Amazing Grace, Who Proves That Virtue Has Its Silver Lining

Transcriber's Note:

Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Amazing Grace

[Illustration: I took up the first one]

Amazing Grace

_Who Proves That Virtue Has Its Silver Lining_

By KATE TRIMBLE SHARBER _Author of_ THE ANNALS OF ANN, AT THE AGE OF EVE, ETC.

Illustrated By R. M. Crosby

Indianapolis The Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers

Copyright 1914 The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Press Of Braunworth & Co. Bookbinders And Printers Brooklyn, N. Y.

To Laura Norvell Elliott Who Has The Old Letters--

Contents

Chapter Page

I Strained Relations 1

II A Glimpse Of Promised Land 26

III Nip And Tuck 40

IV The Quality Of Mercy 59

V Et Tu, Brute! 82

VI Flag Day 99

VII Straws Point 115

VIII Longest Way Home 128

IX Maitland Tait 141

X In The Firelight 157

XI Two Men And A Maid 168

XII An Assignment 186

XIII Jilted! 211

XIV The Skies Fall 230

XV The Journey 244

XVI London 278

XVII House Of A Hundred Dreams 312

Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace

Chapter I

Strained Relations

Some people, you will admit, can absorb experience in gentle little homeopathic doses, while others require it to be shot into them by hypodermic injections.

Certainly my Dresden-china mother up to the time of my birth had been forced to take this bitter medicine in every form, yet she had never been known to profit by it. She would not, it is true, fly in the very face of Providence, but she _would_ nag at its coat tails.

"You might as well name this child 'Praise-the-Lord,' and be done with it!" complained the rich Christie connection (which mother had always regarded as outlaws as well as in-laws), shaking its finger across the christening font into mother's boarding-school face on the day of my baptism. "Of course all the world knows you're _glad_ she's posthumous, but--"

"But with Tom Christie only six weeks in spirit-land it isn't decent!" Cousin Pollie finished up individually.

"Besides, good families don't name their children for abstract things," Aunt Hannah put in. "It--well, it simply isn't done."

"A woman who never does anything that isn't done, never does anything worth doing," mother answered, through pretty pursed lips.

"But, since you must be freakish, why not call her Prudence, or Patience--to keep Oldburgh from wagging its tongue in two?" Aunt Louella suggested.

Oldburgh isn't the town's name, of course, but it's a descriptive alias. The place itself is, unfortunately, the worst overworked southern capital in fiction. It is one of the Old South's "types," boasting far more social leaders than sky-scrapers--and you can't suffer a blow-out on _any_ pike near the city's limits that isn't flanked by a college campus.

"Oldburgh knows how I feel," mother replied. "If this baby had been a boy I should have named him Theodore--gift of God--but since she's a girl, her name is _Grace_."

She said it smoothly, I feel sure, for her Vere de Vere repose always jutted out like an iceberg into a troubled sea when there was a family squall going on.

"_All_ right!" pronounced two aunts, simultaneously and acidly.

"All _right_!" chorused another two, but Cousin Pollie hadn't given up the ship.

"Just name a girl Faith, Hope or Natalie, if you want her to grow up freckle-faced and marry a ribbon clerk!" she threatened. "Grace is every bit as bad! It is indicative! It proclaims what you think of her--what you will expect of her--and just trust her to disappoint you!"

Which is only too true! You may be named Fannie or Bess without your family having anything up its sleeve, but it's an entirely different matter when you're named for one of the prismatic virtues. You know then that you're expected to take an A. B. degree, mate with a millionaire and bring up your children by the Montessori method.

"Bet Gwace 'ud ruther be ducked 'n cwistened, anyhow!" observed Guilford Blake, my five-year-old betrothed.--Not that we were Hindus and believed in infant marriage exactly! Not that! We were simply southerners, living in that portion of the South where the principal ambition in life is to "stay put"--where everything you get is inherited, tastes, mates and demijohns--where blood is thicker than axle-grease, and the dividing fence between your estate and the next is properly supposed to act as a seesaw basis for your amalgamated grandchildren.--Hence this early occasion for "Enter Guilford."

"My daughter is not going to disappoint me," mother declared, as she motioned for Guilford's mother to come forward and keep him from profaning the water in the font with his little celluloid duck.

"Don't be too sure," warned Cousin Pollie.

"Well, I'll--I'll risk it!" mother fired back. "And if you must know the truth, I couldn't express my feelings of gratitude--yes, I said _grat_itude--in any other name than Grace. I have had a wonderful blessing lately, and I am going to give credit where it is due! It was nothing less than an act of heavenly grace that released me!"

At this point the mercury dropped so suddenly that Cousin Pollie's breath became visible. Only six weeks before my father had died--of delirium tremens. It was a case of "the death wound on his gallant breast the last of _many_ scars," but the Christies had never given mother any sympathy on that account. He had done nothing worse, his family considered, than to get his feet tangled up in the line of least resistance. Nearly every southern man born with a silver spoon in his mouth discards it for a straw to drink mint julep with!

"Calling her the whole of the doxology isn't going to get that Christie look off her!" father's family sniffed, their triumph answering her defiant outburst. "She is the living image of Uncle Lancelot!"

You'll notice this about in-laws. If the baby is like their family their attitude is triumphant--if it's like anybody else on the face of the earth their manner is distinctly accusing.

"'Lancelot!'" mother repeated scornfully. "If they had to name him for poetry why didn't they call him Lothario and be done with it!"

The circle again stiffened, as if they had a spine in common.

"Certainly it isn't becoming in you to train this child up with a disrespectful feeling toward Uncle Lancelot," some one reprimanded quickly, "since she gives every evidence of being very much like him in appearance."

"My child like that notorious Lancelot Christie!" mother repeated, then burst into tears. "Why she's a Moore, I'll have you understand--from here--down to _here_!"

She encompassed the space between the crown of my throbbing head and the soles of my kicking feet, but neither the tears nor the measurements melted Cousin Pollie.

"A Moore! Bah! Why, you needn't expect that she'll turn out anything like you. A Lydia Languish mother always brings forth a caryatid!"

"A what?" mother demanded frenziedly, then remembering that Cousin Pollie had just returned from Europe with guide-books full of strange but not necessarily insulting words, she backed down into her former assertion. "She's a Moore! She's the image of my revered father."

"There's something in that, Pollie," admitted Aunt Louella, who was the weak-kneed one of the sisters. "Look at the poetic little brow and expression of spiritual intelligence!"

"But what a combination!" Aunt Hannah pointed out. "As sure as you're a living woman this mouth and chin are like Uncle Lancelot!--Think of it--Jacob Moore and Lancelot Christie living together in the same skin!"

"Why, they'll tear the child limb from limb!"

This piece of sarcasm came from old great-great-aunt, Patricia Christie, who never took sides with anybody in family disputes, because she hated them one and all alike. She rose from her chair now and hobbled on her stick into the midst of the battle-field.

"Let me see! Let me see!"

"She's remarkably like Uncle Lancelot, aunty," Cousin Pollie declared with a superior air of finality.

"She's a thousand times more like my father than I, myself, am," poor little mother avowed stanchly.

"Then, all I've got to say is that it's a devilish bad combination!" Aunt Patricia threw out, making faces at them impartially.

And to pursue the matter further, I may state that it was! All my life I have been divided between those ancient enemies--cut in two by a Solomon's sword, as it were, because no decision could be made as to which one really owned me.

You believe in a "dual personality"? Well, they're mine! They quarrel within me! They dispute! They pull and wrangle and seesaw in as many different directions as a party of Cook tourists in Cairo--coming into the council-chamber of my conscience to decide everything I do, from the selection of a black-dotted veil to the emancipation of the sex--while I sit by as helpless as a bound-and-gagged spiritual medium.

"They're not going to affect her future," mother said, but a little gasp of fear showed that if she'd been a Roman Catholic she would be crossing herself.

"Of course not!" Aunt Patricia answered. "It's all written down, anyhow, in her little hand. Let me see the lines of her palm!"

"Her feet's a heap cuter!" Guilford advised, but the old lady untwisted my tight little fist.

"Ah! This tells the story!"

"What?" mother asked, peering over eagerly.

"Nothing--nothing, except that the youngster's a Christie, sure enough! All heart and no head."

Mother started to cry again, but Aunt Patricia stopped her.

"For the lord's sake hush--here comes the minister! Anyhow, if the child grows up beautiful she may survive it--but heaven help the woman who has a big heart and a big nose at the same time."

Then, with this christening and bit of genealogical gossip by way of introduction, the next mile-stone in my career came one day when the twentieth century was in its wee small figures.

"I hate Grandfather Moore and Uncle Lancelot Christie, both!" I confided to Aunt Patricia upon that occasion, having been sent to her room to make her a duty visit, as I was home for the holidays--a slim-legged sorority "pledge"--and had learned that talking about the Past, either for or against, was the only way to gain her attention. "I hate them both, I say! I wish you could be vaccinated against your ancestors. Are they in you to stay?"

I put the question pertly, for she was not the kind to endure timidity nor hushed reverence from her family connections. She was a woman of great spirit herself, and she called forth spirit in other people. A visit with her was more like a bomb than a benediction.

"Hate your ancestors?"

At this time she was perching, hawk-eyed and claw-fingered, upon the edge of the grave, but she always liked and remembered me because I happened to be the only member of the family who didn't keep a black bonnet in readiness upon the wardrobe shelf.

"I hate that grandfather and Uncle Lancelot affair! Don't you think it's a pity I couldn't have had a little say-so in that business?"

"Yes--no--I don't know--ouch, my knee!" she snapped. "What a chatterbox you are, Grace! I've got rheumatism!"

"But I've got 'hereditary tendencies,'" I persisted, "and chloroform liniment won't do any good with my ailment. I wish I need never hear my family history mentioned again."

"Then, you shouldn't have chosen so notable a lineage," she exclaimed viciously. "Your Grandfather Moore, as you know, was a famous divine--"

"I know--and Uncle Lancelot Christie was an equally famous infernal," I said, for the sake of varying the story a little. I was so tired of it.

She stared, arrested in her recital.

"What?"

"Well, if you call a minister a divine, why shouldn't you call a gambler an infernal?"

"Just after the Civil War," she kept on, with the briefest pause left to show that she ignored my interruption, "your grandfather did all in his power--although he was no kin to me, I give him credit for that--he did all in his power to re-establish peace between the states by preaching and praying across the border."

"And Uncle Lancelot accomplished the feat in half the time by flirting and marrying," I reminded her.

She turned her face away, to hide a smile I knew, for she always concealed what was pleasant and displayed grimaces.

"Well, I must admit that when Lancelot brought home his third Ohio heiress--"

"The other two heiresses having died of neglect," I put in to show my learning.

"--many southern aristocrats felt that if the Mason and Dixon line had not been wiped away it had at least been broken up into dots and dashes--like a telegraph code."

I smiled conspicuously at her wit, then went back to my former stand. I was determined to be firm about it.

"I don't care--I hate them both! Nagging old crisscross creatures!"

She looked at me blankly for a moment, then:

"Grace, you amaze me!" she said.

But she mimicked mother's voice--mother's hurt, helpless, moral-suasion voice--as she said it, and we both burst out laughing.

"But, honest Injun, aunty, if a person's got to carry around a heritage, why aren't you allowed to choose which one you prefer?" I asked; then, a sudden memory coming to me, I leaped to my feet and sprang across the room, my gym. shoes sounding in hospital thuds against the floor. I drew up to where three portraits hung on the opposite wall. They represented an admiral, an ambassador and an artist.

"Why can't you adopt an ancestor, as you can a child?" I asked again, turning back to her.

"Adopt an ancestor?"

Her voice was trembling with excitement, which was not brought about by the annoyance of my chatter, and as I saw that she was nodding her head vigorously, I calmed down at once and regretted my precipitate action, for the doctor had said that any unusual exertion or change of routine would end her.

"I only meant that I'd prefer these to grandfather and Uncle Lancelot," I explained soothingly, but her anxiety only increased.

"Which one?" she demanded in a squeaky voice which fairly bubbled with a "bully-for-you" sound. "_Which one_, Grace?"

"Him," I answered.

"They're all hims!" she screamed impatiently.

"I mean the artist."

At this she tried to struggle to her feet, then settled back in exhaustion and drew a deep breath.

"Come here! Come here quick!" she panted weakly.

"Yes, 'um."

She wiped away a tear, in great shame, for she was not a weeping woman.

"Thank God!" she said angrily. "Thank God! That awful problem is settled at last! I knew I couldn't have a moment's peace a-dying until I had decided."

"Decided what?" I gasped in dismay, for I was afraid from the look in her eyes that she was "seeing things." "Shall I call mother, or--some one?"

"Don't you dare!" she challenged. "Don't you leave this room, miss. It's _you_ that I have business with!"

"But I haven't done a thing!" I plead, as weak all of a sudden as she was.

"It's not what you've done, but what you _are_," she exclaimed. "You're the only member of this family that has an idea which isn't framed and hung up! Now, listen! I'm going to leave you something--something very precious. Do you know about that artist over there--James Mackenzie Christie--our really famous ancestor--_my_ great-uncle, who has been dead these sixty years, but will always be immortal? Do you know about him?"

"Yes--I know!"

"Well, I'm going to leave--those letters--those terrible love-letters to _you_!"

I drew back, as if she'd pointed a pistol straight at me.

"But they're the skeleton in the closet," I repeated, having heard it expressed that way all my life.

She was angry for a moment, then she began laughing reminiscently and rocking herself backward and forward slowly in her chair. Her face was as detached and crazy as Ophelia's over her botany lesson, when she gets on your nerves with her: "There is pansies, that's for thoughts," and so forth.

"Yes, he left a skeleton--what was considered a skeleton in those days--Uncle James--our family's great man--but such a skeleton! People now would understand how wonderful it is--with its carved ivory bones--and golden joints and ruby eyes! _You little fool!_"

"Why, I'm proud!" I denied, backing back, all a-tremble. "I'll love those letters, Aunt Patricia."

"You'd better!"

"I'll be sure to," I reiterated, but her face suddenly softened, and she caught up my hand in her yellow claw. She studied the palm for a moment.

"You'll understand them," she sighed. "Poor little, heart-strong Christie!"

And, whether her words were prophetic or delirious, she had told the truth. I have understood them.

She gave them over into my keeping that day; and the next morning we found her settled back among her pillows, imagining that all her brothers and sisters were flying above the mantlepiece and that the Chinese vase was in danger. Another day passed, and on Sunday afternoon all the wardrobe shelves yielded up their black bonnets.

I was not distressed, but I was lonely, with an ultra-Sabbathical repression over my spirits.

"I believe I'll amuse myself by reading over those old letters," I suggested to mother, as time dragged wearily before the crowd began to gather. But she uttered a shriek, with an ultra-Sabbathical repression over its tone.

"Grace, you amaze me!" she said.

"She's really a most American child!" Cousin Pollie pronounced severely, having just finished doing the British Isles.

After this it seemed that years and years and years of the twentieth century passed--all in a heap. I awoke one morning to find myself set in my ways. Most women, in the formation of their happiness, are willing to let nature take its course, then there are others who are not content with this, but demand a postgraduate course. I, unfortunately, belonged to this latter class. Growing up I was fairly normal, not idle enough at school to forecast a brilliant career in any of the arts, nor studious enough to deserve a prediction of mediocre plodding the rest of my life; but after school came the deluge. I was restless, shabby and _single_--no one of which mother could endure in her daughter.

So I was a disappointment to her, while the rest of the tribe gloated. The name, Grace, with all appurtenances and emoluments accruing thereto, availed nothing. I was a failure.

"My pet abomination begins with C," I chattered savagely to myself one afternoon in June, a suitable number of years after the above-mentioned christening, as I made my way to my own private desk in the office of _The Oldburgh Herald_, pondering family affairs in my heart as I went. "Of course this is at the bottom of the whole agony! They just can't bear to see me turn out to be a newspaper reporter instead of Mrs. Guilford Blake. And I hate everything that they love best--cities, clothes, clubs, culture, civilities, conventions, chiffons!"

I was thinking of Cousin Pollie's comment when she first saw a feature story in the _Herald_ signed with my name.

"Is the girl named Grace or Disgrace?" she had asked. "Not since America was a wilderness has the name of any Christie woman appeared outside the head-lines of the society column!"

"The whole connection has raised its eyebrows," I laughed, when I met the owner and publisher of the paper down in his private office the next day. He was an old friend of the family, having fought beside my revered grandfather, and he had taken me into the family circle of the _Herald_ more out of sympathy than need.

"That's all right! It's better to raise an eyebrow than to raise hell!" he laughed back.

But on the June afternoon I have in mind, when I hurried up-town thinking over my pet abominations beginning with C, I was still a fairly civilized being. I lived at home with mother in the old house, for one thing, instead of in an independent apartment, after the fashion of emancipated women--and I still wore Guilford Blake's heirloom scarab ring.

"Aren't your nerves a little on edge just now, Grace, from the scene this morning?" something kept whispering in my ears in an effort to tame my savagery. It was the soft virtuous personality of my inner consciousness, which, according to science, was Grandfather Moore. "You'll be all right, my dear, as soon as you make up your mind to do the square thing about this matter which is agitating you. And of course you are going to do the square thing. Money isn't all there is."

"Now, that's all rot, parson!" Uncle Lancelot, in the other hemisphere of my brain, denied stoutly. "Don't listen to him, Grace! You can't go on living this crocheted life, and money will bring freedom."

"He's a sophist, Grace," came convincingly across the wires.

"He's a purist, Grace," flashed back.

"Hush! Hush! What do two old Kilkenny cats of ancestors know about my problems?" I cried fiercely. Then, partly to drown out their clamor, I kept on: "My pet abominations in several syllables are--checkered career--contiguous choice--just because his mother and mine lived next door when they were girls--circumscribed capabilities--"

"And the desire of your heart begins with H," Uncle Lancelot said triumphantly. "You want Happy Humanness--different brand and harder to get than Human Happiness--you want a House that is a Home, and above all else you want a Husband with a sense of Humor!"

"But how could this letter affect all this?" I asked myself, stopping at the foot of the steps to take a message in rich vellum stationery from my bag. "How can so much be contained in one little envelope?"

After all, this was what it said:

"My dear Miss Christie:

"While in Oldburgh recently on a visit to Mr. Clarence Wiley"--he was the author of blood-and-thunder detective stories who lived on Waverley Pike and raised pansies between times--"I learned that you are in possession of the love-letters written by the famous Lady Frances Webb to your illustrious ancestor, James Mackenzie Christie. Mr. Wiley himself was my informer, and being a friend of your family was naturally able to give me much interesting information about the remaining evidences of this widely-discussed affair.

"No doubt the idea has occurred to you that the love-letters of a celebrated English novelist to the first American artist of his time would make valuable reading matter for the public; and the suggestion of these letters being done into a book has made such charming appeal to my mind that I resolved to put the matter before you without delay.

"To be perfectly plain and direct, this inheritance of yours can be made into a small fortune for you, since the material, properly handled, would make one of the best-selling books of the decade.

"If you are interested I shall be glad to hear from you, and we can then take up at once the business details of the transaction. Mr. Wiley spoke in such high praise of the literary value of the letters that my enthusiasm has been keenly aroused.

"With all good wishes, I am, "Very sincerely yours,

"Julien J. Dutweiler."

There was an embossed superscription on the envelope's flap which read: "Coburn-Colt Company, Publishers, Philadelphia." They were America's best-known promoters--the kind who could take six inches of advertising and a red-and-gold binding and make a mountain out of a mole-hill.

"'Small fortune!'" I repeated. "Surely a great temptation _does_ descend during a hungry spell--in real life, as well as in human documents."

Chapter II

A Glimpse Of Promised Land

"Hello, Grace!"

I was passing the society editor in her den a moment later, and she called out a cheery greeting, although she didn't look up from her task. She was polishing her finger-nails as busily as if she lived for her hands--not by them.

"Hello, Jane!"

My very voice was out of alignment, however, as I spoke.

"Are you going to let all the world see that you're not a headstrong woman?" something inside my pride asked angrily, but as if for corroboration of my conscientious whisperings, I looked in a shamefaced way at the lines of my palm.--The head-line _was_ weak and isolated--while the heart-line was as crisscrossed as a centipede track!

But a heart-line has nothing at all to do with a city editor's desk--certainly not on a day when the crumpled balls of copy paper lying about his waste-basket look as if a woman had thrown them! Every one had missed its mark, and up and down the length of the room the typewriters were clicking falsetto notes. The files of papers on the table were in as much confusion as patterns for heathen petticoats at a missionary meeting.

"What's up?"

I had made my way to the desk of the sporting editor, who writes poetry and pretends he's so aerial that he never knows what day of the week it is, but when you pin him down he can tell you exactly what you want to know--from the color of the bride's going-away gown to the amount the bridegroom borrowed on his life insurance policy.

"Search me!" he answered--as usual.

"But there's something going on in this office!" I insisted. "Everybody looks as exercised as if the baby'd just swallowed a moth-ball."

"Huh?"

He looked around--then opened his eyes wider. "Oh, I believe I did hear 'em say--"

"What?"

"That they can't get hold of that story about the Consolidated Traction Company."

"--And damn those foreigners who come over here with their fool notions of dignity!" broke in the voice of the city editor--then stopped and blushed when he saw me within ear-shot, for it's a rule of the office that no one shall say "damn" without blushing, except the society editor and her assistants.

"Who's the foreigner?" I asked, for the sake of warding off apologies. That's why men object so strongly to women mixing up with them in business life. It keeps them eternally apologizing.

"Maitland Tait," he replied.

"Maitland Tait? But that's not foreign. That's perfectly good English."

"So's he!" the city editor snapped. "It's his confounded John Bullishness that's causing all the trouble."

"But the traction company's no kin to us, is it?" the poet inquired crossly, for he was reporting a double-header in verse, and our chatter annoyed him.

"Trouble will be kin to us--if somebody doesn't break in on Great Britain and make him cough up the story," the city editor warned over his shoulder. "I've already sent Clemons and Bolton and Reade."

"--And it would mean a raise," the poet said, with a tender little smile. "A raise!"

"Are you sure?" I asked, after the superior officer had disappeared. "I'd like--a raise."

He looked at me contemptuously.

"You don't know what the Consolidated Traction Company is, I suppose?" he asked.

My business on the paper was reporting art meetings at the Carnegie Library and donation affairs at settlement homes because the owner and publisher drank out of the same canteen with my grandfather--and my fellows on the staff called me behind my back their ornamental member.

"I do!" I bristled. "It's located at a greasy place, called Loomis--and it's something that makes the wheels go round."

He smiled.

"It certainly does in Oldburgh," he said. "It's the biggest thing we have, next to our own cotton mills and to think that they're threatening to take their doll-rags and move to Birmingham and leave us desolate!"

"Where the iron would be nearer?" I asked, and he fairly beamed.

_"Sure!_ Say, if you know that much about the company's affairs, why don't you try for this assignment yourself?"

But I shook my head.

"I've got relatives in Alabama--that's how I knew that iron grows on trees down there," I explained.

"Well--that's what the trouble is about! Oldburgh can't tell whether this fellow, Maitland Tait, is going to pack the 'whole blarsted thing, don't you know, into his portmanteau' and tote it off--or buy up more ground here and enlarge the plant so that the company's grandchildren will call this place home."

I turned away, feeling very indifferent. Oldburgh's problem was small compared with that letter in my hand-bag.

"And he won't tell?" I asked, crossing over to my own desk and fitting the key in a slipshod fashion.

"He seems to think that silence is the divine right of corporations. Nobody has been able to get a word out of him--nor even to see him."

"Then--they don't know whether he's a human being or a Cockney?"

He leaned across toward me, his elbow flattening two tiers of keys on his machine.

"Say, the society's column's having fever and ague, too," he whispered. "The tale records that two of our 'acknowledged leaders' met him in Pittsburgh last winter--and they're at daggers' points now for the privilege of killing the fatted calf for him.--The one that does it first is IT, of course, and Jane Lassiter's scared to death! The calf is fat and the knife is sharp--but no report of the killing has come in."

I laughed. It always makes me laugh when I think how hard some people work to get rid of their fatted calves, and how much harder others have to labor to acquire a veal cutlet.

"Of course he was born in a cabin?" I turned back to the poet and asked, after a little while devoted to my own work, in which I learned that my mind wouldn't concentrate sufficiently for me to embroider my story of an embryo Michaelangelo the Carnegie Art Club had just discovered. "A cabin in the Cornish hills--don't you know?"

The sporting editor pulled himself viciously away from his typewriter.

"Ty Cobb--Dry sob--By mob--"

"Oh, I beg your pardon!"

"Can't you see when a poem is about to die a-borning?" he asked furiously.

"I am sorry--and perhaps I might help you a little," I suggested with becoming meekness. "How's this?--High job--Nigh rob--"

I paused and he began writing hurriedly. Looking up again he threw me a smile.

"Bully! Grace Christie, you're the light o' my life," he announced, "and--and of course that blamed Englishman was born in a cabin, if that's what you want to know."

"It's not that I care, but--they always are," I explained. "They're born in a cabin, come across in the steerage amid terrific storms--Why is it that everybody's story of steerage crossing is stormy?--It seems to me it would be bad enough without that--then he sold papers for two years beneath the cart-wheels around the Battery, and by sheer strength of brain and brawn, has elevated himself into the proud privilege of being able to die in a 'carstle' when it suits his convenience."

The sporting editor looked solicitous.

"And now, if I were you, to keep from wearing myself out with talking, I'd get on the car and ride out to Glendale Park," he advised.

But I shook my head.

"I can't."

"You really owe it to yourself," he insisted. "You are showing symptoms of a strange excitement to-day. You look as if you were talking to keep from doing something more annoying--if such a thing were possible."

"I'm not going to weep--either from excitement or the effects of your rudeness," I returned, then wheeling around and facing my desk again I let my dual personality take up its song.

"I can and I can't; I will and I won't; I'll be damned if I do-- I'll be damned if I don't!"

The story goes that a queen of Sweden composed this classic many years ago, but it's certainly the national song of every one who has two people living in his skin that are not on speaking terms with each other.

Then, partly to keep from annoying the poet again, partly because it's the thing a woman always does, I took out the letter and read it over once more.

"Coburn-Colt--Philadelphia!"

The paper was a creamy satin, the embossing severely correct, the typing so neat and businesslike that I could scarcely believe the letter was meant for me when I looked at the outside only.

"Wonder what 'Julien J. Dutweiler' would call a small fortune?" I muttered. "Five thousand dollars? Ten thousand dollars!--Good heavens, then mother could have all the crepe meteor gowns she wanted without my ever--_ever_ having to marry Guilford Blake for her sake!"

But as I sat there thinking, grandfather took up the cudgels bravely--even though the people most concerned were Christies and not Moores.

"Think well, Grace! That 'best-selling' clause means not only Maine to California, but England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Berwick-on-the-Tweed!" he warned. "Everybody who had ever heard of either of these two unfortunate people will buy a copy of the book and read it to find out what really happened!"

"But the letters are hers!" Uncle Lancelot reminded him. "If people don't want posterity to know the truth about them they ought to confine themselves to wireless communications."

"And--what would your Aunt Patricia say?" grandfather kept on. "What would James Christie say? What would Lady Frances Webb say?"

Thinking is certainly a bad habit--especially when your time belongs to somebody else and you are not being paid to think! Nevertheless, I sat there all the afternoon, puzzling my brain, when my brain was not supposed to wake up and rub its eyes at all inside the _Herald_ office. I was being paid to come there and write airy little nothings for the _Herald's_ airy little readers, yet I added to my sin of indecision by absorbing time which wasn't mine.

"Of course the possession of these letters in a way connects you with greatness," grandfather would say once in a while, in a lenient, musing sort of way. "But I trust that you are not going to let this fly to your head. Anyway, as the family has always known, your Uncle James Christie didn't leave his letters and papers to his great-niece; he merely _left_ them! True, she was very close to him in his last days and he had always loved and trusted her--"

"But there's a difference between trusting a woman and trusting her _with your desk keys_!" Uncle Lancelot interrupted. "Uncle James ought to have known a thing or two about women by that time!"

"Yet we must realize that the value of the possession was considerable, even in those days," grandfather argued gently. "We must not blame his great-niece for what she did. James Mackenzie Christie had caught the whole fashionable world on the tip of his camel's-hair brush and pinioned it to canvases which were destined to get double-starred notices in guide-books for many a year to come, and the correspondence of kings and queens, lords and ladies made a mighty appeal to the young girl's mind."

"Then, that's a sure sign they'd be popular once again," said Uncle Lancelot. "Of course there's a degree of family pride to be considered, but that shouldn't make much difference. The Christies have always had pride to spare--now's the time to let some of it slide!"

Thus, after hours of time and miles of circling tentatively around the battlements of Colmere Abbey--the beautiful old place which had been the home of Lady Frances Webb--I was called back with a stern suddenness to my place in the _Herald_ office.

"Can _you_ think of anything else?" the poet's voice begged humbly. "I'm trying to match up just plain 'Ty' this time--but I'm dry."

I turned to him forgivingly. I welcomed any diversion.

"Rye, lie, die, sky,--why, what's the matter with your think tank?" I asked him. "They swarm!"

But before he could thank me, or apologize, the voice of the city editor was in the doorway. He himself followed his rasping tones, and as he came in he looked backward over his shoulder at a forlorn dejected face outside. He looked at his watch viciously, then snapped the case as if it were responsible for his spleen.

"Get to work then on something else," he growled. "There's no use spending car fare again to Loomis to-day that I can see! He's an Englishman--and of course he kisses a teacup at this time of the afternoon."

Chapter III

Nip And Tuck

When I reached home late that afternoon I was in that state of spring-time restlessness which clamors for immediate activity--when the home-keeping instinct tries to make you believe that you'll be content if you spend a little money for garden seeds--but a reckless demon of extravagance notifies you that nothing short of salary sacrificed for railroad fare is going to avail.

Grandfather and Uncle Lancelot, of course, came in with their gratuitous advice, the one suggesting nasturtium beds with geraniums along the borders--the other slyly whispering that a boat trip from Savannah to Boston was no more than I deserved.

Then, reaching home in this frame of mind, I was confronted with two very perplexing and unusual conditions. _Mignon_ was being played with great violence in the front parlor--and all over the house was the scent of burnt yarn.

"What's up?" I demanded of mother, as she met me at the door--dressed in blue. "Everything seems mysterious and topsyturvy to-day! I believe if I were to go out to the cemetery I'd find the tombstones nodding and whispering to one another."

"Come in here!" she begged in a Santa Claus voice.

I went into the parlor, then gave a little shriek.

"Mother!"

I have neglected to state, earlier in the narrative, that the one desire of my heart which doesn't begin with H was a player-piano! It was there in the parlor, at that moment, shining, and singing its wordless song about the citron-flower land.

"It's the very one we've been _watching_ through the windows up-town," she said in a delighted whisper.

"But did you get it as a prize?" I inquired, walking into the dusky room and shaking hands with my betrothed, who rose from the instrument and made way for me to take possession. "How came it here?"

"I had it sent out--on--on approval," she elucidated. That is, her words took the form of an explanation, but her voice was as appealing as a Salvation Army dinner-bell, just before Christmas.

"On approval? But why, please?"

"Because I want you to get used to having the things you want, darling!"

Then, to keep from laughing--or crying--I ran toward the door.

"What _is_ that burning?" I asked, sniffing suspiciously.

It was a vaguely familiar scent--scorching dress-goods--and suggestive of the awful feeling which comes to you when you've stood too close to the fire in your best coat-suit--or the comfortable sensation on a cold night, when you're preparing to wrap up your feet in a red-hot flannel petticoat.

"What is it? Tell the truth, mother!"

But she wouldn't.

"It's your brown tweed skirt, Grace," Guilford finally explained, as my eyes begged the secret of them both. They frequently had secrets from me.

"My brown tweed skirt?"

"It was as baggy at the knees as if you'd done nothing all winter but _pray_ in it!" mother whimpered in a frightened voice. "I've--I've burned it up!"

For a moment I was silent.

"But what shall I tramp in?" I finally asked severely. "What can I walk out the Waverley Pike in?"

Then mother took fresh courage.

"You're not going to walk!" she answered triumphantly. "You're going to ride--in your very--own--electric--coupé! Here's the catalogue."

She scrambled about for a book on a table near at hand--and I began to see daylight.

"Oh, a player-piano, and an electric coupé--all in one day! I see! My fairy godmother--who was old Aunt Patricia, and she looked exactly like one--has turned the pumpkin into a gold coach! You two plotters have been putting your heads together to have me get rich quick and gracefully!"

"We understand that this stroke of fortune is going to make a great change in your life, Grace," Guilford said gravely. He was always grave--and old. The only way you could tell his demeanor from that of a septuagenarian was that he didn't drag his feet as he walked.

"'Stroke of fortune?'" I repeated.

"The Coburn--" mother began.

"Colt--" he re-enforced, then they both hesitated, and looked at me meaningly.

I gave a hysterical laugh.

"You and mother have counted your Coburn-Colts before they were hatched!" I exclaimed wickedly, sitting down and looking over the music rolls. I did want that player-piano tremendously--although I had about as much use for an electric coupé, under my present conditions in life, as I had for a perambulator.

"Grace, you're--indelicate!" mother said, her voice trembling. "Guilford's a man!"

"A man's a man--especially a Kentuckian!" I answered. "You're not shocked at my mention of colts and--and things, are you, Guilford?"

My betrothed sat down and lifted from the bridge of his nose that badge of civilization--a pair of rimless glasses. He polished them with a dazzling handkerchief, then replaced the handkerchief into the pocket of the most faultless coat ever seen. He smoothed his already well-disciplined hair, and brushed away a speck of dust from the toe of his shoe. From head to foot he fairly bristled with signs of civic improvement.

"I am shocked at your reception of your mother's kind thoughtfulness," he said.

He waited a little while before saying it, for hesitation was his way of showing disapproval. Yet you must not get the impression from this that Guilford was a bad sort! Why, no woman could ride in an elevator with him for half a minute without realizing that he was the flower-of-chivalry sort of man! He always had a little way of standing back from a woman, as if she were too sacred to be approached, and in her presence he had a habit of holding his hat clasped firmly against the buttons of his coat. You can forgive a good deal in a man if he keeps his hat off all the time he's talking to you!

"'Shocked?'" I repeated.

"Your mother always plans for your happiness, Grace."

"Of course! Don't you suppose I know that?" I immediately asked in an injured tone. It is always safe to assume an injured air when you're arguing with a man, for it gives him quite as much pleasure to comfort you as it does to hurt you.

"I didn't--mean anything!" he hastened to assure me.

"Guilford merely jumped at the chance of your freeing yourself of this newspaper slavery," mother interceded. "You know what a humiliation it is to him--just as it is to me and to every member of the--Christie family."

My betrothed nodded so violently in acquiescence that his glasses flew off in space.

"You know that I am a Kentuckian in my way of regarding women, Grace," he plead. "I can't bear to see them step down from the pedestal that nature ordained for them!"

I turned and looked him over--from the crown of his intensely aristocratic fair head to the tip of his aristocratic slim foot.

"A Kentuckian?"

"Certainly!"

"A Kentuckian?" I repeated reminiscently. "Why, Guilford Blake, you ought to be olive-skinned--and black-eyed--and your shoes ought to turn up at the toes--and your head ought to be covered by a red fez--and you ought to sit smoking through a water-bottle of an evening, in front of your--your--"

"Grace!" stormed mother, rising suddenly to her feet. "I will not have you say such things!"

"What things?" I asked, drawing back in hurt surprise.

"H-harems!" she uttered in a blushing whisper, but Guilford caught the word and squared his shoulders importantly.

"But, I say, Grace," he interrupted, his face showing that mixture of anger and pleased vanity which a man always shows when you tell him that he's a dangerous tyrant, or a bold Don Juan--or both. "You don't think I'm a Turk--do you?"

"I do."

He sighed wistfully.

"If I were," he said, shaking his head, "I'd have caught you--and _veiled_ you--long before this."

I looked at him intently.

"You mean--"

"That I shouldn't have let you delay our marriage this way! Why should you, pray, when my financial affairs have changed so in the last year?"

I rose from my place beside the new piano, breaking gently into his plea.

"It isn't that!" I attempted to explain, but my voice failed drearily. "You ought to know that--finances hadn't anything to do with it. I haven't kept from marrying you all these years because we were both so poor--then, last year when you inherited your money--I didn't keep from marrying you because you were so rich!"

"Then, what is it?" he asked gravely, and mother looked on as eagerly for my answer as he did. This is one advantage about a life-long betrothal. It gets to be a family institution. Or is that a disadvantage?

"I--don't know," I confessed, settling back weakly.

"I don't think you do!" mother observed with considerable dryness.

"Well, this business of your getting to be a famous compiler of literature may help you get your bearings," Guilford kept on, after an awkward little pause. "You have always said that you wished to exercise your own wings a little before we married, and I have given in to you--although I don't know that it's right to humor a woman in these days and times. Really, I don't know that it is."

"Oh, you don't?"

"No--I don't. But we're not discussing that now, Grace! What I'm trying to get at is that this offer means a good deal to you. Of course, it is only the beginning of your career--for these fellows will think up other things for you to do--and it will give you a way of earning money that won't take you up a flight of dirty office stairs every day. Understand, I mean for just a short while--as long as you insist upon earning your own living."

"And the honor!" mother added. "You could have your pictures in good magazines!"

I stifled a yawn, for, to tell the truth, the conflict had made me nervous and weary.

"At all events, I must decide!" I exclaimed, starting again to my feet. "Somehow, the office atmosphere isn't exactly conducive to deep thought--and I've had so little time since morning to get away by myself and thresh matters out."

Mother looked at me incredulously.

"Will you please tell me just what you mean, Grace?" she asked.

"I mean that I must get away--I've imagined that I ought to take some serious thought, weigh the matter well, so to speak--before I write to the Coburn-Colt Publishing Company. In other words, I have to decide."

"Decide?" mother repeated, her face filled with piteous amazement. "_Decide?_"

"Decide?" Guilford said, taking up the strain complainingly.

"If you'll excuse me!" I answered, starting toward the door, then turning with an effort at nonchalance, for their sakes, to wave them a little adieu. "Suppose you keep on playing 'Knowest thou the land where the citron-flower blooms,' Guilford--for I am filled with _wanderlust_ right now, and this music will help out Uncle Lancelot's presentation of the matter considerably!"

"What?"

"I'm going to listen to the voices," I explained. "All day long grandfather and Uncle Lancelot have been busy making the fur fly in my conscience!"

Mother darted across the room and caught my hand.

"You don't mean to say that you have scruples--_scruples_--Grace Christie?"

She couldn't have hated smallpox worse--in me.

"Honest Injun, I don't know!" I admitted. "Of course, it does seem absurd to ponder over what a family row might be raised in the Seventh Circle of Nirvana by the publication of these old love-letters, but--"

"James Mackenzie Christie died in 1849," she declared vehemently. "Absurd! It is _insane_!"

"That's what the Uncle Lancelot part of my intelligence keeps telling me," I laughed. "But--good heavens! you just ought to hear the grandfather argument."

"What does he--what does that silly _Salem_ conscience of yours say against the publication of the letters?" she asked grudgingly.

I sat down again.

"Shall I tell you?" I began good-naturedly, for I saw that mother was at the melting point--melting into tears, however, not assent. "Whenever I want to do anything I'm not exactly _sure_ of, these two provoking old gentlemen come into the room--the council-chamber of my heart--and begin their post-mortem warfare. Grandfather is white-bearded and serene, while Uncle Lancelot looks exactly as an Italian tenor _ought_ to look--and never does."

"And you look exactly like him," mother snapped viciously. "Nothing about you resembles your grandfather except your brow and eyes."

"I know that," I answered resignedly. "Hasn't some one said that the upper part of my face is as lofty as a Byronic thought--and the lower as devilish as a Byronic _deed_?"

Neither of them smiled, but Guilford stirred a little.

"Go on with your argument, Grace," he urged patiently. He was always patient.

"I'm going!" I answered. "All day grandfather has been telling me what I already know--that the Coburn-Colt Company doesn't want those letters of James Christie's because they are literary, or beautiful, or historical, but simply and solely because they are _bad_! They'll make a good-seller because they're the thing the public demands right now. Lady Frances Webb was a _married_ woman!"

"Nonsense," mother interrupted, with a blush. "The public doesn't demand bad things! There is merely a craze for intimate, biographical matter--told in the first person."

"I know," I admitted humbly. "This is what distinguishes a human from an inhuman document."

"The craze demands a simple straightforward narrative--" Guilford began, then hesitated.

"In literature this is the period of the great '_I Am_,'" I broke in. "People want the secrets of a writer's soul, rather than the tricks of his vocabulary, I know."

"Well, good lord--you wouldn't be giving the twentieth century any more of these people's souls than they themselves gave to the early nineteenth," he argued scornfully. "She put his portrait into every book she ever wrote--and he annexed her face in the figure of every saint--and sinner--he painted!"

"Well, that was because they couldn't _see_ any other faces," I defended.

"Bosh!"

"But Lady Frances Webb was a good woman," mother insisted weakly. "She had pre-Victorian ideas! She sent her lover across seas, because she felt that she must! Why, the publication of these letters would do _good_, not harm."

"They would shame the present-day idea of 'affinity' right," said Guilford.

I nodded my head, for this was the same theory that Uncle Lancelot had been whispering in my ears since the postman blew his whistle that morning. And yet--

"Maybe you two--don't exactly understand the import of those letters as I do," I suggested, sorry and ashamed before the gaze of their practical eyes. "But to me they mean so much! I have always _loved_ James Christie and--his Unattainable. I can feel for them, and--"

"And you mean to say that you are going to give way to an absurd fancy now--a ridiculous, far-fetched, namby-pamby, quixotic fancy?" mother asked, in a tone of horror.

"I--I'm--afraid so!" I stammered.

"And miss this chance--for all the things you want most? The very things you're toiling day and night to get?"

"And put off the prospect of our marriage?" Guilford demanded. "I had hoped that this business transaction would satisfy the unaccountable desire you seem to have for independence--that after you had circled about a little in the realm of emancipated women and their strained notions of what constitutes freedom, you'd see the absurdity of it all and--come to me."

"I am awfully sorry, Guilford," I answered, dropping my eyes, for I knew that "freedom," "independence" and "emancipation" had nothing on earth to do with my delayed marriage--and I knew that I was doing wrong not to say so. "I am _awfully_ sorry to disappoint you."

"Then you have decided finally?" mother asked in a suspicious voice.

"I believe I have," I answered. "Oh, please don't look at me that way--and please don't cry! I can't help it!"

"It is preposterous," Guilford said shortly.

"But you don't--understand!" I cried, turning to him pleadingly. "You don't know what it is to feel as I feel about those lovers--those people who had no happiness in this world--and are haunted and tormented by curiosity in their very graves!--don't you suppose I want to do the thing you and mother want me to do? Of course, I do! I want this--this new piano--and another brown tweed skirt that doesn't bag at the knees--and I want--so many things!"

"Then why in the name of----" he began.

"Because I _won't_!" I told him flatly. "Call it conscience--fancy, or what you will!--I have those two people in my power--their secrets are right here in my hands! And I'm not going to _give them away_!"

"Grace, you a-maze me!" mother sobbed.

But Guilford rose tranquilly and reached for his hat.

"Any woman who has a conscience like that ought to cauterize it--with a curling-iron--and get rid of it," he observed dryly.

Chapter IV

The Quality Of Mercy

That night I went to my bedroom and pulled open the top of an old-fashioned desk standing in the corner. Except for this desk there was not another unnecessary piece of furniture in the apartment, for I like a cell-like place to sleep. I consider that fresh air and a clear conscience ought to be the chief adjuncts--for a cluttered-up, luxurious bedroom always reminds me of Camille--and tuberculosis.

"And all this fuss about a few little faded wisps of paper!"

I sat down before the desk, after I had loosed my hair--which is that very, very black, that is the Hibernian accompaniment to blue eyes--and had slipped my slippers on.

"You have put me to considerable trouble to-day, Lady Frances."

Her portrait was hanging there--a small, cabinet-sized picture, in a battered gold frame. Her lover had succeeded in making her face on canvas very beautiful--with the exaggerated beauty of eyes and mouth which all portraits of that period show. Her brow was fine and thoughtful, irradiating the face with intelligence, yet I never looked at her without having a feeling that I was infinitely wiser than she.

Isn't it queer that we have this feeling of superiority over the people in old portraits--just because they are dead and we are living? We open an ancient book of engravings, and say: "Poor little Mary Shelley! Simple little Jane Austen! Naughty little Nell Gwynne!"--There's only one pictured lady of my acquaintance who smiles down my latter-day wisdom as being a futile upstart thing. I can't pity her! Oh, no! Nor endure her either, for she's Mona Lisa!

I had always had this maternal protectiveness in my attitude toward Lady Frances Webb, and to-night it was so keen that I could have tucked her in bed and told her fairy tales to soothe away the trembling fright she must have endured all that day. Instead of doing this, however, I satisfied myself with reading some of the letters over again. Isn't it a pity that above every writing-desk devoted to inter-sex correspondence there is not a framed warning: "Beyond Platonic Friendship Lies--Alimony!"

Anyway, Lady Frances and James Christie tried the medium ground for a while. Over in a large pigeonhole, far away from the rest, was a packet of letters tied with a strong twine. They were the uninteresting ones, because they were _muzzled_. The handwriting was the same as that of the others--dainty, last-century chirography, as delicate and curling as a baby's pink fingers--but I never read them, for I don't care for muzzled things. Gossip about Lady Jersey--Marlborough House--the cold-blooded ire of William Lamb--all this held but little charm--compared with the other.

"Not you--not to-night," I decided, pushing them aside quickly. "I've got to have good pay for my pains of this day!"

I sought another compartment, where a batch huddled together--a carefully selected batch. They were as many, and as clinging in their contact with one another, as early kisses. I took up the first one.

"Dear Big Man"--it began.

"It has been weeks and weeks now since I have seen you! If it were not that you lived in that terrible London and I in this lonely country, I should be too proud to remind you of the time, for I should expect you to be the one to complain.

"Surely it is because of this that I now hate London so! It keeps this knowledge of separation--this sense of dreary waiting--from burning into your heart, as it does into mine!

"There you are kept too busy to think--but here I can do nothing else!--Or perhaps I am quite wrong, and it is not a matter of London and Lancashire, after all, but the more primal one of your being a man, and my being a woman! _Do_ I love the more? I wonder? And yet, I don't think that I care much! I am willing to love more abjectly than any woman ever loved before--if you care for me just a little in return."

(I always felt _very_ wise and maternal at this point.)

"You were an awful goose, Lady Frances!" I said. "This is a mistake that _I_ have never made!"

"Still, I am tormented by thoughts of you in London," the letter kept on. "I think of you--there--as a lion. It presses down upon me, this recollection that you are James Christie, the great artist, and the only release from the torture is when I go alone into the library and sit down before the fire. The two chairs are there--those two that were there that day--and then I can forget about the lion. 'Jim--Jim!' I whisper--'just my _lover_!'

"Then your face comes--it has to come, or I could never be good! Your rugged face that speaks of great forests which have been your home--the fierce young freedom which has nurtured you--and the glorious uplift you have achieved above all that is small and weak!

"You have asked me a thousand times why I love you, but I have never known what to say--because I love you for so many things--until now, when I have nothing but memories--and the ever-present sight of your absent face. And now I don't know why I love you, but I know what I love best about you. Shall I tell you--though of course you know already! It is not your talent--wonderful as it is--for there have been other artists; nor your terrible charm with its power to lure women away from duty--for England is full of fascinating men; nor your sweetness--and I think the first time I saw you smile I sounded the depths of this--it is not any of these, dear heart! Not any of these! I love best the strength of you which you use to control the charm--the untamed force of your personality which makes your talent seem just an incident--and the big, _big_ virility of you!

"Do you think for a moment that you look like an artist? Half-civilized you? Why, you are a woodsman, dear love--but not a hunter! You could never kill living things for the joy of seeing them die!

"You look as if you had spent all your life in the woods, doing hard tasks patiently--a woodcutter, or a charcoal burner! Ah, a charcoal burner! A man who has had to grip life with bared hands and wrest his bread from grudging circumstances. This is what you are, Jim, to my heart's eyes. You are a primal creature--simple-souled, great-bodied, and your mind is given over to naked truth.

"But all the time you are a famous artist--and London's idol! Your studio in St. James's Street is the lounging-place for curled darlings! The hardest task that your hands perform is over the ugly features of a fat duchess!--How can you, Jim? Why don't you come away? You are a man first, an artist afterward--and it is the man that I love!

"And, Jim, _do_ you know how much I love you? Do you know how your face leads me on?--It is your face I must have now, darling. _Portrait of the Artist, by Himself_, is a title I have often smiled over, wondering how a man could be induced to paint his own features, but now I know! It is always because some woman has so clamorously demanded it--a woman who loved him! What else can so entirely satisfy--and when will you send it to me?"

When I came to the end I was sorry, for I had such a way of getting en rapport with her sentiments that I eyed the next express wagon I passed, eagerly, to see if it could possibly be bringing the _Portrait of the Artist, by Himself_!

And on this occasion I reread a portion of the letter.

"Your face--your rugged face--or I could never be good!"

The picture of a rugged face was haunting me, and after a moment a sudden thought came to me.

"Why, that's what _I_ should like!"

I had the grace to feel ashamed, of course, especially as I recalled how mother and Guilford had tormented me that afternoon to know why I wouldn't marry--and I found the answer in this sudden discovery. Still, that didn't keep me from pursuing the subject.

"A rugged face--great forests--fierce freedom--glorious uplift!--Oh, Man! Man! Where are you--and where is your great forest?--That's exactly what I want!"

I turned back to the desk, after a while, and still allowing my mind to circle away from the business at hand somewhat, I drew out another letter. It was short--and troubled. The dear, little, lady-like writing ran off at a tangent.

"Yes, I have seen the picture! Next to Murillo's _Betrothal of St. Catherine_,--the face is the loveliest thing I have ever seen on canvas.

"Of course it is idealized--yet so absurdly _like_ that they tell me all Mayfair is staring! This talk--this stirring-up of what has been sleeping--will make it a thousand times harder for us ever to see each other, yet I am glad you did it!

"They are saying--Mayfair--that your 'making a pageant of a bleeding heart' is as indelicate as Caroline Lamb's _Glenarvon_! If people are going to be in love wickedly at least they ought not to write books about it--nor paint pictures of it!... Oh, beloved, let us pray that we may always keep bitterness out of our portraits of each other!"

The letter burned my fingers, for the pen marks were quick and jagged--like electric sparks--and I felt the pain that had sent them out; so I turned back to others of the batch--others that I knew almost by heart, yet always found something new in.

"I don't know that it's such an enviable state, after all, this being in love," I mused. "It seems to me it consists of--quite a mixture! But, of course, it will take Heaven itself to solve the problem of a thornless rose!"

I ran my finger over the edges of the improvised envelopes, heavily sealed and bearing complicated foreign stamping. There were dozens of them--many only the common garden variety of love-letters, long-drawn out, confidential, reminiscent or hopeful, as the case might be--and a few which sounded at times almost light-hearted.

"When I say that I think of you all the time I am not so original as my critics give me credit for being, dear heart," she wrote in one. "Nothing else in the annals of love-making is so trite as this, but when I explain how persistently your image is before me, how intricately woven with every thought of the future--how inseparably linked with every vision of happiness--you will know that mine is no light nor passing attachment.

"If I give you one foolish example of this will it bore you? I've written you before, I believe, that this spring I have been outdoors all the time--riding or driving about the country, because the mad restlessness of thinking about you drives me out. In this house, in these gardens, _you_ are so constantly present that I can do nothing but remember--then I go away, hoping to forget--and what happens?--I go into a castle--a place where you have never been, perhaps--and before I can begin talking with any one, or think of any sensible thing to say the thought comes to me: 'How well the figure of my lover would fit in with all this grandeur! How naturally and easily he would swing through these great rooms!'

"Then, early some mornings I ride into the village--past cottages that look so humble and happy that I feel my heart stifling with longing to possess one of them--and _you_! 'How happy I could be living there,' I think, 'but--how tremendously tall and stalwart Jim would look coming in through this low doorway, as I called him to supper!'

"Then I spend hours and hours planning the real home I want us to have, dear love of mine. I don't care much whether it is a castle or a cottage, just so it has you in it--and all around it must be the sight of distant hills! These for _your_ artist's soul!

"You and a hundred distant hills, Jim! Then days--and nights, and nights and days--and summers and winters of joy!

"Some time this will come to pass--it must--and we shall call it heaven! And we shall rejoice that we were strong to keep the faith through the days of trial and longing so that we could reach it and be worthy of it.

"And, when this shall come, I can never know fear again--fear that London will make you cease to love me--that some other woman may gain possession of you--that the artist in you may crush out and starve the lover. There will be but one thought of fear then, and that will be that you may die and leave me, but this will not be hopeless, for I too can die!

"Oh, do you remember that first day--that wonderful, anguished, bewildering first day--then that night when I kissed you? When I think of sickening fear I always remember that time. Two weeks before the London newspapers had chronicled your visit to Colmere Abbey 'to paint the portrait of the novelist, Lady Frances Webb,' but you were deceiving the newspapers, for you had lost your power to paint!

"It was quite early in the morning of that eighth or ninth day of blessed dalliance, when the canvas still showed itself accusingly bare, that you threw down your brush and declared you were going back to London, 'because--because Colmere Abbey had robbed your hands of their power.'

"And what did I do when you told me this terrible thing? I said, wickedly and without shame, 'Would you go away and leave me all alone in idleness?'

"'Idleness?' you repeated, pretending not to understand.

"'Neither can I do any work--since you came to Colmere!'

"You stood quite still beside the easel for a breathless moment, then:

"'Do _I_--keep _you_--from working?' you asked.

"Your face tried to look sorry and amazed, but the triumph showed through and glorified your dear eyes.

"'Then certainly I must go away--at once--to-day,' you kept on, but you came straight across the room and placed your hands upon my shoulders. 'Just this once--just one time, sweetheart, then I'll go straight away and never see you again!'

"And that night, true to your promise, you did go away, but I followed you to the gates--and when I saw horses ready saddled there to take you away from me, the high resolves I had made came fluttering to earth. I put my hands up to your face and kissed you. During all the giddy joy of that day's confessional I had kept from doing this, but--not when I saw you leaving!

"'I wish that this kiss could mark your cheek--and let all the world know that you are mine,' I whispered, shivering against you in that first madness of fear over losing you.

"'You've made a mark!' you laughed fondly. 'A mark that I shall carry all the days of my life.'

"But I was still fearful.

"'You may know that you are marked, but how will the world--how will other women know that you are mine?'

"'The world shall know it,' you declared, brushing back my hair and kissing me again. 'There will never be another woman in my life--and some day, when I can paint your portrait, it will certainly know then. To me you are so very beautiful.'"

Another letter was just a note, addressed to London, and evidently written in great haste to catch a delayed post-bag.

"Oh, my dear, that orange tree of ours--that you and I planted together that day--is putting out tiny blossoms! Do you suppose it is a happy omen, Jim? How I have worked with it through this dreary winter--and now to think that it is blooming!

"Your dear hands have touched it! It is a living thing which can receive my caresses and repay their tenderness by growing tall and strong and beautiful--like you. Do you wonder that I love it?

"When you come again I shall take you out to see it, and we shall walk softly up to the shelf where it stands--so carefully, to keep from jarring a single leaf--and we shall separate the branches, still very carefully, to look down at the little new stems. And, Jim--Jim--the blossoms will be like starry young eyes looking up at us! The pink, faintly-showing glow will be as delicate as a tiny cheek, when sleep has flushed it--and the petals will close over our fingers with all the clinging softness of a helpless little clutch!

"We will be very happy for a little while, but, because I am savage and resentful over our delayed joy, I shall cry on your shoulder and say it's cruel--_cruel_--that you and I have only this plant to love together."

After this came two or three more, like it, then I reached for one which brought a misty wetness to my eyes. The lover was gone--quite gone--and the woman had seemed to feel that they would meet no more.

... "At other times I remember all the months which have gone by since then--and the miles of dark water which roll between your land and mine. God pity the woman who has a lover across the sea!

"_Am_ I sorry that I sent you away? You ask me this--yet how can you! How many letters I have written, bidding you, nay _begging_ you to come back--how many times have I dropped them into the post-bag in the hall--then, after an hour's thought, have run in terror and snatched them out again!

"I am trying so hard to be good! Can I hold out--just a little while longer? I am going to die young, remember, and that is the one hope which consoles me! It used to be that I shrank from the medical men who told me this--who told me with their pitying eyes and grave looks--but now I welcome their gravity. Sir Humphrey Davy has written a letter to my husband, advising him to send me off to Italy for this incoming winter--but I shall not go! 'I fear that dread phthisis in the rigor of English cold,' he writes--but for me it can not come too soon!

"... Yet all the time the knowledge haunts me that our lives are passing! I can not bear it! I spend the hours out in the garden--where the sun-dial tells me--all _silently_--of the day's wearing on.

"Since you went away I can not listen to the sound of the clock in the hall. That chime--that holy trustful chime--'O Lord, our God, be Thou our Guide,' shames the unholy prayer on my lips.

"Then the clock ticks, ticks, ticks--all day--all night--on, and on, and on--to remind me of our hearts' wearying beats! Does this thought ever come to madden you? That our hearts have only so many times to throb in this life--and when we are apart every pulsation is wasted?"

I thrust this letter back into its place--then hastily closed down the desk. The sensation of reading a thing like that is not pleasant. She had written with an awful, _awful_ pain in her heart--and she had lived before the days of anesthetics!

"Women don't feel things like that--now," I muttered, as I crossed the room and lowered the curtain. "They--they have too many other things to divert them, I suppose!"

I knew, however, that I was judging everybody by myself, and certainly _I_ had never known an awful hurt like that.

"Why, I could listen to a _taximeter_ tick--for a whole year--while Guilford was away from me, and I don't believe it would make me nervous for a sight of him."

I was considerably disgusted with myself for my callousness as I came to this conclusion, however, and I sat down in the window, overlooking the tiny strip of rose-garden to think it out. Presently I crossed the room again to the desk.

_"I'm_ not going to jest at scars--even if I haven't felt a wound!" I decided, once and for always.

I opened the desk then and gathered up the letters, packet by packet, tying them into one big bundle.

"Publish these--heart-throbs!"

I was so furious that I could have gagged Uncle Lancelot if he had opened his mouth--which he didn't dare do! In this respect he and grandfather are very much like living relatives. They'll argue with you through ninety-nine years of indecision, but once you've made up your mind irrevocably they close their lips into a sullen silence--saving their breath for "I told you so!"

"I don't see how anybody could have thought of such blasphemy!" I kept on. "It would be like a vivisection! That's what people want though, nowadays--they won't have just a book! They want to be present at a clinic!--They want to see others' hearts writhe--because they have no feelings of their own!"

Then, after my thoughts had had time to get away from the past up into the present and project themselves, somewhat spitefully, into the future, I made another decision, slamming the desk lid to accentuate it.

"I shall not publish them myself--nor ever give anybody else a chance to publish them!" I declared. "By rights they are not really mine! I am just their guardian, because Aunt Patricia couldn't take them on her journey with her--and some day I shall take them on a journey with me. To Colmere Abbey--that dream-house of mine! That's the thing to do! And burn them on the hearth in the library, where she likely burned his--if she did burn them! Of course I can't run the risk of what the next generation might do!"

This last thought tormented me as I fell asleep.

"No, I can not hand those letters down to my daughters," I decided drowsily, being in that hazy state where the mind traverses unheard-of fields--unheard-of for waking thought--and queer little twisting decisions come. "They would _never_ be able to understand!"

I was aroused by this hypothesis into sudden wakefulness.

"Of course they could not understand--me or my feelings!" I muttered, sitting up in bed and facing the darkness defiantly. "They _could_ not--if--_if_ they were Guilford's daughters, too!"

Chapter V

Et Tu, Brute!

My first waking thought the next morning had nothing on earth to do with the dilemma of the day before. I stretched my arms lazily, then a little shrinkingly, as I remembered what the daily grind would be. There was to be a Flag Day celebration of the Daughters of the American Revolution--and I was to report Major Coleman's speech. That's why I shrank. I am not a society woman.

"D. A. R.," I grumbled, jumping out of bed and going across to the window to see what kind of day we were going to have.--"_D-a-r-n!_"

Anyway, the day was all right, and after waving a welcome to the sun--whose devout worshiper I am--I rubbed a circle of dust off the mirror and looked at myself. Every woman has distinctly pretty days--and distinctly homely ones; and usually the homely ones come to the front viciously when you're booked for something extraordinary. However, this proved to be one of my good-looking periods, and out of sheer gratitude I polished off the whole expanse of the mirror. Incidentally, I am not an absolutely dustless housekeeper, in spite of my craze for simplicity. I consider that there are only two things that need be kept passionately clean in this life--the human skin and the refrigerator.

"Are you going to dress for the fête--before you go to the office?" mother inquired rebelliously, as she saw me arranging my hair with that look of masculine expectation later on in the morning. "Why don't you get your other work off, then come back home and dress?"

"Well--because," I answered indifferently.

"But the _Sons_ of the Revolution are going to meet with the Daughters!" she warned.

"I know that."

As if to demonstrate my possession of this knowledge I turned away from the mirror and displayed my festive charms. A light gray coat-suit had been converted into the deception of a gala garment by the addition of Irish lace; and mother, looking it over contemptuously, went into her own bedroom for a moment, and came back carrying her diamond-studded D. A. R. pin. She held it out toward me--with the air of a martyr.

"But--aren't you going to wear it yourself?" I asked, with a little feeling of awe at the lengths of mother-love. She had been regent of her chapter--and loved the organization well enough to go to Washington every year.

"No."

"Then--then do you mean to say that you're not going to Mrs. Walker's to-day?"

She shook her head.

"Why--mother!"

I turned to her and saw that a tear had dropped down upon the last golden bar bridging the wisp of red, white and blue. There were ten bars in all, each one engraved for an ancestor--and when I wore the thing I felt like a foreign diplomat sitting for his picture.

"What's the matter, honey?" I asked. She had always been my little girl, and I felt at times as if I were unduly severe in my discipline of her.

"Grace, you don't know how I feel!"

The words came jerkily--and I knew that I was in for it.

"Does your head ache?" I asked hastily. "You'd better get on the car and ride out into the--"

"My head _doesn't_ ache!" she denied stoutly. "It's my h-heart!--To see you--Grace Chalmers Christie--racing around to such things as this in a coat-suit! You ought, by right of birth and charm, be the chief ornament of such affairs as this--the chief ornament, I say--yet you go carrying a _'hunk o' copy paper_!'"

"In my bag," I modified.

"And you get up and leave places before you get a bite of food--and race back to that office, like a wild thing, to _'turn it in_!'"

This contemptuous use of my own jargon caused me to laugh.

"And do you think that the wearing of this heavy pin will prove so exhausting that I'll have to stay at Mrs. Walker's to-day for a bite of food?" I asked.

She looked at me in helpless reproach.

"I want you to go to this thing as a D. A. R.," she explained, "not as a _Herald_ reporter."

"Then I'll wear it," I promised, kissing her soothingly. "But you must go, too."

She shook her head again.

"I can't--I really can't!" she said. "I've got nothing fine enough to wear. This is going to be a magnificent thing, every one tells me--with all the local Sons--and this wonderful Major Coleman to lecture on flags."

She looked at me suspiciously as she uttered her plaint about the Sons being present, and in answer, I thrust forward one gray suede pump.

"But I'm ready for any Son on earth--Oldburgh earth," I protested. "Don't you _see_ my exquisite lace collar--and the pink satin rose in my chapeau--and this silken and buskskin footgear? Surely no true Son would ever pause to suspect the 'hunk o' copy paper' which lieth beneath all this glory!"

"Isn't Guilford going with you?" she called after me as I left the house a few minutes later. "Will he meet you at the office?"

"No--thank heaven--it's an awful thing to have to listen to two men talk at the same time--especially when you're taking one down in shorthand--and Guilford is mercifully busy this afternoon."

I had a bunch of pink roses, gathered fresh that morning from our strip of garden, and I stopped in the office of the owner and publisher when I had reached the _Herald_ building. Just because he's old, and drank out of the same canteen with my grandfather I made a habit of keeping fresh flowers in his gray Rookwood vase. This spot of color, together with the occasional twinkle from his eyes, made the only break in the dusty newspapery monotony of the room. He looked up from his desk, and his face brightened as he saw my holiday attire.

"Well, Grace?"

He started up, big and shaggy--and wistful--like a St. Bernard. I like old men to look like St. Bernards--and young ones to look like greyhounds.

"Don't get up--nor clear off a chair for me," I warned, catching up the vase and starting toward the water-cooler. "I can't stay a minute."

He collapsed into his squeaky revolving chair. When he was a lad a Yankee minnie ball had implanted a kiss upon his left shoulder-blade, and he still carried that side with a jaunty little hike--a most flirtatious little hike, which, however, caused the distinguished rest of him to appear unduly severe.

"Ah! But you must explain the 'dolled-up' aspect," he begged.

I laughed at the schoolgirl slang.

"Why, this is Flag Day!" I told him. "How can you have forgotten?--There will be a gigantic celebration at Mrs. Hiram Walker's--and all the pedigreed world will be there."

He smiled--slowly.

"And you're writing it up?"

"Just Major Coleman's lecture! They say he is quite the most learned man in the world on the subject of flags. He knows them and loves them. He carries them about with him on these lecture tours in felt-lined steel cases."

"Cases?" he smiled.

"Certainly," I answered. "Whatever a man esteems most precious--or useful--he has cases for! The commercial man has his sample cases--the medical man his instrument cases--the artistic man, his--"

"Divorce cases," he interrupted dryly.

"Alas, yes!" I sighed, my thoughts traveling back.

He wheeled slowly, giving me a glance which finally tapered off with the pink rosebuds in my hands.

"Then," he asked kindly, "if you're going to a very great affair this afternoon, why don't you keep these flowers and wear them yourself?"

I shook my head.

"But I'm a newspaper woman!" I said with dignity. "I might as well wear a vanity-bag as to wear flowers."

"Bosh! You're not a newspaper woman, Grace," he denied, still looking at me half sadly. "And yet--well, sometimes it is--just such women as you who do the amazing things."

"Mother thinks so, certainly!" I laughed. "But you meant in what way, for instance?"

He hesitated, studying me for a moment, while I held still and let him, for there's always a satisfaction in being studied when there's a satin rose in your hat.

"Oh--nothing," he finally answered, with a look of regret upon his face.

"But it is something!" I persisted, "and, even if I am in a big hurry, I shan't budge until you tell me!"

"Well, since you insist--I only meant to say that I'd been doing a little thinking on my own account lately--as owner and publisher of this paper, with its interests at heart--and I've wondered just how much a woman might accomplish, after a man had failed."

"A woman?"

"By the ill use of her eyes, I mean," he confessed, his own eyes twinkling a little. "Women can gain by the ill use of their eyes what men fail to accomplish by their straightforward methods."

"But that's what men hate so in women!" I said.

He nodded.

"Ye-es--maybe! That is, they make a great pretense of hating a woman when she uses her eyes to any end save one--charming them for their own dear sakes!"

"They naturally grudge her the spoils she gains by the ill use of those important members," I answered defensively.

"Oh," he put in quickly, "I wasn't going to suggest that you do any such thing--unless you wanted to! I was merely thinking--that was all!"

"And besides," I kept on, "all the men who have ever done anything worth being interviewed for--nearly all of them, I mean--are so old that--"

He interrupted me wrathfully.

"Old men are not necessarily blind men, Miss Christie," he explained. "But we'll change the subject, if you please!"

"Anyway, it doesn't happen once in twenty years that a newspaper woman gets a scoop just because she's a woman," I continued, not being ready just then to change the subject even if he had demanded it.

"It does," he contradicted. "It's one of the most popular plots for magazine stories."

"Bah! Magazine stories and life are two different propositions, my dear Captain Macauley!" I explained with a blasé air. "I should like some better precedent before I started out on an assignment."

"Yet you are a most unprecedented young woman," he replied in a meaning tone. "I've suspected it before--but recent reports confirm my worst imaginings."

I glanced at him searchingly.

"You've been talking with mother?" I ventured.

For a moment he was inscrutable.

"Oh, I know you have!" I insisted. "She's told it to everybody who will listen."

"The story of the Coburn-Colt that wasn't hatched?"

His face was severe, but the little upward twist of his left shoulder was twitching as if with suppressed emotion.

"She told you with tears in her eyes, I know," I kept on. "All the old friends get the tearful accompaniment."

"Well, miss, doesn't that make you all the more ashamed of your foolishness?" he demanded.

"My foolishness?"

Something seemed to give way under me as he said this, for he was always on my side, and I had never found sympathy lacking before.

"I mean that--that Don Quixote carried to an extreme becomes Happy Hooligan," he pronounced.

I drew back in amazement.

"Why, Captain Horace Macauley--of Company A--18th Kentucky Infantry!"

He tried hard not to smile.

"You needn't go so far back--stay in the present century, if you please."

"But ever since then--even to this good day and in a newspaper office, where the atmosphere is so cold-blooded that a mosquito couldn't fly around without getting a congestive chill, you know your reputation! Why, you could give the Don horse spurs and armor, then arrive a full week ahead of him at a windmill!"

"Tommy-rot."

"Supererogation is a prettier word," I amended, but he shook his head.

"No! Six syllables are like six figures-they get you dizzy when you commence fooling with them! Besides, I was discussing _your_ right to commit foolish acts of self-sacrificing, Grace, not mine."

"But it didn't seem foolish to me," I tried to explain.

"When you're working in this rotten newspaper office, where no woman could possibly feel at home, for the vigorous sum of seventy-five dollars a month?--Then it doesn't seem idiotic?"

"No!"

"And your mother moping and pining for the things she ought to have?"

"No-o--not much!"

"And Guilford Blake standing by, waiting like a gentleman for this fever of emancipation to pass by and desquamation to take place?"

This interested me.

"What's 'desquamation?'" I asked. "I haven't time to get my dictionary now."

"You couldn't find it in any save a medical dictionary, likely," he explained, with a pretense at patience. "Anyway, it's the peeling off process which follows a high fever--especially such fevers as you girls of this restless, modern temperament so often experience!"

I shivered.

"Ugh! It doesn't sound pretty!" I commented.

"Nor is it pretty," he assured me, "but it's very wholesome. Once you've caught the fever, lived through it, peeled off and got a shiny new skin you're forever immune against its return. This, of course, is what Guilford is waiting so patiently for. He is one of the most estimable young fellows I know, Grace, and--"

I looked wounded.

"Don't you suppose I know that?" I asked. Then glancing quickly at the watch bracelet on my wrist, and seeing with a gasp of relief that the hands were pointing toward the dangerous hour of three, I turned toward the door.

"I must hurry!" I plead. "You've really no idea what an interesting occasion a Flag Day celebration is, Captain Macauley!"

"No?" he smiled, understanding my sudden determination to leave.

"Indeed, no! Why, for three hundred and sixty-four days in the year you may have a gentle Platonic affection for General Washington, Paul Revere and the rest, but on the other day--Flag Day--your flame is rekindled into a burning zeal! You can't afford to be late! You must hurry!--Especially if you have to go there on the street-car!"

"It's a deuced pity you can't get up a zeal for a devoted _living_ man," he called after me in a severe voice as I reached the door. "It's a pity you can't see the idiocy of this determination of yours--before that publishing company revokes its offer."

"Well, who knows?" I answered, waving him a gay good-by. "I hate street-cars above everything, and I'm sorry my coupé isn't waiting at the door right now!"

Chapter VI

Flag Day

Now, according to my ethics, there are two kinds of men who go to daylight parties--idiots and those that are dragged there by their wives.

I had scarcely crossed the lawn of Seven Oaks and found for myself a modest place beside the speaker's stand--which was garlanded with as many different kinds of flags as there were rats in Hamelin Town--when I observed that this present congregation held a fair sprinkling of each kind.

But these held my attention for only a moment--because of the house in the background, and the trees overhead. (To be candid, Mrs. Hiram Walker's country place is not exactly a soothing retreat to visit when temptation is barking at your heels like a little hungry dog--and the desire of your heart begins with H.)

"House that's a Home" might have been written on the sign-board of the car-station much more truthfully than "Seven Oaks"--for only the immense patriarchal ones were included in the "Seven" there being hordes of lesser ones which were no more mentioned than children are when they're getting big enough to be paying railroad fare. The grove was well cared for, but not made artificial, and even the luxuriousness of the house itself could not hurt the charm, for the Hiram Walkers were human beings before they were society column acrobats.

Our families had always been friends, so I happened to know that years and years ago, when Mr. Walker was a clerk in an insurance office--with a horse and buggy for business through the week and joy unconfined on Sunday--they had been in the habit of haunting this spot, he and his slim young wife--bringing a basket full of supper and thrusting the baby's milk bottle down into the ice-cream freezer. Then, there were more years, of longing and saving; they bought the hill, patiently enduring a period of blue-prints and architectural advice before the house was built. By this time Mrs. Walker's slimness was gone, and Mr. Walker had found out the vanity of hair tonics--but the house was theirs at last. It was big and very beautiful--roomy, rather than mushroomy--and thoughtful, rambling, old-timey, spreading out a great deal of portico to the kiss of the sun. Brown-hooded monks and clanking beads ought, by rights, to have gone with that portico.

Then, the June sunshine was doing such wonders with the oaks, great and small, along the hillsides!

It touched up, with a tinge of glory, even the shining motor-cars in the driveway. There were dozens of them--limousines, touring cars, lady-like coupés--with their lazy, half-asleep attendants, and the regularity of their unbroken files, their dignity, their quietness, and the glitter of the sun against their metal gave them something of a martial aspect. The silver sheen of the lamps and levers was brought out in a manner to suggest a line of marching men, silent, but very potent--and enjoying more than a little what they offered to view, the dazzle of helmet, sword and coat-of-mail.

The beauty of it all--the softened glory of the shade in which I sat making me feel that I was a spectator at a tournament--cast a spell over me, for I never find it very hard to fall spellbound. Isn't it funny that when you're possessed of an intelligence which has fits of St. Vitus' dance they call it Imagination?--That's the kind mine is--jerky and unreliable. It is the kind of imagination which can take a dried-up acorn and draw forth a medieval forest; or gaze upon a rusty old spur and live over again the time when knights were bold.

But to get back to "those present."

First of all, I noted Oldburgh's best-known remittance man. I noted him mentally, mind you, not paragraphically, for they never made me do the real drudgery of the society page. He was sitting beside his mama, swinging her gauze fan annoyingly against her lorgnette chain. His divorce the year before had come near uniting Church and State, since it's a fact that nothing so cements conflicting bodies like the uprising of a new common foe; and he had sinned against both impartially. After him came two or three financial graybeards; three or four yearling bridegrooms, not broken yet to taking the bit between their teeth and staying rebelliously at the office; a habitual "welcomer to our city"--Major Harvey Coleman, a high officer in the Sons of the American Revolution, and the pièce de résistence of this occasion--then--then--!

Well, certainly the impassive being next him was the most unsocial-looking man I had ever had my eyes droop beneath the gaze of!

He was sitting in the place of honor--in the last chair of the first row--but despite this, he so clearly did not belong at that party, and he so clearly wished himself away that I--well, I instantly began searching through the crowds to find a woman with handcuffs! I felt sure that, whoever she might be--she hadn't got him there any other way!

And yet--and yet--(my thoughts were coming in little dashing jerks like that) he _was_ rather too big for any one woman to have handled him!

I decided this after another look and another droop of my own eyes, for he was still looking--and that was what I decided about him first--that he was very _big_! Then misbehaving brown hair came next into my consciousness. It came to top off a picture which for a moment caused me to wonder whether he was really a flesh-and-blood man at Mrs. Walker's reception, or the spirit of some woodsman--come again, after many years, to haunt the grove of the Seven Oaks.

His New York clothes didn't make a bit of difference--except to spoil the illusion a little. They were all light gray, except for a glimpse of blue silk hose, and their perfection only served to remind you that it was a pity for a man who looked like _that_ to dress like _that_!

Modern man has but one artistic garment--a bathrobe; yet it wouldn't have relieved my feelings any if this man had been dressed in one. For he wasn't artistic--and certainly he wasn't modern!

Still, I felt the pity of it all, for he ought to have had better perceptions. He ought to have had his clothes and cosmic consciousness match! He ought to have been dressed in a coat of goatskin--and his knees ought to have been bare--and the rawhide thongs of his moccasins ought to have been strong and firm!

I had just reached this point in my plans for the change in his wardrobe, when our hostess bustled up and shooed me out of my quiet corner.

"Grace," she whispered, "move out a bit, will you, and let me crowd a man in over there--"

"In here?"

She nodded.

"Where he can't _escape_!" she explained.

I gathered up my opened sheet of copy paper and moved obediently into the next chair, which she had indicated.

"That's right--thank you! I've found out by experience that if you let certain suspicious characters linger on the ragged edges of a crowd like this they're sure to disappear."

Then she turned and beckoned to my Fifth-Avenue-looking backwoodsman--with a smile of triumph.

"_Him?_" I asked in surprise.

She was looking in his direction, so failed to see the expression of my face.

"It's no more than he deserves--having this American Revolution rubbed in on him," she observed absently. "I have never worked so hard in my life over any one man as I have over this identical Maitland Tait!"

I saw him rise and come toward her--then I began having trouble with my throat. I couldn't breathe very easily.

"Maitland Tait!" I gasped.

"Yes--_the_ Maitland Tait!"

Her voice sounded with a brass-band echo of victory.

"But how did you--"

"By outwitting Pollie Kendall--plague take her!"

The man was coming leisurely, stopping once to speak to one of the graybeard financiers.

"Have you met him?" Mrs. Walker asked carelessly, as he approached.

"No."

She turned to him.

"I'm going to put you in here--where you'll have to stay," she laughed, her big, heavy frame looking dwarfed beside his own towering height.

"I wasn't going to run away."

"No? You can't always tell--and I thought it safe to take every precaution, for this lecture may be long, and it's certain to be irritating to one of your nationality.--In this location you'll be in the clutches of the Press, you see, and--by the way, you must meet Miss Christie!--Mr. Tait, Miss Christie!"

His face was still perfectly impassive, and he bowed gravely--with that down-to-the-belt grace which foreigners have. I nodded the pink satin rose on my hat in his direction. This was all! Neither made any further demonstration than that!--And to think that since Creation's dawn--the world over--the thing is done just as idly and carelessly as that! "Mr. Tait, Miss Christie!"--These are the words which were said--and, dear me, all the days of one's life ought to be spent in preparation for the event!

"You are a Daughter of the Revolution, I presume?" his voice finally asked me--a deep clear voice, which was strong enough to drown out the Wagnerian processionals beating at that moment against my brain, and to follow me off on the mother-of-pearl cloud I had embarked upon. It was a glorious voice, distinctly un-American, but with the suggestion of having the ability to do linguistic contortions. He looked like a man who had traveled far--over seas and deserts--and his voice confirmed it. It proclaimed that he could bargain with equal ease in piasters and pence. Still, it was a big wholesome voice. It matched the coat of goatskin, the bare knees and the moccasins I had planned for him.

"Yes, I am," I answered.

Our eyes met for an instant, as he disengaged his gaze from that ten-barred insignia on my coat. Far, far back, concealed by his dark iris, was a tinge of amused contempt.

"Then I dare say you're interested in this occasion?" he inquired. I shouldn't say that he inquired, for he didn't. His tone held a challenge.

"No, indeed, I'm not!" I answered foolishly. "I came only because I have to write up Major Coleman's speech for my paper. I am a special writer for the _Herald_."

And it was then that he smiled--really smiled. I saw a transformation which I had never seen in any other man's face, for with him a smile escapes! There is a breaking up of the ruggedness, an eclipse of the stern gravity for a moment, and--no matter how much you had cared for these an instant before--you could not miss them then--not in that twinkling flood of radiance!

"Oh--so you're not an ancestor-worshiper?"

"No."

"But I thought Americans were!" he insisted.

"Americans?" I repeated loftily. "Why, of course, that's an English--religion."

"Not always," he answered grimly, and the Italian band stationed behind the clump of boxwood cut short any further conversation.

I was glad, for I did not want to talk to him then. I merely wanted to stand off--and look at him--and tell myself what manner of man he must be.

To do this I glanced down at my copy paper, with one eyelid raised in favor of his profile. An ancestor-worshiper? Absurd! Ancestors were quite out of the question with him, I felt sure. There was something gloriously _traditionless_ about his face and expansive frame. But his hands? Those infallible records of what has gone before?--I dropped my eyes to their normal position. His hands were _good_! They were big and long and brown--that shade of brownness that comes to a meerschaum pipe after it has been kissed a time or two by nicotine. And his hair was brown, too light by several shades to match with his very dark eyes, but it likely looked lighter on account of its conduct, standing up, and away, and back from his face. His complexion spoke of an early-to-bed and early-to-tub code of ethics. His nose and mouth were well in the foreground.

"You are a man who cares nothing at all for your ancestors--but you'll care a great deal for your descendants!" was the summing up I finally made of him.

At the close of the band's Hungarian Rhapsody he leaned over and whispered to me.

"Did you say the _Herald_?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I have had my--attention called to your paper recently," he said, in so serious a tone that I was compelled to look up and search for the smile which I felt must lurk behind it. And when I saw it there I felt reassured, and smiled in response.

"So they told me at the office," I said with great cordiality. "Is it three or four of our reporters you've thrown down your front steps?"

"Oh, I haven't got close enough to them to throw them down the steps," he disclaimed quickly. "That's one thing you have to guard against with reporters. They've got you--if they once see the whites of your eyes!"

I felt it my duty to bristle, in defense of my kind.

"Not unless your eyes _talk_," I said. Then, when he stared at me in uncertainty for a moment, I dropped my own eyes again, for I felt that they were proclaiming their convictions as loudly as a Hyde Park suffragette meeting.

The band at that moment struck up _The Star-Spangled Banner_ in a manner to suggest the president's advent into the theater, and I searched in my bag for my pencil. I had seen the lecturer cough.

"I say--how long is this convocation supposed to last?" Maitland Tait inquired in a very inconspicuous whisper, as the white-flanneled lion of the affair arose from his chair and became the cynosure of lorgnettes.

"Well, this talk will absorb about forty-five minutes, I should hazard," I said. Already I had had the forethought to jot down the usual opening: "Ladies and Gentlemen--Daughters and Sons of the American Revolution: It is with a feeling of profoundest pleasure that I have the privilege of being with you to-day," etc. So for the moment my attention was undivided.

"And there will be other talks?"

"Yes."

"And a walk through the gardens, I believe Mrs.--Mrs. Walker said?"

"Probably so. The Seven Oaks gardens are very lovely in June."

At the mention of gardens his eyes wandered, with what I fancied was a tinge of homesickness, toward the colorful flowering spaces beyond the box hedges. There were acres and acres of typical English gardens back there; and the odor of the sweet old-fashioned shrubs came in on gentle heat waves from the open area. He looked as if he would like to be back there in those English-looking gardens--with all the people gone.

Chapter VII

Straws Point

"And are you going to write up the whole thing?" he inquired, during a little commotion caused by one of the large flags slipping from its stand and threatening to obscure the speaker.

"You mean make a society column report of it?"

"Yes."

"No. I'm a sort of special feature writer on the _Herald_, and I am to get only this speech of Major Coleman's to put in my Sunday page."

The lecture had commenced in good earnest by this time, and I was scribbling away in shorthand as I talked.

"Not one among us is insensible to the visions of patriotic pride and affection which the very name of 'Old Glory' conjures up within us, but at the same time we may do well to review, quite dispassionately, once in a while the wonderful chain of historical changes which came about in evolving this flag to its present form.... For we all realize that there is no perfect thing in this world which has not been an evolution from some imperfect thing.... When Pope Gregory, the"--Somethingth, I quite failed to catch his number--"granted to Scotland the white cross of St. Andrew, and to England the red cross of St. George, he faintly surmised what a tempest in a teapot he was stirring up!"

He paused, and the man at my side got in a word, edgewise.

"All of it?" he asked, looking aghast at the pages of long-tailed dots and dashes under my hand. I laughed.

"I'm paid to do it," I answered. "I don't disfigure my handwriting this way for nothing."

"But--but--you must be very clever," he commented, so appalled at the thought that he forgot he was talking to a stranger. I like that faculty. I like a man who dares to be awkwardly sincere.

"Not clever--only very needy," I replied, turning over the page as I saw the lecturer replace the white flag of St. Andrew into its stand and take up the thread of his talk. "And I don't know that I need get every word of the discourse. The women who read my page don't care a rap about flags--but they do care to see a picture of Major Coleman and his wife and their dog on the piazza of their winter home, just out from Tampa!--I've got to have enough of this lecture to carry that picture."

He nodded gravely.

"I see. But after you get this report?"

"I'm going back to the city," I answered. "I have to catch the five o'clock car in."

"... The jealousy became so fierce between the two nations--the absurd jealousy over which should first salute the flag of the other--St. George claiming great superiority in the way of godliness over St. Andrew, and St. Andrew, with the true Scotch spirit, stiffening his neck to the breaking point, while waiting for St. George to take off his hat to him, that when the story of this dissension reached the ears of Pope Gregory, he--"

I never knew what he did until afterward, for at that moment I saw Maitland Tait slip his watch out carefully, guarding the action with an outspread left hand.

"I've an engagement at five, too," he said.

"... He determined to lose no time," was the next sentence I found myself jotting down on paper, and wondering whether Major Coleman had really said such a thing or whether it had been born in my mind of the stress of the moment.... "He was a man of the most impulsive, sometimes of the most erratic, actions."

"Of course!" my heart said between thumps. "I shouldn't like him if he were not."

"I can make my excuses to Mrs. Walker at the same time you make yours," the deep voice said, in a surprisingly soft tone.

"... For he saw in such a course protection and peace," Major Coleman announced. "All the world suspected that his ultimate aim was union, but--"

"An international alliance," my heart explained, as I jotted down the words of the lecturer.

"Mayn't I take you back to town in my car?"

"... And all the world knew that he was a man absolutely untrammeled by tradition," the white-flanneled one proclaimed.

"Thank you, that would be lovely, but I'm afraid Mrs. Walker won't consent to your going so soon," I said between curlicues.

"I'm going, however," he answered. "I've an important engagement, and--I'm not going to stay at this--this," he closed his lips firmly, but the silence said "_cussed_," that dear, fierce, American adjective. "I'm not going to stay at this party one minute after you're gone. I don't like to talk to just any woman."

"... Yet I would have you understand that he was a temperamental man," was thundered in a warning tone from the speaker's stand. "He was quick in judgment and action, but he was fine and sensitive in spirit. I've never a doubt that he disliked and feared the occasion which caused this precipitate action. He was quaking in his boots all the time, but he was courageous. He decided to make brief work of formalities and take a short cut to his heart's desire."

"What was it he did?" I asked of Mr. Tait, startled at the thought of what I'd missed. "Do you know what this thing was that Pope Gregory did?"

"No-o--listen a minute!" he suggested.

"... Can't you just imagine now that he was afraid of what people might say--or do?" asked the major encouragingly. "It was absolutely unprecedented in the annals of history--such a quick, rash and sudden decision. If England and Scotland were going to be eternally bickering over their flags, they should have _one_ flag! They should be united! They should--"

"The _Union Jack_!" whispered the deep voice close at my side, while the grave dark eyes lighted, as--as they should have lighted, or I'd never have forgiven him. "He created the Union Jack, by George!"

And the speaker on the stand demonstrated the truth of this conclusion by displaying a big British flag, which caught in its socket as he attempted to lift it and occasioned another pause in the speech.

"This enthusiasm makes me hungry," Maitland Tait observed, as the audience courteously saluted the ancient emblem of hostility, and the echoes of applause died away. "Since we're going to get no tea here, can't we drive by some place up-town? There's a good-looking place in Union Street--"

"But that would make you very late for your engagement, I'm afraid," I demurred. "It will take some little time to drive in."

He looked at me wonderingly for a moment.

"My engagement? Oh, yes--but it can wait."

"Then, if it can, I'm afraid Mrs. Walker will not let you off. I happen to know that--"

He cut short my argument by motioning me to pay attention to the speaker, who at the moment had replaced the flag of Pope Gregory's cunning, and was talking away at a great rate.

"... Yet, who can say that the hastiest actions do not often bring about the best results? Certainly when a decision is made out of an excessive desire to bring happiness to all parties concerned, its immediate action can not fail to denote a wholesome heartiness which should always be emulated.... Different from most men of his native country, possessing a genuinely warm heart, a subtle mentality, coupled with a conscience which impelled him always toward the right, he was enabled, by this one impetuous act, to become a benefactor of mankind! What he longed for was harmony--a harmonious union; and what he has achieved has been the direct outcome of a great longing. He created a union--wholesome, strengthening and permanent," I took down in shorthand.

* * * * *

I have a confused impression--I suppose I should say post-impression, for I didn't remember anything very clearly until afterward--that Betsy Ross, Pope Gregory, the Somethingth, and Mrs. Hiram Walker were all combining to tie my hands and feet together with thongs of red, white and blue.

It seemed hours and hours before that lecture ended, then more hours before the tall restless man and I could make our way through a sea of massaged faces to a distant point where our hostess stood giving directions to a white-coated servant.

She turned to me, with a fluttering little air of regret, when I reached her side.

"Grace, surely you don't have to hurry off at this unchristian hour!" she insisted. "My dear, you really should stay! Solinski has arranged the loveliest spread, and I'm not going to keep the company waiting forever to get to it, either!--The ices will be the surprise of the season."

"I'm sorry," I began, but she interrupted me.

"Why _didn't_ your mother come?"

Already her vague regret over my own hasty departure had melted away, and as she saw the tall man following me, evidently bent upon the same mission as mine, she put her query in a perfunctory way to hide her chagrin.

"Mother couldn't come, Mrs. Walker. There is only one D. A. R. pin in the family, as you know--and I had to wear that."

Maitland Tait, looking over my shoulder, heard my explanation and smiled.

"It is a great deprivation to miss the rest of your charming party, Mrs. Walker," he began, but as he mentioned going, in a cool final voice, our hostess emitted a little terrified shriek.

"What? Not you, too!"

His face was the picture of deep contrition.

"I _am_ sorry," he said, as only an Englishman can say it, and it always sounds as if he were digging regret up out of his heart with a shovel, "but I have an important engagement that really can not wait--"

"And the General Seth O'Callen Chapter fairly holding its breath to meet you!" she wailed, the despair in her voice so genuine that it was impossible to keep back a smile. "That is our chapter composed entirely of _young_ women, you know, and I'd given their regent my word of honor that you'd be here to-day!"

"Which the Regent has entirely forgotten in the charm of that delightful lecture we've just heard, I'm sure," he answered, his tones regretfully mollifying. "If it were at all possible for me to get word to the man--the men--"

The rest of the fabrication was cut short and drowned out by the shriek of a trolley-car, grinding noisily round a curve of the track at that instant. It was the five-o'clock car, and I had grown to watch for its shriek as fearfully as ever Cinderella listened for the stroke of twelve from the castle clock. For me there was never a garden party without its trolley-car back to the city--its hateful, five-o'clock car--its hurried, businesslike, hungry summons--while ice in tea glasses tinkled to the echo.

From force of long habit now that grinding sound of the car-wheels acted upon my nervous system like a fire alarm upon an engine horse--and I started to run.

"Charming party--so sorry to have to rush off this way--hope next time I'll not be so busy--yes, I'll tell mother!"

I gathered the folds of copy paper close, having forgotten to thrust them away out of sight into my bag, and made a break for the front gate. Then, as I reached the line of waiting motor-cars, I remembered--and stopped still with a foolish little feeling.

Looking back I saw Mrs. Walker shaking hands in an injured fashion with her troublesome lion--who, after the manner of lions, proved that he could afford anxiety as well after being caught as before,--and turning her back resolutely upon his departing glory.--The whole of the General Seth O'Callen Chapter was before her, I knew she was thinking bitterly.

"Thank goodness she won't see this!" I volunteered to myself, as the tall gray figure came hastily down the line and caught up with me. "She has troubles enough of her own, and--and she won't stop to wonder over whether I went back to the city by trolley, motor, or chariot of fire!"

Chapter VIII

Longest Way Home

"You hadn't forgotten?" he inquired, coming up behind me with an expression of uneasiness as I passed the first two or three cars in the line.

"No--that is, I forgot for only a moment! I'm so used to going to town on this trolley-car."

"Then--ah, here we are--"

The limousine to which I was conducted was a gleaming dark-blue affair, with light tan upholstery, and the door-knobs, clock-case and mouth-piece of the speaking-tube were of tortoise-shell.

The chauffeur touched something and the big creature began a softened, throbbing breathing. Isn't it strange how we can not help regarding automobiles as _creatures_? Sometimes we think of them as gliding swans--at other times as fiery-eyed dragons. It all depends upon whether _we're_ the duster, or the dustee.

I gained the idea as I stepped into this present one--which of course belonged to the gliding swan variety--that its master must be rather ridiculously well-to-do--for a cave-man. His initials were on the panels, and the man at the wheel said, "Mr. Tait, sir," after a fashion that no American-trained servant, white, black, or almond-eyed, ever said. Evidently the car had come down from Pittsburgh and the chauffeur had made a longer journey. Together, however, they spelled perfection--and luxury. Still, strange to say, the notion of this man's possible wealth did not get on my throat and suffocate me, as the notion of Guilford's did. I felt that the man himself really cared very little about it all. The idea of his being a man who could do hard tasks patiently did not fade in the glamour of this damask and tortoise-shell.

"Which is--the longest way to town?" he asked in a perfectly grave, matter-of-fact way as we started.

"Down this lane to the Franklin Pike, then out past Fort Christian to Belcourt Boulevard--and on to High Street," I replied in a perfectly grave, matter-of-fact way, as if he were a tubercular patient, bound to spend a certain number of hours in aimless driving every day.

"Thank you," he answered very seriously, then turned to the chauffeur.

"Collins, can you follow this line? I think we drove out this way the day the car came?"

"Oh, yes, sir--thank you," the man declared, slipping his way in and out among the throngs of other vehicles.

Then as we whirled away down the pike I kept thinking of this man--this young Englishman, who had come to America and elevated himself into the position of vice-president and general-manager of the Consolidated Traction Company, but, absurdly enough, no thought of the limousine nor the traction company came into my musings. I thought of him as a spirit--a spirit-man, who had lived in the woods. He had dwelt in a hut--or a cave--and toiled with his hands, hewing down trees, burning charcoal, eating brown bread at noon. Then, at dusk, he laid aside his tools, rumbling homeward in a great two-wheeled cart, whistling as he went, but softly--because he was deep in thought.

The seven _ages_ of man are really nothing to be compared in point of interest with the different conditions of mind which women demand of them.

Very young girls seek about--often in vain--for a man who can compel; then later, they demand one who can feel; afterward their own expansion clamors for one who can understand--but the final stage of all is reached when the feminine craving can not be satisfied save by the man who can _achieve_.

This, of course, indicates that the woman herself is experienced--sometimes even to the point of being a widow--but it is decidedly a satisfying state of mind when it is once reached, because it is permanent.

And your man of achievement is pretty apt to be an uncomplicated human. His deepest "problem" is how to make the voices of the nightingale and alarm clock harmonize. For he is a lover between suns--and a _laborer_ during them.

At Solinski's Japanese tea-room in Union Street, the limousine slowed up. The band was playing _The Rosary_ as we went in, for it was the hour of the afternoon for the professional seers and seen of Oldburgh's medium world to drop in off the sidewalks for half an hour and dawdle over a tutti-frutti. The ultra-sentimental music always gets such people as these--and the high excruciating notes of this love-wail were ringing out with an intense poignancy.

"Each hour a pearl--each pearl a prayer--"

"Which table do you prefer?" my companion asked me, but for a moment I failed to answer. I was looking up at the clock, and I saw that the hands were pointing to six. I had met Maitland Tait at four!--Thus I had two pearls already on my string, I reckoned.

"Oh, which table--well, farther back, perhaps!"

I came down to earth after that, for getting acquainted with the caprices of a man's appetite is distinctly an earthly joy. Yet it certainly comes well within the joy class, for nothing else gives you the comfortable sense of possession that an intimate knowledge of his likes and dislikes bestows.

Just after the "each-hour-a-pearl" stage you begin to feel that you have a _right_ to know whether he takes one lump or two! And the homely, every-day joys are decidedly the best. You don't tremble at the sounds of a man's rubber heels at the door, perhaps, after you're so well acquainted with him that you've set him a hasty supper on the kitchen table, or your fingers have toyed with his over the dear task of baiting a mouse-trap together--but he gets a dearness in this phase which a pedestal high as Eiffel Tower couldn't afford.--It is this dearness which makes you endure to see Prince Charming's coronet melted down into ducats to buy certified milk!

"And what are--those?" Maitland Tait asked, after the tea-service was before us, and I had poured his cup. He was looking about the place with a frank interest, and his gaze had lighted upon a group of marcelled, manicured manikins at a near-by table. They were chattering and laughing in an idly nervous fashion.

I dropped in two lumps of sugar and passed him his cup.

"They are wives," I answered.

"What?"

"Just wives."

Being English, it took him half a second to smile--but when he did I forgave him the delay.

"_Just_ wives? Then that means not mothers, nor helpmeets, nor--"

"Nor housekeepers, nor suffragettes, nor saints, nor sinners, nor anything else that the Lord intended, nor apprehended," I finished up with a fierce suddenness, for that was what Guilford wanted me to be. "They're _just_ wives."

He stirred his tea thoughtfully.

"That's what I find all over America," he said, but not with the air of making a discovery. "Men must work, and women must _eat_."

"And the sooner it's over the sooner to--the opera," I said.

He looked at me in surprise.

"Then you recognize it?" he asked.

"Recognize it? Of course _I_ recognize it--but I'm not a fair sample. I work for my living."

He was silent for a moment, looking at the manikins with a sort of half-hearted pity.

"If they could all be induced to work they'd not be what they are--to men," he observed.

"To men?"

"I find that an American wife is a tormenting side-issue to a man's busy life," he said, with a tinge of regret. "And I am sorry, too--for they are most charming. For my part, I should like a woman who could do things--who was clever enough to be an inspiration."

I nodded heartily, forgetful of personalities.

"I too like the workers in the world," I coincided. "My ideal man is one whose name will be made into a verb."

He laughed.

"Like Marconi, eh, and Pasteur--and--"

"And Boycott, and Macadam, and--oh, a host of others!"

It was quite a full minute before he spoke again.

"I don't see how I could make my name into a verb," he said quietly, "but I must begin to think about it. It is certainly a valuable suggestion."

It was my turn to laugh, which I did, nervously.

"In Oldburgh, Tait seems to stand for the opposite of dictate," I hazarded. "That means to _talk_, and you won't--talk."

"But I am talking," he insisted. "I'm asking you questions as fast as ever I can."

"However, your technique is wrong," I replied. "You shouldn't ask questions of a newspaper woman. You should let her ask the questions, and you should furnish the answers."

"But you're not a newspaper woman now, are you?" he demanded in some alarm. "I hope not--and certainly I must ask you questions before I begin to tell you things. There are quite a few facts which I wish to find out now."

"And they are, first--?"

"Where you live?"

I told him, and he took from his pocket a small leather book with his name, Maitland Tait, and an address in smaller letters which I could not make out, on the inside lining. In a small, rather cramped hand, he wrote the address I gave him, "1919 West Clydemont Place," then looked up at me.

"Next?" I laughed, in a flutter.

"Next I want to know when you will let me come to see you?"

"When?" I repeated, rather blankly.

He drew slightly back.

"I should have said, of course, _if_ you will let me come, but--"

"But I shall be very glad to have you come," I made haste to explain. "I--I was only thinking!"

I was thinking of my betrothed--for the first time that afternoon.

"The length of time I am to stay in the South is very uncertain," he went on to explain with a gentle dignity. "At first it appeared that I might have to make a long stay, but we are settling our affairs so satisfactorily that I may be able to get back to Pittsburgh at any time now. That's why I feel that I can't afford to lose a single day in doing the really important things."

"Then come," I said, with a friendly show, which was in truth a desperate spirit of abandon. "Come some day--"

"To-morrow?" he asked.

"To-morrow--at four."

But during the rest of the meal grandfather and Uncle Lancelot came and took their places on either side of me. They were distinctly de trop, but I could not get rid of them.

"This is--really the wrong thing to do, Grace," grandfather said, so soberly that when I rose to go and looked in the mirror to see that my hat was all right, his own sad blue eyes were looking out at me in perplexed reproach. "--Very wrong."

Then the sad blue eyes took in the lower part of my face. I believe I've neglected to say that there is a dimple in my chin, and Uncle Lancelot's spirit is a cliff-dweller living there. He comes out and taunts the thoughtful eyes above.

"Nonsense, parson!" he expostulated jauntily now. "Look on the lips while they are red! She's _young_!"

"Youth doesn't excuse folly," said grandfather severely.

"It exudes it, however," the other argued.

I turned away, resolutely, from their bickering. I had enough to contend with besides them--for suddenly I had begun wondering what on earth mother _would_ say, after she'd said: "Grace, you amaze me!"

Chapter IX

Maitland Tait

The only difference between the houses in West Clydemont Place and museums was that there was no admission fee at the front door. Otherwise they were identical, for the "auld lang syne" flavor greeted you the moment you put foot into that corner of the town. You knew instinctively that every family there owned its own lawn-mower and received crested invitations in the morning mail.

Yet it was certainly not fashionable! Indeed, from a butler-and-porte-cochère standpoint it was shabby. The business of owning your own lawn-mower arises from a state of mind, rather than from a condition of finances, anyway. We were poor, but aloof--and strung high with the past-tension. The admiral, the ambassador and the artist rubbed our aristocracy in on any stray caller who lingered in the hall, if they had failed to be pricked by it on the point of grandfather's jeweled sword in the library.

I saw 1919 through a new vista as I came up to it in the late dusk, following the Flag Day reception, and I wondered what the effect of all this antiquity would be on the mind of a man who so clearly disregarded the grandfather clause in one's book of life. I hoped that he would be amused by it, as he had been by the long-tailed D. A. R. badge on my coat.

"You'd better have a little fire kindled up in the library, Grace," mother observed chillingly just after lunch that next afternoon. "It's true it's June, but--"

"But the day _is_ bleak and raw," I answered, with a sudden cordial sense of relief that she was on speaking terms with me again. "Certainly I'll tell Cicely to make a fire."

"The dampness of the day has nothing at all to do with it," she kept on with frozen evenness. "I suggested it because a fire is a safe place for a girl to look into while her profile is being studied."

"Mother!"

Her sense of outraged propriety suddenly slipped its leash.

"It keeps her eyes looking earnest, instead of _eager_," she burst out. "And any girl who'd let a man--allow a man--to run away from a party whose very magnificence was induced on his account, and take her off to tea in a public place, and come to see her the very next afternoon--a stranger, and a foreigner at that--is--is playing with fire!"

"You mean she'd better be playing with fire while he's calling?" I asked quietly. "We must remember to have the old andirons polished, then."

She stopped in her task of dusting the parlor--whose recesses without the shining new player-piano suddenly looked as bare and empty as a shop-window just after the holidays.

"You wilfully ignore my warning," she declared. "If this man left that party yesterday and comes calling to-day, of course he's impressed! And if you let him, of course _you're_ impressed. This much goes without saying; but I beg you to be careful, Grace! You happen to have those very serious, _betraying_ eyes, and I want you to guard them while he's here!"

"By keeping my hands busy, eh?" I laughed. "Well, I'll promise, mother, if that'll be any relief to you."

So the fire was kindled, as a preventative measure; and at four o'clock he came--not on the stroke, but ten minutes after. I was glad that he had patronized the street railway service for this call, and left the limousine in its own boudoir--you couldn't imagine anything so exquisite being kept in a lesser place--or I'm afraid that our little white-capped maid would have mistaken it for an ambulance and assured him that nobody was sick. Gleaming blue limousines were scarce in that section.

"Am I early?" he asked, after we had shaken hands and he had glanced toward the fire with a little surprised, gratified expression. "I wasted a quarter of an hour waiting for this car."

Now, a woman can always forgive a man for being late, if she knows he started on time, so with this reassurance I began to feel at home with him. I leaned over and stirred the fire hospitably--to keep my eyes from showing just how thoroughly at home I felt.

"No--you are not early. I was expecting you at four, and--and mother will be down presently."

He studied my profile.

"I was out at the golf club dance last night," he said, after a pause, with a certain abruptness which I had found characterized his more important parts of speech. I stood the tongs against the marble mantlepiece and drew back from the flame.

"Was it--enjoyable?" I asked politely.

"Extremely. Mrs. Walker was there, and she had very kindly forgiven me for my defection of the afternoon. In fact, she was distinctly cordial. She talked to me a great deal of you and your mother."

My heart sank. It always does when I find that my women friends have been talking a great deal about me.

"Oh, did she?"

"She is very fond of you, it seems--and very puzzled by you."

"Puzzled because I work for the _Herald_?"

I spoke breathlessly, for I wondered if Mrs. Walker had told of the Guilford Blake puzzle, as well; but after one look into the candid half-amused eyes I knew that this information had been withheld.

"Well, yes. She touched upon that, among other things."

"But what things?" I asked impatiently. At the door I heard the maid with the tea tray. "I suppose, however, just the usual things that people tell about us. That we have been homeless and penniless--except for this old barn--since I was a baby, and that, one by one, the pomps of power have been stripped from us?"

He looked at me soberly for a moment.

"Yes, she told me all this," he said.

"And that our historic rosewood furniture was sold, years ago, to Mrs. Hartwell Gill, the grocer's wife who used the chair-legs as battering-rams?"

He smiled.

"Against Oldburgh's unwelcoming doors? Yes."

"And that--"

"That you belonged to the most aristocratic family in the whole state," he interrupted softly. "So aristocratic that even the possession of the rosewood furniture is an open sesame! And of course this state is noted for its blooded beings, even in my own country."

"Really?" I asked, with a little gratified surprise.

"Indeed, yes!" he replied earnestly. "And Mrs. Walker told me something that I had not in the least thought to surmise--that you are a descendant of the famous artist, Christie. I don't know why I happened not to think about it, for the name is one which an Englishman instantly connects with portrait galleries. He was very favorably known on our side."

"Yes. He had a very remarkable--a very pathetic history," I said.

Turning around, he glanced at a small portrait across the room.

"Is--is this James Christie?" he asked.

"Yes. There is a larger one in the hall."

He walked across the room and examined the portrait. After a perfunctory survey, which did not include any very close examination of the strong features--rugged and a little harsh, and by no means the glorious young face which had been a lodestar to Lady Frances Webb--he turned back to me. For a moment I fancied that he was going to say something bitter and impulsive--something that held a tinge of mass-hatred for class, but his expression changed suddenly. I saw that his impulse had passed, and that what he would say next would be an afterthought.

"Do you care for him--for this sort of thing?" he asked, waving his hand carelessly toward the other portraits in the room and toward the sword, lying there in an absurd sort of harmlessness beneath its glass case. "I imagined that you didn't."

He spoke with a tinge of disappointment. Evidently he was sorry to find me so pedigreed a person.

"I do--and I don't," I answered, coming across the room to his side and drawing back a curtain to admit a better light. "I certainly care for--him."

"The artist?"

"Yes."

"But why?" he demanded, with a sudden twist of perversity to his big well-shaped mouth. "To me it seems such a waste of time--this sentiment for romantic antiquity. But I am not an unprejudiced judge, I admit. I have spent all the days of my life hating aristocracy."

"Oh, my feeling for him is not caused by his aristocracy," I made haste to explain. "And indeed, the Christies were very commonplace people until he elevated them into the ranks of fame. He was not only an artist of note, but he was a very strong man. It is this part of his history that I revere, and when I was a very young girl I 'adopted' him--from all the rest of my ancestors--to be the one I'd care for and feel a pride in."

He smiled.

"Of course you don't understand," I attempted to explain with a little flurry. "No _man_ would ever think of adopting an ancestor, but--"

He interrupted me, his smile growing gentler.

"I think I understand," he said. "I did the selfsame thing, years ago when I was a boy. But my circumstances were rather different from yours. I selected my grandfather--my mother's father, because he was clean and fine and strong! He was--he was a collier in Wales."

"A collier?" I repeated, wondering for the moment over the unaccustomed word.

"A coal-miner," he explained briefly. "He was honest and kind-hearted--and I took him for my example. He left me no heirlooms that--"

I turned away, looking at the room's furnishings with a feeling of reckless contempt.

"Heirlooms are--are a nuisance to keep dusted!" I declared quickly.

"Yet you evidently like them," he said, as we took our places again before the fire, and the little maid, in her nervous haste, made an unnecessary number of trips in and out. The firelight was glowing ruddily over the silver things on the tea-table, and looking up, I caught his eyes resting upon the ring I wore--Guilford's scarab. "That ring is likely an heirloom?"

"Yes--the story goes that Mariette himself found it," I elucidated, slipping the priceless old bit of stone off my hand and handing it to him to examine.

But as I talked my head was buzzing, for grandfather was at one ear and Uncle Lancelot was at the other.

"Grace, you ought to tell him!" grandfather commanded sharply. "Tell him this minute! Say to him: 'This ring is an heirloom in the family of my betrothed.'"

"_Rot_, parson!" came in Uncle Lancelot's dear comforting tones. "Shall a young woman take it for granted that every man who admires the color of her eyes is interested in her entire history?--Why, it would be absolutely indelicate of Grace to tell this man that she's engaged. It's simply none of his business."

"You'll see! You'll see!" grandfather warned--and my heart sank, for when a member of your family warns you that you'll see, the sad part of it is that you _will_ see.

"It's a royal scarab, isn't it?" Maitland Tait asked, turning the ancient beetle over and viewing the inscription on the flat side.

"Yes--perhaps--oh, I don't know, I'm sure," I answered in a bewildered fashion. Then suddenly I demanded: "But what else did Mrs. Walker tell you? Surely she didn't leave off with the mention of one illustrious member of my family."

"She told me about your great-aunt--the queer old lady who left James Christie's relics to you because you were the only member of the family who didn't keep a black bonnet in readiness for her funeral," he laughed, as he handed me back the ring.

"They were just a batch of letters," I corrected, "not any other relics."

"Yes--the letters written by Lady Frances Webb," he said.

It was my turn to laugh.

"I knew that Mrs. Walker must have been talkative," I declared. "She didn't tell you the latest touch of romance in connection with those letters, did she?"

He was looking into the fire, with an expression of deep thoughtfulness; and I studied his profile for a moment.

"Late romance?" he asked in a puzzled fashion, as he turned to me.

"A publishing company has made me an offer to publish those letters! To make them into a stunning 'best-seller,' with a miniature portrait of Lady Frances Webb, as frontispiece, I dare say, and the oftenest-divorced illustrator in America to furnish pictures of Colmere Abbey, with the lovers mooning 'by Norman stone!'"

He was silent for a little while.

"No, she didn't tell me this," he finally answered.

"Then it is because she doesn't know it!" I explained. "You see, mother is still too grieved to mention the matter to any one by telephone--and it happens that she hasn't met Mrs. Walker face to face since the offer was made."

"And--rejected?" he asked, with a little smile.

"Yes, but how did you know?"

The smile sobered.

"There are some things one _knows_," he answered. "Yet, after all, what are you going to do with the letters? If you don't publish them now how are you going to be sure that some other--some future possessor will not?"

"I can't be sure--that's the reason I'm not going to run any risks," I told him. "I'm going to burn them."

He started.

"But that would be rather a pity, wouldn't it?" he asked. "She was such a noted writer that I imagine her letters are full of literary value."

"It would be a cold-blooded thing for _me_ to do," I said thoughtfully. "I've an idea that some day I'll take them back to England and--and burn them there."

"A sort of feeling that they'd enjoy being buried on their native soil?" he asked.

"I'll take them to Colmere Abbey--her old home," I explained. "To me the place has always been a house of dreams! She describes portions of the gardens in her letters--tells him of new flower-beds made, of new walls built--of the sun-dial. I have always wanted to go there, and some day I shall bundle all these letters up and pack them in the bottom of a steamer trunk--to have a big bonfire with them on the very same hearth where she burned his."

Chapter X

In The Firelight

Again there was a silence, but it was not the kind of silence that gives consent. On the other hand his look of severity was positively discouraging.

"If I may inquire, what do you know about this place--this Colmere Abbey?" he finally asked. "I mean, do you know anything of it in this century--whether it's still standing or not--or anything at all save what your imagination pictures?"

It was a rather lawyer-like query, and I shook my head, feeling somewhat nonplused.

"No--nothing!"

"Then, if you should go to England, how would you set about finding out?"

"Oh, that wouldn't be so bad. In fact, I believe it would be a unique experience to go journeying to a spot with nothing more recent than a Washington Irving sketch as guide-book."

He looked at me half pityingly.

"You might be disappointed," he said gently. "For my part, I have never taken up a moment's time mooning about people's ancestral estates--I've had too much real work to do--but I happen to know that residents often fight shy of tourists."

I had a feeling of ruffled dignity.

"Of course--tourists!" I answered, bridling a little.

"Because," he hastened to explain, "the owners of the places can so often afford to live at home only a short season every year. Many of them are poor, and the places they own are mortgaged to the turrets."

"And the shut-up dilapidation would not make pleasant sight-seeing for rich Americans?"

He nodded.

"I happen to have heard some such report about this Colmere Abbey--years ago," he said.

"Are you sure it was the same place?" I asked, my heart suddenly bounding. "Colmere, in Lancashire?"

"Quite sure! I was brought up in Nottingham, and have heard of the estate, but have never seen it."

"Then it's still there--my house of dreams?"

For a moment I waited, palpitatingly, for him to say more, but he only looked at me musingly, then back into the fire. After a second he leaned forward, shaking his unruly hair back, as if he were trying to rid himself from a haunting thought.

"I--I can't talk about 'landed gentry,'" he said, turning to me with a quick fierceness. "I grow violent when I do! You've no idea how hateful the whole set is to a man who has had to make his own way in the world--against them!" Then, after this burst of resentment, his mood seemed to change. "But we must talk about England," he added, with a hasty gentleness. "There are so many delightful things we can discuss! Tell me, have you been there? Do you like it?"

I nodded an energetic affirmative.

"I have been there and--I love it! But it was a long while ago, and I wasn't old enough to understand about the things which would interest me most now."

"A long while ago?"

"Yes--let me see--ten years, I believe! At all events it was the summer after we sold the rosewood furniture--and the piano. Mother was so amazed at herself for having the nerve to part with the grand piano that she had to take a sea-voyage to recover herself."

"But what a happy idea!" he commented seriously, as he looked around. "A grand piano would really be a nuisance in this cozy room."

For a long time afterward I wondered whether my very deepest feeling of admiration for him had been born at the moment I looked at him first, or when he made this remark. But I've found it's as hard to ascertain Love's birthday as it is to settle the natal hour of a medieval author.

"How long have you been in America?" I next asked, abruptly; and he looked relieved.

"Ten years--off and on," he answered briskly. "Most of the time in Pittsburgh, for my grandfather had chosen that place for me. He would not have consented to my going back to England often, if he had lived, but I have been back a number of times, for I love journeying over the face of the earth--and, strange as it may seem, I love England. Some day--when things--when my affairs--are in different shape over there I shall go back to stay."

The tea things were finally arranged by Cicely's nervous dusky hands, and with a cordial showing of the letter-but-not-spirit-hospitality, mother appeared, in the wake of the steaming kettle.

Her expression said more plainly than words that she would do the decent thing or die.

"I was--" she began freezingly, as we both arose to greet her, "I was--"

She took in at a glance Maitland Tait's gigantic size, and shrank back--a little frightened. Then his good clothes reassured her. A giant who patronizes a good New York tailor is a _cut_ above an ordinary giant, she evidently admitted.

"--detained," she added, with the air of making a concession. She accepted the chair he drew up for her, and his down-to-the-belt grace began making itself conspicuous. She looked him over, and her jaundiced eye lost something of its color.

"--_unavoidably_," she plead, with a regretful prettiness.

Then she made the tea, and when she saw how caressingly the big man's smooth brown hands managed his cup, the remaining thin layer of ice over her cordiality melted, and she became the usual charming mother of a marriageable daughter. While she was at all times absolutely loyal to Guilford, still she knew that a mother's appearance is a daughter's asset, and she had always laid up treasures for me in this manner.

"You were at Mrs. Walker's Flag Day reception yesterday Grace tells me?" she inquired as casually as if a bloody battle of words had not been waging over the occurrence all morning. "And Mrs. Kendall was talking with me this morning on the telephone about her dance Friday night--"

She paused, looking at him interrogatively, because that had been Mrs. Kendall's own emotion when mentioning the matter.

Mr. Tait glanced toward me.

"Ah, yes--I had forgotten! You will be there?"

"Yes," I answered hastily, and mother came near scalding the kitten on the rug in the excess of her surprise. All morning, through the smoke of battle, I had sent vehement protestations against having my white tissue redraped for the occasion, declaring that nothing could induce me to go.

"I find that one usually goes to no less than three social affairs on a trip like this--and I--well, I'm afraid I'm rather an unsocial brute! I select the biggest things to go to, for one has to talk less, and there is a better chance of getting away early," he explained.

Mother left the room soon after this--the sudden change of decision about the dance had been too much for her. Even perfect clothes and well-bred hands and a graceful waist-line could not make her forgive this in me. She made a hasty excuse and left.

Then our two chairs shifted themselves back into their former positions before the fire and we talked on in the gloaming. Somehow, since that outburst of anger against the present-day owners of Colmere Abbey, the vision of the big man--the cave-man--in the coat of goatskins, with the bare knees and moccasins, had come back insistently.

Yet it was just a vision, and after a few minutes it vanished--after the manner of visions since the world began. He looked out the window at the creeping darkness and rose to go.

"Then I'm to see you Friday night?" he asked at parting.

"Yes."

"I'm--I'm glad."

There had been a green and gold sunset behind the trees in the park across the way, and after a moment more he was lost in this weird radiance; then he suddenly came to view again, in the glow of electric light at the corner.

A car to the city swung round the curve just then, and a dark figure, immensely tall in the shadows, stepped from the pavement. I heard the conductor ring up a fare--a harsh metallic note that indicated _finality_ to me--then silence.

"He's gone--gone--gone!" something sad and lonesome was saying in my heart. "What if he should be suddenly called back to Pittsburgh and I shouldn't see him again?"

To see the very last of him I had dropped down beside the front door, with my face pressed against the lace-veiled glass, and so intent was I upon my task that I had entirely failed to hear mother's agitated step in the hall above.

I was brought to, however, when I heard the click of the electric switch upon the stair. The lower hall was suddenly flooded with light. I scrambled to my feet as quickly as I could. Mother's face, peering at me from the landing, was already pronouncing sentence.

"Grace, I was just coming down to tell you that--well, I am compelled to say that you _amaze_ me!" she emitted first, with a tone of utter hopelessness struggling through her newly-fired anger. "Down on your knees in your new gown--and gowns as scarce as angels' visits, too!"

"Ah--but--I'm sorry--"

"What on earth are you doing there?" she kept on.

I turned to her, blinking in the dazzling light.

"I was--let me see?--oh, _yes_!" A brilliant thought had just come to me. "--I was looking for the _key_!"

Now, I happen to hate a liar worse than anything else on earth, and I hated myself fervently as I told this one.

"The key?" she asked suspiciously.

"It--it had fallen on the floor," I kept on, for of course whatever you do you must do with all your might, as we learn in copy-book days.

"And it never occurred to you to turn on the light?" she demanded, coming up and looking at me as if to see the extent of disfigurement this new malady had wrought. "Down on your knees searching for a key--and it never occurred to you to turn on the light?"

"No," I answered, thankful to be able to tell the truth again. "No, it never once occurred to me!"

Chapter XI

Two Men And A Maid

Have you ever thought that the reason we can so fully sympathize with certain great people of history, and not with others, is because we are occasionally granted a glimpse of the emotion our favorites enjoyed--or endured?

For instance, no man who has ever knocked the "t" out of "can't" stands beside Napoleon's tomb without a sensation which takes the form of: "_We_ understand each other--don't we, old top?"

And every year at spring-time, Romeo is patted on the back condescendingly by thousands of youths--so susceptible that they'd fall in love with anything whose skirt and waist met in the back.

The night of the Kendalls' dance _I_ knew what Cleopatra's cosmic consciousness resembled--exactly. I knew it from the moment she glanced away from the glint of her silver oars of the wonderful Nile barge (because the glint of Antony's dark eyes was so much more compelling) to the hour she recklessly unwrapped the basket of figs in her death chamber! I ran the whole gamut of her emotions--'twixt love and duty--and I came out of it feeling that--well, certainly I felt that a conservatory is a room where eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves!

"Is everybody crazy to-night?" I whispered to Guilford, as we paused for a moment before the dancing commenced just outside one of the downy, silky reception rooms--quite apart from the noisy ballroom farther back--and I saw two people inside. The girl was seated before the piano, and was singing softly, while the man stood at her side, listening with a rapt expression.

"Who would ever have thought that _that_ girl would be singing _that_ song to _that_ man?" I asked, with a quivery little feeling that the world was going topsyturvy with other people besides me. The singer was the careless, rowdy golf champion of the state, and the man listening was Oldburgh's astonishing young surgeon--the kind who never went anywhere because it was said he laid aside his scalpel only when he was obliged to pick up his fork.

"What is the song?" Guilford inquired, looking in, then drawing back softly and dropping the curtain that screened the doorway.

"_Caro Mio Ben!_"

"A love song?"

I smiled.

"Well, rather!"

Then somebody crowded up and separated Guilford and me. I stood there listening to the lovely Italian words, and wondering if the night were in truth bewitched. Guilford, under the impulse induced by a white tissue gown and big red roses, had suffered an unusual heart-action already and had spent half an hour whispering things in my ear which made me feel embarrassed and ashamed. The only thing which can possibly make a lifelong engagement endurable is the brotherly attitude assumed by the lover in his late teens.

"Come in," he said, elbowing his way back to me through the chattering throng of the autumn's débutantes, after a few minutes. "I hear the violins beginning to groan--and say--_haven't_ they got everybody worth having here to-night?"

"I don't--know," I replied vaguely, looking up and down the length of the room that we were entering.

"But--there's Mrs. Walker, and there are the Chester girls, and Dan Hunter, just back from Africa--and--"

"Certainly they've got a fine selection of Oldburgh's solid, rolled-gold ornaments," I co