olive in the other, joking with Gail, and complimenting her, and teasing
her, but in every word and look and action, showing that they loved her.

She had a new knowledge of them, an understanding of what it is like to
have a whole circle of friends who have grown up from childhood
together. They understood each other, and knew each other’s weaknesses
and faults, so that they were not shocked when they saw evidences of
them, and they knew each other’s virtues, so that they did not
overestimate anything and look for too much, and they were dependent
upon each other and knew it, and they were loyal; that was it! Loyal!
Loyal to the very core! It was good, so good to be home!

No one thought anything about it when Howard Clemmens stayed behind,
after all the rest had gone home. Howard had always done that. It was
his right.

Howard was distressed in his mind about several things, and, out of a
habitual acquiescence in his old assumption of leadership, and because
she was tired, and because she was tender of thought toward all her old
friends, she answered his very direct questions. Yes, she had finished
her visit. No, she was not engaged. That atrocious newspaper article had
only been a regular Sunday paper social sensation. They fastened that
sort of a story on some one at least once a year. These little matters
settled, Howard was himself again. He was very glad that Gail had
returned to her normal mode of existence, and now that all this
foolishness was over, he took the earliest opportunity to mention the
little matter between them. Would Gail reconsider her answer to the
question he had asked her in New York? He informed her fully as to the
state of his affections, which had not changed in the least, and he
rather expected that this magnanimous attitude on his part would meet
with melting appreciation. He was very much astonished that it did not,
and displeased when she refused him again. Confound it, he had not given
her time to settle down!

She was only slightly troubled when he bade her good-night. She was
sorry that she could not see the matter as he did, but there was no
trace of doubt in her mind. Somehow, Howard seemed rather colourless of
late. He was a dear, good boy; but she was not the kind of a girl he
needed.

With only as much trouble on her brow as could be smoothed away by her
fingertips, she went back into the dining room, where her father, who
liked to have a table near him, was enjoying an extra cup of coffee with
his cigar, and shedding the mild disapproval of Mrs. Sargent, who
foresaw a restless night for him. Gail, who had not spared time for
food, poured herself a glass of water, picked up one of the delicious
little chicken sandwiches, and sat down, within easy leaning distance of
her father, for one of the good, old-time, comfortable family chats.
Taffy curled around her feet, and the group was complete.

Somehow, that inexplicable feeling of loneliness returned to her, in the
midst of this most dear intimacy. What was it? No one can form far ties
without leaving behind some enduring thread of spiritual communication;
for better or for worse.

                              CHAPTER XVI
                              GAIL AT HOME

“I hear Miss Gail’s back home.” It was the ice man. He had given her
slivers of ice in the days when she had wished that she were a boy.

“Yassum.” Mammy Emma. She said “Yassum” to everybody; men, women, and
children.

Gail, still snuggled in the pillows, smiled affectionately, and knew
what time it was. She reached lazily out and pressed the button.

“Prettier than ever, I suppose.” A slam and a bang and a rattle of
crockery.

“Heaps.” The clink of a muffin pan. Gail knew the peculiar sound from
that of all the other pans in the house. “I thought I done tole you
yeahs ago to saw that ice straight. Does it fit that away?”

“All right, Emma.” The slam of a lid. “I’ll remember it next time. Miss
Gail home for good?”

“Praise the Lawd, yes.”

The clank of ice tongs.

“She’s a fine girl!” This with profound conviction. “She didn’t get her
head turned and marry any of those rich New Yorkers.”

“She could if she’d ‘a’ wanted to!” This indignantly.

“Sure she could.” Sounds of a heavy booted iceman coming down the steps
of the kitchen porch. “New York papers said she could have her pick; but
she come back home.”

Gail’s maid came in, a neat French girl who had an artist’s delight in
her. She shivered and closed the windows.

“Arly!”

“Good morning,” came a cheerful voice through three open doors. “I’m up
hours,” and Arly trotted in, fresh-eyed and smiling, clad in a rich blue
velvet boudoir robe and her black hair braided down her back. “I peeped
in a few minutes ago, but you were sound asleep. I want my coffee.”

“You poor infant,” and Gail promptly slid two pink feet out of bed to be
slippered by Nanette. “I’ll be ready in a minute. Why didn’t you ring?”

“I did. Aunty Clem was up and took all the burden of living away from
me. I wouldn’t have coffee by myself, though. I get that at home,” and
there was the slightest trace of wistfulness in her tone.

“Call Clem again,” directed Gail. “Shall we have it in your
dressing-room or mine?”

“All over both suites,” laughed Arly. “I shall never have enough of
these beautiful little rooms,” and she hurried back to her own quarters,
to summons, once more, the broadly smiling face of Aunty Clem.

That was the beginning of the first morning at home, with every
delightful observance just as it had used to be; first the fragrant
coffee, and the pathetically good hot muffins and jam; then the romping,
laughing, splashing process of dressing; then interrupted by a visit
from Mrs. Sargent, and from Taffy, and from Vivian Jennings, who lived
next door, and from Madge Frazier, who had stayed the night with Vivian;
then a race out to the stables, to say good morning to the horses, and
laughing with moist eyes, hear their excited whinnies of greeting, and
slip them lumps of sugar; then to the kennels to be half smothered by
the eager collies; then over to Vivian’s, to surround deaf old
grandmother Jennings with the flowers she loved best, the faces of young
girls; then back to the house and the telephone, for a cheery good
morning to everybody in the world, beginning with Dad, who was already
plugging away in his office, the morning half gone, and looking forward
to lunch.

Breakfast at eleven, a brisk horseback ride, a change, and Gail’s little
grey electric was at the door. There was a tremendous lot of shopping to
be done. To begin with, sixteen new hair ribbons, and nine fancy
marbles, not the big ones that you can’t use, but the regular
unattainable fifteen centers, and twenty-five pears, and twenty-five
small boxes of candy, and eleven pound packages of special tea, and six
pound packages of special tobacco, and one quart of whiskey, and
eighteen bunches of red carnations, five to the bunch, five grouping
better than four or six. None of these things were to be delivered. Gail
piled them all in her coupé, and, after saying “howdydo” to about
everybody on Main Street, and feeling immensely uplifted thereby, she
inserted Arly in among the carnations and pears and tobacco and things,
and whirled her out to Chickentown, which was the actively devilish
section of the city allotted to Gail’s church work.

There were those of the guild who made of this religious duty a solemn
and serious task, to be entered upon with sweet piety and uplifting
words; but Gail had solved her problem in a fashion which kept
Chickentown from hating her and charity. She distributed flowers and
pears and tobacco and things, and perfectly human smiles, and a few
commonsense observations when they seemed to be necessary, and scoldings
where they seemed due, and it was a lasting tribute to her diplomacy and
popularity that all the new born babies in the district were named
either Gail or Gale.

Chickentown lay in a smoky triangle, entirely surrounded by railroad
yards and boiler factories and packing houses and the like, and it was
as feudal in its instincts as any stronghold of old. Its womenfolk would
not market where the Black Creek women marketed, its men would not drink
in the same saloons, and its children came home scarred and prowed from
gory battles with the Black Creek gang; yet, in their little cottages
and in their tiny yards was the neatness of local pride, which had
sprung up immediately after Gail had inaugurated the annual front yard
flower prize system.

No sooner had the familiar coupé crossed the Black Creek bridge than a
yell went up, which could be heard echoing and reverberating from street
to street throughout the entire domain of Chickentown! One block inside
the fiefdom, the progress of the car was impeded by exactly twenty-five
children. By some miracle they all arrived at nearly the same time, the
only difference being that those who had come the farthest were the most
out of breath. Gail jumped out among them, and twenty-five right hands
went straight up in the air. She inspected the hands critically, one by
one, and, by that inspection alone, divided the mobs into two groups,
the clean handed ones, who were mostly girls, and the dirty-handed ones,
who looked sorry. She shook hands with the first group, and she smiled
on both, and she distributed hair ribbons and marbles and pears and
candy with cordial understanding.

“It doesn’t do for me to be away so long,” she confessed, looking them
over regretfully. “I don’t believe you are as clean.”

Those who were as clean looked consciously hurt, but for the most part
they looked guilty; and Gail apologised individually, to those who
merited it.

“Now we’ll hear the troubles,” she announced; “and you must hurry. The
cleanest first.”

Twenty-five hands went up, and she picked out the cleanest, a neat
little girl with yellow hair and blue eyes and a prim little walk, who
shyly came forward alone out of the group and wiggled her interlocked
fingers behind her, while Gail sat in the door of her coupé and held her
court.

A half-whispered conversation; a genuine trouble, and some sound and
sensible advice. Yellow Hair did not like her school-teacher; and what
was she to do about it? A difficult problem that, and while Gail was
inculcating certain extremely cautious lessons of mingled endurance and
diplomacy, which would have been helpful to grown-ups as well as to
yellow-haired little girls, and which Gail reflected that she might
herself use with profit, Arly, with an entirely new sort of smile in her
softened eyes, walked over to the chattering group, all of whom had
troubles to relate, and asked a boy to have a bill changed for her into
quarter dollars. The boy looked at his hand.

“I guess I won’t be next for a long time,” and taking the bill ran for
the candy shop, which was nearest. There were seven places of retail
business in Chickentown, and since they dealt mostly in coppers, he
expected to be a long time on this errand.

Arly watched Gail handle the case of a particularly black-eyed little
girl, whose brother was getting too big to play with her any more; and
she grew wistful.

“Do you mind if I hear a few troubles, Gail?” she requested.

“Help yourself,” was the laughing reply. “I think there’s enough to go
around.”

“I’ll begin at the other end,” decided Arly. “Put up your hands,
kiddies,” and they went up slowly. She conscientiously picked the
dirtiest one, but the boy who owned it came forward with a reluctance
which was almost sullen.

“I druther tell Miss Gail,” he frankly informed her.

“Of course,” Arly immediately agreed, smiling down into his eyes with
more charm than she had seen fit to exert on anybody in many months.
“But you can tell Miss Gail about it afterwards, if you like, or you
might tell me your littlest trouble and save your biggest one for Miss
Gail.”

“I ain’t got but one,” responded the boy, and he looked searchingly into
Arly’s black eyes. Her being pretty, like Gail, was a recommendation.

“There’s a kid over in Black Creek that I used to lick; but now he’s got
me faded.”

From his intensity, this was a serious trouble, and Arly considered it
seriously.

“Does he fight fairly?” she asked, and that one question alone showed
that she knew the first principles of human life and conduct, which was
rare in a girl or woman of any type.

He came a step closer, and looked up into her eyes with all his
reservation gone.

“Yessum,” he confessed, and there was something of a clutch in his
throat which would never grow up to be a sob, but which would have been
one in a girl. He’d rather have lied, but you couldn’t get any useful
advice that way.

“Maybe he’s growing faster than you.”

“Yessum. I eat all the oatmeal they give me, and I take trainin’ runs
every evening after school, clear up to Scraggers Park and back; but it
don’t do any good.”

Arly pondered.

“When does he lick you?” she asked.

“Right after supper when he catches me.”

“Do you play all day?”

“I go to school.”

“Baseball?”

“Yessum. Baseball, and one-old-cat, and two-old-cat, and rounders, and
marbles, and prisoner’s base, and high-spy, but mostly baseball and
marbles.”

Arly studied the future citizen with the eye of a practical physical
culturist, who knew exactly how she had preserved her clear complexion
and lithe figure. In spite of his sturdy build, there was not enough
protuberance to his chest, and, though his cheeks were full enough,
there was a hollow look about his jaws and around his eyes.

“You’re over-trained,” she decisively told him. “You mustn’t play
marbles very often, or very long at a time, because that stooping over
in the dust isn’t good for you, and you mustn’t take your training runs
up to that park. The other boy licks you because you’re all tired out. I
don’t believe it’s because he’s a better fighter.”

That boy breathed with the sigh of one freed from a mighty burden, and
the eyes which looked up into Arly’s were almost swimming with
gratitude.

“She’s all right,” he told the next candidate. “She’s a pippin! Say, do
you know what’s the matter with me? I’m over-trained,” and he smacked
his chest resounding whacks and felt of his biceps.

There were troubles of all sorts and shapes and sizes, and Arly bent to
them more concentrated wisdom than she had been called upon to display
for years. It was a new game, one with a live zest, and Gail had
invented it. Her admiration for Gail went up a notch. One boy was not so
funny as his brother, and was never noticed; another had to eat turnips;
and Arly’s only little girl, for she had started at the boy end,
couldn’t have little slippers that pinched her feet!

“I’m glad I came home with you,” commented Arly, when she had finished
her court and had distributed her money, which Gail had permitted her
just this once, and they had driven up the block attended by an escort
of exactly twenty-five. “It makes me think, and I’d almost forgotten
how.”

“It makes me think, too,” confessed Gail, very seriously. “Suppose I
should go away. They’d go right on living, but I like to flatter myself
that I’m doing more good for them than somebody else could do.” Why that
thought had worried her she could not say. She was home to stay now,
except for the usual trips.

“You’d find the same opportunities anywhere,” Arly quickly assured her.

“Yes, but they wouldn’t be these same children,” worried Gail. “I’d
never know others like I know these.”

“No,” admitted Arly slowly. “I think I’ll pick out a few when I go back
home. I’ve often wondered how to do it, without having them think me a
fool or a nosy, but you’ve solved the problem. You’re tremendously
clever.”

“Here’s Granny Jones’s,” interrupted Gail, with a smile for the
compliment. “Don’t come in, for she’s my worst specimen. She’s a duty,”
and taking some carnations and a package of tea, she hurried away.

Flowers and tea for the old ladies, tobacco and flowers for the old men,
and the bottle of whiskey for old Ben Jackson, to whom his little nip
every morning and night was a genuine charity, though one severe worker
left the guild because Gail persisted in taking it to him.

At the house they found silver-haired old Doctor Mooreman, the rector of
the quaintly beautiful little chapel up the avenue, and he greeted Gail
with a smile which was a strange commingling of spiritual virtue and
earthly shrewdness.

“Well, how’s my little pagan?” he asked her, in the few minutes they had
alone.

“Worse than ever, I’m afraid,” she confessed. “I suppose you’re asking
about the state of my mind and the degree of my wickedness.”

“That’s it exactly,” agreed the Reverend Doctor, smiling on her fondly.
“Are you still quarrelling with the Church, because it prefers to be
respectable rather than merely good?”

“I’m afraid so,” she laughed. “I still don’t understand why Hell is
preached when nobody believes it; nor why we are told the material
details of a spiritual Heaven, when no one has proved its existence
except by ancient literature; nor why an absolutely holy man whose works
are all good, from end to end of his life, can’t go to Heaven if he
doubts the divinity of the Saviour; nor why so much immorality is
encouraged in the world by teaching that marriage itself is sinful; nor
why a hundred other things, which are necessarily the formulas of man,
are made a condition of the worship of the heart. You see, I’m as bad as
ever.”

The smile of Doctor Mooreman was a pleasant sight to behold.

“You’re in no spiritual difficulties,” he told her. “You’re only having
fun with your mind, and laying tragic stress on the few little innocent
fictions which were once well-meant and useful.”

Gail looked at him in astonishment.

“I never heard you admit that much!” she marvelled.

“You’re approaching years of discretion,” laughed her old rector. “All
these things are of small moment compared with the great fact that the
Church does stand as a constant effort to inculcate the grace of God.
The young are prone to require roses without a blemish, but even God has
never made one.”

“I don’t understand,” she puzzled. “You’re not combatting me on any of
these things as you used to,” and it actually worried her.

“Let me whisper something to you,” and the Reverend Doctor Mooreman,
whose face had the purity which is only visible in old age, leaned
forward, with his eyes snapping. “I don’t believe a lot of them myself;
but Gail, I believe much in the grace of God, and I believe much in its
refining and bettering influence on humanity, so to the people who would
discard everything for the reason of one little flaw, I teach things I
don’t believe; and my conscience is as clean as a whistle.”

“You’re a darling old fraud!” Gail’s mind was singularly relieved. She
had worried how a man of Doctor Mooreman’s intelligence could swallow so
many of the things which were fed him in his profession. The
conversation had done her good. It tempered her attitude toward certain
things, but it did not change her steadfast principle that the Church
would be better off if it did not require the teachings of tenets and
articles of faith which were an insult to modern intelligence.

Had she been unfair with the Reverend Smith Boyd? She could not shake
off that thought. She must tell him the attitude of Doctor Mooreman.
That is, if she ever saw him again. Of course she would, however.

                              CHAPTER XVII
                  SOMETHING HAPPENS TO GERALD FOSLAND

There was something radically wrong with the Fosland household. Gerald’s
man had for years invariably said: “Good morning, sir; I hope you slept
well, sir.” This time he merely said: “Good morning, sir”; and he forgot
the salt. What was the matter with the house? With the exception of
William’s slip, the every morning programme was quite as usual. Gerald
arose, had his plunge, his breakfast, read his mail and his paper, went
for a canter in the Park, had luncheon at the Papyrus Club, and unless
his morning engagement slip had shown him some social duty for the
afternoon, he did not see Mrs. Fosland until he came down, from the
hands of William, dressed for dinner.

One can readily see that no deviation from this routine confronted
Gerald Fosland this morning. He had had his plunge and his breakfast,
his mail and his paper laid before him, and yet there was something
ghastly about the feel of the house. It was as if some one were dead!
Gerald Fosland made as radical a deviation from his daily life as
William had done. He left his mail unopened, after a glance at the
postmark; he left his paper unread, and he started for his canter in the
Park a full half hour early!

He arrived at the Papyrus Club a full half hour early, and sat in the
dimmest corner of the library, taking himself seriously in hand.
Somehow, he was not quite fit, not quite up to himself. It seemed
desperately lonely in the Club. There were plenty of fellows there, but
they were merely nodders. They were not the ones who came at his hour.
He brightened a shade as Tompkinson came in five minutes early. He was
about to wonder if all the world had started a trifle early this
morning, when he remembered that, ordinarily on his arrival, he found
Tompkinson there. He could not analyse why this should be such a relief
to him, unless it was that he found mere normality comforting to-day.

“Good morning, Fosland,” drawled Tompkinson. “Beautiful weather.”

“Yes,” said Gerald, and they sat together in voiceless satisfaction
until Connors came in.

“Good morning,” observed Connors. “Beautiful weather.”

“Yes,” replied Fosland and Tompkinson, and Connors sat.

“Depressing affair of Prymm’s,” presently remarked Tompkinson, calling a
boy for the customary appetiser.

“Rotten,” agreed Connors, with some feeling. All his ancestors had been
Irish, and it never quite gets out of the blood.

“I haven’t heard,” suggested Fosland, with the decent interest one
club-fellow should have in another.

“Wife went to Italy with the sculptor who made her portrait; Carmelli,
that’s the name. Intense looking fellow, you know. Prymm had him here at
the club.”

“You don’t tell me.” Gerald felt an unusual throb of commiseration for
Prymm. “Mighty decent chap.”

“Yes, Prymm’s all cut up about it,” went on Tompkinson. “Has a sort of
notion he should kill the fellow, or something of the kind.”

“Why?” demanded Connors, with some feeling again. Connors was a widower,
and Fosland suddenly remembered, though he could not trace a connection
leading to the thought, that Connors had not been a frequenter of the
club until after the death of his wife. “Prymm’s a thoroughly decent
chap, but he was so wasteful.”

This being a new word in such connection, both Fosland and Tompkinson
looked at Connors inquiringly.

“I hadn’t noticed.” This Tompkinson.

“Wasteful of Mrs. Prymm,” explained Connors. “She is a beautiful young
woman, clever, charming, companionable, and, naturally, fond of
admiration. Prymm admired her. He frequently intimated that he did. He
admired his horse, and an exceptional Botticelli which hung in his music
room, but his chief pleasure lay in their possession. He never
considered that he should give any particular pleasure to the
Botticelli, but he did to the horse.”

Gerald Fosland was aware of a particular feel of discomfort. Rather
heartless to be discussing a fellow member’s intimate affairs this way.

“It is most unfortunate,” he commented. “Shall we go down to lunch?”

In the hall they met Prymm, a properly set up fellow, with neatly
plastered hair and an air of unusually perfect grooming. He presented
the appearance of having shaved too closely to-day.

“Good morning,” said Prymm. “Beautiful weather.”

Inconsiderate of Prymm to show up at the club. A trifle selfish of him.
It put such a strain on his fellow members. Of course, though, he had
most of his mail there. He only stopped for his mail, and went out.

“You’ll be in for the usual Tuesday night whist, I dare say,” inquired
Tompkinson perfunctorily.

“Oh yes,” remembered Fosland, and was thoughtful for a moment. “No, I
don’t think I can come. Sorry.” He felt the eye of Connors fixed on him
curiously.

On Fosland’s book was a tea, the date filled in two weeks ago; one of
those art things to which men are compelled. Arly had handed it to him,
much like a bill for repairs, or a memorandum to secure steamer tickets.
He drove home, and dressed, and when William handed him his hat and
gloves and stick he laid them on the table beside him, in his lounging
room, and sat down, looking patiently out of the window. He glanced at
his watch, by and by, and resumed his inspection of the opposite side of
the street. He stirred restlessly, and then he suddenly rose, with a
little smile at himself. He had been waiting for word from Mrs. Fosland,
that she was ready. For just a few abstracted moments he had forgotten
that he was to pay the social obligations of the house of Fosland
entirely alone.

He picked up his hat and gloves and stick, and started to leave the
room. As he passed the door leading to Arly’s apartments, he hesitated,
and put his hand on the knob. He glanced over his shoulder, as a guilty
conscience made him imagine that William was coming in, then he gently
turned the knob, and entered. A tiny vestibule, and then a little
French-grey salon, and then the boudoir, all in delicate blue, and sweet
with a faint, delicate, evasive fragrance which was like the passing of
Arly. Something made him stand, for a moment, with a trace of feeling
which came to awe, and then he turned and went out of the terribly
solemn place. He did not notice, until afterwards, that he had tiptoed.

Gerald Fosland had never been noted for brilliance, but he was an
insufferable bore at the art tea. People asked him the usual polite
questions, and he either forgot that they were talking or answered about
something else, and he entirely mislaid the fragments of art
conversation which he was supposed to have put on with his ascot. Nearly
every one asked about Arly, and several with more than perfunctory
courtesy. He had always known that Arly was very popular, but he had a
new perception, now, that she was extremely well liked; and it gratified
him.

Occupied with his own reflections, which were not so much thought as a
dull feeling that he was about to have a thought, he nevertheless felt
that this was a rather agreeable gathering, after all, until he
accidentally joined a group which, with keen fervour, was discussing the
accident to Prymm. He had a general aversion to gossip anyhow, and
shortly after that he went home.

He wrote some letters, and, when it grew dark, he rang for William.

“I shall remain in for dinner to-night,” he observed, and mechanically
took up the evening paper which the quiet William laid before him. A
headline which made his hand tremble, caught his eye, and he dropped the
paper. Prymm had shot himself.

No tragedy had ever shaken Gerald Fosland so much as this. Why, he had
met Prymm only that noon. Prymm had said: “Good morning, beautiful
weather.” For a moment Fosland almost changed his mind about remaining
in for dinner, but, after all, the big panelled dining room, with its
dark wainscoting and its heavily carved furniture and its super-abundant
service, was less lonely than the club. The only words which broke the
silence of the dim dining room during that dinner, were: “Sauce, sir?”

Gerald took his coffee in his lounging room, and then he went again to
Arly’s door. He turned before he opened it, and tossed his cigarette in
the fireplace. He did not enter by stealth this time. He walked in. He
even went on to the dainty blue bedroom, and looked earnestly about it,
then he went back to the boudoir and seated himself on the stiff chair
in which he had, on rare occasions, sat and chatted with her. He
remained there perhaps half an hour. Suddenly he arose, and called for
his limousine, and drove to Teasdale’s. They were out, he was told. They
were at Mr. Sargent’s, and he drove straight there. Somehow, he was glad
that, since they were out, they had gone to Sargent’s. He was most
anxious to see Lucile.

“Just in time to join the mourners, Gerald,” greeted Ted. “We’re doing a
very solemn lot of Gailing.”

“I’ll join you with pleasure,” agreed Gerald, feeling more at home and
lighter of heart here than he had anywhere during the day. Lucile seemed
particularly near to him. “Have you any intimation that Gail expects to
return soon?”

“None at all,” stated Aunt Helen, with a queer mixture of sombreness and
impatience. “She only writes about what a busy time they are having, and
how delightfully eager her friends have been about her, and how popular
Arly is, and such things as that.”

“Arly is popular everywhere,” stated Gerald, and Lucile looked at him
wonderingly, turning her head very slowly towards him.

“What do you hear from Arly?” she inquired, holding up her hand as if to
shield her eyes from the fire, and studying him curiously from that
shadow.

“Much the same,” he answered; “except that she mentions Gail’s
popularity instead of her own. She had her maid send her another
trunkful of clothing, I believe,” and he fell to gazing into the
fireplace.

“I am very much disappointed in Arly,” worried Aunt Helen. “I sent Arly
specifically to bring Gail back in a week, and they have been gone nine
days!”

“I’m glad they’re having a good time,” observed Jim Sargent. “She’ll
come back when she gets ready. The New York pull is something which hits
you in the middle of the night, and makes you get up and pack.”

“Yes, but the season will soon be over,” worried Aunt Helen. “Gail’s
presence here at this time is so important that I do not see how she can
neglect it. It may affect her entire future life. A second season is
never so full of opportunities as the first one.”

“Oh nonsense,” laughed Jim. “You’re a fanatic on match-making, Helen.
What you really mean is that Gail should make a choice out of the
matrimonial market before it has all been picked over.”

“Jim,” protested Mrs. Sargent, the creases of worry appearing in her
brow. Her husband and sister had never quarrelled, but they had
permitted divergences of opinion, which had required much mutual
forbearance.

“A spade is a spade,” returned Jim. “I think it’s silly to worry about
Gail’s matrimonial prospects. Whenever she’s ready to be married, she’ll
look them all over, and pick out the one who suits her. All she’ll have
to say is ‘Eeny-meeny-miny-moe, you’re it,’ and the fellow will rush
right out and be measured for his suit.”

“Just the same, I’d rather she’d be here when she counts out,” laughed
Lucile.

“So would I,” agreed Jim; “but, after all, there are good men
everywhere. Girls get married out in the middle-west as well as here,
and live happily ever after.”

“They grow fine men out there,” stated Mrs. Sargent, with a
complimentary glance at her husband. She had never wavered in her
opinion of that fine man.

“Right you are,” agreed Sargent heartily. “They have not the polish of
eastern men perhaps, but they have a strength, and forcefulness, and
virility, which carries them through. There are men out there, stacks of
them, who would appeal to any bright and vivacious woman, sweep her off
her feet, carry her away by storm, and make her forget a lot of things.
If any handsome woman is unappreciated in New York, all she has to do is
to go out to the middle-west.”

Lucile, listening to the innocently blundering speech of Gail’s proud
uncle, watched Gerald with intense interest. She could scarcely believe
the startling idea which had popped into her head! Gerald’s only
apparent deviation from his normal attitude had consisted in
abstractedly staring into the fire, instead of paying polite attention
to every one, but that he had heard was evidenced by the shifting glance
he gave Sargent. Otherwise he had not moved.

“You scare me,” said Lucile, still watching Gerald. “I’m not going to
leave Gail out there any longer. I’m going to have her back at once.”

Gerald raised his head immediately, and smiled at her.

“Splendid,” he approved. “Fact of the matter is,” and he hesitated an
instant, “I’m becoming extremely lonesome.”

Even Ted detected something in Gerald’s tone and in his face.

“It’s time you were waking up,” he bluntly commented. “I should think
you would be lonely without Arly.”

“Yes, isn’t it time,” agreed Gerald, studying the matter carefully. “You
know, both having plenty of leisure, there’s never been any occasion for
us to travel separately before, and, really, I miss her dreadfully.”

“I think I’ll have to get her for you, Gerald,” promised Lucile,
removing her hand from in front of her eyes, and smiling at him
reassuringly. She could smile beautifully just now. The incredible thing
she had thought she detected was positively true, and it made her
excitedly happy! Gerald Fosland had been in love with his wife, and had
never known it until now!

“If you can work that miracle, and bring Gail back with her, you’ll
spread sunshine all over the place,” declared Jim Sargent. “It’s been
like a funeral here since she went home. You’d think Gail was the most
important section of New York. Everybody’s blue; Allison, Doctor Boyd;
everybody who knew her inquires, with long faces, when she’s coming
back!”

“What do you propose?” inquired Mrs. Helen Davies, with a degree of
interest which intimated that she was quite ready to take any part in
the conspiracy.

“I have my little plan,” laughed Lucile. “I’m going to send her an
absolutely irresistible reminder of New York!”

                             CHAPTER XVIII
                       THE MESSAGE FROM NEW YORK

It was good to be home! Gail wondered that she could ever have been
content away from the loving shelter of her many, many friends. She had
grown world weary in all the false gaiety of New York! She was
disillusioned! She was blasé. She was tired of frivolity; and she
immediately planned or enthusiastically agreed to take part in a series
of gaieties which would have made an average hard-working man anticipate
them with an already broken constitution.

The house was full of them, morning, noon and night; young girls, sedate
and jolly, and all of them excitedly glad that Gail was among them
again; and young men, in all the degrees from social butterflies to
plodding business pluggers, equally glad.

Good comfortable home folks these, who were deliciously nice to the
stately black-haired Arly, and voted her a tremendous beauty, and stood
slightly in awe of her. The half cynical Arly, viewing them critically,
found in them one note of interesting novelty; a certain general
clean-hearted wholesomeness, and, being a seeker after the unusual, and
vastly appreciative, she deliberately cultivated them; flattering the
boys, but not so much as to make the other girls hate her. To the girls
she made herself even more attractive, because she liked them better.
She complimented them individually on the point of perfection for which
each girl most prided herself; she told them that they were infinitely
more clever than the women of New York, and better looking, in general;
for the New York women were mostly clothes and make-up; and, above all,
she envied them their truer lives!

No group of young people could resist such careful work as that,
especially when performed by a young woman so adroit and so attractive,
and so well gowned; so they lost their awkwardness with her, which
removed any sense of discomfort Gail might have felt, which was the aim
to be accomplished. In those first few days Gail was the happiest of all
creatures, in spite of the fact that the local papers had carried a
politer echo of that despicable slave story. At nights, however,
beginning with the second one, when the girls had retired to the mutual
runway of their adjoining suites, the conversation would turn something
like this.

“Let’s see, this is the seventeenth, isn’t it?” thus Arly.

“Yes; Tuesday,” concentratedly selecting a chocolate, the box of which
bore a New York name.

“Mrs. Matson’s ice skating ball is to-night.” A sidelong glance at the
busy Gail.

“Um-hum.” A chocolate between her white teeth.

“She always has such original affairs.”

“Doesn’t she!” Gail draws her sandalled feet up under her and stretches
down her pink negligee, so that she looks like a stiff little statue in
tinted ivory.

“And such interesting people. That new artist is certain to be there.
What’s his name? Oh yes, Vloddow. I could adore him.”

“You’re a mere verbal adorer,” laughs Gail, studying anxiously over the
problem of whether she wants another piece of chocolate or not. Allison
had sent such good ones. “Vloddow eats garlic.”

“That’s why I adore him, from a distance. Of course all the nice regular
fellows will be there; Dick Rodley, and Ted, and Houston, and — Oh, oh!
I forgot to write Gerald,” and with a swift passing kiss somewhere
between Gail’s ear and her chin, she hurries into her own dressing-room,
with a backward glance to make sure that Gail is staring, with softened
brown eyes, down into her chocolate box, and seeing there amid the brown
confections, the laughing, swirling skaters in Mrs. Matson’s glistening
ballroom. Dick, and Ted, and Houston, and Willis, Lucile and Marion, Flo
Reynolds, and the gay little Mrs. Babbitt, and a host of others. There
were some who would not be at that ball; Allison, and the Reverend Smith
Boyd, and—Arlene has plenty of time to write her formally dutiful letter
without disturbance.

Gail has letters, too, as the days wear on. She scarcely has time for
them amid all the impromptu gaieties, but she does find a chance to read
them; some of them twice. Of course there are letters from “home,” a
prim and still affectionate one from Aunt Helen Davies, and a loving
one, full of worry about Gail’s possible tonsilitis, from Aunt Grace, a
hearty scrawl from Jim, a bubbling little note from Lucile, an absurd
love letter from Ted, couched in terms of the utmost endearment, and
winding up with the proposition to elope with her if she’d only come
back. That was the tenor of all her letters; if she’d only come back!
Bless their hearts, she loved them; and yes, longed for them, even here
in the happy, sheltering environment of her own dear home and friends!
There were still other letters; a confidently friendly one from Allison,
who sent her regularly candy and flowers on alternate days; a
substantial one from Houston Van Ploon; a thoughtful one from Willis
Cunningham; a florid one from Dick Rodley; nice little notes, calculated
to relieve her embarrassment, from all her “slaves” except the missing
Count; and a discussion from the Reverend Smith Boyd. That was one of
those which she read more than once; for it was quite worth it.

  “Dear Miss Sargent:

  “This being our regular evening for discussion, I beg to remind you
  that on our last debate, I shall not call it a dispute, we had
  barely touched upon the necessity for ritual, or rather, to avoid
  any quibble over the word necessity, on my insistence for the need
  of a ritual, when we decided that it was better to sing for the
  balance of the evening. I was the more ready to acquiesce in this,
  as we had, for the first time, hit upon a theorem to which we could
  both subscribe; namely, that it is just as easy for the human mind
  to grasp the biblical theory of creation as to grasp the creation of
  the life-producing chaos out of which evolution must have
  proceeded.”

Gail laid down the letter at this point and smiled, with dancing eyes.
She could see the stern face of the young rector brightening with
pleasure as she had herself propounded this thought, and she could
revisualise his grave pleasure as he had clothed it in accurate words
for them both. It was, as he had said, an extremely solid starting
point, to which they could always return.

  “That this belief is sufficient, even including a continuance of the
  omnipresent personal regard which we both admit to assume in that
  Creator, I deny. I can see your cheeks flush and your brown eyes
  sparkle as you come to this flat statement; and I am willing to
  answer for you that you object to my making so far-sweeping a
  statement, in the very beginning of what was to have been a slowly
  deductive process. You may not be wording it in just this manner,
  but this is, in effect, what you are saying.

  “With much patience, I reply that you have not waited for me to
  finish, which, I must observe, in justice to myself, you seldom do.

  “Kindly wait just a minute, please. You have thrown back your head,
  your brown hair tossing, your pointed chin uptilted, and a little
  red spot beginning to appear in your delicately tinted cheeks, but I
  hasten to remind you that, if we take up this little side matter of
  my unfortunate mention of one of your youthful proclivities, we
  shall forget entirely the topic under discussion. I apologise for
  having been so rude as to remind you of it, and beg to state that
  when I pause at a comma, you had heard but half a statement.

  “At this point you remark that no discussion should be based upon a
  half statement, and I admit, with shame, that I am slightly
  indignant, for you have not yet permitted me to finish my original
  proposition. Now you are sitting back, with your slender white hands
  folded in your lap, and the toe of one of your little pointed
  slippers waving gently, your curved lashes drooping, and your eyes
  carelessly fixed on my cravat, which I can not see, but which I
  believe to have been tied with as much care as a gentleman should
  expend upon his attire.

  “Miss Sargent, you leave me helpless. I feel a chill sensation in my
  cheeks, as if a cold draught had blown upon them. You are firmly
  resolved to let me talk without interruption for the next half hour,
  upon which you will give me a most adroit answer to everything I
  have said. Your answer will have all the effect of refuting my
  entire line of logic, without having given me an opportunity to
  defend the individual steps.

  “I decline, with much patience, very much patience indeed, to lay
  myself open to this conclusion, not because of the undeserved sense
  of defeat it will force upon me, but because the matter at issue is
  too grave and important to be given a prejudiced dismissal.

  “I can see you now, as I refuse to carry the subject further at this
  session. You stiffen in your chair, your eyes, which have seemed so
  carelessly indifferent, suddenly glow, and snap, and sparkle, and
  flash. The tiny red spots have deepened, enhancing the velvet of
  your cheeks. Your red lips curl. You impatiently touch back the
  waves of your rippling brown hair with your slender white hand,
  which turns so gracefully upon its wrist. You blaze straight into my
  eyes, and tell me that I have taken this means of avoiding the
  discussion, because I perceive in advance that I am beaten.

  “Miss Sargent, I do not tell you that you are unfair and ungenerous
  to seize upon this advantage; instead, I bite my lip, and compel my
  countenance to befitting gravity, knowing that I should be above the
  petty emotions of anger, impatience, and offended pride; but humbly
  confessing, to myself, that I have not my nature under such perfect
  subjection as I should like to have.

  “Consequently, I beg you to defer this step in our logical deduction
  to another night, and turn, with grateful relief, to the music. I
  need not say how heartily I wish that you were here to sing with me.

                                         “Yours earnestly,
                                                         “SMITH BOYD.”

Gail shrieked when she first read that letter, then she read it again
and blushed. She had, as she came upon his initial flat statement of
denial, felt a flush in her cheeks and a snap in her eyes. She had, as
she read, stiffened with indignation, and relaxed in scornful disdain,
and flashed with hot retort, in advance of his discernment that she
would do so! She was flamingly vexed with him! On the third reading her
eyes twinkled, and her red lips curved deliciously with humour, as she
admired the cleverness which she had previously only recognised. In
subsequent readings this was her continued attitude, and she kept the
letter somewhere in the neighbourhood where she might touch it
occasionally, because of the keen mental appreciation she had for it.
Were her eyes really capable of such an infinite variety of expression
as he had suggested? She looked in the glass to see; but was
disappointed. They were merely large, and brown, and deep, and, just
now, rather softened.

There was an impromptu party at Gail’s house, a jolly affair, indeed.
All her old, steadfast friends, you know, who were quite sufficient to
fill her life; and this was the night of the gay little Mrs. Babbitt’s
affair in New York. How much better than those great, glittering, social
pageants was a simple, wholesome little ball like this, with all her
dear girl chums, in their pretty little Paris model frocks, and all the
boys, in their shiny white fronts. No one had changed, not even
impulsive Howard Clemmens. Poor Howard! He knew now that his refusal was
permanent and enduring, yet he came right to the front with his same
assumption of proprietorship. She let him do it. You see, in all these
years, the boys had tacitly admitted that Howard “had the inside track”;
so, while they all admired and loved her, they stepped aside and
permitted him to monopolise her. Back home there was a sort of esprit de
corps like that, though it was sometimes hard on the girl. When Gail had
flown home from the cruel world to the sheltering arms of her mother and
her friends, she had firmly planned to set Howard in his proper place as
a formal friend, and thereafter be free. There were quite a number of
the boys who had, at one time or another, seemed quite worth
cultivation. When she came to meet them again, however, with that same
old brotherly love shining in their eyes, she somehow found that she did
not care to be free. Anyhow, it would humiliate Howard to reduce him so
publicly to the ranks, snip off his buttons and take his sabre, as it
were; so she allowed him to clank his spurs, to the joy and delight of
Arly.

This was the gayest party of which Gail had been the bright particular
ornament since her return, and she quite felt, except for the presence
of Arly, that she had fallen back into her old familiar life. Why, it
seemed as if she had been home for ages and ages! There was the same old
dance music, the Knippel orchestra, with the wonderfully gifted fat
violinist, and the pallid pianist with the long hair, who had four
children, and the ’cellist who scowled so dreadfully but played the deep
passages so superbly, and clarinettist, whom every one thought should
have gone in for concert work, and the grey-haired old basso player, who
never looked up and who never moved a muscle except those in his arms,
one up and down and the other crosswise; there was a new second
violinist, a black-browed man who looked as if he had been disappointed
in life, but second violinists always do.

At the end of the Sargent ballroom, where Gail’s sedate but hospitable
mother always sat until the “Home, Sweet Home” dance was ended, were the
same dear, familiar palms, which Marty, the florist, always sent to
everybody’s house to augment the home collection. The gorgeous big one
had a leaf gone, but it was sprouting two others.

Tremendously gay affair. Everybody was delighted, and said so; and they
laughed and danced and strolled and ate ices, and said jolly nothings,
and knew, justifiably, that they were nice, and clever, and happy young
people; and Arly Fosland, with any number of young men wondering how old
her husband was, danced conscientiously, and smiled immediately when any
one looked at her. Gail also was dancing conscientiously, and having a
perfectly happy evening. At about this hour there would be something
near four hundred people in the ballroom, and the drawing-rooms, and the
conservatory of Mrs. Babbitt’s.

She was whirling near the balcony windows with a tall young friend who
breathed, when there was an exclamation from a group of girls at the
window. Vivian Jennings turned. She was a girl with the sort of eyes
which, in one sweep, can find the only four-leafed clover in a
forty-acre field.

“Gail!” she cried, almost dancing. “Gail! Do come and see it!”

Gail did not desert her partner; she merely started over to the window
with one hand trailing behind her as an indication to follow, and
immediately, without looking around, she called:

“Arly! Where’s Arly?”

What she saw was this. A rich brown limousine, in which the dome light
was brightly burning, had drawn up to the steps. Inside, among the rich
brown cushions and hangings, and pausing to light a leisurely cigarette,
sat the most wickedly handsome man in the world! He was black-haired,
and black-moustached and black-goateed, and had large, lustrous, melting
black eyes, while on his oval cheeks was the ruddy bloom of health.
Every girl in the window sighed, as, with a movement which was grace in
every changing line, he stepped out of the brilliantly lighted
limousine, and came slowly up the steps, tall, slender, magnificent, in
his shining silk hat and his flowing Inverness, and his white tie, and
his pleated shirt front—Oh, everything; correct to the last detail,
except for the trifling touches of originality, down to his patent
leather tips! With a wave of careless ease he flung back his Inverness
over one shoulder, and rang the bell!

“Dick!” cried a voice just behind Gail’s ear. Gail had not known that
any one was leaning heavily on her shoulders, but now she and Arly, with
one accord, turned and raced for the vestibule!

“You handsome thing!” cried Arly, as he stepped into the hall and held
out a hand to each of them. “I’ve a notion to kiss you!”

“All right,” he beamed down on her, sparing another beam for Gail. No,
Gail had not exaggerated in memory the magic of his melting eyes. It
could not be exaggerated!

“There aren’t any words to tell you how welcome you are!” said Gail, as
the butler disappeared with his hat and Inverness.

“What on earth brought you here to bless us?” demanded Arly.

“I came to propose to Gail,” announced Dick calmly, and took her hand
again, bending down on her that wonderfully magnetic gaze, so that she
was panic-stricken in the idea that he was about to proceed with his
project right on the spot.

“Wait until after the dance,” she laughingly requested, drawing back a
step and blushing furiously.

“We’re wasting time,” protested Arly. “Hurry on in, Dick. We want to
exhibit you.”

“I don’t mind,” consented Dick cheerfully, and stepped through the
doorway, where he created the gasp.

Eleven girls dreamed of his melting eyes that night; and Howard Clemmens
lost his monopoly. Viewing Gail’s victorious scramble with Arly for
Dick’s exclusive possession, Howard’s friends unanimously reduced him to
the ranks.

After the dance, Dick made good his threat with Gail, and formally
proposed, urging his enterprise in coming after her as one of his claims
to consideration; but Gail, laughing, and liking him tremendously, told
him he was too handsome to be married, and sent him back home with a
fresh gardenia in his buttonhole. That night Arly and Gail sat long and
silently on the comfortable couch in front of Arly’s fireplace, one in
fluffy blue and the other in fluffy pink, and the one in fluffy blue
furtively studying the one in fluffy pink from under her black
eyelashes. The one in pink was gazing into the fire with far-seeing
brown eyes, and was braiding and unbraiding, with slender white fingers,
a flowing strand of her brown hair.

“Gail,” ventured the one in blue.

“Yes.” This abstractedly.

“Aren’t you a little bit homesick? I am.”

“So am I!” answered Gail, with sudden animation.

“Let’s go back!” excitedly.

“When?” and Gail jumped up.

                              CHAPTER XIX
                            THE RECTOR KNOWS

The Reverend Smith Boyd came down to breakfast with a more or less
hollow look in his face, and his mother, inspecting him keenly, poured
his coffee immediately. There was the trace of a twinkle in her eyes,
which were nevertheless extremely solicitous.

“How is your head?” she inquired.

“All right, thank you.” This listlessly.

“Are you sure it doesn’t ache at all?”

The Reverend Smith Boyd dutifully withdrew his mind from elsewhere, to
consider that proposition justly.

“I think not,” he decided, and he fell into exactly such a state of
melancholy, trifling with his grape fruit, as Mrs. Boyd wished to test.
She focussed her keen eyes on him microscopically.

“Miss Sargent is coming back to-night; on the six-ten train.”

There was a clatter in the Reverend Smith Boyd’s service plate. He had
been awkward with his spoon, and dropped it. He made to pick it up, but
reached two inches the other side of the handle. Mrs. Boyd could have
laughed aloud for sheer joy. She made up her mind to do some energetic
missionary work with Gail Sargent at the first opportunity. The foolish
notions Gail had about the church should be removed. Mrs. Boyd had long
ago studied this matter of religion, with a clear mind and an honest
heart. It was a matter of faith, and she had it; so why be miserable!
Her reverie was broken by the calm and mellow voice of her son.

“That is delightful news,” he returned with a frank enthusiasm which was
depressing to his mother.

“I think I shall have the Sargents over to dinner,” she went on,
persisting in her hope.

“That will be pleasant.” Frank again, carefree, aglow with neighbourly
friendliness; even affection!

Mrs. Boyd had nothing more to say. She watched her son Tod start
vigorously at his grape fruit, with a vivacity which seemed to indicate
that he might finish with the rind. He drew his eggs energetically
toward him, buttered a slice of toast, and finished his breakfast.
Suddenly he looked at his watch.

“I have an extremely busy day before me,” he told her briskly. “I have
Vedder Court this morning, some calls in the afternoon, and a mission
meeting at four-thirty. I might probably be late for dinner,” and
feeling to see if he had supplied himself with handkerchiefs, he kissed
his mother, and was gone without another word about Gail! She could have
shaken him in her disappointment. What was the matter with Tod?

The Reverend Smith Boyd sang as he went out of the door, not a tune or
any set musical form, but a mere unconscious testing of his voice. It
was quite unusual for him to sing on the way to Vedder Court, for he
devoted his time to this portion of his duties because he was a
Christian. He had sympathy, more than enough, and he both understood and
pitied the people of Vedder Court, but, in spite of all his intense
interest in the deplorable condition of humanity’s weak and helpless, he
was compelled to confess to himself that he loathed dirt.

Vedder Court was particularly perfect in its specialty this morning. The
oily black sediment on its pavements was streaked with iridescence, and
grime seemed to be shedding from every point of the drunken old
buildings, as if they had lain inebriated in a soaking rain all night,
and had just staggered up, to drip. They even seemed to leer down at the
Reverend Smith Boyd, as if his being the only clean thing in the street
were an impertinence, which they would soon rectify. It had been
comparatively dry in the brighter streets of New York, but here, in
Vedder Court, there was perpetual moisture, which seemed to cling, and
to stick, and to fasten its unwholesome scum permanently on everything.
Never had the tangle of smudge-coated children seemed so squalid; never
had the slatternly women seemed so unfeminine; never had the spineless
looking men seemed so shuffling and furtive and sodden; never had the
whole of the human fungi in Vedder Court seemed so unnecessary, and
useless, and, the rector discovered in himself with startled contrition,
so thoroughly not worth saving, body or soul!

A half intoxicated woman, her front teeth missing and her colourless
hair straggling, and her cheekbones gleaming with the high red of
debauchery, leered up at him as he passed, as if in all her miserable
being there could be one shred, or atom, to invite or attract. A
curly-headed youngster, who would have been angelically beautiful if he
had been washed and his native blood pumped from him, threw mud at the
Reverend Smith Boyd, out of a mere artistic desire to reduce him to
harmony with his surroundings. A mouthing old woman, with hands clawed
like a parrot’s, begged him for alms, and he was ashamed of himself that
he gave it to her with such shrinking. The master could not have been
like this. A burly “pan handler” stopped him with an artificial whine. A
cripple, displaying his ugly deformity for the benefit and example of
the unborn, took from him a dole and a wince of repulsion.

“The poor ye have always with ye!” For ages that had been the excuse for
such offences as Vedder Court. They were here, they must be cared for
within their means, and no amount of pauperising charity could remove
them from the scheme of things. In so far, Market Square Church felt
justified in its landlordship, that it nursled squalor and bred more.
Yet, somehow, the rector of that solidly respectable institution was not
quite satisfied, and he had added a new expense to the profit and loss
account in the ledger of this particular House of God. He had hired a
crew of forty muscular men, with horses and carts, and had caused them
to be deputised as sanitary police, and had given them authority to
enter and clean; which may have accounted for the especially germ laden
feel of the atmosphere this morning. Down in the next block, where the
squad was systematically at work, there were the sounds of countless
individual battles, and loud mouthings of the fundamental principles of
anarchy. A government which would force soap and deodorisers and
germicides on presumably free and independent citizens, was a government
of tyranny; and it had been a particular wisdom, on the part of the
rough-hewn faced man who had hired this crew, to select none but
accomplished brick dodgers. In the ten carts which lined the curb on
both sides, there were piled such a conglomerate mass of nondescript
fragments of everything undesirable that the rector felt a trace better,
as if he had erased one mark at least of the long black score against
himself. Somehow, recently, he had acquired an urgent impulse to clean
Vedder Court!

He turned in at one of the darkest and most uninviting of the rickety
stairways. He skipped, with a practised tread, the broken third step,
and made a mental note to once more take up, with the property
committee, the battle of minor repairs. He stopped at the third landing,
and knocked at a dark door, whereupon a petulant voice told him to come
in. The petulant voice came from a woman who sat in a broken rockered
chair, with one leg held stiffly in front of her. She was heavy with the
fat which rolls and bulges, and an empty beer pail, on which the froth
had dried, sat by her side. On the rickety bed lay a man propped on one
elbow, who had been unshaven for days, so that his sandy beard made a
sort of layer on his square face. The man sat up at once. He was a
trifle under-sized, but broad-shouldered and short-necked, and had
enormous red hands.

“How are you to-day, Mrs. Rogers?” asked the rector, sitting on a
backless and bottomless chair, with his hat on his knees, and holding
himself small, with an unconscious instinct to not let anything touch
him.

“No better,” replied the woman, making her voice weak. “I’ll never know
a well day again. The good Lord has seen fit to afflict me. I ain’t
saying anything, but it ain’t fair.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd could not resist a slight contraction of his
brows. Mrs. Rogers invariably introduced the Lord into every
conversation with the rector, and it was his duty to wrestle with her
soul, if she insisted. He was not averse to imparting religious
instruction, but, being a practical man, he could not enjoy wasting his
breath.

“There are many things we can not understand,” he granted. “What does
the doctor say about your condition?”

“He don’t offer no hope,” returned the woman, with gratification. “This
knee joint will be stiff till the end of my days. If I had anything to
blame myself with it would be different, but I ain’t. I say my prayers
every night, but if I’m too sick, I do it in the morning.”

“Can that stuff!” growled the man on the bed. “You been prayin’ once a
day ever since I got you, and nothin’s ever happened.”

“I’ve brought you a job,” returned the Reverend Smith Boyd promptly. “I
have still ten places to fill on the sanitary squad which is cleaning up
Vedder Court.”

The man on the bed sat perfectly still.

“How long will it last?” he growled.

“Two weeks.”

“What’s the pay?”

“A dollar and a half a day.”

The man shook his head.

“I can’t do it,” he regretted. “I don’t say anything about the pay, but
I’m a stationary engineer.” He was interested enough in his course of
solid reasoning to lay a stubby finger in his soiled palm. “If I take
this two weeks’ job, it’ll stop me from lookin’ for work, and I might
miss a permanent situation.”

The rector suppressed certain entirely human instincts.

“You have not had employment for six months,” he reminded Mr. Rogers.

“That’s the reason I can’t take a chance,” was the triumphant response.
“If I’d miss a job through takin’ this cheap little thing you offer me,
I’d never forgive myself; and you’d have it on your conscience, too.”

“Then you won’t accept it,” and the rector rose, with extremely cold
eyes.

“I’d like to accommodate you, but I can’t afford it,” and the man
remained perfectly still, an art which he had brought to great
perfection. “All we need is the loan of a little money while I’m huntin’
work.”

“I can’t give it to you,” announced the Reverend Smith Boyd firmly.
“I’ve offered you an opportunity to earn money, and you won’t accept it.
That ends my responsibility.”

“You’d better take it, Frank,” advised the woman, losing a little of the
weakness of her voice.

“You ’tend to your own business!” advised Mr. Rogers in return. “You’re
supposed to run the house, and I’m supposed to earn the living! Reverend
Boyd, if you’ll lend me two dollars till a week from Saturday—”

“I told you no,” and the rector started to leave the room.

There was a knock at the door. A thick-armed man with a short, wide face
walked in, a pail in one hand and a scrubbing brush in the other. On the
back of his head was pushed a bright blue cap, with “Sanitary Police” on
it, in tarnished braid. Mr. Rogers stood up.

“What do you want?” he quite naturally inquired.

“Clean up,” replied the sanitary policeman, setting down his pail and
ducking his head at the rector, then mopping his brow with a bent
forefinger, while he picked out a place to begin.

“Nothin’ doing!” announced Mr. Rogers, aflame with the dignity of an
outraged householder. “Good-night!” and he advanced a warning step.

The wide set sanitary policeman paused in his survey long enough to wag
a thick forefinger at the outraged householder.

“Don’t start anything,” he advised. “There’s some tough mugs in this
block, but you go down to the places I’ve been, and you’ll find that
they’re all clean.”

With these few simple remarks, he turned his back indifferently to Mr.
Rogers, and, catching hold of the carpet in the corner with his fingers,
he lifted it up by the roots.

“There’s no use buckin’ the government,” Mr. Rogers decided, after a
critical study of the sanitary policeman’s back, which was extremely
impressive. “It’s a government of the rich for the rich. Has a poor man
got any show? I’m a capable stationary engineer. All I ask is a chance
to work—at my trade.” This by an afterthought. “If you’ll give me two
dollars to tide me over—”

The Reverend Smith Boyd stepped out of the way of the sanitary
policeman, and then stepped out of the door.

“And you call yourself a minister of the gospel!” Mr. Rogers yelled
after him.

That was a sample of the morning’s work, and the Reverend Smith Boyd
felt more and more, as he neared luncheon time, that he merited some
consideration, if only for the weight of the cross he bore. There were
worse incidents than the abuse of men like Rogers; there were the
hideous sick to see, and the genuinely distressed to comfort, and
depthless misery to relieve; and any day in Vedder Court was a terrific
drain, both upon his sympathies and his personal pocket.

He felt that this was an exceptionally long day.

Home in a hurry at twelve-thirty. A scrub, a complete change of
everything, and a general feeling that he should have been sterilised
and baked as well. Luncheon with the mother who saw what a long day this
was, then a far different type of calls; in a sedate black car this
time, up along the avenue, and in and out of the clean side streets,
where there was little danger of having a tire punctured by a wanton
knife, as so often happened in Vedder Court. He called on old Mrs.
Henning, who read her Bible every day to find knotty passages for him to
expound; he called on the Misses Crasley, who were not thin but bony,
who sat frozenly erect with their feet neatly together and their hands
in their laps, and discussed foreign missions with greedy relish; he
spent a half hour with plump Mrs. Rutherford, who shamelessly hinted
that a rector should be married, and who was the worried possessor of
three plump daughters, who did not seem to move well from the shelves;
he listened to the disloyal confessions of Mrs. Sayers, who at heart
liked her husband because he provided her so many faults to brood upon;
he made brief visits with three successive parishioners who were sweet,
good women with a normally balanced sense of duty, and with two
successive parishioners who looked on the Kingdom of Heaven as a
respectable social circle, which should be patronised like a sewing
girls’ club or any other worthy institution.

Away to Vedder Court again, dismissing his car at the door of Temple
Mission, and walking inside, out of range of the leers of those senile
old buildings, but not out of the range of the peculiar spirit of Vedder
Court, which manifested itself most clearly to the olfactory sense.

The organ was playing when he entered, and the benches were half filled
by battered old human remnants, who pretended conversion in order to
pick up the crumbs which fell from the table of Market Square Church.
Chiding himself for weariness of the spirit, and comforting himself with
the thought that one greater than he had faltered on the way to Golgotha
he sat on the little platform, with a hymn book in his hand, and, when
the prelude was finished, he devoted his wonderful voice to the
blasphemy.

The organist, a volunteer, a little old man who kept a shoemaker’s shop
around the corner, and who played sincerely in the name of helpfulness,
was pure of heart.

The man with the rough-hewn countenance, unfortunately not here to-day,
was also sincere in an entirely unspiritual sort of way; but, with these
exceptions, and himself, of course, the rector knew positively that
there was not another uncalloused creature in the room, not one who
could be reached by argument, sympathy, or fear! They were past
redemption, every last man and woman; and, at the conclusion of the
hymn, he rose to cast his pearls before swine, without heart and without
interest; for no man is interested in anything which can not possibly be
accomplished.

With a feeling of mockery, yet upheld by the thought that he was holding
out the way and the light, not only seven times but seventy times seven
times, to whatever shred or crumb of divinity might lie unsuspected in
these sterile breasts, he strove earnestly to arouse enthusiasm in
himself so that he might stir these dead ghosts, even in some minute and
remote degree.

Suddenly a harsh and raucous voice interrupted him. It was the voice of
Mr. Rogers, and that gentleman, who had apparently secured somewhere the
two dollars to tide him over, was now embarked on the tide. He had taken
just enough drinks to make him ugly, if that process were possible, and
he had developed a particularly strong resentment of the latest
injustice which had been perpetrated on him. That injustice consisted of
the Reverend Smith Boyd’s refusal to lend him money till a week from
next Saturday night; and he had come to expose the rector’s shallow
hypocrisy. This he proceeded to do, in language quite unsuited to the
chapel of Temple Mission and to the ears of the ladies then present;
most of whom grinned.

The proceedings which followed were but brief. The Reverend Smith Boyd
requested the intruder to stop. The intruder had rights, and he stood on
them! The Reverend Smith Boyd ordered him to stop; but the intruder had
a free and independent spirit, which forbade him to accept orders from
any man! The Reverend Smith Boyd, in the interests of the discipline
without which the dignity and effectiveness of the cause could not be
upheld, and pleased that this was so, ordered him out of the room. Mr.
Rogers, with a flood of abuse which displayed some versatility, invited
the Reverend Smith Boyd to put him out; and the Reverend Smith Boyd did
so. It was not much of a struggle, though Mr. Rogers tore two benches
loose on his way, and, at the narrow door through which it is difficult
to thrust even a weak man, because there are so many arms and legs
attached to the human torso, he offered so much resistance that the
reverend doctor was compelled to practically pitch him, headlong, across
the sidewalk, and over the curb, and into the gutter! The victim of
injustice arose slowly, and turned to come back, but he paused to take a
good look at the stalwart young perpetrator, and remembered that he was
thirsty.

The Reverend Smith Boyd found himself standing in the middle of the
sidewalk, with his fists clenched and his blood surging. The atmosphere
before his eyes seemed to be warm, as if it were reddened slightly. He
was tingling from head to foot with a passion which he had repressed,
and throttled, and smothered since the days of his boyhood! He had
striven, with a strength which was the secret of his compelling voice,
to drive out of him all earthly dross, to found himself on the great
example which was without the cravings of the body; he had sought to
make himself spiritual; but, all at once, this conflict had roused in
him a raging something, which swept up from the very soles of his feet
to his twirling brain, and called him man!

For a quivering moment he stood there, alive with all the virility which
was the richer because of his long repression. He knew many things now,
many things which ripened him in an instant, and gave him the heart to
touch, and the mind to understand, and the soul to flame. He knew
himself, he knew life, he knew, yes, and that was the wonderful miracle
of the flood which poured in on him, he knew love!

He reached suddenly for his watch. Six-ten. He could make it! Still
impelled by this new creature which had sprung up in him, he started;
but at the curb he stopped. He had been in such a whirl of emotion that
he had not realised the absence of his hat. He strode into the mission
door, and the rays of the declining sun, struggling dimly through the
dingy glass, fell on the scattered little assemblage—as if it had been
sent to touch them in mercy and compassion—on the weak, and the poor,
and the piteously crippled of soul; and a great wave of shame came to
him; shame, and thankfulness, too!

He walked slowly up to the platform, and, turning to that reddened
sunlight which bathed his upturned face as if with a benediction, he
said, in a voice which, in its new sweetness of vibration, stirred even
the murky depths of these, the numb:

“Let us pray.”

                               CHAPTER XX
                           THE BREED OF GAIL

Who was that tall, severely correct gentleman waiting at the station,
with a bunch of violets in his hand, and the light in his countenance
which was never on sea or land? It was Gerald Fosland, and he astonished
all beholders by his extraordinary conduct. As the beautiful Arly
stepped through the gates, he advanced with an entirely unrepressed
smile, springing from the ball of his feet with a buoyancy too active to
be quite in good form. He took Arly’s hand in his, but he did not bend
over it with his customary courteous gallantry. Instead, he drew her
slightly towards him, with a firm and deliberate movement, and, bending
his head sidewise under the brim of her hat, kissed her; kissed her on
the lips!

Immediately thereafter he gave a dignified welcome to Gail, and with
Arly’s arm clutched tightly in his own, he then disappeared. As they
walked rapidly away, Arly looked up at him in bewilderment; then she
suddenly hugged herself closer to him with a jerk. As they went out
through the carriage entrance, she skipped.

It was good to see Allison, big, strong, forceful, typical of the city
and its mighty deeds. His eye had lighted with something more than
pleasure as Gail stepped out through the gates of the station; something
so infinitely more than pleasure that her eyes dropped, and her hand
trembled as she felt that same old warm thrill of his clasp. He was so
overwhelming in his physical dominance. He took immediate possession of
her, standing by while she greeted her uncle and aunt and other friends,
and beaming with justifiably proud proprietorship. Gail had laughed as
she recognised that attitude, and she found it magnificent after the
pretentions of Howard Clemmens. The difference was that Allison was
really a big man, one born to command, to sway things, to move and shift
and re-arrange great forces; and that, of course, was his manner in
everything. She flushed each time she looked in his direction; for he
never removed his gaze from her; bold, confident, supreme. When a man
like that is kind and gentle and considerate, when he is tender and
thoughtful and full of devotion, he is a big man indeed!

She let him put her hand on his arm, and felt restful, after the
greetings had been exchanged, as he led her out to the big touring car,
asking her all sorts of eager questions about how she found her home and
her friends, and if the journey had fatigued her, and telling her, over
and over, how good she looked, how bright and how clear-eyed and how
fresh-cheeked, and how charming in her grey travelling costume. She felt
the thrill again as he took her hand in his to help her into the car,
and she loved the masterful manner in which he cleared a way to their
machine through the crowded traffic. In the same masterful air, he
gently but firmly changed her from the little folding seat to the big
soft cushions in the rear, beside her Aunt Grace.

The Reverend Smith Boyd was at the steps of the Sargent house to greet
her, and her heart leaped as she recognised another of the dear familiar
faces. This was her world, after all; not that world of her childhood.
How different the rector looked; or was it that she had needed to go
away in order to judge her friends anew? His eyes were different;
deeper, steadier and more penetrating into her own; and, yes, bolder.
She was forced to look away from them for a moment. There seemed a warm
eagerness in his greeting, as if everything in him were drawing her to
him. It was indescribable, that change in the Reverend Smith Boyd, but
it was not unexplainable; and, after he had swung back home, with the
earnest promise to come over after dinner, she suddenly blushed
furiously, without any cause, while she was talking of nothing more
intense than the excellent physical condition of Flakes.

Gay little Mrs. Babbitt brought her husband, while the family group was
still jabbering over its coffee, and after them came the deluge; Dick
Rodley and the cherub-cheeked Marion Kenneth, and Willis Cunningham, and
a host of others, including the Van Ploons, father, son, and solemn
daughter. The callow youth who had danced with her three times was
there, with a gardenia all out of proportion to him, and he sat in the
middle of the Louis XIV salon, where he was excessively in everybody’s
road, and could feast on Gail, for the most of the evening, in numb
admiration; for his point of vantage commanded a view into the library
and all the parlours.

With a rapidity which was a marvel to all her girl friends, Gail had
slipped upstairs and into a creamy lace evening frock without having
been missed; and she was in this acutely harmonious setting when the
Reverend Smith Boyd called, with his beautiful mother on his arm. The
beautiful mother was in an exceptional flurry of delight to see Gail,
and kissed that charming young lady with clinging warmth. The rector’s
eyes were even more strikingly changed than they had been when he had
first met her on the steps, as they looked on Gail in her creamy lace,
and after she had read that new intense look in his eyes for the second
time that evening, she hurried away, with the license of a busy hostess,
and cooled her face at an open window in the side vestibule. There was a
new note in the Reverend Smith Boyd’s voice; not a greater depth nor
mellowness nor sweetness, but a something else. What was it? It was a
call, that was it; a call across the gulf of futurity.

They came after her. Ted and Lucile had arrived. She was in a vortex.
Dick Rodley hemmed her in a corner, and proposed to her again, just for
practice, within eye-shot of a dozen people, and he did it so that
onlookers might think that he was complimenting her on her clever
coiffure or discussing a new operetta; but he made her blush, which was
the intention in the depths of his black eyes. It seemed that she was in
a perpetual blush to-night, and something within her seemed to be
surging and halting and wavering and quivering! Her Aunt Helen Davies,
rather early in the evening, began to act stiff and formal.

“Go home,” she murmured to Lucile. “All this excitement is bad for
Gail’s beauty.”

She felt free to give the same advice to the gay little Mrs. Babbitt,
and the departure of four people was sufficient to remind the stiff Van
Ploon daughter of the conventions. She removed the elder Van Ploon’s
eyes from Gail, and gathered up Houston, who was energetically talking
horse with Allison. After that the exodus became general, until only the
callow youth and Allison and the Reverend Smith Boyd remained. The
latter young gentleman had taken his flutteringly happy mother home
early in the evening, and he had resorted to dulness with such of the
thinning guests as had seemed disposed to linger.

It was Aunt Helen who, by some magic of adroitness, sent the callow
youth on his way. He was worth any amount of money to which one cared to
add ciphers, and his family was flawless except for him; but Aunt Helen
had decisively cut him off her books, because he was so well fitted to
be the last of his line. She thought she had better go upstairs after
that, and she glanced into the music room as she passed, and knitted her
brows at the tableau. The Reverend Smith Boyd, who seemed unusually fine
looking to-night, stood leaning against the piano, watching Gail with an
almost incendiary gaze. That young lady, steadily resisting an impulse
to feel her cheek with the back of her hand, sat on the end of the piano
bench furthest removed from the rector, and directed the most of her
attention to Allison, who was less disconcerting. Allison, casting an
occasional glance at the intense young rector, seemed preoccupied
to-night; and Mrs. Helen Davies, pausing to take her sister Grace with
her, walked up the stairs with a forefinger tapping at her well-shaped
chin. She seemed to have reversed places with her sister to-night; for
Mrs. Sargent was supremely happy, while Helen Davies was doing the
family worrying.

She could have bid Allison adieu had she waited a very few minutes. He
was a man who had spent a lifetime in linking two and two together, and
he abided unwaveringly by his deductions. There was no mistaking the
nature of the change which was so apparent in the Reverend Smith Boyd;
but Allison, after careful thought on the matter, was able to take a
comparatively early departure.

“I’ll see you to-morrow, Gail,” he observed finally. Rising, he crossed
to where she sat, and, reaching into her lap, he took both her hands. He
let her arms swing from his clasp, and, looking down into her eyes with
smiling regard, he gave her hands an extra pressure, which sent, for the
hundredth time that night, a surge of colour over her face.

The Reverend Smith Boyd, blazing down at that scene, suddenly felt
something crushing under his hand. It was the light runner board of the
music rack, and three hairs, which had lain in placid place at the crown
of his head, suddenly popped erect. Ten thousand years before had these
three been so grouped, Allison would have felt a stone axe on the back
of his neck, but as it was he passed out unmolested, nodding carelessly
to the young rector, and bestowing on Gail a parting look which was the
perfection of easy assurance.

The Reverend Smith Boyd wasted not a minute in purposeless hesitation or
idle preliminary conversation.

“Gail!” he said, in a voice which chimed of all the love songs ever
written, which vibrated with all the love passion ever breathed, which
pleaded with the love appeal of all the dominant forces since creation.
Gail had resumed her seat on the end of the piano bench, and now he
reached down and took her hand, and held it, unresisting. She was weak
and limp, and she averted her eyes from the burning gaze which beamed
down on her. Her breath was fluttering, and the hand which lay in her
lap was cold and trembling. “Gail, I love you!” He bent his head and
kissed her hand. The touch was fire, and she felt her blood leap to it.
“Gail dear,” and his voice was like the suppressed crescendo of a
tremendous organ flute; “I come to you with the love of a man. I come to
you with the love of one inspired to do great deeds, not just to lay
them at your feet, but because you are in the world!” He bent lower, and
tried to gaze into the brown eyes under those fluttering lashes. He held
her hand more tightly to him, clasped it to his breast, oppressed her
with the tremendous desire of his whole being to draw her to him, and
hold her close, as one and a part of him for all time to come, mingling
and merging them into one ecstatic harmony. “Gail! Oh, Gail, Gail!”

There was a cry in that repetition of her name, almost an anguish. She
stole an upward glance at him, her face pale, her beautiful lips half
parted, and in her depthless brown eyes, alive now with a new light
which had been born within her, there was no forbiddance, though she
dropped them hastily, and bent her head still lower. She had made
herself an eternal part of him just then, had he but seized upon that
unspoken assent, and taken her in his arms, and breathed to her of the
love of man for woman, the love that never dies nor wavers nor falters,
so long as the human race shall endure.

He bent still closer to her, so that he all but enfolded her. His warm
breath was upon her cheek. The sympathy which was between them bridged
the narrow chasm of air, and enveloped them in an ethereal flame which
coursed them from head to foot, and had already nigh welded them into
one.

“I need you, Gail!” he told her. “I need you to be my wife, my
sweetheart, my companion. I need you to go with me through life, to walk
hand in hand with me about the greatest work in the world, the
redemption of the fallen and helpless, into whose lives we may shed some
of the beauty which blossoms in our own.”

There was a low cry from Gail, a cry which was half a sob, which came
with a sharp intake of the breath, and carried with it pain and sorrow
and protest. She had been so happy, in what she fancied to be the near
fulfilment of the promptings which had grown so strong within her. No
surge of emotion like this had ever swept over her; no such wave of
yearning had ever carried her impetuously up and out of herself as this
had done. It had been the ecstatic answer to all her dreams, the ripe
and rich and perfect completion of every longing within her; yet, in the
very midst of it had come a word which broke the magic thrall; a thought
which had torn the fairy web like a rude storm from out the icy north; a
devouring genii which, dark and frightening, advanced to destroy all the
happiness which might follow this first inrushing commingling of these
two perfectly correlated elements!

“I can’t!” she breathed, but she did not withdraw her hand from his
clasp. She could not! It was as if those two palms had welded together,
and had become parts of one and the same organism.

There was an instant of silence, in which she slowly gathered her
swirling senses, and in which he sat, shocked, stunned, disbelieving his
own ears. Why, he had known, as positively, and more positively, than if
she had told him, that there was a perfect response in her to the great
desire which throbbed within him. It had come to him from her like the
wavering of soft music, music which had blended with his own pulsing
diapason in a melody so subtle that it drowned the senses to languorous
swooning; it had come to him with the delicate far-off pervasiveness of
the birth of a new star in the heavens; it had come to him as a
fragrance, as a radiance, as the beautiful tints of spring blossoms, as
something infinitely stronger, and deeper, and sweeter, than the sleep
of death. That tremendous and perfect fitness and accord with him he
felt in her hand even now.

“I can’t, Tod,” she said again, and neither one noticed that she had
unconsciously used the name she had heard from his mother, and which she
had unconsciously linked with her thoughts of him. “There could never be
a unity of purpose in us,” and now, for the first time, she gently
withdrew her hand. “I could never be in sympathy with your work, nor you
with my views. Have you noticed that we have never held a serious
dispute over any topic but one?”

He drew a chair before her, and took her hand again, but this time he
patted it between his own as if it were a child’s.

“Gail, dear, that is an obstacle which will melt away. There was a time
when I felt as you do. The time will come when you, too, will change.”

“You don’t understand,” she gently told him. “I believe in God the
Creator; the Maker of my conscience; my Friend and my Father. I am in no
doubt, no quandary, no struggle between faith and disbelief. I see my
way clearly, and there are no thorns to cut for me. I shall never
change.”

He looked at her searchingly for a moment, and then his face grew grave;
but there was no coldness in it, nor any alteration in the blueness of
his eyes.

“I shall pray for you,” he said, with simple faith.

                              CHAPTER XXI
                         THE PUBLIC IS AROUSED

Clad in her filmy cream lace gown, Gail walked slowly into her boudoir,
and closed the door, and sank upon her divan. She did not stop to-night
to let down her hair and change to her dainty negligee, nor to
punctiliously straighten the room, nor to turn on the beautiful green
light; instead, with all the electric bulbs blazing, she sat with her
chin in her hand, and, with her body perfectly in repose, tried to study
the whirl of her mind.

She was shaken, she knew that, shaken and stirred as she had never been
before. Something in the depths of her had leaped up into life, and
cried out in agony, and would not stop crying until it was satisfied.

The hardest part of the whirl from which to untangle herself was the
tremendous overwhelming attraction there had been between them. The red
wave of consciousness rose up over her neck and crimsoned her cheeks and
flushed her very brow, as the nearness of him came back to her. Again
she could feel that marvellous welding of their palms, the tingle of her
shoulder where he had accidentally brushed against it; the music of his
voice, which had set up that ecstatic answering vibration within her.
She felt again his warm breath upon her cheek, the magnetic thrill of
his arms as he enfolded her, the breathless joy which had ensued when he
had drawn her to his breast, and held and held and held her there, as an
indivisible part of him, forever and forever. The burning pressure of
his lips upon hers! That breathless, intolerable ecstasy when he had
folded her closer, and still closer! A sense of shame flooded her that
she had yielded so much, that she had been so helpless in the might and
the strength and the sweep—

She raised her head with a jerk, and rubbed her hands over her eyes. Why
there had been no such episode! He had not folded her in his arms, nor
drawn her to him, nor kissed her lips; though her breath was fluttering
and her wrists burning in the bare memory of it; he had only drawn quite
near to her, and held her hand; and once he had kissed it! How then had
she reproduced all these sensations so vividly? Then indeed, shame came
to her, as she realised how much more completely than he could know, she
had, in one breathless instant, given herself to him!

It was that shame which came to her rescue, which set her upon her
defence, which started her to the seeking for her justification. She had
refused him, even at the very height of her most intense yielding. And
why? She must go deeper into the detail of that. She had to grope her
way slowly and painfully back through the quivering maze of her senses,
to recall the point at which she had been taken rudely from the present
into the future.

“I need you to walk hand in hand with me about the greatest work in the
world!” That was it; the greatest work in the world! And what was that
work? To live and teach ritual in place of religion; to turn worship
into a social observance; to use helpless belief as a ladder of
ambition; to reduce faith to words, and hope to a recitation, and
charity to an obligation; to make pomp and ceremony a substitute for
conscience, and to interpose a secretary between the human heart and
God!

For just an instant Gail’s eyelids dropped, her long brown lashes curved
upon her cheeks, while beneath them her eyes glinted, and a smile
touched the corners of her lips; then she was serious again. No, she had
decided wisely. They could not spend a lifetime in the ecstasy of touch.
Between those rare moments of the rapture of love must come stern hours
of waking. Then she must live a constant lie, she must battle down her
own ideals and her own thoughts and her own worship and subscribe to a
dead shell of pretence, which she had come to hold in contempt and even
loathing. She must appear constantly before the world as subscribing to
and upholding a sham which had been formulated as thoroughly as the
multiplication table; and to do all these things she would be compelled
to throttle her own dear Deity, with whom she had been friends since her
babyhood, to whom she could go at any hour with pure faith and simple
confidence; always in love and never in fear!

Yes, she had chosen wisely. Through all the years to come there would be
clash upon clash, until they would grow so far apart spiritually that no
human yearning, no matter how long nor how strong, could bridge the
chasm. She was humiliated to be compelled to confess to herself that the
tremendous fire which had consumed them, that the tremendous attraction
which had drawn them together, that the tremendous ecstasy which had
enveloped them, was by no means of the soul or the spirit or the mind.
And yet, how potent that attraction had been, how it left her still
quivering with longing. Did she despise that tendency in herself?
Something within her answered defiantly “No!” Still defiantly, she
exulted in it; for many instincts which the Creator has planted in
humanity have been made sinful by teaching alone. Moreover, a further
search brought a deserved approbation to the rescue of her self-respect.
Mighty as had been the call upon her from without and from within, she
had resisted it, and driven it back, and leashed it firmly with the
greater strength of her faith! She gloried that she had not been weak in
this stormy test, and her eyes softened with a smile of gratitude. Poor
Tod!

There was a knock on the door, and Gail smiled again as she said:

“Come in.”

Mrs. Helen Davies entered, tall and stately in her boudoir frills and
ruffles. She gazed searchingly at Gail’s now calm face, with its
delicately tinted oval cheeks and its curved red lips and its brown
eyes, into which a measure of peace had come. The face did not tell her
as much as she had expected to find in it, but the fact that Gail had so
far deviated from her unbreakable habit of piling into a negligee and
putting every minute trace of disorder to rights before she did anything
else, was sufficient indication that something unusual had occurred.
Aunt Helen sat down in front of Gail and prepared to enact the rôle of
conscientious mother.

“Doctor Boyd proposed to you to-night,” she charged, with affectionate
authority.

“Yes, Aunt Helen,” and Gail began to pull pins out of her hair.

A worried expression crossed the brow of Aunt Helen.

“Did you accept him?” and she fairly quivered with anxiety.

“No, Aunt Helen.” Quite calmly, piling more hairpins and still more into
the little tray by her side, and shaking down her rippling waves of
hair.

Aunt Helen sighed a deep sigh of relief, and smiled her approval.

“I was quite hopeful that you would not,” and the tone was one of
distinct pleasure. “Doctor Boyd is a most estimable young man, but I
should not at all consider him a desirable match for you.”

Gail walked across to her dressing table, and rang for her maid.
Something within her flared up in defence of Tod, but the face which, an
instant later, she turned toward the older woman, had its eyelids down
and the eyes glinting through that curving fringe and the little smile
at the corners of the lips.

“Of course, he is perfectly eligible,” went on Aunt Helen, studying the
young man in question much as if he were on the auction block, and
guaranteed sound in every limb. “While there would be no possibility of
gaiety, and no freedom of action for even an instant, with the eyes of
every one so critically fixed on a rector’s wife, still she would have
the entrée into the most exclusive circles, and would have a social
position of such dignified respectability as could be secured in no
other way.” Interested in her own analysis, and perfectly placid
because, after all, Gail had refused him, she did not notice that Gail,
now brushing her hair, stopped in the middle of a downward stroke, and
then fell to brushing furiously. “Moreover, the young man is highly
ambitious,” went on Aunt Helen. “The movement for the magnificent new
cathedral had lagged for years before he came; but he had not been here
twelve months before he had the entire congregation ambitious to build
the most magnificent cathedral the world has ever seen. My dear child,
you’ll break your hair with that rough brushing! Moreover, the new
rectory must, of course, be built in keeping with the cathedral, and no
multi-millionaire could erect a home more palatial than Doctor Boyd will
occupy.”

Gail unfastened her necklace.

“However, Gail dear, you have shown a degree of carefulness which I am
delighted to find in you,” complimented Aunt Helen. “If you handle all
your affairs so sensibly, you have a brilliant future before you.”

“I must be an awful worry to you, Aunt Helen,” observed Gail, and
walking over, she slipped her arm around Mrs. Davies’ neck, and kissed
her, and looked around for her chocolate box.

Gail’s maid came in, and Mrs. Davies bade her sister’s niece good-night
most cordially, and retired with a great load off her mind; and half an
hour later the lights in Gail’s pretty little suite went out.

If she lay long hours looking out at the pale stars, if, in the midst of
her calm logic, she suddenly buried her face in her pillows and sobbed
silently, if, toward morning, she awoke with a little cry to find her
face and her hands hot, all these things were but normal and natural. It
is enough to know that she came to her breakfast bright-eyed and
rosy-cheeked and smiling with the pleasant greetings of the day, and
picked up the papers casually, and lit upon the newest sensation of the
free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan press!

The free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan press had found Vedder
Court, and had made it the sudden focus of the public eye. Those few who
were privileged to know intimately the workings of that adroit master of
the public welfare, Tim Corman, could have recognised clearly his fine
hand in the blaze of notoriety which obscure Vedder Court had suddenly
received. After having endured the contamination and contagion of the
Market Square Church tenements for so many years, the city had, all at
once, discovered that the condition was unbearable! The free and
entirely uncurbed metropolitan press had taken up, with great
enthusiasm, the work of poking the finger of scorn at Vedder Court. It
had published photographs of the disreputable old sots of buildings,
and, where they did not seem to drip enough, the artists had retouched
them. It had sent budding young Poes and Dickenses down there to write
up the place in all the horrors which a lurid fancy could portray, or a
hectic mind conceive; and it had given special prominence to the
masterly effort of one litterateur, who never went near the place, but,
after dancing ably until three A.M., had dashed up to his lonely room,
and had wrapped a wet towel around his head, and had conceived of the
scene as it would look in absolute darkness, with one pale lamp gleaming
on the Doréian faces of the passersby! It had sent the sob sisters there
in shoals to interview the down-trodden, and, above all things, it had
put prominently before the public eye the immense profit which Market
Square Church wrung from this organised misery!

Gail turned sick at heart as she read. Uncle Jim permitted four morning
papers to come to the house, and the dripping details, with many
variations, were in all of them. She glanced over toward the rectory and
the dignified old church standing beyond it, with mingled indignation
and humiliation. A sort of ignominy seemed to have descended upon it,
like a man whose features seem coarsened from the instant he is doomed
to wear prison stripes; and the fact which she particularly resented was
that a portion of the disgrace of Market Square Church seemed to have
descended upon her. She could not make out why this should be; but it
was. Aunt Grace Sargent, bustling about to see that Gail was supplied
with more kinds of delicacies than she could possibly sample, saw that
unmistakable look of distress on Gail’s face, and went straight up to
her sister Helen, the creases of worry deep in her brow.

Mrs. Helen Davies was having her coffee in bed, and she continued that
absorbing ceremony while she considered her sister’s news.

“I did not think that Gail was so deeply affected by the occurrences of
last night,” she mused; “but of course she could not sleep, and she’s
full of sympathy this morning, and afraid that maybe she made a mistake,
and feels perfectly wretched.”

Grace Sargent sat right down.

“Did the rector propose?” she breathlessly inquired.

Mrs. Davies poured herself some more hot coffee, and nodded.

“She refused him.”

“Oh!” and acute distress settled on Grace Sargent’s brow, with such a
firm clutch that it threatened to homestead the location. Mrs. Sargent
shared the belief of the Reverend Smith Boyd’s mother, that Smith Boyd
was the finest young man in the world; and Gail’s aunt was speechless
with dismay and disappointment.

“I have ceased to worry about Gail’s future,” went on Mrs. Davies
complacently. “It is her present condition about which I am most
concerned. She is so conscientious and self-analytical that she may
distress herself over this affair, and I must get in Arly and Lucile,
and plan a series of gaieties which will keep her mind occupied from
morning until night.”

In consequence of this kindly decision, Gail was plunged into gaiety
until she loathed the scrape of a violin! The mere fact that she had no
time to think did not remove the fact that she had a great deal to think
about, and the gaiety only added dismally to her troubled burden.

Meanwhile, the free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan press went
merrily onward with its righteous Vedder Court crusade, until it had the
public indignation properly aroused. The public indignation rose to such
a pitch that it almost meant something. There is not the slightest doubt
that, if the public had not been busy with affairs of its own, and if it
had not been in the habit of leaving everything to be seen to by the
people financially interested, and if it had not consisted chiefly of a
few active vocal cords, there is not the slightest doubt, it is worth
repeating, that the public might have done something about Vedder Court!
As things were, it grew most satisfactorily indignant. It talked of
nothing else, in the subways and on the “L’s” and on the surface lines,
and on the cindery commuter trains; and on the third day of the
agitation, before something else should happen to shake the populace to
the very foundation of its being, the city authorities condemned the
Vedder Court property as unsanitary, inhuman, and unsafe, as a menace to
the public morals, health and life, and as a blot upon civilisation;
this last being a fancy touch added by Tim Corman himself, who, in his
old age, had a tendency to link poetry to his practicability. In
consequence of this decision, the city authorities ordered Vedder Court
to be forthwith torn down, demolished, and removed from the face of the
earth; thereby justifying, after all, the existence of the free and
entirely uncurbed metropolitan press! The exact psychological moment had
been chosen. The public, caught at the very height of its frenzy,
applauded, and ate its dinner in virtuous satisfaction; and Gail
Sargent’s distress crystallised into a much easier thing to handle; just
plain anger!

And so Market Square Church had persisted in clutching its greedy hold
on a commercial advantage so vile that even a notoriously corrupt city
government had ordered it destroyed! Her mind was immensely relieved
about the Reverend Smith Boyd. She had chosen well, and wisely!

                              CHAPTER XXII
                      THE REV. SMITH BOYD PROTESTS

The doves which in summer flitted about the quiet little vestry yard,
and cooed over the vestry door, would have flown away had they been at
home; for it was a stormy affair, with loud voices and clashing wills
and a general atmosphere of tensity, which was somewhat at variance with
the red-robed figure of the Good Shepherd in the pointed window of the
vestry. The late arrival was Joseph G. Clark, and his eye sought that of
Banker Chisholm, before he nodded to the others and took his seat at the
Gothic table. The Reverend Smith Boyd, who was particularly straight and
tall to-day, and particularly in earnest, paused long enough for the
slight disturbance to subside, and then he finished his speech.

“That is my unalterable position in the matter,” he declared. “If Market
Square Church has a mission, it is the responsibility for these
miserable human wrecks whom we have made our wards.”

“We can’t feed and clothe them,” objected Banker Chisholm, whose white
mutton chops already glowed pink from the anger-reddened skin beneath.

“It doesn’t pay to pauperise the people,” supplemented Willis
Cunningham, stroking his sparse Vandyke complacently. Cunningham, whose
sole relationship to economics consisted in permitting his secretary to
sign checks, had imbibed a few principles which sufficed for all
occasions.

“I do not wish to pauperise them,” returned the rector. “I am willing to
accept the shame of having the city show Market Square Church its duty,
in exchange for the pleasure of replacing the foul tenements in Vedder
Court with clean ones.”

Joseph G. Clark glanced again at Chisholm.

“They’d be dirty again in ten years,” he observed. “If we build the new
type of sanitary tenement we shall have to charge more rent, or not make
a penny of profit; and we can’t get more rent because the people who
would pay it will not come into that neighbourhood.”

“Are we compelled to make a profit?” retorted the rector. “Is it
necessary for Market Square Church to remain perpetually a commercial
landlord?”

The vestry gazed at the Reverend Smith Boyd in surprised disapproval.
Their previous rector had talked like that, and the Reverend Smith Boyd
had been a great relief.

“So long as the church has property at all, it will meet with that
persistent charge,” argued Chisholm. “It seems to me that we have had
enough of it. My own inclination would be to sell the property outright,
and take up slower, but less personal, forms of investment.”

Old Nicholas Van Ploon, sitting far enough away to fold his hands
comfortably across his tight vest, screwed his neck around so that he
could glare at the banker.

“No,” he objected; for the Van Ploon millions had been accumulated by
the growth of tall office buildings out of a worthless Manhattan swamp.
“We should never sell the property.”

“There are a dozen arguments against keeping it,” returned the nasal
voice of old Joseph G. Clark. “The chief one is the necessity of making
a large investment in these new tenements.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd rose again, shutting the light from the red robe
of the Good Shepherd out of quietly concentrated Jim Sargent’s eyes.

“I object to this entire discussion,” he stated. “We have a moral
obligation which forbids us to discuss matters of investment and profit
within these walls as if we were a lard trust. We have neglected our
moral obligation in Vedder Court, until we are as blackened with sin as
the thief on the cross.”

Shrewd old Rufus Manning looked at the young rector curiously. He was
puzzled over the change in him.

“Don’t swing the pendulum too far, Doctor Boyd,” Manning reminded him,
with a great deal of kindliness. These two had met often in Vedder
Court. “Our sins, such as they are, are more passive than active.”

It was, of course, old Nicholas Van Ploon who fell back again on the
stock argument which had been quite sufficient to soothe his conscience
for all these years.

“We give these people cheaper rent than they can find anywhere in the
city.”

“We should continue to do so, but in cleaner and more wholesome
quarters,” quickly returned the rector. “This is the home of all these
poverty stricken people whom Market Square Church has taken under its
shelter, and we have no right to dispose of it.”

“That’s what I say,” and Nicholas Van Ploon nodded his round head. “We
should not sell the property.”

“We can not for shame, if for nothing else,” agreed the rector, seizing
on every point of advantage to support his intense desire to lift the
Vedder Court derelicts from the depth of their degradation. “We lie now
under the disgrace of having owned property so filthy that the city was
compelled to order it torn down. The only way in which we can redeem the
reputation of Market Square Church is to replace those tenements with
better ones, and conduct them as a benefit to the people rather than to
our own pockets.”

“That’s a clever way of putting it,” commended Jim Sargent. “It’s time
we did something to get rid of our disgrace,” and he was most earnest
about it. He had been the most uncomfortable of all these vestrymen in
the past few days; for the disgrace of Market Square Church had been a
very reliable topic of conversation in Gail Sargent’s neighbourhood.

The nasal voice of smooth-shaven old Joseph G. Clark drawled into the
little silence which ensued.

“What about the Cathedral?” he asked, and the hush which followed was
far deeper than the one which he had broken. Even the Reverend Smith
Boyd was driven to some fairly profound thought. His bedroom and his
study were lined with sketches of the stupendously beautiful cathedral,
the most expensive in the world, in which he was to disseminate the
gospel.

“Suppose we come back to earth,” resumed Clark, who had built the
Standard Cereal Company into a monopoly of all the breadstuffs by that
process. “If we rebuild we set ourselves back in the cathedral project
ten years. You can’t wipe out what you call our disgrace, even if you
give all these paupers free board and compulsory baths. My proposition
is to telephone for Edward E. Allison, and tell him we’re ready to
accept his offer.”

“Not while I’m a member of this vestry,” declared Nicholas Van Ploon,
swivelling himself to defy Joseph G. Clark. “We don’t sell the
property.”

“I put Mr. Clark’s proposition as a motion,” jerked W. T. Chisholm, and
in the heated argument which ensued, the Good Shepherd in the window,
taking advantage of the shifting sun, removed from the room the light of
the red robe.

In the end, the practical minded members won over the sentimentalists,
if Nicholas Van Ploon could be classed under that heading, and Allison
was telephoned. Before they were through wrangling over the decision to
have him meet them, Allison was among them. One might almost have
thought that he had been waiting for the call; but he exchanged no more
friendly glances with Clark and Chisholm, of the new International
Transportation Company, than he did with any of the others.

“Well, Allison, we’ve about decided to accept your offer for the Vedder
Court property,” stated Manning.

“I haven’t made you any, but I’m willing,” returned Allison.

Jim Sargent drew from his pocket a memorandum slip.

“You offered us a sum which, at three and a half per cent., would
accrue, in ten years, to forty-two million dollars,” he reminded the
president of the Municipal Transportation Company. “That figures to a
spot-cash proposition of thirty-one millions, with a repeating decimal
of one; so somebody will have to lose a cent.”

“That offer is withdrawn,” said Allison.

“I don’t see why,” objected Jim Sargent. “The property is as valuable
for your purpose as it ever was.”

“I don’t dispute that; but in that offer I allowed you for the income
earning capacity of your improved property. Since that capacity is
stopped, I don’t feel obliged to pay you for it, or, in other words, to
make up to you the loss which the city has compelled you to sustain.”

“There is some show of reason in what Allison says,” observed Joseph G.
Clark.

Chisholm leaned forward, with his elbows on the table, around the edge
of which were carved the heads of winged cherubs.

“What is your present offer?”

“Twenty-five million; cash.”

“We refuse!” announced Nicholas Van Ploon, bobbing his round head
emphatically.

“I’m not so sure that we do,” returned Clark. “I have been studying
property values in that neighbourhood, and I doubt if we can obtain
more.”

“Then we don’t sell!” insisted Nicholas Van Ploon.

“I scarcely think we wish to take up this discussion with Mr. Allison
until we have digested the offer,” observed the quiet voice of Manning,
and, on this hint, Allison withdrew.

He smiled as he heard the voices which broke out in controversy the
moment he had closed the door behind him. Being so near, he naturally
called on Gail Sargent, and found her entertaining a little tea party of
the gayest and brightest whom Aunt Helen Davies could bring together.

She came into the little reception “cosy” to meet Allison, smiling with
pleasure. There seemed to be a degree of wistfulness in her greeting of
her friends since the night of her return.

“Of course I couldn’t overlook an opportunity to drop in,” said Allison,
shaking her by both hands, and holding them while he surveyed her
critically. There was a tremendous comfort in his strength.

“So you only called because you were in the neighbourhood,” bantered
Gail.

“Guilty,” he laughed. “I’ve just been paying attention to my religious
duties.”

“I wasn’t aware that you knew you had any,” returned Gail, sitting in
the shadow of the window jamb. Allison’s eyes were too searching.

“I attend a vestry meeting now and then,” he replied, and then he
laughed shortly. “I’d rather do business with forty corporations than
with one vestry. A church always expects to conduct its share of the
negotiations on a strictly commercial basis, while it expects you to
mingle a little charity with your end of the transactions.”

“The Vedder Court property,” she guessed, with a slight contraction of
her brows.

“Still after it,” said Allison, and talked of other matters.

Jim Sargent returned, and glancing into the little reception tête-à-tête
as he passed, saw Allison and came back.

“I didn’t expect to see you so soon,” wondered Allison.

“We broke up in a row,” laughed Jim Sargent. “Clark and Chisholm were
willing to accept your price, but the rest of us listened to Doctor Boyd
and Nicholas Van Ploon, and fell. We insist on our cathedral, and Doctor
Boyd’s plan seems the best way to get it, though even that may
necessitate a four or five years’ delay.”

“What’s his plan?” asked Allison.

“Rebuilding,” returned Sargent. “We can put up tenements good enough to
pass the building inspectors and to last fifteen years. With the same
rents we are now receiving, we can offer them better quarters, and, as
Doctor Boyd suggested, redeem ourselves from some of the disgrace of
this whole proceeding. Clever, sensible idea, I think.”

Gail was leaning forward, with her fingers clasped around her knee; her
brown eyes had widened, and a little red spot had appeared in either
cheek; her red lips were half parted, as she looked up in wonder at her
Uncle Jim.

“Is that the plan upon which they have decided?” and Allison looked at
his watch.

“Well, hardly,” frowned Sargent. “We couldn’t swing Clark and Chisholm.
At the last minute they suggested that we might build lofts, and the
impending fracas seemed too serious to take up just now, so we’ve tabled
the whole thing.”

Allison smiled, and slipped his watch back in his pocket.

“It’s fairly definite, however, that you won’t sell,” he concluded.

“Not at your figure,” laughed Sargent. “If we took your money, Doctor
Boyd would be too old to preach in the new cathedral.”

“He’ll pull it through some way,” declared Allison. “He’s as smart as a
whip.”

Neither gentleman had noticed Gail. She had settled back in her chair
during these last speeches, weary and listless, and overcome with a
sense of some humiliation too evasive to be properly framed even in
thought. She had a sense that she had given away something vastly
precious, and which would never be valued. Neither did they notice that
she changed suddenly to relief. She had been justified in her decision.

She took the reins of conversation herself after Uncle Jim had left, and
entertained Allison so brightly that he left with impatience at the tea
party which monopolised her.

Later, when the Reverend Smith Boyd dropped in, he met with a surprising
and disconcerting vivacity. In his eyes there was pain and suffering,
and inexpressible hunger, but in hers there was only dancing frivolity;
a little too ebullient, perhaps, if he had been wise enough to know; but
he was not.

                             CHAPTER XXIII
                          A SERIES OF GAIETIES

Gaiety consists in rising in the morning so tired that it takes three
hours of earnest work with a maid, a masseuse, a physical directress, a
hairdresser, and a bonnetiere, before one can produce a spontaneous
silvery laugh, which is never required, expected or considered good form
before two P.M. Gail Sargent went in for gaiety, and, moreover, she
enjoyed it. She rode, she drove, she went calling and received, she
attended teas and gave them, she dined out and entertained, in the name
of her eager Aunt Grace, she went to theatres, the opera, concerts, and
the lively midnight cafés, which had all gone nervously insane with
freak dancing, she attended balls, house parties, and all the in-between
diversions which her novelty-seeking friends could discover or invent,
and she flirted outrageously! She used her eyes, and the pretty pout of
her red lips, and the toss of her head, and all the wiles of coquetry,
to turn men into asses, and she enjoyed that, too! It was a part of her
feminine birthright to enter with zest into this diversion, and it was
only envy which criticised her. Aunt Helen Davies, who knew her world by
chapter and verse, stood behind the scenes of all this active
vaudeville, and applauded. It was at the opera that Aunt Helen could no
longer conceal her marvel.

“My dear,” she said, under cover of the throbbing music of Thais, “I
have never seen anything like you!”

“I don’t quite know whether to take that as a compliment or not,”
laughed Gail, who had even, in her new stage of existence, learned to
pay no attention to music.

“The remark was not only intended to be complimentary, but positively
gushing,” replied Aunt Helen, returning with a smile the glance of their
hostess, the stiff Miss Van Ploon. “After two weeks of the gayest season
I have ever witnessed, you are as fresh and vivacious as when you
started.”

“It’s a return to first principles,” stated Gail, considering the matter
seriously. “I’ve discovered the secret of success in New York, either
commercial or social. It is to have an unbreakable constitution.”

The dapper little marquis, who was laying a very well conducted siege
for the heart and hand of Miss Van Ploon, leaned over Gail’s velvet
shoulder and whispered something in her ear. Gail leaned back a trifle
to answer him, her deep brown eyes flashing up at him, her red lips
adorably curved, that delicate colour wavering in her cheeks; and Mrs.
Davies, disregarding entirely the practised luring of the dapper little
marquis, who was as harmless as a canary bird, viewed Gail with
admiration.

Houston Van Ploon, surveying Gail with pride, made up his mind about a
problem which he had been seriously considering. Gail Sargent, taken
point by point, appearance, charm, manner, disposition and health, had
the highest percentage of perfection of any young woman he had ever met,
an opinion in which his father and sister had agreed, after several
solemn family discussions.

Nicholas Van Ploon leaned over to his daughter.

“She has dimples,” he catalogued, nodding his round head in satisfaction
and clasping his hands comfortably over his broad white evening
waistcoat.

Dick Rodley irrupted into the box with Lucile and Arly, just as Thais
started for the convent, and they were only the forerunners of a
constant stream which, during the intermission, came over to laugh with
Gail, and to look into her sparkling eyes, and exchange repartee with
her, and enjoy that beauty which was like a fragrance.

Who was the most delighted person in the Van Ploon box? Aunt Helen
Davies! She checked off the eligibles, counting them, estimating them,
judging the exact degree in which Gail had interested them, and the
exact further degree Gail might interest them if she chose.

Gail, standing, was a revelation to-night, not alone to Nicholas Van
Ploon, who nearly dislocated his neck in turning to feast his gaze on
her in numb wonder, but to Aunt Helen herself. Gail wore an Egyptian
costume, an absurdly straight thing fashioned like a cylinder, but
which, in some mysterious and alluring way, suggested the long, slender,
gracefully curving lines which it concealed. The foundation colour was
tarnished gold, on which were beaded panels in dark blue stones, touched
here and there with dull red. Encircling her small head was an Egyptian
tiara, studded in the front with lapis lazuli and deep red corals, with
one great fire opal glowing in the centre; and her shining brown hair
was waved well below the ears, and smoothly caught under around the back
of her perfect neck. On her cheeks and on her lips were the beautiful
natural tints which were the envy and despair of every pair of lorgnette
shielded eyes, but on her eyelashes, as part of her costume, Gail had
daringly lined a touch of that intense black which is ground in the
harems of the old Nile.

“You’re the throb of the evening, sweetheart,” Dick Rodley laughed down
at her, as they stood at the door of the box with the function passing
in and out.

“Thank you, Dicky dear,” she responded, smiling up at him. Since her
earnest gaieties had begun, Dick had been her most frequent companion.
He was one of the component members of that zestful little set composed
of Gail, Lucile and Arly, and the bubbling little Mrs. Babbitt, the
cherub-cheeked Marion Kenneth, the entirely sophisticated Gwen Halstead,
and whatever nice men happened to be available. Dick and Ted and Gerald
were, of course, always available.

“I’m disappointed,” complained Dick. “You don’t blush any more when I am
affectionate with you.”

“One loses the trick here,” she laughed. “The demands are too frequent.”

He bent a little closer to her.

“I’m going to propose to you again to-night,” he told her.

“You’re so satisfactory,” she returned carelessly. “But really, Dicky, I
don’t see how you’re going to manage it, unless you perform it right
here, and that’s so conventional.”

“Play hooky,” he mischievously advised. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do.
You shoo Houston out of the house the minute you get in; then Lucile and
Ted and Arly and Gerald and I will sail up and carry you off to supper,
after which I’ll take you home and propose.”

Gail’s eyes snapped with the activity of that disloyal programme, and
the little silvery laugh, for which she had been so noted, welled up
from her throat.

“You have to wait around the corner until he goes away,” she insisted.

“I’ll bring a guitar if you like,” Dick promised, with so much avidity
that she feared, for an instant, that he might do it.

“You’re monopolising me scandalously,” she protested. “Go away,” and she
turned immediately to the dapper little marquis, who was enduring the
most difficult evening of his life. Gail was so thoroughly adapted to a
grand affair, one in which he could avow universes; and the Miss Van
Ploon was so exacting.

The study door was open when Houston Van Ploon sedately escorted Mrs.
Davies and Gail into the library, one of those rooms which appoint
themselves the instinctive lounging places of all family intimates. Gail
turned up her big eyes in sparkling acknowledgment as the punctilious
Van Ploon took her cloak, and, at that moment, as she stood gracefully
poised, she caught the gaze of the Reverend Smith Boyd fixed on her with
such infinite longing that it distressed her. She did not want him to
suffer.

Uncle Jim strode out with a hearty greeting, and, at the sound of the
voices of no one but Gail and Mrs. Davies and Houston Van Ploon, old
“Daddy” Manning appeared in the doorway, followed by the rector.

“The sweetest flower that blows in any dale,” quoted “Daddy” Manning,
patting Gail’s hand affectionately.

The rector stood by, waiting to greet her, after Manning had monopolised
her a selfish moment, and the newly aroused eye of colour in him seized
upon the gold and blue and red of her straight Egyptian costume, and
recognised in them a part of her endless variety. The black on her
lashes. He was close enough to see that; and he marvelled at himself
that he could not disapprove.

Gail was most uncomfortably aware of him in this nearness; but she
turned to him with a frank smile of friendship.

“This looks like a conspiracy,” she commented, glancing towards the
study, which was thick with smoke.

“It’s an offensively innocent one,” returned Manning, giving the rector
but small chance. “We’re discussing the plans for the new Vedder Court
tenements.”

“Oh!” observed Gail, and radiated a distinct chill, whereupon the
Reverend Smith Boyd, divesting himself of some courteous compliment,
exchanged inane adieus with Mrs. Davies and young Van Ploon, and took
his committee back into the study.

Mrs. Davies remained but a moment or so. She even seemed eager to
retire, and as she left the library, she cast a hopeful backward glance
at the dancing-eyed Gail and the correct young Van Ploon, who, with his
Dutch complexion and his blonde English moustache and his stalwart
American body, to say nothing of his being a Van Ploon, represented to
her the ideal of masculine perfection. He was an eligible who never did
anything a second too early or a second too late, or deviated by one
syllable from the exact things he should say.

If the anxious Aunt Helen had counted on any important results from this
evening’s opportunities, she had not taken into her calculations the
adroitness of Gail. In precisely five minutes Van Ploon was on the
doorstep, with his Inverness on his shoulders and his silk hat in his
hand, without even having approached the elaborate introduction to
certain important remarks he had definitely decided to make. Gail might
not have been able to rid herself of him so easily, for he was a person
of considerable momentum, but he had rather planned to make a more
deliberate ceremony of the matter, impulsive opportunities not being in
his line of thought.

A tall young man in an Inverness walked rapidly past the door while Van
Ploon was saying the correctly clever things in the way of adieu; and
shortly after she had closed the door on Van Ploon, a pebble struck the
side window of the library. Gail opened the window and looked out. Dick
Rodley stood just below, with his impossibly handsome face upturned to
the light, his black eyes shining with glee, his Inverness tossed
romantically back over one shoulder, and an imaginary guitar in his
hands. Up into the library floated the familiar opening strains of
Tosti’s Serenade, and the Reverend Smith Boyd glanced out through the
study door at the enticing figure of Gail, and knitted his brows in a
frown.

“You absurd thing,” laughed Gail to the serenader. “No, you daren’t come
in,” and she vigorously closed the window. Laughing to herself, she
bustled into her wraps.

“Here, where are you going?” called her Uncle Jim.

“Hush!” she admonished him, peering, for a glowing moment, in the study
door, a vision of such disturbing loveliness that the Reverend Smith
Boyd, for the balance of the evening, saw, staring up at him from the
Vedder Court tenement sketches, nothing but eyes and lips and waving
brown hair, and delicately ovalled cheeks, their colour heightened by
the rolling white fur collar. “None of you must say a word about this,”
she gaily went on. “It’s an escapade!” and she was gone.

Uncle Jim, laughing, but nevertheless intent upon his responsibilities,
grabbed her as she opened the front door, but on the step he saw Dick
Rodley, and, in the machine drawing up at the curb, Arly and Gerald and
Lucile and Ted, so he kissed Gail good-night, and passed her over to the
jovial Dick, and returned to the study to brag about her.

Gaiety reigned supreme once more! Lights and music and dancing, the hum
of chatter and laughter, the bustle and confusion of the place, the
hilarity which brings a new glow to the cheek and sparkle to the eye,
and then home again in the crisp wintry air, and Dick following into the
house with carefree assurance.

“Gracious, Dicky, you can’t come in!” protested Gail, with half
frowning, half laughing remonstrance. “It’s a fearful hour for calls.”

“I’m a friend of the family,” insisted Dick, calmly closing the door
behind them and hanging his hat on the rack. He took Gail’s cloak and
threw off his Inverness. “I guess you’ve forgotten the programme.”

“Oh, yes, the proposal,” remembered Gail. “Well, have it over with.”

“All right,” he agreed, and taking her arm and tucking her shoulder