THE REAPING

THE
REAPING

By
MARY IMLAY TAYLOR
AUTHOR OF “ON THE RED STAIRCASE,” “MY LADY
CLANCARTY,” “THE IMPERSONATOR,” ETC.

With a Frontispiece in Color by
GEORGE ALFRED WILLIAMS

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

BOOK I

THE REAPING

I

“WILLIAM FOX? He’s the most brilliant man they’ve got, but a two-edged sword; they’re all afraid of him!”

The speaker had just left the swinging doors at the foot of the staircase from the Rotunda, under the old Library rooms in the west front of the Capitol, and his companion, who was also a member, was working himself slowly into his greatcoat.

“No wonder; he’s got a tongue like a whiplash and his smooth ways only make its sting worse,” he retorted, between his struggles with a recalcitrant sleeve lining and a stiff shoulder.

“That’s it, his tongue and his infernal sarcastic humor,” Fox’s admirer admitted with reluctance, “but his logic—it’s magnificent,—his mind cuts as clean as a diamond; look at his speech on the Nicaraguan affair. Lord, I’d like to see the opposition beat it! They can’t do it; they’ve done nothing but snarl since. He’ll be President some day—if he doesn’t cut his own throat.”

“Pshaw, man!” retorted the other irritably, “he’s brilliant, but as unstable as water, and a damned egoist!”

They had reached the top of the wide steps which descend from the west terrace, and Allestree lost the reply to his outburst in the increasing distance as they went down into the park below. He stood looking after their indistinctly outlined figures as they disappeared slowly into the soft mist which enveloped the scene at his feet. It was about six o’clock, an early December evening, and already night overhead where the sky was heavily clouded. The streets, streaming with water, showed broad circles of shimmering light under the electric lamps, and the naked trees and the ilexes clustered below the terrace made a darkness through which, and beyond, he saw the long, converging vista of the Avenue, lined on either side with what seemed to be wavering and brilliant rainbows, suspended above the wet pavements and apparently melting into one in the extreme distance, as though he looked into the sharp apex of a triangle. The whole was veiled and mystically obscured by a palely luminous vapor which transformed and softened every object, while the vehicles and pedestrians, constantly hurrying across the foreground, loomed exaggerated and fantastic in the fog. Now and then a keen point of light, the eye of some motor-car, approached, flashed past the Peace Monument and was lost at the elbow of the Hill.

The terrace, except for Allestree, was deserted, and the continuous murmur and roar of city life came up to him slightly softened and subdued, both by the atmospheric depression and the intervening space of the park. Behind him both wings of the Capitol were vividly lighted, for the House had just risen after a heated debate, prolonged, as he amusedly surmised, by the eloquence of William Fox.

At the thought, that much discussed figure arose before his mind’s eye in a new aspect created by the fragment of conversation which had just reached him. He was in the habit of viewing Fox from that intimate standpoint which, discovering all the details, loses the larger effect of the whole; as the man in the wings of the theatre, disillusioned by the tinsel on the costume of an actor and the rouge on his face, loses the grand climax of his dramatic genius and sees instead only the charlatan. Yet Allestree’s affection for his cousin was strong enough to embrace even those defects, of which he was keenly aware, and personal enough to feel a thrill of elation at the constant evidences of an increasing recognition of Fox’s really great abilities. Yet there was something amusing in the fear which he was beginning to inspire in his opponents; amusing, at least, to one who knew him, as Allestree did, to be a man of careless good humor and large indifference.

Knowing all Fox’s peculiarities, his not infrequent relaxations, and the complex influences which were at work upon his temperament—the irresponsible temperament of genius—Allestree could not but speculate a little upon that future which was beginning to be of poignant interest to more than one aspirant in the great arena of public life.

But his reflections were cut short at this point by the abrupt appearance of Fox himself. He came out of the same door which had, a few moments earlier, emitted his critics, and as he emerged upon the terrace the keen light from the electric globes at the head of the steps fell full on his remarkable face and figure. For, while by no means above the average in stature, Fox possessed one of those personalities which cannot be overlooked. Genius like beauty has magnetic qualities of its own and, even at night and out of doors, Allestree was fully aware of the singular brilliance and penetration of his glance.

“Well, Bob,” he said genially, as he joined his cousin, “you’re a lucky dog, out here in the open! The House has steamed like the witches’ cauldron to-night and brewed devil’s broth, tariff revision and all manner of damnable heresies.”

Allestree smiled grimly in the dusk. “Then you must be the father of them,” he retorted; “I just heard that you’d been making a speech.”

“Eh? you did, did you?” Fox paused an instant to light his cigar; “so I did,” he admitted, tossing away the match, “I talked tommyrot for an hour and a half to keep the House sitting; I might be going on still if old Killigrew hadn’t got to his feet and howled for adjournment. He usually dines at six sharp, and it’s a quarter to seven now; he had death and starvation in his eye, and I yielded the point as a matter of humanity.”

“According to recent information you have very little humanity in you,” Allestree replied, as they descended the long flight of steps from the terrace, “in fact, you are a ‘damned egoist.’”

Fox threw back his head with a hearty, careless laugh. “Which of my enemies have you been interviewing?” he asked, with unruffled good humor.

His cousin briefly related the result of his accidental début in the rôle of eavesdropper, incidentally describing the two men.

“I know who they are,” Fox said amusedly; “one is Burns of Pennsylvania, and the other a fellow from Rhode Island who is picking flaws in everything and everybody; the government’s rotten, the Senate’s corrupt, the Supreme Court is senile—so on and so on ad infinitum! Meanwhile there’s some kind of a scandal attached to his own election—no one cares what! He reminds me of Voltaire’s enraged description of Jean Jacques with the rotten hoops off Diogenes’ tub.”

“That is not all; even your admirer feared the suicidal effects of your tongue,” continued Allestree teasingly, “which is said to be two-edged, while your sarcasm is ‘infernal.’”

“Oh, that’s a mere façon de parler,” laughed Fox, “I’m really as mild as a lamb and as harmless as a dove!”

“Quite so!” retorted his cousin dryly, “yet I think most of your enemies and some of your friends resort to the litany when you cut loose for an oratorical flight.”

“Well, it’s said that even the devil goes to prayers on occasions,” said Fox with a shrug, “so why not my enemies? By the way, the nominations were sent to the Senate just before adjournment to-night, and the Cabinet changes are slated; I heard it as I came out.”

“Does Wingfield go out?” Allestree asked, after a momentary pause, as they threaded their way between the electric cars and the carriages which were slightly congested at the crossing below the Peace Monument.

Fox nodded. “And Seymour gets his place, while Wicklow White is made Secretary of the Navy.”

His companion looked up quickly and caught only his pale profile outlined against the surrounding fog; his expression was enigmatical. “Upon my word!” exclaimed Allestree, “White’s luck is stupendous—you remember what a block-head we always thought him at Harvard? Well, well, Margaret will have her heart’s desire,” he added amusedly.

Fox slightly frowned. “So!” he said contemptuously, “you think the sum total of a woman’s desire is to see a chump of a husband with his foot in the stirrup?”

His cousin smiled coldly. “My dear fellow, it was for that Margaret married him,” he retorted, “that and his money. When I see her, as I saw her the other night, the most beautiful and charming creature, in a miracle of a costume,—she knows how to wear clothes that make pictures,—I longed to say to her:—

“‘You that have so fair parts of woman on you,

Have too a woman’s heart: which ever yet

Affected eminence, wealth, sovereignty.’”

“Pshaw, you dreamer of dreams and painter of pictures; it’s a hollow show, an ugly travesty! What has a man like White to give such a woman? The husks of the prodigal!” Fox’s luminous dark eyes kindled with anger, “when I see him—” he checked himself abruptly and walked on rapidly, his long, easy stride carrying him ahead of Allestree. “Pearls before swine!” he muttered to himself after a moment, plunging his hands into his pockets and relapsing into an angry silence.

They walked on at a smart pace, having occasionally to thread their way single file through the increasing throng, as the long blocks slipped behind them and they approached the heart of business life near Fourteenth Street. When they came together again after such a separation, Allestree asked Fox if he could come home with him to dine but Fox declined rather curtly, pleading an early evening engagement, and Allestree said no more, having his own surmises as to the nature of that engagement, and being somewhat guiltily aware that he was not an entirely involuntary party to his mother’s conspiracy to draw Fox away from a dangerous attraction. Both men were, in fact, conscious that a discord had arisen in their usually confidential relations, and neither of them desired to broach any subject which would add acrimony to the conversation; with the usual masculine instinct of self-defense, therefore, they relapsed into silence. However, at the entrance of a large hotel on the corner, their hurried progress was interrupted to give way to a visitor who was crossing the wide pavement to her carriage, escorted by one of the attendants and a footman. The light from the lobby, brilliantly illuminating the space beneath the awning, outlined her as sharply as a silhouette against the darkness, and her figure,—she was a young and slender girl,—was thrown into high relief; the quiet elegance of her dress, the sables on her shoulders, as well as the large picture hat which framed her face, being merely superfluous accessories to beauty of a type at once unusual and spiritual.

Fox, startled out of a revery which was largely pervaded by the personality of another woman, could not but observe this radiant picture; there was a vitality, a power of expression in every feature of her face and every movement of her tall, lithe figure which at once specialized her. She seemed to belong to a different race of beings from those who were hurrying past her through the fog, whose figures lost themselves at once to vision and memory, dissolving into the masses of the commonplace, as completely as the individual sands at the seashore are lost in the larger sweep of the dunes.

She turned her head, saw Allestree and smiled. “How are you?” she said, with the easy manner of an old intimacy; “I hardly dare look at you—I know I broke the appointment and several of the studio commandments!”

Allestree had hurried forward at once, apparently forgetting his companion, and was helping her into her carriage. “You did,” he said, “and shamelessly; but you must come and make amends.”

She laughed, her hand on the carriage door, and her eyes, involuntarily passing him to Fox, were as quickly averted. “I will, on Saturday at twelve—will that do, Bobby? Don’t be too exacting. I’ve a dozen engagements, you know,” she added lightly, in a tone of careless propitiation.

Fox did not catch his cousin’s reply, it was too low spoken, and in a moment the horses started and the carriage passed him on its way to F Street. Secretly a little piqued at Allestree’s failure to present him, and yet amused at his discovery of his cousin playing knight-errant to a beauty, Fox walked on a few moments in silence, aware that the other was not a little confused.

But at last: “Who is she, Bob, wood-nymph, dryad, or Psyche herself?”

Allestree’s face sobered sharply. “It was Miss Temple,” he said, a trifle stiffly.

Fox gave a moment to reflection. “Ah,” he observed, “I recollect, Judge Temple has a daughter. I had never seen her; I’ve heard her spoken of, though, a hundred times; her name is—?”

“Rose Temple.”

William Fox glanced at his companion obliquely and smiled, but he made no attempt at pleasantry. After a little, however, as they approached the residential quarter and neared his club, where he intended to dine, he returned to the subject. “You are painting Miss Temple’s portrait?”

“Yes, attempting it,” assented Allestree, with marked reluctance; he felt it to be almost a sacrilege to speak of a piece of work which had become, in more ways than one, a labor of love.

He was indeed painting Rose Temple’s portrait, for he was already a notable portrait painter, but he was doing it much as Raphael may have painted the Sistine Madonna, with a reverence which was full of ineffable tenderness and inspiration, and he was too keenly aware of Fox’s intimate knowledge of him and his unmerciful insight into human motives to endure the thought of Fox in possession of his inmost secrets and on terms of friendship with Rose. Fox! one of the most enigmatical, the most dangerous, the most fascinating personalities—Allestree had seen the potency of that spell—to be brought in contact with any woman, and most of all with a young and imaginative girl.

After a moment Fox’s laugh interrupted him. “My dear Allestree,” he said provokingly, “why not paint the Angel Gabriel?”

His companion, whose sensitiveness amounted to an exquisite self-torture, bit his lip and made no reply.

At the door of the club they both paused as Allestree prepared to take a car uptown while his cousin went in to dine.

“Sorry you can’t come to us,” he said, in a tone which was a shade less cordial than usual; “mother will be disappointed; there is no one else coming, and she always counts greatly on a talk with you.”

“Give her my love instead,” Fox retorted, with easy kindness, “I’m sorry, but I dine here and then go up to the Whites’. I promised; there’s to be music—or something—to-night.”

Allestree slightly shrugged his shoulders. “So I supposed,” he said dryly, and signalled his car.

II

A FEW hours later William Fox presented himself at the home of the new Cabinet minister. He was an intimate habitué of the house; a fact which created no little comment in social and political circles, for Fox and White were naturally almost antipodal personalities and had often engaged in political controversies, which had inevitably ended in White’s defeat at the hands of his daring and brilliant adversary. But it was not their antipathies or their rivalries in politics which aroused the gossip, of which Fox was vaguely and carelessly aware, but the presupposed existence of an old sentimental relation between him and White’s wife. However, gossip of all kinds troubled Fox but little, and he followed his own inclinations with the indolent egoism of a man who has been for many years the spoiled darling of fortune.

The house was one of the old landmarks of Washington, and the true values of space and effect were consequently somewhat diminished by low ceilings and small old-fashioned doors. As Fox entered he heard the buzz of conversation in the distance, in more tongues than English, and when the butler announced him he came upon a group of dinner guests who were gathered around the immense fireplace at the end of the ballroom—a huge addition to the original house especially designed for the elaborate entertainments for which the host and hostess were already famous—and the warm glow of the leaping fire increased the effect and brilliance of the scene.

At his name his hostess detached herself from the group and tossing her cigarette into the fire held out her hand in greeting. “You inconsequent wretch!” she said, shaking an admonishing finger, “late as usual—we expected you to dinner and M. de Caillou tells us that, instead, you made a great speech! Pray, what became of you afterwards?”

“Total oblivion for the space of three hours,” replied Fox gaily; “I come now to congratulate you! The next step will be the Presidency, White,” he added, as he shook hands with his host.

“If I can keep you out of it,” retorted the secretary, dryly.

Fox laughed, acknowledging the intimate greetings of the other guests. At a glance he saw that the gathering was as notable as usual, and was secretly amused at White’s attitude which seemed to accept all this as his own achievement, ignoring the influence of his wife. The French ambassador was there, a Russian prince, an Austrian savant, an Italian ex-diplomat, the chancellor of the British embassy, two other Cabinet ministers, a literary celebrity, a Roman Catholic dignitary, and a somewhat notorious French journalist and socialist who had dipped his pen in gall during the controversy between France and the Vatican. Margaret’s usual selections, Fox thought with a smile, and noted that the only other woman was Mrs. Osborne, the former wife of an American ambassador to Russia, whose divorce had created a sensation as distinct and startling as her beauty, which was of that type which somewhat openly advertises the additions of art. A woman, in fact, who had given rise to so much “talk” that the old-fashioned wondered at Margaret White’s complacence in receiving her and even admitting her upon terms of intimacy at the house. But Margaret’s personality was as problematical as it was charming. She stood now regarding Fox with a slightly pensive expression in her gray eyes, which seemed unusually large and bright because of the dark shadows beneath them, while her small head was set on a slender white neck which supported it like the stem of a flower. She was thin, but with a daintiness which eliminated angles, and she possessed in a marked degree, as Allestree had said, the talent for artistic costumes; her slight figure, which had the grace and delicate suppleness of some fabled dryad, had the effect, at the moment, of being marvellously enveloped in a clinging, shimmering cloud of soft, gold-colored silk and embroidery out of which her white shoulders rose suddenly; she was much décolletée, and, except for the jewelled shoulder-straps, her slender but beautiful arms were bare.

She rested her hands on the high back of a chair, apparently listening to all, but actually attentive only to that which immediately concerned Fox and her husband, who were exchanging commonplaces with the purely perfunctory manner of men who cordially detested each other at heart.

“White only pretends indifference,” said Louis Berkman, the literary genius, who was one of the famous writers of the day; “actually he is overjoyed at the exit of Wingfield; that is the very pith of the matter, isn’t it, Mrs. White?”

Margaret shrugged her shoulders. “Why not?” she retorted; “what was it Walpole said? ‘One tiger is charmed if another tiger loses his tail.’”

There was the general laugh at this, which always followed Margaret’s careless and daring candor.

“It was certainly a case of ‘heads or tails’ with the President,” Louis Berkman retorted, with the ease of political detachment in the midst of the inner circle of officialdom; “we shall have a budget now which will carry a billion dollar naval increase.”

“You’ve lived too long in England,” said Fox amusedly, “you don’t get our terms, Berkman. But we shall insist on Mrs. White christening all the new ships.”

“To be sure—I forgot that I was speaking to the money supply, Fox,” he replied; “heaven help White if he gets into your clutches; I should as soon expect mercy from an Iroquois Indian!”

“I don’t mind that from you,” laughed Fox,—“we expect anything from the ‘outs,’—as long as you don’t write us up for the magazines!”

“The gods forbid!” said Berkman sharply, “I’m not ‘the man with the muckrake;’ now if—” he turned his head and, catching a glimpse of the French journalist engaged in an animated discussion with the Italian ex-diplomat, who fairly bristled with suppressed anger, he bit his lip to hide a smile.

One of the secretaries leaned forward to select a new cigarette from the elaborate gold box on the table. “Berkman,” he remarked, “I read that article of yours on the Duma with a great deal of interest, but I got an impression that you lost sight of the main issues in your passion for artistic effects.”

The author responded at once to this challenge with an eagerly indignant denial, and Fox found himself again slightly detached from the group and still standing beside his hostess. She had been taking no part in the conversation and seemed to be in a dreamy mood which ignored alike her environment and her social duties. There was always something in Margaret’s aspect which differentiated her from other people, a spiritual aloofness from the passing moment which could fall upon her suddenly, even in her wildest and gayest moods, and which always carried with it a mystical, uninterpreted suggestion of some tragic destiny, which cast a long shadow before it across the unthinking sybaritism of her life.

“It seems some time since I saw you last,” said Fox; “the House has been very exacting lately and abominably dull. What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Oh, learning to dance,” she replied, “I’m to be a Merry Andrew now, you know, for the delectation of the dear public. Wicklow insists that I must have public receptions; good heavens, what an endless bore!”

Fox smiled. “He takes it seriously then, I see! We must look higher, in that case; you may as well study for the White House rôle at once.”

Margaret laughed derisively, glancing across at her husband who was leaning over Mrs. Osborne’s chair with a quite apparent air of absorption. “Look at them!” she mocked, her eyes gleaming with malicious mischief; “see the pose; Lily Osborne is playing now for a Madame d’Épinay; she discusses French literature and the philosophers. Can you imagine Wicklow as Jean Jacques? I must get him a black cloak!”

Fox laughed involuntarily, but said nothing; Margaret’s free speech sometimes offended his finer discrimination, and the notion of criticizing White to White’s wife did not coincide with his masculine code. “I heard that Mrs. Osborne won the cup at the fencing contest,” he remarked, after a moment.

“She did; Wicklow gave it, you know,” Margaret smiled sarcastically. Then she looked at him suddenly. “Where did you dine to-night?—with Allestree?”

“No, at the club. I really didn’t understand that I was expected here.”

“I must have forgotten how to write notes, or I have too much else to say to you. I’m going to let Bobby Allestree paint my portrait; you know he’s been trying to do it for years.”

Fox smiled. “I admire Allestree’s work,” he said, “but there are limitations; one can’t paint intangible sprites.”

“Do you mean to infer that I’m not human?” she retorted with a frown; “wait and see how beautiful I shall be.”

“You don’t really want compliments from me, Margaret?”

She was silent a moment, then she lifted her softest glance to his face, her own pensive again and slightly shadowed with thought. “No, I don’t!” she said abruptly, “I don’t think I should believe in them—it makes me shiver sometimes to even imagine what you must think of me!”

Fox hesitated how to reply; he was by no means a prudent man, but he was instinctively aware of the dangers of her mood, and he had swiftly entertained and rejected two or three answers which would have led them into yet deeper intricacies, when they were happily interrupted by the approach of the French ambassador, a gentleman who united with great astuteness and diplomatic suavity a strong resemblance to an intelligent and bewhiskered French poodle.

“We have heard so much of those dancing steps, Mrs. White; when shall we have the pleasure of seeing them?” he asked, smilingly courteous and attentive.

“Oh, now!—on the instant,” Margaret retorted, her mood changing like a flash and her eyes sparkling a gay defiance; “there’s no time like the present. William, are the musicians there?”

Fox looked across at the palm-screened alcove, and catching a glimpse of a violin, assented. She clapped her hands. “Tell them to play me the Spanish piece which they played on Tuesday,” she commanded.

At the first note there was a general cessation of conversation, and every eye turned quickly toward her. She stood in the centre of the room, her slender arms raised and her hands clasped behind her head, a dreamy expression on her half lifted face, the shadowy masses of her pale brown hair framing a white brow. Her eyes drooped, her whole aspect seemed to change, like the chameleon’s, to become an embodiment of the dreamily seductive strains which floated softly into space, then, as the music quickened and developed, she began to sway slightly, dancing down the long room alone, her clinging, shimmering skirts trailing around her feet, flowing in and out, but never seeming to arrest the wonderful rhythmic swing of her movements. With her, dancing was an interpretation of music, an expression of some subtle mystery of her nature, the very personification of an enchanting grace.

There was an almost breathless attention on the part of her guests, and no one was conscious of the displeasure on White’s full flushed face. No one but his wife; as she danced to and fro, weaving in the fantasy of strange figures, her eyes rested occasionally on him, and the mockery of her glance was a revelation to those who could read it. It was but little observed, however, nor was she understood when, at last, with a sudden swift movement she caught up her filmy draperies, displaying two slender ankles and a pair of wonderfully shod feet, as she executed a deliberate fandango which not a little amazed the more sedate of her guests.

In answer, perhaps, to some secret signal of White’s, the music stopped abruptly and with it Margaret’s astonishing performance. Quite unmoved, and ignoring the interruption, or rather treating it as the natural termination of her dance, she turned with a graceful swirl of gleaming silks and received the rather effusive applause of her guests with heightened color and flashing eyes.

Louis Berkman alone had lost all the bizarre effect of the finish, and been absorbed in the dance. “A poem in motion, superb!” he exclaimed, with such genuine enthusiasm that Margaret’s expression softened.

The French ambassador was still softly applauding. It appeared that he had seen Bernhardt execute the same figures once; “but madame’s performance was more exquisite, an interpretation, the very expression of the music itself!”

“Naturally,” laughed Margaret maliciously, “I’m an American, ambassador. Did you dream that even Bernhardt could excel one?”

“Bien! I admire your patriotism, also,” he replied smiling.

“Oh, it’s only the screech of the eagle! Of course you are all enthusiastic—all except you, William,” she added abruptly, whirling around to confront Fox with a teasing glance, “you are mute; didn’t I please you?”

He smiled. “You bewildered me; the sudden transitions are confusing. Where did you learn the dance?”

She put her head on one side. “Last week—that’s all I shall ever tell you!” she replied, “but I want Bobby Allestree to paint my portrait dancing. Wicklow would prize it so highly,” and she laughed wickedly.

“Allestree is painting a portrait now, I think,” Fox said, to turn her aside from a dangerous channel, “Miss Temple’s, I believe.”

Margaret’s eyes widened and she looked keenly at him, an indescribable change in her face. “Rose—yes,” she said slowly, “have you seen it?”

He shook his head. “I saw her for the first time to-night.”

She made no immediate reply. M. de Caillou and Berkman had begun to talk together, and the others were already engaged in animated conversation; the controversy between the Italian and the Frenchman having been resumed was rising in a staccato duet. Fox was abruptly aware of a stir in the room beyond and surmised the arrival of evening guests, but his hostess was apparently oblivious.

“She is supremely lovely at times,” she said quietly, after a moment, “but—but not exactly a beauty. What do you think of her?”

Fox parried the question easily. “My dear Margaret, I only saw her for a moment getting into her carriage.”

She gave him a searching glance and bit her lip. He thought he had never seen her wear so entirely the air of a spoiled child; her flushed cheeks, her slightly rumpled hair and the angry droop of her eyes, all appealed for praise and resented criticism. “Allestree is painting her on his knees,” she said, with a little bitter laugh; “he doesn’t regard her as human; you will see that he will make me the imp to her angel, he—”

“Margaret!” Mr. White was hurrying forward, with the ruffled manner of an affronted host; “are you blind as well as deaf, my dear?” he asked curtly, “here are your guests!”

She turned haughtily and looked over her shoulder, her smallest attitude always seeming to defy him, while Fox had an uneasy feeling that he was more acutely aware than usual to-night of the impossible relations between the two. Meanwhile, the entrance to the long room was already filling with the rapidly arriving throng which seemed, to the casual observer, a mass of satin and jewels and lavishly exposed necks and shoulders, with here and there a sprinkling of the black coats of the men.

In spite of this influx, however, the young hostess stood a moment longer looking at them with a glance of malicious amusement in her drooping eyes, noting the whole effect of White’s large and rather florid personality as he received the first enthusiastic advance, responding genially to the murmur of congratulations. Then she turned and swept across the wide intervening space, her small head thrown proudly back, her whole grace of figure and dignity of pose—in direct contradiction to her former wild gayety and audacity—at once suggesting the grande dame assuming her rightful and appropriate place. But Fox found it impossible to as easily free himself from the haunting sorrow of her beautiful haggard eyes. Sometimes she seemed to him to be as fragile, as exquisite and as perishable as a bit of delicately carved ivory. Yet he was forced to dismiss the analogy, for ivory, no matter how marvellously carved in imitation of a living creature, is inanimate, while she was the very personification of unrest; it seemed rather that some wild and beautiful sprite must have been enthralled into temporary captivity, and was wearing its way to liberty through the exquisite clay which had been fashioned into human shape for its mortal disguise, that the touch of inevitable sadness which sometimes came upon her was the moment when the sprite relapsed into the melancholia of prolonged captivity.

III

IT was a little past noon on Saturday when Rose Temple went to Allestree’s studio accompanied by Aunt Hannah Colfax, a faithful old negro woman who had been devoted to her from childhood and now performed the dual duties of maid and duenna with all the complacence and shrewdness of her age and color.

Passing the quaint show-windows of Daddy Lerwick’s curiosity-shop on the first floor, in which were displayed—in amazing medley—pewter cups, old line engravings, camel’s-hair shawls and horse-pistols, they ascended the long narrow flight of stairs to the rooms above. On reaching them, Aunt Hannah promptly ensconced herself and her knitting under the window on the landing, while Rose pushed aside the portière and entered the studio, unconsciously carrying with her some of the crisp out-of-door atmosphere from whence she came and of which, in her buoyant and radiant youth, she seemed a visible and triumphant embodiment.

“It’s perfectly angelic of me to come to-day, Robert,” she remarked, as she greeted him, “for I’m not in the mood for a sitting and, of course, I shall behave abominably.”

“And you wish me to be bowed in the dust with gratitude for your angelic determination to behave abominably?” he replied dryly, looking at her with all an artist’s perception of her beauty and a reluctant consciousness that the glow in her eyes and the color in her cheeks were purely responses to the keen winter air, and that neither had ever been inspired by his presence nor called into being by his words.

Meanwhile Rose moved unconsciously before the long mirror, and removing her hat, slightly and deftly rearranged her beautiful and luxuriant hair as she answered him. “Why not?” she said banteringly; “you can’t believe that any one likes to pose for an hour—even to be made into one of your delightful pictures—but I’ll try to behave beautifully if you’ll answer all my questions, instead of going on with your painting, with a cigarette between your teeth and with the face of a sphinx, as you did the other day!”

“When you asked a dozen questions I couldn’t answer!” Allestree was selecting his brushes and contemplating the canvas on his easel with a despairing eye.

He had already outlined Rose’s figure and decided on the desired pose, but it seemed to him impossible to do justice to the exquisite charm of her beauty. It was a simple picture; he had endeavored to preserve what seemed to him the keynote of her personality, and had forborne to use any of those effects of brilliant color, rich draperies and elaborate accessories which a portrait painter commonly loves to lavish on a beautiful subject; instead, he had made her figure, with its superb poise, stand out in absolute simplicity. To Allestree she personified all the glorious possibilities of youth, with its buoyant hopes, its poignant truth, its magnificent faith in life, in the world, in itself. But when he looked from her to the canvas—where he had hoped to express something of all this—he felt deeply discouraged; his brush might be touched with the magic of a deep if unspoken passion, but it could never paint her as she appeared to him!

“I do not remember asking anything but the simplest questions,” she remarked, as she took her seat in the carved armchair which he had placed for her before a curtain of soft deep blue which seemed to suggest an April sky; “only you didn’t want to answer them. I warn you that I mean to be answered to-day! There’s nothing so abominable as your silences.”

Allestree smiled a little as he began to paint, with a slow and reluctant touch, feeling his way toward some achievement which might at least foreshadow success. “I fancied there was a virtue in silence; there’s a copy-book axiom to that effect,” he remarked; “besides, you would never come here at all punctually if you are not left in doubt on some mooted point. Mystery lures a woman as surely as magic.”

Rose gave him a reproachful glance. “And you think I like to sit here and listen to Mammy Hannah snore while you smoke and paint?” she said in a vexed tone, “for you always smoke and she always falls asleep.”

“Which is a special providence,” he retorted, “and the greatest virtue I ever met in a duenna.”

Without replying Rose looked absently around her, observing the details of his workshop more carefully than usual and noticing the harmonious effect of the colors, which he had grouped in his hangings. There was the high northern light concentrated on his subject, but beyond, in the corners, there were invitingly rich shadows, and here and there a bold, half finished sketch had been nailed to the walls. A well worn Turkey rug covered the portion of the floor occupied by his model, and a table in the window was set with a chafing-dish, a box of Egyptians and an odd shaped bronze tea-pot with some egg-shell cups which he had purchased in Japan. In a way Rose knew the history of everything in the room and almost the cost, but there was a touch of luxury about it which vaguely irritated her; it often seemed that Allestree was too well off to ever be a great artist,—he lacked the spur of necessity.

“Shall you paint for a living if you are ever poor?” she asked abruptly, resting her chin in her hand and contemplating him with a clear and impersonal gaze.

Allestree looked up, and observing the delicate hand with its tapering fingers and the jewelled chain which clasped her throat, smiled. “Shall you sing?” he asked, amused.

She sighed softly. “I wish that I might—and in opera too!” she replied, “I fear I should to-day but for father. You think me a very useless person, I see,” she added, smiling a little, “and perhaps I am. But isn’t it because I’ve had no chance? Girls are trained up in such an objectless way unless they are brought up to marry. Thank heaven, I escaped that; father is as innocent of such designs as a baby! But if I had been a boy I should have been given a profession, I should have had something to do instead of being expected merely to dress well and look ornamental!”

As she spoke her face lost a little of its vivid color and animation, but the slight pensiveness of her look seemed to Allestree to increase the poignancy of her spell; there was a subtle suggestion of that imaginative longing for the fulfilment of those vague youthful conceptions of happiness and life and love which stir in all young things, as the sap stirs in the trees in springtime and the bud forms under the leaves.

He did not immediately reply, but continued to work on the portrait before him which seemed to him more and more hopelessly colorless and lifeless compared with his model. “Perhaps my point of view is too concentrated to be of much value,” he said at length; “to me the mere fact of your existence seems enough to compensate for the loss of a good many more actively employed and earthly individuals who must be working out your privileged season as a lily of the field.”

She gave him a quick, slightly amazed look, and blushed. “You speak as though I were selected from the rubbish heap!” she exclaimed laughing, “as though I profited by the misfortunes of others. I don’t know whether to regard it as a compliment or not!”

But Allestree was quite unmoved, absorbed indeed in his work. “Did I ever pay you a compliment, Rose?” he asked, after an instant, meeting her glance with one that was so eloquent of deeper feeling that she withdrew hers, vaguely alarmed.

“I don’t believe you ever did,” she replied hastily, with an instinctive desire to put off any suggestion of passion on his part, for much as she liked him and long as she had known him, Allestree was only a lay figure on her horizon; he had never stirred her heart, and she dreaded a break in that friendship which she dreamed of prolonging forever with a girl’s usual infatuated belief in the possibilities of such a friendship between a man and a woman. The channel into which their talk had unconsciously drifted so alarmed her indeed that she rose abruptly and went to the window and stood looking down into the street, her perfect profile and the soft upward sweep of her beautiful hair showing against the dark draperies which she had pushed aside, and moving the painter in turn to still deeper depths of artistic self-abasement.

“Robert,” she said suddenly, after a moment’s embarrassed silence, “who was that with you the other evening? Was it Mr. Fox?”

Allestree glanced up quickly, and then stooped to pick up a brush which had dropped to the floor. “Yes,” he said quietly, “how did you happen to recognize him?”

“I was not sure—but I’ve seen two or three pictures of him in the magazines and the weeklies. One can’t forget his head, do you think?” and she came slowly back to her chair, unconscious of the change in Allestree’s expression.

“Well, I never tried,” he confessed; “I’ve known William Fox all my life, and he’s my own first cousin besides. It’s rather odd,” he added, “by the way, that you never met him, but then you have been away from the city when he has been here.”

Rose regarded him thoughtfully, her composure fully restored. “He has a very remarkable face,” she observed, “and it is fine and pale like a bit of old ivory.”

“Oh, yes, all the women fall in love with him,” Allestree assented with impatient irony.

“Do they? That doesn’t sound interesting, but I should not believe it of his face, he doesn’t look like a lady’s man! Is it true—” she added with a moment’s hesitation—“that he has never loved any one but Margaret White?”

“It’s true that Margaret treated him abominably,” said Allestree bluntly; “she was engaged to him when they were both very young and threw him over to marry White.”

“What a singular choice,” Rose observed, “White has nothing attractive about him, and he is so selfish, so hard; they say he treats her badly.”

“He should—in poetic justice,” replied Allestree laughing, “for she married him for his money and his position. Fox was a poor man then with no prospects but his brains and, strange to say, Margaret underestimated their possibilities.”

“And yet she is very clever. Did he really feel it so much?” she added, her natural sympathy for a sentimental situation touched and strengthened by the remembrance of Fox’s clear-cut face, which had appeared to her vision cameo-like against the night.

“Now you are beginning to ask me your unanswerable questions,” he retorted smiling grimly, with a keen sense of annoyance that Fox could intrude so sharply into their talk. “I know he was very much in love with her then, but he is on good terms with them both now and—” he stopped abruptly; his quick ear had caught a step on the stairs accompanied by another sound which startled him with an impatient certainty of a surprise.

It was the tread of a large Scotch collie who lifted the portière on his nose and walked deliberately into the room. Allestree laid down his brush with a peculiarly exasperated expression.

“Well, Sandy,” he said, not unkindly, addressing the dog.

Rose turned and held out her hand. “What a beautiful creature,” she remarked; “who does he belong to? Who is coming?”

Her companion gave her an enigmatical glance, observing the collie as he approached and laid his head against her knee. The step on the stair had now reached the landing, and they heard Aunt Hannah’s chair scrape as she moved and her knitting needles rattled on the floor, for she had been startled out of a nap.

“Who is it?” Rose repeated, framing the question with her lips.

“Fox,” replied Allestree dryly, laying down his palette and lighting a cigarette; “he has an uncommonly retentive memory it appears.”

She glanced at him quickly, a suddenly illuminated understanding in her eyes, and blushed exquisitely, for she was still young enough to be easily embarrassed. At the same moment Fox pushed aside the portière and entered the room.

“Hello, Bobby,” he began, and then paused abruptly at the sight of Rose. “I fear I’m an intruder,” he added courteously.

Allestree smiled grimly and presented him to Miss Temple. “On the contrary, I think you got the time pretty closely,” he remarked ironically.

Fox laughed. “Guilty!” he exclaimed with perfect good humor; “down Sandy!” he added sharply to his collie; “you’ve bewitched the dog, Miss Temple; he rarely makes friends with strangers.”

“Then I appreciate all the more his advances,” she replied smiling, “a dog always knows a friend.”

“And an honest man,” said Fox; “I’m free to confess that I don’t trust one who dislikes dogs.”

“Every man has his crank,” remarked Allestree, walking to and fro before his easel, “and if you begin on dogs with William there’s no end.”

Rose laughed, glancing from Allestree’s slightly vexed countenance to the serenity on the brow of his cousin, who had seated himself on the edge of an elaborate brass-bound chest which was one of the studio properties. “I can sympathize, Mr. Fox,” she said; “we’ve always had dogs.”

Fox gave her one of his brilliant inscrutable looks. “I entirely agree with Lamartine, Miss Temple,” he replied; “when a man is unhappy God gives him a dog.”

“Good Lord, Billy, are you making a bid for our sympathy?” exclaimed Allestree with exasperation.

Both Fox and Rose laughed merrily.

“He’s only quoting the modern classics,” she replied gayly.

“What I should like to know is how he gets out of school in the middle of the day,” said Allestree dryly; “for a man who is supposed to be a leader, he manages to desert at the most remarkable moments. One of the party whips told me the other day that Fox was as hard to trail as a comet.”

“Nothing of the sort,” replied Fox, with indolent amusement; “we adjourned over, last night, until Monday, and I came around here as usual to sit for my portrait.”

Allestree bit his lip, conscious that his irritability was thrown into sharp relief by his cousin’s imperturbable good humor, and resenting, with a sting of premonition, the effect of Fox’s pose upon Rose Temple. He was not a dull man and could not close his eyes to the fact that she had apparently come to life, been revivified and animated by Fox’s entrance, and he knew well enough the interest that the touch of romance in his past history added to his cousin’s brilliant personality. However, it was useless to sulk at the inevitable misfortune which had destroyed his hour with Rose, and he turned his attention to hospitality.

“Will you make tea for us, Rose, if I set the kettle boiling?” he asked, as he drew forward the table, “I’ve got some cakes in the cupboard and a few sandwiches.”

“Why, of course; it will be delightful,” she assented readily, rising from her chair to help him find the tea caddy. “I’m eternally indebted, Mr. Fox; he’s going to let me off a half-hour’s posing,” she added, smiling over her shoulder at him.

He laughed, moving over apparently to study the half outlined portrait on the easel, but really enjoying the sight of the graceful figure bending over the table, and her delicate hands engaged in opening the caddy and measuring the tea into Allestree’s old tea-pot. As she did so the light from the window fell vividly on her bright head, and the exquisite details of her profile, the curve of her cheek and chin, the thick lashed white eyelids, the short upper lip, the little pink ear, all engaged Fox’s critical and appreciative eye. Like most men who are forced to live in bachelor apartments, he felt keenly the domesticity of the little scene and the touch of gracious femininity which her presence lent to the tea-table. There was a charm, too, in her unconsciousness, and he was almost sorry when she finally turned with a steaming cup in her hands.

“You’ll have to take lemon,” she said, “for Robert never has cream unless it’s sour, but do you take sugar?”

“He takes three lumps to a cup,” interposed Allestree bluntly; “but he’ll probably deny it—he’s a politician.”

Fox laughed. “And in the house of my friends!” he said; “but that is only a coup d’état on his part,” he added, “to keep me from asking for his last lump, Miss Temple; I saw him looking for more just now.”

“We’ll draw lots for it, Robert,” said Rose gayly, taking her seat at the table and smiling across at Fox from pure pleasure in the little unconventional picnic.

But Allestree’s attention had been arrested by something in the street below, and he interrupted them with a gesture of despair. “Mrs. Osborne is coming!” he announced with a grimace.

Rose glanced hastily at the clock. “Oh, I must be going,” she exclaimed; “I had no idea it was so late!” and she rose hurriedly and reached for her hat.

Allestree murmured something uncomplimentary to his approaching visitor, and Fox set down his cup of tea. The first tremor of an earthquake shock could scarcely have broken up the little group more abruptly. Rose had put on her hat and adjusted her filmy veil, and it was Fox who helped her with her coat and her furs. Allestree, instead, threw a cloth over the picture on the easel.

Rose held out her hand. “Good-by,” she said with a charming smile; “I know I’m a trying model, but you’re a perfect angel of patience, Robert.”

As she spoke there was a frou-frou of skirts in the hall, and Lily Osborne came slowly and gracefully through the portière. She was a handsome woman with an abundance of reddish gold hair and long black eyes which had the effect of having no white, a peculiarity possessed by Rachel and also, we are told, by the devil.

The two women bowed stiffly and Rose slipped out, attended by Fox and Sandy, leaving Allestree to devour his chagrin and receive his accomplished visitor.

IV

ALLESTREE lived alone with his widowed mother in a roomy, old-fashioned mansion in one of the older residential sections, which stand now like decadent environs of the more brilliant quarters where the millionaire and the multi-millionaire erect their palaces. But these changes, in matters of fashion and display, did not trouble the serene bosom of old Mrs. Allestree, who felt that she held her place in the world by the inalienable rights of birth, blood, and long established family position, for, happily, she had as yet no notion of the shadowy nature of such claims in the event of financial disaster, which is as impersonal as the deluge. She was contentedly aware that her old-fashioned drawing-rooms had been the scene of many a brilliant gathering even before her nephew, William Fox, became such a figure in the public eye that his frequent presence in her house was enough to draw there the most distinguished and representative men at the capital. But the old lady herself was clever, shrewdly conversant with the world and its affairs, and not averse to giving ear to the current gossip; she was, indeed, often amused at her son’s aloofness from these worldly concerns which pleased and interested her the most. For, though a detached spectator, because of her age and her comparatively delicate health, she was yet keenly aware of the drift of events both social and political, and possessed the advantages of age in being able to make comparisons between the past and the present, with a touch of eclecticism amusing in one who had been so devotedly attached to the frivolities of fashion. She could draw more accurate deductions than many who were more intimately concerned in the whirling conflict of social and political ambitions which was raging around her. When the President quarrelled with the party leaders, when Congress administered a rebuke by withholding a vote of confidence, she was able to recall this or that parallel case, this or that precedent for an action which to many seemed unprecedented, and when the entertainments at the White House began to evolve a new system of exclusions she could point out an incident when some former President’s wife had tried to introduce a similar measure and had met with disaster on leaving her stronghold, lost at once in the current of a social millrace which whirls to oblivion the queen of yesterday and the leader of to-day, engulfing all past glories in a maelstrom of forgetfulness; the inevitable condition in a republican society where there can be no hereditary distinction and those of class are constantly fluctuating with the rise and fall of fortunes, the manipulations of the Stock Exchange, while birth and breeding have no consideration at all in comparison with the purchase power of gold.

Fully aware of these things, and rejoicing in the rich memories of a varied past, when she had known all the great men of her day, old Mrs. Allestree delighted in observing the world of fashion from her retired corner and, though devoted to her son and admiring and believing in his talent, she sometimes suffered a keen pang of regret that her sister and not she had borne William Fox. But she was jealously afraid of this secret thought, scarcely admitting it even to herself, because of her intuitive feeling that Allestree had already suffered and might suffer more at the hands of his brilliant and careless cousin, and that he was supremely gifted in the refinements of self-torture.

It was twilight, and Mrs. Allestree sat alone by her drawing-room window watching for her son’s return from his workshop. She had been a very handsome woman, and even in age retained much of her beauty and dignity, and her figure and face were finely outlined as she sat against the folds of heavy velvet curtains, looking down into the street where the lamps had just been lighted and shone with the vivid whiteness of electricity on the smooth pavements, while the carriages and motor-cars were beginning to wheel by on their return from afternoon receptions, teas, and matinées. Below, at the circle, she saw the gayly lighted electric cars sweeping around the curve and receding to a final vanishing point of light at the top of a distant hill, while above it the sky was still bright with the afterglow and one star shone like the tip of a naked sword. The city in this retired quarter showed its most kind and friendly aspect, suggesting nothing of the struggle and rush of modern life, but only the whirl of winter gayety, the ceaseless rounds of society.

Within was an atmosphere of repose and comfort; the tea-table was set by the open fire, and the rose-patterned, silver tea kettle was emitting a little cloud of steam when Allestree finally opened the door.

“Well, mother, you here alone in the dark?” he remarked, as he turned on some light and revealed the warm homeliness of the large old-fashioned room, with its mahogany furniture, its soft rugs and velvet hangings, and its long, oval mirrors framed in gold and surmounted by cupids and lovers’ knots.

“Never less alone than when alone,” she replied brightly, and then glancing shrewdly at his slightly perturbed expression, she added: “you’ll take some tea, you look tired.”

“No,” he replied, throwing himself into an easy chair by the fire; “Rose made some tea in the studio, and it’s a bit too late now for another cup.”

“So Rose kept her appointment? I hope you got on with the portrait.”

Allestree shrugged his shoulders. “Impossible, Fox came and then Lily Osborne. The gods don’t mean that I shall finish that picture. And Reynolds painted several of his best in eight hours!” he added despairingly.

But his mother ignored the latter part of his speech. “Fox?” she glanced at him keenly, “then the House adjourned?”

“Yes, and he knew Rose was to be there,” Allestree laughed a little bitterly; “it was the merest chance in the world, he was with me when I met her the other day. Of course he came in as handsome, as gay as ever—and as careless!”

Mrs. Allestree had left her seat by the window and was mechanically pouring out a cup of tea, her fine old hands under their falls of lace as firm and deft as a girl’s. “I wish he was less careless,” she observed quietly; “I’ve just heard some more gossip about him; Martha O’Neal was here to lunch. It appears that he was really selected for the Navy, could have had the portfolio for the lifting of his finger and, at the last moment, when there was no apposite reason for a change, there was a deal and White got it.”

“Well, we can’t blame him for that, can we?” said her son smiling, “you know the saying is that the Administration will not ‘stand hitched.’”

She shook her head. “That’s not it—he made the deal himself; he deliberately favored White, and you can imagine what is said; every one believes that silly story that he’s desperately in love with Margaret still, and, of course, it looks like it. He could have saved Wingfield, and he didn’t, and you know Mrs. Wingfield hates Margaret!”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Allestree calmly; “Fox is too much of an egoist. Probably he didn’t want to go into the Cabinet; in fact I’ve heard him say it was a safe receiving-vault for the defunct candidates. Can’t the women ever forget that he was in love with Margaret?”

“Possibly they could,” his mother replied shrewdly, “if Margaret wasn’t in love with him.”

“Good Lord, how you all flatter Fox!” her son exclaimed, with exasperation, “for my part, I can’t fancy that Margaret ever loved him; she treated him abominably to marry White, and now she has everything she wants, money, luxury and power; she’s a perfect little sybarite.”

The old woman looked at him with an expression of affectionate tolerance. “My dear boy,” she said quietly, “Margaret is wildly unhappy; money never yet purchased happiness; that’s the reason she behaves so outrageously. Have you heard of her latest? She danced a kind of highland fling or a jig after her dinner the other night. White was furious, and they’re telling a story of an open quarrel after the musicale when he swore at her and she laughed in his face.”

“White is a brute, but Margaret chose him with her eyes open,” he replied, “and I think Fox feels it. At any rate there’s nothing in that gossip about Wingfield; he had quarrelled with the President. You know the story is that he was found walking up and down his hall, the Wednesday after Congress met, shaking his fist and shouting about the message. ‘That damned message!’ he said, ‘it will ruin the party—if I’d only been here!’ He was away at the time it was written and, of course, that paragraph did virtually condemn his administration of the department. He had to resign; that goes without saying!”

“I suppose so, and Mrs. Wingfield talked; we all know what a tongue she has!”

Allestree laughed, leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head. “Well, she’s going, anyway.”

“But she isn’t,” sighed Mrs. Allestree; “she’s to stay over two months, heaven knows why!”

“The Lord deliver Margaret then!” exclaimed her son, still laughing.

Mrs. Allestree nodded sagely. “Margaret can hold her own though, Robert, and everybody knows how she has insulted Mrs. Wingfield. Margaret’s bon mots have convulsed the town time and again. You know, as well as I do, that it was Margaret who set half the stories going about her. Margaret can do and say the most shocking and heartless things at one moment and be the most charming creature at the next. She often seems to me to be a perfect Undine, to have no soul! Really, sometimes her treatment of White is impossible. Even Lily Osborne professes to be shocked at the dance the other night; she told Martha O’Neal that it was as suggestive as Salome.”

“Mrs. Osborne is a hypocrite,” retorted Allestree scornfully; “by the way, I’m to paint her portrait. I put it at a figure which, I thought, was prohibitive and precluded all possibility of an order, but she closed it at once, without turning an eyelash.”

Mrs. Allestree gave him a long, comprehending look. “White pays for it then,” she remarked dryly.

“Of course,” he replied, “and White pretends to quarrel with his wife’s wild ways!”

The old woman set down her teacup and looked mournfully into the fire. “It’s a terrible business from beginning to end,” she said finally; “when I think of those two poor babies! Little Estelle is just beginning to notice things too, and Margaret seems utterly indifferent to them. What is the world coming to?”

Allestree laughed and patted his mother’s hand. “You can’t regulate it, mother,” he said cheerfully.

“Heaven forbid! There are too many divorces; one can’t go out now without meeting men with two wives and women with a plurality of husbands; yet we are objecting to seating the Mormons in Congress!”

“After all, is a divorce worse than such a marriage as Margaret’s?” her son rejoined, indolently enjoying the controversy.

“There should have been no marriage,” she retorted firmly, pushing back her chair and rising with a rustle of silks, “White could never have loved her, he hasn’t been true to her for a moment. Her beauty pleased him, or that charm which is more subtle than beauty and which makes her what she is. Now he’s lost his head over the gorgeous coloring, the flesh and blood of Lily Osborne; she would have pleased Rubens, Robert. By the way, Martha O’Neal told me of a curious rumor about her; it is said that she is in the secret employ of the Russian Government; you know she has no conscience.”

“A spy?” Allestree laughed, “but why here? We’ve done Russia a good turn, it’s Japan that is chewing the rag.”

“Robert! what a disgusting expression. But of course you know the tales of the Black Cabinet and that our embassy dispatches were tampered with.”

“Now you’re in your element, mother; you love a mystery!”

The old woman put her hand on his head, stroking back his hair with a fond gesture. “Tell me about Rose,” she said, watching him narrowly, with all her maternal intuition alive; “did she sit patiently—and will your portrait please you? That’s really the only question; every one else is sure to be pleased.”

He shook his head. “I can’t get it to please me,” he replied quietly; “after all, Rose’s beauty is less a question of feature than I thought. I might interpret a soul if I were a Raphael or a Fra Angelico—as it is, it will never look like her.”

“Nonsense! Rose is very human; don’t put her on too high a pedestal, my dear,” his mother counselled wisely; “you are too sensitive, too imaginative. Fox would never make the mistake of treating a woman like a saint on a pillar!”

Allestree made an inarticulate sound and rose also. “Fox—no!” he said a little bitterly; “Fox could make love to Saint Catherine without offending her; he’s one of the men whom women love!”

His mother smiled but made no reply; at heart she was fully aware that there was much truth in the saying. Old as she was, she felt the indescribable spell of Fox’s genius, and knowing her son’s heart as she did, she foresaw difficulties in the way of his happiness if his cousin should forget his old love and find a new one. Much as she had desired and endeavored to break up the unfortunate intimacy between Fox and the Whites, she had not foreseen that her own son’s happiness might be, in a way, dependent on Margaret’s power to hold her place in the regard of her early lover. As she stood looking at the fire in silence the shrewd old woman reflected that the ways of Providence are inscrutably hard to divine and that, after all, it is sometimes fatal to thrust one’s hand into the fire to save a brand from the burning.

V

THAT Mrs. Allestree’s divinations were not very far short of the truth, or unlikely of fulfilment, would have been apparent to her could she have looked in, a few weeks later, on Rose and Fox together in Judge Temple’s fine old library. In the judge’s estimation the library was the one spot of the house, the sanctum sanctorum, and its noble book-lined walls imparted a warmth of color and an erudite dignity to a room of fine proportions lighted by an immense southern bow-window which overlooked the walled garden, where Rose had cultivated every flower which blooms in summer and every evergreen vine and ilex which lives in winter.

Over the high wide mantel was one fine old painting which testified both to the extravagance and distinctive taste of the judge’s grandfather, and on the book littered table stood a slender vase filled with roses. There was an exquisite delicacy, a refinement, an atmosphere of culture, even in such minutiæ as these, which gave a detailed charm to the perspective of the entire house.

Rose herself sat in a high-backed chair by the open fire, her bright head and slender figure outlined against the dark background, while she listened, with all the freshness and enthusiasm of girlhood, to Fox’s gay, easy talk, his dog, Sandy, lying stretched on the hearthrug between them in the blissful content of physical comfort and the instinctive assurance of safety and friendship which Rose’s presence seemed to increase.

To Fox, half the girl’s charm lay in a certain rigid mental uprightness, a clear ethical point of view, which was entirely different from the careless tolerance of the smart set in which he had hitherto almost exclusively moved. Fox had no religion; Rose was devout, and swift in her denunciation of wrong, for she had all the terrible unrelenting standards of youth and the religion of youth which is wont to be the religion of extremes. Her character was indeed just emerging from that raw period of girlhood which is full of passionate beliefs and renunciations as well as a shy pride which can inflict keen mental suffering for a little hurt; a season when the mind is wonderfully receptive and the young, untried spirit full of beautiful inspirations, hopes, and beliefs which are too frequently destined to woeful annihilation in later years.

Fox had recently made a great speech, a speech which had filled both the floor and the galleries of the House to suffocation, and even thronged the corridors with spectators who could gain no admittance, yet, while it had thrilled Rose’s pulses with excitement and enthralled her with the spell of its eloquence, her rigid sense of the proprieties had been shocked; she had felt its flowing periods its scornful references to mysteries which seemed to Fox as rotten as they were immaterial, and the fact that she had taken umbrage at phrases of his, which seemed to him sufficiently innocuous to escape all criticism, amused and pleased him. It was a new point of view; he liked to tease her into expressing a shy opinion, or into a sudden outburst of righteous disapproval which brought the color to her cheek and the sparkle to her eye. It delighted him to feel that even disapproving of him she could not hate him, for in their dawning intimacy he found ample assurance of her liking, and the unguarded friendliness of her feeling showed in her eagerness to win him to her side on any mooted question.

He leaned back in his chair, watching her with a keen appreciation of her loveliness and her unconscious betrayal of her own emotions. “So! after all you didn’t approve of me the other day?” he said, with perfect good humor; “you were really condemning my ethics while you applauded—you know you did applaud, you told me you congratulated me on my ‘great speech.’”

Rose returned his teasing look seriously. “I did congratulate you; it was a great speech, but I didn’t like it,” she said in a low voice and with an evident effort.

“And why?” he asked, his brilliant gaze bent more fully on her.

She turned away, her cheek red, and resting her chin on her hand she fell to studying the fire though she was still courageous. “I didn’t like the tone of it; you belittle your own great gifts,” she said softly, hesitating slightly and choosing her words with care; “you make them of your own creation when they are really given you, given you as the five talents were given to the man in the Scriptures. You haven’t laid them away in a napkin; why then are you ashamed to give the glory where it is justly due? You can’t deny that there is glory in it all!”

He smiled. “You make me feel like a thief. To be entirely honest, I’m not religious, but I read the Bible and Shakespeare as dictionaries of eloquence. Do you think me a dreadful sinner—worse than those on whom the tower of Siloam fell?”

Rose bit her lip. “I’ve no doubt you think me a hypocrite!” she replied.

“I should like to tell you what I think of you,” he said softly, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, looking across at her, “but I’m afraid—afraid of you!”

She laughed a little with a charming diffidence, for she had met the sweetness of his glance which was full of gentle admiration.

“I sometimes wonder,” he continued, “how you would meet a great moral question which involved your happiness and, perhaps, that of another whom you loved.”

She shivered a little, stretching out one slender hand to the fire. “Ah,” she said, with a faint smile, “I hope I may never meet such a question! I see you make me a Pharisee.”

“God forbid!” he replied quickly, “you belong rather to the Christian martyrs; I’m either a Barbarian or a Scythian!”

They both laughed softly at this, and Rose forgot her momentary embarrassment. “I should try to be just!” she said.

He shook his head with that rare smile of his which seemed half mocking, half caressing. “You couldn’t be!” he retorted provokingly, “you are a little Puritan, narrow, firm, righteous; I begin to be more and more afraid of you!”

She lifted her chin. “You think me too narrow to be just? Isn’t that the charge that you worldlings always bring against—against—”

“The righteous?” he supplied quickly.

They laughed again. “You convict me out of my own mouth; I shall dare no more arguments!”

“Ah, now you know how I feel under your criticisms!” he flashed back at her.

His manner wore its happiest aspect, it was delightful to be with her; through all contradictions he began to feel the temperamental sympathy, and she, too young to understand these subtleties, was aware of the glow and warmth of his presence, the sweetness of his manner which could be, when he was neither stern nor angry nor self-absorbed, one of a delicacy and sentiment uncommon in a man; with all his egotism, his spoiled acceptance of the world’s homage, he retained qualities that were inherently noble and lovable.

“But I have more reason,” she declared with warmth, “it’s unworthy of you to espouse any cause for the mere sake of party, ‘to stand pat’ when your heart is against the issue; I don’t believe in it!”

“You have been reading revolutionary documents; you are full of this new heresy,” he retorted, still laughing softly; “you are like some of the new politicians; they pull down the pillars of the temple on their own heads.”

She leaned forward eagerly, her eyes sparkling. “Do you know what this party worship reminds me of?” she said, “this devotion in a man to his party? The tomb of Rosicrucius and the statue which crushed the worshipper who entered there! So your party’s graven image crushes out a man’s originality.”

“Little heretic!” he mocked, “little revolutionist! A party is a great machine; we can’t do without it!”

She shook her head vehemently. “The children of Israel thought they couldn’t do without the golden calf! You were not so strong a party man five years ago, do you remember?”

He looked at her quickly. “Do you?”

“I read your speeches,” she confessed with charming ingenuousness, her eyes kindling with emotion; “I read the first speech they ever printed in the newspapers here. I’ve wanted to tell you how beautiful I thought it, how eloquent!”

He regarded her a moment in silence; he felt suddenly that there had always been a link between them, that across space and time he had spoken not to the public but to her, and even been understood by her; that the virgin whiteness of her young soul had received the inscription of his mind. Then he was as suddenly and vividly conscious of his folly, his egotism, his unworthiness! She was too lovely and too innocent to have received the impression of his spirit; and he—the thought of his careless life, his worship at Margaret’s shrine, the strength of the old fetters which bound him, made him suddenly humble. And then, the beauty of her smile, the warm sympathy of her temperament created an angry impatience of such restrictions; with characteristic scorn of conventionalities he thrust them aside. The perfect innocence and spontaneity of her praise and appreciation was the most subtle of all flattery, and he possessed the temperament of genius which is, at one moment, above the consideration of either praise or blame and the next quivers with sensibility at the breath of either. He returned her shy but glowing look with one of unusual humility. “I feel as if I didn’t deserve it,” he said gently; “it is an exquisite happiness to be praised by you!”

She smiled. “And I feel ashamed to have set myself up as a judge,” she replied quickly, “but it was because—because I didn’t want you to fall below your own standard! You see what it is to have a record of great achievements.”

“Hereafter I shall only seek to deserve your praise,” he rejoined, “but I feel myself a sublime egoist; I’ve sat here talking of myself, of my work, and meanwhile I remember that my aunt told me of your voice. Why do you never sing for me?”

“Because you have never asked me,” she replied simply, with an involuntary smile.

Fox leaned toward her with an eloquent gesture of appeal. “Did I deserve that? Am I such a miserable egoist?” he exclaimed, and then: “I ask you now.”

Rose was entirely unaffected, and she went at once to the piano in the room beyond, and seating herself began to play the first soft notes of a prelude. Fox had followed her and took his place near the instrument, again observing her with keen appreciation; her sweetness, her whiteness of soul had taken possession of his imagination with a force which he had supposed, until this moment, impossible. For, after one bitter and humiliating experience in the drama of love and passion, he had withdrawn with seared sensibilities, and assuming a new attitude had regarded women as a detached spectator, fancying that he possessed a high degree of eclecticism in comparing the emotional phases of their existence which should be henceforth quite apart from his; love and marriage were mere episodes in a man’s life, and feeling no need of assuming either the duties or the responsibilities of the latter state he had not seriously contemplated the former as anything but a remote possibility. Besides, in a curious way, his life seemed to be linked with Margaret White’s; she continued to make claims upon him, to tacitly presuppose his devotion, and he had been too uncertain of himself, too indolent, too easily drifting with the tide to make any effort to free himself from the shackles of that old love affair. But all these things slipped out of mind as he sat listening to Rose’s song.

It was a simple Italian love-song, soft, caressing, gently plaintive, and peculiarly suited to her voice, but the air and the words were nothing compared with that voice. When Mrs. Allestree spoke of it, Fox had thought of it as the usual vocal accomplishment of a raw schoolgirl, something young and sweet, no doubt, but full of crudity and weakness. Instead, he was suddenly aware that he was listening to a voice which had a scope and richness beyond any that he had ever heard except in opera, and there were but few of the great singers who had such a gift as this. The thrill and exquisite freshness of its tones touched his very soul. He found himself listening with a keen feeling of depression; this gift of hers lifted her at once into another sphere than his, and he reflected that her beautiful body was an exquisite envelope for the spirit, her voice its divine interpretation.

His mind drifted back to the sweeter and more sacred relations of life, to those simple emotions which approach more nearly the divine. The complex affairs of the world, of politics, passion, intrigue, slipped away from him, and the holier aspects of a pure and devoted life took visible shape to his imagination in this young and beautiful girl. He had never fully appreciated his own susceptibility to the uplifting power of music, and the charm of her voice seemed more poignant because so unexpected; he lost himself in a delightful revery, the poet in him awoke with a thrill of pleasure,—the joy we feel in discovering a new power, a larger grasp; he was no longer conscious of his surroundings, but only of the supreme delight of her presence.

As she finished singing, her hands slipped from the keys into her lap and she turned and looked at him, smiling, expecting some applause, unconscious of the depth of his emotion. For a moment he said nothing, then he rose and held out his hand, his eyes eloquent of feeling.

“Exquisite!” he said, and she blushed with pleasure, knowing that he could not express his appreciation in words.

She laid her hand in his, rising too. “Thank you,” she exclaimed, “I’m so glad!”

As she spoke and while he still held her hand, intending to tell her how profoundly she had moved him, they were both suddenly aware of some one’s entrance, and turned to see Mrs. White standing just inside the drawing-room door. She had entered unannounced, and stopped abruptly as she came upon the little scene. She was elaborately dressed in black velvet with ermine furs, and an immense bizarre hat of violet velvet and chiffon with masses of violets on the wide brim. Under her arm was a toy Pomeranian as black as her gown and as glossy as silk, its little black head just appearing over her immense ermine muff. She had evaded the servant’s intention of announcing her, she had thought only of surprising Rose at her music and had come upon this! She stood still, a sudden spiritual perception sweeping over her and thrusting a blade of agony into her heart. Every vestige of color ran out of her cheeks, her gray eyes dilated. When they turned they surprised a look on her face which distorted its usual gayety and defiance. Then she thrust it aside with a great effort of will, with the force of a new and vivid determination, and greeted their amazement with her light little laugh.

“Caught!” she said, “next time I shall send a footman—or ring a bell!”

Rose came forward with a blushing but eager welcome, but Fox stood in a moment of awkwardness which both vexed and amused the woman. Men have no resources, she thought bitterly.

As for him he experienced a shock of dismay; he was trying to shake off a vague feeling which possessed him that he had no right to be there, that he owed allegiance still to Margaret, that her look, her manner, her very presence demanded it while, in fact, she had long ago forfeited all claims upon him.

Meanwhile she had led the way back to the library, driven Sandy away from her Pomeranian, and was seated in Rose’s chair, an elegant and conspicuously important figure, at once the centre of the stage; she had one of those personalities which are immediately predominant in society. “So,” she said lightly, “this is why William deserted my Sunday afternoons; I should have looked for him in vain!”

“It seems you are yourself a deserter,” Fox retorted, “this is your day at home.”

“You thought me safely anchored?” she laughed, with a little mocking intonation, caressing the Pomeranian’s ears; “I should be, but I had to make a call of condolence. Wicklow insisted; you know he’s so conventional and so determined upon being the popular public man! Mrs. Wingfield lost her grandmother two weeks ago so, of course, I must call and make my condolences!”

Fox laughed softly; her manner brought back the normal tone of affairs and he knew her moods to perfection. “Of course you condoled?” he said.

She shrugged her shoulder, looking at Rose. “My dear,” she said, “you will be interested; no mere man could understand. I’ve always been uncertain in my mind about the correct mourning for a grandmother; now I know,—it’s settled beyond appeal.”

“By Mrs. Wingfield?” Rose smiled her incredulity.

“By Mrs. Wingfield—it’s shrimp pink!” Margaret said, “she had on a tea-gown with lace ruffles; it was a violent, vivid shrimp pink, and her nose was red. Of course I said all manner of appropriate things. Everybody stared, then I made a grand finale and departed. She was furious. And Wicklow sends me out to make his way for him!” and she threw out her hands with a little gesture of mock despair.

“Why do you tease that poor soul so?” Rose protested laughing, “she falls an easy prey, too. I heard they were going abroad soon.”

“In three months,” Margaret said, “to the Riviera; they tried Switzerland, she told me, a year ago, but she found ‘it wasn’t really fashionable.’”

“Margaret!” Rose shook an admonishing finger, “you make her say such things, you know you do!”

Mrs. White raised her eyebrows, her eyes haggard. “One would suppose me a Sapphira. She truly said it and I kept on asking her what she said; she repeated it twice,—they were all listening of course, and M. de Caillou tried to look plaintive.”

“He’s solemn enough anyway, Margaret,” Fox said, amused; “he might well be shocked at your levity.”

“Oh, I always want to make him sit up and beg for a lump of sugar,” she retorted scornfully.

As she spoke she rose and went to the window, looking out with an abruptness of manner which seemed to take no account of their presence. She was struggling with an overwhelming dread; with the keen intuition of unhappiness she read Fox’s mood, and her very soul cried out against it. But she was an actress, an actress of long training and accomplishment. She turned carelessly, lifting her Pomeranian to her shoulder and resting her cheek against its long black fur. “There’s my motor back,” she said, catching a glimpse of it through the long window in the drawing-room. “I’m going home to receive Wicklow’s public. Can I borrow Fox, Rose?”

Rose turned easily, mistress of herself and aware of his annoyance, keenly alive to the possibility that his old love for Margaret might still be a factor in his life. “I’m afraid I haven’t asked Mr. Fox to take a cup of tea,” she said laughing; “father is late and you know we dine early on Sundays; we’re very unconventional and old-fashioned.”

Margaret was trailing slowly to the door, her velvet draperies and her long ermine stole seeming heavy and burdensome on her slender figure. “Oh, I know,” she retorted, “you’re Old Testament Christians; I’m always expecting to see the scapegoat caught in your fence-railing! In spite of my shortcomings though, you are going to sing for me some Sunday, Rose, and make my sinners think they’ve found the gate of Paradise.”

But Rose shook her head, laughing. “Ask father,” she said; “he declares that I shall not exhibit!”

VI

“MAMMA, give me the beads!”

Margaret turned reluctantly and looked down at the child, a girl between five and six years old, without even the ephemeral beauty of babyhood, and showing already a strong resemblance to her father. “By all means, only don’t swallow them; it’s after the doctor’s office hours,” she replied carelessly.

She was seated before her toilet-table clad in a silk kimono, and her maid had just finished doing her hair and gone in search of some minor accessories of the toilet, for her mistress was dressing for a large dinner at Mrs. O’Neal’s. Meanwhile Margaret sat looking into the oval mirror in front of her, making a keen and critical survey of her own face and figure. As she did so she moved a candle slightly, and thus throwing a stronger light on her features was startled by the haggard look in her eyes, the purple rings beneath them, the hollowing of her cheeks. Was she beginning to lose her beauty? The thought alarmed her, and she leaned forward looking at herself more closely. Yes, there were lines, and she was thin, deplorably, unquestionably thin. The vivid misery of her expression in this unguarded moment was apparent even to her. Heavens, did she look like that to others? The thought was pregnant with fierce mortification; she must be wearing her heart upon her sleeve! And Fox? Was she losing him? The keen pang of agony which had shot through her at the sight of Fox and Rose together, at the glimpse of that little scene by the piano, recurred to her with a burning sense of humiliation. Was she to taste this bitter cup also?

She had known for years the miserable mistake of her choice of White, she had grovelled in the dust of repentance, but there had been one drop of honey in the cup of gall, one saving grace in the situation; she was sure that Fox still loved her, that he would be true to her. No other woman had been set up in her shrine. She knew how deep the hurt had been, and she had fondly believed that she alone could heal it. Through all those arid years, those years of gayety, of luxury, of false happiness and false show, she had hugged her secret to her heart; Fox still loved her!

And now? What had she read in the kindled sympathy of that look at Rose Temple? She bit her lip, staring into the mirror with haggard eyes. Could he give her up? She, who knew so much of the brutal egotism of which a man can be capable, she who had seen such a nature as White’s revealed in the scorching intimacy of married life,—dared she picture Fox as unselfish enough to be still true to her, to content himself with comforting her wretchedness when love and youth and beauty—beauty such as she had never worn—might be his? Her sore heart throbbed passionately in her bosom. She had expiated her mistake, she had suffered for her fault, she had a right to be happy! She would be happy; it is the eternal cry of the human soul. “Every pitifullest whipster,” says Carlyle, “seeks happiness, a happiness impossible even for the gods.” And Margaret’s wilful soul cried out for happiness; why should it not be hers? She was shackled, it was true, with fetters of her own forging, but—the eager thought of liberty darted through her mind like an arrow—others had been so bound and were now free, others were making new lives out of the old, and the ease with which such ties can be dissolved was not the least of her temptations.

Her glance fell suddenly on the child, Estelle, playing soberly with the amethyst beads which she had begged for. The little girl had learned to be quiet; if she was noisy or in the way she was immediately dismissed to the nursery, and she had her lesson by heart; she was making no noise but a soft crooning sound as she fondled the beads. Her hair was flaxen, her face dull and not pretty, her eyes like her father’s. Margaret shuddered and averted her gaze; how cruel that she should look like him! And the baby, only two years old but already like him; she felt it her curse, the retribution of her loveless marriage, that these two living and visible links to bind her to her vows were both like the man she had married without love and without respect, because she could not give up her life and its luxuries to be poor. A marriage with Fox then would have meant the renunciation of everything which seemed to her essential to existence, it would have combined the miseries of cheap living and self-denial, of small and hideous economies, which made her shudder even to contemplate; she had always been a sybarite. Brought up by an extravagant, pleasure-loving mother, by a father who had spent all to live well, Margaret had been unable to conceive anything more horrible than genteel poverty, and White had offered her a dazzling vista of wealth, position, social success. She was very young, raw, untried, and the temptation had been too great.

As she sat there, idly, at her toilet-table, surrounded by all the beautiful and splendid luxuries of a boudoir which had been fitted up with reckless expense to meet her whims and self-indulgences, she remembered with keen self-contempt her excitement over her own magnificent wedding, her tour through France and Italy in a motor-car which had cost a fortune; then a keen pang wrung her heart as she remembered the boy they had killed in the little crooked Italian village and the people who had stoned them! She had felt it then as a cruel prognostication of ill luck, a terrible beginning of her married life and now, whenever she closed her eyes, she could see again the narrow street, the brown Italian houses, that seemed ready to topple over on them, the children playing, the vivid sky above—then the cry, the awful scene, the child’s dead face. She shuddered; so had her gilded dream of happiness ended; a cry, a rush of misery, and now her sore heart to hide, the dance of death to go on to the end unless—again came the haunting thought; it had beset her lately, tempted her, teased her. It was so easy, it would be so easy to break the bonds, and who could blame her? To be happy!

“Mamma, it broke!” Estelle cried suddenly, with a quivering lip, “I didn’t do it!”

Margaret turned and looked at her. “No matter,” she said strangely, “it broke easily, didn’t it, Estelle? Thank heaven, one can break chains!”

As she spoke there was a knock at her door, and White himself entered. He was not a large man but his face was broad and heavy, his hair had been light but was now gray above the ears, and his jaws were slightly purpled by high living. There were some who thought him distinguished, chiefly those who always perceive a halo around officialdom and wealth. Actually he belonged to that type of man who has been in clubs, political and social, from boyhood, who has unlimited money, a mighty egotism and the unfailing preference for his neighbor’s wife. Meeting Margaret’s challenging glance he paused near the door, his hand on a chair, and looked at her with a cold fixed eye which neither changed nor wavered as he spoke.

“I have something to say to you,” he began in a hard dry tone; “it seems to me about time to speak out. I don’t know what’s come over you; you’re clever enough, but you seem to forget that I’m a public man. You were absolutely rude at the reception this afternoon, and your whims are intolerable. It’s all very annoying! If I choose to open my house to the public I expect my wife to accept the rôle and then to play it to the end.”

Margaret looked at him. “I fail to understand you,” she said ironically; “is this a lecture?”

“You may call it what you please,” he retorted angrily, walking to and fro; “you know well enough!”

The reaping

THE REAPING

BOOK I

I

II

III

IV

V

VI