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                              STRATFORD-
                                ON-AVON

                             A sketch-book

                                  by

                                GORDON
                                 HOME

                         Adam & Charles Black
                         Soho Square; London.

           [Illustration: The Monumental Bust, Title-Page.]

                            Illustrations.

               1 The Monumental Bust, Title-Page.
               2 In the High Street.
               3 Holy Trinity Church.
               4 The Birthplace.
               5 The Birth Room in Shakespeare's House.
               6 The Guild Hall & Grammar School.
               7 The Site of New Place & The Guild Chapel.
               8 The New Place Panelling in the Falcon Hotel.
               9 A doorway in Sheep Street.
              10 The Memorial Theatre from the Church-yard Wall.
              11 The Clopton Bridge.
              12 The Corner of Ely Street.
              13 In The Hall of The Harvard House.
              14 Details of the front of Harvard House.
              15 The Entrance to the Grammar School.
              16 The approach to The Church porch.
              17 In Holy Trinity Church.
              18 Mason's Court, Rother Street.
              19 In the garden of the Birthplace.
              20 Seven gables of the Dower House.
              21 Anne Hathaway's Cottage.
              22 Anne Hathaway's, The garden view.
              23 Anne Hathaway's Bed.
              24 The Home of Mary Arden.

[Illustration: In the High Street.]

[Illustration: Holy Trinity Church.]

[Illustration: The Birthplace.]

[Illustration: The Birth Room in Shakespeare's House.]

[Illustration: The Guild Hall & Grammar School.]

[Illustration: The Site of New Place & The Guild Chapel.]

[Illustration: The New Place Panelling in the Falcon Hotel.]

[Illustration: A doorway in Sheep Street.]

[Illustration: The Memorial Theatre from the Church-yard Wall.]

[Illustration: The Clopton Bridge.]

[Illustration: The Corner of Ely Street.]

[Illustration: In The Hall of The Harvard House.]

[Illustration: Details of the front of Harvard House.]

[Illustration: The Entrance to the Grammar School.]

[Illustration: The approach to The Church porch.]

[Illustration: In Holy Trinity Church.]

[Illustration: Mason's Court, Rother Street.]

[Illustration: In the garden of the Birthplace.]

[Illustration: Seven gables of the Dower House.]

[Illustration: Anne Hathaway's Cottage.]

[Illustration: Anne Hathaway's, The garden view.]

[Illustration: Anne Hathaway's Bed.]

[Illustration: The Home of Mary Arden.]

End of Project Gutenberg's Stratford-on-Avon; A Sketch-Book, by Gordon Home


He took her with a sigh!”

Her voice fluttered on the last word—forsook the note. He looked up to
see her, large-eyed, pale, staring at him. The significance in the words
had seized her. Had he told her flatly that she loved him, he could not
have had her more by surprise.

“I—you—” she stammered. The blood rushed back to her face. The tears
were too many for her eyes.

He sprang up. “For God’s sake—_don’t_ cry!” He took her in his arms, and
kissed her over-brimmed eyes as if she were a child. She might well have
been, so pliant she was to his touch, so comforted with his lips on her
eyes and forehead.

An instant before, antagonists; now their pulses had the throb of one.
It was a miracle—wonderful! He kissed her on the mouth.

[Illustration: “‘_For God’s sake—don’t cry!_’”]

Consciousness was in that kiss. For a moment it knit them closer
together. Then she stiffened in his arms, thrust at him with a fury of
strength. He let her go.

She drew back; she looked at him with a breathless expectation—then
beseeching bewilderment. He looked at her, and remembered Florence. What
had he done! Ever so slightly he hesitated. Ever so little his face
changed. But she saw. Her look froze. All that she had heard—and
forgotten—came back to her. Blind misunderstanding! Terrible
humiliation! She covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t
understand what he was saying; she was deaf—blind.

He tried to uncover her face.

“Let me go, let me go!” she implored. She escaped him. Her skirts swept
his feet in going. The curtains whispered where her passage stirred
them. A fragment of lace was in his fingers. The hollow wood of the
piano seemed to hold the echo of the last note sung.

He stared at the floor, seeing her last look. How it had despised him!
Worse—it had despised herself. The past hour had been but a succession
of violent emotions and inconsequent actions. He had rushed along with
them, without the ability to think; and here was the climax—the result!
He had wounded the one whom, above all others, he wanted to protect. Why
had his tongue hesitated with a scruple? It was too late then! Better
have lied to Florence than let a false honor hold back the truth from
the woman he loved.

_Loved!_ He stared at this fact—recognized it, astounding, impossible as
it seemed. This fiery girl had disenchanted him of every other thing but
her own passionate presence.

He knew he had asked Florence to marry him; and yet he revolved
desperately some way of making Julia believe that he loved her. He would
pay any price for that.

Could he pay the price of playing false, of telling Florence that since
he had asked her to marry him he had fallen in love with another woman?
It was better than that Julia should remember him all her life with
loathing. That was insupportable. But could his freedom, now, bring her
back? That he could ever explain his hesitation was preposterous. He
could not hope she would understand it. And not understanding, how could
she forgive? Hopeless! How she must hate him! She could not hate him
more than he hated himself.

He walked to the window. The wind puffed the thin curtains against his
face. The whispering silk was like the soft rush of her from the room.

She was a child. She would not remember too long. A hard thought.
Perhaps this whole inexplicable business was a madness of this latter
spring, a thing of blood.

But now, here, it was a torment. The thing was to get away—anywhere,
instantly! But there was Florence.

He came back sullenly enough to that thought. He knew he must see her
before he went. She had always stood to him for what was honorable and
reasonable against what was impulse. Duty was the word above all others
he hated, but he was bound to it now. He had never pictured Florence so
palely as at this moment. She had been a fascination, an inspiration, a
companion. She had been everything to him. There had been a moment, a
transfiguration; and she was an obligation, a debt unpaid. She deserved
a hundredfold more than he could give, and he almost hated her for it.

Yet—he reasoned resolutely, as he crossed the library—she, who had given
so much, who had centered her life in his interests, had the greatest
right to his honor and faith. And she _should_ have them, he thought.
But he must see her at once.

Through the open doors of the reception-hall he heard voices from
somewhere out of sight over the dip of the terrace. The hall was empty
of all but a slim, Spanish-eyed maid wiping down the wainscoting. She
thought that Mrs. Essington was in her room. She carried up-stairs the
card Longacre wrote upon. He waited, tossing over the accumulations of
the morning’s mail.

A dog came and sat in the open door, his tail beating the mat with
expectation of attention. It was one of Julia’s dachshunds. There
flashed back to Longacre, with all the colors and odors keen as if
actual, the picture of the girl standing tall and flushed on the
dripping grass, tossing pebbles down the terrace.

He felt a sharp contraction of heart. That memory made what he was about
to do unendurable.

Pinioned between his alternatives, his eye caught his own name on an
envelope that carried a New York postmark. He took it up slowly. He read
the letter-head. This was what he had been waiting for for months. This
was to have made the turn in his life. Now a quite different thing had
made it. The turn was a wrench. Everything, beside it, was
insignificant.

He ripped open the letter with indifference. He read it with his brain
still tortured with his quandary, and got no meaning from it, only an
impression that it was not what he had expected. He re-read the cautious
sentences, this time with attention.

There had been some lack of authority for the final decision in the last
communication from the Metropolitan Opera Syndicate. On account of—he
got through the list of reasons to the closing sentence—the Syndicate
could not, after all, arrange to produce the “Harold.”

He stood looking at the hand that held the envelop while the blood
gathered in his face. A year of unsparing labor, a year of wire-pulling
and waiting, thrown over because of a stronger pull!

He had nothing to offer but failure. Nothing to offer Florence.

That was the name he thought. But under the thought was the death of a
wild, rebel hope.

He lifted his eyes to see Florence on the step above him.

                               CHAPTER IX

                        MRS. ESSINGTON SAYS “NO”

SHE wore a gown of sheer white, with a mantle of Spanish lace drawn
close over her sloping shoulders and the flowing lines of her arms.
Above it her large gray eyes looked out luminously.

“What is it?” she asked. Her face was full of queries. She divined her
crisis already upon her.

Without a word he handed her the letter.

She read it through, dwelt on it a frowning space—looked at him while
the frown smoothed itself.

His full under lip twitched with a suggestion half cruel, half
sensitive. She saw he was suffering, but there was a confusion of
feeling, something with which the letter had nothing to do.

“Let us go somewhere else,” she said. Her glance had traveled toward the
open door.

He followed her through the library, dreading lest she pause there; but
she went on into the conservatory.

He closed the door, shutting them into the room of glass. In the midst
of the transparent walls, searched by the sun, they were alone. The
north end where the outer door opened, the south end looking on the lift
of the hill lawn, were screened thick with heliotrope and passion-vine.
The west fronted the skirts of the terrace, the somber, lonely
oak-plantation, the distant sea. They saw through glass the
out-of-doors, spacious, fresh, moved by the wind. Within, the air was
motionless, too hot, too sweet, with scents of newly watered flowers.

She handed the letter back to him as though it were a mere nothing,
saying simply, “Hawtry was against us from the first. He had more
influence than we.” She put it plural from habit.

“Hawtry was on the spot, not dawdling on the other side of the
continent,” he answered sullenly. The way he put it was brutal to her.

“_I_ know the thing’s all right,” he said half to himself; “but the rest
of ’em have to know it, too! I’ve got to make ’em! _That’s_ my failure.
Florence—as a force I’m nothing. Lord! How I hate the public—and I’m
just one of the least of ’em! That’s it,” he said. His chin was sunk on
his breast.

“The public is slow to see and quick to change. What they think doesn’t
matter with good work.”

Her mind was busy beyond mere saying. She had never heard him talk in
this strain before. She could remember when he had not known that his
work was good; and he said “_I_,” not “_we_.” She saw that marked an
end. More—he not only separated himself from her, but he divided that
self: the musician—the man, and called the man a failure. The letter was
not responsible for that.

“I’d like to give _you_ a better proof than this of what you’ve done.
For, Florence, you have done everything!” That was what he was saying.

She put up her hand, warning the words away. “I don’t need proof of what
you can do.”

“_Don’t_ you?” he questioned, looking at her. “Haven’t you begun lately
to suspect I wasn’t worth what you’ve given?”

“Tony!” her reproach was a cry. “You know—I couldn’t! But I have taken
more than I have given!” An insane passion for confession was on her.
But he was following his one idea.

“Then why have you avoided me so lately?” She had been expecting it.

“Have we ever been much together among people?”

He looked at her, baffled, but with something dogged and determined in
his face. She had never seen such a look on it before. And she was going
to refuse what he was about to ask. How broad his shoulders bulked on
the glare of glass!

“Do you regret what you said at the dance, then?” he persisted.

“No!” She said it with such vehement impulse that he straightened, took
a step toward her.

“But now you know what a failure I am—?”

“Oh, Tony—one failure isn’t failure!”

“But,” he gloomed at her, “it is if there’s never anything else!”

“There will be,” she said steadily; “but _if_ there never were, who was
ever loved for his successes!”

“Florence,” he said, “you are—you—oh, I don’t deserve it!” He took her
gently by the shoulders. “_Will_ you marry me?”

The question was between them, but left each cold. She was a long time
looking out through the begonia leaves before she answered—“No.”

His hands dropped from her shoulders. She saw with a sort of shock how
sure he had been of her! He could hardly take in what she meant.

“Do you remember what you said?” His voice, coming after a minute,
sounded at a distance to her.

She couldn’t speak. She nodded.

“Then why—now—this?”

“Because—” her voice broke. She waited a minute, fighting for
self-control; then went on more quietly—“because you don’t love me,
Tony.”

She startled him. “Florence,” he said earnestly, “you wrong us both. You
know you’ve always been the only one!”

“I only know,” she said, “that you do not love me now—because you once
did. Think! Am I what I was to you six months ago? Then think of
marriage! A lifetime! You will be still a young man when I am an old
woman. It was inevitable this should end.”

“But why do you talk like this?” He had her by the shoulders again.
“What has age to do with it? You knew that three nights ago as well as
now. It’s an excuse! Don’t you love me?”

Her voice was almost listless. “I love you so much that I’m not afraid
even of ending it.”

“Florence, if you knew how I need you!” How he touched her vulnerable
point! “If you knew how I have lost the only faith I had in myself!”

“You have _not_!” she made passionate denial. She freed herself, and
stepped back from him; but he came on until he was close in front of her
as she pressed back among the ferns. He looked bewildered—furious.

“You don’t need me!” she denied him. “We have given all we can. It is
different. I have nothing more for you.” She put her hands behind her.

“Florence, Florence!” He spoke her name threateningly. “That is just
talk! Why didn’t you say at once you were tired of me!”

“I have told you the truth.”

“Oh, the truth! Words! Good God, what woman ever talked reason to the
man she loved!”

She gave a little, bitter shrug, as if his words had frozen her in the
midst of the sun and flowers.

“_You_ have nothing to regret!” he said, savage with self-pity. “There’s
no blame—Lord, I don’t _blame_ you! But why didn’t you tell me—” he
stared at her, white with his dreadful realization—“why didn’t you tell
me before?”

Scarcely less pale, she looked back at him. What was it that had already
happened? Had everything been done too late?

                               CHAPTER X

                             THE MAD RIDING

TO Florence everything—leaf, and wind, and the movement of her own
blood—seemed to stop and harken to his steps going from her. To him the
power and procession of incident were suddenly precipitated in a rending
confusion, in which established custom was uprooted, faith cast down,
self-confidence shaken to bits.

What went on around him had lost significance. He was among people,
talking to people, looking at Florence across the table; but in this
blind rage of suffering he was as indifferent to all external things as
if he had been alone.

Neither Julia nor Bessie Lewis had appeared at luncheon. Julia had sent
word that she would be late, to her mother’s absent-minded distraction.
Mrs. Budd’s desire to rush away and fetch her fluttered before the faces
of her guests like a flag of distress. In the end she was deflected by
an imperative telephone that caught her just as her guests were rising.
While they loitered between the dining-room and living-hall, chatting in
groups, Julia, with Bessie Lewis at her heels, came down the stairs,
habited, hatted, booted, drawing on her gloves, her riding-whip under
her arm.

She was pale, but singularly vivid. Her dark eyes gleamed under her
thick brows. Her red lips were tight and thin.

Florence, looking quickly at Longacre, hated the presence descending the
stairs.

“Oh, I say, young madam,” Thair protested, amused; “it won’t do, you
know. You’re going to break your neck.”

“_You_ aren’t coming!” she laughed at him, though he was in his pinks.
“But Mr. Holden is!”

“Here, here!” Holden protested, shaking his head, half serious. “Don’t
misquote me!”

“But we’re all going!” she cried, with a look straight at Longacre.
“There are the horses!” She was buoyant. “Are two women going to ride
cross-country alone?” she mocked them.

“By gad!” murmured Holden in stark admiration for such daring.

Julia turned on Longacre. “Are you ready?” she said.

He stared. Then—“Not for this,” he answered briefly.

“Oh!” Her look again was diabolical. “Are _you_ the man who wasn’t
afraid this morning?”

“Did you accept the offer?”

“If I didn’t—” her red lips curled over her teeth—“I do now!”

“You’ll break your neck!”

“My neck!” She began laughing, as if that were something superlatively
ridiculous. There was a contagion of recklessness in the sound of it.
She leaned a little nearer and shook her head at him.

“My neck is worth at least two fences! And yours?”

“Oh, not that much!” It was an answering spirit.

“Then come!” she cried. “We’ll lead them!”

A quick step hurrying from the dining-room, and Mrs. Budd’s emphatic
voice was lifted.

“Where _did_ those horses come from?” The tone expressed mere general
wonder to the aggregation in the hall, that quickened to personal
apprehension at sight of her daughter equipped for the saddle.

“Why, _Julia_!” she began. Then seeing Bessie Lewis, she hesitated,
dismayed.

[Illustration: “‘_Are you ready?_’”]

“We’re just off, mama!” cried Julia. “I told James to have the cart
ready to drive you over to the ‘finish.’”

“Off? Over?” Mrs. Budd helplessly questioned.

“Why, the drag—the drag-hunt!” her daughter exclaimed. “You haven’t
forgotten our great event!”

“The drag-hunt! My dear child! Why, you’re _crazy_!” Mrs. Budd’s hands
were eloquent of horror. “Mr. Thair—Mr. Holden! Surely—why, it’s
_impossible_!”

Thair repudiating all part in the proceeding, Holden struggling for
neutral ground, Mrs. Budd adjuring them to a firm stand with her against
this harebrained escapade, a confusion of voices began. Bessie Lewis
wavered in the face of her hostess’s vehemence. In the midst of the
indecision Julia, who had been standing, her teeth on her under lip, her
crop slashing at her boots, suddenly recommanded the situation.

“Well, I’m off!” she cried. “See you again at the ‘kill!’”

She caught up her riding-skirt, and ran across the hall and down the
step. Longacre was after her. He felt a horrid responsibility for this
mad bravado.

Her foot hardly pressed his hand as she sprang into the saddle.

Mrs. Budd clasped Thair’s arm.

“Bring her back! Oh, _bring_ her back!” she entreated.

“Safe and sound—no danger,” he reassured her.

“Pretty rapid for the start,” he smiled to Holden, as he tucked up
Bessie Lewis on an excited mare. “Can you hit the pace?”

“I’m with you,” Holden muttered, straddling a dancing bay. “Can’t let
’em go alone!”

They galloped in the wake of the mad riders. Julia’s habit fluttered at
the front. The reckless spirit of her rose with the swinging pace. Just
through the gate she wheeled left into a wagon-track over fields, a
shortcut to the meet; Longacre followed, a neck behind. The rest, going
at a more discreet pace, stuck to the sea road, so that the two reached
the meet some few moments ahead, and waited, without a word to each
other, with the few pink coats, among a yelping pack in a meadow ruffled
over by the wind, ringed by live-oaks and somber cypresses. The others
came pounding in, breaking through the trees in a rush of voices and
color.

“Too far ahead of the procession!” cried Holden.

“You can follow as fast as you please,” called Julia.

“Oh, we follow, princess, we follow!” drawled Thair; “but don’t make the
way too steep.”

The pink coats gave curious glances at Longacre’s bare head and golf
attire.

The uncoupled hounds scattered over the field, nuzzling through the wet,
brown grass, till, with a short yelp from one throat and a long howl
from thirty, they had the scent and were off. The field was bunched at
the start, Longacre well up with Julia, who was riding hard for the
lead.

The going was heavy, and for this the bars were down, but the girl rode
straight at the fence. Her black mare sank over fetlock on the other
side, but was away with a bare instant lost, a nose behind Longacre,
who, with the rest, had taken the open gate.

“If you do that again,” he shouted, “I’ll lead you!”

She laughed and spurred away from him.

The M. F. H., with a dismayed look at her, was protesting to Thair, who
shrugged. There was no help for it, he seemed to say.

The girl’s hat, crammed over her eyes, pressed the hair to a close sweep
low above her brows. Her nostrils dilated, her color burned. The riders
strung out, Holden drawing abreast Julia, Longacre dropping back a
length to Thair’s pace.

“Easier going presently, I trust,” the latter said, as his horse sank an
off leg. “Look at the dogs,” he added, as the pack darted away in a
course almost at right angles to their first. “We’ll have a run for our
money!”

“Stiff going?” said Longacre, watching the black mare drawing up on the
M. F. H.

“Ground gets better; fences, ditches, worse; the neck-breaking course of
the country.” Thair, craning forward, laughed at Julia. “The filly’s got
the bit in her teeth. Cruel going—got to see it through somehow!”

He took the other side of a mire and edged away to the left, seeking the
narrowest place in the nearing ditch. It looked easy, a tiny gully
swollen full by the rains. But Longacre knew how the banks, under-eaten
by water, would not give firm footing to a dog. Julia rode at it as if
it were a crack in a rock. Holden, who was having his first experience
cross-country, slacked a little; but Longacre crowded forward, reckless
of the boggy ground.

“Take it long—long!” he entreated. Her eyes flashed at him.

“Are you afraid?” she cried.

The horses rose together. His went over like a swallow. The black mare
jumped short. One hind foot went down, but hands and voice and Kentucky
blood lifted her out with hardly a struggle.

Holden’s bay had refused the leap. Another had floundered badly. Thair’s
pink coat was sailing along the lower field toward a break in the brush
fence.

“Shall we lead him?” said Julia, pointing on with her whip.

“For God’s sake, go carefully!” he entreated.

It seemed to delight her to torment him. She pressed forward, looking
back with a challenge. Her lips, parted in the ardor of excitement,
showed a cruel white of teeth. The ground was precarious, but she rode
headlong. It was courting destruction.

He kept her pace, not in response to her reckless spirit, but for fear
of what might happen, with the desperate hope of averting disaster. They
flew down the field toward the thunder of the sea, with the sun and the
salt wind strong in their eyes; crashed through the hedge; scrambled
down into a road, up the sandy bank on the other side, through the
scrub-oaks with a rush, and at once the salt-meadows were before them,
their skirts of cypress black on a purple sea. Over the ocean a white
arm of fog extended stealthily. Its thin forefinger pointed landward.
Already the first films were caught on ragged pine and crooked cypress,
like flying shreds of veil.

“That’ll cut us short,” said Thair, frowning seaward.

“It won’t be in till night,” said Julia, pricking her mare till the
creature bounded.

“In an hour,” Thair decided. “We won’t make the cypress plantation.”

She spurred forward. “We’ll finish by five,” she called back. “We can
ride through a hedge—we can ride through a mist.”

“A ditch in a fog,” muttered Thair. “Not me!”

“We can ride like the devil and get through!” decided the M. F. H. “The
damned dogs are off the scent again!”

Below, among the tussocks of the first meadow, the pack were whimpering,
mingling, starting off on a false scent—returning, fawning, leaping up
on Julia riding to and fro among them. The exasperated whipper-in beat
at them. The four other riders came stringing over the rise among the
sand-hummocks.

“What’s up?”

“Oh, dear, have they lost the scent?”

They scattered down the dip among the dispersed and nosing pack.

“They have it!”

“No. Fake scent!”

“Why on earth is there such a long break?”—Bessie Lewis’s treble.

“_I_ didn’t carry the drag!” cried Julia, furiously, fretted with the
delay. “Loo, loo, loo!” She urged the dogs. “Good heavens! I could find
it quicker myself!”

She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—rein the black in to the group gathered in the
lee of the dunes, but darted away with swoops and stops beyond the
farthest-straying dog.

“Can’t we call it off?” urged Holden, looking anxiously at the
encroaching fog. It was spreading out, a thick sheet raveling at the
edges.

“Not until we have to!” said Thair, well into his cross-country humor.
“But don’t let the young madam get too far ahead.”

Then Longacre—who had never taken his eyes from where Julia glimmered
down the somber sward—“They have it! They’re off!” and was away after
them.

He heard the rest hot-pace behind, but he had a moment’s advantage, and,
having saved his horse between ditch and fence, now drew away fresh as
at the start. He had an open course—two miles of sandy turf—to catch her
in. She had ridden down near the sea, and, following the pack, now
zigzagged up hill. He, hugging the line of the dunes, cut off a corner,
and so caught up with her. Hearing him coming, she spurred harder; but
he drew up inch by inch, until, his roan abreast her black, they rushed
into the face of the wind together.

Hounds in front and hunters behind were forgotten; between the cypresses
crowding down from the hills, and the oblivion of fog beating in from
sea, they sped, wild with the elation of flight, unmindful of beginning,
oblivious of end.

Fog was already streaming among the fantastic trees of the Point of
Pines, cutting them off in front; but Julia held an unswerving course
until the damp breath blew on her hot cheeks, and moisture stood in
pearls in her hair.

The point went back from the sea in a low ridge, running up into a
straggling grove of cypress. Its backbone of round, tumbling stones was
cruel footing for horses. The pack made nothing of it, slipping over
like snakes. Julia was for following, but Longacre turned a sharp flank
movement that had the black headed off, flying up the point for the
trees, the pack yelping a parallel course on the left of the ridge.

Julia brought her whip down savagely on the black’s flank as she passed
him. Longacre took an in-breath as they swept under the trees. The sun
through the fine, blowing mist made a dazzle for the eyes.

Over a ground broken and spotted with black stumps the girl guided her
horse with admirable skill, Longacre saving his neck by luck. Their pace
perforce was slower, dodging the trees that sprang on them out of the
mist like specters.

Then, with a hallo, a crashing rush, Thair broke through the scrub on
their left. Old rider that he was, he knew the short cuts of every
course. He shouted, and they swerved toward him.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he panted.

“After the hounds!” cried Julia.

“The wild juggernaut couldn’t finish this run!” he protested.

“Nonsense!” The girl wheeled her horse. “We’ll be out of the mist when
we get away from the point.”

“_That_ you won’t. It’s coming in from the land, too. It’ll be thick in
five minutes, and we’ll snag, or break our precious necks on these
dwarf-cypresses!”

“We’ll be out in half a minute!” Julia said, shook her reins, and was
off.

“Keep Miss Lewis back!” Longacre shouted it over his shoulder.

He heard Thair take up the words and call them again to some dim
horseman looming large in the mist.

Already the hounds were a faint cry far in front, the girl a gray wraith
flitting among the trees. Now the cypresses had her! Now she flashed
into a clearing! Longacre heard hoofs and faint voices behind him, but
in that fog, that covered the earth and swallowed the sun, the rider a
length ahead of him was the only living creature. Before them the slope
slid away into white oblivion. It was madness—this blind flight. He felt
himself gaining upon her. His hand was ready for the black’s bit. The
thicket opened out; the trees fell away right and left. A dark line swam
up in front.

“What’s ahead?” he shouted.

“Fence!” She flung it back at him with a note of fear. The sound of that
brought him abreast her. Stark and black, the rails sprang out at him.
He saw a glittering mist where the other side should have been—heard
voices shouting through the fog—shouting them to stop. He snatched for
the mare’s bit. She swerved—she sprang to the spur. He saw Julia’s
profile, white on white, flash past him. His ears were full of his own
name—her voice calling his name—as the roan leaped upward.

To Thair and Holden, blundering down the field, seeing six feet in front
of them, came a sound—the dull, unresonant drop of a body falling from a
height—a cry, suddenly cut off. Involuntarily they halted. Thair peered
into the obscurity. Holden halloed. The silence was dreadful. They edged
cautiously forward, expecting a hail for direction. Then suddenly out of
the fog the black mare plunged on them, empty saddle, flying rein.

“God!” said Holden.

“E-e-easy!” muttered Thair, leading forward cautiously.

Now the stark line of the fence rose up; now, almost abreast of it, they
saw the roan on the far side, standing, head tossed; and near him, vague
as ghosts, two figures, one kneeling by one prone in the long, wet
grass.

                               CHAPTER XI

                           THE WHITE DARKNESS

FLORENCE watched the riders down the terrace with a curious sense of
participation in the race.

The whole thing had gone with such reckless abandon! What had happened
to set Julia, with her hot glitter, headlong on such an escapade, to
drag Longacre so doggedly after her? Her presentiment recurred to
Florence with a hopeless drop of courage—that, after all, it had been
too late! In freeing him, then, had she simply thrust him from her over
a precipice?

She saw from the veranda the pink coats crowding through the drive gate.
She heard around her voices exclaiming, reassuring, complaining. The
riders had left behind them confusion of a petty, biting quality. She
felt her endurance at snapping-point. She wanted to get out to “Tres
Pinos,” to stand on the rocky point, above the tumult of the sea, and
shout against the shouting breakers.

Instead she walked among oleanders and pampas plumes with a rigorous
composure. The placid face of the garden, with its blended sweets and
colors, was cloying; the passionless blue sky, defiant.

She had let him go! After that she had hoped at least for quiet—even the
quiet of hopelessness. But here was only irritating unrest, a striving
to understand what, after all, she had done. She had meant that release
to be so much to him! She kept seeing Longacre as he had left her. She
kept hearing him reproach her: “Why didn’t you tell me before?” The
whole thing was in that!

She paced the garden over, threaded its thickets, measured its lawns
with her steps, distanced its farthest hedges—moving, moving, while
shadows lengthened over the lawns, the light grew yellow, the sun struck
aslant through the oaks. Her thoughts kept her eyes oblivious to the
waning of the afternoon, to the increasing chill in the breeze, to the
queer, damp breath that seemed to come from no quarter, but to exhale
from the earth, the sky, the sea. She came back to keen consciousness of
her surroundings with a high voice questing her among the trees.

“What are you doing, poked off here at the end of creation?” cried
Cissy. “We’re going to drive over to the club to see the finish and have
supper. It’s the most we can do after the way they rushed off and left
us!” There was a pettish twitch to her tiny chin. “Emma is having a fit
for fear something has happened to ‘dear Julia,’ though I should say
she’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself. There’s not the least
bit of danger.”

“Danger?” Florence repeated uneasily.

“Why, the fog! Look!” Cissy indicated airily.

Florence saw a gray sea drifting up the bay, ocean above ocean, covering
the far turn of the coast, and flowing, white as wool, among the low
hills to the south.

“Of course there’s no danger they’ll run into it,” Cissy was saying.
“They’ll finish in less than an hour—so hurry.”

Florence’s first impulse was to refuse. Next she wondered why. She was
too nervous to be still. She felt, all at once, it would be a great
relief to see the riders come in safely. Could she wait till after
midnight to be sure of—of what would quiet this senseless uneasiness?
She was so sure that it was best to go, she could hardly credit her own
refusal. It made Cissy stare. Her look was a mixture of incredulity and
relief. It gave Florence a faint amusement in the midst of her
abstraction.

With Cissy had returned the rasping confusion that had been with the
rush of the riders, but it did not depart with her.

Standing solitary, among the laurustinus bushes, Florence felt the
impetus of it about her. She watched the fog gathering in, inclosing
land and sea in an ever-narrowing ring. She caught herself wondering if
by chance one of the long fingers had caught the hunt in its hook.
Suddenly her restlessness, her unease, was crystallized into a sharp
anxiety. Was it also an expectation?

She heard the party for the club-house drive away with relief. Why
hadn’t she gone with them? What was she waiting for?

A veil was drawn over the burning disk of the sun as he dipped near the
ocean. She was chilled with the fine approach of the fog.

She walked slowly back toward the house, turning once, and once again,
to look behind her at the vanishing line of coast. She shivered,
covering her head with her black Spanish lace and drawing it close over
the bosom of the white gown that she had forgotten to change.

She had forgotten time that day. As much had crowded into a few hours as
might fill a life. Henceforth time would be too much with her.

Her foot was on the veranda step when she saw a pink coat turn in at the
drive gate. She strained her eyes. Charlie Thair—and without a hat. She
had never before seen him, out-of-doors, without a hat. As he drew up
the drive at a quick canter, she thought he had reined in a yet quicker
pace. She stood, arrested in mid-motion, turning to him a face that was
a question. He was the first to speak, hailing her while barely within
distance, as if to make sure of the first word.

“Where is Mrs. Budd, Mrs. Essington?”

“She drove over to the country club with the others to see the finish.
What—”

“Thank God! Are you the only one here?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Did they take the victoria?”

“No; who is hurt?”

He only looked at her.

“Is it—is it—” she put her hand to her throat—“_Julia?_” she brought out
desperately.

“No, _not_ Julia.” He looked at her very keenly, very kindly. He need
not have spoken the name that followed. She knew before she heard.

She got her breath with a sobbing sound, pressing her hand to her side.

“Oh, not a bad fall,—not bad, Mrs. Essington!” Thair was beside her. She
thought he steadied her. “Some of the youngsters lost their heads, got
into the fog. He went after ’em—took a nasty fence. Stunned, possibly a
broken bone—nothing for the hunting-field,” he smiled to her. He kept
her from going to pieces. But she looked through him. He saw he had not
reassured her, and was glad she knew, in spite of him, how bad it might
be.

“It was too far from the club-house to get him there,” he said. “Must
have a carriage and a doctor.”

“Doctor!” she repeated, catching at the word as something to help pull
herself together. “Who is there?”

He gave a name and number. She went in to the telephone, dazed, dreamy,
not half taking in what had happened. All objects were confused, all
thought stunned in her. She seemed to be floating. But the curt
professional voice that answered her over the telephone woke her,
spurring her faculties to activity. She was kept minutes when seconds
were so precious. She could hardly hear him out.

She snatched a flask from the butler’s pantry, a man’s coat from the
rack in the living-hall, dragged rugs and cushions from the divans. She
was heaping them into the victoria when Thair came around from the
stables. The overcoat covered her gown, but the lace was still over her
head from which her face looked a sharp, silvery oval.

“The doctor can be here in half an hour,” she said. “Can we take a short
cut?”

“I’ll show the man; I’m going to ride,” Thair said, putting her in. He
took her going as the thing most to be expected. She leaned from the
carriage. The sharp motion arrested him like a detaining hand.

“Who was it he went after?”

Thair looked at her. For a moment he hesitated. Then, “Yes, it was
_she_,” he said. “Now then”—to the man—“_lively_!”

The carriage spun over the coast road. Its wheels flew, halos now of
mud, now of water. The span were at their sharpest trot, but to Florence
they seemed to crawl.

The fog was all around, over, eddying like smoke among the trees.
Somewhere under its oblivion breakers were rolling in with sullen voices
and heavy, crashing fall upon the sand.

She leaned forward, peering into the gray blur before. She was conscious
only of interminable mist and one person it held away from her. She
watched Thair’s pink coat moving like a will-o’-the-wisp. Now it
stopped. Thair shouted to the driver. The victoria turned, dipped under
the trees, passed between two gate-posts. She saw long grass under the
wheels. The carriage rocked over broken ground. The horses were at a
canter. Through a second gate, with a lurch, one wheel thumping over the
bars half drawn aside. They were in the fields, with the ocean’s hoarse
voice dwindled to a whisper that was “Hush!” while her heart, audible to
her in the deep silence, drummed “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” Then above the
melancholy sea she heard the sharp chopping of the pack. Cruel sound! It
made her shiver. Then a hallo. Gray shapes moved in the fog like shadows
on a sheet. One was close to the carriage, a woman crying. Then Holden’s
voice saying to Thair, “Quicker than we hoped”; then, beside the
carriage, exclaiming, “Florence!”

Her name was on his lips for the first time. She did not hear it.

“Where is he?” she said.

“Wait here,” Holden answered, and rode ahead.

The carriage stopped. She sprang out and ran forward a few steps—paused.
She saw two men coming toward her, carrying something between them.
Nearer, she saw it was a man. He hung dead weight, head fallen back,
arms hanging, hands trailing in the long, wet grass. Behind, like a
following dog, came a tall bare-headed girl. It seemed unreal, a play
scene, till she saw the injured man’s face, dead white, with a dark
streak across the mouth that lengthened it out into a horrible smile.

“Over here,” Florence said to the coachman. Her voice was lost in her
throat, but he obeyed the beckoning hand. She was back in the carriage.
The men were lifting up the burden her hands reached for.

“Easy with the shoulders!” Thair muttered. They laid it on the heaped-up
cushions. Trembling as she was, she seemed to lift and move the inert
body as easily as the men. She stooped and wiped away the stain that
disfigured the poor face. And then it seemed the vacancy of it was the
saddest look it could have worn.

“Can’t we get back by a road? The cut’s so rough?” she appealed to
Holden.

The somber eyes of the men consulted each other.

“Yes,” Thair decided; “strike the country-club road over here. Longer,
but—better.”

Holden nodded to the whipper-in.

“We’ll go ahead and knock out some rails.”

“You’d better go back to the house with ’em,” Thair called after him.
“We’ll ride over and let ’em know at the club.” He turned to Julia, who,
through it all, had stood back, not moving or taking her eyes from the
shape in the carriage.

“_You_ ought to go in the victoria.”

She turned her eyes quickly to Florence. She put her hands to her face.
“No! No!” she cried with vehemence—it might have been horror.

Florence looked at her. Julia’s habit was torn away at the waist, her
hair falling on her shoulders. She looked stunned, stupid.

Florence turned to Thair. “_Can_ she ride?”

“I can ride,” Julia repeated dully. Thair was holding the black, but she
made no motion to mount. She only stood watching the black bulk of the
carriage laboring away across the broken field.

Four riders waited uncertain, whispering, looking after the carriage,
looking at Thair, looking at Julia.

Bessie Lewis was mopping her cheeks with the wet ball of her
handkerchief. She gave a hysterical gasp. “Oh, Julia, your habit!” She
dabbed nervously at the skirt.

Julia roused, shrinking away from the touch, turning to Thair. He almost
lifted her to the saddle. But once up, she seemed to wake, to stiffen.
She let him take the rein and lead the black through the ragged opening
left by the torn-away rails. The carriage had turned down the road under
the overarching trees.

Thair watched her anxiously. He kept her rein. He turned, touching his
horse lightly with the spur.

“If you can ride as far as the club—” he began.

She pulled herself together, alert, staring at him, at the whispering
four.

The rein jerked out of Thair’s hand. He half turned in his saddle,
blank, dismayed, as she wheeled and rode furiously after the victoria.

                              CHAPTER XII

                       MRS. ESSINGTON SAYS “YES”

DARK had shut down in a weeping mist when the carts from the country
club drove up the “Miramar” terrace. The doctor’s dry, professional
presence met Mrs. Budd’s voluble anxiety on the threshold, and, in a
measure, smoothed it.

Oh, it was all right—all right, he assured her; only, the place must be
kept quiet. (He had a grudging eye for the people getting out of the
carts.) The patient ought to be moved to the cottage hospital, but—He
pursed out his lips....

But Mrs. Budd wouldn’t hear of such a thing! Since the poor young man
was her guest, had been hurt—she saw it dramatically—in saving her
daughter—

The doctor’s hands waved it away.

“My dear madam, that’s not the point. I want this case under my eye.”

“Oh! Is it as bad as _that_?”

His look was everywhere but at her.

“Not at all—the usual thing. These youngsters all do it, but—send these
people away!”

It was hushed enough that night, the house, but full of whispers,
conjectures, things told and asked.

“Why, what happened?”

Nobody knew exactly.

“But, afterward, you should have seen her face!”

“Oh, just queer—dreadful!”

“But she was that at the start!”

“Then, of all things, her riding after them!”

“Them!”

“Why, Mrs. Essington came for him.”

“Mrs. _Essington_! Well!”

So much was out, and so flat, one didn’t know what might jump out next.
Julia’s indifference—a stunned quiescence under her mother’s reproaches
and the curious glances of the guests—her white face, her blank eyes,
added the last touch. “Queer” was the word for it, and this “queerness”
clung to them, held them irresolute, was almost too much for their sense
of decency. It needed just a turn to start them off, and this Thair
gave, cornering Cissy Fitz Hugh, who, in the midst of the indecision,
preserved a settled air.

He wanted to know was she aware that an early train and an eight-o’clock
breakfast required bags packed overnight?

Cissy was mildly surprised. “How _can_ I leave Emma at such a time?”

“Has she asked you to stay?” Thair rather brutally threw at her.

“But she doesn’t have to _ask me_!”

“I should think not—since she’s already asked two people whom she seems
to want,—Mrs. Essington for one—myself for another.” He smiled
diabolically.

Cissy gasped. “As an old friend, there are some things I might do for
Emma—”

“My good Cicely, there’s only one thing you haven’t done. Do _go_, like
a decent woman!”

“But the others?” She was injured. “Aren’t they going, too?”

“Oh, I guess they are,” he grinned, “if you mention it to ’em.”

She was indignant, but her departure was by the morning train that swept
the house of all its guests.

Holden left with the others, but instead of traveling townward went to
the hotel. He had seen Florence first.

He would like, he said, to escort her if she could let him know what day
she was going up to San Francisco. He was thinking of the promise she
had made him, that morning, driving out to the links. Through all the
perplexing appearances of the last three days he had held by that as
something tangible.

She had forgotten it.

She did not know when she would be going; _could_ not tell him. Her
pallor, her heavy eyes, the look she had, while she talked, of listening
for something—all were eloquent to plead for her. He didn’t understand
it, but he waited.

She was merely grateful to him that he let her alone. At the moment she
was living so in another’s life that she seemed to own no separate
existence. She seemed to waver between living and dying. When the
relapse that followed the fever dropped him lowest, she felt herself
reaching out toward death. When the crisis, passing, drifted him back,
she felt herself quickened. The most she had ever wished, then seemed
granted her.

Not only while she was with him, but when she was away, alone, she felt
herself drawn somehow closer to him than ever before. She had forgotten
the other people. She had forgotten the separation. While he lay, with
the returning tide of living yet so low in him that he could hardly lift
his eyelids, she was happy.

From half-consciousness Longacre roused, on the fourth day, to a clearer
sense of what was around him. While Florence was in the room his eyes
followed her as if fearful, should he turn them away, she would vanish.
Twice he tried to ask a question, but the whisper failed him. Her ear to
his mouth could not catch it.

She fretted, wondering if she had grown deaf that she could not
understand what he so much wanted to know!

He lay with the question shut in his half-closed eyes until the fifth
morning, when his voice grew from a breath to a sound; and she heard,
his lax fingers in her firm ones, her eyes dropped to meet his, lifted.

“Is she safe?”

It took Florence a moment, groping into what was past, to understand, to
realize; and another moment, while she looked across the bed, through
the window, into the open sky, to answer—“Yes.”

With that he closed his eyes and turned away his head, as though there
were nothing more in the world to ask. She rose and went to the window.

She seemed to see Julia’s blank eyes—how they had leaped to life at
sight of her! And then the girl’s cry!

The sick man slept.

Florence wrestled with emotions, primitive, savage.

That he should ask, with his first breath, _that_! That with her
assurance he should turn from her to sleep, without a look, a word, a
memory!

Yet, she told herself, what wonder that the last, violent instant before
unconsciousness should rise before him with his reawakening. Had the
question any personal significance? Had not his eyes followed _her_?
Didn’t he now turn to her, away from all the rest? Had not the wild
girl, with her piece of folly, closed the door on _that_ incident? What
could renew it?

It was a question, a cry, half hoping—but she knew it was a forlorn
hope.

He reawakened early in the afternoon. His first stir brought her to him,
still hot from her conflict with herself. He was stronger this time,
more awake to living. He did not ask, but demanded.

“I must get out of here,” he said.

Her amazement questioned him. He dwelt long on her face, seemed to pluck
some significance from it.

“You know,” he asked, “how it happened? How I—?”

She nodded yes.

Again he stared at her long and steadily.

“Don’t blame _her_,” he said slowly. “It was not her fault. Mine—mine!”

“Never mind,” she told him; “we can go to-morrow.”

To hear him accuse himself for that other was more than she could bear.
Again he seemed to divine her.

“You don’t know, Florence, what happened that morning. I was—I am—” he
seemed to contemplate himself—“something no woman could forgive! It left
her in such a way—oh, wretched!” His head rolled on the pillow. His eyes
drooped away from her.

Florence recalled how he had met her at the stair-foot with the letter
in his hand and some greater trouble in his face. Then that angry
insistence of his in the glass room had been simply reparation! He had
known then that he loved the girl, and somehow known too late. And he
had told Julia _that_! She saw with dreadful clearness. Did everything
go back to the night when she had wanted and taken so ruthlessly what
she desired? It was not Julia, but she, herself, who had led that leap
in which he had fallen.

“I must get away,” she heard him mutter.

In her own room she lay a long time, accustoming herself to the new face
of the situation, struggling back from extremes of self-hate and
self-love to a clearer vision. She must touch again what she had so
hoped she had finished with. Something she had called fate had seemed to
be thrusting him from that girl; but fate, as she looked, grew to wear
too much her own aspect. Had she let conditions alone in the
beginning—but she had fought them, curbed them in a measure to her will.
She had made a catastrophe, and she must mend it. That was the reason of
it. But under reason was a passionate desire that he should be happy.
That covered everything.

His self-accusation recurred to her. “Something no woman could forgive.”
Could not that girl forgive him that he was loyal? But she was so young,
so appallingly young! And oh, the dangerous, difficult task of playing
another’s game for him! Yet, could he have played it himself, had he had
his strength, he would have made it a different matter. Now, all he
could manage in his great bodily weakness was that one absorbing desire
to get away. She knew how impossible it was to deflect him where once
his obstinate mind was made up. She felt every moment, with his
returning strength, her chance was slipping further from her. But she
was baffled. Turn and twist as she could, she was shut fast in the
middle of a deadlock.

The departure of all the amalgamating presences had left the
estrangement of these few so closely concerned a naked fact. They felt
its presence palpable among them. It filled the rooms of the house, sat
between them at table, walked with them in the gardens. Julia,
unreachable behind her hard indifference, through which her voice broke
sometimes with sharp suggestions of collapse; Mrs. Budd, nervous,
vacillating, strung to the verge of tears; she, herself, out of love
with everything but the hope of one man’s life; all were desperately at
odds, no one trusting another.

Thair, alone, had given her the sense of an outsider. If he were in the
midst of it as much as any one, it didn’t touch him. The very perfection
of his manner, meeting those anxious, studying looks Mrs. Budd threw at
him, was assurance that he knew his uneasy place in her conjecture. To
Florence he had been, with his unconcern, like fresh air in a close
room. He perfectly understood; and he took it easily. Their tacit
understanding was the only note of confidence in the unquiet house.

She knew he knew to a certain point just how she stood; but that point
was the turn where she had let Longacre go. Just how far Thair missed
this, she had read in his kind, congratulatory looks at her—his odd,
half-protecting air of seeming to ease her off, as much as possible,
from the strain, the reiterant conflict of mother and daughter, as from
something quite beside her interest.

He had never had so much that air to her as now, this afternoon, when he
encountered her stepping through the tall French window upon the
veranda, and turned and lifted the passion-vines for her to pass
under—such a pretty thing, she thought, for a man to do for a woman as
old, as haggard, as self-absorbed as she. They went the length of the
fennel walk together. She remembered the morning when Longacre had left
Julia so impetuously to follow her as something that had happened a very
long time ago—something into which Thair’s voice dropped sharply,
shattering the image.

“We are to be abandoned,” he was saying. “The young madam is leaving us
for town.”

She stood, looking over the sun-drenched terraces. The thing had come on
her so suddenly! She had lost her chance! She put her hand to her
forehead. This would be the end! The thing would just fall to pieces by
itself!

Then the lasting silence got her, and she looked at Thair. He was
looking at her.

“What is the matter?” that look was saying. “Isn’t it all right? Aren’t
you glad? Wasn’t it that that you wanted?”

Her reply was just her look of despair.

“What _can_ I do!” She might as well have said it out. It was so clear
between them that his answering her with words seemed quite natural.

“Can _I_ do anything?”

She looked away from him to that glittering spot where the sun struck
the sea.

Why, there was only _one_ thing any one could do, so elemental that it
took this sharp necessity to make it possible. She saw now. It was, all
along, the only thing she could have done.

She turned back to Thair, whose last question hung, waiting her answer.

“No, nothing—you’re good—not now—except let me go back alone!”

She ran. From the moment he had confounded her she had dropped all
consideration of appearances. On the stair she passed a maid, her arms
heaped with newly ironed linen and delicate flowered fabrics—frocks
Julia had worn about the house. Then she must be packing. She would be
in her room. Half-way down the upper hall, Florence heard the rushing
approach of sweeping silk. She stopped, almost opposite her own door,
and waited. Julia came down the hall, headlong even when walking. She
saw Florence not until she was upon her. She started, drew herself
together, made to go on, hesitated.

“Can I do anything?” she said. Her voice gave the commonplace sharp
significance, as though her very self depended on the “anything” she
could do.

“Yes,” Florence said, holding open her door. “Come in.”

The girl gazed, as if this were the last thing she had expected. Her
eyes looked out blackly, defiance through suspicion, as the door closed
after her. “See how miserable I am,” they seemed to say, “but don’t dare
pity me!” Her face was startling, bewildering. It meant so much more
than seemed in nature, even in a woman who had injured the man she
loved. It had the furtive suffering of a creature in a trap. It seemed
that at any moment her strained voice would break into a cry.

“You’re going to-morrow?” Florence asked her.

Julia stiffened. Her manner was perfunctory. “Yes, I’m going up to town.
If there is anything I can do for you there—”

“Aren’t you needed here?” Florence asked her. She felt quieted by the
other’s agitation.

The girl stared as if she suspected she was made sport of. “I? Oh!” She
smiled sharply.

“Are you sure there is nothing you could do by _staying_?” Florence
persisted.

“I see what you mean,” Julia replied, still in that whetted tone that
served to defend her weakness. “My fault it happened! It’s done. How can
I mend it? Oh, do you think any one regrets it more than I? I would do
anything—_anything_,” she repeated with sudden vehemence, “to change it,
to—but it is impossible!” Her hands, that she had pressed together, fell
apart. She turned nervously toward the window, as if the sight of the
wide, warm garden could help her. But Florence moved to intercept the
glance.

“If one had injured a person one loved—” she began. She stopped,
startled at the application those words had for her own case.

“A person one loved!” Julia repeated. The words seemed dragged out of
her throat. She turned on the other woman piercing eyes. “But, if—he did
not love you? If he loved another woman?”

Florence pressed her hand to her side.

“And, loving her,” the girl rushed on, “still gave you a—a pretense for
truth—if you had hurt him mortally—oh, mortally—what would you do?”

Florence, white, breathing short, looked at the floor. It seemed rising
up to strike her. She was overwhelmed that Julia had divined her
case—had guessed,—a dozen frantic suppositions flew through her mind.
Then the fact flashed on her: the girl had only cried her own tragedy!
But how was it hers? How could it be Julia’s, when Longacre had told
her—? Florence filled her lungs with a deep, slow-drawn breath, as if
she were drawing in courage to face what was rising in her mind. It was
Longacre’s face as it had peered up into hers that morning, and his
voice restlessly repeating, “I am something no woman could forgive!” Her
quickening comprehension embraced what that might be. Longacre had told
Julia nothing! She put her hand out behind her, touched the table to
steady herself. The passionate gratitude that rose in her at his forlorn
loyalty stood still when she raised her eyes to Julia’s face. She knew
what the girl was suffering. It was what she herself suffered, but
worse, for Julia was blind. Julia could see no way out of it, and
Florence herself, for a moment, was nerveless before the enormousness of
her own task.

Her voice came weakly. “I would be very sure, first, that he did _not_
love me.” The answer seemed her own as well as Julia’s.

The girl’s eyes blazed at her.

“Don’t _you_ know?” she said.

But Florence expected to be stabbed.

“Yes, I do,” she answered steadily; “but you must see him yourself.”

The girl’s bosom lifted sharply. “Oh, _no!_” she breathed. She stood up.
She seemed to tower over the other woman. She seemed to force it home to
Florence how impossible it was to find a way out.

“Oh, if you knew,” she cried, “you couldn’t ask it! Even _you_ couldn’t
wish me such—such humiliation.”

“If I knew?” Florence repeated, dreading, shrinking from any further
revelation.

“What happened,” Julia moaned, turning away.

“Would what happened seem any less impossible,” Florence slowly began,
“if the man thought himself bound in honor to another woman—”

“_Thought!_” Julia cried.

“A woman whom he did not love,” Florence kept on; “to whom he was tied
by old promises, with whom now there was nothing but an old friendship?”

Julia looked at her a little wildly.

“I—don’t know what you mean!”

“I mean this woman did not—was not in love with him any more. When she
knew of—of you, she released him.”

“But that was after—”

“What happened? Yes.”

“Then he didn’t keep faith with her—with either!” Julia cried, still
fixing Florence with her white, quivering face.

“Because he loved you.”

Julia seemed to stand there irrationally, convinced by the sound of
Florence Essington’s voice—by just the weight of its own deep,
passionate conviction.

“Then why couldn’t he have told me?” the girl murmured forlornly. “I
would have believed him! Why couldn’t he trust me!”

The last words caught a little bitter echo in the woman’s heart. She
silenced it. She took Julia by the shoulders, who had slid to the floor,
half kneeling, half sitting, the tears slipping down her cheeks.

“Even if you love him,” she cried, “isn’t he human? Can’t you forgive
him that much? He will forgive you—men forgive more in women!”

Julia’s hands held the folds of her gown. “But what can I do?” she
implored. She hung on the other’s words with a passionate dependence.

Florence, with an impulse, took the face between her hands.

“Be sure you want him more than anything else,” she murmured.

The head inclined faintly. The wide eyes still held hers with their
piteous stare and falling tears.

“Go to him,” Florence whispered. She felt the girl trembling.

“When?”

“Now!”

Julia sobbed. “My mother!”

“That will come afterward. Never mind any of the rest of us—what we do
and say. It doesn’t matter. Only think of him! Promise me you won’t
leave him until you have made it right!”

“Are you sure I can?” the girl whispered, with such a face of hope and
fear, such joy struggling with tears, that Florence, remembering in what
hard ways even the greatest love may lead, leaned down and kissed her.

“Quite sure,” she said.

Julia drew yet closer. “Are you _sure_ he—he loves me?” The last words
were a breath.

Florence drew back coldly. “You must go _now_,” she said. Then seeing
Julia shrink at her strange, dry voice, she added, “Do you think he
would tell that to _me_?”—at what cost she herself did not measure.

But she did not realize that she was in the midst of her crisis. She was
too much in it to look back or forward. She saw only outward actions,
the minute present. When she spoke with the nurse at the door of the
sick-room her voice was even matter-of-fact.

The white-capped woman came out. Florence waited until she went into
another room farther down the hall. Then she almost pushed Julia in. “No
one will come,” she murmured as she closed the door after her.

                              CHAPTER XIII

                          THAIR CONGRATULATES

FLORENCE sat down in the window-seat in the dusky hall. The diamond
panes of milky glass let in a misty light. She drew the drapery of the
dark curtains around her, the better to insure against interruption. The
house was silent at that long hour of the afternoon when all the day’s
processes seem to stand still, and heart and brain alike grow torpid.
She waited, as still as her still surroundings, a piece with the dull
curtain, until an opening door should reanimate her to living.

At the sound of an approaching step—was it an hour or a day she had kept
her post?—she started nervously. Through the slightly parted curtains
she watched the stair-turn anxiously. That long, dangling, masculine
figure was at least not Mrs. Budd. She sighed relief. It was Thair. He
came on with his elegant slouch, turning down the hall toward the window
embrasure, stopped a moment on the threshold of the morning-room,
looking in with a questing turn of his long neck, strolled on, craning
at the alcove curtains.

Florence thrust them back. Evidently it was not she he was looking for.
He was surprised, and something more, hardly curious, but a look that
harked back to what had been revealed him on the terrace.

“I am,” he explained to her, “in search of the young madam.” He added
with a considerative smile, “Our last ride together—if _she_ has
anything to say about it.”

Her face showed an odd mingling of distress and relief.

“But you will have to wait. She can’t be disturbed now.”

“Well”—he dawdled over it a minute—“but she _will_ be disturbed. _I’ll_
wait, of course; but will—Mrs. Budd?” He brought it out with the
faintest embarrassment.

Florence looked at him, considering.

“It’s just what she never _will_ do,” he said. “She’ll expect to see us
off.”

Her answer was the dismayed sound that escaped her lips. She put her
hand out with a gesture that warned him back. They were like a small
secret conclave, shut in their alcove behind the curtains, stilled in
the middle of their plots.

A door down the hall had softly closed. They saw Julia stand for a
moment outside the door of Longacre’s room. Then she turned and came
slowly along the hall. She was coming down upon them, and with every
step she overwhelmed them more. Such a strange Julia, so pale, so
unimperious, with all her sparkle stilled! Yet she shone! Her great
dilated eyes, her face, dawning on them, glimmering by, looked aghast
with happiness.

Florence was trembling. Her eyes were on the narrow slit between the
curtains where that vision of Julia had passed. She could not speak
immediately when she finally turned to Thair. He was looking at her with
the oddest possible expression.

“Well, it doesn’t matter about Mrs. Budd _now_,” he said. His usually
smooth voice sounded uneven. “She’s done for!”

At this the lines in her forehead grew deep. “If one could only make it
easier for her! It is _dreadful_! But—didn’t you see, just now?—it was
the only thing to do!”

“Dear girl,” he earnestly assured her, “that you think so is enough for
me! But you can’t show it to _her_, poor lady!”

She looked at him with a sudden flash. “_You_ could make it easier.”

[Illustration: “_Such a strange Julia!_”]

“I?” He was blank.

“If she thought—if she knew that some other hope she may have had for
Julia—was—couldn’t you make her know?”

At this he fixed her with his old diabolical glint.

“You mean I could congratulate her—heartily?”

Her answering smile was wan. She left it to him.

He looked back at her once as he went down the stair.

She held herself still until he was out of hearing. Then, on tiptoe, she
stole down the hall to the door, and hesitated with beating heart. There
was nothing in the world she so dreaded, nothing she so much wanted, as
to see Longacre, to hear his voice. She slipped into the room, expecting
to find it somehow extraordinarily changed, revolutionized. There was a
change. It was in the man who lay upon the bed.

He lay, eyes closed, face quiet. But, ah, asleep! The strong structure
of the face came out startling in its emaciation. She looked at that
face, dwelt upon it, saw in the salient lines something she had been
seeking since she had known it. Dared she think this had come through
her—the last thing she had given him! She waited to see those obstinate
lids unclose.

She had come so lightly he had not heard her. She would not for the
world have spoken, but if she looked at him—he _must_ know she was
looking at him!

Then, as he lay so still, not a muscle of the sensitive mouth moving,
breathing lightly, regularly, it came upon her that he wished her to
suppose him asleep.

A faint, cold breath ran in the nerves of her body. She turned her head
quickly away, as though, through their closed lids, his waking eyes
could spy on her.

She had thought, child-blind, not of friendship, not of recognition for
what she had spent, but of just that last bitter-sweet confidence when
he would tell her, show her without words, perhaps, how much this new
happiness would be to him. And he hid it from her!

Well, he was right. How impossible anything else was! There were
barriers of gratitude—yes, and higher yet than those—barriers she
herself had reared between them!

She stood, hands limply dropped, head bent. She saw shadows of jessamine
leaves moving like fine, gray fingers on the sunny floor.

She had no more right in that room than the veriest stranger.

                              CHAPTER XIV

                          THE QUEEN’S COURTESY

THE cart drew up at the station with a bounce. Before it had fairly
stopped, a large man in the clothes of a working citizen, with the
umbrella and bag of a traveler, sprang out and made a rush for the door
of the ticket-office.

A lean, brown fellow in riding-trousers, who was dawdling on the
platform, stared and laughed.

“Holden, what’s the rush?”

“Good Lord, have I missed it?” gasped the other.

“The train?” Thair yawned. “Twenty minutes early.”

“They told me I’d barely make it!” Holden stared resentfully at the
vacant rails.

“H’m. Del Monte,” Thair smiled. “Even the clocks are fast!” He squinted
at the sky, soft sapphire-blue.

“Why go up to-day? Wait over, and I’ll show you a bit of a cross-country
run.”

“Thanks,” grunted Holden; “I’ve had my money’s worth.” The grunt ended
in a grin.

Thair chuckled.

“Well,” Holden demanded impatiently, “how is it over at the house?”

“We-e-ell,”—Thair drawled out the word interminably, while amused
recollection crossed his face,—“the rains fell, and the winds blew! _I_
stayed at the club through the worst of it. I was sorry for the
women—the young madam and Mrs. Essington. They had to stick it out.”

“You mean Mrs. Budd was so annoyed?” Holden was a little puzzled.

“Annoyed! Oh, Lord, that’s not the word! Cis says ‘upset.’ That’s
nearer, only seventeen times more upset than usual! Poor woman, she
feels that Julia owes the man some reparation for ‘breaking his neck,’
but marriage seems to her extreme.”

“But what’s the objection? He seems a decent sort of chap.”

“He is; the decentest of his sort; but it’s not the sort madam had hoped
for Julia. Money, y’ know, and—well, composers seem a bit out of the way
to her. But the girl has too much blood to take—” he smiled
quizzically—“what was the ‘correct thing.’”

“I’ve had an idea that this would come about from the first,” said
Holden, complacently.

“M’m?” Thair mused, interrogative.

“Mrs. Essington’s been immensely interested in those two young people.
Shouldn’t wonder—”

Thair bit off a smile. “Remarkable woman, Mrs. Essington,” he observed.

“That damned train’s spending the night on the switch,” growled Holden.
He didn’t look down the track, but over his shoulder at the “Miramar”
runabout that had just come into sight around the turn of the drive.

The lady who sat so erect beside the groom was Florence Essington.

Holden looked relieved. Thair indulged in what might be called a mental
whistle. He gave one sharp glance at Holden, whose attention was
engrossed by the approaching vehicle; then a frank smile and a wave of
the hand toward the lady—a salute she returned in kind. The approaching
train hurried their greetings and farewells, but in that short time he
got an impression of a more obvious sophistication, a more pronounced
worldliness in her than he had recalled.

Her gown, black with dashes of white, suggested the last and finest
flight of fashion; her manner, the latest, most charming importation;
her very movement, a consciousness of the keen eye of the world.

While he pondered whether these differences did not merely enhance the
beauty of her shadowed eyes, her black and white glimmered through the
door of the car. Holden waved his hand from the step and followed her.

Thair wandered down the platform toward where the groom held his uneasy
mount.

“That’s a match,” he muttered. “She’ll take him. That’s what she means.
She’s wise. Great woman! If a man were fool enough—h’m, h’m!” He nodded
to the groom.

Holden, having established his bags in a seat near the door, took the
chair next Florence.

She was merry, full of twisted phrases, making him laugh in spite of his
impatience.

“I believe,” he told her, half in earnest, “it’s because you’ve fetched
that engagement you’re in such spirits.”

“Oh, do you think me a match-maker?” she laughed.

“Well, I wish you’d be one for yourself,” he said bluntly.

Florence bit her lip. She was hating to face what she knew she finally
must.

“Don’t you remember,” he went on, “a few days ago you said you would
have something to tell me on our way back to town?”

A few days ago! Could it be possible! She looked out of the window. Past
rushed a stream of black oaks pricked through with flashes of sea.

She knew what she would answer. She had turned it over for twenty-four
hours. She had not dreamed how hard it would be to utter. His kindly
eyes were bent upon her with a steady patience, but his blunt fingers
drummed the arm of her chair.

“I tried then to make you see,” she began, “that I wasn’t merely putting
you off. I didn’t know then just what I could say—how much I was fit for
what you ask of me.” She supported his look. “Now I am sure I am not.”

He waved away her objection with his large, open hand. “Are _you_ the
judge of that?”

“Who else? Do you think I could take without giving? If I loved you it
would be different.”

“Yes. Well—I hardly hoped that, after what you said the other day,” he
answered sturdily; “but we are no longer children; I would not ask too
much of you. You are a woman of wide interests, and my life takes me so
much among people, manipulations of men as well as things, you might—”

She took it up. “Yes, if I could give your interests all my interest,
all my energy, my thought, as I might have done once, as I would now,
gladly, if I could. But I can’t. I have used up such power as I had.
I’ve done all I can do in other people’s interests. Now my interests
will be scattered. My ways are already fixed. You offer me an active
life in the world, but I am through my activities.”

“Good Heaven!” he broke out; “why, you talk as if you were old—_you_,
with the best of your life before you!”

Her smile was tight. “Perhaps I have lived through things too quickly.
But I know I like you too much to cheat you, which I should do if I
married you. I can’t—can’t do it! Believe me, I would like to give you
what you ask, but I haven’t it.”

“Is this the last word?” he said, half risen.

She nodded, her eyes full of tears.

He saw them, and touched her arm. “Don’t, don’t!” he said gently. “I
suppose you know what is best for _you_!” The accent fell on the last
word sadly. He rose; she saw him, a dim bulk on the light window-square
as he stooped to gather up bags and umbrella; saw him passing her. The
door closed behind him.

Florence, with a shiver, relaxed from her tension, leaning back in her
chair a little weakly. Her eyes closed. All the glitter she had shown
them on the platform had fallen away from her; and thus, with shut eyes,
her unlighted face showed exhaustion so deep that peace seemed the next
thing to it. The noise of the train swam heavily in her head. She had no
thoughts, only—as now and again she opened her eyes—a vague noticing of
small things; and then at sight of green onion-fields wheeling past the
window, a sad stab of memory. She shut her eyes, lest some other sight
remind her too cruelly of what was left behind. She did not sleep. She
was unconscious of time in her deep, complete lethargy of soul and
brain. When she opened her eyes again the lights were swinging down the
middle of the car, and through the windows she looked out over water,
beautiful violet-blue in a softly gathering dark. The train was puffing
slower, and now a glimmering succession of windows shut out the water.

The dark tunnel of the ferry-house encompassed her, but the memory of
the purple flash of sea lingered with a vivid pleasure—more vivid that
the glimpse had been so short—as she followed the rush out of the car
door. The cool, soft wind on her face, the crowd tearing to and fro,
roused her. The “overland” was just pulling out; a string of electric
lights, white jackets jumping to the platforms, faces peering from the
windows, it passed her. She felt a queer throb, a wish to be going with
it somewhere, outward bound. What had she to hold her anywhere? But even
with the thought the sense of poignant personal loss would not rise up
before her. Her lethargy was lost, but her consciousness, no longer
concentrated upon herself, was relaxed to a keener perception of her
surroundings—of the high, dusky-vaulted ferry-house, echoing full of
voices and footsteps; of the fitful play of light on the foam churning
through the tall piles of the ferry-slip; of the crowd she moved among,
streaming down the ferry gangway, a succession of faces glimmering past,
each stamped with its headlong personal object. They were still spurred
and ridden by it, while she.... The salt breath of the sea rushed up to
meet her, with suggestion of the immensities of oceans.

She found an outside seat forward.

It was an evening clear, moonless, with a marvelous purple over water
and sky. Every light of the ships in harbor was reflected, a trailing
glory, in the glassy bay; and the ferry was plowing through them, with
its dull, monotonous pulse like the beat of a heart. The white bulk of a
steamer moved directly before its course, white lights, green, red
lights—the _Nippon Maru_ outward bound. Florence’s eyes followed it. And
there stirred faintly in her the passion she had always cherished for
the mysterious other side of the world—Japan, and that great continent
beyond it. And as the immensity unrolled before her—the thousands of
miles, the millions of people with passions identical, with ideals
unintelligible to hers, but in the great sum of existence as
necessary—the vast, varied face of the world diminished, dwarfed her own
identity.

She had one of those fortunate moments when, the body being very weary,
the spirit takes its opportunity and mounts beyond the body’s demands.
If she had put it to herself, she would have said she had “got outside
of things.” It floated before her, more like an impression than a
thought, that to have had one’s happiness was what counted, though it
passed like the glimpse of purple sea. And the eye of the soul that
could catch it, could treasure it up to carry into some dim, empty,
echoing time-to-come. The time of activity, of struggle for what was
most desirable, most beautiful, or most necessary to life—the delights,
the sufferings, the defeating, the half successes—this time inevitably
was ended. Sometimes the change life made was death, sometimes only
another face of life, as now it came to her—a time of waiting, of
watching, of trying to perceive and understand, from the passionate,
personal motives acting themselves out around her, the great intention
of the whole.

Before her the lights of the city were all alive, trailing around the
water-front, marching over the hills, ringing them with fire, and
trembling away into the large stars of the low, soft sky. Her hand was
on the rail, and she dropped her chin upon it, looking longingly,
searchingly into the heart of the glittering tangle, as if it were the
veritable tangle of life.

 ● Transcriber’s Notes:
    ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
    ○ Unbalanced quotation marks were left as the author intended.
    ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
    ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
      when a predominant form was found in this book.
    ○ Page 159 “envelop” was changed to “envelope”.
    ○ Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).