that I don't know anything at all. Tell him to take me to Meikelham's hotel. Good night. You're all right, Simmy."

"To Meikelham's? I want you to go home, George."

"Well, that's home for me at present. Rotten place, believe me, but it's the best I can get for a dollar a day," grated George.

"I thought you were living with your mother?"

"No. Kicked out. That was six weeks ago. Couldn't stand seeing me around. I don't blame her, either. But that's none of your business, Simmy, so don't say another word."

"It's pretty rough, that's all."

"On me—or her?"