The Fighting Chance by Robert W. Chambers (page 5)

sane man would ruin his own enterprise, when there is no need to. His people are openly supporting Amalgamated and hammering Inter-County; and, besides, there’s Ferrall in it, and Mrs. Ferrall is Quarrier’s cousin; and there’s Belwether in it, and Quarrier is engaged to marry Sylvia Landis, who is Belwether’s niece. It’s a scrap with Harrington’s crowd, and the wheels inside of wheels are like Chinese boxes. Who knows what it means? Only it’s plain that Amalgamated is safe, if Quarrier wants it to be. And unless he does he’s crazy.”

Mortimer puffed stolidly at his cigar until the smoke got into his eyes and inflamed them. He sat for a while, wiping his puffy eyelids with his handkerchief; then, squinting sideways at Plank, and seeing him still occupied with Fleetwood, turned bluntly on O’Hara:

“See here: what do you mean by being nasty to Plank?” he growled. “I’m backing him. Do you understand?”

“It is curious,” mused O’Hara coolly, “how much of a cad a fairly decent man can be when he’s out of temper!”

“You mean Plank, or me?” demanded Mortimer, darkening angrily.

“No; I mean myself. I’m not that way usually. I took him for a bounder, and he’s caught me with the goods on. I’ve been thinking that the men who bother with such questions are usually open to suspicion themselves. Watch me do the civil, now. I’m ashamed of myself.”

“Wait a moment. Will you be civil enough to do something for him at the Patroons? That will mean something.”

“Is he up? Yes, I will;” and, turning in his chair, he said to Plank: “Awfully sorry I acted like a bounder just now, after having accepted your hospitality at the Fells. I did mean to be offensive, and I’m sorry for that, too. Hope you’ll overlook it, and be friendly.”

Plank’s face took on the dark-red hue of embarrassment; he looked questioningly at Mortimer, whose visage remained non-committal, then directly at O’Hara.

“I should be very glad to be friends with you,” he said with an ingenuous dignity that surprised Mortimer. It was only the native simplicity of the man, veneered and polished by constant contact with Mrs. Mortimer, and now showing to advantage in the grain. And it gratified Mortimer, because he saw that it was going to make many matters much easier for himself and his protege.

The tall glasses were filled and drained again before they departed to the cold plunge and dressing-rooms above, whence presently they emerged in street garb to drive down town and lunch together at the Lenox Club, Plank as Fleetwood’s guest.

Mortimer, very heavy and inert after luncheon, wedged himself into a great stuffed arm-chair by the window, where he alternately nodded over his coffee and wheezed in his breathing, and leered out at Fifth Avenue from half-closed, puffy eyes. And there he was due to sit, sodden and replete, until the fashionable equipages began to flash past. He’d probably see his wife driving with Mrs. Ferrall or with Miss Caithness, or perhaps with some doddering caryatid of the social structure; and he’d sit there, leering with gummy eyes out of the club windows, while servants in silent processional replenished his glass from time to time, until in the early night the trim little shopgirls flocked out into the highways in gossiping, fluttering coveys, trotting away across the illuminated asphalt, north and south to their thousand dingy destinations. And after they had gone he would probably arouse himself to read the evening paper, or perhaps gossip with Major Belwether and other white-haired familiars, or perhaps doze until it was time to summon a cab and go home to dress.

That afternoon, however, having O’Hara and Fleetwood to give him countenance, he managed to arouse himself long enough to make Plank known personally to several of the governors of the club and to a dozen members, then left him to his fate. Whence, presently, Fleetwood and O’Hara extracted him–fate at that moment being personified by a garrulous old gentleman, one Peter Caithness, who divided with Major Belwether the distinction of being the club bore–and together they piloted him to the billiard room, where he beat them handily for a dollar a point at everything they suggested.

“You play almost as pretty a game as Stephen Siward used to play,” said O’Hara cordially. “You’ve something of his cue movement–something of his infernal facility and touch. Hasn’t he, Fleetwood?”

“I wish Siward were back here,” said Fleetwood thoughtfully, returning his cue to his own rack. “I wonder what he does with himself–where he keeps himself all the while? What the devil is there for a man to do, if he doesn’t do anything? He’s not going out anywhere since his mother’s death; he has no clubs to go to, I understand. What does he do–go to his office and come back, and sit in that shabby old brick house all day and blink at the bum portraits of his bum and distinguished ancestors? Do you know what he does with himself?” to O’Hara.

“I don’t even know where he lives,” observed O’Hara, resuming his coat. “He’s given up his rooms, I understand.”

“What? Don’t know the old Siward house?”

“Oh! does he live there now? Of course; I forgot about his mother. He had apartments last year, you remember. He gave dinners–corkers they were. I went to one–like that last one you gave.”

“I wish I’d never given it,” said Fleetwood gloomily. “If I hadn’t, he’d be a member here still. . What do you suppose induced him to take that little gin-drinking cat to the Patroons? Why, man, it wasn’t even an undergraduate’s trick! it was the act of a lunatic.”

For a while they talked of Siward, and of his unfortunate story and the pity of it; and when the two men ceased,

“Do you know,” said Plank mildly, “I don’t believe he ever did it.”

O’Hara looked up surprised, then shrugged. “Unfortunately he doesn’t deny it, you see.”

“I heard,” said Fleetwood, lighting a cigarette, “that he did deny it; that he said, no matter what his condition was, he couldn’t have done it. If he had been sober, the governors would have been bound to take his word of honour. But he couldn’t give that, you see. And after they pointed out to him that he had been in no condition to know exactly what he did do, he shut up. . And they dropped him; and he’s falling yet.”

“I don’t believe that sort of a man ever would do that sort of thing,” repeated Plank obstinately, his Delft-blue eyes partly closing, so that all the Dutch shrewdness and stubbornness in his face disturbed its highly coloured placidity. And he walked away toward the wash-room to cleanse his ponderous pink hands of chalk-dust.

“That’s what’s the matter with Plank,” observed O’Hara to Fleetwood as Plank disappeared. “It isn’t that he’s a bounder; but he doesn’t know things; he doesn’t know enough, for instance, to wait until he’s a member of a club before he criticises the judgment of its governors. Yet you can’t help tolerating the fellow. I think I’ll write a letter for him, or put down my name. What do you think?”

“It would be all right,” said Fleetwood. “He’ll need all the support he can get, with Leroy Mortimer as his sponsor. . Wasn’t Mortimer rather nasty about Siward though, in his role of the alcoholic prophet? Whew!”

“Siward never had any use for Mortimer,” observed O’Hara.

“I’ll bet you never heard him say so,” returned Fleetwood. “You know Stephen Siward’s way; he never said anything unpleasant about any man. I wish I didn’t either, but I do. So do you. So do most men. . Lord! I wish Siward were back here. He was a good deal of a man, after all, Tom.”

They were unconsciously using the past tense in discussing Siward, as though he were dead, either physically or socially.

“In one way he was always a singularly decent man,” mused O’Hara, walking toward the great marble vestibule and buttoning his overcoat.

“How exactly do you mean?”

“Oh, about women.”

“I believe it, too. If he did take that Vyse girl into the Patroons, it was his limit with her–and, I believe his limit with any woman. He was absurdly decent that way; he was indeed. And now look at the reputation he has! Isn’t it funny? isn’t it, now?”

“What sort of an effect do you suppose all this business is going to have on Siward?”

“It’s had one effect already,” replied Fleetwood, as Plank came up, ready for the street. “Ferrall says he looks sick, and Belwether says he’s going to the devil; but that’s the sort of thing the major is likely to say. By the way, wasn’t there something between that pretty Landis girl and Siward? Somebody–some damned gossiping somebody–talked about it somewhere, recently.”

“I don’t believe that, either,” said Plank, in his heavy, measured, passionless voice, as they descended the steps of the white portico and looked around for a cab.

“As for me, I’ve got to hustle,” observed O’Hara, glancing at his watch. “I’m due to shine at a function about five. Are you coming up-town either of you fellows? I’ll give you a lift as far as Seventy-second Street, Plank.”

“Tell you what we’ll do,” said Fleetwood, impulsively, turning to Plank: “We’ll drive down town, you and I, and we’ll look up poor old Siward! Shall we? He’s probably all alone in that God-forsaken red brick family tomb! Shall we? How about it, Plank?”

O’Hara turned impatiently on his heel with a gesture of adieu, climbed into his electric hansom, and went buzzing away up the avenue.

“I’d like to, but I don’t think I know Mr. Siward well enough to do that,” said Plank diffidently. He hesitated, colouring up. “He might misunderstand my going with you–as a liberty–which perhaps I might not have ventured on had he been less–less unfortunate.”

Again Fleetwood warmed toward the ruddy, ponderous young man beside him. “See here,” he said, “you are going as a friend of mine–if you care to look at it that way.”

“Thank you,” said Plank; “I should be very glad to go in that way.”

The Siward house was old only in the comparative Manhattan meaning of the word; for in New York nothing is really very old, except the faces of the young men.

Decades ago it had been considered a big house, and it was still so spoken of–a solid, dingy, red brick structure, cubical in proportions, surmounted by heavy chimneys, the depth of its sunken windows hinting of the thickness of wall and foundation. Window-curtains of obsolete pattern, all alike, and all drawn, masked the blank panes. Three massive wistaria-vines, the gnarled stems as thick as tree-trunks, crawled upward to the roof, dividing the facade equally, and furnishing some relief to its flatness, otherwise unbroken except by the deep reveals of window and door. Two huge and unsymmetrical catalpa trees stood sentinels before it, dividing curb from asphalt; and from the centres of the shrivelled, brown grass-plots flanking the stoop under the basement windows two aged Rose-of-Sharon trees bristled naked to the height of the white marble capitals of the flaking pillars supporting the stained portico.

An old New York house, in the New York sense. Old in another sense, too, where in a rapid land Time outstrips itself, painting, with the antiquity of centuries, the stone and mortar which were new scarce ten years since.

“Nice old family mausoleum,” commented Fleetwood, descending from the hansom, followed by Plank. The latter instinctively mounted the stoop on tiptoe, treading gingerly as one who ventures into precincts unknown but long respected; and as Fleetwood pulled the old-fashioned bell, Plank stole a glance over the facade, where wisps of straw trailed from sparrows’ nests, undisturbed, wedged between plinth and pillar; where, behind the lace pane-screens, shadowy edges of heavy curtains framed the obscurity; where the paint had blistered and peeled from the iron railings, and the marble pillars of the portico glimmered, scarred by frosts of winters long forgotten.

“Cheerful monument,” repeated Fleetwood with a sarcastic nod. Then the door was opened by a very old man wearing the black “swallow-tail” clothes and choker of an old-time butler, spotless, quite immaculate, but cut after a fashion no young man remembers.

“Good evening,” said Fleetwood, entering, followed on tiptoe by Plank.

“Good evening, sir.” . A pause; and in the unsteady voice of age: “Mr. Fleetwood, sir. . Mr.–.” A bow, and the dim eyes peering up at Plank, who stood fumbling for his card-case.

Fleetwood dropped both cards on the salver unsteadily extended. The butler ushered them into a dim room on the right.

“How is Mr. Siward?” asked Fleetwood, pausing on the threshold and dropping his voice.

The old man hesitated, looking down, then still looking away from Fleetwood: “Bravely, sir, bravely, Mr. Fleetwood.”

“The Siwards were always that,” said the young man gently.

“Yes, sir. . Thank you. Mr. Stephen–Mr. Siward,” he corrected, quaintly, “is indisposed, sir. It was a–a great shock to us all, sir!” He bowed and turned away, holding his salver stiffly; and they heard him muttering under his breath, “Bravely, sir, bravely. A–a great shock, sir! . Thank you.”

Fleetwood turned to Plank, who stood silent, staring through the fading light at the faded household gods of the house of Siward. The dim light touched the prisms of a crystal chandelier dulled by age, and edged the carved foliations of the marble mantel, above which loomed a tarnished mirror reflecting darkness. Fleetwood rose, drew a window-shade higher, and nodded toward several pictures; and Plank moved slowly from one to another, peering up at the dead Siwards in their crackled varnish.

“This is the real thing,” observed Fleetwood cynically, “all this Fourth Avenue antique business; dingy, cumbersome, depressing. Good God! I see myself standing it. . Look at that old grinny-bags in a pig-tail over there! To the cellar for his, if this were my house. . We’ve got some, too, in several rooms, and I never go into ’em. They’re like a scene in a bum play, or like one of those Washington Square rat-holes, where artists eat Welsh-rabbits with dirty fingers. Ugh!”

“I like it,” said Plank, under his breath.

Fleetwood stared, then shrugged, and returned to the window to watch a brand-new French motor-car drawn up before a modern mansion across the avenue.

The butler returned presently, saying that Mr. Siward was at home and would receive them in the library above, as he was not yet able to pass up and down stairs.

“I didn’t know he was as ill as that,” muttered Fleetwood, as he and Plank followed the old man up the creaking stairway. But Gumble, the butler, said nothing in reply.

Siward was sitting in an arm-chair by the window, one leg extended, his left foot, stiffly cased in bandages, resting on a footstool.

“Why, Stephen!” exclaimed Fleetwood, hastening forward, “I didn’t know you were laid up like this!”

Siward offered his hand inquiringly; then his eyes turned toward Plank, who stood behind Fleetwood; and, slowly disengaging his hand from Fleetwood’s sympathetic grip, he offered it to Plank.

“It is very kind of you,” he said. “Gumble, Mr. Fleetwood prefers rye, for some inscrutable reason. Mr. Plank?” His smile was a question.

“If you don’t mind,” said Plank, “I should like to have some tea–that is, if–“

“Tea, Gumble, for two. We’ll tipple in company, Mr. Plank,” he added. “And the cigars are at your elbow, Billy,” with another smile at Fleetwood.

“Now,” said the latter, after he had lighted his cigar, “what is the matter, Stephen?”

Siward glanced at his stiffly extended foot. “Nothing much.” He reddened faintly, “I slipped. It’s only a twisted ankle.”

For a moment or two the answer satisfied Fleetwood, then a sudden, curious flash of suspicion came into his eyes; he glanced sharply at Siward, who lowered his eyes, while the red tint in his hollow cheeks deepened.

Neither spoke for a while. Plank sipped the tea which Wands, the second man, brought. Siward brooded over his cup, head bent. Fleetwood made more noise than necessary with his ice.

“I miss you like hell!” said Fleetwood musingly, measuring out the old rye from the quaint decanter. “Why did you drop the Saddle Club, Stephen?”

“I’m not riding; I have no use for it,” replied Siward.

“You’ve cut out the Proscenium Club, too, and the Owl’s Head, and the Trophy. It’s a shame, Stephen.”

“I’m tired of clubs.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“Very well, I won’t,” said Siward, smiling. “Tell me what is happening–out there,” he made a gesture toward the window; “all the gossip the newspapers miss. I’ve talked Dr. Grisby to death; I’ve talked Gumble to death; I’ve read myself stupid. What’s going on, Billy?”

So Fleetwood sketched for him a gay cartoon of events, caricaturing various episodes in the social kaleidoscope which might interest him. He gossiped cynically, but without malice, about people they both knew, about engagements, marriages, and divorces, plans and ambitions; about those absent from the metropolis and the newcomers to be welcomed. He commented briefly on the opera, reviewed the newer plays at the theatres, touched on the now dormant gaiety which had made the season at nearby country clubs conspicuous; then drifted into the hunting field, gossiping pleasantly in the vernacular about horses and packs and drag- hunts and stables, and what people thought of the new English hounds of the trial pack, and how the new M. F. H., Maitland Gray, had managed to break so many bones at Southbury.

Politics were touched upon, and they spoke of the possibility of Ferrall going to the Assembly, the sport of boss-baiting having become fashionable among amateurs, and providing a new amusement for the idle rich.

So city, State, and national issues were run through lightly, business conditions noticed, the stock market speculated upon; and presently conversation died out, with a yawn from Fleetwood as he looked into his empty glass at the last bit of ice.

“Don’t do that, Billy,” smiled Siward. “You haven’t discoursed upon art, literature, and science yet, and you can’t go until you’ve adjusted the affairs of the nation for the next twenty-four hours.”

“Art?” yawned Fleetwood. “Oh, pictures? Don’t like ’em. Nobody ever looks at ’em except debutantes, who do it out of deviltry, to floor a man at a dinner or a dance.”

“How about literature?” inquired Siward gravely. “Anything doing?”

“Nothing in it,” replied Fleetwood more gravely still. “It’s another feminine bluff–like all that music talk they hand you after the opera.”

“I see. And science?”

“Spider Flynn is matched to meet Kid Holloway; is that what you mean, Stephen? Somebody tumbled out of an air-ship the other day; is that what you mean? And they’re selling scientific jewelry on Broadway at a dollar a quart; is that what you want to know?”

Siward rested his head on his hand with a smile. “Yes, that’s about what I wanted to know, Billy–all about the arts and sciences. . Much obliged. You needn’t stay any longer, if you don’t want to.”

“How soon will you be out?” inquired Fleetwood.

“Out? I don’t know. I shall try to drive to the office to-morrow.”

“Why the devil did you resign from all your clubs? How can I see you if I don’t come here?” began Fleetwood impatiently. “I know, of course, that you’re not going anywhere, but a man always goes to his club. You don’t look well, Stephen. You are too much alone.”

Siward did not answer. His face and body had certainly grown thinner since Fleetwood had last seen him. Plank, too, had been shocked at the change in him–the dark, hard lines under the eyes; the pallor, the curious immobility of the man, save for his fingers, which were always restless, now moving in search of some small object to worry and turn over and over, now nervously settling into a grasp on the arm of his chair.

“How is Amalgamated Electric?” asked Fleetwood, abruptly.

“I think it’s all right. Want to buy some?” replied Siward, smiling.

Plank stirred in his chair ponderously. “Somebody is kicking it to pieces,” he said.

“Somebody is trying to,” smiled Siward.

“Harrington,” nodded Fleetwood. Siward nodded back. Plank was silent.

“Of course,” continued Fleetwood, tentatively, “you people need not worry, with Howard Quarrier back of you.”

Nobody said anything for a while. Presently Siward’s restless hands, moving in search of something, encountered a pencil lying on the table beside him, and he picked it up and began drawing initials and scrolls on the margin of a newspaper; and all the scrolls framed initials, and all the initials were the same, twining and twisting into endless variations of the letters S. L.

“Yes, I must go to the office to-morrow,” he repeated absently. “I am better–in fact I am quite well, except for this sprain.” He looked down at his bandaged foot, then his pencil moved listlessly again, continuing the endless variations on the two letters. It was plain that he was tired.

Fleetwood rose and made his adieux almost affectionately. Plank moved forward on tiptoe, bulky and noiseless; and Siward held out his hand, saying something amiably formal.

“Would you like to have me come again?” asked Plank, red with embarrassment, yet so naively that at first Siward found no words to answer him; then–

“Would you care to come, Mr. Plank?”

“Yes.”

Siward looked at him curiously, almost cautiously. His first impressions of the man had been summed up in one contemptuous word. Besides, barring that, what was there in common between himself and such a type as Plank? He had not even troubled himself to avoid him at Shotover; he had merely been aware of him when Plank spoke to him; never otherwise, except that afternoon beside the swimming pool, when he had made one of his rare criticisms on Plank.

Perhaps Plank had changed, perhaps Siward had; for he found nothing offensive in the bulky young man now–nothing particularly attractive, either, except for a certain simplicity, a certain direct candour in the heavy blue eyes which met his squarely.

“Come in for a cigar when you have a few moments idle,” said Siward slowly.

“It will give me great pleasure,” said Plank, bowing.

And that was all. He followed Fleetwood down the stairs; Wands held their coats, and bowed them out into the falling shadows of the winter twilight.

Siward, sitting beside his window, watched them enter their hansom and drive away up the avenue. A dull flush had settled over his cheeks; the aroma of spirits hung in the air, and he looked across the room at the decanter. Presently he drank some of his tea, but it was lukewarm, and he pushed the cup from him.

The clatter of the cup brought the old butler, who toddled hither and thither, removing trays, pulling chairs into place, fussing and pattering about, until a maid came in noiselessly, bearing a lamp. She pulled down the shades, drew the sad-coloured curtains, went to the mantelpiece and peered at the clock, then brought a wineglass and a spoon to Siward, and measured the dose in silence. He swallowed it, shrugged, permitted her to change the position of his chair and footstool, and nodded thanks and dismissal.

“Gumble, are you there?” he asked carelessly.

The butler entered from the hallway. “Yes, sir.”

“You may leave that decanter.”

But the old servant may have misunderstood, for he only bowed and ambled off downstairs with the decanter, either heedless or deaf to his master’s sharp order to return.

For a while Siward sat there, eyes fixed, scowling into vacancy; then the old, listless, careworn expression returned; he rested one elbow on the window-sill, his worn cheek on his hand, and with the other hand fell to weaving initials with his pencil on the margin of the newspaper lying on the table beside him.

Lamplight brought out sharply the physical change in him–the angular shadows flat under the cheek-bones, the hard, slightly swollen flesh in the bluish shadows around the eyes. The mark of the master-vice was there; its stamp in the swollen, worn-out hollows; its imprint in the fine lines at the corners of his mouth; its sign manual in the faintest relaxation of the under lip, which had not yet become a looseness.

For the last of the Siwards had at last stepped into the highway which his doomed forebears had travelled before him.

“Gumble!” he called irritably.

A quavering voice, an unsteady step, and the old man entered again. “Mr. Stephen, sir?”

“Bring that decanter back. Didn’t you hear me tell you just now?”

“Sir?”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“Yes, Mr. Stephen, sir.”

There was a silence.

“Gumble!”

“Sir?”

“Are you going to bring that decanter?”

The old butler bowed, and ambled from the room, and for a long while Siward sat sullenly listening and scoring the edges of the paper with his trembling pencil. Then the lead broke short, and he flung it from him and pulled the bell. Wands came this time, a lank, sandy, silent man, grown gray as a rat in the service of the Siwards. He received his master’s orders, and withdrew; and again Siward waited, biting his under lip and tearing bits from the edges of the newspaper with fingers never still; but nobody came with the decanter, and after a while his tense muscles relaxed; something in his very soul seemed to snap, and he sank back in his chair, the hot tears blinding him.

He had got as far as that; moments of self-pity were becoming almost as frequent as scorching intervals of self-contempt.

So they all knew what was the matter with him–they all knew–the doctor, the servants, his friends. Had he not surprised the quick suspicion in Fleetwood’s glance, when he told him he had slipped, and sprained his ankle? What if he had been drunk when he fell–fell on his own doorsteps, carried into the old Siward house by old Siward servants, drunk as his forefathers? It was none of Fleetwood’s business. It was none of the servants’ business. It was nobody’s business except his own. Who the devil were all these people, to pry into his affairs and doctor him and dose him and form secret leagues to disobey him, and hide decanters from him? Why should anybody have the impertinence to meddle with him? Of what concern to them were his vices or his virtues?

The tears dried in his hot eyes; he jerked the old-fashioned bell savagely; and after a long while he heard servants whispering together in the passageway outside his door.

He lay very still in his chair; his hearing had become abnormally acute, but he could not make out what they were saying; and as the dull, intestinal aching grew sharper, parching, searing every strained muscle in throat and chest, he struck the table beside him, and clenched his teeth in the fierce rush of agony that swept him from head to foot, crying out an inarticulate menace on his household. And Dr. Grisby came into the room from the outer shadows of the hall.

He was very small, very meagre, very bald, and clean-shaven, with a face like a nut-cracker; and the brown wig he wore was atrocious, and curled forward over his colourless ears. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, each glass divided into two lenses; and he stood on tiptoe to look out through the upper lenses on the world, and always bent almost double to use the lower or reading lenses.

Besides that, he affected frilled shirts, and string ties, which nobody had ever seen snugly tied. His loose string tie was the first thing Siward could remember about the doctor; and that the doctor had permitted him to pull it when he had the measles, at the age of six.

“What’s all this racket?” said the little old doctor harshly. “Got colic? Got the toothache? I’m ashamed of you, Stephen, cutting capers and pounding the furniture! Look up! Look at me! Out with your tongue! Well, now, what the devil’s the trouble?”

“You–know,” muttered Siward, abandoning his wrist to the little man, who seated himself beside him. Dr. Grisby scarcely noted the pulse; the delicate pressure had become a strong caress.

“Know what?” he grunted. “How do I know what’s the matter with you? Hey? Now, now, don’t try to explain, Steve; don’t fly off the handle! All right; grant that I do know what’s bothering you; I want to see that ankle first. Here, somebody! Light that gas. Why the mischief don’t you have the house wired for electricity, Stephen? It’s wholesome. Gas isn’t. Lamps are worse, sir. Do as I tell you!” And he went on loquaciously, grumbling and muttering, and never ceasing his talk, while Siward, wincing as the dressing was removed, lay back and closed his eyes.

Half an hour later Gumble appeared, to announce dinner.

“I don’t want any,” said Siward.

“Eat!” said Dr. Grisby harshly.

“I–don’t care to.”

“Eat, I tell you! Do you think I don’t mean what I say?”

So he ate his broth and toast, the doctor curtly declining to join him. He ate hurriedly, closing his eyes in aversion. Even the iced tea was flat and distasteful to him.

And at last he lay back, white and unstrung, the momentarily deadened desperation glimmering under his half-closed eyes. And for a long while Dr. Grisby sat, doubled almost in two, cuddling his bony little knees and studying the patterns in the faded carpet.

“I guess you’d better go, Stephen,” he said at length.

“Up the river–to Mulqueen’s?”

“Yes. Let’s try it, Steve. You’ll be on your feet in two weeks. Then you’d better go–up the river–to Mulqueen’s.”

“I–I’ll go, if you say so. But I can’t go now.”

“I didn’t say go now. I said in two weeks.”

“Perhaps.”

“Will you give me your word?” demanded the doctor sharply.

“No, doctor.”

“Why not?”

“Because I may have to be here on business. There seems to be some sort of crisis coming which I don’t understand.”

“There’s a crisis right here, Steve, which I understand!” snapped Dr. Grisby. “Face it like a man! Face it like a man! You’re sick–to your bones, boy–sick! sick! Fight the fight, Steve! Fight a good fight. There’s a fighting chance; on my soul of honour, there is, Steve, a fighting chance for you! Now! now, boy! Buckle up tight! Tuck up your sword-sleeve! At ’em, Steve! Give ’em hell! Oh, my boy, my boy, I know; I know!” The little man’s voice broke, but he steadied it instantly with a snap of his nut-cracker jaws, and scowled on his patient and shook his little withered fist at him.

His patient lay very still in the shadow.

“I want you to go,” said the doctor harshly, “before your self-control goes. Do you understand? I want you to go before your decision is undermined; before you begin to do devious things, sly things, cheating things, slinking things–anything and everything to get at the thing you crave. I’ve given you something to fight with, and you won’t take it faithfully. I’ve given you free rein in tobacco and tea and coffee. I’ve helped you as much as I dare to weather the nights. Now, you help me–do you hear?”

“Yes . I will.”

“You say so; now do it. Do something for yourself. Do anything! If you’re sick of reading–and I don’t blame you, considering the stuff you read–get people down here to see you; get lots of people. Telephone ’em; you’ve a telephone there, haven’t you? There it is, by your elbow. Use it! Call up people. Talk all the time.”

“Yes, I will.”

“Good! Now, Steve, we know what’s the matter, physically, don’t we? Of course we do! Now, then, what’s the matter mentally?”

“Mentally?” repeated Siward under his breath.

“Yes, mentally. What’s the trouble? Stocks? Bonds? Lawsuits? Love?” the slightest pause, and a narrowing of the gimlet eyes behind the lenses. “Love?” he repeated harshly. “Which is it, boy? They’re all good to let alone.”

“Business,” said Siward. But, being a Siward, he was obliged to add “partly.”

“Business–partly,” repeated the doctor. “What’s the matter with business–partly?”

“I don’t know. There are rumours. Hetherington is pounding us–apparently. That Inter-County crowd is acting ominously, too. There’s something underhand, somewhere.” He bent his head and fell to plucking at the faded brocade on the arm of his chair, muttering to himself, “somewhere, somehow, something underhand. I don’t know what; I really don’t.”

“All right–all right,” said the doctor testily; “let it go at that! There’s treachery, eh? You suspect it? You’re sure of it–as reasonably sure as a gentleman can be of something he is not fashioned to understand? That’s it, is it? All right, sir–all right! Very well–ver-y well. Now, sir, look at me! Business symptoms admitted, what about the ‘partly,’ Stephen ?–what about it, eh? What about it?”

But Siward fell silent again.

“Eh? Did you say something? No? Oh, very well, ver-y well, sir. . Perfectly correct, Stephen. You have not earned the right to admit further symptoms. No, sir, you have not earned the right to admit them to anybody, not even to yourself. Nor to–her!”

“Doctor!”

“Sir?”

“I have–admitted them.”

“To yourself, Steve? I’m sorry. You have no right to–yet. I’m sorry–“

“I have admitted them–admitted them–to her.”

“That settles it,” said the doctor grimly, “that clinches it! That locks you to the wheel! That pledges you. The squabble is on, now. It’s your honour that’s engaged now, not your nerves, not your intestines. It’s a good fight–a very good fight, with no chance of losing anything but life. You go up the river to Mulqueen’s. That’s the strategy in this campaign; that’s excellent manoeuvring; that’s good generalship! Eh? Mask your purpose, Steve; make a feint of camping out here under my guns; then suddenly fling your entire force up the Hudson and fortify yourself at Mulqueen’s! Ho, that’ll fix ’em! That’s going to astonish the enemy!”

His harsh, dry, crackling laughter broke out like the distant rattle of musketry.

The ghost of a smile glimmered in Siward’s haunted eyes, then faded as he leaned forward.

“She has refused me,” he said simply.

The little doctor, after an incredulous stare, began chattering with wrath. “Refused you! Pah! Pooh! That’s nothing! That signifies absolutely nothing! It’s meaningless! It’s a detail. You get well–do you hear? You go and get well; then try it again! Then you’ll see! And if she is an idiot–in the event of her irrational persistence in an incredible and utterly indefensible attitude”–he choked up, then fairly barked at Siward–“take her anyway, sir! Run off with her! Dominate circumstances, sir! take charge of events! . But you can’t do it till you’ve clapped yourself into prison for life. . And God help you if you let yourself escape!”

And after a long while Siward said: “If I should ever marry–and–and–“

“Had children, eh? Is that it? Oh, it is, eh? Well, I say, marry! I say, have children! If you’re a man, you’ll breed men. The chances are they may not inherit what you have. It skips some generations–some, now and then. But if they do, good God! I say it’s better to be born and have a chance to fight than never to come into the arena at all! By winning out, the world learns; by failure, the world is no less wise. The important thing is birth. The main point is to breed–to produce–to reproduce! but not until you stand, sword in hand, and your armed heel on the breast of your prostrate and subconscious self!”

He jumped up and began running about the room with short little bantam steps, talking all the while.

“People say, ‘Shall criminals be allowed to mate and produce young? Shall malefactors be allowed to beget? No!’ And I say no, too. Never so long as they remain criminals and malefactors; so long as the evil in them is in the ascendant. Never, until they are cured. That’s what I say; that’s what I maintain. Crime is a disease; criminals are sick people. No marriage for them until they’re cured; no children for them until they’re well. If they cure themselves, let ’em marry; let ’em breed; for then, if their children inherit the inclination, they also inherit the grit to cauterise the malady.”

He produced a huge handkerchief from the tails of his coat, and wiped his damp features and polished his forehead so violently that his wig took a new and jaunty angle.

“I’m talking too much,” he said fretfully; “I’m talking a great deal–all the time–continually. I’ve other patients–several–plenty! Do you think you’re the only man I know who’s trying to disfigure his liver and make spots come out all over inside him? Do you?”

Siward smiled again, a worn, pallid smile.

“I can stand it while you are here, doctor, but when I’m alone it’s–hard. One of those crises is close now. I’ve a bad night ahead–a bad outlook. Couldn’t you–“

“No!”

“Just enough–“

“No, Stephen.”

“–Enough to dull it–just a little? I don’t ask for enough to make me sleep–not even to make me doze. You have your needle; haven’t you, doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Then, just this once–for the last time.”

“No.”

“Why? Are you afraid? You needn’t be, doctor. I don’t care for it except to give me a little respite, a little rest on a night like this. I’m so tired of this ache. If I could only have some sleep, and wake up in good shape, I’d stand a better chance of fighting. . Wait, doctor! Just one moment. I don’t mean to be a coward, but I’ve had a hard fight, and–I’m tired. . If you could see your way to helping me–“

“I dare not help you any more that way.”

“Not this once?”

“Not this once.”

There was a dead silence, broken at last by the doctor with a violent gesture toward the telephone. “Talk to the girl! Why don’t you talk to the girl! If she’s worth a hill o’ beans she’ll help you to hang on. What’s she for, if she isn’t for such moments? Tell her you need her voice; tell her you need her faith in you. Damn central! Talk out in church! Don’t make a goddess of a woman. The men who want to marry her, and can’t, will do that! The nincompoop can always be counted on to deify the commonplace. And she is commonplace. If she isn’t, she’s no good! Commend me to sanity and the commonplace. I take off my hat to it! I honour it. God bless it! Good-night!”

Siward lay still for a long while after the doctor had gone. More than an hour had passed before he slowly sat up and groped for the telephone book, opened it, and searched in a blind, hesitating way until he found the number he was looking for.

He had never telephoned to her; he had never written her except once, in reply to her letter in regard to his mother’s death–that strange, timid, formal letter, in which, grief-stunned as he was, he saw only the formality, and had answered it more formally still. And that was all that had come of the days and nights by that northern sea–a letter and its answer, and silence.

And, thinking of these things, he shut the book wearily, and lay back in the shadow of the faded curtain, closing his sunken eyes.

CHAPTER IX CONFESSIONS

In a city in transition, where yesterday is as dead as a dead century, where those who prepare the old year for burial are already taking the ante-mortem statement of the new, the future fulfils the functions of the present. Time itself is considered merely as a by-product of horse- power, discounted with flippancy as the unavoidable friction clogging the fly-wheel of progress.

Memory, once a fine art, is becoming a lost art in Manhattan.

His world and his city had almost ceased to think of Siward.

For a few weeks men spoke of him in the several clubs of which he had lately been a member–spoke of him always in the past tense; and after a little while spoke of him no more.

In that section of the social system which he had inhabited, his absence on account of his mother’s death being taken for granted, people laid him away in their minds almost as ceremoniously as they had laid away the memory of his mother. Nothing halted because he was not present; nothing was delayed, rearranged, or abandoned because his familiar presence chanced to be missing. There remained only one more place to fill at a cotillion, dinner, or bridge party; only another man for opera box or week’s end; one man the more to be counted on, one more man to be counted out–transferred to the credit of profit and loss, and the ledger closed for the season.

They who remembered him, among those who had not yet lost that old- fashioned art, were very few–a young girl here and there, over whom he had been absent-mindedly sentimental; a debutante or two who had adored him from a distance as a friend of elder sister or brother; here and there an old, old lady to whom he had been considerate, and who perhaps remembered something of the winning charm of the Siwards when the town was young–his father, perhaps, perhaps his grandfather–these thought of him at intervals; the remainder had no leisure to remember even if they had not forgotten how to do it. Several cabmen missed him for a while; now and then a privileged cafe waiter inquired about him from gay, noisy parties entering some old haunt of his. Mr. Desmond, of art gallery and roulette notoriety, whose business is not to forget, was politely regretful at his absence from certain occult ceremonies which he had at irregular intervals graced with votive offerings. And the list ended there–almost, not quite; for there were two people who had not forgotten Siward: Howard Quarrier and Beverly Plank; and one other, a third, who could not yet forget him if she would–but, as yet, she had not tried very desperately.

The day that Siward left New York to visit everybody’s friend, Mr. Mulqueen, in the country, Plank called on him for the second time in his life, and was presently received in the south drawing-room, the library being limited to an informality and intimacy not for Mr. Plank.

Siward, still lame, and using unskilfully two shiny new crutches, came down the stairs and stumped into the drawing-room, which, in spite of the sombre, clustering curtains, was brightly illuminated by the winter sunshine reflected from the snow in the street. Plank was shocked at the change in him–at the ghost of a voice, listlessly formal; at the thin, nerveless hand offered; startled, so that he forgot his shyness, and retained the bony hand tightly in his, and instinctively laid his other great cushion-like paw over it, holding it imprisoned, unable to speak, unconscious, in the impulse of the moment, of the liberty he permitted himself, and which he had never dreamed of taking with such a man as Siward.

The effect on Siward was composite; his tired voice ceased; surprise, inability to understand tinged with instinctive displeasure, were succeeded by humourous curiosity; and, very slowly it became plain to him that this beefy young man liked him, was naively concerned about him, felt friendly toward him, and was showing it as spontaneously as a child. Because he now understood something of how it is with a man who is in the process of being forgotten, his perceptions were perhaps the finer in these days, and the direct unconsciousness of Plank touched him more heavily than the pair of heavy hands enclosing his.

“I thought I’d come,” began Plank, growing redder and redder as he began to realise the enormity of familiarity committed only on the warrant of impulse. “You don’t look well.”

“It was good of you to think of me,” said Siward. “Come up to the library, if you’ve a few minutes to spare an invalid. Please go first; I’m a trifle lame yet.”

“I–I am sorry,” muttered Plank, “very, very sorry.”

At first, in the library, Plank was awkward and silent, finding nothing to say, and nowhere to dispose of his hands, until Siward gave him a cigar to occupy his fingers. Even then he continued to sit uncomfortably, his bulk balanced on a rickety, spindle-legged chair, which he stubbornly refused to exchange for another, at Siward’s suggestion, out of sheer embarrassment, and with a confused idea that his refusal would somehow ultimately put him at his ease with his surroundings.

Siward, secretly amused, rang for tea, although the hour was early. After a little while, either the toast or the tea appeared to act on Plank as a lingual laxative, for he began suddenly to talk, which is characteristic of bashful men; and Siward gravely helped him on when he floundered and turned shy. After a little, matters went very well with them, and Plank, much more at ease than he had ever dared to hope he could be with Siward, talked and talked; and Siward, his crutches across his knees, lay back in his arm-chair, chatting with that winning informality so becoming to men who are unconscious of their charm.

Watching Plank, it occurred to him gradually that this great, cumbersome creature was not a shrewd, thrifty, self-made and self-finished adult at all; only a big, wistful, lonely boy, without comrades and with nowhere to play. On Plank’s round face there remained no trace of shrewdness, of stubbornness, nothing even of the heavy, saturnine placidity of a dogged man who waits his turn.

Plank spoke of himself after a while, sounding the personal note with tentative timidity. Siward gravely encouraged him, and in a little while the outlines of his crude autobiography appeared, embodying his eventless boyhood in a Pennsylvania town; his career at the high school; the dawning desire for college equipment, satisfied by his father, who owned shares in the promising Deepvale Steel Plank Company; the unhappy years at Harvard–hard years, for he learned with difficulty; solitary years, for he was not sought by those whom he desired to know. Then he ventured to speak of his father’s growing interest in steel; the merging and absorbing of independent plants; his own entry upon the scene on the death of his father; and–the rest–material fortune and prosperity, which, perhaps, might stand substitute as a social sponsor for him; stand, perhaps, for something of what he lacked in himself, which only long residence amid the best, long-formed habits for the best, or a long inheritance of the best could give. Did Siward think so? Was the best beyond his reach? Was it hopeless for such a man as he to try? And why?

The innocent snobbery, the abashed but absolute simplicity of this ponderous pilgrim from the smelting pits clambering upward through the high school of the smoky town, groping laboriously through the chilly halls of Harvard toward the outer breastworks of Manhattan, interested Siward; and he said so in his pleasant way, without offence, and with a smiling question at the end.

“Worth while?” repeated Plank, flushing heavily, “it is worth while to me. I have always desired to be a part of the best that there is in my own country; and the best is here, isn’t it? “

“Not necessarily,” said Siward, still smiling. “The noisiest is here, and some of the best.”

“Which is the best?” inquired Plank naively.

“Why, all plain people, whose education, breeding, and fortune permit them the luxury of thinking, and whose tastes, intelligence, and sanity enable them to express their thoughts. There are such people here, and some of them form a portion of the gaudier and noisier galaxy we call society.”

“That is what I wish to be part of,” said Plank. “Could you tell me what are the requirements?”

“I don’t believe I could, exactly,” said Siward, amused. “With us, the social system, as an established and finished system, has too recently been evolved from outer chaos to be characteristic of anything except the crudity and energy of the chaos from which it emerged. The balance between wealth, intelligence, and breeding has not yet been established–not from lack of wealth or intelligence. The formula has not been announced, that is all.”

“What is the formula?” insisted Plank.

“The formula is the receipt for a real society,” replied Siward, laughing. “At present we have its uncombined ingredients in the raw–noisy wealth and flippant fashion, arrogant intelligence and dowdy breeding–all excellent materials, when filtered and fused in the retort; and many of our test tubes have already precipitated pure metal besides, and our national laboratory is turning out fine alloys. Some day we’ll understand the formula, and we’ll weld the entire mass; and that will be society, Mr. Plank.”

“In the meanwhile,” repeated Plank, unsmiling, “I want to be part of the best we have. I want to be part of the brightness of things. I mean, that I cannot be contented with an imitation.”

“An imitation?”

“Of the best–of what you say is not yet society. I ask no more than your footing among the people of this city. I wish to be able to go where such men as you go; be permitted, asked, desired to be part of what you always have been part of. Is it a great deal I ask? Tell me, Mr. Siward–for I don’t know–is it too much to expect?”

“I don’t think it is a very high ambition,” said Siward, smiling. “What you ask is not very much to ask of life, Mr. Plank.”

“But is there any reason why I may not hope to go where I wish to go?”

“I think it depends upon yourself,” said Siward, “upon your capacity for being, or for making people believe you to be exactly what they require. You ask me whether you may be able to go where you desire; and I answer you that there is no limit to any journey except the sprinting ability of the pilgrim.”

Plank laughed a little, and his squared jaws relaxed; then, after a few moments’ thought:

“It is curious that what you cast away from you so easily, I am waiting for with all the patience I have in me. And yet it is always yours to pick up again whenever you wish; and I may never live to possess it.”

He was so perfectly right that Siward said nothing; in fact, he could have no particular interest or sympathy for a man’s quest of what he himself did not understand the lack of. Those born without a tag unmistakably ticketing them and their positions in the world were perforce ticketed. Siward took it for granted that a man belonged where he was to be met; and all he cared about was to find him civil, whether he happened to be a policeman or a master of fox-hounds.

He was, now that he knew Plank, contented to accept him anywhere he met him; but Plank’s upward evolutions upon the social ladder were of no interest to him, and his naive snobbery was becoming something of a bore.

So Siward directed the conversation into other channels, and Plank, accepting another cup of tea, became very communicative about his stables and his dogs, and the preservation of game; and after a while, looking up confidently at Siward, he said:

“Do you think it beastly to drive pheasants the way I did at Black Fells? I have heard that you were disgusted.”

“It isn’t my idea of a square deal,” said Siward frankly.

“That settles it, then.”

“But you should not let me interfere with–“

“I’ll take your opinion, and thank you for it. It didn’t seem to me to be the thing; only it’s done over here, you know. The De Coursay’s and the–“

“Yes, I know. . Glad you feel that way about it, Plank. It’s pretty rotten sportsmanship. Don’t you think so?”

“I do. I–would you–I should like to ask you to try some square shooting at the Fells,” stammered Plank, “next season, if you would care to.”

“You’re very good. I should like to, if I were going to shoot at all; but I fancy my shooting days are over, for a while.”

“Over!”

“Business,” nodded Siward, absently grave again. “I see no prospect of my idling for the next year or two.”

“You are in–in Amalgamated Electric, I think,” ventured Plank.

“Very much in,” replied the other frankly. “You’ve read the papers and heard rumours, I suppose?”

“Some. I don’t suppose anybody quite understands the attacks on Amalgamated.”

“I don’t–not yet. Do you?”

Plank sat silent, then his shrewd under lip began to protrude.

“I’m wondering,” he began cautiously, “how much the Algonquin crowd understands about the matter?”

Siward’s troubled eyes were on him as he spoke, watching closely, narrowly.

“I’ve heard that rumour before,” he said.

“So have I,” said Plank, “and it seems incredible.” He looked warily at Siward. “Suppose it is true that the Algonquin Trust Company is godfather to Inter-County. That doesn’t explain why a man should kick his own door down when there’s a bell to ring and servants to let him in–and out again, too.”

“I have wondered,” said Siward, “whether the door he might be inclined to kick down is really his own door any longer.”

“I, too,” said Plank simply. “It may belong to a personal enemy–if he has any. He could afford to have an enemy, I suppose.”

Siward nodded.

“Then, hadn’t you better–I beg your pardon! You have not asked me to advise you.”

“No. I may ask your advice some day. Will you give it when I do?”

“With pleasure,” said Plank, so warmly disinterested, so plainly proud and eager to do a service that Siward, surprised and touched, found no word to utter.

Plank rose. Siward attempted to stand up, but had trouble with his crutches.

“Please don’t try,” said Plank, coming over and offering his hand. “May I stop in again soon? Oh, you are off to the country for a month or two? I see. . You don’t look very well. I hope it will benefit you. Awfully glad to have seen you. I–I hope you won’t forget me–entirely.”

“I am the man people are forgetting,” returned Siward, “not you. It was very nice of you to come. You are one of very few who remember me at all.”

“I have very few people to remember,” said Plank; “and if I had as many as I could desire I should remember you first.”

Here he became very much embarrassed. Siward offered his hand again. Plank shook it awkwardly, and went away on tiptoe down the stairs which creaked decorously under his weight.

And that ended the first interview between Plank and Siward in the first days of the latter’s decline.

The months that passed during Siward’s absence from the city began to prove rather eventful for Plank. He was finally elected a member of the Patroons Club, without serious opposition; he had dined twice with the Kemp Ferralls; he and Major Belwether were seen together at the Caithness dance, and in the Caithness box at the opera. Once a respectable newspaper reported him at Tuxedo for the week’s end; his name, linked with the clergy, frequently occupied such space under the column headed “Ecclesiastical News” as was devoted to the progress of the new chapel, and many old ladies began to become familiar with his name.

At the right moment the Mortimers featured him between two fashionable bishops at a dinner. Mrs. Vendenning, who adored bishops, immediately remembered him among those asked to her famous annual bal poudre; a celebrated yacht club admitted him to membership; a whole shoal of excellent minor clubs which really needed new members followed suit, and even the rock-ribbed Lenox, wearied of its own time-honoured immobility, displayed the preliminary fidgets which boded well for the stolid candidate. The Mountain was preparing to take the first stiff step toward Mohammed. It was the prophet’s cue to sit tight and yawn occasionally.

Meanwhile he didn’t want to; he was becoming anxious to do things for himself, which Leila Mortimer, of course, would not permit. It was difficult for him to understand that any effort of his own would probably be disastrous; that progress could come only through his own receptive passivity; that nothing was demanded, nothing required, nothing permitted from him as yet, save a capacity for assimilating such opportunities as sections of the social system condescended to offer.

For instance, he wanted to open his art gallery to the public; he said it was good strategy; and Mrs. Mortimer sat upon the suggestion with a shrug of her pretty shoulders. Well, then, couldn’t he possibly do something with his great, gilded ball-room? No, he couldn’t; and the less in evidence his galleries and his ball-rooms were at present the better his chances with people who, perfectly aware that he possessed them, were very slowly learning to overlook the insolence of the accident that permitted him to possess what they had never known the want of. First of all people must tire of repeating to each other that he was nobody, and that would happen when they wearied of explaining to one another why he was ever asked anywhere. There was time enough for him to offer amusement to people after they had ceased to find amusement in snubbing him; plenty of time in the future for them to lash him to a gallop for their pleasure. In the meanwhile he was doing very well, because he began to appear regularly in the Caithness-Bonnesdel box, and old Peter Caithness was already boring him at the Patroons; which meant that the thrifty old gentleman considered Plank’s millions as a possible underpinning for the sagging house of Caithness, of which his pallid daughter Agatha was the sole sustaining caryatid in perspective.

Yes, he was doing well; for that despotic beauty, Sylvia Landis, whose capricious perversity had recently astonished those who remembered her in her first season as a sweet, reasonable, and unspoiled girl, was always friendly with him. That must be looked upon as important, considering Sylvia’s unassailable position, and her kinship to the autocratic old lady whose kindly ukase had for generations remained the undisputed law in the social system of Manhattan.

“There is another matter,” said Leila Mortimer innocently, as Plank, lingering after a disastrous rubber of bridge with her, her husband, and Agatha Caithness, had followed her into her own apartments to write his cheque for what he owed. “You’ve driven with me so much and you come here so often and we are seen together so frequently that the clans are sharpening up their dirks for us. And that helps some.”

“What!” exclaimed Plank, reddening, and twisting around in his chair.

“Certainly. You didn’t suppose I could escape, did you?”

“Escape! What?” demanded Plank, getting redder.

“Escape being talked about, savagely, mercilessly. Can’t you see how it helps? Oh dear, are you stupid, Beverly?

“I don’t know,” replied Plank, staring, “just how stupid I am. If you mean that I’m compromising you–“

“Oh, please! Why do you use back-stairs words? Nobody talks about compromising now; all that went out with New Year’s calls and brown- stone stoops.”

“What do they call it, then?” asked Plank seriously.

“Call what? you great boy!”

“What you say I’m doing?”

“I don’t say it.”

“Who does?”

Leila laughed, leaned back in her big, padded chair, dropping one knee over the other. Her dark eyes with the Japanese slant to them rested mockingly on Plank, who had now turned completely around in his chair, leaving his half-written cheque on her escritoire behind him.

“You’re simply credited with an affair with a pretty woman,” she said, watching the dull colour mounting to his temples, “and that is certain to be useful to you, and it doesn’t affect me. What on earth are you blushing about?” And as he said nothing, she added, with a daring little laugh: “You are credited with being very agreeable, you see.”

“If–if that’s the way you take it–” he began.

“Of course! What do you expect me to do–call for help before I’m hurt?”

“You mean that this talk–gossip–doesn’t hurt?”

“How silly!” She looked at him, smiling. “You know how likely I am to require protection from your importunities.” She dropped her pretty head, and began plaiting with her fingers the silken gown over her knee. “Or how likely I would be to shriek for it even if”–she looked up with childlike directness–“even if I needed it.”

“Of course you can take care of yourself,” said Plank, wincing.

“I could, if I wanted to.”

“Everybody knows that. I know it, Leroy knows it; only I don’t care to figure as that kind of man.”

Already he had lost sight of her position in the matter; and she drew a long, quiet breath, almost like a sigh.

“Time enough after you marry,” she said deliberately, and lighted a cigarette from a candle, recreating her knees the other way.

He considered her, started to speak, checked himself, and swung around to the desk again. His pen hovered over the space to be filled in. He tried to recollect the amount, hesitated, dated the cheque and affixed his signature, still trying to remember; then be looked at her over his shoulder.

“I forget the exact amount.”

She surveyed him through the haze of her cigarette, but made no answer.

“I forget the amount,” he repeated.

“So do I,” she nodded indolently.

“But I–“

“Let it go. Besides, I shall not accept it.”

He flushed up, astonished. “You can’t refuse to take a gambling debt.”

“I do,” she retorted coolly. “I’m tired of taking your money.”

“But you won it.”

“I’m tired of winning it. It is all I ever do win . from you.”

Her pretty head was wreathed in smoke. She tipped the ashes from the cigarette’s end, watching them fall to powder on the rug.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he persisted doggedly.

“Don’t you? I don’t believe I do, either. There are intervals in my career which might prove eloquent if I opened my lips. But I don’t, except to make floating rings and cabalistic signs out of cigarette smoke. Can you read their meaning? Look! There goes one, and there’s another, and another–all twisting and uncurling into hieroglyphics. They are very significant; they might tell you a lot of things, if you would only translate them. But you haven’t the key–have you?”

There was a heavy, jarring step in the main living-room, and Mortimer’s bulk darkened the doorway.

“Entrez, mon ami,” nodded Leila, glancing up. “Where is Agatha?”

“I’m going to Desmond’s,” he grunted, ignoring his wife’s question; “do you want to try it again, Beverly?”

“I can’t make Leila take her own winnings,” said Plank, holding out the signed but unfilled cheque to Mortimer, who took it and scrutinised it for a moment, rubbing his heavy, inflamed eyes; then, gesticulating, the cheque fluttering in his puffy fingers:

“Come on,” he insisted. “I’ve a notion that I can give Desmond a whirl that he won’t forget in a hurry. Agatha’s asleep; she’s going to that ball–where is it?” he demanded, turning on his wife. “Yes, yes; the Page blow-out. You’re going, I suppose?”

Leila nodded, and lighted another cigarette.

“All right,” continued Mortimer impatiently; “you and Agatha won’t start before one. And if you think Plank had better go, why, we’ll be back here in time.”

“That means you won’t be back at all,” observed his wife coolly; “and it’s good policy for Beverly to go where he’s asked. Can’t you turn in and sleep, now, and amuse your friend Desmond to-morrow night?”

“No, I can’t. What a fool I’d be to let a chance slip when I feel like a winner!”

“You never feel otherwise when you gamble,” said Leila.

“Yes, I do,” he retorted peevishly. “I can tell almost every time what the cards are going to do to me. Leila, go to sleep. We’ll be back here for you by one, or half past.”

“Look here, Leroy,” began Plank, “there’s one thing I can’t stand for, and that’s this continual loss of sleep. If I go with you I’ll not be fit to go to the Pages.”

“What a farmer you are!” sneered Mortimer. “I believe you roost on the foot-board of your bed, like a confounded turkey. Come on! You’d better begin training, you know. People in this town are not going to stand for the merry ploughboy game, you see!”

But Plank was shrewdly covering his principal reason for declining; he had too often “temporarily” assisted Mortimer at Desmond’s and Burbank’s, when Mortimer, cleaned out and unable to draw against a balance non-existent, had plucked him by the sleeve from the faro table with the breathless request for a loan.

“I tell you I can wring Desmond dry to-night,” repeated Mortimer sullenly. “It isn’t a case of ‘want to,’ either; it’s a case of ‘got to.’ That old pink-and-white rabbit, Belwether, got me into a game this afternoon, and between him and Voucher and Alderdine I’m stripped clean as a kennel bone.”

But Plank shook his head, pretending to yawn; and Mortimer, glowering and lingering, presently went off, his swollen hands thrust into his trousers’ pockets, his gross features dark with disgust; and presently they heard the front door slam, and a rattling tattoo of horses’ feet on the asphalt; and Leila sprang up impatiently, and, passing Plank, traversed the passage to the windows of the front room.

“He’s taken the horses–the beast!” she said calmly, as Plank joined her at the great windows and looked out into the night, where the round, drooping, flower-like globes of the electric lamps spread a lake of silver before the house.

It was rather rough on Leila. The Mortimers maintained one pair of horses only; and the use given them at all hours resulted in endless scenes, and an utter impossibility for Leila to retain the same coachman and footman for more than a few weeks at a time.

“He won’t come back; he’ll keep Martin and the horses standing in front of Delmonico’s all night. You’d better call up the stables, Beverly.”

So Plank called up a livery and arranged for transportation at one; and Leila seated herself at a card-table and began to deal herself cold decks, thoughtfully.

“That bit in ‘Carmen,'” she said, “it always brings the shudder; it never palls on me, never grows stale.” She whipped the ominous spade from the pack and held it out. “La Mort!” she exclaimed in mock tragedy, yet there was another undertone ringing through it, sounding, too, in her following laugh. “Draw!” she commanded, holding out the pack; and Plank drew a diamond.

“Naturally,” she nodded, shuffling the pack with her smooth, savant fingers and laying them out as she repeated the formula: “Qui frappe? Qui entre? Qui prend chaise? Qui parle? Oh, the deuce! it’s always the same! Tiens! je m’ennui!” There was a flash of her bare arm, a flutter, and the cards fell in a shower over them both.

Plank flipped a card from his knee, laughing uncertainly, aware of symptoms in his pretty vis-a-vis which always made him uncomfortable. For months, now, at certain intervals, these recurrent symptoms had made him wary; but what they might portend he did not know, only that, alone with her, moments occurred when he was heavily aware of a tension which, after a while, affected even his few thick nerves. One of those intervals was threatening now: her flushed cheeks, her feverish activity with her hands, the unconscious reflex movement of her silken knees and restless slippers, all foreboded it. Next would come the nervous laughter, the swift epigram which bored and puzzled him, the veiled badinage he was unequal to; and then the hint of weariness, the curious pathos of long silences, the burnt-out beauty of her eyes from which the fire had gone as though quenched by invisible tears within.

He ascribed it–desired to ascribe it–to her relations with her husband. He had naturally learned and divined how matters stood with them; he had learned considerable in the last month or two–something of Mortimer’s record as a burly brother to the rich; something of his position among those who made no question of his presence anywhere. Something of Leila, too, he had heard, or rather deduced from hinted word or shrug or smiling silence, not meant for him, but indifferent to what he might hear and what he might think of what he heard.

He did listen; he did patiently add two and two in the long solitudes of his Louis XV chamber; and if the results were not always four, at least they came within a fraction of the proper answer. And this did not alter his policy or weaken his faith in his mentors; nor did it impair his real gratitude to them, and his real and simple friendship for them both. He was faithful in friendship once formed, obstinately so, for better or for worse; but he was shrewd enough to ignore opportunities for friendships which he foresaw could do him no good on his plodding pilgrimage toward the temple of his inexorable desire.

Lifting, now, his Delft-coloured eyes furtively, he studied the silk- and-lace swathed figure of the young matron opposite, flung back into the depths of her great chair, profile turned from him, her chin imprisoned in her ringed fingers. The brooding abandon of the attitude contrasted sharply with the grooming of the woman, making both the more effective.

“Turn in, if you want to,” she said, her voice indistinct, smothered by her pink palm. “You’re to dress in Leroy’s quarters.”

“I don’t want to turn in just yet.”

“You said you needed sleep.”

“I do. But it’s not eleven yet.”

She slipped into another posture, reaching for a cigarette, and, setting it afire from the match he offered, exhaled a cloud of smoke and looked dreamily through it at him.

“Who is she?” she asked in a colourless voice. “Tell me, for I don’t know. Agatha? Marion Page? Mrs. Vendenning? or the Tassel girl?”

“Nobody–yet,” he admitted cheerfully.

“Nobody–yet,” she repeated, musing over her cigarette. “That’s good politics, if it’s true.”

“Am I untruthful?” he asked simply.

“I don’t know. Are you? You’re a man.”

“Don’t talk that way, Leila.”

“No, I won’t. What is it that you and Sylvia Landis have to talk about so continuously every time you meet?”

“She’s merely civil to me,” he explained.

“That’s more than she is to a lot of people. What do you talk about?”

“I don’t know–nothing in particular; mostly about Shotover, and the people there last summer.”

“Doesn’t she ever mention Stephen Siward?”

“Usually. She knows I like him.”

“She likes him, too,” said Leila, looking at him steadily.

“I know it. Everybody likes him–or did. I do, yet.”

“I do, too,” observed Mrs. Mortimer coolly. “I was in love with him. He was only a boy then.”

Plank nodded in silence.

“Where is he now–do, you know?” she asked. “Everybody says he’s gone to the devil.”

“He’s in the country somewhere,” replied Plank cautiously. “I stopped in to see him the other day, but nobody seemed to know when he would return.”

Mrs. Mortimer tossed her cigarette onto the hearth. For a long interval of silence she lay there in her chair, changing her position restlessly from moment to moment; and at length she lay quite still, so long that Plank began to think she had fallen asleep in her chair.

He rose. She did not stir, and, passing her, he instinctively glanced down. Her cheeks, half buried against the back of the chair, were overflushed; under the closed lids the lashes glistened wet in the lamplight.

Surprised, embarrassed, he halted, as though afraid to move; and she sat up with a nervous shake of her shoulders.

“What a life!” she said, under her breath; “what a life for a woman to lead!”

“Wh-whose?” he blurted out.

“Mine!”

He stared at her uneasily, finding nothing to say. He had never before heard anything like this from her.

“Can’t anybody help me out of it?” she said quietly.

“Who? How? . Do you mean–“

“Yes, I mean it! I mean it! I–“

And suddenly she broke down, in a strange, stammering, tearless way, opening the dry flood-gates over which rattled an avalanche of words–bitter, breathless phrases rushing brokenly from lips that shrank as they formed them.

Plank sat inert, the corroding echo of the words clattering in his ears. And after a while he heard his own altered voice sounding persistently in repetition:

“Don’t say those things, Leila; don’t tell me such things.”

“Why? Don’t you care?”

“Yes, yes, I care; but I can’t do anything! I have no business to hear–to see you this way.”

“To whom can I speak, then, if I can not speak to you? To whom can I turn? Where am I to turn, in all the world?”

“I don’t know,” he said fearfully; “the only way is to go on.”

“What else have I done? What else am I doing?” she cried. “Go on? Am I not trudging on and on through life, dragging the horror of it behind me through the mud, except when the horror drags me? To whom am I to turn–to other beasts like him?–sitting patiently around, grinning and slavering, awaiting their turn when the horror of it crushes me to the mud?”

She stretched out a rounded, quivering arm, and laid the small fingers of the left hand on its flawless contour. “Look!” she said, exasperated, “I am young yet; the horror has not yet corrupted the youth in me. I am fashioned for some reason, am I not?–for some purpose, some happiness. I am not bad; I am human. What poison has soaked into me can be eliminated. I tell you, no woman is capable of being so thoroughly poisoned that the antidote proves useless.

“But I tell you men, also, that unless she find that antidote she will surely reinfect herself. A man can not do what that man has done to me and expect me to recover unaided. People talk of me, and I have given them subjects enough! But–look at me! Straight between the eyes! Every law have I broken except that! Do you understand? That one, which you men consider yourselves exempt from, I have not broken–yet! Shall I speak plainer? It is the fashion to be crude. But–I can’t be; I am unfashionable, you see.”

She laughed, her haunted eyes fixed on his.

“Is there no chance for me? Because I drag his bedraggled name about with me is there no decent chance, no decent hope? Is there only indecency in prospect, if a man comes to care for a married woman? Can’t a decent man love her at all? I–I think–“

Her hands, outstretched, trembled, then flew to her face; and she stood there swaying, until Plank perforce stepped to her side and steadied her against him.

So they remained for a while, until she looked up dazed, weary, ashamed, expecting nothing of him; and when it came, leaving her still incredulous, his arms around her, his tense, flushed face recoiling from their first kiss, she did not seem to comprehend.

“I can’t turn on him,” he stammered, “I–we are friends, you see. How can I love you, if that is so?”

“Could you love me?” she asked calmly.

“I–I don’t know. I did love–I do care for–another woman. I can’t marry her, though I am given to understand there is a chance. Perhaps it is partly ambition,” he said honestly, “for I am quite sure she has never cared for me, never thought of me in that way. I think a man can’t stand that long.”

“No; only women can. Who is she?”

“You won’t ask me, will you?”

“No. Are you sorry that I am in love with you?”

His arms unclasped her body, and he stepped back, facing her.

“Are you?” she asked violently.

“No.”

“You speak like a man,” she said tremulously. “Am I to be permitted to adore you in peace, then–decently, and in peace?”

“Don’t speak that way, Leila. I–there is no woman, no friend, I care for as much as I do you. It is easy, I think, for a woman, like you, to make a man care for her. You will not do it, will you?”

“I will,” she said softly.

“It’s no use; I can’t turn on him. I can’t! He is my friend, you see.”

“Let him remain so. I shall do what I can. Let him remain a monument to his fellow-beasts. What do I care? Do you think I desire to turn you into his image? Do you think I hope for your degradation and mine? Are you afraid I should not recognise love unaccompanied by the attendant beast? I–I don’t know; you had better teach me, if I prove blind. If you can love me, do so in charity before I go blind forever.”

She laid one hand on his arm, looked at him, then turned and passed slowly through the doorway.

“If you are going to sleep before we start you had better be about it!” she said, looking back at him from the stairs.

But he had no further need of sleep; and for a long while he stood at the windows watching the lamps of cabs and carriages sparkling through the leafless thickets of the park like winter fire-flies.

At one o’clock, hearing Agatha Caithness speak to Leila’s maid, he left the window, and sitting down at the desk, telephoned to Desmond’s; and he was informed that Mortimer, hard hit, had signified his intention of recouping at Burbank’s. Then he managed to get Burbank’s on the wire, and finally Mortimer himself, but was only cursed for his pains and cut off in the middle of his pleading.

So he wandered up-stairs into Mortimer’s apartments, where he tubbed and dressed, and finally descended, to find Agatha Caithness alone in the library, spinning a roulette wheel and whistling an air from “La Bacchante.”

“That’s pretty,” he said; “sing it.”

“No; it’s better off without the words; and so are you,” added Agatha candidly, relinquishing the wheel and strolling with languid grace about the room, hands on her hips, timing her vagrant steps to the indolent, wicked air. And,

“‘Je rougirais de men ivresse Si tu conservais ta raison!'”

she hummed deliberately, pivoting on her heels and advancing again toward Plank, her pretty, pale face delicate as an enamelled cameo under the flood of light from the crystal chandeliers.

“I understand that Mr. Mortimer is not coming with us,” she said carelessly. “Are you going to dance with me, if I find nobody better?”

He expressed himself flattered, cautiously. He was one of many who never understood this tall, white, low-voiced girl, with eyes too pale for beauty, yet strangely alluring, too. Few men denied the indefinable enchantment of her; few men could meet her deep-lidded, transparent gaze unmoved. In the sensitive curve of her mouth there was a kind of sensuousness; in her low voice, in her pallor, in the slim grace of her a vague provocation that made men restless and women silently curious for something more definite on which to base their curiosity.

She was wearing, over the smooth, dead-white skin of her neck, a collar of superb diamonds and aquamarines–almost an effrontery, as the latter were even darker than her eyes; yet the strange and effective harmony was evident, and Plank spoke of the splendour of the gems.

She nodded indifferently, saying they were new, and that she had picked them up at Tiffany’s; and he mentally sketched out the value of the diamonds, a trifle surprised, because Leila Mortimer had carefully informed him about the condition of the Caithness exchequer.

That youthful matron herself appeared in a few moments, very lustrous, very lovely in her fragrant, exotic brightness, and Plank for the first time thought that she was handsome–the vigorous, youthful incarnation of Life itself, in contrast to Agatha’s almost deathly beauty. She greeted him not only without a trace of embarrassment, but with such a friendly, fresh, gay confidence that he scarcely recognised in her the dry-eyed, feverish woman of an hour ago, whose very lips shrank back, scorched by the torrent of her own invective.

And so they drove the three short blocks to the Page’s in their hired livery; the street was inadequate for the crush of vehicles; and the glittering pressure within the house was outrageous; all of which confused Plank, who became easily confused by such things.

How they got in–how they managed to present themselves–who took Leila and Agatha from him–where they went–where he himself might be–he did not understand very clearly. The house was large, strange, full of strangers. He attempted to obtain his bearings by wandering about looking for a small rococo reception-room where he remembered he had once talked kennel talk with Marion Page, and had on another occasion perspired freely under the arrogant and strabismic glare of her mother. That good lady had really rather liked him; he never suspected it.

But he couldn’t find the rococo room–or perhaps he didn’t recognise it. So many people–so many, many people whom he did not know, whom he had never before laid eyes on–high-bred faces hard as diamonds; young, gay, laughing faces; brilliant eyes encountering his without a softening of recognition; clean-cut, attractive men in swarms, all animated, all amused, all at home among themselves and among the silken visions of loveliness passing and repassing, with here an extended gloved arm and the cordial greeting of camaraderie, there a quick smile, a swift turn in passing, a capricious bending forward for a whisper, a compliment, a jest–all this swept by him, around him, enveloping him with its brightness, its gaiety, its fragrance, and left him more absolutely alone than he had ever been in all his life.

He tried to find Leila, and gave it up. He saw Quarrier talking to Agatha, but the former saluted him so coldly that he turned away.

After a while he found Marion, but she hadn’t a dance left for him; neither had Rena Bonnesdel, whom he encountered while she was adroitly avoiding one of the ever-faithful twins. The twin caught up with her in consequence, and she snubbed Plank for his share in the disaster, which depressed him, and he started for the smoking-room, wherever that haven might be found. He got into the ball-room, however, by mistake, and adorned the wall, during the cotillon, as closely as his girth permitted, until an old lady sent for him; and he went and talked about bishops for nearly an hour to her, until his condition bordered on frenzy, the old lady being deaf and peevish.

Later, Alderdene used him to get rid of an angular, old harridan who seemed to be one solid diamond-mine, and who drove him into a corner and talked indelicacies until Plank’s broad face flamed like the setting sun. Then Captain Voucher unloaded a frightened debutante on him who tried to talk about horses and couldn’t; and they hated each other for a while, until, looking around her in desperation, she found he had vanished–which was quick work for a man of his size.

Kathryn Tassel employed him for supper, and kept him busy while she herself was immersed in a dawning affair with Fleetwood. She did everything to him except to tip him; and her insolence was the last straw.

Then, unexpectedly in the throng, two wonderful sea-blue eyes encountered his, deepening to violet with pleasure, and the trailing sweetness of a voice he knew was repeating his name, and a slim, white- gloved hand lay in his own.

Her escort, Ferrall, nodded to him pleasantly. She leaned forward from Ferrall’s arm, saying, under her breath, “I have saved a dance for you. Please ask me at once. Quick! do you want me?”

“I–I do,” stammered Plank.

Ferrall, suspicious, stepped forward to exchange civilities, then turning to the girl beside him: “See here, Sylvia, you’ve dragged me all over this house on one pretext or another. Do you want any supper, or don’t you? If you don’t, it’s our dance.”

“No, I don’t. No, it isn’t. Kemp, you annoy me!”

“That’s a nice thing to say! Is it your delicately inimitable way of giving me my conge?”

“Yes, thank you,” nodded Miss Landis coolly; “you may go now.”

“You’re spoiled, that’s what’s the matter,” retorted Ferrall wrathfully. “I thought I was to have this dance. You said–“

“I said ‘perhaps,’ because I didn’t see Mr. Plank coming to claim it. Thank you, Kemp, for finding him.”

Her nod and smile took the edge from her malice. Ferrall, who really adored dancing, glared about for anybody, and presently cornered the frightened and neglected debutante who had hated Plank.

Sylvia, standing beside Plank, looked up at him with her confident and friendly smile.

“You don’t care to dance, do you? Would you mind if we sat out this dance?”

“If you’d rather,” he said, so wistfully that she hesitated; then with a little shrug laid one hand on his arm, and they swung out across the floor together, into the scented whirl.

Plank, like many heavy men, danced beautifully; and Sylvia, who still loved dancing with all the ardour of a schoolgirl, permitted a moment or two of keen delight to sweep her dreamily from her purpose. But that purpose must have been a strong one, for she returned to it in a few minutes, and, looking up at Plank, said very gently that she cared to dance no more.

Her hand resting lightly on his arm, it did not seem possible that any pressure of hers was directing them to the conservatory; yet he did not know where he was going, and she was familiar with the house, and they soon entered the conservatory, where, in the shadow of various palms various youths looked up impatiently as they passed, and various maidens sat up very straight in their chairs.

Threading their dim way into the farther recesses they found seats among thickets of forced lilacs over-hung by early wistaria. A spring-like odour hung in the air; somewhere a tiny fountain grew musical in the semi-darkness.

“Marion told me you had been asked,” she said. “We have been so friendly; you’ve always asked me to dance whenever we have met; so I thought I’d save you one. Are you flattered, Mr. Plank?”

He said he was, very pleasantly, perfectly undeceived, and convinced of her purpose–a purpose never even tacitly admitted between them; and the old loneliness came over him again–not resentment, for he was willing that she should use him. Why not? Others used him; everybody used him; and if they found no use for him they let him alone. Mortimer, Fleetwood, Belwether–all, all had something to exact from him. It was for that he was tolerated–he knew it; he had slowly and unwillingly learned it. His intrusion among these people, of whom he was not one, would be endured only while he might be turned to some account. The hospital used him, the clergy found plenty for him to do for them, the museum had room for other pictures of his. Who among them all had ever sought him without a motive? Who among them all had ever found unselfish pleasure in him? Not one.

Something in the dull sadness of his face, as he sat there, checked the first elaborately careless question her lips were already framing. Leaning a little nearer in the dim light she looked at him inquiringly and he returned her gaze in silence.

“What is it, Mr. Plank,” she said; “is anything wrong?”

He knew that she did not mean to ask if anything was amiss with him. She did not care. Nobody cared. So, recognising his cue, he answered: “No, nothing is wrong that I have heard of.”

“You wear a very solemn countenance.”

“Gaiety affects me solemnly, sometimes. It is a reaction from frivolity. I suppose that I am over-enjoying life; that is all.”

She laughed, using her fan, although the place was cool enough and they had not danced long. To and fro flitted the silken vanes of her fan, now closing impatiently, now opening again like the wings of a nervous moth in the moonlight.

He wished she would come to her point, but he dared not lead her to it too brusquely, because her purpose and her point were supposed to be absolutely hidden from his thick and credulous understanding. It had taken him some time to make this clear to himself; passing from suspicion, through chagrin and overwounded feeling, to dull certainty that she, too, was using him, harmlessly enough from her standpoint, but how bitterly from his, he alone could know.

The quickened flutter of her fan meant impatience to learn from him what she had come to him to learn, and then, satisfied, to leave him alone again amid the peopled solitude of clustered lights.

He wished she would speak; he was tired of the sadness of it all. Whenever in his isolation, in his utter destitution of friendship, he turned guilelessly to meet a new advance, always, sooner or later, the friendly mask was lifted enough for him to divine the cool, fixed gaze of self-interest inspecting him through the damask slits.

Sylvia was speaking now, and the plumy fan was under savant control, waving graceful accompaniment to her soft voice, punctuating her sentences at times, at times making an emphasis or outlining a gesture.

It was the familiar sequence; topics that led to themes which adroitly skirted the salient point; returned capriciously, just avoiding it–a subtly charming pattern of words which required so little in reply that his smile and nod were almost enough to keep her aria and his accompaniment afloat.

It began to fascinate him to watch the delicacy of her strategy, the coquetting with her purpose; her naive advance to the very edges of it, the airy retreat, the innocent detour, the elaborate and circuitous return. And at last she drifted into it so naturally that it seemed impossible that fatuous man could have the most primitive suspicion of her premeditation.

And Plank, now recognising his cue, answered her: “No, I have not heard that he is in town. I stopped to see him the other day, but nobody there knew how soon he intended to return from the country.”

“I didn’t know he had gone to the country,” she said without apparent interest.

And Plank was either too kind to terminate the subject, or too anxious to serve his turn and release her; for he went on: “I thought I told you at Mrs. Ferrall’s that Mr. Siward had gone to the country.”

“Perhaps you did. No doubt I’ve forgotten.”

“I’m quite sure I did, because I remember saying that he looked very ill, and you said, rather sharply, that he had no business to be ill. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Is he better?”

“I hope so.”

“You hope so?”–with the controlled emphasis of impatience.

“Yes. Don’t you, Miss Landis? When I saw him at his home, he was lame–on crutches–and he looked rather ghastly; and all he said was that he expected to leave for the country. I asked him to shoot next year at Black Fells, and he seemed bothered about business, and said it might keep him from taking any vacation.”

“He spoke about his business?”

“Yes, he–“

“What is the trouble with his business? Is it anything about Amalgamated and Inter-County?”

“I think so.”

“Is he worried?”

Plank said deliberately: “I should be, if my interests were locked up in Amalgamated Electric.”

“Could you tell me why that would worry you?” she asked, smiling persuasively across at him.

“No,” he said, “I can’t tell you.”

“Because I wouldn’t understand?”

“Because I myself don’t understand.”

She thought awhile, brushing the rose velvet of her mouth with the fan’s edge, then, looking up confidently:

“Mr. Siward is such a boy. I’m so glad he has you to advise him in such matters.”

“What matters?” asked Plank bluntly.

“Why, in–in financial matters.”

“But I don’t advise him.”

“Why not?”

“Because he hasn’t asked me to, Miss Landis.”

“He ought to ask you. . He must ask you. . Don’t wait for him, Mr. Plank. He is only a boy in such things.”

And, as Plank was silent:

“You will, won’t you?”

“Do what–make his business my business, without an invitation?” asked Plank, so quietly that she flushed with annoyance.

“If you pretend to be his friend is it not your duty to advise him?” she asked impatiently.

“No; that is for his business associates to do. Friendship comes to grief when it crosses the frontiers of business.”

“That is a narrow view to take, Mr. Plank.”

“Yes, straight and narrow. The boundaries of friendship are straight and narrow. It is best to keep to the trodden path; best not to walk on the grass or trample the flowers.”

“I think you are sacrificing friendship for an epigram,” she said, careless of the undertone of contempt in her voice.

“I have never sacrificed friendship.” He turned, and looked at her pleasantly. “I never made an epigram consciously, and I have never required of a friend more than I had to offer in return. Have you?”