The Long Lane's Turning

Her lips trembled, but she spoke in a clear undertone,
audible only to him, which faltered the merest trifle ([Page 316].)

THE LONG LANE'S TURNING

BY

HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES

(Mrs. Post Wheeler)

Author of "Satan Sanderson" "Hearts Courageous,"
"The Valiants of Virginia," etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
FRANCES ROGERS

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1917

Copyright, 1916, 1917
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
as "The Heart of a Man"

Copyright, 1917
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

[ Her lips trembled, but she spoke in a clear
undertone, audible only to him, which faltered
the merest trifle. (Page 316) . . . Frontispiece ]

[ "I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all.
You will please consider it final" ]

[ He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway.
"Echo!" he cried and rose to his feet ]

[ All at once the hound flung up his great head with a
low howl, then, crouching, licked the nerveless
hand that hung down ]

THE LONG LANE'S TURNING

CHAPTER I

THE COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENCE

The dark was falling over the court-room. A lurid ray of the setting sun gleamed redly on the dust-streaked window panes, and struggled disconsolately with the melancholy gleam of the oil lamps that an awkward attendant with creaking foot-leather had laboriously lighted in their wall-brackets. Their pale radiance gleamed on the painted faces of dead jurists that looked down from fly-specked canvases on the walls and was reflected from the mass of moving, living faces that filled the room, whose eyes gazed alternately at the Judge's vacant seat, and at the empty railed space that had penned in the restless jury now considering their verdict in an upper room—to return again and again to the spot where sat the man over whose dingy case a medley of voices had declaimed and wrangled throughout that southern spring day.

He sat slouched in his chair, his narrow, faded-blue eyes, strained and frightened, fixed on the empty jury-box, his uncertain hand lifting from time to time to give a swift, furtive touch to his collar or a thrust to his wiry, sand-coloured hair. In the pallid lamp-light the hard sneer that had curved his lips during the dragging trial had faded and his face seemed all at once piteous and younger.

To a stranger there would have seemed little in the circumstances to inspire the popular interest the full room betokened. The accused was a rough sawyer, known to his fellows of the logging camp as "Paddy the Brick," with a history of sluggishness and inebriety behind him. The crime of which he stood charged was the theft of a comrade's earnings, the story merely one of those sordid dramas of menial life which were so familiar. The evidence, though purely circumstantial, was, to a casual eye, sufficiently conclusive.

Yet in the minds of most of those who had filled the dingy court room during the two days just passed, there had been until the last hour a general expectation that the man would be cleared. This had been based upon nothing save the common knowledge that his counsel was Harry Sevier.

The latter had never failed to justify the expectations that had habitually heralded his doings. Young, likable, perfectly equipped and knowing his southern world, he had returned, after a half dozen years of foreign schooling, to step into a social niche readily accorded him by those who had seen little of him since boyhood. His grey eyes and crisp, dark beard, had been distinguishing marks of forebears whose lives had been lived in that neighbourhood and who had left their vivid impress upon the institutions of their time; statesmen, diplomats and soldiers had been of that line, and he himself, with his characteristic mannerisms, his unimpeachable grooming, his nice observance of the social code, had come to be regarded as the perfect pattern of his type. Left an orphan at an early age, he had inherited a comfortable property and the income of a city block, and he spent the money judiciously, if lavishly. His Panhard was the swiftest car in town, as his offices were the most sumptuous, though ostentatiously simple in appointment. He had a Japanese valet, and the "at homes" which he occasionally gave in his bachelor apartment, though they might be dominated "pink teas" by the envious unbidden, were affairs to which an entrée was a hallmark. He maintained also a shooting-box on an upper slope of the Blue Ridge—a comfortable bungalow set in a hundred acres of wilderness—whither of autumns he and a dozen other choice spirits were wont to fare for a fortnight's tramping and fishing, sleeping on pungent hemlock boughs and eating homely food cooked by the single negro servant who lived there as caretaker. He had a gift for private theatricals—he was in constant demand of the Amateur Dramatic Club—and had more than a dilettante appreciation of music and art.

As regards his profession, he had injected into the somewhat cut-and-dried legal life of the old Capital an unusual and winning element of personality and a method at variance with established usage. His very eccentricities had set him apart from the mass, who were so glamoured with the sordid things of life; and the apparent contempt for material reward with which he defended poor and unknown clients as readily as rich and influential ones had its appeal to a class which possessed imagination and ideals. There had seldom been a case in which he had not successfully employed a curious subterranean logic—an apparently wilful insistence upon what seemed at first glance the unvital and immaterial—as a preliminary to a swift volte-face by which he turned the evidence at a new and unexpected angle of inference, and drove home the doubt with a brilliant display of oratory which captivated and—for the moment—convinced. In the four years in which he had stamped his individuality upon the town, not only had he never lost a criminal case, but he had created a certain conviction that a trial in which he figured would offer unmistakable elements of surprise and entertainment. So that the Criminal Court had come, in a way, to be the fashion, and the sombre chambers of justice saw many an assemblage that would have graced another sort of gathering.

Seldom, however, on this day had Harry's glance through his gold-rimmed eye-glasses wandered to the benches. With many there he had danced and golfed and bridged a hundred times. That, however, had been play; this, which had come to furnish another and quite as fascinating a sort of entertainment for them, was what he had chosen to make the more serious business—in so far as anything had been serious to him—of his life. So that his apparent disregard of this tribute to his personality for the sober business in hand, set over against the palpable frivolity of purpose that actuated the moiety of his audience, was, after all, only another indication to them of that fine sense of the fitting for which his world admired him.

Through the long morning the evidence had accumulated. One by one the merciless rivets had been driven home by the prosecuting attorney. The chain of evidence seemed flawless. And Harry Sevier's cross-examination had seemed scarcely more than perfunctory—had appeared somehow to miss that subtle and pregnant suggestion, that longer reach that heretofore had uncovered a hitherto unnoted but baffling doubt. Yet to those who knew him this but pointed to a more effective climax, a more engrossing sensation when the psychological moment should arrive and that appealing figure arise to insert the nicely calculated spoke in the wheel that, under the manipulation of the state's attorney, was rolling so swiftly in its ominous course; and on the back-benches, where sat a group of members of the Country Club, a whispered bet that the accused this time would not get off, found as usual no taker.

Evidence finished, the Court rose for a recess and Harry vanished through a side-door. Ten minutes later he was in his office. He vouchsafed no word to the clerk who sat in the outer room, but passed quickly through to the inner sanctum and closed and locked the door. The self-control bred of the strenuous occupation of the court room had slipped now from his face, leaving it suddenly strained. There were moist drops upon his forehead but his hands were arid and dry. He drew the blind to shut out the dull, grey, winter light and switched on the electric desk-lamp, and as he did so his eyes turned stealthily to the wall—to a locked cabinet whose key was in his pocket.

They turned again almost immediately to the baize-covered desk, where stood a plain, flat silver frame. It held a photograph of a portrait painted by Sargent which had been a salon favourite of a few years before. It was that of a young girl, seated and leaning intently forward from an arm chair. One hand was at her throat, the other dropped against the dusky shoulder of a dog stretched at her feet, and in her dark eyes was the eternal question which maidenhood asks of life. The lines of the face were cameo-like, and its southern beauty held that particular blend of ingeniousness and hauteur that is the result of the selection and inbreeding of generations. He stood still a moment, looking fixedly at it, his tongue touching his lips, before he crossed the room and turned the picture face-down upon the desk. He almost ran to the cabinet, unlocked its mirrored door, and took from it a bottle and a glass. He poured out a full goblet of the gurgling liquid and drank it off. Then he drew a long breath.

"Yes," he said, "I'll lie to myself no more! I've got to have it or throw up the sponge. It was my own once, that wonderful gift—whatever it is. Once it was my own brain, unhelped, that sent the glow to my heart and the fire to my tongue—till words had glorious colours and pictures painted themselves out of nothing. Once it was my own mind that saw a problem as clear as crystal. But I wasn't content. I wanted the short cut, and this showed me the way. And now—now—I've dropped the reins. It's not Harry Sevier that wins cases—it's that bottle!"

He began to stride up and down the narrow room; deep lines had etched themselves in the mobile face. "There was the Davencourt Case," he said to himself. "Not a shred of decent evidence to go on, and the whole court packed with prejudice, and he was as guilty as the devil. Yet I won! That was only a year ago, but I couldn't do it now—without what is in that decanter! All day yesterday I was heavy, my mind was as blank as a glacier. In the cross-examination I couldn't see a foot before me. But for this half-hour it would go hard with my client at the finish. As it is I wouldn't want a better foil than old Maitland for the prosecution. How he has slaved over his witnesses! I might have made some of the testimony that sounded so damning look like a cocked-hat if I had gone about it in his laborious way. For this 'Paddy the Brick' has plenty of friends, for all his crookedness. Half the logging-camp, apparently, chipped in to make up my retaining-fee. But pshaw! what's the use? I can get him off without it. In the last analysis it's feeling, not facts, that will sway them—feeling first, and then conscience. Every man of them must see himself, first shivering in the shoes of my thief, and then wearing the Judge's gown. When the psychological moment comes there is only to drive home the fallibility of circumstantial evidence and sear those twelve slow-going, matter-of-fact brains with a sense of the inherent perversity of appearances!" He smiled bitterly. "Especially," he added, "when there's whisky in the story. My client was drunk as a boiled owl when he was arrested—the stolen plunder might easily have been put on him, as he claims it was. The jury will understand that. There's probably not a man on it who doesn't get squiffy now and then."

He stopped in his walk and held up a hand against the light—it wavered ever so little. The draught had not yet brought its accustomed poise of nerve—its tense certitude, its mental glow and confidence. With an impatient gesture he turned again to the cabinet. "One used to do it," he said; "it will evidently take more to-day to restore our bold Turpin to his career on the highway!" He set the empty glass in its place with a short laugh.

"Curious," he said. "If he were innocent and drink had got him into this scrape, there would be a poetic justice in drink's getting him out!"

As he turned to lock the cabinet, the bell of his desk-telephone rang—three short, sharp rings. It was the clerk's warning that the court was about to reassemble. He drew a deep breath, and cast a quick glance at the little mirrored door. No tinge was rising in his colourless face, no warming tingle in his veins. His hands were uncertain and his fingers had an odd numbness. A keen, cold edge of anxiety touched him. Always heretofore, when he had sat with the black decanter, he had felt the wonderful, slow change—the gradual glow creeping through every nerve, the tightening of muscle and sinew as for a race, the thrilling, glad sense of renewed power and unleashed ability and the inevitable quivering rush of lambent images in his brain. The signal was too long in coming to-day—and he could not wait! His hand shook as it reached again to the little shelf. An instant he hesitated—for a breath, while the light twinkled from the deep-cut facets, he strove to remember whether he had drunk one glass or two. Then with a frown he poured the draught and drinking it off, locked the cabinet, and went hurriedly out.

When he entered the courtroom, the wide space had filled again and the State's Attorney had opened his address—a brief one, icily emotionless and rigidly exact—the very background upon which so often Harry Sevier's winged words had spelled victory for a cause prejudged as lost. And he was to reply—with the final speech for whose inspiration he had fled to that locked cabinet in the darkened inner-office. Paddy the Brick listened with the look of some trapped thing gazing at its captor, sometimes turning toward his counsel a furtive wavering glance that was blent equally of dread and dog-like appeal. These glances were unreturned. Harry Sevier sat motionless, his eyes straight before him.

But behind that mask Harry's thought was turning and turning upon itself. The sudden sharp edge of anxiety that had caught him in his office had grown to a thriving fear. His ally was failing him. The master, whose upper hand he had just acknowledged—whose aid had been so freely given him in really vital moments—was forsaking him at the turn of a wretched, second-rate case of common thievery! He realised it with a sickening sense of wonder that mingled with a dull anger at the littleness of the issue, and through the confused mist of his mind his inner ear seemed to hear a far-distant sardonic laughter—as though the Djin of the bottle laughed in the locked wall-cabinet at his dismay.

He rose to speak for the defence with an icy clog upon his faculties, while beneath that frozen surface the something that had been shackled reared and struggled vainly. Vocabulary, cunning of phrase, and logical sequence of argument had not deserted him; he realised this with a blind rage that seemed with a singular separateness to lie outside of himself—to associate itself strangely with the prisoner. But the persuasion that had so often checkmated justice, the calculated force, the insinuating tactfulness, the living, warm appeal that had had their way in the past were absent. He had a curious feeling of duality, as though two Harry Seviers had suddenly and painfully drawn apart—the one whose measured voice was speaking, and the other which clamoured and appealed, conscious only of its own deadly smother and of the despairing face of the man with the wiry sand-coloured hair who sat slouched in his chair beside him.

The roomful seemed very still. The Judge was looking at him fixedly, through bowed horn-glasses set far down on his nose. Harry was aware that in the countenance of the state's attorney puzzle and a stealthy relief struggled together. With desperate narrowness he watched the faces of the jury for a sign, a tentative withdrawal of stolidity that betokened a quickened and awakening interest. But they sat moveless and impassive. There was a last hideous pause, in which he thought the foreman suppressed an incipient yawn, when his own brain refused further struggle. He knew that he had been betrayed. The door of human sympathy would not open—he had lost the magic key.

The reply of the State's Attorney was a mere résumé of the evidence. He had needed no more. The Judge's charge was brief. Then had come the stir of moving bodies and the buzz of whispers—the shuffling of feet as the Judge retired and the jurors filed out—and at length the painful hiatus with the red sunlight and the pallid lamps.

This was broken presently by three measured raps on the door of the jury-room, which, as the Judge re-entered, opened to admit the jurors. They were quickly polled and the verdict given—guilty. The sentence followed immediately.

With the fateful words Harry Sevier turned his eyes, almost as if suddenly awakening from sleep, upon the court-room, and met across the moving benches a woman's concentrated and wondering look. She was Echo Allen, the original of the portrait whose photograph lay face-down upon his office desk. The neutral-tinted presentment, however, had been far from realising the concrete flush of sensuous beauty of its living original, with her straight lithe frame, her hair all a wash of warm russets and sunny golds, framing a face perfect in contour and with a complexion as soft as a moth's wing. And the beauty of this was now deepened, if possible, by the shadow upon it of puzzled pain and inquiry. An instant the gaze between them hung, then it broke as she turned away, gathering her white furs about her throat with a slow, hesitant gesture. With the sudden stab of shame and humiliation that rushed through him—for he had not seen her there before that moment—something seemed to break, too, in Harry's brain; it was the rigid lock which had been somehow put upon his faculties. The emptying room felt all at once a furnace, and little jerking shocks, like tiny electric currents, were running over him, prickling to the tips of his fingers. Intoxication was upon him, sudden and overwhelming, but he did not recognise it. He had never been drunk, in the sense popularly understood. He had always regarded with wondering distaste the occasional abject surrender of mind and body to the effect of alcohol with which he was familiar in men of his class, and the vulgar spree filled him with disgust. He was nicely abstemious at his club and he had never entered a saloon in his life. His indulgences, deeper and more and more frequent as they had grown of late, had been hidden behind the shades of his inner office, and the liquor he had drunk there he had never carried in his legs. For him these cloistered hours had meant no harrowing aftermath of remorse, no shrinking memory of license or ribaldry, but only the strange mental exaltation that had borne him to success. He sat now outwardly calm and collected, but mentally in an odd confusion, grasping at strange alert suggestions that were thronging about him in a lurid phantasmagoria.

He came to his feet with a start, suddenly aware that the slouching figure beside him had arisen at the heavy touch of the sheriff's hand. He took a step forward, the lawyer for a moment again uppermost, the perplexed mind groping for the conventional expression of professional regret. But he did not speak. Instead, as the narrow, red-rimmed eyes stared for a breath into his, Harry's outstretched hand fell at his side and a painful blur swept across his vision. His unsober, kaleidoscopic mind had opened to something that lay naked and anguished beneath the haggard face of the prisoner, something no longer glossed by sullen scowl and sneering bravado—a concrete fact, perturbing and vaguely horrifying, which would not express itself in mental symbols.

With hands clenched and a face like a sleepwalker's, Sevier crossed the emptying room to the side door, where his motor now waited. "Anywhere, Bob," he said thickly, "but go like the devil till I tell you to stop, if it's a thousand miles!"

As the burnished mechanism shot into pace and the cool wind stung his face, the early arc-lights above the roadway swelled to great pallid moons tangled in a net of stars, and in their yellow lustre the thing he had seen in the prisoner's face suddenly shouted itself to his brain. He flung up an arm as though to ward a blow.

"He wasn't guilty!" he gasped. "He never did it, by God!"

CHAPTER II

A MAN AND A WOMAN

The girl whose gaze had for that instant found Harry Sevier's across the crowded court room left the place with her mind in a conflict of feeling. She was nonplussed. She had entered for that last hour sharing intuitively the general belief that the prisoner would be acquitted: a belief, founded like that of the rest, upon her knowledge of his counsel. She had seen no straining for the spectacular in what some had been wont to call "Harry Sevier's pyrotechnics," and on past occasions on which she had heard him address a jury she had fallen wholly under the spell of that peculiar magnetism that swayed all alike. Aside from his continuous success in a calling with which her whole life had been associated—her father, Judge Beverly Allen, was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and his father had been Chancellor before him—with his brilliant way, his undenied leadership among his fellows, he had been to her a dominant personality. She had not lacked the masculine homage of a dozen others of their set, but Harry Sevier had always been the imminent figure in her thought, and it had needed no spoken word or promise between them to link her imagination wholly to a future in which he reigned supreme. So that his failure to-day had affected her strongly.

On the dusky court house steps she stopped to exchange greetings with a group who chatted there. They were full of the puzzle of Sevier's failure, or laughingly rueful at their own discomfiture, and she stopped but a moment before a negro coachman tucked her into a carriage. As he climbed lumberingly to his seat and gathered up the reins, a heavy, assured figure approached the curb. Cameron Craig was big and broad and in his strong and arrogant face lines of conflict had early etched themselves. He shook hands with her with a smile.

"I didn't know you were in town," she said, with a trace of aloofness.

"I'm here for only a day or two," he answered. "I had to talk a little politics with my attorney, Mr. Treadwell. It's his busy day, it seems, and as the mountain couldn't come to Mahomet, Mahomet came to the mountain. So here I am at the halls of justice. It's been an entertaining afternoon—the trial, I mean—but upon my word, I thought at first I had strayed into a convention of the Daughters of the Confederacy."

She smiled, but it came with difficulty. "Oh, court has become a social dissipation with us. It competes now with auction-bridge and the fox-trot."

"You tempt me to steal a purse or two," he said. "I love to hold the centre of the stage. The only thing I've been charged with stealing so far is an election, but one never knows to what heights he may rise. If I pick your pocket will you come to my trial?"

"If it were my pocket, I'd have to, wouldn't I?"

He bowed smilingly and turned away, as the coachman flicked the tossing manes with the tip of his whip. Looking over her shoulder, while the horses whirled her away, Echo saw his big frame swinging up the steps into the emptying building, every move expressive of virile strength and conscious power.

These were traits Cameron Craig had acquired through direct inheritance. His father had come penniless, to a small town in the adjoining state where, with calm assurance and without unnecessary delay, he had married the neighbourhood's prettiest girl and pre-empted a worn-out iron deposit with a tumble-down furnace, relic of a series of disgusted British owners. With the same certainty of judgment he had uncovered the lost ore, developed the property till it paid a miraculous dividend, and died. He had been a man of one idea—the "Works"—and had known and cared for nothing else. The son, however, with his father's force and will, had inherited, with less praiseworthy traits, a further ambition. The young Cameron Craig's first free act after his schooling ended was to dispose of the iron plant and to throw his money and his brain together into a group which now stood back of the great Public Services Corporation that held in control the vested interests of two states, exclusive of the railroads. At thirty he was a personality that loomed large in organised politics, and might be depended on to loom steadily larger to the end of the chapter.

As he entered the old building now he was thinking of the face of the girl he had just left, with its brilliant beauty and flashing youth.

"Why not?" he said to himself. "She has birth and breeding, but I can match them with things the world counts as high. I've never failed yet to get what I wanted—if I wanted it enough!" His thoughts recurred to the trial and to Harry Sevier. "Curious that nobody seemed to guess what the matter was—none but me. But I know what that look back of his eyes meant. The young fool! To have that gift—every thing right in his hand—and then to throw it away. For that's what it will come to, sure as fate, in the end!"

A hand fell upon his shoulder. It was Lawrence Treadwell, the attorney, and he followed the latter into a private room and sat down. "Have you got the new committee list?" he asked, without preamble.

For answer the other took a closely written paper from his pocket and handed it over. "Senator Colby sent it down by his secretary this morning."

Craig drew his chair to the table and began to make pencilled changes and corrections, his hand moving swiftly and unhesitatingly. "There," he said, returning it. "That will be better. Let the senator have it back to-morrow." He sat a moment silent, his strong white fingers drumming on the table. "By the way, is this young Sevier likely to take a hand in the next campaign?"

"I don't know," replied the other. "I've always expected him to burst into politics some day. He has a curious hold on people—a wonderful magnetism. To-day's is the first jury case I've ever known him to lose. He as well as let it go by default. How he came to handle it so beats me!"

Craig might have enlightened him, but he did not.

"I've concluded we don't want him," he said. "He's uneven: the trial to-day proved that. Besides, he's too high-chinned—we can't depend on his type to obey orders. We are coming to a big fight and we want the docks clear. No overtures to him. We must cut out every man whose absolute footing we can't count on till the day of judgment."

The attorney lit a cigar and regarded its blue haze thoughtfully before he answered. "All right," he agreed. "I should have picked him for good material. But you're the doctor."

Meanwhile the carriage was whirling Echo Allen over the darkening asphalt. The tired night lay still, watching under dusky lids, the moon, a great blown magnolia, floating in the limpid sky. As the horses pounded on, the coachman's voice broke in upon her revery:

"Reck'n Marse Harry done got dat man clar, Miss Echo, lak he allus do?"

She drew her furs closer about her throat with a little gesture as though dismissing a baffling problem. "No, 'Lige; not this time."

"Sho' now!" he exclaimed, looking back with his thick, blue-black lips framed to a whistle. "Muss-a been pow'ful guilty ef he couldn't git him off. Ah reck'n dem yuthah lawyahs 'cluded dey wanter tek Marse Harry down—he done put it ovah dem so off'n—en dey jes' tek dat 'cused man, en fool eroun', en fool eroun', tell dey done prove it on him!"

But 'Lige's sage reflection upon the situation brought no smile to Echo Allen's face.

At length the horses came to a great double-gate, lighted with heavy wrought-iron lamps, opening on a curving drive, into which they turned, to swing panting up to a wide-porched mansion set in a grove of oaks and acacias. This was "Midfields," the home of the Allens for four generations and of the Beverlys before them. Its wide wings and columned front spoke of old colony days, as did its name of a time when rolling acres of tobacco instead of suburban streets surrounded it. Twilight was drifting thickly over it now, and the box-hedged garden, with its plenteous rose-shrubs and wild sun-dial, was purpled with shadow.

Echo jumped down without assistance and ran into the hall, throwing off her hat and coat and pausing before a glass to pat into place the rebellious whorls of her springing, gold-brown hair before she entered the dimly-lighted library.

It was a wide, pleasant room, with tradition and gentle birth in every line of its furnishing. The table held an old China lamp of gilt and lapis-lazuli blue, and the simple, colonial book-cases were of rich-veined mahogany which held the same shimmering, tawny lights as Echo's hair and had leaded-glass doors in key with the silver, glass-prismed candle-sticks on the mantel-piece. A huge old English screen of painted leather stood at one side. On the dull green walls were framed steel engravings of the ancestral home of the Allens in Dorsetshire and of that sturdy ancestor, in lace and peruke, whose rugged signature is on the Declaration. The place had but one modern touch—a splendid portrait of Echo herself that hung between two great windows—the canvas whose photograph at that moment lay face-down in Harry Sevier's inner office.

In the room sat her father, the Judge, perusing a magazine. He was a pale, placid man, straight and grey as a silver-birch, with ivory, distinguished features that suggested an old daguerreotype and seemed to call for a silk-velvet waistcoat and a stock. He tossed the magazine aside as she came to him and stooping, in a swift birdlike way she had, dropped a kiss on the top of his billowy, grey hair.

"There you are," she chided, "ruining your poor eyes with fine print in this wretched light!"

She turned the reading-lamp higher and drew the curtains. As she pulled the heavy folds together they swept from its place a heavy brass bowl filled with Marechal Niel roses, and it fell with a crash onto a frail Italian desk of dark rosewood quaintly inlaid with designs in lighter colour, which sat in a corner.

She sprang to catch it with a cry. "I'm as bad as Uncle Nelson!" she exclaimed. "How lucky it didn't spill!" She set the bowl back and passed a hand along the polished desk-top, frowning. "It has made a terrific dent in the poor old thing!" she said, remorsefully. "It must have jarred it frightfully. I'm so sorry!" She looked at her father, who had half risen at her cry. "You were always fond of the little old desk, though you never used it. I used to love it when I was a child. It was so mysterious, with its tiny cubby-holes and carvings. Some one told me once that such foreign desks always had secret drawers and I used to spend hours trying to find one. Where did it come from? Did it belong to grandfather?"

"No. It was willed to me many years ago by—a friend. It was when you were a baby."

"How curious," she said, "for a man to choose a piece of furniture like that! Why, it's as feminine as a toilet-table!" She came and perched one small toe on the fender, as he asked: "Where's Nancy!"

"I haven't seen her since luncheon. She was going to tea at Cora Spottiswoode's."

"Her father has written me she must come home at the end of the week," said the Judge. "He says if she doesn't he'll start an action against somebody for kidnapping—says nobody can fix his coffee just right but her."

She smiled. The two families were life-long friends and since their boarding-school days she and Nancy Langham had exchanged annual visits. "I'll tell her," she said. "I wish she could stay longer, though it's lonely for her father, no doubt. I love to have her here. She's—fond of Chilly, and I've been hoping it—might have an influence over him."

The Judge sighed. The name of Chisholm Allen, Echo's twin-brother, was a synonym in the city for debonair devil-may-care. With the likeliness that kept him popular even among those staid members of society who did not countenance his peccadillos, he combined a negligence and dissipation that from his boyhood had made him a thorn-in-the-flesh to his father.

"Yes," he said, "she's fond of him. That's why I think she shouldn't stay too long."

There was silence for a moment. Then he said in a lighter tone, "I wonder how Sevier's case came out. It was expected to finish to-day, wasn't it?"

"Oh," she answered, "he lost. The jury found against him. I was there for an hour, just at the end."

He made an exclamation of surprise, and stole a quick glance at her, but she had bent down to straighten a shoe-buckle and he could not see her face. "Ah well," he said, "it won't do him any harm to get a set-back now and then. Perhaps he needs it. Were there many there?"

"Half the world," she answered. "I saw Cameron Craig."

"So he is in town, eh? I must send a note to the hotel and ask him to luncheon to-morrow."

She was silent and he said quizzically. "Come, my dear, you mustn't be such a chin-tilted patrician. 'Other times, other manners.' Craig has his place, and it's not a low one, either."

She made a move of impatience. "He's a member of the best clubs in his own city, and all that, I know. He belongs there. But here it is different. We are not beholden to him. Why should we go out of our way to treat him like one of us? He isn't, really. He may be a University man and he may have travelled all over the world. Yes, and I'll admit he has manners—a manner, if you like—too. But there's something that keeps him an outsider just the same. Besides, people tell unpleasant tales about him."

Her father cleared his throat. Gossip had been prolific in tales of Craig as regarded the fairer—and frailer—sex. He had heard the stories—unsavoury ones, such as inevitably cling to men, whatever their business or social standing, who acquire the whispered reputation of the voluptuary. He had himself, however, a singular reserve of judgment, coupled with an impatient intolerance of scandal. Men to him were as he found them, till the event proved otherwise.

"I know what you mean," he said judicially. "He hasn't our traditions and standards. That's true. He's not born to them. But this is an uncharitable world, my dear, and half the tattle one hears is apt to be sheer envy. He is a person of importance. He has a good deal of influence, as well as money, and is affiliated with men with whom a large part of my earlier life was associated."

She hardly heard his closing words: "Influence and money!" she repeated, with a little shrug. "Why need we bother about them! The Judiciary, thank heaven! has nothing to do with political influence, and as for money, I should hate to think that what we have came, like his, from the United Distilleries!"

"Echo!" The name fell sharply behind them.

Both turned—the Judge a little self-consciously—to where his wife stood in the doorway. She was already dressed for dinner and her dark corsage set off her white neck and beautifully rounded shoulders—a cool, statuesque woman, of unfailing poise and manner, with her grey hair perfectly disposed above a complexion whose tinting was the despair of many a younger matron. Instinctively the girl's hand had crept into the Judge's arm, and insensibly the two had drawn a shade nearer together.

Mrs. Allen stood looking at them a moment, faintly smiling, before she said deliberately, "That is a ridiculous way of talking. Please let me remind you that your father was the Trust's counsel for many years, and until he went on the Bench."

"Oh, I forgot—" she began, distressed. "I only meant—"

"There, there!" the Judge said, frowning. "People feel differently about those things. You have a perfect right to think in that way, if you choose."

"I couldn't think anything you did was wrong," she cried passionately. "And, anyway, giving a company legal advice is very far from being in its business. Every one has to have lawyers, of course. They defend even criminals."

He smiled quizzically at her argument. "Well," he countered, "I'm respectable in my old age, at any rate." He had pressed a bell as he spoke and to the grizzled negro who now entered he said, "Nelson, has your Marse Chilly come in yet? If he has I'd like to see him."

The old man shook his head. "Marse Chilly done tellyfoam he won' be home fo' dinnah, suh."

The Judge pulled his chin, palpably annoyed, but quick to his resentful mood, Echo laid her hand caressingly on his arm.

"Never mind, dear," she said coaxingly. "Don't fret about Chilly."

Mrs. Allen's voice interposed. "Chilly sent me the message an hour ago," she said, with an accent that seemed finally to dismiss the topic. "I think you would better dress now, Echo. Nancy has been in some time, and dinner's at seven-thirty."

CHAPTER III

THE AWAKENING

An automobile speeding through the starry dark! No hesitant progress through congested traffic, no frequent swerving for daylight wayfarers. The city was far behind now—only the clear, well-nigh deserted road, winding like a tremulous magenta ribbon through the swooping gloom that seemed to shrink and cringe from the metal monster hurtling after its golden halo through the eddying dust.

A practised hand was on the throttle and the yellow-lined face bent over the wheel was shrewd and keen. There had been no supper for Bob that night and no evening at Black Joe's billiard parlour, but the chauffeur knew his master. "Go like the devil till I tell you to stop," the other had said, and without the word from the moveless figure on the rear seat, he would obey till the engine stopped or his hand went numb on the wheel. Hamlets flashed by—huddles of flaring street-lights—then shadow and blankness again. Now and then a hollow rumbling marked a bridge, or a jovial, beckoning doorway betokened a road-house. Ten, twenty, thirty miles. A turn of the wheel and the car swept into a divergent highway. Another mile and again a turn—Bob was shuttling back and forth now, fearful of an impossible distance from home.

The man behind him sat as if graven in stone. At first, while his senses instinctively resisted the intoxication, Harry had been conscious only of blind movement, a frantic flight to escape the unescapable. Yet his whole body was tense, his eyes never wavered, his hand was as steady as his chauffeur's. He was sharply conscious of all about him, every sense recording its message unerringly. He felt the wind-flung dust, heard the chatter of the exhaust, grasped acutely at each detail of sight and sound in the reeling panorama through which they passed with such arrow-like swiftness, under a sky that was a wild, blue field of silver flowers. Yet the governance of the mind, the sole arena in which the intoxicant ravened and rioted, the logical faculty to which sense-impression is but material, was astray. And at length the intoxication had wholly conquered.

And with the acknowledged dominance of the sinister thing that held him, the mental turmoil had swiftly stilled. There had come sudden composure—a strange, appalling peace, in which was no appreciation of place or time or fact, but yet a curious exaltation, a sensation of seeing not through a glass darkly, but with a further mental vision which knew no material bars.

Three hours, four hours—and still no sign. Bob stole a glance behind him. "Wonder what's the matter?" he muttered. "He sure never did want to go hell-bent-for-election like this before. Lucky I filled the tank plumb full this morning. She's good for another forty mile, I reckon."

As he withdrew his eyes he became aware of a red light swinging down into the road—a railway-crossing. He threw himself forward on the gear and with a grinding roar the brakes took hold. Plunging and shuddering, the car stopped dead, its forward lamps jingling against the warning bar.

With the sudden stop Harry lurched forward. And, curiously, with the abrupt cessation of motion and roar, the vast, vague distance through which his mind had been shuttling, closed instantly up. The baleful intoxication had lifted as it had come. He did not wake fully at once, for the breaking of the spell left him in a strange confusion through which he saw but dimly the outlines of the real present. He found himself sitting dazed and shaken in his motor—staring at the broad back of his chauffeur beyond which, an isolated point in the darkness of the night, swung the angry red lantern of the crossing. He put a hand to his forehead—what was he doing there?

It was coming back to him. He remembered the straining trial, the hour in his inner office—with the little wall-cabinet! He saw the crowded courtroom, saw himself standing impotent before the bar, saw the despairing face of the man beside him, the puzzled countenances about him, the dim lamps. He heard verdict and sentence. He saw himself turn to gaze into the face of the girl across the court-room—knew the swift rush of the motor, the blazing arc lights and that final stab of realisation!

His lips tightened to shut back something like a groan, as there rushed upon him a sense of horror, of disgust, of shame. The Harry Sevier he had been—the Harry Sevier of good repute, of disdain for the intemperate, of brilliant accomplishment and regular habit, was gazing with horrified eyes at the Harry Sevier he had unwittingly become, the slave of the spirit he had so long invoked, whose coarse debauch had to-day betrayed his client, and sent an innocent man to the wretched cell of a convict!

He spoke. "Bob, where are we?"

The chauffeur stole a quick glance behind him—there was relief in it. "Penitentiary-Crossing, sir," he said. "There's the Black Maria." He pointed to one side, where the gloomy vehicle, a wheeled ark with a narrow barred window set in its rear, waited with its patient mules.

The train was at the crossing now and the rumble of the brakes swelled to a vibrant screech, the long dotted line of dimly-lighted windows shuddering to a stop right athwart the road. A train-man with a lantern jumped down, followed by a couple of passengers. Harry opened the door of the tonneau and suddenly conscious that he was stiff and aching in every joint, achieved the ground and took a step toward the train.

Two figures just then emerged from the glare. He saw that they were linked together by a wrist and as the coat of one blew aside, the lights of the motor glinted from a nickel star—the badge of a deputy-sheriff. They had passed him, and the train was moving again to the chug-chug of the engine, when the officer turned back, biting the end from a cigar.

"Could you give me a light?" he asked.

"Certainly." Sevier took a silver match-box from his pocket.

The other struck the match, hauling irritably at his lagging prisoner, and the red light, flaring up, for an instant showed the two faces, the sheriff's grim and tenacious, and the one beside it—a white, dogged face, with red-rimmed eyes and a shock of sand-coloured hair.

Sevier shrank as though at a blow in the face. He drew a sharp breath, for the sight pierced to the excoriate spot that lay like a live coal in his soul. There before him stood his client of that day's trial, on the last lap of his dismal journey, the man whom he, Harry Sevier, had sent there! Back of this man of the law, with his gleaming star and pocket revolver, he saw himself standing, the real mainspring of that blatant enginery.

The flare of the match fell. "Well, good night to you," said the deputy-sheriff.

"Hold on," said Harry. "Can a prisoner use money?"

"They're not supposed to, but I reckon money talks as loud in a concrete cell as anywhere else."

Sevier had taken some crisp yellow-backs from his pocket and now he held them out—to the jailbird. "Here!" he said. "Take this."

The other looked at the bills with a suddenly contorted face, then with a whirl of his unfettered hand dashed them on the ground. "Keep your money!" he snarled. "I'm a thief—that's what I am now! When I want money I'll steal it!"

The sheriff made an exclamation, and jerked viciously on the tethered wrist. "Don't you mind, sir," he said. "You mean it well, but this is an ugly one. Lord love you, they'll soon take that out of him over there! Come along, you," he added to the other, pulling him toward the Black Maria, "and if you open your face like that I'll give you what for!"

Sevier stood an instant looking dully after them, then mechanically picked up the fallen bills, fumblingly replaced them in his pocket, and climbed into the motor. He felt his face suddenly hot. In those flung words his judicial mind recognised the indictment. From the little wall-cabinet in his inner-office had crept a thing of shame and humiliation to himself. He saw this now suddenly swell and grow—as did the vapour from the fisherman's cruse—to a blighting, tentacled thing, reaching interminably into the future, holding in its coils a human life of pain, of desperate warfare, of social outlawry.

He sat down on the leather cushions like one in a dream.

"Home now, Bob," he said, heavily.

CHAPTER IV

THE PRODIGAL

At Midfields that evening the late moonlight poured a flood of radiance on the wide columned porch with its climbing roses where Echo sat on the step, chin in hand, absorbed in her own thought. She was alone. Nancy had slipped off to bed, her mother had retired to her room and her father to the quiet of the library and his reading.

From the kitchens she could hear the muffled clash of table-silver and the strident voice of Aunt Emily the cook, grumbling at Nelson: "Yo'-all hurry erlong wid dem ar fawks, now! Speck ah's gwine wait heah all night, yo' triflin' trash, yo'? Yo' heah me—yo' ain' blind! What yo' 'spose Marse Bev'ly pay yo' fo', anyhow?" From far down the road, beyond the gates, she could hear the faint twang of a guitar and the refrain of strolling, darky voices:

"Reign! Reign! Reign-a mah Lawd!
Reign, Marse Jesus, reign!
Reign salvation in-a mah soul,
Reign, Marse Jesus, reign!"

These died away with the sharp, eager bark of a dog. Then at length distinguishable sounds faded and there was only the deep, somnolent peace of the southern night, with the scent of the roses wreathing the garden with their intense, mystical odour—only the faint stirring of little leaves playing hide-and-seek with their shadows, and the thin, fairy tone-carpet woven by the myriad looms of night insects for near whispers to tread on.

Since that homeward ride she had had no time to ponder upon the event of the day. At dinner the trial had been touched upon but casually. Now that she was alone, however, it had rushed uppermost in her thought. It was not that Harry Sevier had lost the verdict: but his speech had seemed to her, in the tension of the crisis, with a man's honour and liberty at stake, inconsequential and almost flippant. And in the measure of her disappointment she had realised anew the depth of her regard for him. Again and again she pictured the scene in the courtroom but each time her thought returned upon itself, baffled and puzzled.

At length, with a long breath that was almost a sigh, she stirred, and rising, passed into the library where the Judge sat in the arm-chair by his reading lamp. "You're a disgraceful night-owl," she said, "and I refuse to keep you in countenance any longer."

He smiled at her. "That's right, Sorrel-Top! It's time for beauty-sleep if you and Nancy are off to ride in the morning. Just give me my eye-shade, will you, before you go?"

She brought the green crescent and snapped it on his forehead. "There! You haven't told me how you like my dress to-night. It's a new one."

He looked. "It's beautiful."

She turned about before him. "I do choose well sometimes, don't I?"

"You do everything well, my dear." In his tone now was a quaint and curious humility which always touched her when she discerned it—something of utter fondness and dependance—and she smoothed his iron-grey hair, one of her characteristic endearments, as she kissed him good night.

Upstairs Echo opened the door of her room softly. It was hung in blue—that shade which one sees in a Gainsborough ribbon, a Romney sash or a Reynolds sky—and its furniture was of simple white, with large pink dahlias trailing over the chintz window-curtains and chair-cushions. In the dim night-light the triple mirror of the dresser reflected the carven four-post bed, in one of whose pillows Nancy's dark head was already buried.

"Is that you, Echo?"

"Yes, it's I. Were you asleep already?"

"Almost," yawned Nancy. "I shall be in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Has Chilly come home yet?"

"No, not yet."

"Do you think he's really at the club, Echo?"

"Of course I do."

"Men are so queer!" sighed Nancy, drowsily. "We had such a lovely evening—all except Chilly's not being there."

Echo slipped off her gown and drew out the pins from her hair, letting it fall in a shimmering cloud to her waist. Then in the moon-light she drew a deep chair before the open window and began to brush out that wonderful mass of stirring gold that curled and waved about her bare, round shoulders. Below her the garden lay, a mass of olive shadows, wound in cloudy golds and misty greens, sprinkled with moon-dust and drenched with the dizzying scent of roses and honeysuckle. All was lapped in the utter quiet of the night—only the swift wing of a night-bird shook the darker clump of ivy that marked the sun-dial. A long time she sat there, the brush parting and smoothing the bronze mesh with long sweeping movements, gazing into the whisper-haunted gloom and listening to the measured breathing of the girl behind her that seemed to form a rhythmical current for her own thoughts.

All at once in the hush there came the clashing of the gate at the foot of the drive and jovial "good-byes," mingled with a hilarious voice asseverating that its owner had had "the time of his young life."

She bit her lip. "It's Chilly!" she whispered, with a frowning look over her shoulder.

She listened intently. There was the crunch of an uncertain step on the gravel, the sound of a stumble from the porch—then the slamming of the front door.

The dulled sound reverberated through the old house. It roused Nancy and she sat upright in the drift of silken coverlets, her eyes heavy with sleep. "Is it Chilly?"

"Yes. He has just come in."

"Is he—?"

"I'm afraid so, dear."

The younger girl caught her breath. "Oh, I hope your father has gone to bed. He's so hard on him!"

Echo turned. "How can he be otherwise?" she said, sadly. "It's so often and often it happens, nowadays. Won't you try and influence him? He cares for you, darling!"

Nancy's hands were clasped tight about her knees. She stirred uneasily. "How can I, Echo? A boy has to have a little bit of a good time once in awhile. I wouldn't want him to be a molly-coddle! He won't be any the worse for it when he gets older and settled down."

"The worse for it!" The words fell sadly. "Don't you think he is the worse for it already? He's making no progress with his law-study and he's been two years out of college, now. There's nothing to blame but his drinking—and the company he keeps. What will be the end of it? Oh, Nancy, you have a responsibility. Every woman has with some one man. If women only wouldn't countenance it as they do!"

"But, Echo—you talk as if Chilly was—as if you thought he was doing something disgraceful. Why, he's a gentleman; he couldn't be anything but that, no matter what he did!"

Echo came to the bed and sat down beside the other. In her filmy night-gown, wound in the mist of her loosened gold shadowed hair she looked like some ethereal thing in the moonlight.

"Ah, that's just what so many say! That a gentleman is a gentleman whether he is drunk or sober! It's not so with other things. Is a gentleman a gentleman whether he lies, or cheats at cards, or not? Isn't there to be any standard, really? Don't you see that there never will be any penalty—as far as drinking is concerned—until women make it? Listen, Nancy. The year I came out, I went to a dance—my first big one. There was a boy there who followed me about all over the floor. He wanted me to dance with him, and he was—he could hardly walk. At first I was frightened, but at last I grew angry. I asked a lady why he was not asked to leave the floor. She seemed quite astonished and indignant. 'But,' she said, 'don't you know who he is? That's the son of General Moultrie!' It was Cale Moultrie. You know what became of him, don't you?"

"Yes." Nancy's voice was muffled. "But Chilly—"

"Oh, my dear, there was a time when Cale drank no more than the others, and everybody liked him—as they do Chilly. It's coming to be the same with him, I'm afraid. There's no penalty for him yet because he's Chisholm Allen—because he's father's son!"

She stopped, caught by the sound of a sob. In another moment her arms were around the frail little body and the flower-like face was pressed hard against her breast.

"I don't care if he is d-d-dissipated," said Nancy passionately. "I'd rather have him come to me d-d-drunk than any other man sober! He's just Ch-Ch-Chilly, all the same!"

CHAPTER V

THE UNLAID GHOST

On the ground floor of the old house all was silent save in the dining-room, where a single electric bulb threw into garish relief the dismantled table with a bowl of fern glowing like a fountain of emeralds against the dark wood. It lighted the Chippendale sideboard, before which Chisholm Allen confronted old Nelson, the butler. A cut-glass decanter of sherry was in one hand; the other was alternately fumbling uncertainly with the stopper and pushing back the persuasive fingers of the aged negro. His straw hat was tipped awry, his face was flushed and his eyes unnaturally bright. He was laughing immoderately.

"You old black stick-in-the-mud!" he said. "What's the matter with you? Think you own that decanter, eh? Well, you don't, not by a long shot. I do—Chris'mas present from the Duchess. Hope to die if it wasn't. Leggo, you virtuous old chicken-thief, and give me a tumbler!"

"Now, Marse Chilly!" The low voice was deprecating and appealing, and there was love in it too—the deep, changeless affection of the old-time negro for his white master. "Yo' knows yo' don' want no mo' dat ar. Yo' done had er plenty at dat ole club down town. Ef yo' tuck away any mo' now, yo' gwine have er haid lak er rainbar'l on yo' shouldahs in dee mawnin'! Yo' knows yo' is!"

Chilly's hand dragged at the black detaining fingers. "What do you know about heads? Take your fool hands away, I tell you! I'm only going to take a couple of swallows."

"Ah knows dem ar swallers," pleaded the old man. "Yo' go erlong tuh baid. Hit's long pas' midnight. Marse Bev-ly's in dee lib'ry."

"Oh bother!" said Chilly irreverently. "He's gone to bye-bye long ago. Shut your face or you'll wake him up."

"Fo' dee Lawd, Marse Chilly!" stuttered the old man. "Ah heahs him comin' now! Ah sho' does!"

"You can't bamboozle me!" laughed Chilly. "Old Huckleberry's been snoozing this hour! If he does come, you and I'll drink his health. Eh? Wonder what he'd say!"

He was not to be left in doubt, for at the moment the hall-door opened. His father stood on the threshold. He was dressed and the green eyeshade was on his forehead.

"We will dispense," he said in a tone of quiet hardness, "with a ceremony which, however filial, is somewhat ill-timed. Nelson, I think you needn't wait up any longer."

"Yas, Marse Bev'ly. Yas, suh." The old man went to the door, hesitated and came back. "Is yo' sho' yo' don' want nothin' else, Marse Bev'ly?"

"Nothing further, Nelson."

"Yas, suh. Good night, Marse Bev'ly. Good night, Marse Chilly." This time he went out, closing the door behind him with exaggerated caution.

"Come now, Judge," said his son, still mirthfully. "There's no masonic funeral going on in the bungalow, is there? Can't one have a harmless night-cap without being excommunicated?"

His father looked at him from under the green shade with gloomy disapproval. The address did not tend to mend matters; his son was wont to reserve the judicial title for moods of especial mellowness such as to-night's. He noted the flushed face and sparkling eyes, the general air of goodnatured recklessness that so clearly spoke the nature of the other's evening's pleasure.

"We'll discuss that to-morrow." He crossed to the wall and laid his hand on the electric switch. "Good night."

Chisholm still smiled without apparent resentment. "I guess you weren't ever as young as I am, Judge, anyway. You seem to think I'm a rotten bad lot just because I like to take a glass now and then and go out with the boys. You drink your mint-julep all right enough. And I'll bet whoever you had to dinner to-night took as much as I've had under my vest. The only difference is I haven't had any dinner. It does make a difference, I assure you."

His father's hand was still extended to the wall. "I said good night, Chisholm."

Chilly shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, what's the use?" he said listlessly, and went unsteadily out by the rear door.

The Judge snapped off the switch, and putting out the light in the library, ascended the stair. The hard look had deepened on his face. As he gazed at that nonchalant epitome of ribaldry he had thought of other men who had so often been grouped about the table in that room—men of tempered habit, of standing and achievement. His own son had contempt for such company. It bored him. He preferred to "go out with the boys" and to come home in the small hours—as he had to-night. So he was thinking as he entered the room above. There he stopped in surprise, for across the threshold stood his wife. She was in her night-gown, over which she had thrown a robe of pale crêpe with lace at the neck and wrists. Her face showed a heightened colour and her lips were trembling. He drew forward a chair.

"I thought you were asleep long ago," he said.

She declined the seat with a gesture. "I heard your voices. What did you say to Chilly?"

"I said 'Good night,'" he answered heavily. "That was about all."

Her lip curled. The glance she gave him was critically cold. When she married Beverly Allen she had loved him—in so far as she had been capable of loving. To her marriage had meant the assumption of woman's predestined place in the social fabric, the inevitable change of habit which time brings to all, with its widened orbit and opportunities. She had been drawn to him by every instinct of selection which took count of name, standing, worldly endowment and mental equipment; but there had been behind it no throb of maidenly impulse, no thrill of the great current that feeds the romance of the world. The one point at which life for her caught and focused had been the son, whose misconduct stood so sharply out against the spotless Allen name. He was her one weakness, her love for him an unreasoning passion that had swayed her from his birth. To her his transgressions showed as venial, his delinquencies as but the forgivable errors of youth. The few instances in which he had been openly called to task by his father had been sharpened in the latter's memory by her resentment. But on none of these occasions had her husband seen her so moved as now. He did not know that for many minutes she had stood on the dark landing listening to the murmurous voices, and that now she resented what seemed to her a deliberate evasion. She spoke with slow, even point:

"As a monologist Chilly is a distinct surprise. Was he saying 'good night' also?"

Under the unaccustomed anger of her voice the Judge's pale face flushed. He took off the eyeshade and set it on the table, as he replied evenly:

"Chilly is not himself to-night, Charlotte. Does it matter particularly what he said?"

Beneath his voice now there was a kind of subterranean compassion, a note almost of entreaty, as though in this trouble that touched them both he could have wished to comfort her, if, indeed, she had made that possible.

She made an involuntary movement—not a sign that a chord had been touched, but rather a mark of agitation. Chilly was the one subject upon which she could not bring to bear the tempered reason which otherwise marshalled her even life. It seemed to her now that she was being thrust aside, in the interest of some new plan of discipline and coertion. She turned swiftly on her husband.

"I suppose you think it should make no difference to me!" Her eyes blazed. "You are so sure you understand Chilly! You—his father—have you ever really known him all his life? Does he ever come to you when he is in trouble or needs advice?"

Her voice held a bitter sarcasm and again the flush swept up the Judge's pale face. But his voice was emotionless as he said, "Chilly never felt the need of advice from any one. He goes his own sweet way."

"That is just it!" she said. "You set yourself so far above him. You have such a contempt for his pleasures and so thoroughly despise the company he keeps. Suppose he has a taste for liquor. He is still a gentleman, I believe. But you, with your solemn rectitude and your touch-me-not self-righteousness—you would drive him to the very people and places he ought to keep away from!"

He stared at her. "I have never regarded my repugnance to his habits as inducing him to further excesses," he said slowly. "Nor have I set myself up as preacher. Perhaps I have never understood him as—you do. I only know that his ways are not my ways. He has had every advantage that education and environment can confer. He is older than I was when I began practice. But what is he making of his life? He thinks of nothing but playing fast and loose at country-houses and loafing at the club and acting the fop and the fool generally!"

Her shaking hand was plucking at the lace at her throat. His every word had been a live coal laid to her resentment. "Is that the worst you can say of him?" she asked. "Can't you call him sot or black-leg?"

"Not yet." He was feeling now a dull anger at her scorn, at her persistent disapproval. The throb of sympathy he had first felt had been frozen by her icy reproach. "There are other things I wish to be able to say of my son. I want him to be more than a decorative philanderer. I want him to be a man—one to whom men may look for manliness, and women for honour!"

She had grown pale to the lips. "'And women for honour!'" she repeated. "As I looked to—you!"

He had flung out his arm with a characteristic gesture, but at her last words it suddenly stiffened and remained, as if it had been frozen in the air. Slowly it dropped at his side as he stared at her with ashen face—a look of shocked and disconcerted inquiry. For the exclamation, as at the swift slash of a blade, had torn away a veil, woven of time and habit, that covered an old wound. For twenty years by tacit consent this hidden thing of the past had never been acknowledged by any word or deed between them. Now a single sentence had laid it bare, quick and quivering and mutually confessed. They had been married twenty-two years, and if in that early period he had discerned any lack in her, he had given her no reproaches. On her part, she had fulfilled what she esteemed her whole duty, and in her own mind stood blameless. And he had had his profession. But in the end starved nature had reasserted itself. There had come to him a passion, swift and terrible while it lasted, to which he had surrendered wholly—till death swept it from him. The gall and wormwood had been sweetened then by the birth, in merciful coincidence with that loss, of his twin children. He had thought the episode buried forever from sight and hearing, but a later chance had discovered it to his wife, and in her own immaculateness she had been able neither to forget nor to forgive. It had made no difference in her life before their world. Cold and perfect and correct, she had held her way, but from the day when she had faced him with his secret in her hand, their hearts had been strangers to one another. He had climbed high and she had risen with him. And in twenty years no word had fallen from her lips to open that old tomb—till to-night when the heavy doors swung ajar at the echo of that one exclamation.

"As I looked to—you!" There it was—the old ghost, called up to haunt his present as it had waylaid his past. His hand fumbled for the discarded eye-shade and adjusted it as he slowly said:

"I have never counted myself a pattern, Charlotte—least of all for my own son."

She caught the note of pain and weariness now in his voice, and something new and unaccustomed stirred for one brief moment in her heart. She had struck harder than she had intended. But she had lost control at a critical moment and old bitterness, that had never been tinctured with the sweetness of charity and forgiveness, had sharpened her tongue. Now his shocked white face smote her with a sense of self-reproach whose very strangeness threw her momentarily off her poise. For a fleeting second words trembled on her tongue that might have dissolved the icy barrier between them. But the golden second passed.

"That is generous," she said with a distant laugh.

"No doubt Chilly will profit by experience, if not by precept. Shall you be at court to-morrow?"

"Yes," he answered. "I have a hearing."

"You will prefer the horses, then," she said, turning to the door. "I will take the electric for my shopping. Good night."

He opened the door for her. "Good night," he said.

CHAPTER VI

THE JUDGE SITS IN THE LAMPLIGHT

In the silence of the room the Judge stood for a moment with his hand at his lips, as though he tasted blood. The summer night outside was very still. The curtain before one of the windows swayed gently in the air and from the acacia trees on the lawn he could hear the sleepy twitter of an oriole. He turned off the light and went into the hall. There at one side stood the white, panelled door of his wife's room. It was shut. It came to him that it stood for a perfect symbol of that cold immaculateness of hers which had so long denied him the living bread of sympathy. She could forgive anything in her son, but nothing in her husband. For twenty long years they two might have dwelt at opposite ends of the Milky Way, and it seemed to him suddenly monstrous, whatever the cause, whosesoever the fault, that they, being man and wife, should yet be so far apart.

He went slowly down the stair again, his hand, shaking a little, slipping along the polished banister. The dim night-light made the lower hall a place of ghostly shadows. He re-entered the library, moved to the table and turned on the reading-lamp. Then, lifting it to the limit of its silken cord, he threw the electric glow upon the canvas that hung above the mantel, studying it intently.

"Mine!" he muttered, with a sort of fierce satisfaction. "Mine, every inch—mine, not Charlotte's! My blood gave you that curve of brow and those full lips and that deep, dark blue of eye—they are of my side, not of hers! You, at least belong to me!"

He returned the lamp to its place, and turning, cast his glance at the little Italian desk in the corner. His lips trembled. At that desk she had sat—the woman knowledge of whom had sharpened the sword of his wife's never-dying disdain. The woman who had come into his life too late! He thought of their meetings, few enough, indeed. How often he had wondered how life would have turned for him, if at the end she had listened to his desperate pleading, and gone with him along that alluring way that had drawn him like an opal path among Italian asphodels, flinging to the winds social standing, reputation, career, friends, honour, all! If she had said "yes" to that wild letter he had sent her—the one to which she had vouchsafed no reply—which might have been written in his very heart's blood!

He looked again at the painted portrait of Echo, in her splendid youth and clean heritage: the answer was there.

He sat down before the little desk, stretched his arms upon it and bowed his head upon them. "You were right, Eleanor," he sighed. "You were right. But somehow it's been so long!"

He felt a fluttering touch upon his hair and started up. There before him on the desk lay a faded leaf of paper—a page closely written over in twirly, dim writing. He lifted it up and held it to the light, his nostrils catching a scent wraith-frail and delicate, like a dead pansy's ghost—

No—no—no! Why did you write it? Why did you put it into words? For now I must keep it always. I cannot destroy it. You knew I would not—could not—-let you do what you beg me to! Never, never! I am not so mad. Nor are you, really. It is not your best self speaking in this letter. Sometime—

His gaze became fixed. He gave a hoarse cry—a mist was before his eyes. He snatched at the top of the yellowed sheet—it was dated twenty years before, and the hand-writing, how familiar! He laid the leaf flat in the lamp-light and read it through, with every nerve throbbing to a memory that had started afresh, as instinct as though days, not years, had sifted their dust upon it:

Sometime you will thank me—will think of this only as a ghastly indiscretion from which you were caught away in time. We do not make the world we live in, and it is a thousand times stronger than we are. No, if we play the game we must stick to the rules. To think of overstepping that boundary, in such a desperate fashion, gives my fastidious sense a strange recoil—something like that curious shame and confusion that associates itself with a dream in which one finds one's-self scantily clad in the midst of wondering strangers! No—no! I do not think I shall send this letter—but perhaps I may at the end. For I am going away. I sail to-morrow. Shall I see you again—ever—ever? What will you think—

That was all. It broke off abruptly as though the writer had laid it aside, never to be finished.

In the silent library the Judge looked at that mute witness as at one risen from the dead. Twenty years of absence and silence—twenty years out of his ken, save to the thriving memory! For how long the hand that had penned those lines had been dust, yet the poor symbols of ink and paper persisted to confront him now! How had the sheet come to be on that desk that she had bequeathed him? It had not lain there a moment before.

He brought the lamp and examined the desk attentively, pulling out every tiny drawer, sounding each carved partition, twisting and tugging at every projecting portion of the ornamentation. With a thin, metal paper-knife he explored each warp and crevice. But his search was fruitless. If the leaf had slipped from some crack—loosened, perhaps, by the fall of the brass bowl upon it that day—the old desk kept its secret.

A strange feeling stole over him, the feeling of mystery that comes to one with some sudden apposition of incident that thrills with a sense of an overpowering meaning in a circumstance in itself banal and trivial. Something of her proud and passionate spirit she had etched into those lines. Might it be that spirit, somewhere in the great void, reached out to him through this silent witness—to say that love does not wholly die?

He gently spoke her name. "Eleanor! You forgave me for writing—that. If you hadn't you wouldn't have left me this desk when you—died, away over there in Florence! So I've got your letter at last."

He sighed again and groping for his big chair, sat down, with the sheet of paper spread out upon his knee.

On the upper floor Mrs. Allen tapped lightly on Chilly's door and when there was no answer, opened it softly and entered. At the whisper of his name he started up in bed.

"Duchess!" he exclaimed.

The pet name, as always, touched her. It was a perennial tribute to that stateliness and dignity which she had made her own. She came and sat down on the edge of the bed and he caught her hand and held it to his lips. "You shouldn't have come," he chided. "You'll take cold."

"I heard your father talking to you," she whispered. "You—you know what he dislikes so. Why can you not be—discreet?"

Chilly moved uneasily: "Oh, I know," he said. "But I can't always be giving an imitation of a quaker meeting! I'm not a child."

"You must not anger him," she said. "I—for my sake, I wish you would be more careful."

He patted her hand. "All right, Duchess! I'll mind my p's and q's. But you must go back to bed now. Don't you worry about me."

She bent down and kissed him on the forehead before she glided from the room.

CHAPTER VII

ARROWS OF DESIRE

"Here is the new rose," said Echo. "Its name is the Laurant Carle."

Cameron Craig looked—at her, not at the blossom. She was in simple white and as she stood there in the perfumed garden, vivid, elemental, tuned to the wonder and passion of living, her slim figure outlined against the dark green shrubbery and her face and gold-bronze hair touched with the slanting sunlight, she seemed herself some great, rare, golden flower in a silver sheath. Lines he had somewhere read sprang into his mind:

"Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire,"

and, contained man that he was, he caught his breath at the sudden leap in him of the thing that had been covered and hidden there so long, something fine and keen as flame, that set his habitually cool blood beating under his eyelids.

"It was not the rose," he said. "I had another reason in asking you to come here."

"Yes?" Her voice was evenly inquiring.

"It was to ask you if you will marry me."

She took a quick step backward; a look of amaze had sprung to her face. "I?" she exclaimed. "You want me to—marry you?"

"Yes. Is there anything strange in that?"

She looked away. In all her thoughts of the man before her there had not lurked this possibility. She had been bred among youth who, whatever their other vices, maintained a chivalric ideal of womankind which excluded fast-and-loose conduct; and the whispers that clung about Cameron Craig—set, as they were, over against his force and undeniably brilliant attainments—had lent her opinion of him a certain cold contempt. And now here he was—he of all men!—saying this to her! And it was no hasty impulse: she read that in the steady, confident eyes, the hard, heavy jaw, the steadfast, deep-lined face.

She felt his waiting gaze. "No," she answered, slowly. "Perhaps it is not strange. It is only that the unexpected seems so." She looked at him curiously. "Why did you ask me—to-day?"

"The opportunity came," he said. "It must have, sooner or later."

"So you have intended for some time to say this to me?"

"Since I first met you, a year ago," he answered. "You have two things that I want—as I have their complements."

She considered this a moment. "Forgive me," she said then, "but I am a very curious person—as well, it seems, as a very blind one. Would you mind telling me what are those two qualities that you imagine I possess, which you value so highly?"

"Breeding, first," he replied, "and all that it implies. You represent a stock."

She nodded gravely. "And the other desideratum?"

"Beauty. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen."

"And—the complements of these things, that you possess?"

"Money," he answered. "And the power it gives—the accessories which a woman like you must have if she would really live. I think you don't doubt that my wife shall have these things."

She shook her head. "Not in the least. Indeed, I am sure she will. But you see, Mr. Craig, I happen to be not at all the sort of person you think I am—the kind you wish to marry."

"I'll risk that!" he flung her.

"The proof is that you ask me—as you have. The things you have to offer seem overwhelmingly attractive to you, no doubt, but I'm afraid they mean much less to me." He could not see the look that was in her face now, for her head was turned away. "I have no longing for money. I could be contented in a mountain lean-to, with morning-glories instead of an orchid conservatory. I could cook my own meals on a gas-stove and live in one room over a hardware store—with the man I loved. I don't care particularly for what you call 'place' either. I could be happy enough on a prairie—with the man I loved. But love must be there, Mr. Craig."

"Do you doubt my love for you?" he asked.

"You had not cited it," she rejoined, calmly. "You spoke of money first—"

"Because I have lived long enough to know that it is the paramount requisite in most women's eyes."

"Your estimate of me by the mass was flattering," she said with gentle satire. "Have you been so busy making this wonderful money of yours that you think it can take the place of everything?"

He made an abrupt, almost angered, gesture. "Surely you know money means—has meant—nothing to me!" he exclaimed. "I am rich, yes. I dare say I could buy and sell almost any one you know. But it was never the main thing. It was winning that counted. It was the game, and money was only the counters. I played to win and I have won. And wealth was a stepping-stone to other things."

His voice had subtly altered and he drew closer to her where she stood, moveless and straight against the dark foliage, her gaze averted. "Then—I met you! I have known many women, but they have been nothing, less than nothing, to me! Business has been the only thing that really counted. But since I met you, the whole world has been changing for me. Even my work isn't the main thing to me any more. The main thing is you!"

She lifted her eyes, wide with the swift sense of the unexpected—touched now with an odd, disquieting prescience. His voice was no longer the cold, even voice of the Cameron Craig she had known. There was passion in it. She saw his big hand tremble.

"There has never been a day or hour since then when I have not wanted you! You have entered into my blood and my brain, and the want of you has coloured all I have thought and done! If this is love, then I love you—Echo, Echo!"

She shrank perceptibly at the name on his lips. "Stop!" she said. "The love you talk of must be mutual. I do not—care for you in that way. I never could!"

"That makes no difference to me!" he protested. "I know what I want—I always have. And I want you."

"No," she said. "It is not the real me that you want, but we can pass that by. The important fact is that you have offered your last price and the bid is declined."

He looked at her with a sudden flash in his eyes. "Do I deserve that?" He had grown pale to the lips.

"Yes, you do. I have told you that I should never love you. Yet that means less than nothing to you. You have apparently not considered my possible love as a requisite in the case. It is 'breeding' you want, and beauty—and for that you make your offer. You propose purchase, not exchange, Mr. Craig. Well, I am not for sale!"

He flushed to his hair a dark, heavy red. He appeared to be controlling himself by a fierce effort. "Don't answer me now," he said. "Let me speak to you again later."

"I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all. You will please consider it final."

"I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all. You will please consider it final"

A whirl of what seemed almost rage shook him; with a single stride he reached her and seized both her hands. "Is there—another man?" There was what startled her now in the harsh, hard voice.