me to say, I’d have received her from the start. What I’ve always said
is, ‘What’s the good of keeping up these fights? No one gets anything
by them. They don’t do any one any good.’ But you know mommer. The
first thing she said when we talked about the house wedding, and I said
you’d give me away, was, ‘If he’ll come without his wife.’ Those were
her very words, and you know when she says a thing she means it. And,
Dominick, you _will_ come? You’re the only brother I’ve got. You’re the
only man representative of the family. You can’t turn me down on my
wedding day.”

There were tears in her eyes and Dominick saw them and looked down at
his plate.

“All right,” he said quietly. “I’ll come. When is it to be?”

“Oh, Dominick,” his sister breathed in an ecstasy of relief and
gratitude. “I knew you would. And I’ll do anything for you I can. If
mommer wouldn’t get so dreadfully angry, I’d call on your wife, but you
know I can’t offend her. She’s my mother, and I can’t stand up against
her. But some day I’ll pay you back--I will indeed.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Cornie,” he said, turning to summon the waiter.
“I can’t let my sister get married without me. Tell mother I’ll come.
You haven’t yet told me when it’s to be.”

“June,” said the prospective bride, once more beginning to blush and
beam, “early in June. The roses are so fine then, and we can have
the house so beautifully decorated. We’ve already begun to plan the
trousseau. It’s going to be just stunning, I tell you; the dresses from
New York and all the lingerie and things like that from Paris. Mommer
says she’ll give me fifteen thousand dollars for it. And she’s going to
give me, besides, a string of pearls that hangs down to here”--Cornelia
indicated a point on her person with a proud finger--“or else a house
and lot anywhere in town that I like. Which would you take?”

Dominick was saved from the responsibility of stating a preference on
this important point by Etienne, the waiter, presenting his hat to him
with the low bow of the well-tipped garçon. With a scraping of chair
legs, they rose and, threading their way among the now crowded tables,
passed out into the wind-swept streets. Here they separated, Cornelia,
with her armful of wilting flowers, going home, and Dominick back to
the bank.

He was entering the building when he met Bill Cannon, also returning
to his office from a restaurant lunch at a small Montgomery Street
chop-house, where, every day at one, he drank a glass of milk and ate
a sandwich. The Bonanza King stopped and spoke to the young man, his
greeting marked by a simple friendliness. Their conversation lasted a
few minutes, and then Dominick entered the bank.

Two hours later, while he was still bending over his books, in the
hushed seclusion of the closed building, Bill Cannon was talking to
Berny in the parlor of the Sacramento Street flat. This interview was
neither so long, and (on Berny’s part) did not show the self-restraint
which had marked the first one. The offer of one hundred thousand
dollars which the old man made her was refused with more scorn and less
courtesy than had been displayed in her manner on the former occasion.

CHAPTER XVII

A CUT AND A CONFESSION

Berny was extremely unsettled. She had never been in such a
condition of worry and indecision. She was at once depressed and
elated, triumphant and cast down, all in a bubble of excitement and
uncertainty. A combination of violent feelings, hostile to one another,
had possession of her and used her as a battle-ground for shattering
encounters.

She loved money with the full power of her nature--it was her
strongest, her predominating passion--and now for the first time in her
life it was within her grasp. She could at any moment become possessed
of a fortune, undisputedly her own, to do with as she liked. She lay
awake at night thinking of it. She made calculations on bits of paper
as she footed up the bills at her desk.

But then on the other hand, there was Dominick, Dominick suddenly
become valuable. He was like a piece of jewelry held in slight esteem
as a trifling imitation and suddenly discovered to be real and of rich
worth. Insignificant and strange are the happenings which determine
the course of events. The sage had told her that one more inch in the
length of Cleopatra’s nose would have altered the face of the world and
changed the course of history. Had Berny not gone to the park on that
Sunday afternoon, and seen a woman’s face change color at the sight of
her husband, she might have come to terms with Mrs. Ryan and now have
been on her way to Chicago in the first stage of the plan of desertion.

It was another woman’s wanting Dominick that made Berny more determined
to cling to him than if he had been the Prince Charming of her dreams.
She carried about with her a continual feeling of self-congratulation
that she had discovered the full significance of the plot in time.
Her attitude was that of the quarreling husband and wife who fight
furiously for the possession of a child for which neither cares. To
herself she kept saying, “They want my husband, do they? Well, I’ll
take mighty good care, no matter how much they want him and he wants to
go, they don’t get him.”

It made her boil with rage to think of them all, with Dominick at their
head, getting everything they wanted and sending her off to Paris, even
though Paris might be delightful, and she have a great deal better time
there than she ever had in San Francisco.

All these thoughts were in her mind as she walked down town one
afternoon for her usual diversion of shopping and promenading. Of late
she had not been sleeping well and the fear that this would react
upon her looks had spurred her to the unwonted exertion of walking.
The route she had chosen was one of those thoroughfares which radiate
from Market Street, and though not yet slums, are far removed from
the calm, wide gentility of the city’s more dignified highways. With
all her cleverness, she had never shaken off the tastes and instincts
of the class she had come from. She felt more at home in this noisy
byway, where children played on the pavements and there were the
house-to-house intimacies, the lack of privacy, of the little town,
than she did on the big, clean-swept streets where the houses presented
a blank exterior to the gaze, and most of the people were transported
in cars or carriages. Even the fact that the Tenderloin was in close
proximity did not modify her interest with a counteracting disgust;
though she was not one of the women who have a lively curiosity as to
that dark side of life, it did not, on the other hand, particularly
repel her. She viewed it with the same practical utilitarianism with
which she regarded her own virtue. That possession had been precious to
her for what she could gain with it. When she had sacrificed it to her
ambition, she had not liked giving it up at all, but had reconciled
herself to doing so because of the importance of the stake involved.

Walking loiteringly forward she crossed Powell Street, and approached
the entrance of that home of vaudeville, the Granada Theater. This
was a place of amusement that she much favored, and of which she was
a frequent patron. Dominick did not like it, so she generally went to
the matinée with one of her sisters. There had been a recent change of
bill, and as she drew near she looked over the posters standing by the
entrance on which the program for the coming week was printed in large
letters. Midway down one of these, her eye was caught by a name and she
paused and stood reading the words:

          “JAMES DEFAY BUFORD
  _The Witty, Brilliant and Incomparable_
              MONOLOGIST
      _In His Unrivaled Monologue
              Entitled_
          KLONDIKE MEMORIES”

She remembered at once that this was the actor Dominick had spoken of
as having been snowed in with them at Antelope. Dominick had evidently
not expected he would come to San Francisco. He had said the man had
been going to act in Sacramento. After standing for some moments
looking at the words, she moved on again with the short, mincing step
that was habitual to her, and which always made walking a slow and
undesirable mode of progression. She seemed more thoughtful than she
had been before she saw the program, and for some blocks her face wore
an absent and somewhat pensive air of musing.

Her preoccupation lasted up Grant Avenue and down Post Street till
it was finally dispelled by the sight of that attractive show-window
in which a large dry-goods establishment exhibits the marvels of new
millinery. It was April, and the spring fashions were just in from
Paris, filling the window with a brilliant display of the newest
revolutionary modes of which San Francisco had so far only heard. Women
stood staring, some dismayed at the introduction of styles which they
felt would have a blighting, not to say obliterating effect on their
own beauty. Others, of practical inclinations, studied the new gowns
with an eye to discoveries whereby their wardrobes might be induced to
assume a deceptive air of second youth.

Berny elbowed her way in among them and pressed herself close to the
glass, exploring, with a strained glance, the intricacies of back
draperies turned from view. She wished Hazel was there with her. Hazel
was wonderfully sharp at seeing how things were put together, and
could carry complications of trimming and design in her head without
forgetting them or getting them mixed. The discovery that skirts
were being cut in a new way gave Berny a shock of painful surprise,
especially when she thought of her raspberry crape, still sufficiently
new to be kept in its own box between layers of tissue paper, and yet
at the stage when the necessity of paying for it was at a comfortable,
unvexing distance.

She was standing with her back to the street when a woman next her
gave a low exclamation and uttered the name of Mrs. Con Ryan. Berny
wheeled about just as the exceedingly smart victoria of Mrs. Cornelius
Ryan drew up at the curb and that august matron prepared to descend
from it. In these afternoon shopping excursions she had often met her
mother-in-law, often met her and invariably seen her turn her head and
fix her eyes in the opposite direction. Now, however, matters were on
another footing. If Mrs. Ryan had not recognized Berny, or spoken to
her, or received her, she had at least opened negotiations with her,
negotiations which presupposed a knowledge of her existence if not a
desire for her acquaintance. Berny did not go so far as to anticipate
a verbal greeting, but she thought, in consideration of recent
developments, she was warranted in expecting a bow.

She moved forward almost in Mrs. Ryan’s path, paused, and then
looked at the large figure moving toward her with a certain massive
stateliness. This time Mrs. Ryan did not turn her head away. Instead,
she looked at the young woman directly and steadily, looked at her full
in the eye with her own face void of all recognition, impassive and
stonily unmoved as the marble mask of a statue. Berny, her half-made
bow checked as if by magic, her face deeply flushed, walked on. She
moved down the street rapidly, her head held high, trembling with
indignation.

Such are the strange, unaccountable contradictions of the female
character that she felt more incensed by this cut than by any previous
affront or slight the elder woman had offered her. The anticipated bow,
neither thought of nor hoped for till she had seen Mrs. Ryan alighting
from the carriage, was suddenly a factor of paramount importance in
the struggle between the two. So small a matter as a nod of the elder
woman’s head would have made the younger woman more pliable, more
tractable and easily managed, than almost any other action on her
mother-in-law’s part. Berny, bowed to, would have been a more docile,
reasonable person than either Mrs. Ryan or Bill Cannon had had yet to
deal with; while Berny, cut, flamed up into a blaze of mutinous fury
that, had they known it, would have planted dismay in the breasts of
those bold conspirators.

As she walked down the street she was at first too angry to know where
she was going, but after a few moments of rapid progress she saw that
she was approaching the car line which passed close to her old home.
In the excitement of her wrath, the thought of her sisters--the only
human beings who could be relied on unquestioningly and ungrudgingly to
offer her sympathy--came to her with a sense of consolation and relief.
A clock in a window showed her it was nearly five. Hannah would have
been home for some time, and Hazel might be expected within an hour.
Without more thought she hailed an up-town car.

As the car whisked her up the long hill from Kearney Street she thought
what she would say to her sisters. Several times of late she had
contemplated letting them into the secrets--or some of the secrets--of
her married life and its present complications. She wanted their
sympathy, for they were the only people she knew who were interested
in her through affection, and did not blame her when she did things
that were wrong. She also wanted to surprise them and to impress them.
She wanted to see their eyes grow round, and their faces more and more
startled, as she told of what Mrs. Ryan was trying to do, and how the
sum of one hundred thousand dollars was hers--their sister’s--when she
chose to take it. They were good people, the best people for her to
tell it to. They did not know too much. They could be relied upon for a
blind, uninquiring loyalty, and she could now (as she had before) tell
them, not all--just enough--suppressing, as women do, those facts in
the story which it were best for her to keep to herself.

She found them both at home, Hazel having been allowed to leave her
work an hour earlier than usual. Sitting in a small room in the back of
the house, they were surrounded by the outward signs of dressmaking.
Yards of material lay over the chairs, and on a small wooden table,
which fitted close to her body and upon which portions of the material
lay neatly smoothed out, Hannah was cutting with a large pair of shears.

Hazel sat near by trimming a hat, a wide, flat leghorn, round which
she twined a wreath of brier roses. Black velvet bows held the wreath
in place, and Hazel skewered these down with long black pins, several
of which she held in her mouth. Berny knew of old this outburst of
millinery activity which always marked the month of April. It was the
semi-annual rehabilitation of Pearl’s wardrobe, and was a ceremonial
to which all the females of the family were supposed to contribute. In
her own day she herself had given time and thought to it. She had even
been in sympathy with the idea of the family’s rise and increase of
distinction through Pearl, who was going to be many steps farther up
the social ladder than her mother and her aunt, if those devoted women
could possibly accomplish it.

Now, watching her sisters bent over their tasks after the heat and
burden of their own day’s work, she felt a deep, heartfelt sense
of gratitude that she had escaped from this humble, domestic sphere
in which they seemed so content. Whether Pearl’s summer hat should
be trimmed with pink or blue had once been a question which she had
thought worthy of serious consideration. How far she had traveled from
the world of her childhood could not have been more plainly shown her
than by the complete indifference she now felt to Pearl, her hat, and
its trimmings.

She had come prepared to surprise her sisters, and to shake out of
them, by her revelations, the amazed and shocked sympathy she felt
would ease her of her present wrath and pain. She was too overwrought
to be diplomatic or to approach the point by preparatory gradations.
Thrown back in the one arm-chair in the room, her head so pressed
against its back that her hat was thrust forward over her forehead,
she told them of her meeting with Mrs. Ryan, and the cut which she had
received.

Neither Hannah nor Hazel expressed the outraged astonishment at
this insult that Berny had anticipated. In fact, they took it with
a tranquillity which savored of indifference. For the moment, she
forgot that they knew nothing of her reason for expecting Mrs. Ryan
to recognize her, and to her quivering indignation was added a last
wounding sense of disappointment. The sight of Hazel, holding the
leghorn hat off at arm’s length and studying it with a preoccupied,
narrowed eye, was even more irritating than her remark, made mumblingly
because of the pins in her mouth:

“I don’t see why you should feel so bad about that. I should think
you’d have got sort of used to it by this time. She’s been cutting you
for over two years now.”

“Do you think that makes it any better?” said Berny in a belligerent
tone, not moving her head, but shifting her eyes to stare angrily at
Hazel from under her projecting hat-brim. “Do you think you’d get used
to it if Josh’s mother cut you on the street?”

It was hard to compass the idea of Josh’s deceased parent, who had left
behind her a memory of almost unique meekness, cutting anybody. It made
Hazel laugh and she had to bend her head down and take the pins out of
her mouth before she could answer.

“Well, if she’d been doing it for over two years, I think I’d have got
sort of broken to it by now,” she said. “What makes you so mad about it
all of a sudden?”

“Maybe things aren’t just the same as they’ve been for the last two
years,” said Berny darkly. “Maybe there’s a reason for Mrs. Ryan’s
bowing to me.”

These words had the effect that the victim of the cut desired. Her
sisters paused in their work and looked at her. There had been times
lately when Hannah had felt uneasy about Berny’s fine marriage, and
she now eyed the younger woman with sober intentness over the glasses
pushed down toward the tip of her nose.

“Reason?” said Hazel. “What reason? Have you and she been trying to
make up?”

“I don’t know whether you’d call it that or not,” said Berny.

“Have things really changed between you and her, Berny?” she asked
gravely.

Hannah put down the shears and laid her hands on the table. She felt
the coming revelations.

“Well, yes, I guess you’d say they have,” said Berny slowly, letting
every word make its impression. “She’s trying to buy me off to leave
Dominick. I suppose you’d call that a change.”

If Berny wanted to surprise her sisters, she certainly now had the
satisfaction of realizing her hopes. For a moment they stared at
her, too amazed to speak, even Hannah, who had scented difficulties,
being completely unprepared--after the way of human nature--for the
particular difficulty that had cropped up. It was Hazel who first spoke.

“Buy you off to leave Dominick? Give you money to go away from him, do
you mean?”

“That’s what I said,” returned her sister with dry grimness. “She’s
made me two offers to leave my husband, wants me to get out and, after
I’ve gone for a year, ask him to bring suit for desertion.”

“My Lord!” murmured Hannah in a hushed voice of horror.

“Well, that beats anything I’ve ever heard!” exclaimed Hazel. “That
beats the ball, and not speaking to you, and all the rest. It’s the
worst yet! What’s made her do it? What’s the matter with her?”

“The same thing that’s always been the matter with her--she doesn’t
like me, she wants to get rid of me. She tried to freeze me out first
by not speaking to me, and leaving us to scramble along the best way we
could on Dominick’s salary. Now, she’s seen that that won’t work, and
she’s gone off on a new tack. She’s a woman of resources. If she finds
the way blocked in one direction, she tries another.”

“She’s actually offered you money to leave Dominick?” asked Hannah.
“Said she’d give it to you if you’d desert him and let him get a
divorce?”

“That’s it,” returned her sister, in the same hard tone, tapping with
her finger-tips on the arms of the chair. “That’s the flattering offer
she’s made me twice now.”

“How much did she offer you?” said Hazel.

This was a crucial question. Berny knew its importance and sat up,
pushing back her disarranged hat.

“One hundred thousand dollars,” she said calmly.

There was a second pause which seemed charged with astonishment, as
with electrical forces. The sisters, their hands fallen in their laps,
fastened their eyes on the speaker in a stare of glassy amaze.

“A hundred thousand dollars!” gasped Hazel. “Why--why--Berny!”

She stopped, almost trembling in the excitement of her stunned
incredulity.

“_A hundred thousand dollars!_” Hannah echoed, each word pronounced
with slow, aghast unbelief. “Oh, it _can’t_ be that much!”

“It’s that much now,” said Berny, her calmness accentuated to the point
of nonchalance, “and if I want I can make them double it, raise it to a
quarter of a million. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars isn’t so
much when you’ve got millions in trunks. What’s that to the Ryans?”

She looked at her sisters with a cool, dispassionate glance, feeling
that it had been worth while to tell them. Hannah’s face was a pale,
uninteresting mask of shocked surprise--the kind of face with which
one would imagine Hannah’s greeting such intelligence. But through
the astonishment of Hazel’s a close and intimate understanding of the
possibilities of the situation, an eagerness of rising respect for it
and for the recipient of such honors, was discernible and appealed to
Berny’s vanity and assuaged her more uncomfortable sensations.

“You could get a quarter of a million?” Hazel persisted. “How do you
know that?”

Berny looked at her with disdain which was softened by a slight,
indulgent smile.

“My dear, if they want it bad enough to offer one hundred thousand,
they want it bad enough to offer two. The money is nothing to them,
and I’m a good deal. I shouldn’t be surprised if I could get more.”
She thought of Bill Cannon’s participation in the matter, and let an
expression of sly, knowing mysteriousness cross her face. But Bill
Cannon’s participation was a fact she did not intend to mention. He was
a part of the story that she had decided to suppress.

“But two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!” said Hazel. “Why, it’s
a fortune! The interest on it alone would make you rich. You could go
to Europe. You could have a house on Pacific Avenue. Just fancy! And
three years ago you were working for twenty a week in the Merchants and
Mechanics Trust Company. Do you remember when they agreed to give you
that you thought you were on velvet? Twenty dollars a week! That looks
pretty small now, doesn’t it?”

“But she doesn’t intend to take it, Hazel McCrae!” said Hannah in a
deep voice of shocked disapproval. “You talk as if she was going to
accept their outrageous offer.”

Hazel’s face, which, as her fancy ranged over these attractive
possibilities, had shown varying stages of flushed and exhilarated
excitement, now suddenly fell. Conscious that she had exhibited a
condition of mind that was low and sordid, she hastily sought to
obliterate the effect of her words by saying sharply,

“Of course, I knew she wasn’t going to accept. I never had such an
idea. I’d be the first one to turn it down. I was just thinking what
she _could_ do if she _did_.”

“Oh, there’s any amount of things I could do,” said Berny. “They want
me to go abroad and live there. That was”--she was going to say “one
of the conditions,” but this, too, she decided to suppress, and said
instead--“one of the things they suggested. They told me the income
of the money would go twice as far there. Then the year while I was
deserting Dominick--I was to go to Chicago, or New York, and desert him
that way--I’d have seven thousand dollars for my expenses. They weren’t
mean about it, I’ll say that much for them.”

“And then laying it all out like that!” said Hannah. “It’s just the
most scandalous thing I’ve ever heard of. I’ve never had much opinion
of Mrs. Ryan, but I really didn’t believe she’d go that far.”

“But Dominick?” said Hazel suddenly; “what about Dominick? What did he
say?”

The matter of Dominick was the difficult part of the revelation. Berny
felt the necessity of a certain amount of dissembling, and it helped to
chill the excitement and heat that had carried her up to her sisters
and on to this point. Dominick’s part of the story was one of the
subjects upon which she had decided to let her remarks be as notes
about the text, and expurgated notes at that. Now, she realized it was
a complicated matter of which to tell only half, and looking on the
floor pricked the carpet with the tip of her parasol, and tried to
maintain her tone of airy indifference.

“Dominick doesn’t know anything about it,” she said. “He’s never to
know. They were pretty decided on that point. He’s to be deserted
without his own knowledge or consent.”

“But to take his wife away from him!” Hannah cried. “To rob him of her!
They must be crazy.”

“Dominick can get along all right without me,” said Dominick’s wife,
looking at the tip of her parasol as she prodded the carpet.

Hazel, the married sister, heard something in these words that the
spinster did not recognize. A newly-wakened intelligence, startled and
suspicious, dawned on her face.

“Dominick’s not so dead in love with me,” continued Berny, with her
eyes following the parasol tip. “He could manage to bear his life
without me. He--” she paused, and then said, enraged to hear that her
voice was husky--“doesn’t care a button whether I live or die.”

The pause that greeted this statement was entirely different from its
predecessors. There was amazement in it, and there was pain. Neither
listener could for a moment speak; then Hannah said with a solemnity
full of dignity,

“I can’t believe that, Berny.”

“You needn’t if you don’t want to,” returned Berny, still not looking
up. “If you like to keep on believing lies, it’s all the same to
me. But I guess I know more about Dominick Ryan, and what he feels,
than you do, and I tell you he doesn’t care a hang for me. He gave
up caring”--she paused, a memory of the ball, the quarrel, and the
fatal visit to Antelope flashing through her mind--“over a year ago. I
guess,” she raised her head and looked coolly at her sisters, “he won’t
lay awake nights at the thought of losing me.”

They looked at her without speaking, their faces curiously different
in expression from what they had been after her first confessions. All
excitement had gone from them. They looked more wounded and hurt than
she did. They were women, dashed and mortified, by a piece of news that
had abashed them in its admitted failure and humiliation of another
woman.

“I--I--can’t believe it,” faltered Hannah. “Dominick’s always so kind,
so attentive, so----”

She came to a stop, checked by an illuminating memory of the Sundays
on which Dominick now never came to dinner, of his absence from their
excursions to the park, of his mysterious mid-winter holiday to the
Sierra.

“Have you had a row?” said Hazel. “Everybody has them some time and
then you make up again, and it’s just the same as it was before.
Fighting with your husband’s different from other fighting. It doesn’t
matter much, or last.”

Berny looked down at the parasol tip. Her lips suddenly began to
quiver, and tears, the rare burning tears of her kind, pricked into her
eyes.

“We haven’t lived together for over eight months,” she said.

The silence that greeted this remark was the heaviest of all the
silences.

“Why didn’t you tell us before?” said Hazel, in a low, awed voice.

For a moment, Berny could not answer. She was ashamed and angry at the
unexpected emotion which made it impossible for her to command her
voice, and made things shine before her eyes, brokenly, as through
crystal. She was afraid her sisters would think she was fond of
Dominick, or would guess the real source of the trouble.

“I was afraid something was wrong,” said Hannah, mechanically picking
up the shears, her face pale and furrowed with new anxieties.

The concern in her tone soothed Berny. It was something not only to
have astonished her family, but to have disturbed their peace by a
forced participation in her woes. It had been enraging to think of them
light-heartedly going their way while she struggled under such a load
of care.

“It was all right till last autumn,” she said in a stifled voice, “and
then it all got wrong--and--and--now it’s all gone to pieces.”

“But what made Dominick change?” said Hazel, with avid, anxious
eagerness. “Everything was happy and peaceful a year ago. What got hold
of him to change him?”

Berny felt that she had told enough. It had been harder telling, too,
than she had imagined. The last and greatest secret that she had
determined to keep from her sisters was that of Dominick’s love for
another woman--what she regarded as his transfer of affection, not yet
having guessed that his heart had never been hers. Now she raised her
head and looked at the two solemn-faced women, angrily and bitterly,
through the tears that her eyes still held.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care what’s changed him,” she said
defiantly. “I stood by my side of the bargain, and that’s all I know.
I’ve made him a good wife, as good a one as I knew how. I’ve been
bright and pleasant when his family treated me like dirt. I’ve not
complained and I’ve made the best of it, staying indoors and going
nowhere, when any other woman would have been getting some sort of fun
out of her life. I’ve managed that miserable little flat on not half
enough money, and tried to keep out of debt, when any one else in the
world would have run up bills all over for Mrs. Ryan to pay. Nobody can
say I haven’t done my part all right. Maybe I’ve got my faults--most of
us have--but I haven’t neglected my duty this time.”

She rose abruptly from her seat, pushing it back and feeling that
she had better go before she said too much. She realized that in her
hysterical and overwrought state she might become too loquacious and
afterward regret it. For the moment she believed all she said. Her
sisters, full of sincere sympathy for her, believed it too, though in
periods of cooler reflection they would probably question some of her
grievances; notably that one as to the small income, three thousand a
year, representing to them complete comfort, not to say affluence.

As she rose, Hazel rose too, her face full of suspicious concern.

“It’s not another woman, is it, Berny?” she almost whispered.

Berny had told so many lies that she did not bother about a few more.
Moreover, she was determined not to let her sisters know about Rose
Cannon--not yet, anyway.

“No,” she said with short scorn, turning to pick up her feather boa.
“Of course it’s not. He’s not that kind of a man. He’s too much of a
sissy. Another woman! I’d like to tell him that.”

She gave a sardonic laugh and turned to the glass, disposing her boa
becomingly and adjusting her hat. Hannah, shaking herself loose from
the encircling embrace of the cutting table, rose too, exclaiming,

“Don’t go yet. You must tell us more of this. I’ve not heard anything
for years that’s upset me so. If Dominick’s not in love with somebody
else, what’s got into him? Why doesn’t he care for you any more? A man
doesn’t stop loving his wife for no cause whatever. It isn’t in human
nature.”

“Well, it’s in Dominick’s nature,” said Dominick’s wife, pulling on her
gloves. “Maybe that isn’t human nature, but it’s the nature of the man
I’m married to and that’s all that concerns me. Remember, you’re not to
say a word about this. It’s all a secret.”

“Why should we talk about it?” said the practical Hazel. “It’s bad
enough to have had it happen. You don’t want to go round gossiping
about a member of your family getting thrown down.”

To their pressing invitations to remain longer, Berny was deaf. She had
said her say and wanted to go. The interview had undoubtedly eased her
of some of the choking exasperation that had followed Mrs. Ryan’s cut;
and it was a source of comfort to think that she had now broken the ice
and could continue to come and pour out her wrongs and sorrows into
the ever-attentive ears of her sisters. But now she wanted to get away
from them, from their penetrative questions, and their frank curiosity,
the curiosity of normal, healthy-minded women, whose lives had lacked
the change and color of which hers had been full. She cut her good-bys
short and left them to their own distracted speculations, staring
blankly at each other, amid the scattered millinery of the disordered
room.

When she reached home, she found on the hall table a note which the
Chinaman told her had been left by a messenger. It was from Bill Cannon
and contained but a few lines. These, of a businesslike brevity,
expressed the writer’s desire to see her again, and politely suggested
that, if she could come to his office on any one of the three specified
afternoons, between the hours of two and four, he would be deeply
honored and obliged.

Berny, frowning and abstracted, was standing with the note in her
hand when Dominick opened the hall door and came up the stairs. His
eye casually fell on the square of paper, but he asked no question
about it, hardly seemed to see it. Yet her state of suspicion was so
sensitively active that his lack of interest seemed fraught with
meaning, and pushing the letter back into its envelope she remarked
that it was a note from her dressmaker. Even the fact that his answer
was an indifferent, barely-articulated sound seemed significant to her,
and she took the letter into her bedroom and hid it in her handkerchief
box, as though her husband, instead of being the least, was the most
curious and jealous of men.

CHAPTER XVIII

BUFORD’S GOOD LUCK

In his “Klondike Monologue” at the Orpheum, Buford, the actor, made
a sudden and unexpected hit. The morning after his first appearance,
both Dominick and Berny read in the paper eulogistic notices of the
new star. Dominick was particularly interested. He remembered Buford’s
state of worry while at Antelope and was glad to see that the unlucky
player was, in the parlance of his own world, “making good.”

The evening papers contained more laudatory paragraphs. Buford’s act
was spoken of with an enthusiasm which taxed the vocabulary of the
writers who found that the phrases they had been using to describe the
regular vaudeville performances were not adequate for so sparkling an
occasion.

It was a rambling monologue of mining-camp anecdotes, recollections,
and experiences, delivered with confidential, simple seriousness.
Buford’s appearance in an immense, fur-lined overcoat with buttons made
of gold nuggets and a voluminous fur cap on his head, was given the
last touch of grotesqueness by a tiny tinsel spangle fastened on the
end of his nose. This adornment, on his entrance hardly noticeable, was
soon the focusing point of every eye. It looked as if it grew on its
prominent perch, and as he spoke, a slight, vibrating movement, which
he imparted to that portion of his visage, made the tinsel send out
continuous, uneasy gleams. The more serious his discourse was and the
more portentously solemn his face, the more glimmeringly active was the
spangle, and the more hysterically unrestrained became the laughter
of the audience. Altogether, Buford had made a success. Three days
after his first appearance, people were talking about “The Klondike
Monologue” as a few weeks before they had been talking about the last
play of Pinero’s as presented by a New York company.

From what Buford had told him, Dominick knew that the actor’s luck had
been bad, and that the period of imprisonment at Antelope was a last,
crowning misfortune. Through it he feared that he had forfeited his
Sacramento engagement, and the young man had a painful memory of the
long jeremiad that Buford, in his anxiety and affliction, had poured
out to himself and Rose Cannon. That the actor was evidently emerging
from his ill fortune was gratifying to Dominick, who, in the close
propinquity forced upon them by the restricted quarters of Perley’s
Hotel, had grown to like and pity the kindly, foolish and impractical
man.

Now, from what he heard, Buford’s hard times should be at an end. Such
a hit as he had made should give him the required upward impetus. Men
Dominick knew, who had theatrical affiliations, told him that Buford
was “made.” The actor could now command a good salary on any of the
vaudeville circuits in the country, and if “he had it in him” he might
ascend the ladder toward the heights of legitimate comedy. His humorous
talent was unique and brilliant. It was odd, considering his age, that
it had not been discovered sooner.

Berny was very anxious to see him. Hazel and Josh had seen him on one
of the first evenings and pronounced him “simply great.” She extorted
a promise from Dominick that, at the earliest opportunity, he would
buy tickets for her, and, if he could not accompany her himself, she
could go with one of her sisters. Dominick did not want to go. He had
no desire to see Buford and be reminded of the three weeks’ dream which
had interrupted the waking miseries of his life, and more than that he
hated, secretly and intensely, sitting beside Berny, talking to her
and listening to her talk, during the three hours of the performance.
The horrible falseness of it, the appearance of intimacy with a woman
toward whom he only felt a cold aversion, the close proximity of her
body which he disliked, even accidentally, to brush against, made him
shrink from the thought as from the perpetration of some mean and
repulsive deception.

He stopped to buy the tickets one midday on his way to lunch. He made
up his mind to buy three, then Berny could either take her two sisters,
or Hazel and Josh, whose craving for the theater was an unassuageable
passion. The good seats were sold out for days ahead and he had to be
content with three orchestra chairs for an evening at the end of the
following week. He was turning from the ticket office window when a
sonorous voice at his elbow arrested him:

“Mr. Ryan,” it boomed out, “do I see you at last? Ever since my
arrival in the city I have hoped for the opportunity of renewing our
acquaintance.”

It was Buford, but a rejuvenated and prosperous Buford, the reflection
of his good fortune shining from his beaming face and fashionable
figure. The red rasped look had left his features and the hollows
beneath his high cheek-bones were filled out. He was dressed in
gray with an almost foppish nicety, a fedora hat of a paler tint on
his head, and a cravat of a dull red rising in a rich puffed effect
below his collar. His shoes shone with the glassy polish of new
patent leather; the red-brown kid gloves that he carried exhaled an
attractive odor of russia-leather. He held out his hand to Dominick,
and the young man grasped it with real heartiness.

“Glad to see you, Buford,” he said, “and glad to hear you’ve made such
a success of it. I haven’t seen it myself, but I hear it’s a great
show.”

Buford, who had seen him buying the tickets, said blandly,

“But you’re going? You’ve been buying tickets, haven’t you? Oh, I’ve
got to have your opinion--nobody’s I’d think more of than Mr. Dominick
Ryan’s.”

Dominick, with the consciousness that he had just been planning not to
go reddening his face, stammered with embarrassed evasiveness,

“I’ve just been buying tickets and couldn’t get them before the end of
next week. You’re such a confounded success that everything’s sold out
days ahead. My wife wants to see you, and that’s the best I could do
for her. Her sister went on the second night and says you’re the hit of
the program. And then the papers! You’ll soon be one of the stars of
the nation.”

Buford acknowledged these compliments with cool, acquiescent
complacence.

“I have struck my gait,” he said, nodding his head in condescending
acceptance. “I have at last won my spurs.”

“But you didn’t expect to come down here when you were at Antelope.
Didn’t you tell me your engagement was for two weeks in Sacramento, and
that you were afraid you’d forfeited it by being snowed in there? How
was it you came down after all?”

“The luck turned. The tide that comes in the affairs of men came in
mine. I must say it had got down to about the lowest ebb. You’re right
about forfeiting my engagement. Got to Sacramento three weeks behind
time and found they’d procured a substitute, and all I had for my pains
was a blackguarding because the Lord had seen fit to snow me in in the
Sierras.”

Dominick laughed, and the actor allowed a slight, sour smile to disturb
the professional gravity of his face.

“Yes,” he nodded, “that’s the way of the transgressor, especially when
his transgressions ain’t of his own doing. After I’d been there two
weeks, I hadn’t a V between me and starvation. I looked for jobs with
the water squelching in my boots, and finally I had to do a turn in a
fifth-rate variety performance that showed in a sort of cellar down
a flight of stairs. That’s where the ‘Klondike Monologue’ was born.
Like lots of other good things, it had a pretty mean beginning. I just
pieced it together from bits and scraps that were the tailings of the
two years I had spent in that Arctic mill up there. It caught on from
the start--let the public alone to recognize a good thing when they
see one! That dirty cellar was pretty well sprinkled the first week,
and the second they had the standing room signs out. I didn’t introduce
the spangle till the end of the engagement. Some people think it a
great touch.”

He looked with sober questioning at Dominick, who said apologetically,

“So I hear, but I haven’t seen it.”

Buford raised his flexible brows with an air of stimulated, excusing
memory.

“True, true,” he replied, “I had forgotten. Two nights after I had
introduced the spangle, one of the ‘Granada’ people saw me. I didn’t
know it at the time, but I am a true artist; whatever my audience, I
give it of my best, and, in that instance, it was only one more case of
bread cast upon the waters. There’d been a vacancy here. Estradilla,
the Spanish Snake Dancer, was taken suddenly sick, collapsed after her
third performance, tied her intestines up in a knot with her act, they
say, and the wonder was she hadn’t done it before. Anyhow, they had to
substitute in a hurry, heard of my Klondike act and sent a man up to
see if I’d do to fill in. The next week I was here and--you know the
rest.”

“They say every man has his chance. You didn’t suppose the snowstorm
that caught you at Antelope was going to be the foundation of yours?”

Buford raised his brows till they about touched his hair, and said with
his most magisterial sonority of tone,

“No, no indeed. The ways of Fate--or let me say Providence--are truly
inscrutable. I thought that lock-up in the Sierras would be my undoing,
and I’m sure I never imagined the two years I spent in that accursed
Arctic were going to return to roost as blessings. I turned my face to
the North in a bitter hour, and it was in a bitter hour that I adopted
the stage.”

Dominick was exceedingly surprised. He had supposed Buford always to
have been an actor, to have been born to it. If he had heard that the
man had made his debut as an infant prodigy or even in his mother’s
arms in swaddling clothes, he would have felt it was in keeping
with Buford’s character, and just what he suggested. Now, in a tone
expressing his surprise, the young man queried,

“Then you went on the stage up there? You’ve only been on a few years?”

“Nearly four,” said the actor. He looked down at his shoe for a moment
as if considering, and repeated without looking up, “It will be four
next September. Trouble drove me to those far distant lands and hard
luck drove me on the stage. I’d never had anything to do with it till
then; I hadn’t a stage game about me. There’d even been a time when I
had a strong prejudice against the theater and never went to one. But
a man must live and----”

He stopped, his attention arrested by a hand laid softly on his sleeve.
A youth of Hebraic countenance had issued from a door behind him, and,
touching his arm with a hesitating, unclean finger, began to speak in
a low tone. Buford turned to the boy. Dominick backed away from them
toward the box-office window. As they conferred he took a card out of
his wallet, and hastily traced the address of the flat below his name.
He had it ready to offer Buford, when the actor, his conference over,
came toward him.

“Duty calls,” said Buford. “I am sorry, but they want me inside. But
this is not going to be our only meeting. I’m booked for two weeks
longer here, and I’m hoping to see something more of you.”

Dominick gave him the card, with assurances that he would be glad to
see him, and that his own home was a better meeting-place than the
bank. At this mark of friendship, the actor was openly gratified. He
looked at the card with a smile and said,

“Most certainly I’ll avail myself of this privilege. I hope later to be
able to place a box at your disposal. Madame, you say, is very desirous
of seeing me. Well, I’ll see to it that she does so under the most
favorable conditions. Though I have never met her, I think I may ask
you to convey my respects to her.”

He bowed impressively as though saluting Berny in person, and then,
with a last dignified farewell to Dominick, turned toward the door
which opened at his approach, disclosing the waiting Jew boy. As
the actor drew near, Dominick heard the boy break into low-toned
remonstrances, and then the door closed upon Buford’s sonorous and
patronizing notes of reproval.

CHAPTER XIX

ROSE’S POINT OF VIEW

The following Sunday, at ten o’clock in the morning, Dominick
noiselessly descended the stairs of the flat and let himself out into
the street. He had had a sleepless night, and as he stood in the
dazzling sunshine, debating which way he should go, his face showed the
hollows and lines left by hours of worried wakefulness.

His day--the holiday of his week of steady work--was without
engagement. The friend with whom he usually walked over the suburban
hills had moved to the country. His rest from labor would take the form
of a day spent away from his home in the open air. As he had eaten
his breakfast he had planned his itinerary, carefully considering the
best distribution of these twelve treasured hours of liberty. He would
spend the morning walking, anywhere--the direction did not matter
much--anywhere where there was quiet and a view. He would take his
lunch at any little joint--country hotel, city chop-house--he happened
to pass, and in the afternoon he would walk again, on for hours,
probably over the Presidio Hills where the poppies were beginning to
gild the slopes, or along the beach where there were unfrequented nooks
in which a man could lie and look at the water, and think. A whole
day away from Berny and the flat, in the healing balm of the sunshine
and the clean, untroubled air, was the best way to renew the fund of
philosophy and patience that of late he had felt was almost exhausted.

The ferment of his wakeful night was still in his blood as he walked
across the city, aiming for the eminence of Telegraph Hill. He walked
slowly without looking up; his eyes on the tip of his cane as it struck
the pavement. It was a superb day, calm, still, breathing peace, like
that other Sunday when he had gone to the park with the Iversons and
seen Rose Cannon. But the splendors of the morning did not divert
his mind from its heavy musings. With down-drooped head, watching
the striking tip of the cane as though in it there lay some mystic
solution of his difficulties, he walked on, a slow-moving figure, a man
wrestling with his own particular world-problem, facing his fate and
repudiating it.

There had been times lately when he had felt he could no longer
endure the present conditions of his life. As he had lain thinking in
the darkness of the previous night, it had come upon him, with the
clearness of conviction, that he could not stand it. The future with
Berny had loomed before him, crushing, unbearable, and he had seen no
end to it, and repeated to himself that he must be free of it. It had
been awful as a nightmare, and turning on his bed he had wondered how
he had endured the situation so long.

Now, as he walked through the sweet, gay morning he felt a renewal
of courage and reasoned with himself, using the old arguments with
which for two years he had been subduing his rebellion and curbing
the passion and impatience of his youth. Because a man had married
an uncongenial woman, was that an excuse for him to leave her, to
put her away from him when she had honestly tried to live up to her
marriage contract? Summing it all up in a sentence--his wife had a bad
temper and he had ceased to care for her, was that a reason for him to
separate from her?

Last night he had used none of these arguments. He had felt too
strongly to reason about the righteousness of moral obligation. Lying
in the dark, listening to the striking of the clocks, he had said to
himself that he could not stand Berny any longer--he could not live
in the house with her. He did not hate her, it was far from that. He
wished her well; to hear that she was happy and prosperous somewhere
where he did not have to dine with her and sit in the den with her
every evening, would have given him the greatest satisfaction. He felt
that the sight of her was daily growing more unbearably and unnaturally
obnoxious to him. Little personal traits of hers had a strange,
maddening power of exciting his dislike. In the evening the rustling of
the sheets of the newspaper as she turned and folded them filled him
with a secret anger. He would sit silent, pretending to read, waiting
for that regular insistent rustling, and controlling himself with an
effort. As they sat opposite each other at breakfast, the sound she
made as she crunched the toast seemed to contain something of her
own hard, aggressive personality in it, and he hated to hear it. In
the dead depression of the night, he had felt that to listen to that
rustling of newspapers every night and that crunching of toast every
morning was a torment he could no longer bear.

In the clear light of the morning, patience had come and the old
standards of restraint and forbearance reasserted themselves. The
familiar pains, to which he had thought himself broken, had lost much
of their midnight ghoulishness. The old ideals of honor and obligation,
with which he had been schooling himself for two years, came back
to his mind with the unerring directness of homing pigeons. He went
over the tale of Berny’s worthiness and his own responsibility in the
misfortunes of her life and disposition. It was a circular process of
thought that always returned to the starting place: what right had he
to complain of her? Had not most of the disappointments that had soured
and spoiled her come from his doing, his fault, his people?

He breathed a heavy sigh and looked up. To this question and its humbly
acquiescing answer these reflections always brought him. But to-day
it was hard to be acquiescent. The rebellion of the night was not
all subdued. The splendor of the morning, the pure arch of sky, the
softness of the air, called to him to rejoice in his strength, to be
glad, and young. He raised his head, breathing in the sweet freshness,
and took off his hat, letting the sun pour its benediction on his head.
His spirit rose to meet this inspiring, beneficent nature, not in
exhilaration, but in revolt. The thought of Rose gripped him, and in
the strength of his manhood he longed for her.

He ascended the hill by one of the streets on its southern slope,
violently steep, the upward leaps of its sidewalk here and there
bridged by flights of steps. Every little house was disgorging its
inmates, garbed in the light Sunday attire of the Californian on
pleasure bent. The magnificent day was calling them, not to prayer and
the church, but to festival. Families stood on the sidewalks, grouped
round the Sunday symbol of worship, a picnic-basket. Lovers went by in
smiling pairs, arm linked in arm. A pagan joy in life was calling from
every side, from the country clothed in its robe of saffron poppies,
from the sky pledged to twelve hours of undimmed blue, from the air
mellowed to a warmth that never burns, from the laughter of light
hearts, the smiles of lovers, the eyes of children.

Dominick went up the hill in the clear, golden sunlight, and in his
revolt he pushed Berny from his mind, and let Rose come in her place.
His thoughts, always held from her, sprang at her, encircled her,
seemed to draw her toward him as once his arms had done. She was a
sacred thing, the Madonna of his soul’s worship, but to-day she seemed
to bend down from her niche with less of the reverenced saint than of
the loving woman in the face his fancy conjured up.

Standing on the summit of the hill, where the wall of the quarry drops
down to the water front and the wharves, he relinquished himself to
his dream of her. The bay lay at his feet, a blue floor, level between
rusty, rugged hills. There was an island in it, red-brown, incrusted
with buildings, that seemed to clutch their rocky perch with long
strips and angles of wall. In the reach of water just below there was
little shipping, only a schooner beating its way to sea. The wind
was stiffer down there than on the sheltered side of the hill. The
schooner, with sails white as curds against the blue, was tacking, a
long, slantwise flight across the ruffled water. She left a thin,
creamy line behind her which drifted sidewise into eddying curves like
a wind-lashed ribbon. Dominick, his eyes absently on her, wondered if
she were bound for the South Seas, those waters of enchantment where
islands, mirrored in motionless lagoons, lie scattered over plains of
blue.

A memory crossed his mind of a description of some of these islands
given him by a trader he had once met. They were asylums, lotus-eating
lands of oblivion, for law-breakers. Those who had stepped outside the
pale, who had dared defy the world’s standards, found in them a haven,
an elysian retreat. They rose before his mental vision, palm-shaded,
lagoon-encircled, played upon by tropic breezes, with glassy waves
sliding up a golden beach. There man lived as his heart dictated,
a real life, a true life, not a bitter tale of days in protesting
obedience to an immutable, heart-breaking law. There he and Rose might
live, lost to the places they had once filled, hidden from the world
and its hard judgments.

The thought seized upon his mind like a drug, and he stood in a tranced
stillness of fascinated imagination, his eyes on the ship, his inner
vision seeing himself and Rose standing on the deck. He was so held
under the spell of his exquisite, enthralling dream, that he did not
see a figure round the corner of the rough path, nor notice its slow
approach. But he felt it, when its casual, roaming glance fell on him.
As if called, he turned sharply and saw Rose standing a few yards away
from him, looking at him with an expression of affrighted indecision.
As his glance met hers, the dream broke and scattered, and he seemed
to emerge out of a darkness that had in it something beautiful and
baleful, into the healthy, pure daylight.

The alarm in Rose’s face died away, too. For a moment she stood
motionless, then moved toward him slowly, with something of reluctance
about her approach. She seemed to be coming against her will, as if
obeying a summons in his eyes.

“I wasn’t sure it was you,” she said. “And then when I saw it was, I
was going to steal away before you saw me. But you turned suddenly as
if you heard me.”

“I felt you were there,” he answered.

It was natural that with Rose he should need to make no further
explanation. She understood as she would always understand everything
that was closely associated with him. He would never have to explain
things to her, as he never, from their first meeting, felt that he
needed to talk small talk or make conversation.

She came to a stop beside him, and they stood for a silent moment,
looking down the bare wall of the quarry, a raw wound in the hill’s
flank, to the docks below where the masts of ships rose in a forest,
and their lean bowsprits were thrust over the wharves.

“You came just in time,” he said. “I walked up here this morning to
have a think. I don’t know where the think was going to take me when
you came round that corner and stopped it. What brought you here?”

“Nothing in particular. It was such a fine morning I thought I’d just
ramble about, and I came this way without thinking. My feet brought me
without my knowledge.”

“My think brought you,” he said. “That’s the second time it’s happened.
It was a revolutionary sort of think, and there was a lot about you in
it.”

He looked down at her, standing by his shoulder, and met her eyes. They
were singularly pellucid, the clearest, quietest eyes he thought he had
ever looked into. His own dropped before them to the bay below, touched
and then quickly left the schooner which was beating its way toward
them on the return tack.

“If you could only always come this way when I want you, everything
would be so different, so much easier,” he said in a low tone. “I was
surrounded by devils and they were getting tight hold of me when you
came round that corner.”

He glanced at her sidewise with a slight, quizzical smile.

This time she did not answer his look, but with her eyes on the bay,
her brows drawn together, asked,

“New devils or old ones?”

“The old ones, but they’ve grown bigger and twice as hard to manage
lately. They----” he broke off, his voice suddenly roughened, and said,
“I don’t seem to know how to live my life.”

He turned his face away from her. The demons she had exorcised had left
him weakened. In the bright sunshine, with the woman he loved beside
him, he felt broken and beaten down by the hardships of his fate.

“Sit down and talk to me,” she said quietly. “No one can hear you. It’s
like being all alone in the world up here on the hilltop. We can sit on
this stone.”

There was a broken boulder behind them, close to the narrow foot-way,
and she sat on it, motioning him to a flat piece of rock beside her.
Her hands were thrust deep in the pockets of her loose gray coat, the
wisps of fair hair that escaped below the rim of her hat fanning up and
down in faint breaths of air, like delicate threads of seaweed in ocean
currents.

“Tell me the whole thing,” she said. “You and I have never talked much
about your affairs. And what concerns you concerns me.”

He pricked at the earth with the tip of his cane, ashamed of his moment
of weakness, and yet fearing if he told her of his cares it might
return.

“It’s just what you know,” he began slowly. “Only as every day goes by
it seems to get worse. I’ve never told you much about my marriage. I’ve
never told anybody. Many men make mistakes in choosing a wife and find
out, and say to themselves early in the game, that they _have_ made a
mistake and must abide by it. I don’t think I’m weaker than they are,
but somehow----”

He stopped and looked at the moving tip of his cane. She said nothing,
and after taking a deep breath he went on.

“I knew all about her when I married her. I was young, but I wasn’t a
green fool. Only I didn’t seem to realize, I didn’t guess, I didn’t
dream, that she was going to stay the way she was. I seemed to be at
the beginning of a sort of experiment that I was sure was going to turn
out well. I didn’t love her, but I liked her well enough, and I was
going to try my best to have things go smoothly and make her happy.
When she was my wife, when I’d try to make everything as comfortable
and pleasant as I could, then I expected she’d--she’d--be more like the
women men love, and even if they don’t love, manage to get on with. But
it didn’t seem to go well even in the beginning, and now it’s got worse
and worse. Perhaps it’s my fault. I’m not one of those fellows who
can read a woman like a book. When a person tells me a thing, I think
they mean it; I’m not looking into them to see if they mean just the
opposite.”

He stopped again and struck lightly at a lump of earth with his cane.
He had pushed his hat back from his forehead and his face bore an
expression of affected, boyish nonchalance which was extremely pathetic
to Rose.

“Maybe there are men who could stand it all right. She’s very nice part
of the time. She’s a first-class housekeeper. I give her two hundred
dollars a month, and on that little bit she runs the flat beautifully.
And she’s quiet. She doesn’t want to be out all the time, the way some
women do. She’s as domestic as possible, and she’s been very decent
and pleasant since I came back. The way she was treated over the ball
would have r’iled any woman. I didn’t tell you about that--it’s a mean
story--but she got no invitation and was angry and flared up. We had
a sort of an uncomfortable interview, and--and--that was the reason I
went to Antelope. I didn’t think I’d ever go back to her then. I was
pretty sore over it. But--” he paused, knocking the lump of clay into
dust, “I thought afterward it was the right thing to do. I’d married
her, you see.”

Rose did not speak, and after a moment he said in a low voice,

“But it’s--it’s--awfully hard to live with a person you don’t get on
with. And it’s the sort of thing that goes on and on and on. There
isn’t any end; there isn’t any way out.”

Once more he stopped, this time clearing his throat. He cleared it
twice, and then said,

“I oughtn’t to say this. I oughtn’t to complain. I know I’m a chump and
a coward to talk this way to you, but--” he dropped his voice to a note
of low, inward communing, and said, “it’s so hopeless. I can’t see what
to do.”

He leaned forward and rested his forehead on the head of his cane,
hiding his face from her. The silence between them vibrated with
the huskiness of his voice, the man’s voice, the voice of power and
protection, roughened with the pain he was unused to and did not know
how to bear.

Rose sat looking at him, her soul wrung with sympathy. Her instinct was
to take the bowed head in her arms and clasp it to her bosom, not as a
woman in love, but as a woman torn by pity for a suffering she could
not alleviate. She made no movement, however, but kept both hands deep
in her pockets, as she said,

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t talk this way to me. I think I’m the one
person in the world that you ought to speak to about it.”

“I can’t talk to anybody else, not to any friend, not to my own mother.
It’s my affair. No one else had any responsibility in it. I brought
it on myself and I’ve got to stand by it myself. But you--you’re
different.”

He drew himself up, and, staring out into the great wash of sun and air
before him, went on in a louder voice, as if taking a new start.

“I was thinking last night about it, looking it in the face. The
dark’s the best time for that, you seem to see things clearer, more
truthfully. And I came to the conclusion it would be better if I ended
it. I didn’t see that I had any obligation to go on martyrizing myself
for ever. I didn’t see that anybody was benefiting by it. I thought
we’d be happier and make something better of our lives if we were
apart, in different houses, in different towns.”

“Does she want to leave you?”

The question seemed to touch a nerve that startled and then stiffened
him. He answered it with his head turned half toward her, the eyebrows
lifted, a combative note in his voice:

“I don’t know whether she does or not.” He stopped and then said, with
his face flushing, “No, I don’t think she does.”

“How can you leave her then?”

“Well, I can--” he turned on her almost angrily and met her clear eyes.
“Oh, I can’t go into particulars,” he said sharply, looking away again.
“It’s not a thing for you and me to discuss. Incompatibility is a
recognized ground of separation.”

He fell to striking the lump of clay again, and Rose said, as if
offering the remark with a sort of tentative timidity,

“You said just now you had nothing to complain of against her. It
doesn’t seem fair to leave a woman--a wife--just because she’s hard to
live with and you no longer like her.”

“Would you,” he said with a manner so full of irritated disagreement as
to be almost hectoring, “advocate two people living on together in a
semblance of friendship, who are entirely uncongenial, rub each other
the wrong way so that the sight of one is unpleasant to the other?”

“Are you sure that’s the way she feels about you?”

He again looked away from her, and answered in a sullen tone, as though
against his will,

“I don’t know.”

They were silent for a space, and he went on.

“Doesn’t it strike you as wrong, cowardly, mean, for a man and woman
to tear their lives to pieces out of respect for what the world says
and thinks? Every semblance of love and mutual interest has gone from
our companionship. Isn’t it all wrong that we should make ourselves
miserable to preserve the outward forms of it? We’re just lying to the
world because we haven’t got the sand to tell the truth. You ask me if
my views on this matter are hers. I don’t know, that’s the truth.” A
memory of Berny’s futile and pathetic efforts to make friends with him
on his return swept over him and forced him to say, “Honestly, I don’t
think she wants to leave me. I think the situation doesn’t drive her
crazy the way it does me. I think she doesn’t mind it. I don’t know
why, but she doesn’t seem to. But surely, any woman living would rather
be free of a man she no longer cared for, than forced to live on in
a false relation with him, one irritating the other, the two of them
every day growing more antagonistic.”

“She would not want to be free if she loved him.”

“Loved him!” he ejaculated, with angry scorn. “She never loved me or
anybody else. Love is not in her. Oh, you don’t know! I thought last
night I’d offer her all I had, the flat, the furniture, my salary,
everything I could rake and scrape together, and then I’d tell her
I was going to leave her, that I couldn’t stand living that way any
longer. I was going to take a room somewhere and give her everything I
could. I was going to be as generous to her as I knew how. I’d not say
one word against her to anybody. That was what I thought I’d do last
night.”

“But this morning you think differently.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because those are not your real thoughts--they’re the dark,
exaggerated ones that come when a person lies awake at night. It’s as
if, because you couldn’t see your surroundings, you were in another
sort of world where the proportions are different. You couldn’t do that
to your wife. You couldn’t treat her that way. You say in many ways
she’s been a good wife. It isn’t she that’s stopped caring, or finds
her life with you disagreeable.”

“Then, am I to suffer this way for ever--see my life ruined for a fault
man after man commits and goes scott free?”

“Your life isn’t ruined. Things don’t last at such a pressure.
Something will change it. By and by, you’ll look back on this and
it’ll seem hundreds of miles away and you’ll wonder that you were so
discouraged and hopeless.”

“Yes,” he said bitterly, “maybe when I’m fifty. It’s a long time
between then and now, a long time to be patient.”

Manlike, he was wounded that the woman of his heart should not side
with him in everything, even against his own conscience. Had Rose been
something closer to him, a sister, a wife, this would have been one of
the occasions on which he would have found fault with her and accused
her of disloyalty.

“I thought you’d understand,” he said, “I thought you’d see how
impossible it is. You make me feel that I’m a whining coward who has
come yelping round like a kicked dog for sympathy.”

“I care so much that I do more than sympathize,” she said in a low
voice.

This time he did not answer, feeling ashamed at his petulance.

“With any one else it would be just sympathy,” she said, “but with you
there’s more than that. It’s because I care, that I expect more and
demand more. Other men can do the small, cowardly, mean things that
people do, and find excuses for, but not you. I could make excuses for
them too, but I must never have to make excuses for you. You’re better
than that, you’re yourself, and you do what’s true to yourself and
stand on that. You’ve got to do and be the best. Maybe it won’t be what
you want or what’s most comfortable, but that mustn’t matter to you.
If you’re not to be happy that mustn’t matter either. What pleases you
and me mustn’t matter if it’s not the thing for a man like you to do.
You can’t shirk your responsibilities. You can’t stick to something
you’ve done just while it’s pleasant and then, when it’s hard, throw
it up. Lots of people do that, thousands of them. Just as you said
now--hundreds of men do what you have done and go scott free. That’s
for them to do if they want to, but not for you. Let them drop down if
they want, that’s no reason why you should. Let them go on living any
way that’s agreeable to them, _you_ know what you ought to do and you
must do it. It doesn’t matter about them, or the world, or what anybody
says. The only thing that matters is that the thing you know in your
heart is the thing that’s true for you.”

“You expect too much of weak human nature,” he said.

“No,” she answered, “I don’t. I only expect what you can do.”

He turned and looked at her.

“Then I’m to live for the rest of my life with a wife I don’t care for,
separated from the woman I love? What is there in that to keep a man’s
heart alive?”

“The knowledge that we love each other. That’s a good deal, I think.”

It was the first time she had said in words that she loved him. There
was no trace of embarrassment or consciousness on her face; instead
she seemed singularly calm and steadfast, much less moved than he.
Her words shook him to the soul. He turned his eyes from her face and
grasping for her hand, clasped it, and pressed it to his heart, and to
his lips, then loosed it and rose to his feet, saying, as if to himself,

“Yes, that’s a good deal.”

There was silence between them for some minutes, neither moving, both
looking out at the hills and water. From the city below, sounds of
church bells came up, mellow and tranquil, ringing lazily and without
effort. Other sounds mingled with them, refined and made delicate by
distance. It was like being on an island floating in the air above the
town. Rose got up and shook the dust from her coat.

“The churches are coming out, it must be nearly one. It will be
lunch-time before I get home.”

He did not turn or answer, but stood with his hand on the metal rope
that protected the quarry’s ledge, looking down. Her eyes followed his,
and then brought up on the schooner bearing away on its long tack,
strained and careening in the breeze that, down there in the open, blew
fresh and strong from the great Pacific.

“It’s a schooner,” she said absently. “Where do you suppose it’s going?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere a long way off, I hope. My devils are sailing
away on it.”

They stood side by side, gazing down at it till she moved away with a
sudden “Good-by.”

“Good-by,” he answered, and stretched out his hand.

But she was already some feet in advance and had begun to move quickly.

“Good-by, Rose,” he cried after her, with something in his voice of the
wistful urgency in a child’s when it is left behind.

“Good-by,” she called over her shoulder without looking back. “Good-by.”

He followed her with his eyes till she disappeared round the bend of
the path, then turned back and again dropped his glance to the schooner.

He stood watching it till it passed out of sight beneath the shoulder
of the hill, straining and striving like a wild, free creature in its
forward rush for the sea.

CHAPTER XX

THE LITTLE SPIDER

Berny had been turning over in her mind the advantages of accepting the
money--had been letting herself dwell upon the delights of possible
possession--when at the Sunday dinner that afternoon Josh McCrae threw
her back into the state of incensed rejection with which she had
met the first offer. With his face wreathed in joyous grins, he had
apprised her of the fact that only an hour earlier, while walking on
Telegraph Hill, he had seen Dominick there talking with Miss Cannon.

A good deal of query followed Josh’s statement. There was quite an
outburst of animated interrogations rising from the curiosity the
Iversons felt concerning Bill Cannon’s daughter, and under cover
of it Berny controlled her face and managed to throw in a question
or two on her own account. There had been a minute--that one when
Josh’s statement had struck with a shocking unexpectedness on her
consciousness--when she had felt and looked her wrath and amaze.
Then she had gripped her glass and drunk some water and, swallowing
gulpingly, had heard her sister’s rapid fire of questions, and Josh,
proud to have imparted such interesting information, answering
importantly. Putting down her glass, she said quite naturally,

“Where did you say you saw them--near the quarry?”

“Just by the edge, talking together. I was going to walk along and join
them, and then I thought they looked so sort of sociable, I’d better
not butt in. Dominick got to know her real well up in the Sierra,
didn’t he?”

“Yes, of course,” she said hurriedly. “They grew to be quite friends.
They must have met by accident on the hill. Dominick’s always walking
in those queer, deserted places.”

“You haven’t got acquainted with her yet, have you?” said the simple
Josh, whose touch was not of the lightest. “It would be a sort of grind
on the Ryans if you get really solid with her.”

“Oh, I can know her whenever I want,” Berny answered airily, above a
discomfort of growing revelation that was almost as sharp as a pain.
“Dominick’s several times asked me if I wanted to meet her, but it
always was at times when I’d other things to do. We’re going to ask her
to the flat to tea some time.”

On ordinary occasions, Berny would never have gone to this length of
romantic invention, for she was a judicious liar and believed, with
the sage, that a lie was too valuable a thing to waste. But just now
she was too upset, too preyed upon by shock and suspicion, to exercise
an artistic restraint, and she lied recklessly, unmindful of a future
when her listeners would expect to see her drafts on the bank of truth
cashed.

She was quiet for the rest of the afternoon, but it was not till she
had reached her own home, silent in its untenanted desertion, that she
had an opportunity to turn the full vigor of her mind on what she had
heard.

She had been jealous of Rose since that fatal Sunday when she had
discovered why Dominick was changed. It was not the jealousy of
disprized love, it was not the jealousy of thwarted passion. It
was a subtle compound of many ingredients, the main one a sense of
bursting indignation that two people--one of them a possession of
her own--should dare to seek for happiness where she had found only
dullness and disappointment. She had an enraging premonition that Rose
would probably succeed where she had failed. It made her not only
jealous of Rose, it made her hate her.

Josh’s words increased this, and caused her suspicions, which, if not
sleeping, had of late been dormant, to wake into excited activity.
Dominick’s lonely Sunday walks she now saw shared by the girl
who was trying to buy his freedom. Incidents that before she had
taken at their face value now were suddenly fraught with disturbing
significance. Why did Dominick go out so often in the evening? Since
the moonlight night, he had been out twice, once not coming back till
eleven. The confirmation of sight could hardly have made her more
confident that he must spend these stolen hours with Rose Cannon in
the palatial residence on Nob Hill. And it was not the most soothing
feature in the case that Berny should picture them in one of the
artistically-furnished parlors of which she had heard so much and seen
nothing but the linings of the window curtains. Here, amid glories of
upholstery, from the sight of which she was for ever debarred, Rose and
Dominick talked of the time when he should be free. Berny, like the
tiger lashing itself to fury with its own tail, thought of what they
said, till she became sure her imaginings were facts; and the more she
imagined, the more enraged and convinced she became.

She put from her mind all intention of ever taking the money. She
wanted it desperately, terribly; she wanted it so much that when she
thought of it it made her feel sick, but the joys of its possession
were at the unrealizable distance of dreams, while the fact of her
husband’s being enticed away by another woman was a thing of close,
immediate concern, a matter of the moment, as if some one were trying
to pick her pocket. As an appurtenance of hers, Dominick might not have
been a source of happiness, but that was no reason why he should be a
source of happiness to some one else.

Berny did not argue with any such compact clearness. She was less
lucid, less defined and formulated in her ideas and desires than she
had been when Bill Cannon made the first offer. Anger had thickened and
obscured her clarity of vision. Suspicions, harbored and stimulated
by a mind which wished for confirmation of the most extravagant, had
destroyed the firm and well-outlined conception of what she wanted and
was willing to fight for. In fact, she had passed the stage in the
controversy when she was formidable because she stood with the strength
of sincerity in her position, her demands, and refusals. Now the
integrity of her defiance was gone. She wanted the money. She wanted
to take it, and her refusal to do so was false to herself and to her
standards.

She knew that the interview for which Bill Cannon had asked was for a
last, deciding conversation. He was to make his final offer. It was a
moment of torture to her when she wondered what it would be, and her
mind hovered in distracted temptation over the certain two hundred
thousand dollars and the possible quarter of a million. It was then
that she whipped up her wrath, obscured for the moment by the mounting
dizziness of cupidity, and thought of Rose and Dominick in the Japanese
room, or the Turkish room, or the Persian room, into which she had
never been admitted. The thought that they were making love received a
last, corrosive bitterness from the fact that Berny could not see the
beautiful and expensive surroundings of these sentimental passages.

She was in this state of feverish distractedness when she went to
Bill Cannon’s office. She had chosen the last of the three days he
had specified in his note, and had left the flat at the time he had
mentioned as the latest hour at which he would be there. She had
chosen the last day as a manner of indicating her languid interest in
the matter to be discussed, and had also decided to be about fifteen
minutes late, as it looked more indifferent, less eager. Bill Cannon
would never know that she was dressed and ready half an hour before
she started, and had lounged about the flat, watching the clocks, and
starting at every unrecognized sound.

She was received with a flattering deference. As her footstep sounded
on the sill of the outer office, a face was advanced toward one of the
circular openings in the long partition, immediately disappeared, and
then a door was thrown back to admit to her presence a good-looking,
well-dressed young man. His manner was all deferential politeness.
A murmur of her name, just touched with the delicately-questioning
quality imparted by the faintest of rising inflections, accompanied
his welcoming bow. Mr. Cannon was expecting her in the private office.
Special instructions had been left that she should be at once admitted.
Would she be kind enough to step this way?

Berny followed him down the long strip of outer office where it flanked
the partition in which the regularly-recurring holes afforded glimpses
of smooth bent heads. She walked lightly, and had an alert, wary air
as though it might be a good thing to be prepared for an ambush. She
had been rehearsing her part of the interview for days; and like
other artists, now that the moment of her appearance was at hand,
felt extremely nervous, and had a sense of girding herself up against
unforeseen movements on the part of the foe.

Nothing, however, could have been more disarmingly friendly than the
old man’s greeting. As the door opened and the clerk pronounced her
name, he rose from his seat and welcomed her in a manner which was a
subtle compound of simple cordiality and a sort of masonic, unexpressed
understanding, as between two comrades bound together by a common
interest. Sitting opposite him in one of the big leather chairs, she
could not but feel some of her resentment melting away, and her
stiffly-antagonistic pose losing something of its rigidity as he smiled
indulgently on her, asking about herself, about Dominick, finally about
her sisters, with whose names and positions he appeared flatteringly
familiar.

Berny answered him cautiously. She made a grip at her receding anger,
conscious that she needed all her sense of wrong to hold her own
against this crafty enemy. Even when he told her he had heard with
admiration and wonder of Hannah’s fine record in the primary school
department, her smile was guarded, her answer one of brief and watchful
reserve. She wished he would get to the point of the interview. Her
mind could not comfortably contain two subjects at once, and it was
crammed and running over with the all-important one of the money. Her
eyes, fixed on him, did not stray to the furnishings of the room or the
long windows that reached to the ceiling and through the dimmed panes
of which men on the other side of the alley stood looking curiously
down on her.

“Well,” he said, when he had disposed of Hannah’s worthiness and even
celebrated the merits of Josh in a sentence of appreciation, “it’s
something to have such a good sterling set of relations. They’re
what make the ‘good families’ in our new West out here. And they’re
beginning to understand that in Europe. When they see your people in
Paris, they’ll recognize them as the right kind of Americans. The
French ain’t as effete as you’d think from what you hear. They know
the real from the imitation every time. They’ve had their fill of Coal
Oil Johnnys and spectacular spenders. What they’re looking for is the
strong man and woman who have carved out their own path.”

Berny’s eyes snapped into an even closer concentration of attention.

“Maybe that’s so,” she said, “but I don’t see when my sisters are ever
going to get to Paris.”

“They’ll go over to see you,” he answered. “I guess I could manage now
and then to get ’em passes across the continent.”

He rested one elbow on the desk against which he was sitting, and with
his hand caressing his short, stubby beard, he looked at Berny with
eyes of twinkling good nature.

“Come to think of it,” he added, “I guess I could manage the
transportation across the ocean, too. It oughtn’t to cost ’em, all
told, more’n fifty dollars. It seems hard luck that Miss Hannah, after
a lifetime of work, shouldn’t see Paris, and----”

“What makes you think I’m going to be there?” said Berny sharply. She
found any deviation from the subject in hand extremely irritating, and
her manner and voice showed it.

“Oh, of course you are,” he said, with a little impatient, deprecating
jerk of his head. “You can’t be going to persist in a policy that’s
simply cutting your own throat.”

“I rather fancy I am,” she answered in a cool, hard tone. To lend
emphasis to her words, she unbent from her upright attitude and leaned
against the chair-back in a sudden assumption of indifference. Her
eyes, meeting his, were full of languid insolence.

“I don’t feel that I’ll go to Paris at all,” she said. “I think little
old San Francisco’s good enough for me.”

He looked away from her at the papers on the desk, eyed them for a
thoughtful moment, and then said,

“I didn’t think you were as short-sighted as that. I’ll tell you fair
and square that up to this I’ve thought you were a pretty smart woman.”

“Well, I guess from this on, you’ll have to put me down a fool.”

She laughed, a short, sardonic laugh, and her adversary smiled politely
in somewhat absent response. With his eyes still on the papers, he said,

“No, no--I can’t agree to that. Short-sighted is the word. You’re not
looking into the future, you’re not calculating on your own powers of
endurance. How much longer do you think you can stand this battle with
your husband and the Ryans?”

In the dead watches of the night, Berny had asked herself this
question, and found no answer to it. She tried to laugh again, but it
was harder and less mirthful than before.

The old man leaned forward, shaking an admonitory forefinger at her.

“Don’t you know, young woman, that’s a pretty wearing situation?
Don’t you know to live in a state of perpetual strife will break down
the strongest spirit? The dropping of water will wear away a stone.
You _can’t_ stand the state of siege and warfare you’ve got yourself
into much longer. Your rage is carrying you along now. You’re mad as
a whole hive full of hornets and the heat of it’s keeping you going,
furnishing fuel to the engines, so to speak. But you can’t keep up such
a clip. You’ll break to pieces and you’ll break suddenly. Then what’ll
happen? Why, the Ryans’ll come with a big broom and sweep the pieces
out. They won’t leave one little scrap behind. That flat on Sacramento
Street will be swept as clean of you as if you’d never had your dresses
hanging in the cupboard or your toothbrush on the wash-stand. Old
Delia’s a great housekeeper. When she gets going with a broom there’s
not a speck escapes her.”

His narrowed eyes looked into hers with that boring steadiness that
she was beginning to know. He was not smiling now, rather he looked a
man who knew he was talking of very momentous things and wanted his
companion to know it too.

“That’s all talk,” Berny snapped. “If that’s all you’ve got to say to
me, I’d better be going.”

“No, no,” he stretched out an opened hand and with it made a
down-pressing gesture that was full of command. “Don’t move yet. These
are just suggestions of mine, suggestions I was making for your good.
Of course, if you don’t care to follow them, it’s your affair, not
mine. I’ve done my duty, and, after all, that’s what concerns me most.
What I asked you to come here for to-day was to talk about this matter,
to talk further, to thresh it out some more. I’ve seen Mrs. Ryan since
our last meeting.”

He paused, and Berny sat upright, her eyes on him in a fixity of
listening that was almost a glare. She was tremulously anxious and yet
afraid to hear the coming words.

“What did she say?” she asked with the same irritation she had shown
before.

“She doubles her offer to you. She’ll give you two hundred thousand
dollars to leave her son.”

“Well, I won’t,” said Berny, drawing herself to the edge of the chair.
“She can keep her two hundred thousand dollars.”

“That two hundred thousand dollars, well invested, would give an income
of from twelve to fifteen thousand a year. On that, in Paris, you’d be
a rich woman.”

“I guess I’ll stay a poor one in San Francisco.”

He eyed her ponderingly over the hand that stroked his beard.

“I wonder,” he said slowly, “what’s making you act like this? You stump
me. Here you are, poor, treated like dirt, ostracized as if you were a
leper, with the most powerful family in California your open enemy, and
you won’t take a fortune that’s offered you without a condition, and go
to a place where you’d be honored and courted and could make yourself
anything you’d like. I can’t make it out. You beat me.”

Berny was flattered. Even through the almost sickening sense of longing
that the thought of the lost two hundred thousand dollars created in
her, she was conscious of the gratified conceit of the woman who is
successfully mysterious.

“Don’t bother your head about it,” she said as lightly as she could.
“Think I’m crazy, if that makes it any easier for you.”

“I can’t think _that_,” he answered, conveying in the accented
monosyllable his inability to think lightly of her mental equipment.
“There’s something underneath it all I don’t know. You’ve not been
quite open, quite as open as I think _my_ frankness deserves. But, of
course, a man can’t force a lady’s confidence. If you don’t want to
give me yours, I’ve got to be content without it.”

Berny emitted a vague sound of agreement. She once more drew herself to
the edge of the chair, taking the renewed, arranging grip of departure
on her purse. She wanted to go.

“Well,” she said with the cheerful lengthening of the word, which is
the precursor of the preliminary sentence of farewell, “I guess----”
but he stopped her again with the outspread, authoritative hand.

“Don’t be in such a hurry; I’ve not finished yet. There’s more to be
said, and it’s worth losing a few moments over.” His face was so much
more commanding than his words that she made no attempt to move, though
each minute deepened her desire to leave.

“This is just between you and me,” he went on slowly, his voice
lowered, dropped to the key of confidences. “It’s a little matter
between us that no one else needs to know anything about. My part of
it just comes from the fact that I want to do a good turn not only to
Delia Ryan, but to you. I’m sorry for you, young woman, and I think
you’re up against it. Now, here’s my proposition; I’ll add something
to that money myself. I’ll give you another hundred thousand. I’ll put
it with Mrs. Ryan’s pile, and it’ll run your fortune up well past a
quarter of a million.”

His eyes fixed upon her were hard in his benevolently-smiling face.

“What do you think about it?” he asked, as she was speechless. “Three
hundred thousand dollars in a lump’s a goodish bit of money.”

Berny felt dizzy. As her rancor had seemed slipping from her in the
earlier part of the interview, now she felt as if her resolution was
suddenly melting. She was confused between the strangling up-rush of
greed and the passion that once again rose in her against the old man,
who showed such a bold determination to sweep her from his daughter’s
path. She was no longer mistress of herself. Inward excitement, the
unfamiliar struggle with temptation, had upset and unnerved her. But
she did not yet know it, and she answered slowly, with a sort of
sullenness, that might have passed as the heaviness of indifference.

“What do you want to give it to me for?”

“Because I’m sorry for you. Because I want you to get out of this hole
you’re in, and go and make something of your life.”

Before she knew it, Berny said low, but with a biting incisiveness,

“Oh, you liar!”

Cannon was surprised. He looked for a staring moment at her pale face,
stiff over its strained muscles, and said in a tone of cheerful amaze,

“Now, what do you mean by that?”

“Just what I say,” she said. “You’re a liar and you know it. Every word
you’ve said to me’s been a lie. Why, Mrs. Ryan’s better than you. She
don’t come covering me with oily stories about wanting me to be happy.
You think that I don’t know why you’re offering me this money. Well,
old man, I do. You want to get my husband for your own daughter, Rose
Cannon.”

It was Cannon’s turn to be speechless. He had not for years received so
unexpected and violent a blow. He sat in the same attitude, not moving
or uttering a sound, and looking at Berny with a pair of eyes that each
second grew colder and more steely. Berny, drawn to the edge of her
chair, leaned toward him, speaking with the stinging quickness of an
angry wasp.

“You thought I didn’t know it. Well, I do. I know the whole thing. I’ve
just sat back and watched you two old thieves thinking everything was
hidden, like a pair of ostriches. And you being so free with your glad
hand and being sorry for me and wanting me to make the most of my life!
You said I was a smart woman. Well, I’m evidently a lot smarter than
you thought I was.”

“So it seems,” he said. “Smart enough to do some very neat inventing.”

“Inventing!” she cried, “I wish there was some inventing about it. _I_
don’t take any pleasure in thinking that another woman’s trying to buy
my husband.”

He dropped his hand from his chin, and moved a little impatiently in
his chair.

“Come,” he said with sudden authority, “I can’t waste my time this
way. Are you going to take the money or not?”

His manner, as if by magic, had changed. Every suggestion of deference,
or consideration had gone from it. The respect, with which he had been
careful to treat her, had suddenly vanished; there was something subtly
brutal in his tone, in the very movement of impatience he made. It was
as if the real man were at last showing himself.

She uttered a furious phrase of denial and sprang to her feet. His
manner was the last unbearable touch on the sore helplessness of her
futile rage. His chair had been standing sidewise toward the desk, and
now, with a jerk of his body, he swept it back into position.

“All right, then go!” he said, without looking at her.

Berny had intended going, rushing out of the place. Now at these words
of dismissal, flung at her as a bone to a dog, she suddenly was rooted
to the spot. All her reason, balance, and common sense were swept away
in the flood of her quivering, blind anger.

“I will _not_ go,” she cried, at the pitch of folly, “I will _not_ till
I’m good and ready. Who are you to order me out? Who are you to tell
me what I’m to do? A man who tries to buy another woman’s husband for
his daughter, and then pretends he and she are such a sweet, innocent
pair! Wouldn’t people be surprised if they knew that Miss Rose Cannon
wanted my husband, was getting her father to make bids for him, and was
meeting him every Sunday!”

“Stop!” thundered the old man, bringing his open hand down on the table
with a bang.

The tone of his voice was bull-like, and the blow of his hand so
violent that the fittings of the heavy desk rattled. Berny, though not
frightened, was startled and drew back. For a moment she thought he
was going to rise and forcibly put her out. Then she looked sidewise
and saw two men at a window on the other side of the alley gazing
interestedly down at them. Cannon was conscious of the observers at the
same time. He restrained the impulse to spring to his feet which had
made her shrink, and rose slowly.

“Look here,” he said quietly, “you don’t seem to understand that this
interview’s at an end.”

“No,” she said with a stubborn shake of her head, “I’m not through yet.”

“There’s nothing more for you to say unless you want to accept Mrs.
Ryan’s offer.”

“Yes, there is, there’s lots more for me to say, but since you seem in
such a hurry to get rid of me, I’ll have to wait and say it to your
daughter next time I see her.”

She paused, daring and impudently bold. She was a woman of remarkable
physical courage, and the old man’s aspect, which might have affrighted
a less audacious spirit, had no terrors for her. He stood by the desk,
his hands on his hips, the fingers turned toward his back, and his
face, the chin drawn in, fronting her with a glowering fixity of menace.

“When do _you_ ever see my daughter?” he asked, the accented pronoun
pregnant with scorn.

“Oh, on the streets, in the stores, walking round town. I often meet
her. I’ve wanted several times lately to stop and tell her what I think
of the way she’s acting. She doesn’t think that I know all about what
she’s doing. She’ll be surprised when she hears that I do and what _I_
think about it.”

She faced the old man’s motionless visage with an almost debonair
audacity.

“You can offer me money,” she said, “but you can’t muzzle me.”

Cannon, without changing his attitude, replied,

“I can do a good many things you don’t think of. Take my advice, young
woman, and muzzle yourself. Don’t leave it for me to do. I’ve had
nothing but friendly feelings for you up to this, and I’d hate to have
you see what a damned ugly enemy I can be.”

He gave his head a nod, dropped his hands and turned from her. As he
moved, a small spider that had been hidden among the papers on the
desk started to scuttle over the yellow blotting pad. It caught his eye.

“Look there,” he said, indicating it, “that little spider thinks it can
have things all its own way on my desk. But--” and he laid his great
thumb on it, crushing it to a black smudge--“that’s what happens to it.
Now, Mrs. Dominick Ryan, that’s not the first little spider that’s come
to grief trying to run amuck through my affairs. And it don’t seem, as
things look now, as if it was going to be the last. It’s not a healthy
thing for little spiders to think they can run Bill Cannon.”

He rubbed his soiled thumb on the edge of the blotter, and Berny looked
at the stain that had been the spider.

“Best not butt into places where little spiders are not wanted,” he
said, and then looking at her sidewise, “Well, is it good-by?”

Something in the complete obliteration of the adventurous insect--or
the words that had accompanied its execution--chilled Berny. She
was not frightened, nor less determined, but the first ardor of her
defiance was as though a cold breath had blown on it. Still she did not
intend to leave, ignominiously withdrawing before defeat. She wanted to
say more, rub it in that she knew the reason for his action, and let
him see still plainer in how slight esteem she held his daughter. But
the interlude of the spider had been such a check that she did not know
exactly how to begin again. She stood for a moment uncertain, and he
said,

“Will you take the money?”

“No!” she said loudly. “Don’t ask me that again!”

“All right,” he answered quietly, “that ends our business. Do you know
your way out, or shall I ring for Granger to see you to the door?”

There was a bell on the desk and he extended his hand toward it. She
guessed that Granger was the polished and deferential young man who had
greeted her on her entrance, and the ignominy of being escorted out
under a cloud--literally shown the door by the same youth, probably no
longer polished or deferential, was more than she could bear.

“I’m going,” she said fiercely. “Don’t dare to touch that bell! But
just be sure of one thing, Bill Cannon, this is not the last you or
your daughter will hear of me.”

He bowed with an air of irony that was so slight it might not have been
noticed.

“Any messages from you will be received by me with pleasure. But when
it comes to other things”--her hand was on the door-knob but she had to
listen--“remember the little spider.”

“Rats!” she said furiously, and tore open the door.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Ryan,” he cried. “Good afternoon!”

She did not answer, but even in her excitement was conscious that the
clerks behind the partition might be listening, and so shut the door,
not with the bang her state of mind made natural, but with a soft,
ladylike gentleness. Then she walked, with a tapping of little heels
and a rustle of silken linings, down the long, narrow office and out
into the street.

CHAPTER XXI

THE LION’S WHELP

It was late, almost dark, that evening when Cannon left his office. He
had sat on after Berny’s departure, sunk in a reverie, which was not
compounded of those gentle thoughts that are usually associated with
that state of being. In the past, when he had been struggling up from
poverty, he had had his fierce fights, and his mortifying defeats. He
had risen from them tougher and more combative than ever, filled with
the lust of vengeance which in the course of time was assuaged. But of
late years few (and these antagonists of his own measure) had had the
temerity to cross swords with him.

Now he had been defied in his stronghold and by the sort of person
that he looked upon as a worm in the path--the kind of worm a man did
not even tread on but simply brushed aside. It was incredible in its
audacity, its bold insolence. As he walked down Montgomery Street
to the car, he pondered on Berny, wonderingly and with a sort of
begrudging, astonished admission of a courage that he could not but
admire. What a nerve the woman had to dare to threaten him! To threaten
Bill Cannon! There was something wild, uncanny, preposterous in it
that was almost sublime, had the large, elemental quality of a lofty
indifference to danger, that seemed to belong more to heroic legend
than to modern life in the West. But his admiration was tempered by his
alarm at the thought of his daughter’s learning of the sordid intrigue.
The bare idea of Rose’s censuring him--and he knew she would if she
ever learned of his part in the plot--was enough to make him decide
that some particularly heavy punishment would be meted out to the woman
who dared shatter the only ideal of him known to exist.

But he did not for a moment believe that Berny would tell. She was
angry and was talking blusteringly, as angry women talk. He did not
know why she was in such a state of ill temper, but at this stage of
the proceedings he did not bother his head about that. For the third
time she had refused the money--that was the only thing that concerned
him. If she refused three hundred thousand dollars, she would refuse
anything. It was as much to her as a million would be. She would know
it was as large a sum as she could expect. If that would not buy her,
nothing would. Her threats were nonsense, bluff and bluster; the
important thing was, she had determined, for some reason of her own,
to stick to Dominick Ryan.

How she had found out about Rose he could not imagine, only it was
very enraging that she should have done so. It was the last, and most
detestable fact in the whole disagreeable business. Brooding on the
subject as the car swept him up the hill, he decided that she had
guessed it. She was as sharp as a needle and she had put this and that
together, the way women do, and had guessed the rest. Pure ugliness
might be actuating her present line of conduct, and that state of mind
was rarely of long duration. The jealous passions of women soon burn
themselves out. Those shallow vessels could not long contain feelings
of such a fiery potency, especially when harboring the feeling was so
inconvenient and expensive. No one knew better than Berny how well
worth her while it would be to cultivate a sweet reasonableness. This
was the only gleam of hope left. Her power to endure the present
conditions of her life might give out.

That was all the consolation the Bonanza King could extract from the
situation, and it did not greatly mitigate his uneasiness and bad
humor. This latter condition of being had other matter to feed it,
matter which in the interview of the afternoon had been pushed into
the background, but which now once again obtruded itself upon his
attention. It was the first of May. By the morning’s mail he had
received a letter from Gene announcing, with the playful blitheness
which marked all the young man’s allusions to the transfer of the Santa
Trinidad Ranch, that the year of probation was up and he would shortly
arrive in San Francisco to claim his own.

Gene’s father had read this missive in grim-visaged silence. The
sense of self-approval that he might have experienced was not his; he
only felt that he had been “done”. Two months before, thinking that
the ranch was slipping too easily from his grasp, that he was making
too little effort to retain his own, he had hired a detective to go
to San Luis Obispo and watch the career of Gene for signs of his old
waywardness. On the thirtieth of April the man had reported that Gene’s
course had been marked by an abstinence as genuine and complete as the
most exacting father could wish.

The old man crumpled up the letter and threw it into the waste-paper
basket, muttering balefully, like a cloud charged with thunder. It
was not that he wished Gene to drink again; it was that he hated most
bitterly giving him the finest piece of ranch land in California. It
was not that he did not wish his son to be prosperous and respectable,
only he wished that this happy condition had been achieved at some one
else’s expense.

His mood was unusually black when he entered the house. The servant,
who came forward to help him off with his coat, knew it the moment
he saw the heavy, scowling face. The piece of intelligence the man
had to convey--that Mr. Gene Cannon had arrived half an hour earlier
from San Luis Obispo--was not calculated to abate the Bonanza King’s
irritation. He received it with the expressionless grunt he reserved
for displeasing information, and, without further comment or inquiry,
went up the stairs to his own rooms. From these he did not emerge till
dinner was announced, when he greeted Gene with a bovine glance of
inspection and the briefest sentence of welcome.

Gene, however, was not at all abashed by any lack of cordiality. At
the best of times, he was not a sensitive person, and as this had been
his portion since his early manhood, he was now used to it. Moreover,
to-night he was in high spirits. In his year of exile he had learned
to love the outdoor life for which he was fitted, and had conceived
a passionate desire to own the splendid tract of land for which he
felt the love and pride of a proprietor. Now it was his without let or
hindrance. He was the owner of a principality, the lord of thousands
of teeming acres, watered by crystal streams and shadowed by ancient
oaks. He glowed with the joy of possession, and if anything was needed
to complete his father’s discomfiture, it was Gene’s naïve and bridling
triumph.

Always a loquacious person, a stream of talk flowed from him to which
the old man offered no interruption, and in which even Rose found it
difficult to insert an occasional, arresting question. Gene had any
number of new plans. His head was fuller than it had been for years
with ideas for the improvement of his land, the development of his
irrigating system, the planting of new orchards, the erecting of
necessary buildings. He used the possessive pronoun continually, rolled
it unctuously on his tongue with a new, rich delight. He directed most
of his conversation toward Rose, but every now and then he turned
on his father, enthusiastically dilating on a projected improvement
certain to increase the ranch’s revenues by many thousands per annum.

The old man listened without speaking, his chin on his collar, his eyes
fixed in a wide, dull stare on his happy boy. At intervals--Gene almost
clamoring for a response--he emitted one of those inarticulate sounds
with which it was his custom to greet information that he did not like
or the exact purport of which he did not fathom.

The only thing which would have sweetened his mood would have been a
conversation, peaceful and uninterrupted, with his daughter. He had not
seen as much of her as usual during the last few days, as she had been
confined to her room with a cold. This was the first evening she had
been at dinner for four days, and the old man had looked forward to
one of their slow, enjoyable meals together, with a long, comfortable
chat over the black coffee, as was their wont. Even if Rose did not
know of his distractions and schemes, she soothed him. _She_ never,
like this chattering jackass from San Luis Obispo--and he looked
sulkily at his son--rubbed him the wrong way. And he had hardly had a
word with her, hardly, in fact, had heard her voice during the whole
meal.

When it was over, and she rose from her seat, he asked her to play on
the piano in the sitting-room near by.

“Give us some music,” he said, “I want to hear something pleasant. The
whole day I’ve been listening to jays and knaves and fools, and I want
to hear something different that doesn’t make me mad or make me sick.”

Rose left the room and presently the sound of her playing came softly
from the sitting-room across the hall. Neither of the men spoke for a
space, and the old man, casting a side look at Gene, was maliciously
gratified by the thought that his son was offended. But he had reckoned
without his offspring’s amiable imperviousness to the brutalities
of the parental manner, wrought to-night to a condition of absolute
invulnerability by the young man’s unclouded gladness. Gene, his eyes
on his coffee-cup, was in anything but a state of insulted sullenness,
as was proved by his presently looking up and remarking, with innocent
brightness,

“You didn’t expect I’d get it, did you, Pop? I knew from the start you
were sure I’d slip up before the year was out.”

His father eyed him without replying, a blank, stony stare, before
which Gene did not show the slightest sign of quailing. He went on
jubilantly in his high, throaty voice.

“I wasn’t dead certain of it myself at the start. You know it isn’t
the easiest thing in the world to break off drinking habits that have
had you as long as mine had me. But when I went down there and lived
right on the land, when I used to get up in the morning and look out
of my window across the hills and see the cattle dotted all over them,
and the oaks thick and big and bushy, and feel the air just as soft as
silk, I said to myself, ‘By gum, Gene Cannon, you’ve got to have this
ranch if you die for want of whisky.’”

“Well, you’ve got it!” said his father in a loud, pugnacious tone.
“You’ve got it, haven’t you?”

“Well, I guess I have,” said Gene, his triumph tempered by an air of
modesty, “and I guess I earned it fair. I stuck to the bargain and
there were times when I can tell you it was a struggle. I never once
slipped up. If you don’t believe my word, I can bring you men from down
there that know me well, and they’ll testify that I speak the truth.”

The father raised his eyebrows but said nothing. If there was anything
further needed to show him what a complete, consistent fool his son
was, it was the young man’s evident impression that the Santa Trinidad
Ranch had been relinquished upon his own unsupported testimony. That
was just like Gene. For weeks the detective had trotted at his heels,
an entirely unsuspected shadow.

“It was Rose who really put me up to it,” he went on. “She’d say to me
I could do it, I only had to try; any one could do anything they really
made their minds up to. If you said you couldn’t do a thing, why, then
you couldn’t, but if you said you could, you got your mind into that
attitude, and it wasn’t hard any more. And she was right. When I got
my mind round to looking at it that way, it came quite easily. Rose’s
always right.”

This, the first statement of his son’s to which the Bonanza King could
subscribe, did not placate the old man. On the contrary, it still
further inflamed his sense of angry grievance. It was bad enough to
have Gene stealing the ranch--that’s all it was--but to have him
chuckling and grinning over it, when that very day Rose’s chances of
happiness had come to a deadlock, was just what you might expect of
such a fool. Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth spoke, growled
rather,

“I was just waiting to hear you give some credit to Rose. Here you are
talking all through dinner like a megaphone all about yourself and your
affairs, and not giving a thought to your sister.”

Gene stared at his parent in ingenuous, concerned amaze.

“Not a thought to Rose?” he repeated, in a high, surprised key. “Oh,
yes I have--lots of thoughts. I was just telling you now about how she
braced me up.”

“Braced you up! Of course she braced you up. Hasn’t she been doing it
all her life? But you can’t think of anything but yourself. Don’t you
ever look at your sister and think about her and how _she_ feels?”

“Yes,” said Gene, giving his head a confirmatory wag, “I do, I do
whenever I’m in town. You see, being away on the ranch so much----”

The old man leaned back in his chair, emitting a loud, interrupting
groan. Gene stared at him with a dawning uneasiness. He had begun
to grasp the fact that his father was in a state of mind which had
complications that included more than the old familiar contemptuousness
of his every-day mood. He decided to advance more gingerly, for even
Gene’s imperviousness to snubs did not make him proof against the
Bonanza King’s roused displeasure.

“I’m sure,” he said mildly, “no man ever had a more unselfish sister
than I have, or was more devoted to her than I am.”

“Then, why the hell,” said the old man, “do you go on talking about
yourself and your damned concerns, bothering the life out of her when
she’s got troubles of her own?”

The look of foolish amaze on Gene’s face deepened into one of genuine
concern.

“Troubles of her own? What troubles has she got?”

One of the most aggravating features of the situation was that Gene
could not be told why Rose was troubled and his father was cross. While
they were bent under unaccustomed cares, he went happy and free, with
nothing to think of except the ranch he had stolen. If he had been
any other kind of person, he could have been taken into the secret
and might have helped them out. The Bonanza King had thought of ways
in which a young and intelligent man could have been of assistance in
inducing Mrs. Dominick Ryan to listen to reason. Gene, if he’d had any
ability, if he’d had the brains of a mouse, could have made love to
her, induced her to run away with him, and then they could have given
her the money and got rid of her without any more fuss. He could have
been of incalculable value and here he was, perfectly useless, too much
of a fool even to be _told_ the position, moved by the mere gross
weight of his stupidity into an outside place of tranquil ignorance.
That his father could not force him to be a sharer in the family
troubles made the old man still more angry, and it was a poignant
pain to him that the only way he could show his rage was by roaring
wrathfully.

“Yes, Rose has troubles. Of course she has, but what have they got to
do with you, who don’t care about a thing but your damned ranch?”

“What’s the matter with her?” said Gene, roused into active uneasiness
and quite oblivious to his father’s insults. “I didn’t know anything
was wrong. She didn’t tell me.”

“No, and she won’t,” said the father. “And let me tell you if I catch
you asking her any questions or giving her any hints that I’ve said
anything to you, you can stay on your ranch and never come back into
this house. I won’t have Rose worried and upset by every fool that
comes along.”

“Well, but how am I to find out what’s the matter with her,” said the
altogether baffled brother, “if you won’t tell me, and I’m not to ask
her?”

“You needn’t find out. It’s her affair--hers and mine. Don’t you go
poking your nose in and trying to find out. I don’t want you butting
into Rose’s affairs.”

“Just now,” said Gene in an aggrieved tone, “you said I didn’t take
any interest in anything but my ranch. Now, when I want to take an
interest in Rose, you tell me not to butt in. I love my sister more
than most men, and I’d like to know if anything’s wrong with her.”

“She’s got a cold,” said Cannon.

He spoke sharply and looked at Gene with a sidelong eye full of
observant malice. The young man gazed back at him, confused, for
a moment half inclined to laugh, thinking his father, in a sudden
unaccustomed playfulness, was joking with him.

“Well, if it’s only a cold,” he stammered, “it’s nothing to tear up the
ground about. I thought it was something serious, that Rose was unhappy
about something. But a cold----”

He was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Rose herself, her hand
drawing back the portière that veiled the doorway. She, who knew her
father so well, had decided that in his present mood it was better to
curtail his after-dinner chat with Gene. Her quick eye took in their
two faces, and she felt that her brother had probably had a trying
half-hour.

“I’m tired of making music,” she said. “I’ve played my whole
repertoire. Now I want Gene to come back into the sitting-room with me
and tell me about the linen and the furniture I’m to send down to the
ranch. We’ll talk it over to-night and make a list and arrange for the
packing to-morrow.”

The young man rose, very glad to go with her, still uneasy and puzzled.

“How’s your cold, Rosey?” he said. “I didn’t know it was bad or I’d
have asked more about it.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” she said carelessly. “It was never really bad,
but I stayed in my room for a few days to be safe.” Her eye caught
her father’s, half-shut and full of brooding scorn, shot through with
a gleam of sardonic humor. Gene’s half-hour must have been even more
trying than she had at first thought.

“Come along, Gene,” she said, holding out her hand to him, “we’ll leave
the old man to his dreams. I know he never listened to a note of my
music and only told me to play as an excuse to get rid of me.”

She threw a laughing look at her father, who answered it with a lazy,
fond cast of his eye in her direction. Taking Gene’s hand, she drew him
into the hall and dropped the portière. The father could hear their
voices diminishing and growing muffled as they passed up the hall to
the sitting-room.

He sat on as they had left him in his favorite crumpled-up attitude.
After all, it was a good thing the boy did not know, was of the kind
who could not be trusted with any information of importance. He did
not want Gene or anybody else to interfere. He, Rose’s father, and he
alone, without any outside assistance, would reach up and pick out
for her any star that sparkled in the heavens, any moon for which she
might choose to cry. She wanted Dominick Ryan for her husband. She
should have him and it would be her father who would get him for her.
He would give her Dominick Ryan, as he would a pearl necklace or a new
automobile to which she had taken a fancy.

It whetted the old man’s lust of battle that Dominick was so hard to
get. Sitting fallen together in his chair he thought about new ways of
approaching Berny, new ways of bribing, or wheedling, or terrifying
her into giving up her husband. He was not at the end of his rope
yet, by any means. And it lent an added zest to the game that he had
an adversary of so much spirit. He was beginning to respect her. Even
if he had not been fighting for Rose, he would have gone on with the
struggle for its own sake. It was not Bill Cannon’s way to enter a
contest, and then be beaten--a contest with a spitfire woman at that.

CHAPTER XXII

OUT OF THE FULLNESS OF THE HEART

That night it was Berny’s turn to be wakeful. In the silence of the
sleeping house and the warm darkness of her curtained room, she lay
tossing on her bed, hearing the clear, musical striking of the parlor
clock as it marked the hours. When the first thin streak of gray
painted a pale line between the window curtains she rose and took a
sleeping powder and soon after fell into a heavy slumber.

This held her in the dead, motionless unconsciousness that a drug
brings, through the long morning hours. Dominick’s noiseless departure
hardly disturbed the hushed quiet of the little flat. The Chinaman,
trained by his exacting mistress to make no sound while she slept, went
about his work with a stealthy step and cautious touch, even in the
kitchen, shut off by space and muffling doors, continuing his care. He
had had more than one experience with the wrath of Mrs. Ryan when she
had been roused from late slumbers by a banged door or a dropped pan.

It was nearly lunch-time when she awoke, slowly emerging from the
black, unbroken deadness of her sleep to a momentarily augmenting
sense of depression. She rose, her body seeming to participate in the
oppressed discomfort of her mind, and, going to the bedroom window,
drew the curtain and looked out.

The day promised little in the way of cheering influences. Fog hung
heavy in the air, a gray veil depending from a gray haze of sky.
That portion of her neighbor’s garden which the window commanded was
drenched with it, the flowers drooping moistly as if it weighed on
them like a heavy substance under the pressure of which they bent and
dripped. The stretch of wall that she could see gleamed with dampness.
A corner of stone, on which a drop regularly formed, hung and then
fell, held her eyes for a few vacantly-staring moments. Then she turned
away, muttering to herself,

“Good Lord, what a day!”

She was at her lunch when the telephone bell rang. She dropped her
napkin and ran to the instrument which was in the hall. She did not
know what she expected--or rather she did not expect anything in
particular--but she was in that state of feverish tension when she
seemed the focus of portentous happenings, the point upon which events
of sinister menace might, at any moment, bear down. Bill Cannon might
be calling her up, for what purpose she could not guess, only for
something that would be disagreeable and perturbing.

It was, however, her husband’s voice that answered her. He spoke
quickly, as if in a hurry, telling her that he would not be home to
dinner, as a college friend of his from New York had just arrived and
he would dine and go to the theater with him that evening. Berny’s
ear, ready to discover, in the most alien subjects, matter bearing
on her husband’s interest in Rose Cannon, listened intently for the
man’s name. As Dominick did not give it she asked for it, and to her
strained and waiting attention it seemed to come with an intentional
indistinctness.

“What is his name?” she called again, her voice hard and high. “I
didn’t catch it.”

It was repeated and for the second time she did not hear it. Before she
could demand it once more, Dominick’s “Good-by” hummed along the wire
and the connection was cut.

She did not want any more lunch and went into the parlor, where she
sat down on the cushioned window-seat and looked out on the vaporous
transparencies of the fog. She had waked with the sense of weight
and apprehension heavy on her. As she dressed she had thought of the
interview of yesterday with anger and also with something as much like
fear as she was capable of feeling. She realized the folly of the rage
she had shown, the folly and the futility of it, and she realized the
danger of an open declaration of war with the fierce and unscrupulous
old man who was her adversary. This, with her customary bold courage,
she now tried to push from her mind. After all, he couldn’t kill her,
and that was about the only other way he could get rid of her. Even
Bill Cannon would hardly dare, in the present day in San Francisco,
cold-bloodedly to murder a woman. The thought caused a slight,
sarcastic smile to touch her lips. Fortunately for her, the lawless
days of California were passed.

With the curtain caught between her finger-tips, her figure bent
forward and motionless, she looked out into the street as if she
saw something there of absorbing interest. But she saw nothing. All
her mental activity was bent on the problem of Dominick’s telephone
message. She did not believe it. She was in that state where trifles
light as air all point one way, and to have Dominick stay out to dinner
with a sudden and unexpected “friend from New York” was more than a
trifle. She assured herself with slow, cold reiteration that he was
dining with Rose Cannon in the big house on California Street. If they
walked together on Sunday mornings, why shouldn’t they dine together
on week-day nights? They were careful of appearances and they would
never let themselves be seen together in any public place till they
were formally engaged. The man from New York was a fiction. She--that
immaculate, perfect girl--had invented him. Dominick could not invent
anything. He was not that kind of man. But Berny knew that all women
can lie when the occasion demands, and Rose Cannon could thus supply
her lover’s deficiencies.

With her blankly-staring eyes fixed on the white outside world, her
mental vision conjured up a picture of them at dinner that night,
sitting opposite each other at a table glistening with the richest
of glass and silver, while soft-footed menials waited obsequiously
upon them. Bill Cannon was not in the picture. Berny’s imagination
had excluded him, pushing him out of the romance into some unseen,
uninteresting region where people who were not lovers dined dully by
themselves. She could not imagine Rose and Dominick otherwise than
alone, exchanging tender glances over the newest form of champagne
glasses filled with the choicest brand of champagne.

A sound escaped her, a sound of pain, as if forced from her by the
grinding of jealous passions within. She dropped the curtain and rose
to her feet. If they married it would be always that way with them.
They would have everything in the world, everything that to Berny made
life worth while. Even Paris, with her three hundred thousand dollars
to open all its doors, would be a savorless place to her if Rose and
Dominick were to be left to the enjoyment of all the pleasures and
luxuries of life back in California.

Unable to rest, fretted by jealousy, tormented by her longing for the
offered money, oppressed by uneasiness as to Cannon’s next move, the
thought of the long afternoon in the house was unendurable to her. She
could not remain unemployed and passive while her mind was in this
state of disturbance. Though the day was bad and there was nothing to
do down town, she determined to go out. She might find some distraction
in watching the passers-by and looking at the shop windows.

By the time she was dressed, it was four o’clock. The fog was thicker
than ever, hanging over the city in an even, motionless pall of vapor.
Its breath had a keen, penetrating chill, like that exhaled by the
mouth of a cavern. Coming down the steps into it she seemed to be
entering a white, still sea, off which an air came that was pleasant
on the heated dryness of her face. She had no place to go to, no
engagement to keep, but instinctively turned her steps in the down-town
direction. Walking would pass more time than going on the car, and
she started down the street which slanted to a level and then climbed
a long, dim reach of hill beyond. Its emptiness--a characteristic
feature of San Francisco streets--struck upon her observation with a
sense of griping, bleak dreariness. She could look along the two lines
of sidewalk till they were lost in the gradual milky thickening of
the fog, and at intervals see a figure, faint and dreamlike, either
emerging from space in slow approach, or melting into it in phantasmal
withdrawal.

It was a melancholy, depressing vista. She had not reached the top
of the long hill before she decided that she would walk no farther.
Walking was only bearable when there was something to see. But she did
not know what else to do or where to go. Indecision was not usually a
feature of her character. To-day, however, the unaccustomed strain of
temptation and worry seemed to have weakened her resourcefulness and
resolution. The one point on which she felt determined was that she
would not go home.

The advancing front of a car, looming suddenly through the mist,
decided her. She hailed it, climbed on board, and sank into a seat on
the inside. There was no one else there. It smelt of dampness, of wet
woolens and rubber overshoes, and its closed windows, filmed with fog,
showed semicircular streaks across them where passengers had rubbed
them clean to look out. The conductor, an unkempt man, with an unshaven
chin and dirty collar, slouched in for her fare, extending a grimy paw
toward her. As he took the money and punched the tag, he hummed a tune
to himself, seeming to convey in that harmless act a slighting opinion
of his passenger. Berny looked at him severely, which made him hum
still louder, and lounge indifferently out to the back platform where
he leaned on the brake and spat scornfully into the street.

Berny felt that sitting there was worse than walking. There was no
one to look at, there was nothing to be seen from the windows. The