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RUNNING SANDS

RUNNING SANDS

BY

REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN

AUTHOR OF

"The House of Bondage," "The Sentence of Silence," etc.

NEW YORK

THE MACAULAY COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

To

BRUNER KAUFFMAN

Brother and Friend

PREFACE

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and
in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this
Woman in holy Matrimony....

"It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in
the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name....

"It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication;
that such persons as have not the gift of continence might marry, and
keep themselves undefiled....

"It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one
ought to have of the other....

"Into which holy estate these two persons come now to be joined...."

--The Book of Common Prayer.

CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                                 PAGE

      I "WON'T YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOUR?"   1

     II YOUNG BLOOD                        20

    III EN GARDE, MONSIEUR!                34

     IV THE APPLE OF THEIR EYE             59

      V ONE ROAD TO LOVE                   72

     VI A MAID PERPLEXED                   88

    VII FIRE AND TOW                      106

   VIII "THE WORLD-WITHOUT-END BARGAIN"   115

     IX ANOTHER ROAD                      133

      X "UNWILLING WAR"                   156

     XI DR. BOUSSINGAULT                  176

    XII MONTMARTRE                        198

   XIII WORMWOOD                          215

    XIV RUNAWAYS                          230

     XV "NOT AT HOME"                     247

    XVI IN THE BOIS                       254

   XVII THE CALL OF YOUTH                 266

  XVIII OUR LADY OF PROTECTION            285

    XIX HUSBAND AND WIFE                  304

     XX HUSBAND AND LOVER                 318

    XXI THE MAN AND HIS GOD               333

RUNNING SANDS

"WON'T YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOUR?"

Stainton decided that he would go to the Metropolitan Opera House that
night to hear _Madama Butterfly_. He did not care for operatic music,
but he hoped to learn. He did not expect to meet anyone he knew, but he
trusted that he might come to know someone he met. There was, at any
rate, no spot in the Great American Desert, where he had found his
fortune, quite so lonely as this crowded lobby of the Astor, the hotel
at which he was now stopping--so he decided upon the Metropolitan and
_Madama Butterfly_.

A page was passing, uttering shrill demands for a man whose name seemed
to be "Mr. Kerrghrrr." Stainton laid a large, but hesitating, hand upon
the boy's shoulder.

"Where can I buy a ticket for to-night's opera?" he enquired.

The page ceased his vocal rumble and looked up with wounded reproof at
the tall cause of this interruption.

"News-stand," he said, and immediately escaped to resume the summons of
"Mr. Kerghrrr."

Stainton followed the direction that the page's eyes had indicated. Over
the booth where newspapers might be purchased for twice the price that
he would have to pay for them in the street, fifteen yards away, he saw
a sign announcing the fact that opera and theatre tickets were here for
sale. He approached, somewhat awkwardly, and, over a protruding ledge of
red and blue covered magazines on which were portrayed the pink and
white prettiness of impossibly insipid girls, confronted a suave clerk,
who appeared tremendously knowing.

"You have tickets for the opera?" asked Stainton.

"Yessir."

"For the Metropolitan Opera House?"

"Yessir. How many?"

"There are----It's _Madama Butterfly_ to-night, I think the paper said?"

"Yessir. What part of the house do you want?"

"I don't know," said Stainton. "That's a good show, isn't it?"

The clerk was too well fitted for his business to smile at such a query.
He had, besides, perception enough to discern something beyond the
humorous in this broad-shouldered, grave man of anywhere from forty to
fifty, who was evidently so strong in physique and yet so clearly
helpless in the commonplaces of city-life.

"It's the best production of that opera for the whole season," the clerk
made answer. "Caruso sings _Pinkerton_ and----"

"So I understand," said Stainton, quickly.

The clerk nimbly shifted the quality of his information.

"And anyhow," he went urbanely on, "the Metropolitan audience is always
a show in itself, you know. Everybody that is anybody is there; for a
steady thing it beats the Horseshow in Madison Square Garden. You'll be
wanting seats in the orchestra, of course?"

"One," corrected Stainton. "Shall I?" he added.

"Oh, yes. That is, if you're a stranger in New York. I----Pardon me,
sir, but I suppose you are a stranger?"

"Very much of a stranger."

"Then I can recommend this seat, sir." The clerk disappeared behind a
hanging vine of magazines more glorious than the slopes of the Côte d'Or
in autumn, and immediately reappeared with a ticket projecting from a
narrow envelope. "Fifth row," he said. "Second from the aisle. Not on
the side with the brasses, either. You can see all the boxes from it."

Jim Stainton's heavy, iron-grey eyebrows came together in a puzzled
meeting. Under them, however, his iron-grey eyes twinkled.

"Thank you," he said; "but I want to see the stage, you know."

"Oh," the clerk reassured him, "of course you'll see the stage
perfectly."

Stainton accepted the ticket.

"Very well," he said. "Take it out of that."

For many a hard year he had been used, by compulsion of desperate
circumstance, to counting his two-bit pieces, and now, precisely because
all that had passed, he enjoyed sharply the luxury of counting nothing,
not even the double-eagles. He laid a yellow-backed bill on the glass
counter and received, without regarding it, the change that the now
thoroughly deferential clerk deftly returned to him. Doubtless he was
paying a heavy commission to the hotel's ticket-agent; perhaps he was
obtaining less change than, under the terms of that commission, he was
entitled to; but certainly about none of these things did he care. Toil
had at last granted him success, toil and good luck; and success had
immediately given him the right to emancipation from financial trifling.
There are two times in a man's life when no man counts its cost: the
time of his serious wooing and that of his ultimate illness. Stainton
had come to New York with a twofold purpose; he had come to bury the man
that he had been, and he had come to woo.

He went to his elaborate rooms to dress. For the last decade and more,
he had not worn evening-clothes a score of times, and he now donned the
black suit, fresh from a Fifth Avenue tailor's shop, with a care that
was in part the result of this scant experience and in part the
consequence of a fear of just how ridiculous the new outfit would make
him seem. He endangered the shirt when he came to fasten it; he was
sure that he had unnecessarily wrinkled the white waistcoat, and the tie
occupied his bungling fingers for a full five minutes.

His apprehensions, nevertheless, were unjustified. Something, when the
toilet was completed, rather like a man of fashion appeared to have been
made by the man of the needle out of the man of the pick: if the miner
had not wholly vanished, at least the familiar of Broadway had joined
him. Stainton, critically surveying himself in the pier-glass and
secretly criticising his attitude of criticism, saw nothing that, to his
unaccustomed and therefore exacting eye, presented opportunity for
objection. The figure was heavier, more stalwart than, as he had been
told, was for that season the mode, but the mode, that season, exacted a
slimness that indicated the weakling. The clothes themselves were, on
the other hand, perfection and to the point of perfection they fitted.
The face--

Jim Stainton, with suspended breath, drew the hanging electric-lamp
nearer, leaned forward and studied the reflection of that face closely.

He saw a large, well-proportioned head, the head of a man serious,
perhaps, but admirably poised. The black hair was only sparsely
sprinkled with gray. The deep line between the thick brows might be the
furrow of concentration rather than the mark of years. The rugged
features--earnest eyes of steel, strong nose, compressed lips and
square, clean-shaven chin--were all features that, whatever the life
they had faced, betokened stamina from the beginning. Hot suns had
burnished his cheeks, but a hard career had entailed those abstinences
which are among the surest warders of youth. Experience had
strengthened, but time had been kind.

"I am still young," he thought. "I am fifty, but I don't look forty, and
I have the physique of twenty-five."

He walked to the window and flung it wide.

Below him swirled the yellow evening life of the third greatest among
the world's great thoroughfares. Looking down from the height of his
hotel was to Stainton like looking down upon a riverside furnace through
its roof. Molten streams, swelling from the darker channels to the
north, flowed along their appointed alleyways and broke and divided,
hissing and spluttering against the pier that was the Times Building.
And as the steam rises from the red waste that runs from the furnace
into the river, there now rose to Stainton's desert-starved ears the
clanging of cable-cars, the rattle of carriages, the tooting of the
purring motors--all the humming chorus of the night-wakeful thing that
men call New York.

He stretched his arms apart to it. He wanted to enfold it, to inhale its
breath, to mix with it and become lost in it. He had come back. After
all these years, he had come back, and he had come back a victor
unscarred.

"I'm still young," he repeated, raising his head and spreading his
nostrils to the damp air of the city-evening. And "Still young!" he
continued to whisper on his way down in the elevator and through the
crowded dining-room to his seat at a glittering table.

A ready waiter detached himself from a group of his fellows and
dexterously steered a rapid course, between seated diners and laden
serving-tables, to Stainton's broad shoulder.

Stainton was studying, with less difficulty than he had anticipated, the
menu.

"Soup, sir?" suggested the waiter.

"Yes; consommé," said Stainton.

"And a little fish, sir?"

"No, thank you; no fish."

"Those bass are very nice, sir. I can recommend them."

"No, thank you, I think not. I want a steak, sirloin."

"Rare, sir?"

"Medium."

"Yes, sir. And shall we say potatoes _au gratin_?"

"No. Boiled potatoes. And French peas."

"A little cauliflower with sauce _Hollandaise_?"

"No. Only the steak, potatoes, and peas."

The waiter raised his brows ever so slightly.

"And what salad, sir?" he asked.

"No salad, thank you."

"Er--and about dessert?"

"Nothing. After the meal you may bring me a demi-tasse."

The waiter suppressed surprise. A New Yorker may dine simply, but that a
still obvious stranger in New York should dine upon less than five
courses--that was beyond his experience.

"What cocktail, sir?" he enquired.

"None," said Stainton.

"Very good, sir. Shall I send the wine-card?"

"No."

Stainton spoke briefly this time, even sharply, and his tone had the
effect that he desired for it. He ate his dinner undisturbed.

A more pleasant disturbance than that of the waiter was, however, in
store for him. As he left the dining-room and returned to the lobby,
ready now for the opera, there brushed by him, _en route_ from the
bar-room, a stout man of about thirty-five, with a round face and a high
hat perched at the extreme rear of a head almost completely bald.

The two looked at each other.

"I beg your pardon," said the stranger.

"I beg your par----" Stainton began to echo.

But he did not finish, for the stranger, suddenly a stranger no longer,
was fairly shouting:

"Hello, hello, hello! What in the name of all that's----"

Stainton's lips broke into a delighted smile, which showed square, white
teeth.

"Holt," he said: "George Holt!"

"Alive and well--thanks to you, old man." Holt seized the proffered hand
and began to pump it. "And you!" he continued. "Think of it! _You!_ I
saw about your luck in the papers, and I meant to write. Upon my soul, I
did. I don't know how it was I didn't----"

"Oh, that's all right."

"But I was glad. I never was so glad. And you're here--here in little
old New York?"

"So it seems."

"For good? Of course it is. Everybody comes here to spend his money."

"Well, I hope it's not for harm."

Holt ceased pumping, dropped the hand, put both his hands on Stainton's
shoulders, and held him at arm's length.

"Great Scott, but it's good to see you again," he said. "Five years,
isn't it?"

"All of that."

"And then I was out there in the last of the Wild and Woolly, and we
were sworn brother-adventurers and all that, and you saved my life----"

"Nonsense."

"Yes, you did--saved my life, by the great horn spoon, just as the
knife-claws of that big grizzly were raised to rip out what passes with
me for a heart. I'll never forget it as long as I live."

Stainton wished it forgotten.

"How's the world treating you?" he asked.

"So, so; I mean, badly. In fact, it's not treating me at all; I have to
pay for myself, and just enough to pay and none to save, at that. But
you--you! Oh, you lucky beast, you!" He shook Stainton by the shoulders
and again studied his smiling face. "Good old Jim!" he said.

Stainton's smile went somewhat awry.

"Old?" he echoed. "Oh, I don't know."

"What? No, of course not." Holt thrust a playful thumb between
Stainton's ribs. "Young as ever, eh? So am I. Still, you know, time does
pass. Oh, well, what of it? I certainly am glad to see you."

He hooked his arm into Stainton's. "Come on and have a drink."

"Thank you, no," said Stainton; "I scarcely ever take anything, you
know."

Holt, unlike the waiter, showed his disapproval.

"I know you scarcely ever did out there." He jerked his round face in
what he supposed was a westerly direction. "But that's over now. You
don't have to be careful now. What's the good of being rich if you have
to be careful?"

"Still, I am careful," said Stainton, quietly.

"But on this occasion? Surely not on this occasion, Jim!"

The miner laughed freely now.

"You always were a wonder at discovering occasions, George," he said.
"Your occasions were as frequent as saints' days and other holidays in a
Mexican peon's calendar."

"And still are, thank the Lord. But to-night----Even you've got to admit
to-night, Jim. It isn't every day in the year that a man that's saved my
life turns up in New York with a newly discovered, warranted pure, gold
mine in his pocket."

This was so clearly true that Stainton capitulated, or at least
compromised by going to the bar and drinking a thimbleful of white-mint
while Holt, chattering like a cheerful magpie--if a magpie can be
cheerful--consumed two long glasses of Irish whiskey with a little
aerated water added.

Holt made endless plans for his friend. He would "put up" Stainton's
name at his club. He would introduce him to this personage and to that.
He would--

"Oh, by Jove, yes, and the women!" he interrupted himself. "You've got
to go gently there, Jim."

A bright tint showed on Stainton's cheeks.

"I never----" he began.

"Oh, not _them_!" said Holt, dismissing the entire half-world with a
light gesture. "I know you didn't--the more fool you. But what I mean is
the--you know: the all-righters. They'll be setting their caps at you
worse than any of the other sort. You've got to remember that you're a
catch."

This was all very pleasant, and Stainton was too honest with himself not
to admit so much.

"Marriage," he admitted, "isn't beyond my calculations."

"Exactly. Now, you leave that little matter to me, Jim. I know----"

"I think that, if you don't much mind, I shall leave it to myself. There
is no hurry, you see."

"Um; yes. I do see. But if there's no hurry, just you wait--just you
wait, old man, till you have seen what I can show you. New York is the
biggest bond-market and marriage-market in the world." He looked at his
watch. "Hello," he said: "I'll be late. Now, look here: where'll you be
after the opera? I've got to go there. I hate it, but I have to."

"The opera?" repeated Stainton. "The Metropolitan?"

"Yes, sure."

"But I'm going there myself."

"The devil you are. Where are you?"

Stainton produced his ticket.

Holt glanced at it and shook his head.

"Too close to hear," he said. "But what's the difference? We've all
heard the confounded thing so often----"

"I have not," said Stainton.

"Eh? What? But it's _Madama Butterfly_, you know--Oh, yes, of course: I
forgot. Still, what'll interest you, once you get there, will be what
interests everybody else--and that's not the stage and not the
orchestra. Now, look here: I'm with the Newberrys, you know--the Preston
Newberrys----"

"I don't know," said Stainton.

"Well, you will, my boy; you will. That's just the point. We'll call a
taxi and motor there together--it's just a step to the Metropolitan--and
then, after the first act, I'll come round to you and take you over to
meet 'em. What do you say?"

Stainton said what he was expected to say, which was, of course, that he
would be delighted to meet any friends of Holt, and so it befell that
the two men went to the opera-house together and parted at the door only
with the certainty of meeting soon again.

Yet, the miner was still glowing with the thrill of his new life. "I'm
young!" he repeated to himself as he was shown to his seat. And he felt
young. He felt that he had never yet lived and that he was now about to
live; and he thanked Heaven that he had kept himself trained for the
experience.

He had dined slowly, as befits a man that has earned his leisure, and
his conversation with Holt had not been hurried. Consequently, when he
reached his place, the first act of _Madama Butterfly_ was already well
over. With the voice of Apollo and the figure of an elephant, the tenor,
bursting through the uniform of a naval officer with a corpulence that
would endanger a battleship, was engaged in that vocal assault upon a
fortress of heavy orchestration which is the penance of all that have to
sing the rôle of "Pinkerton." Stainton listened and tried to enjoy. He
listened until the curtain fell at length upon the beginning of the
inevitable tragedy, until the lights flashed up about him, and he found
himself looking straight into the eyes of a young girl in a lower box
not thirty feet away.

About him swept the broad curve of boxes that has been called "The
Diamond Horseshoe," filled with wonderful toilettes and beautiful women,
but Stainton did not see these. In the particular box toward which he
was looking there were three other people: there was a matronly woman in
what appeared to be brocade; there was a sleek, weary-eyed, elderly man,
and there was another man faintly suggested in the background, as the
lover of the mistress is faintly suggested in Da Vinci's
masterpiece--but Stainton was no more conscious of this trio than he was
of the gowns and women of the broad horseshoe. He saw, or was conscious
of seeing, only that girl.

And she was leaning far over the rail, at pause where, when their eyes
met, his intense gaze had arrested her: a young girl, scarcely eighteen
years old, her delicate, oval face full of the joy of life, aglow with
the excitement, the novelty of place, people, music. The light was upon
her--upon her slim, softly white-clad body trembling at the unguessed
portal of womanhood just as it trembled also under his gaze. She had
wonderful hair, which waved without artifice, as blue-black as a
thunder-cloud in May; she had level brows and eyes large and dark and
tender. Her lips were damp, the lower one now timidly indrawn. While he
looked at her, there awoke in Stainton the Neolithic man, the savage and
poet that sang what he felt and was unashamed to feel and sing: she was
like a Spring evening in the woods: warm and dusky and clothed in the
light of stars.

Stainton did not move, yet his heart seemed twisting in his breast. Was
he mad? Was he alive, sane, awake and in New York of to-day? If so, if
he were himself, then were the old stories true, and did the dead walk?
Sitting there, stonily, there floated through his brain a line from a
well-conceived and ill-executed poem:

"At Paris it was, at the opera there ..."

The girl was the one to break the spell. When Stainton would have ceased
looking, he could never know. But the girl flushed yet more deeply and
turned away, with a quick movement that was almost a reprimand but not
enough of a reprimand to be an acknowledgment that she was aware of him.

Jim, his own cheeks burning at the realisation of his insolence, but his
heart tumultuous for that other reason, himself started. He shifted
clumsily in his chair and so became conscious of another movement in the
box.

A man--the man that had been, at Stainton's first glimpse of the party,
dimly outlined--was disentangling himself from the background, was
bending forward to make vehement signs in Stainton's direction, was
finally, and with no end of effort on Stainton's part, assuming
recognisable shape. It was George Holt.

Holt waved his hand again and nodded toward the lobby. Then, as Stainton
nodded a tardy comprehension, he faded once more into the background of
the box.

They met a few moments later in the corridor.

"I see you found your friends," said Stainton. At least temporarily, he
had regained his self-control.

"My who? Oh, the Newberrys? Of course. Come over; you must meet them."

"The Newberrys?" Stainton looked a misapprehension.

"Yes, I told you, you know. Good old Preston Newberry and his wife."

"I thought," urged Stainton, "that I saw a girl----"

"Oh, _that_?" asked Holt, recollecting with some difficulty a person of
such small importance. "That's their little Boston ward."

"What's her name?"

"Something or other. I forget. Stannard: that's it--Muriel Stannard.
She's just out of her----"

He stopped and blinked, his narrow eyes directed at Stainton, who had
lifted to his face a hand that visibly trembled.

"What's the trouble?" asked Holt. "Too used to the desert to stand our
nifty opera-house air? Don't wonder. Come out and have a drink. Plenty
of time."

"No," said Stainton. He achieved a smile. "I'm all right. Why in the
world did you think I wasn't? I'm just----She's eighteen, isn't she?"

"Who? Mrs. New----Oh, the girl? Yes, I imagine she is about that. But
she's an orphan and hasn't a cent and is too young to mix in, anyhow.
Don't you bother: she won't interfere. Come along, if you won't have a
drink, and meet the Newberrys. Mrs. Preston is every bit as good as a
Bronx cocktail, though she wouldn't be seen in the Bronx for a thousand
of 'em."

Stainton replied with compressed lips.

"I should like to meet Miss--Miss Stannard," he said.

"Miss Stannard? The youngster?" Holt broke into a laugh. "Bless my soul!
Why, she's not even out yet; and you mean to say----"

But Stainton's firm fingers had closed so sharply about Holt's arm that,
while the pain of the unexpected grip shot through him, Holt's laughter
ended in a gasp.

"Don't joke about this," commanded Stainton. "You remember that we used
to be friends."

"Sure. Aren't we friends now? What's hit you, Jim? We're friends still,
I hope. You don't think I'm likely to forget what you once did for me,
do you?"

"Very well, then: don't joke about Miss Stannard."

"No offence intended," said the perplexed Holt; "but why in thunder
shouldn't I joke about her?"

Stainton's grip loosened, and his eyes twinkled.

"After all," he said, "it must have seemed strange to you----"

"Strange? It looked like the asylum!" said Holt.

"And so," Stainton continued, "I dare say that I do owe you an
explanation." He put out his hand again, but Holt dodged.

"No more of that!" said Holt.

"All right," Stainton answered. He laid a hand on Holt's shoulder. "Can
you keep a secret, George?"

The clubman blinked in anticipation.

"Seems to me we've had a few together," he said.

"Then," said Stainton, "I'll tell you why I was a little sensitive about
comments on Miss Stannard: I am going to marry her."

II

YOUNG BLOOD

Holt's jaw fell.

"I beg your pardon," he stammered; "but I didn't know you even knew
her."

"I have never met her," said Stainton.

"What? Oh, quit your jollying."

"I have never met her."

"Then--well, you _don't_ need a drink, after all."

"After all--that is, after the performance," said Stainton, "I shall
explain. Just now I want you to take me to your friends' box and present
me all round."

Holt recalled having heard that certain of the Cæsars had been driven
mad by their sudden acquisition of power. He recalled having read of
stock-gamblers that went crazy when they achieved a great coup. He
recalled having seen the Las Animas country, when the Las Animas country
was really a prospectors' bedlam, one gold-seeker that had lost his wits
in what were then the vast solitudes of the San Juan Triangle. All of
these recollections rushed in detail through a brain warped by a few
years of the most unnatural side of city life, and following them came
the realisation, as the newspapers had brought it to him, of Stainton's
unexpected success. Stainton had always, when Holt knew him in the West,
been unlike his fellows, a man aloof. Stainton had once, Holt
recollected, been practical, silent, slow; now, having come upon a gold
mine after twenty-five years of adversity, in a country more desolate
than the San Juan had ever been, this man was powerful, almost in a day,
rich. He wondered if--

But Stainton was once more smiling his old self-reliant smile.

"No," he was saying, "I am not crazy, and I am not drunk. It sounds
queer, I know----"

"Sounds! Sounds----"

"But I am sane and sober. Come along and, honestly, I'll
explain--later."

"You can't," said Holt.

"Can't what?"

"Explain. Such things can't be explained. This would balk Teddy
himself."

Nevertheless, in the end Holt did what he was accustomed to doing, which
is to say that he did as he was told, and before the curtain had risen
again Stainton was in the agonies of the introduction.

"Mr. Holt has just been telling us of your splendid bravery and how you
saved his life," said Mrs. Newberry.

She was a stout, uncertain nonentity, whose chief endeavours in her
narrow world were to seem as slim as she would like to be and as certain
of her social position as was proper for a woman of moderate
antecedents, who had married a membership in Manhattan's three most
difficult clubs. What, of course, she had been thinking was not at all
about Stainton's bravery: it was, rather, that Stainton had become quite
rich quite romantically, and that he was not the rough diamond which
tradition demanded.

Stainton took all this for granted and, knowing not what to say in
reply, bowed and said nothing.

"Glad to know you," was what Newberry said: and he presently added: "The
cast's in rotten voice to-night. Sit down."

Newberry, the sleek, weary-eyed elderly man, whom Stainton had barely
noticed in his first survey of the box, was the membership in New York's
three most difficult clubs. He had inherited money without brains, had
sought to adjust matters by marrying brains without money, and had been
intellectually disappointed.

To him in turn Stainton bowed in silence. His eyes were on the girl, and
the girl's slim back was set resolutely toward him.

There was an awkward pause. Nobody seemed to remember Muriel. At length
Holt, still in terror, blundered forward.

"Miss Muriel----" he began.

The girl turned. The glory of her warm eyes brushed Stainton's face and
passed it.

"I am Miss Stannard," she said. "It is good of you to join us. Do sit
down, Mr. Stainton."

Stainton sat down. He sat down directly behind her, and at last,
politely unencouraging though she at first managed to remain, he
succeeded in gaining some sort of conversational opening.

What did he say there, for the early ten minutes of their talk? He was
unable at any later date to recall one word of it. Everything, he was
sure, that was clumsy. As a matter of fact, his own speech was probably
by no means so uncouth as his torturing fancy declared it, hers by no
means so brilliant as his memory, which retained no souvenirs, insisted.
More likely than not, their talk fulfilled the requirements of
convention. Convention requires the commonplace.

Nobody paid any but sporadic attention to the opera. To the left of the
girl and Stainton, Mrs. Newberry and her husband, a Dido matched to a
Don Juan, exchanged low monosyllables with each other and darting
exchanges of talk, like rallies at badminton, with Holt. Sometimes they
were ill-mannered enough to converse in whispers, near Stainton's
shoulder, but mostly Mrs. Newberry was laboriously conventional, out of
a constant fear of being adjudged plebeian, and now and again, to
Stainton's huge disgust, she would lean to confer a word on her niece
and her niece's companion.

"I hope you care for opera," she said to Stainton in one of these
sallies.

"I hope to," replied the miner, guardedly.

"Though of course," pursued Mrs. Newberry, "this is rather an off
evening. The cast led us to expect so much, but they all seem to be in
such poor voice."

Stainton made a civil noise.

"Apart from the music," his hostess continued, "I dare say that the
stage doesn't appeal to you."

"I have had very little chance to know it," said Stainton, "but I am
fond of it."

"Indeed?" Mrs. Newberry's tone indicated that she was mildly interested
in meeting a tamed adventurer. "But I should suppose that it would all
seem so false to you. It must seem false, I should think, to anyone that
has known so much of--of Real Life, you know; and dear Mr. Holt has
given us _such_ descriptions of your romantic career."

Stainton's disavowal of this apparent praise of his career was earnest,
but not convincing.

"My life has seemed dull to me," he said, with a deadly glance at dear
Mr. Holt, grinning in the background.

Holt tried to change the subject.

"At all events, this is a romantic episode for you, isn't it?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" snapped Stainton.

"Oh," Holt hurried to explain, "all this." He indicated the audience
with the sweep of a plump hand.

"It is new," granted Stainton.

Holt edged his chair forward.

"Of course it is, and whatever's new's romantic. That's all romance is,
isn't it, Miss Muriel?"

The girl had been listening to the music, her dark eyes, veiled by their
long lashes, fixed on nothing.

"Is it?" she enquired.

"Sure it is," said Holt. "Now, Jim, you're in the crowd you read about.
You ought to get us to point 'em out to you."

"The woman just next," whispered Mrs. Newberry--"the one in
forget-me-not blue, draped with chiffon and crystal trimmings--don't you
see? The bodice is finished with crystal fringe----"

"I'm afraid----" said Stainton.

Preston Newberry explained.

"Girl with yellow hair," said he.

"Oh!" said Stainton.

"That," Mrs. Newberry went on, "is Dora van Rooz. She was a Huyghens,
you know."

"I'm afraid I don't read the society-columns," Stainton apologised.

"Dora's not confining herself to them," said Newberry. "She and van Rooz
are calling each other names in the divorce-court now."

"And just beyond," Mrs. Newberry ran on, "in the American beauty satin
veiled in ninon--there: her waist is embroidered with beads and rows of
silver lace; you can't see very well in this light."

"Girl with the fine nose," Preston elucidated.

"I see."

"That's Mrs. Billy Merton. You must have heard of her. She divorced Clem
Davis last month and married Billy the next day."

She rattled on for some time, ceasing her chatter only for brief pauses,
at intervals unconsciously regulated by her long acquaintance with the
opera and its finer moments. The strains of the beautiful music seemed
to Stainton to be a loveliness unworthily draping, on the stage, the
story of a base man's perfidy; and the pleasant indiscretions of the
fashionable opera-gowns to be clothing, in the audience, none but women
that had already stripped their souls in one or other of the scandalous
rituals imposed by modern law for the dissolution of the most private of
relationships.

He made but brief answers, and he was unfeignedly relieved when his poor
responsiveness forced Mrs. Newberry to retreat and left him free again
with Muriel. He looked frank admiration at her level brows, her dark
eyes, and her full lips. Here, he assured himself, was innocence: her
face was her young soul made visible.

Perhaps, as she pretended, it was his distress at her aunt's garrulity;
for it must have been evident to her. Perhaps it was the dropped hint of
his adventurous life; for women are all Desdemonas at heart. Perhaps it
was only his patent worship of her beauty; since we are all assailable
through this sort of compliment to whatever of our charms we are least
responsible for. Perhaps it was all or none of these things. In any
case, as Mrs. Newberry retired to a continuation of her gossip with
Holt, broken only by the terser remarks of Newberry, Muriel bent a
little closer to Stainton.

"You don't care a bit about such things, do you?" she enquired.

Her tone was lower than when she had last spoken. It was low enough to
draw the curtain of confidence between them and their companions, with
that subtle quality that takes account of but one listener.

Stainton's pulses leaped.

"About what things?" was all that he was at first able to say.

The girl smiled. Stainton thought her smile wistful.

"The sort that fill these boxes," said Muriel: "the sort, I dare say,
that uncle and aunt and Mr. Holt and I are."

He heard a shimmering sprite of regret in her voice: regret not that he
did not care for these people, but that these people should be what they
were.

"Don't include yourself in this lot," he answered.

He was immediately aware that his reply was scarcely courteous to his
hosts, and so was she.

"You are hard on them," she said.

"Hadn't you just been hard on them, too?" he countered.

"Ah, yes, but they are my relatives. At least Uncle Preston and Aunt
Ethel are. Family criticism is permitted everywhere."

He did not like her schoolgirlish attempt at epigram, and he showed his
disapproval.

"Now you are trying to be of a piece with them," he said.

The glance that she gave him was no longer calm: there was a flash of
flame in it.

"You talk as if you had known me for years."

"For thirty years."

"Yes?" She did not understand.

"I have known you for thirty years."

What sort of man was this? "But I am only eighteen," she said.

"Nevertheless, I have known you for thirty years."

She gave an empty glance at her programme.

"Since you were in pinafores," she said, still looking down.

Stainton bit his lip. There had been no malice in her tone, yet all
children are cruel, he reflected, and the modern child's cruelty is
ingenious. Was there anything in that speech for her to be sorry for,
and, if there were, would she be sorry?

"Some day," he said quietly, "I shall try to explain."

She regarded him again, this time with altered gaze.

"Some day," she said, "I hope you will tell me about that romantic
career that Aunt Ethel was talking of."

Was she sorry? Was she interested?

"It's not romantic," he protested. "It isn't in the least romantic. It's
just a story of hard work and disappointment, and hard work and
success."

"But Mr. Holt told us that in one month you were condemned to
death for piracy in Central America and acted--what do they call
it?--floor-manager for a firemen's ball in Denver."

"George has been dipping his brush in earthquake and eclipse. He never
knew me till he met me in the West five or six years ago. I was
condemned for piracy _in absentio_ by a Spanish-American court because I
had a job as cook on a filibustering ship that was wrecked off Yucatan
and never got any nearer to shore, and I was floor-manager at the
firemen's ball because--well, because I happened to belong to a
fire-company."

"But you did have adventures in Alaska and Colorado and New Mexico?"

"Oh, I've knocked about a bit."

"And----" Her lips were parted, her eyes large. She no longer heard the
voices on the stage. "Did you ever----Mr. Holt said you once shot----"

"Yes," said Stainton, gravely, "I think I once killed a man."

She clasped her hands on the railing of the box.

"Tell me about it," she commanded. Her tone was a compliment.

"There's nothing to tell. It was in an Alaskan mining-camp. The man was
drunk and armed. He attacked me, and I had to defend myself. He shot
twice before I shot at all, but I hit and he didn't. I'm sorry I had to
do it to remain alive, but I'm not sorry to have remained alive."

"Oh," she cried, petulantly, "you are _so_ matter-of-fact!"

"Not nearly so matter-of-fact as you suppose. Not in the important
things. In business, in everyday life, a man has to be matter-of-fact.
It's the only method to get what you want."

"Do you really think so?" She appealed to him now as to a well of
knowledge. Perhaps, he reflected, she had about her ordinarily few wells
to which she was permitted so to appeal. "Then maybe that is why I don't
get what I want."

"Surely you have all you want."

She shook her raven hair. "Not any of it."

"And you want?"

"Lots of things."

"For instance?"

She smiled, but was firm. "No, I sha'n't tell you."

"Not one?"

"Not now."

"Perhaps they are not always the sort of things that you ought to have."

"Yes, they are."

"All of them?"

Her nod was positive: "All."

"But, whether you ought to have them or not, are you equally sure that
they would be worth possessing?"

"How can I know till I have had them?"

"Easily. There are two ways of learning the value of anything we want:
one is to get it, the other to lose it."

"We're crabbed against the things we miss."

"Are we? I don't know. Even if we are, there's a good deal to be said in
favour of the comfort that lies in the philosophy of sour grapes."

She did not wholly follow him, but she was clear on the chief point. "It
doesn't make me feel any more contented," she said, "to believe that I
wouldn't have been happy if I had got something that I wanted to get and
didn't."

Stainton shook his head.

"Some time," he said, "that belief will be your greatest comfort."

Muriel looked away. She was revolving this problem in her youthful mind,
and when she replied it was by the _argumentum ad hominem_, which is an
excellent argument and generally _ab femina_.

"You have been successful," she began. "If you had not been, would it
have made you more contented to believe that success wouldn't have
brought you happiness?"

"I was thinking," said Stainton, "of something in the past, something
that I didn't get, and something that was not a business matter." He
spoke slowly.

She understood.

"I'm sorry," she said, softly.

"No, no," he smiled. "In point of fact, whenever I failed in prospecting
I did try to think that money would not have made me happy. But you may
be right, for I always started prospecting again."

"And now?"

"Oh, now," said Stainton, with a concluding smile, "I am trying hard to
resist the manifold temptations of good fortune."

As he spoke, the curtain was falling on the tragic termination of
_Madama Butterfly_. The Newberrys and their guests rose as the curtain
fell, and Stainton held her cloak for Muriel. Newberry was gasping his
way into his own coat, and Holt was holding for Mrs. Newberry a gorgeous
Japanese kimono absurdly reminiscent of the opera to which they had not
listened; but Muriel's cloak was a simple and beautiful garment in
Stainton's eyes, a grey garment lined with satin of the colour of
old-fashioned roses. As she got into it--"Oh, it's quite easy," she
said--his awkward hand was brushed by her cheek, and he bent his head,
certain of being unobserved in that hurry to depart wherewith the
average American opera-audience expresses its opinion of the average
operatic performance, and inhaled the perfume of her hair. His hands
shook.

With Holt he saw their hosts to their motor.

"Aren't you coming home with us for supper?" asked Mrs. Newberry.

But Holt, who was abominably curious, wished to quiz Stainton, and
Stainton, with the wisdom of his years, knew that enough had been done
for an initial evening.

"No, thanks," Stainton allowed Holt to say; "we've just met after five
years, you know, and we've got no end of things to talk about."

Ethel Newberry leaned forward and pressed Stainton's hand.

"You will look us up soon?" she politely enquired.

"Indeed, yes," said Stainton.

"Always glad to see you," said Newberry.

Muriel said nothing, but Stainton pressed warmly the little hand that
she unreservedly offered.

"Good-night," said Stainton.

"Good-night," said Muriel.

No, thought Stainton, as he reluctantly turned away with Holt, in spite
of her caustic reference to his age, she must be merely an impulsive,
innocent girl. He was glad to come to this determination, glad, however,
simply because it was what he concluded must be a final answer to a
question that had already become annoying.

EN GARDE, MONSIEUR!

As the motor swerved away from them, making for the up-channel of
Broadway, Holt seized Stainton's arm, and began to pilot him through the
crowd.

"Now," said he, "will you _please_ tell me what the----"

"No," said Stainton, "I won't. Not yet."

"But you promised----"

"I know that. Only wait until we get to a quieter place than this. You
can scarcely expect me to call out such things for all New York to
hear."

They freed themselves of the whirlpool around the opera-house and began
to walk northward.

Stainton was looking about him with the eyes of a man that has been for
years in prison and has but just returned to his native town. He was not
a New Yorker by birth, and he had never known the city well, but he had
always loved it and through all his western exile he had dreamed of this
triumphal return. He soon seemed to have forgotten the puzzle that he
had agreed to explain to his friend.

"It's the same," he said, his gaze darting about the scurrying street,
pausing now and again to rest on this or that building new to him
although already old to Broadway. "It's still the same, and yet it's
new--all new.--What's that place, the one over there on the corner?"

Holt grudgingly told him.

"Fresh?" asked Stainton.

"Five years old," said Holt.

"And that?--And that?"

Again Holt supplied the information thus requested.

"I think that New York is alive," said Stainton.

"Well, you never thought it was Philadelphia, did you?"

"I mean that the city itself is a living thing, a gigantic organism. You
know they say a man changes, atom by atom, so that, every seven years,
he is a fresh being, and yet remains the same being. I believe that is
true of some cities and most of all of New York."

Holt slapped him on the back.

"Good old Jim!" said Holt.

The careless words turned Stainton to matters more personal.

"Confound it," he said, only half-good-naturedly, "I wish you wouldn't
call me old. I'm not."

"Of course," said Holt, "not old. Did I say old? Why, you're younger
than ever, and a grand slam younger than I'll ever be again."

Stainton regarded this man of thirty-odd with whom, for a short time, he
had been once so fast a friend and whom New York had so speedily
converted into a corpulent, smug, bald-headed dandy. It would, indeed,
be a pity if Stainton at fifty were not younger than Holt at
thirty-five. And yet Holt had referred to the prematurely withered
Newberry as "Old Newberry" much as he had now spoken of the miner as
"Old Stainton"!

"Oh, you," said Stainton: "you have reached the age at which a man
doesn't object to being called old."

The cheerful Holt snorted. "All right," he said. "Now we're just off the
Lobster Coast. Let's look about for a harbour and a likely place to eat
and hear the sad story of your life."

They found it, although it is always a difficult task for a New Yorker
to decide which of a hundred anxious restaurants he will at any given
time pay to poison him; and, while Stainton's eyes went wide with wonder
at the place, Holt, amid the muddy mill-race of his customary talk where
bobbed only an occasional chip of clean English, piloted the way into
the selected eating and drinking place. It was one of those gilded
khans, each more gilded than the last, which, in the neighbourhood of
Broadway and Forty-Second Street, spring up like grass beside a country
road, last about as long as the grass, and, once gone, are about as long
remembered. Here, at a corner table, Holt, within a few minutes, was
drinking rapid glasses of Irish whiskey and soda, while Stainton slowly
sipped at a glass filled from a half-bottle of champagne.

"Now, then," said Holt: "your story. For Heaven's sake have pity on a
suffering fellow-creature!"

Stainton considered.

"Of course," he said, "this is confidential."

"Of course."

"I shouldn't tell it, George, if it weren't that I had betrayed part of
it in a moment of excitement----"

"Excitement? Well, I suppose that's what some call it."

"And so," pursued Stainton, "made such an ass of myself----"

"Now you're getting down to facts," Holt agreed.

"In the first place," said Stainton, "I repeat that I am not crazy."

"Then I am," said Holt with conviction.

"You are the best judge of that, George."

Holt smiled.

"Wait a bit," said Stainton. "I wouldn't be surprised, George, if you
were a trifle mad; as for me, just make up your mind that J. G. Stainton
is sane."

"That's what they all say," Holt interposed. "Bellevue's full of men
that are sane. Still, anything to get on with your story: sane you are."

"No, you mustn't grant it that way. I want you to draw your conclusions
from what I am going to tell you."

Holt groaned.

"All right; all right," he said, "but for Heaven's sake _tell_ it!"

Stainton settled himself in his chair. He lit a cigar.

"I have to begin," he said, "at the beginning. The average man's
biography is the story of an internecine war, a war between his heart
and his head, and the heart generally wins. What has won with me, you
may, as I said, judge for yourself. My father was a doctor in one of
those little towns that are scattered about Boston in the way that the
smaller drops of ink are scattered about the big splash on a blotter. My
mother died when I was born. The governor didn't have a big practice,
but it was a steady one, and, if he was the sort that would never be
rich, at least he promised to be the sort that would never starve. What
he mostly wanted was to send me to Harvard, and then to make a surgeon
of me."

"I knew you must have had a good coach in bandaging," said Holt.

Stainton disregarded this reference to the grizzly.

"I could never make out," he resumed, "why so many parents think they
have a right to determine their children's tastes and trades. That
tendency is one of our several modern forms of slavery. Most men seem to
assume that Fate, by making them fathers through no will of their own,
has played them a low trick, and that they are therefore right in
revenging themselves on Fate by training their sons into being exactly
the sort of men that they themselves have been, so that Fate will thus
be forced, you see, to do the same thing all over again."

"I don't see," said Holt. "But don't mind me."

"Very well. I am not condemning my father. He was without conscious
malice, and he did his best, poor man. I dare say, after all, that he
was like most of us: so thoroughly pleased with his own life that he
couldn't imagine doing any better for the world than giving it another
life of precisely the same kind. Anyhow, I never was intended by nature
for a doctor, still less for a surgeon, as you will see. The truth is, I
was afraid."

"Afraid? _You!_" Holt laughed at the idea. "I don't believe it," he
said.

"I was. I was afraid of two things: old age and death. They were the
twin horrors of my boyhood. They are still my twin horrors."

"Then, considering how you have run after death and sidestepped old age,
it looks to me as if----"

"Thank you, George; but, if you will only listen a little longer, I
think you will understand. While I was still very small, my father--he
drove about on his professional calls in a buggy: the old-fashioned
way--was kicked in the head by his horse. He never really recovered, and
yet, for a long time, he was not in a condition that peremptorily
demanded treatment. What actually resulted was a disease rare enough, I
dare say, but quite well known: he developed premature and rapid
senility. It all happened, once it got under way, in six months. In that
time I saw him--I, a mere boy--become, day by day, a doting idiot.

"Young as I was, I called in, of my own initiative, a Boston specialist.

"'There is nothing to do, my boy,' he told me, 'except wait for the end.
Meanwhile make your father as comfortable as you can. What you see going
on in him is just what begins to go on in every human being from the
moment of birth: Old Age. Here, of course, it is specialised and
malignantly accelerated. It is senility; that is to say, it is, though
here abnormally magnified, an essentially normal phenomenon. Old age, my
boy; old age.'"

Stainton wet his lips with wine.

"I can see the specialist yet as he said it," he presently went on, "and
I am not likely to forget what it made me feel. There must have been
some neighbour about at the time, or the housekeeper, but it remains in
my memory as an interview between him and me alone. I did the only thing
to be done: I bore it. I hated to have my father sent to an
institution--which shows that I was very young indeed,--and so I simply
nursed him along, the housekeeper and I doing the best we could.

"It was ugly, and it got worse every day. We could see it get worse. It
was--it was Hell. There are things, lots of them, about it that I just
couldn't tell you. I lived in a fascinated terror, and all the time I
kept saying to myself:

"'This is the same thing that's going on in everyone I see. It's going
on in me. It's getting farther and farther along in me with every tick
of my watch. It's what is crawling toward me out of the dark corners of
the years to come.'"

Stainton stopped again, barely to sip his champagne.

"That," he said, "is how I came to be afraid of Old Age."

Holt shuffled his feet.

"A horse-kick isn't hereditary," he said.

"Wait," said Stainton. He put aside his extinguished cigar and resumed:
"One by one I saw my father's powers fade. I could check them off as
they went; powers we are all so used to that we don't know how dependent
we are on them: niceties of the palate, differentiation between pleasant
odours and unpleasant, delicacies of sight, distinctness of hearing,
steadiness, the control of muscles that we are normally unconscious of
controlling. These things go, slowly--very slowly--in each of us, and
when they are gone, even when they are partly gone, when we never guess
that they are gone, but when people about us detect our condition and
comment on it, without our so much as dreaming of it----"

He stopped again, and again went on:

"Then there's Death," he said, with an abrupt change. "Did you ever see
anybody die, Holt?"

Holt shook his bald head. He did not like this sort of thing.

"No," he admitted.

"Not your parents?"

"No; my father died when I was away at school, and my mother during my
first trip abroad."

"Well," continued Stainton, "it is not pretty. We hear a lot of talk
about the dignity and serenity and nobility of death. Nothing to that.
Absolutely nothing. Every doctor and nurse I've ever questioned agrees:
it is always a horrible wrench accompanied by details that are
disgusting. There are subsidiary manifestations.--There is no dignity in
terror; there is no serenity in pain. My father----I was looking towards
him through the garden window. The window was open. He had found a
razor. A dull razor. He may have had some idea that he was shaving. He
cut his throat from ear to ear. Jugular; carotid; pneumogastric nerve. I
remember the queer gurgle and the----

"Do you wonder that I came to be as much afraid of death as I was of old
age? I lay awake nights, I tell you--nights and nights--interminable
nights, thinking, shaking.

"It all ended only after years of fighting and one horrid failure. There
was a girl--it was a good many years ago, and I had just graduated from
Harvard. I fell in love with her. Her people wanted her to marry a
cousin, but I think she really wanted to marry me. At any rate, one day,
when we were skating together, the ice broke beneath her feet, and into
the cold black water we both went.

"It seemed to me that I was hours going down--down, and that I was still
longer coming up. The old fears got me. I went through all the agonies
of realisation. When my head rose above water I grabbed at the ice, and
it cracked to little bits between my fingers. I felt myself sinking
again, and just then she--the girl I was in love with--flung an arm
toward me. I shoved her away.

"We were both rescued. There were lots of people about, the water wasn't
very deep, and there had been only a small percentage of risk. It would
have been, had I not known what death really meant, the chance of a
lifetime for a rogue to play the hero. But, you see, I was too much
afraid of death. I had flung her off to save my own skin, and she
neither forgot nor forgave.

"She wouldn't, of course, have anything more to do with me. She threw me
over, as she had every good reason to. I cleared out and went West. She
married the cousin and eighteen years ago--so I heard long after her
marriage--she died as my mother had died--in childbirth."

Stainton slowly refilled his glass.

Holt shook from him the gloom of the earlier portion of Stainton's
narrative. He became once more interested in the manner in which he was
accustomed to be interested.

"You certainly cured yourself out West," he said.

"Of my twin horrors?" enquired Stainton. "I tried to. That is why people
thought me brave, when they didn't think me rash. I took myself by the
shoulders. I said to myself: 'There are two things that you must do.
First, you must get over showing your fear of death. Next, you must live
in such a way as to postpone old age to the farthest possible limit. In
order to accomplish this postponement, in order to approach old age
gently and in sound condition, you must make enough money to guarantee
you a quiet, unworried life from the age of forty-five or fifty.'"

"Well," said Holt, "you've done it."

"You know what psychologists tell you about apparitions?" said Stainton.

"Not me. I don't go in for spooks."

"They say, George, that if you think you see a ghost and at once run
away from it, you will be seeing ghosts forever after; but that if, at
the first glimpse of your first ghost, you will only grip your nerves,
walk up to him and touch him, you will find that he is only your
yesterday's suit flung on a chair and forgotten, or a sheet flapping
from a clothesline, or something else commonplace seen only in a
different light, and that thereafter you will never again see a ghost."

"Oh!" said Holt, "do they?"

"That principle," said Stainton, "I tried in regard to my fear of death.
I couldn't do it with old age, but I could do it with death, and I did.
I began by taking small risks. Then I took greater ones, and at last I
would deliberately court destruction--or appear to. The outcome was
that, by the time you came to know me, I could do the sort of things you
admired me for."

"Without turning a hair," Holt added. "You'd got your nerve back. You'd
become a brave man."

"No," defined Stainton, "I had become only a man that could conceal his
cowardice. I am still, in my heart, as much afraid of death as I ever
was."

"I don't believe you," said Holt, more warmly; "and I'll bet you did
even better with the other scarecrow."

"Old age?" Stainton's clear eyes snapped. "I had to go at that in
another way, but there at least I have succeeded. George, I have trained
like a Spartan. I have lived like a monk----"

"Don't I know it, Jim? Remember that night I tried to lure you into the
dance-hall at Durango?"

"I have kept hard and keen and clean," said Stainton. "I have got
myself--you can guess by what denials and sacrifice and fights--into the
shape where the fear of senility, of loss or depreciation of my powers,
is reduced to the irreducible minimum." He spoke a little boastfully,
but so earnestly that there was, in tone or words, no hint of the prig.
"Tap that," he said.

He expanded his wide chest. He offered his biceps to Holt's
congratulatory fingers. He filled his glass to the brim and balanced it,
at arm's length, on the palm of his hand without spilling a drop of the
wine.

"I went this morning," he said joyously, "to the best doctor in this New
York of yours. That fellow went over me with all the latest
disease-detecting and age-detecting machinery known to science."

"Well?" asked Holt.

"He said that I was to all intents and purposes not a day over
twenty-five."

Holt nodded approval.

"And you've kept your heart and mind as young as you've kept your body;
that's a cinch," said he.

"Younger," declared Stainton. "I have had to fight there harder than
anywhere else, but I have won. In spite of that first love
disappointment, in spite of friends that have gone back on me now and
then, in spite of rough work in rough places and among rough men, in
spite of money lost and money won, I have kept on believing. I was
saying to someone else this evening that there was comfort in the
philosophy of the sour-grapes, but I didn't really mean it. At any rate,
I never followed the sour-grape school. I have just believed. That is
the whole secret of it, George; all that you have to do is to say to
yourself; 'I don't care; I won't doubt. I _believe_ in the world; I
believe in Man.'"

Holt smiled.

"Wait till you know New York," said he.

"I am doubt-proof," answered Stainton. "I am immune."

"And so----" urged Holt, dropping this phase of the subject and
reverting to Preston Newberry's niece.

"And so," Stainton took him up, "I decided to marry, sell my mine as
soon as a good offer comes and be easy. I came to New York. I went
to-night to the opera." His voice grew unaffectedly softer. "And at the
opera," he said, "I saw the girl that I had loved all those years ago;
that dead girl come to life again; not a curve altered, not a tint
faded; not a day older. I knew, in a flash, that it must be my old
sweetheart's daughter. And it was."

"What? Muriel Stannard?"

"Whose mother was Muriel Benson. Precisely."

Holt whistled softly.

"Well?" asked he.

"Well," said Stainton, "I intend to marry her."

For a moment Holt made no comment. Then he coughed and finally, as his
dry cough produced no visible effect, he broke forth:

"But, Jim----"

There he stopped.

Stainton looked at him enquiringly.

"Yes?"

"But, Jim, you--you----Oh, what's the use!"

"Of course it sounds unusual, to you," admitted Stainton, "but to me it
is all simple enough."

Holt took a deep pull at his glass.

"Oh, it's simple, all right," said he. "It's so simple it's artless."

Stainton's iron-grey brows drew together. "I don't understand."

"Of course it sounds unusual to you," admitted Holt. "If you did
understand, you wouldn't do this thing. You don't understand; you can't,
and that's just the pity of the whole business." Like all men of his
stripe, he gathered both conviction and courage from the sound of his
own voice. "You've lived in the desert and such places like a
what-do-y'-call-it--anchorite--and had opium-dreams without the fun of a
smoke."

Stainton stiffened.

"I didn't ask your advice," said he.

"You wanted it," Holt ventured.

"I don't mind your giving it if it amuses you," said Stainton, shrugging
his shoulders; "but I am quite clear on one point: you are what most
city-bred men are: you have looked so hard after happiness that, when
you see it, you can't enjoy it."

"Am I?" The liquor was burning in Holt's eyes. "Perhaps I am, but that
rule works two ways. Some fellows don't look hard enough. I don't know,
but I imagine if a man never uses his eyes he goes blind."

Stainton, who had carried a few of his books to the West with him,
wanted to quote Cicero: "_Sis a veneris amoribus aversus; quibus si te
dedideris, non aliud quidquam possis cogitare quam illud quod diligis._"
All that he said, however, was:

"I have tried to live in such a way that I may be fit to look a good
woman in the face."

"What man alive is fit to do that?" Holt answered.

Stainton did not directly reply, and Holt, somewhat put out by the
merely silent opposition, found himself a little at a loss.

"You don't want to tie up with a kid," he nevertheless endeavoured to
proceed. "That's what it really amounts to. What you want is a woman, a
ripe one. If you're going to live in the swim, you need somebody that
can teach you the stroke. You want somebody with the _entrée_, somebody
that can run your house in the Avenue or the Drive and isn't afraid of a
man in livery."

"Put my servants in livery?" Stainton was indulgent, but he added: "To
make clowns of your fellow men--really I think that's a sin against
God."

"All right," said Holt; "but you're in love with an idea. Not even a
girl, mind you: an idea. Well, you mark my words: it's a cinch that two
people who haven't anything to do but tell each other how much they
love each other are bound, soon enough, to exhaust the subject and begin
to want something else to talk about."

"Now it is you who don't understand." Stainton did not know why he
should argue with this city waster, unless it was because he had for so
long had no chance to speak of these things to anyone. But he went on:
"There ought to be love in every marriage, but marriage wasn't ordained
for love only."

"Lucky for it," said Holt, "for if it were it would be a worse swindle
than it is now, and that's going some. What _was_ it ordained for?
Babies?"

"Yes."

"What? There are fifty of 'em born outside of marriage right here in New
York every day in the year. When Romeo makes eyes at Juliet, he isn't
thinking babies."

"He only doesn't know that he is, that's all."

"Suppose you're right," said Holt; "that's all the more reason why a
fellow should want to beget a baby instead of marrying one. Look here,
Jim: I'm not butting in on your affairs because I like to; but I know
what I'm talking about when I say you can't play this lead without
spoiling the game."

"Do you mean," asked Stainton, "that Miss Stannard's guardians will
object?"

"Hardly. Her guardians are the Newberrys."

"Then what do you mean?"

Holt interpreted.

"I mean," he said, "that you won't be happy with a child for a wife, and
that a child won't be happy with you for a husband."

Stainton started to rise from the table. Then he seemed to think better,
seemed to recall his old and brief, but firm, friendship with the Holt
of Holt's western days, and sat back in his chair.

"Jim," continued Holt, "you're actually in earnest about all this
marrying-talk, aren't you?"

"So much so," replied Stainton, frowning, "that I don't care to have you
refer to it in that way."

"Oh, all right. I beg pardon. I didn't intend to make you sore. Only it
won't do, you know. Really."

"Why not?"

"I've just been telling you why not. Difference in ages. Too great."

Stainton's face became graver. He leaned forward toward Holt, pushed his
glass aside and, with his heavy forefinger, tapped for emphasis upon the
board.

"I told you," he said, "that your best New York doctor has pronounced me
to all intents and purposes only twenty-five years old."

"O, Hell!" said Holt.

Stainton's brows drew close together.

"I mean what I say," he declared.

"Of course you do. But did the doctor-fellow mean what _he_ said?"

"Why shouldn't he? I paid him to tell the truth. He probably thought I
suspected some illness, so that, from his point of view, there would
have seemed more money in it for him if he had said I needed
treatment--his treatment."

"Perhaps. But medicine isn't an exact science yet--not by several
thousand graveyards full."

"What of that? I didn't need the doctor's assurances--really. I have my
own feelings to go by."

"Yes, I know. I've heard all that before. Many a time. A woman's as old
as she looks, but a man's as young as he feels--per_haps_."

"A man is as old as his arteries--and a few other units of his physical
economy."

"And a girl," said Holt, significantly, "is no older than the--what is
it?--units of _her_ physical economy."

Stainton bit his under lip.

"A girl is mature at eighteen--mature enough. I won't talk of that,
George. We are discussing my age, and I tell you that I have something
better than even the specialist's word to stand on: I have the knowledge
of my own careful, healthy, abstemious life. I am sounder in body than
hundreds and hundreds of what you would call average New Yorkers of
twenty-one. I am sounder than their average. More than that, I have done
something that most of them have not done: I have kept fresh and
unimpaired the tastes, the appetites, the spirit of that age."

"You mean you believe you have."

"I know it."

"How can you know it until you try? And you won't try till you've
committed yourself, Jim."

Stainton shook his great head.

"At this moment," he said, "I'm in twice better health--mental, moral,
physical and every other way--understand me: _every other way_--than you
were ten years ago."

"Certainly," Holt cheerfully admitted, "I'm past salvation; everybody
knows that; but you----"

"I have never been a waster."

"That's just it. It'd be better for you if you had."

"You don't mean that."

"In this mix-up, yes I do. Not much, you know. Just a little picnic now
and then."

"Modern medicine has knocked that theory into a cocked hat."

"Has it, Jim? All right. But a man that's been a long time in a close
room can stand the close room a bit longer than a fellow that's just
come in from the open air. You've formed habits. Fine habits, I grant
you that, but you've formed 'em; they're fixed, just as fixed as my bad
ones are. You've come to depend on 'em, even if you don't know it. Your
brain is used to 'em. So's your body--only more so. Well, what's going
to happen when you change 'em all of a sudden--habits of a lifetime,
mind you? That's what I want to know: what's going to happen?"

"You talk," said Stainton, "as if every man that married, married under
the age of forty-five."

"I talk," Holt retorted, "as if no man of fifty married for his own good
a girl of eighteen."

Stainton's fist clenched. His face flushed crimson. His steel-grey eyes
narrowed. He raised a tight hand. Then, with the fist in mid-air, his
mood changed. He mastered himself. The fist opened. The hand descended
gently. Stainton chuckled.

"You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "I forgive you
because I know you are speaking only out of your friendship for me." He
hesitated. "That is, unless----" He frowned again, but only
slightly--"unless you yourself," he interrogatively concluded, "happen
to feel toward Miss Stannard as I do?"

Holt relieved him there. It was his turn to laugh, and he laughed
heartily.

"O, Lord, no!" said he. "Make yourself easy about that, old man. I've
got just enough to live on comfortably by myself without exercising too
much economy, and if I ever marry it will have to be a woman that can
give me the luxuries I can't get otherwise."

"Then," smiled Stainton, "I hope you will soon need many luxuries and
will soon find a good woman to supply them. I thank you for your
interest, George," he went on; "but you have been arguing about me, and,
in spite of our ages, you are old and I am young. I am young, I tell
you, and even if I were not, I could see nothing wrong in a marriage
between a man of my years and a girl of Miss Stannard's."

"Between fifty and eighteen?"

"Between fifty and eighteen. Exactly. It happens every day."

"It does. But do you think because it's plenty, it's right? Do you think
that whatever happens often, happens for the best?"

"I do not think; I know. I know that a girl of eighteen is better off
with a man steady enough to protect and guide her than she is with an
irresponsible boy of her own years."

"How about the irresponsible girl? Why should the boy be more
irresponsible than the girl?"

"The girl will have a mature man to protect and guide her."

"A man of twenty-five? Or a man of fifty? Protect and guide!" echoed
Holt. "Is _that_ marriage?"

"An important part of it."

"Pff!" George sniffed. "You must think that guiding and protecting is an
easy business."

"I think," said Stainton, good-humouredly, "that you are a good deal of
a fool."

"So you've got it all arranged in your own mind?" Holt, who had ordered
his sixth whiskey-and-soda, poured it down his throat. The fifth was
already thickening his speech.

"All," said Stainton.

"I see. You've counted on everything but God. Don't you think you'd
better reckon a little on God, Jim?"

Stainton bore with him. After all, Holt had now reached that stage of
drunkenness at which most drinkers invite the Deity to a part in their
libations.

"What I do," Stainton said, "I do without blaming God for my success or
failure. I am not one of those persons who, when anything unusually
unpleasant comes to them, refer to it as 'God's will.'"

Holt hiccoughed. Religion had never bothered him and so he, in his sober
moments, religiously refrained from bothering religion. His cups,
however, were sometimes theological.

"Still, He's there, you know," said Holt.

"Your God?" asked Stainton. "Why, your god is only your own prejudices
made infinite."

"You know what I mean," Holt laboriously explained. "In the really
'portant things of life, what's fellow do, and what makes him do it?"

"Reason," suggested Stainton.

"The really 'portant things generally come too quick for--for--lemme
see: for reason."

"Philosophy?"

"To quick for that, too."

"Instinct, perhaps."

"'Nd don't say 'nstinct. Fellow's 'nstincts are low, but he does
something--high. Sort of surroundings 's been brought up in--partly. Not
altogether. Partly's something else; something from--from----" Holt
groped for the word. "From outside," he concluded triumphantly and waved
an explanatory hand. "Well," he added, "that's God."

Stainton rose.

"Yes, yes," he replied. "I dare say. But it's getting late, and I'm an
early riser." He beckoned to a waiter for his bill.

"What's hurry?" enquired Holt.

"It is late," repeated Stainton.

Holt shook his head.

"Never late in New York," said he, and then rising uncertainly to his
feet, he pointed a warning finger. "Or you may call it Nature. Perhaps's
Nature's a better word. Nature. Beautiful nature. Trees and things.
Birds mating in--in May. Mustn't go 'gainst beautiful nature, Jim."

"Come on," said Stainton.

But in the street, Holt flung his arms about his unwilling companion's
neck.

"I'm--I'm fond of you, Jim," he said. "You save' my life 'n'--an' God
knows I love you." Easy tears were running down his puffed cheeks.
"Only you _are_ old, Jim. You know you are."

Stainton disguised his disgust. He disengaged himself gently.

"No, I'm young, George," he said, "and young blood will have its way,
you know."

Holt faced him, swaying on the curb.

"So you really mean--mean to do--to do----? You know what I mean?"

"If she will have me, I do," said Stainton, for the third time that
night: "I intend to marry her."

IV

THE APPLE OF THEIR EYE

Mrs. Preston Newberry had risen to the distinction of that name several
months before Stainton, as a young Harvard undergraduate, came to know
and love her sister. Very likely she had never heard of Jim until his
triumphal march to New York, and certainly, if she had ever heard of
him, she had long ago forgotten his name. Her early married life had
completely occupied itself in an endeavour to live up to her new title,
and, since this effort was not crowned with a success so secure as to
dispense with the necessity of careful watching (for eternal vigilance
is the price of more things than liberty), her present existence was
sufficiently employed to make her regard the care of her niece with
resignation rather than with joy.

Muriel's father had not survived his wife beyond a decade. In that
period he managed to spend all the money that the previous portion of
his mature career had been devoted to acquiring, and Muriel's
grandparents on both sides had long since passed to the sphere of
celestial compensations; the girl had, therefore, in some measure, been
forced upon her aunt. A timid little girl with long dark hair that
nearly concealed her face, she was brought to New York.

"And now," Mrs. Newberry had remarked to her husband, "the question is:
what are we to do with her?"

It may be that she had entertained from her early reading of the novels
of Mrs. Humphry Ward a vague hope that Preston would propose to make
Muriel the child-light of their otherwise now definitely childless home.
If, however, such an expectation had formed, it was speedily shattered:
Preston, like many another husband, inclined to the opinion that one
member of his wife's family was enough in his house. He expressed this
opinion in his usual manner: briefly, but not directly.

"How the hell do I know?" he asked.

When Ethel--Ethel was really the stout Mrs. Newberry's Christian
name--when Ethel had evinced a disposition to discuss in further detail
the question of Muriel's future, Newberry had done what he usually did
when Ethel began any discussion: he recalled an engagement at one of the
three of New York's most difficult clubs.

It was a procedure that seldom failed. He disliked deciding anything,
even where his own pleasures were involved; and so, he was accustomed to
presenting the problem to his wife much as he presented her with an
allowance, recalling an engagement at one of the clubs, going out and
not returning until he was sure that Ethel had gone to bed "to sleep on
it." In this way, even when the subject proved a hard mattress,
Preston's couch remained downy, and Ethel would meet him, over the
breakfast eggcups, with the riddle solved.

In the instance of the disposal of Muriel, the matter proceeded as
always. Mrs. Newberry came downstairs next morning in her newest and
pinkest kimono, an embroidered importation from Japan, whose wing-like
sleeves showed plumper arms and wrists than such a garment is made to
display. Though her eyes were red, she smiled.

"You won't mind paying the child's school bills?" she quavered.

"Not if the school's far enough away," said Preston.

"I had thought----" began his wife.

"Because," said Preston, "it would be wrong to the girl to bring her up
at one of these New York finishing-schools. They inculcate extravagant
ideals; they're full of a lot of the little children of the rich, and
Muriel might acquire there a notion that she was to inherit some of my
money--which she isn't."

Ethel Newberry considered this hint final. She dropped at once to the
last of the dozen institutions of instruction that she had made into a
mental list, and Muriel was sent to a convent school.

"Though we are not Catholics," said Mrs. Newberry.

"Excellent discipline," said Preston. "Is it far away?"

"Nearly in Philadelphia."

"Oh, well, at holiday time----"

"She can"--Ethel brightened--"she can come----"

"Yes, she can have you come to see her," said Preston.

Muriel passed eight years at this school. So long as Mrs. Newberry's
conscience was able to conquer her desires, the young pupil's aunt would
run over to Philadelphia for the short vacations; the long ones were, as
often as could be arranged, spent by Muriel, by invitation, at the home
of one or another of her classmates. Now, however, the girl had
graduated and had remained as a post-graduate as long as the curriculum
permitted.

"She'll have to come out," said Mrs. Newberry.

"Of the school," asked Preston, "or into society?"

"Both. The one entails the other."

"What's the hurry?"

"Good heavens, Preston; if she stays there much longer she'll become a
nun!"

"Suppose she does?" asked Newberry, who was a Presbyterian. "I'm
surprised to hear you refer to a pious life as if it were a smash-up."

Nevertheless, in the end, he agreed that Muriel should pass the present
winter under his hospitable roof ("Though, further than that," he
mentally vowed, "I'll be damned if I endure"). So, Muriel had, without
too much effort on her guardians' part, been taken about with them on
numerous occasions lately, most recently to the Metropolitan, where
Stainton had met her.

It was on the morning after this meeting that, with commendable
promptness, but at a deplorably early hour--to be exact, at eleven
o'clock--Stainton called at the Newberrys'. His card was presented to
Mrs. Newberry through the crack of the door while that good lady was in
her bath.

Ethel, who was big, blonde, and bovine, struggled into the nearest
dressing-gown and hurried to the breakfast-room, where her husband, over
a newspaper, was engaged in his matutinal occupation of scolding the
coffee. Her face a tragic mask, Mrs. Newberry placed the offending
pasteboard by Preston's plate.

"Preston," said she. "Look at that. _Look_ at it!"

Newberry appeared shorter and thinner than ever as he sat crumpled over
the newspaper, his grey moustache short and thin and his head covered by
grey hair, short and thin and worn in a bang. He obeyed his wife's
request. He expressed no surprise.

"Looks like somebody's card," he said.

"It is, Preston," wailed his wife. "It is that awful western person's
that George Holt would drag to our box--_our_ box--last night."

"My dear," said Newberry, "Mr.--er--what's his name?--oh, ah:
Stainton;--yes--Mr. Stainton appears to be a man of means. Concerning
the rich nothing except good."

"But his card, Preston; his card!"

"What's the matter with his card?"

"He has sent it up--here--at this time of day!"

"Hum. Western eccentricity, I suppose. He'll get over all that sort of
thing in time."

Ethel was hopping heavily from one slippered foot to the other.

"He hasn't merely left it," she distractedly explained. "He's here--he's
actually in the house."

"Well, he's not a burglar, Ethel."

"Don't talk so, Preston. I know he's not a burglar. But what does he
want here at this hour?"

"I suppose he wants to see you."

"Now? _What_ can he want to see _me_ about at 11 A.M.?"

"If you really want to know, my dear, I think that the best way to
satisfy your curiosity is to go down and ask him."

"How can I?" She spread wide her arms, the more clearly to bring to her
husband's wandering attention the fact that she was not yet by any means
dressed to receive callers. "Won't you go?" she pleaded.

"Why should I?" asked Newberry. "_I'm_ not in the least curious----This
coffee is worse every morning. You really must have Mrs. Dawson
discharge Jane."

Ethel uttered a mighty sob and fled. She sent word to Stainton that she
would be down in five minutes to greet him. After half an hour, she
entered the reception room. Not ten minutes later, she rushed again upon
her husband, this time in the smoking room, that she called his "study."

"What on earth do you suppose he wants?" she cried.

Preston, with a face like a martyred saint's, put down his newspaper. He
did not, however, take his cigarette from his mouth to reply.

"What who wants?"

Ethel wrung her hands.

"That awful man!" she said.

"Is it possible that you are referring to my friend, Mr.--er--Mr.
Stainton?"

"Of course I am, Preston."

"Oh! He's still here?"

"Why, yes. I've only just seen him."

"You made him wait rather long, my dear. I hope you are not keeping him
waiting again."

"What else could I do?"

"How do I know?"

"Preston, do try to show a little interest. I say: what on earth do you
suppose he wants?"

"If he was as bored by that performance at the Metropolitan as I was,"
said Newberry, yawning, "he wants a drink. Don't _you_ know what he
wants?"

"He wants--he wants," Ethel dramatically brought it out, "to take Muriel
for a ride in his motor."

Preston had been seated in an arm-chair without the slightest indication
of disturbing himself either for his wife or the visitor. At this
announcement by Mrs. Newberry he rose with what, for him, was alacrity.

"I'll call her myself," he said.

"But, Preston! Think of it!"

"That is just what I am doing, my dear--and I think confoundedly well of
it, let me tell you."

"In his motor!" Mrs. Newberry repeated the phrase as if it were pregnant
with evil.

"What's the matter with his motor?" snapped Preston. "It's a motor, you
say, not a monoplane. Mr.--Mr. Stainton has money enough to buy a safe
motor--as motors go."

"Oh, Preston, consider: Muriel--alone--morning! The child isn't even
really out yet!"

At this, Newberry fronted his wife squarely. For perhaps the first time
in his life, he suffered the pains of definite assertion.

"Now, understand, Ethel," he said, "let's cut out all this rot about
Muriel. The girl is _not_ such a child and she is out: she's out of
school, and that's all the outing she's going to get. In fact, it's high
time she was in again."

"She can't go back to the convent, Preston."

"Mr. Stainton doesn't want to motor her back to the convent. No. But if
we manage things with half a hand, she needn't be much longer at large.
Now, don't keep my friend Mr. Stansfield waiting any longer. I surmise
that he has his machine with him?"

"He came in it. It's at the door. I couldn't see the make."

"No. Naturally. Well, his bringing it along shows him to be a man of
expedition. It's what we might expect of a successful miner. And it is
promising for other reasons, too. Get Muriel, take her down, hand her
over to him with your blessing--but be sure you hand her over as your
dearest treasure--and then come back here to me."

Saying this, Preston resumed the perusal of his newspaper.

Ethel left the room. When she returned, she had the air of seeing blood
upon her hands.

"Well?" asked Preston.

"They're gone."

Preston folded the paper and laid it carefully upon the table that stood
beside him. The mood of assertion still tore at his vitals.

"Now then," he began, "about this Mr. Stansfield----"

"Stainton," mildly corrected his wife as she took a seat opposite him
and looked out over the now rapidly filling Madison Avenue.

"Stainton." Newberry accepted the amendment. "What's wrong with him?"

"Oh," said Ethel, her fingers twisting in her lap, "it's not that.
There's nothing _wrong_ with him."

"Well, then!" Preston spoke as if his wife's admission settled the
matter.

But it did not settle the matter.

"Only he is not----" Ethel added: "Is he quite a gentleman?"

Newberry sighed as one sighs at a child that will not comprehend the
simplest statement.

"It's hard for art to compete with Nature," said he; "a gentleman is
man-made, but Nature can do better when she wants."

"We don't really know him."

"I know a good deal about him, Ethel. Enough for present purposes."

"From Mr. Holt?"

"Yes. When Holt read of his success in the papers, the canny George went
to his brokers and made inquiries--thorough inquiries."

"He seems to have got whatever money he has very quickly, Preston."

"That only proves that he is either lucky or crooked. It doesn't prove
he didn't get it. What makes you think he's not quite a gentleman?"

"Well," said Ethel, "----that."

"Poof!" said Newberry. "He was talking a good deal to Muriel at the
opera last night. Didn't he behave all right?"

"I don't know. I suppose so. I asked her what he talked about, and she
said she didn't know."

"Very sensible of her, I'm sure. I wouldn't have expected it of her. It
goes to show that she's not too young to marry."

Ethel permitted herself a fat start.

"O, Preston, you never mean----"

"Now, my dear, you know very well that we've meant nothing else. You've
known it ever since I sent you to call Muriel."

"And you don't think him too old for her?"

"Old? He's probably not fifty."

"Mr. Holt said he thought fifty."

"Very well: fifty. Fifty and eighteen. The one has the youth and the
other supplies the balance. Most suitable. Besides, it's done every day.
Heavens, Ethel, you mustn't expect everything!"

"But do you think there's nobody else, Preston? She has been away a good
deal, you know, and----"

"Somebody else?"

"Yes." Ethel's eyes sought her husband's and, meeting them, fell.
"Somebody that the child cares for," she murmured.

"Stuff!" said Preston. "That convent-place has a high reputation for
the way it's conducted. Also, any man of forty can steal a girl from any
boy of twenty if he only cares to try. The only trouble is that he
hardly ever cares enough about it to try."

"Fifty," repeated Mrs. Newberry.

"Fifty,--granted," continued Preston. "Where we're lucky is that this
fellow seems to want to try--supposing there is any other chap, and of
course there isn't."

"Do you think, Preston"--Ethel's eyes were downcast--"that she can learn
to love him?"

"Ethel!" said Preston.

"But, dear," Ethel insisted, "it does seem a little as if this were the
sort of thing that a girl ought to be left to decide for herself."

Newberry had risen and gone to the mantelpiece to seek a fresh
cigarette. His wife's words brought him to a stop. He folded his thin
arms across his chest.

"Look here," he said; "we have got to face this thing right now, and
once and for all. What are the facts in the case? The facts are these:
Here's Muriel with a pretty face and a good, sound, sensible education
of the proper homely sort, which includes a healthy ignorance of this
wicked world. And here's this fellow Stainsfield, or Stainborough, or
whatever his name is, and I'm sure it makes no difference, a strong,
fatherly kind of old dodo, comes to New York, 'b'gosh,' with his eyes
bugging out at the first good-looker they light on. Well, he's not the
Steel Trust, or a Transatlantic steamship combination, but he's what,
until our palates were spoiled twenty years or so ago, we'd have called
a confoundedly rich man. Understand? Then add to it that Muriel hasn't a
cent of her own and no prospects--_no prospects_, mind you. And now see
whether you'd not better forget to talk sentiment and begin to get busy.
If you and Muriel don't get busy, it's a hundred-to-one shot some other
girl will--and'll get him damned quick. Then Muriel will probably be
left to get a job as school-teacher or something-or-other nearly as bad.
He's worth a half-million if he's worth a cent."

Ethel Newberry's large, innocent eyes opened wide. If surprise can be
placid, they were placidly surprised.

"Are you quite sure about the money, dear?" she asked.

V

ONE ROAD TO LOVE

Among the little company of persons aware of Jim Stainton's sentimental
inclinations, or so far as were concerned the people most intimately
affected by those inclinations, there appeared, thus far, to be a
singular unanimity of opinion regarding the matter. Stainton, it is to
be supposed, approved because the inclinations concurred with his pet
theories. Newberry, although he did not know anything about Stainton's
pet theories and would in all probability have jeered at them had he
been enlightened, proved ready to welcome the miner because he had
decided that the miner should relieve the Newberry household of a quiet
presence that, its quiescence to the contrary notwithstanding,
distinctly disturbed the even course of Newberry's existence. Ethel, as
may be readily believed, found, under her husband's expert guidance, no
difficulty in reaching the conclusion that, as she put it, "a match of
this sort would be for the child's best interests."

To be sure, there was George Holt, if one counted him and his verdict.
Still, even in this singularly imperfect world, where we believe in
majorities and where they misgovern us, we acknowledge the purging
benefits of an ever-present party in opposition; and the party in
opposition to James Stainton was now composed of Mr. George Vanvechten
Holt. He was a splendid minority of one, but he was not one of those
most intimately affected, and he was not generally the sort of
individual noticed. Stainton had saved his life, yet even Holt admitted
that the life was scarcely worth the saving.

"Not that I care anything about the youngster for her own sake," he
would say, night after night, at his club, where he had made all the
club-members he knew an exception to his promise of secrecy; "it's not
that, and it isn't that my liking for Stainton shuts my eyes to his
faults. Not a little bit. Tying up little Muriel to a man half a hundred
years old is like sending virgins to that Minotaur-chap and all that
sort of thing. And hitching good old Jim to a girl of eighteen is like
fastening a scared bulldog to the tail of some new-fangled and
unexploded naval-rocket: you don't know what's inside of it and you
don't know where it's going to land; all you do know is that it's going
to be mighty mystifying to the dog. Still, as I say, I'm not personal.
What makes me sore is the principle of the thing. It's so rottenly
unprincipled, you know."

Holt, however, always ended by declaring that he would not attempt to
interfere. He intimated, darkly, that he could, if he would, interfere
with considerable effect, but he was specific, if darker, in his
reasons therefor, in his decision not to attempt to save his threatened
friends or fight for his outraged principles.

The truth was that George had made one more endeavour after the evening
of the opera. He was severely rebuffed. Because, as he never tired of
stating, he really liked Stainton and would not forget that the miner
had saved his life, he recurred, after much painful plucking-up of
courage, to the amatory subject, which only intoxication had permitted
him so boldly to pursue on the night previous.

He was seated in Stainton's sitting-room high in the hotel. It was late
afternoon; the rumble and clatter of the city rose from the distant
street, and Stainton, full of fresh memories of his motor drive with
Muriel, was walking backward and forward from his bedroom, slowly
getting into evening clothes.

"I sure never would have thought you were morbid," said Holt, from his
seat on the edge of a table, whence he dangled his legs.

"Morbid?" repeated Stainton. "I am not."

"I mean--you know: about death and old age and all that sort of thing."

"I thought I had explained all that last night."

"It must have been over when I was with you in the West."

"It wasn't."

"Not when you were the first man to volunteer to go down in the shaft
of 'Better Days' mine after the explosion?"

"I have rarely been more afraid than I was then."

"Or when you played head-nurse in the spotted-fever mess at Sunnyside?"

"I was nearly sick--scared sick--myself."

Holt's patent-leather boots flashed in and out of the shadow cast by the
table-edge.

"Hum," he said. "It don't seem to show a healthy state of mind, does
it?"

Stainton had disappeared into his bedroom. From there his answer came,
partly muffled by the half-closed door.

"I don't care to talk any more about it. I made my explanation to you
last night, because I had promised to make one. That's all."

"I'm afraid I was a bit illuminated last night," said Holt.

"You were."

"Still, you know, I knew what I was saying."

Stainton did not reply.

"And what I said," Holt supplemented, "is what I think now and what I
always will think."

"Very well. Let it go at that, George."

Holt made a mighty effort.

"The plain truth is," said he, "that people will call you an old fool to
buy a piece of undressed kid."

Stainton's bulky figure filled the doorway. He was in his
shirt-sleeves, his hands busy with the collar-button at the back of his
neck.

"That will do," he said.

"I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings----" said Holt.

"Then keep quiet."

"But you ought to know what people will say. Someone's got to tell you."

"I don't care what people will say."

"They'll say----"

Stainton advanced. His hands were now at his side, idle, but his face
was completely calm.

"Never mind," he said.

"They'll say," concluded Holt, "that you're buying the little girl, and
that you've been cheated in the transaction----"

Stainton's hands were raised. They descended heavily upon Holt's
shoulders. They plucked Holt from his perch and shook him until his
teeth chattered. Then they dropped him, rather gently, into a chair.

"Now," said Stainton. His face was firm, and there was a cold blue flame
playing from under his brows, but he was not even breathing hard. "Now,
let this end it. If you want to be my friend, let this end your comments
on my personal affairs. If you do not want to be my friend, go on
talking as you have been, and I will throw you out of the window."

This incident partially accounts for Holt's resolute refusal thereafter
to advise Stainton. Advise him further George certainly did not,
although among his club-fellows he expressed himself as extremely
anxious to have it remembered that, should anything go wrong with
Stainton, George Holt had predicted as much.

There remained, however, one person of importance to Stainton's project
that still remained unconsulted and might have some opinion of more or
less weight in regard to it. This was Muriel Stannard.

What she thought, or what she would ultimately come to feel about his
plan, did occupy space in Stainton's cogitations. Notwithstanding his
romanticism, Stainton was not so blind to fact as to fail to see that
the girl's mind was as virgin as her body. Indeed, her brain, so far as
her education might be said to have developed that organ, was less
advanced than the rest of her physique, and this not because she was not
intelligent, for now that she was in the world at last he could see her
daily hastening toward mental maturity, but because her pastors and
masters had brought her up in the manner supposed to be correct for
girls of her position. Critics of that manner might say that its
directors proceed on the theory that, since life is full of serpents,
the best way to train children for life is not to teach them to
distinguish between harmless and venomous reptiles, but to keep them in
such ignorance of the snakes that they will be sure not to know one when
they see it. Yet Stainton, anything rather than a critic of the
established order, found himself not displeased with this
manifestation--or lack of it. He wanted youth; he wanted his long lost,
long postponed romance, and chance had put both these things within his
reach in the person of this dusky-eyed girl. Physically she was what her
mother had been, mentally she could be trained to complete resemblance.
He would make of her what he conceived to be the best. And so he loved
her.

To ascertain her opinion, to predetermine it, Stainton was now
elaborately preparing. Beginning with that introductory motor ride, in
which Stainton's cautious manipulation of the automobile seemed to
Muriel's unspoiled delight a union of skill and daring, he went about
his courtship in what he believed a frank and regular way; in a way that
both Preston and Ethel Newberry considered absolutely committal; in a
way that, consider it as she might, Muriel accepted with every evidence
of girlish pleasure.

There were more motor drives, with the aunt now playing chaperon: a
chaperon that conscientiously chaperoned as little as possible. There
were small theatre parties, small suppers, small dinners. One or two
mothers of daughters, who dared to be civil to Stainton, were shooed
away, attacked by Ethel with all the brazen loyalty of a ponderous hen
defending her chicks from the assault of a terrier. The Newberrys, as in
duty bound, retaliated upon Stainton's theatres, dinners, and suppers
with two teas and a luncheon. Stainton "came back at them," as George
Holt phrased it, with more suppers, theatres, and dinners, the dramas
always carefully selected to suit the immature condition of Muriel's
soul; and so the whole courtship progressed along those conventional
lines which lay the road to the altar over a plain of rich foods
irrigated by vintage wines.

"Do you like this sort of thing?" Stainton heard himself asking the girl
during one of the morning walks that he was permitted to take with her,
unescorted, through Central Park.

"What sort of thing?" asked Muriel. "A day like this? I love it!"

It was a day worthy of being loved: one of those crisp autumnal days
when New York is at its best and when the air, from the earth to the
clear blue zenith, has a crystal clarity and a bracing tang that none
other of the world's great cities possesses. Stainton felt as he used on
some Rocky Mountain peak with the crests of lower eminences rolling away
to the horizon like the waves of an inland sea below him; and Muriel,
her cheeks glowing, walked by his side more like some firm-breasted
nymph of those forests than a child of modern days and metropolitan
civilisation.

"Yes," said Stainton, "this is splendid. But I meant the whole thing:
New York, the life here, the city."

"I love that, too," said Muriel.

To Stainton's ear the use of one's first Latin verb translated was not
merely schoolgirl carelessness and want of variety of phrase; it was an
accurate expression of her abounding capacity for intense affection, her
splendid fortune of emotion and her equally splendid generosity in its
disposal.

"So do I," he said. "You can't begin to know how much it means to me to
get back here."

"From the West?" Her eyes were soft at this. "But the West must be so
romantic."

"Scarcely that. It has its points, but romance is not one of them."

"Oh, but your life there was romantic." She nodded wisely. "I know," she
said.

Stainton's smile was tenderly indulgent.

"How did you get that idea?" he asked.

"Auntie Ethel has told me some of the brave things you did, and so has
Uncle Preston."

"They have been reading some of the silly stories that the papers
published when I made my big find. You mustn't believe all that the
newspapers say."

"I believe these things," affirmed Muriel. "Wasn't that true about the
time you rescued the man from the lynchers at Grand Junction?"

"Grand Joining. I didn't read it," said Stainton.

"But did you do it?"

"Oh, there was something of the sort." He honestly disliked to have his
supposedly heroic exploits praised, only from modesty perhaps, perhaps
from a super-sensitive consciousness that they were the results rather
of fear than of bravery. "Look at that sky. Isn't it glorious?"

"Then about the express robbery on the Rio Grande," said Muriel; "they
said you went after the robbers when the sheriff and his men were afraid
to go, and you captured them by yourself--three of them."

Stainton laughed, his broad, white teeth showing.

"The sheriff and his men," he said, "were along with me. It was not half
so exciting as that play last night. Didn't you like the play?"

"I loved it. But, Mr. Stainton----"

"Yes?"

"Won't you tell me about some of these things?"

"I am sure they are much more interesting in the form in which the
newspapers presented them."

"I always wanted to see a mine. Surely a mine must be lovely. Please
tell me about a mine."

He tried to tell her, but mining had been to him only a means to an end
and, the end now being attained, mining struck him as a dull subject. He
abruptly concluded by telling her so.

"Besides," he said, "it is merely a business: a mere business, like any
other. What can girls and women care for business?"

So he brought back the conversation to the play that they had seen the
night before. He discussed the plot with her, the plot having no
relation to business, or to anything else approaching actuality for that
matter, his iron-grey eyes all the while eagerly feeding on her beauty
and her youth.

"You think," he asked, "that the Duchess should not have tried to break
off the match?"

"Just because Arthur was young and poor?" inquired Muriel. "Of course I
think she shouldn't. He was far too nice for her daughter anyway."

"But there was the suspicion that he had cheated at cards. Lord Eustace
had told her so."

"She didn't really believe that; she only wanted to believe it. I think
she was horrid."

"And her daughter, Lady--Lady----" He hesitated for the name.

"Lady Gladys," supplied Muriel. "I think she was horrid, too. To give up
Arthur like that!"

Stainton smiled gravely.

"You would not have done it, Miss Stannard?"

"Indeed I would not!"

"What _would_ you have done?"

Muriel's chin became resolute.

"I should have gone right up to him before them all there in the
drawing-room, and I should have put my----" She broke off, rosy with
embarrassment. "You will think I am awfully silly," she said.

But Stainton did not think so. He urged her on.

"No, you will laugh," said Muriel.

"I should not," he answered her. "I really want to know."

Nevertheless, the illusion of the theatre, which her memory had
partially renewed, her self-consciousness finally dispelled, and her
conclusion was in lame contrast to her beginning:

"I should just have married him in spite of them all."

Of such material was Stainton's wooing made. Though it may seem but poor
stuff to you, it did not seem so to those who wove it, and it was, if
you will but reflect upon your own, the material generally in vogue.

Our modern method of courting is, of course, the most artificial phase
of modern artificial life. The period of courtship is, for most lovers,
what Sunday used to be for the small boy in the orthodox family of the
early 'seventies. As he then put on his best clothes for the Sabbath,
our men and women now put on their best manners for the courting. As he
then put off his real self at church-time, they now lay aside, for this
supposedly romantic interlude in an existence presently to return to the
acknowledged prosaic, all their crudities. It was thus with Muriel and
Stainton.

Not that the latter meant to appear other than he was. His great Plan
presumed, indeed, quite the reverse. He was intent that Muriel should
admire not his wealth or his reputation, but his inherent worth and the
genuine basis for his reputation. He was resolved that she should love
not any or all of the things that he might be, but the one thing, the
real self, that he had himself made. His fault, according to the
prevailing standards, if any fault resulted, consisted only in his
insistence upon a too introspectively observed ideal of just what that
thing happened to be.

Nor yet, and this is likewise intrinsic, would the severest scrutiny
have revealed in Muriel any realisation of a pose upon her own part. Her
aunt, trusting as do most guardians of youth to a natural intuition in
the ward, which has no standing in fact, refrained from informing the
girl in plain language what it was that Stainton wanted. Mrs. Newberry's
fears were ungrounded: the conventional calm had not been disturbed, and
Muriel, save for timid smiles at the butcher's boy when he called at the
school and furtive glances at the acolytes in church, had never yet
known love. Not guessing the truth, Muriel was merely, for the first
time, being accorded a glimpse of those kingdoms of this world of which
all schoolgirls have had their stolen dreams. With what she saw she was
frankly delighted, and when a pretty young girl is frankly delighted, a
pretty young girl is obviously not at her worst.

"You look very happy nowadays," said Mrs. Newberry at the
luncheon-table, looking, however, not at the subject of her remarks but
at the master of her affections, who, chancing to be lunching at home,
sat opposite her.

"I am, Aunt Ethel," said Muriel. "I always have been happy, but I am
happier than ever now."

Mrs. Newberry smiled meaningly at Preston, but Muriel could not see the
smile, and Preston would not.

"Why is that?" asked Ethel.

"Oh, because."

"Because why?"

"Because I am seeing so much. The city, you know, and these suppers and
things. Sitting up until to-morrow. And I do so love the theatres!"

Ethel's smile faded.

"Yes," she said, "Mr. Stainton is very kind."

"And generous," put in Preston so unexpectedly that his wife jumped.
"Thompson; the salmon."

"I think he's lovely," said Muriel.

"Do you?" Mrs. Newberry was bovine even in her playful moods. "He does
really run about like a boy, doesn't he?"

"Well," said Muriel, "I wouldn't say _just_ like a boy."

"He seems quite young--he actually seems very young indeed," mused
Ethel.

"Seems?" said Preston. "He is."

His positive tone startled Mrs. Newberry into indiscretion.

"He is fif----" she began, then, catching her husband's eye, she
corrected herself: "He must be nearly----"

"He is forty," said Newberry, scowling.

"Oh, Uncle Preston," protested Muriel, "Mr. Holt said----"

"George Holt is a fool," said Newberry, "and always was."

"Your uncle is quite right, Muriel," said Ethel. "Mr. Holt does gossip.
Besides, he is not the sort of person a young girl should quote."

"You quote him, Aunt Ethel--often."

"Your aunt," said Preston, "is not a young girl. Mr. Stainton is younger
than Holt, I dare say, for he has evidently taken good care of himself,
and Holt never takes care of anything, least of all his health."

The air of importance that her uncle and aunt seemed to attach to so
trivial a matter as a few years more or less in the age of any man past
thirty puzzled Muriel, and she betrayed her bewilderment.

"I don't see how it much matters," she said, "whether he's forty or
fifty."

"It doesn't matter in the least," said Newberry. "But you had better
make the most of him while you can."

"I don't see why," said Muriel.

"Because he is popular," Preston explained. "There are several
women--women and _girls_--anxious to marry him, and one or other of them
is sure to succeed."

Muriel winced. She did not relish the thought of losing her new friend,
and she wondered why, if he were really sought after in marriage, he had
so much time to devote to her and her aunt and uncle, and why he spoke
so little of women to her.

Stainton, indeed, held his tongue about his intentions for just the
length of time that, as he had previously concluded, a man must hold his
tongue in such matters. If, in the meantime, Muriel heard from both of
the Newberrys more interesting stories of his career in the West, and
was impressed thereby, if she got from the same reliable source equally
romantic accounts of his wealth and was, as the best of us could not in
like circumstances help being, a little impressed by these as well, she
was, nevertheless, honestly unprepared for his final declaration. She
regarded Stainton as a storybook hero, the more so since his
conversation never approached the sentimental, and she delighted in his
company for the "good time"--it was thus that she described it--which he
was "showing her."

In brief, she was at last ready to fall in love with Stainton. Stainton
was in love.

VI

A MAID PERPLEXED

So far as Stainton was privileged to know, the end of this first act in
their comedy came about in much the manner designed by him. He moved
quietly, as he moved in all the details of his life; he had the gift of
precision, and when he arrived at what Sarcey called the _scène à
faire_, though he was perhaps more in love, as that term is generally
understood, than most lovers, he arrived not at all breathless, and
found nothing to complain of in what awaited him.

Mrs. Newberry had ostentatiously deserted him and Muriel in the
white-and-gold Newberry drawing-room splendid with spindle-legged
mahogany and appropriately uncomfortable. It was evening, an evening
that Stainton had taken care should be unoccupied by any disturbing
theatre party or other frivolous forerunner to a declaration.

That Ethel and her husband had tacitly agreed to this arrangement,
Stainton did not notice as significant. Mrs. Newberry, after the spasm
of chaperonage that followed his first unwatched motor drive with
Muriel, had tactfully begun to withdraw from the rôle of duenna, and the
suitor had consoled himself in the ocular demonstration of the proverb
that two are company and three none. Hitherto he had enjoyed his
privilege like the temperate man that he was, which is to say that he
enjoyed it without abusing it. He belonged by birth to that class of
society which, though strong enough in the so-called natural affections,
seems to think it indecent to display emotion in public, and he was
unwilling, for both his own sake and that of the girl he loved, to hurry
an affair that might lose much by speed and gain much by circumspection.
Now, however, the time came to test the virtues of his plan of campaign,
and Stainton was glad that the combination of the time and the place and
the loved one was not marred by any extraneous interference.

The wooer was at his best. The clothes that are designed for those short
hours of the twenty-four when one is at rest without being asleep,
became him; they gave full value to his erect figure, his shapely hips,
and his robust shoulders; and, since he was about to win or lose that
which he now most prized in life, and since he had always felt sure that
the only courage he lacked was physical, his strong face looked far
younger than its years and his iron-grey eyes shone not with fear, but
with excitement.

While he leaned against a corner of the white mantelpiece above the
glowing fireplace, so much as it was possible for his upright figure to
lean, he was thinking that Muriel, opposite him, was more beautiful than
he had ever yet seen her--thinking, but without terror, how dreadful it
would be should he lose her and how wonderful should he win. Young
enough for her in that kindly light he almost looked and was sure he
was; worthy of her, though he felt more worthy than most, he was certain
that no man could be. He saw her as he had seen her that first night at
the opera, but more desirable.

Seated in the farther corner of a long, low couch drawn close to the
chimney-place and at right-angles to it, three or four rose-red pillows
piled behind the suggestion of bare shoulders only just escaping from
her gown of grey ninon draped over delicate pink, Muriel's slim body
fronted the dancing fire and warmed in the light that played from the
flames. Her blue-black hair waved about her white temples and the narrow
lines of her brows; her lips, the lower slightly indrawn, were like
young red roses after the last shower of Spring.

He felt again, as he had felt when he saw her in the Newberrys' box,
that she was lovely not only with the hesitant possibilities of girlhood
at pause before the door of maturity, but because she gleamed with the
gleam of an approaching summer night scented and starred. He noted how
the yellow rays from a high candelabrum standing near the couch cast
what might be an aureole about her head and set it in relief against the
distant, drawn curtains, the curtains of ivory plush, which shut the
heaven of this drawing-room from the earth of everywhere else. In his
every early adventure among the dreams of love, this lonely man of the
desert, reacting on his environment, had been less annoyed by the
demands of a body that clamoured in vain than by the dictates of a soul
that insisted upon the perfection of beauty among beautiful surroundings
beautifully encountered. Now he was to put into action forces that would
either realise or break those dreams, and, knowing that, he imprinted on
his memory this picture of her and always after remembered it: her white
hands clasped about the great bunch of violets he had brought to her,
the glory of her wayward hair, the curve of her throat, her dark eyes
with their curving lashes, her parted lips.

She had again been asking him of his life in the mining-camps of Alaska
and the West and about his solitary journeys prospecting for the gold
that it had often seemed was never to be found, and Stainton, wishing
not to capitalise his achievements and unable to understand why a girl
should interest herself in what was simply a business history, had again
evaded her.

"But you must have suffered a good deal," she said.

"Oh, yes," he said; "that is part of the price of Life."

"You did it all," she asked, "to win a fortune?"

"No," he answered, his glance as steady upon hers as it had been that
night at the opera. "I did it all to win Life. That has always been
what I wanted; that has always been what I never had: Life. I wanted--I
scarcely know how to say it: the full, sharp, clean joys of being. You
understand?"

"I think I understand," she said.

"I wanted them. I saw that no man could have them in these days, living
as we live, unless he was economically independent and morally straight.
I made up my mind to win economic independence and to keep morally
straight at any sacrifice."

She drew her fingers a little tighter about the tinfoil wrapping of the
violets. Over the purple tops of the flowers, as she raised them toward
her face, her intent, innocent face returned his steady scrutiny.

"And you've won?" she asked.

He wished to cross to her, to come to the couch and lean over its back,
and, with his lips close to her cheek, whisper his answer. But he would
not do that; he had decided that to do that at this point would be to
bring about for his benefit an unfair propinquity. Instead, he moved
only a step from the mantelpiece and stood upright, his arms folded.

Only a step, but to the girl he seemed somehow to draw much closer. The
atmosphere of the room was somehow strained to tension. She saw that his
eyes, although they did not waver, softened, and, to fill a pause of
which she began to be afraid, she heard herself repeating:

"And you've won?"

"That," said Stainton, "is for you to say--Muriel."

It was the first time he had called her by her given name. Her eyes
fell. She lowered the violets and, looking only at them, raised a hand
to finger them. The hand shook.

"For me?" she asked.

If there is one thing in which men are more alike than another, it is
the manner of their asking women to marry them. Generally it adds to
many pretences the cruelty of suspense. Stainton was not unusual.

"I have won my fight--yes," he said. "I have got the means. Can I gain
the end? It's you who must tell me that."

She saw now.

"How can I help?" she faltered.

"I wanted Life," he repeated, and wished that he could see her face.
"Life means more than money. Money will protect it, secure it; but Life
means Love. Long ago I knew your mother."

Very simply, but directly, he told her how he had loved that other
Muriel. His morbid fears he did not describe, but his first romance he
sketched with a gentleness that, while she, her heart steadied, looked
up at his reposed strength and remembered all the stories that she had
heard of his adventurous career, brought a quick mist of tears to her
eyes.

"Do you remember," he asked, when his story was finished, "how rudely I
looked at you when I first saw you in the Metropolitan Opera House?"

"It wasn't rude," she said.

"You must have thought it so then."

"I--I didn't know what to think--exactly."

"Well, now you know. It was an astonishing resemblance that made me
stare at you."

Her nether lip trembled.

"I didn't know my mother," she said.

"No," said Stainton, "but you are very like her." He waited a moment and
then, as her eyes were lowered, went on: "That was a boyish love of mine
for her. It was really not love at all--only the rough sketch for what
might have been, but never was, a finished picture. But I went away,
when your mother repulsed me, with the likeness of her in my heart. I
wanted love; I worked to be fit to win love and to keep it once I had
won it. Then I came back and saw in that box at the opera the living
original of the dream-woman that had all those years been with me."

He came another step nearer.

"I arranged to meet you," he said, "and I knew at last I was really in
love. I want to be to you what your mother would not let me be to her.
It is you whom I love, not a memory. I love you. I was young then and
didn't know. Now I am still young--I have kept myself young--but I
_know_." He bent forward and paused. Then, "Muriel," he said.

The girl drew back. She put her hand before her eyes. The violets rolled
to the floor.

"I--I can't tell," she stammered. "I didn't expect--I never thought----"

Even this Stainton had foreseen.

"Then don't hurry now," he said. He drew a chair beside her and quietly
took her free hand. "Take your time. Take a week, two weeks, a month, if
you choose."

"But it's so new; it's all so new," said Muriel. "I never
suspected----Oh, I know girls are always supposed to guess; but really,
really, I never, _never_----"

There was genuine pain in her voice.

"I don't know what is expected of most girls," said Stainton; "but of
you I shall never expect anything but the truth."

She looked up at him with eyes perplexed.

"Yes--yes, that is just what I want to be: honest. And--don't you
see?--that is just why--I am so uncertain--that is just why I can't,
right away, tell you----"

He pressed her hand and rose. He did not like to hurt her.

"I ask only that you will think it over," he said. "Will you think it
over, Muriel?"

She bowed her head.

"Yes," said she.

"And I may come back in----"

"Yes."

"In two weeks?"

"In two weeks." Her voice was low and shaken. "Oh, you don't mind if I
ask you to go now?" she pleaded.

"I understand," said Stainton. "I'll be back two weeks from this
evening. Good-night."

"Good-night, Mr. Stainton," said Muriel.

She waited for him to go. She waited until she heard the street door
close behind him. Then she hurried in retreat toward her own room.

But Mrs. Newberry was lying in ambush on the landing when the girl came
upstairs--Mrs. Newberry, broad in white satin, with diamonds at her neck
and in her hair.

"Well?" asked the aunt.

"Oh!" cried Muriel. She started. "Aunt Ethel!"

"Well?"

"You frightened me," Muriel explained. "I didn't see you until you
spoke."

"Well?" persisted Mrs. Newberry.

"Nothing. That's all," said Muriel. "Nothing--only that----"

Ethel became diplomatic:

"Mr. Stainton didn't stay very long?"

"Not very long, Aunty."

Ethel heard something ominous in her niece's tone.

"You didn't--you don't mean to say you sent him _away_?"

"No, Aunty. Good-night."

"It's early. You're going to bed so early?"

"Yes, I think I'll go to bed. I'm--I'm tired."

"But it's early," repeated Mrs. Newberry, who was accustomed to order
her life according to hours and not to reason.

"Is it?" said Muriel.

"It's scarcely ten. The library clock just struck."

"I think it struck some time ago."

"Did it?"

"I think I shall go to bed, Aunty."

Mrs. Newberry sought to bar the way, but she could not succeed in that
when she could think of no pretext for detaining the girl, so Muriel
brushed past her and went to her own room.

Ethel returned to the library--so called because it contained a few
hundred unread books, the newspapers, and all the current magazines. She
said to herself that she wanted to think it over, "it" being the
opportunity that she had so ceremoniously afforded Stainton and Muriel,
together with Muriel's sudden desire for privacy.

Nevertheless, think it over as she would, she made nothing of it. When
Preston returned from one of his clubs, several hours later, she was no
nearer to a solution than she had at first been, and she told him so.

"I don't understand it," said Ethel. "I don't understand it at all."

Preston enjoyed his clubs so much that he rarely returned from them in
his pleasantest mood.

"Then," he asked, "don't you think it might possibly be just as well for
you to let it alone?"

This occurred on a Thursday. As the week progressed and passed and James
Stainton did not reappear, Mrs. Newberry found it increasingly difficult
to follow the advice that her husband had pointedly suggested. She
assailed Muriel several times to no purpose. She wrote to Stainton,
asking him to come to dinner, but he replied that he was too desperately
engaged in some business that she surmised was vaguely connected with a
French syndicate and his mine. Then, Muriel's silence unbroken, she made
one or two tentative advances, merely inviting the confidence that she
had theretofore demanded as her consanguineous right; but her niece's
manner of meeting these advances merely served to simplify the task of
wifely obedience.

When light was at last cast on the puzzle, it was Muriel's free will
that vouchsafed it. On the Wednesday that fell thirteen days after
Stainton's mysteriously terminated call, Muriel entered Ethel's
boudoir--it was a pink boudoir--where Mrs. Newberry was attempting, at
eleven o'clock in the morning, to dress in time for a two o'clock
luncheon.

"Can you spare Marie?" asked Muriel. Marie was Mrs. Newberry's maid,
just then fluttering about her mistress, who, her dressing advanced only
beyond the ordeal of corsets, was seated, in a grandiose kimono, before
mirrors.

"In two hours and a half perhaps I can," said Ethel. "Why?"

"Because I want to talk with you."

This was odd. It was so odd that Mrs. Newberry should have scented its
import; only, it is difficult to scent the import of anything when one
has supped late the night before, when the first "rat" has not been
nested upon one's head, and when one has but an eighth part of a day in
which to make ready for a luncheon.

"Really, Muriel," complained Ethel. "You do choose the most remarkable
moments for conversation. It's only eleven o'clock! What on earth can
you want to talk about at such an hour?"

Muriel quietly seated herself by the window.

"About Mr. Stainton," she said.

Mrs. Newberry started so violently that a shower of gilt hairpins
clattered upon the dressing-table and floor.

"You may go, Marie," she gasped. She waited until the maid had shut the
door. Then she turned her gaze full upon her niece. "What is it?" she
cried.

"He wants to marry me."

Mrs. Newberry floundered to her feet and rushed upon Muriel. Her flowing
sleeves flew back to her sturdy shoulders. She flung plump arms around
Muriel's neck.

"My dear girl!" said she. She kissed the dear girl on both passive
cheeks. Then she inquired: "You've had a letter?"

"No," said Muriel. "He asked me."

"But, my dear, he hasn't been here for nearly two weeks. It was--let me
see--yes, it will be two weeks to-morrow evening."

"That was when he asked me, Aunty."

Mrs. Newberry's embrace relaxed. She looked hurt.

"And you never told me! I think that implies a lack of confidence--a
lack of affection, Muriel."

"I don't know. I wanted to think it over first."

"Think it over! What was there to debate, I should like to know?"

"A good deal, it seemed to me; and anyhow, Aunty, I think this is the
sort of thing a girl has to decide for herself--if she can."

"Where ever did you get such notions? A girl never _can_ decide it for
herself."

Muriel's answering smile was rueful.

"_I_ couldn't, at any rate," she said, "and so, even if I'm late about
it, I've come to you."

Mrs. Newberry was reassured. After all, the thing had happened; Muriel's
future--so we fatuous moderns reason--was at last secured. According to
the custom of her time and class, Ethel had always taken it for granted
that a poor girl married to a rich man is as safe as a good girl gone
to Heaven--and more certainly comfortable. She became radiant. It was
necessary only that they make such decent speed as would prevent any
other young woman from interfering.

"Well," she said, "I'm glad you _have_ come, because, since long
engagements aren't fashionable any more, your uncle and I must naturally
have all the warning possible--for your uncle will, of course, provide
the wedding. I think it had better be next month--yes, next month and at
St. Bartholomew's."

Muriel's cheek paled. She turned again to the window and looked out.

"I don't think you quite understand," she said. "I'm not sure----"

"Now, don't be silly," interrupted Mrs. Newberry. "I won't hear any
foolish talk about a home wedding or a quiet wedding. It isn't the
proper thing for a wedding to be quiet; it isn't natural; besides, you
have been living here in your uncle's house, and you owe something to
his position."

"That's not it." Muriel's back was still turned; her eyes were fixed on
the cold rain that was falling.

"Well," asked Mrs. Newberry, in complete bewilderment, "then what _is_
it?"

"I am not sure that I love Mr. Stainton."

The plump Mrs. Newberry again rose. Her face was a pretty blank.

"Love?" she repeated, as if she had heard that word somewhere before
but could not for the life of her recall where. "_Love_, did you say?"

"Yes," replied Muriel; "I don't know whether I love him."

"What next?" asked Ethel. "Love? You don't know whether you love him!
The idea! You're too young to know anything about it, my child. Of
course you love him. You're just too young to know it, that's all."

Muriel displayed a wistful face.

"I'm eighteen."

"A mere baby."

"Then I should think I was too young to marry."

"_Do_ you think so?"

"No, only----"

Mrs. Newberry waxed wise.

"As a matter of fact, Muriel, haven't you," she enquired, "often thought
of marrying even when you were younger than you are now?"

"Oh, yes!"

"_Well_, then!" Mrs. Newberry in the past few weeks had acquired a few
of her husband's mannerisms, together with some of his convictions.

But this convincing argument did not settle matters. Muriel again faced
the window; she seemed to draw inspiration for her incomprehensible
stubbornness from the prospect of dripping Madison Avenue.

"It's not so easy----" she began.

"Isn't he kind?" demanded Mrs. Newberry.

"Yes, he's kind."

"You certainly think him good-looking, child. In fact, _I_ should call
him handsome."

"I think he is _almost_ handsome, Aunty."

"Of course he is. I have heard lots of women simply _rave_ about him.
And he is in love with you? You can't deny that?"

"Did you know it, Aunty?"

"How could anyone help knowing it? He shows it all the time. He can't
keep his eyes off you."

"Then, why didn't you tell me?"

"Because----Why, it was so evident that we took it for granted you
knew."

"We?"

"Your uncle and I, yes."

"Oh! There doesn't seem to be any doubt in _his_ mind that he's in love
with me."

"Exactly, Muriel; and he is rich--quite rich. Why, there are hundreds of
girls in New York who would give their eyes to catch him. Hundreds of
them."

"But he is----" Muriel hesitated.

"Yes?"

"He's not young, Aunty."

"What has that to do with it?"

"I don't know, but I should think it might have a good deal to do with
it. Don't people say that the young love the young?"

"And marry them, you mean? Really, my dear, you have such romantic
notions! In that case, what's to become of the old?"

"They're supposed to have married before they became old, I should
think. Now, I am only eighteen. I don't know--I'm only speculating about
it, and I like Mr. Stainton very much--but when you think of a man of
his age marrying----"

Again Mrs. Newberry interrupted. She had her position to maintain: her
position as Preston Newberry's wife.

"Muriel," she said, "I can guess what is in your mind, but I cannot
guess how it got there. You shock me."

"But, Aunty----"

"That is enough. There are _some_ things that a young girl should not
discuss."

Muriel put her hands to her burning cheeks.

"Oh, you don't understand!" she cried. "You don't understand at all. I
don't know what you mean! But he's fifty." She almost sobbed. "I don't
care what Uncle Preston says. I _know_ he is fifty!"

It was a trying moment for Mrs. Newberry, but she met it bravely. She
considered Muriel. Then, in the glass, she considered her own image.