The Precipice by Elia Wilkinson Peattie (page 5)

She told him about her dinner with the Fitzgeralds and about the opera, but she held back her discovery, so to speak, of the baby, and the episode of Marna’s wistful tears when she heard the music, and her amazing _volte-face_ at remembering the baby’s feeding-time. She would have loved to spin out the story to him–she could have deepened the colors just enough to make it all very telling. But she wasn’t willing to give away the reason for her changed mood. It was enough, after all, that he was aware of it, and that when he drew her hand within his arm he held it in a clasp that asserted his right to keep it.

They were happy to be in each other’s company again. Kate had to admit it. For the moment it seemed to both of them that it didn’t matter much where they went so long as they could go together. They rode out to South Chicago on the ill-smelling South Deering cars, crowded with men and women with foreign faces. One of the men trod on Kate’s foot with his hobnailed shoe and gave an inarticulate grunt by way of apology.

“He’s crushed it, hasn’t he?” asked Ray anxiously, seeing the tears spring to her eyes. “What a brute!”

“Oh, it was an accident,” Kate protested. “Any one might have done it.”

“But anyone except that unspeakable Huniack would have done more than grunt!”

“I dare say he doesn’t know English,” Kate insisted. “He’ll probably remember the incident longer and be sorrier about it than some who would have been able to make graceful apologies.”

“Not he,” declared Ray. “Don’t you think it! Bless me, Kate, why you prefer these people to any others passes my comprehension. Can’t you leave these people to work out their own salvation–which to my notion is the only way they ever can get it–and content yourself with your own kind and class?”

“Not variety enough,” retorted Kate, feeling her tenderness evaporate and her tantalizing mood–her usual one when she was with Ray–come back. “Don’t I know just what you, for example, are going to think and say about any given circumstances? Don’t I know your enthusiasms and reactions as if I’d invented ’em?”

“Well, I know yours, too, but that’s because I love you, not because you’re like everybody else. I wish you were rather more like other women, Kate. I’d have an easier time.”

“If we were married,” said Kate, with that cheerful directness which showed how her sentimentality had taken flight, “you’d never give up till you’d made me precisely like Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Smith, and Mrs. Johnson. Men fall in love with women because they’re different from other women, and then put in the first years of their married life trying to make them like everybody else. I’ve noticed, however, that when they’ve finished the job, they’re so bored with the result that they go and look up another ‘different’ woman. Oh, I know!”

He couldn’t say what he wished in reply because the car filled up just then with a party of young people bound for a dance in Russell Square. It always made Kate’s heart glow to think of things like that–of what the city was trying to do for its people. These young people came from small, comfortable homes, quite capacious enough for happiness and self-respect, but not large enough for a dance. Very well; all that was needed was a simple request for the use of the field-house and they could have at their disposal a fine, airy hall, well-warmed and lighted, with an excellent floor, charming decorations, and a room where they might prepare their refreshments. All they had to pay for was the music. Proper chaperonage was required and the hall closed at midnight. Kate descanted on the beauties of the system till Ray yawned.

“Think how different it is at the dance-hall where we are going,” she went on, not heeding his disinclination for the subject. “They’ll keep it up till dawn and drink between every dance. There’s not a party of the kind the whole winter through that doesn’t see the steps of some young girl set toward destruction. Oh, I can’t see why it isn’t stopped! If women had the management of things, it would be, I can tell you. It would take about one day to do it.”

“That’s one of the reasons why the liquor men combine to kill suffrage,” said Ray. “They know it will be a sorry day for them when the women get in. Positively, the women seem to think that’s all there is to politics–some moral question; and the whole truth is they’d do a lot of damage to business with their slap-dash methods, as they’d learn to their cost. When they found their pin-money being cut down, they’d sing another tune, for they’re the most reckless spenders in the world, American women are.”

“They’re the purchasing agents for the most extravagant nation in the world, if you like,” Kate replied. “Men seem to think that shopping is a mere feminine diversion. They forget that it’s what supports their business and supplies their homes. Not to speak of any place beyond our own town, think of the labor involved in buying food and clothing for the two million and a half human beings here in Chicago. It’s no joke, I assure you.”

“Joke!” echoed Ray. “A good deal of the shopping I’ve seen at my father’s store seems to me to come under the head of vice. The look I’ve seen on some of those faces! It was ravaging greed, nothing less. Why, we had a sale the other day of cheap jewelry, salesmen’s samples, and the women swarmed and snatched and glared like savages. I declare, when I saw them like that, so indecently eager for their trumpery ornaments, I said to myself that you’d only to scratch the civilized woman to get at the squaw any day.”

Kate kept a leash on her tongue. She supposed it was inevitable that they should get back to the old quarrel. Deep down in Ray, she felt, was an unconquerable contempt for women. He made an exception of her because he loved her; because she drew him with the mysterious sex attraction. It was that, and not any sense of spiritual or intellectual approval of her, which made him set her apart as worthy of admiration and of his devoted service. If ever their lives were joined, she would be his treasure to be kept close in his personal casket,–with the key to the golden padlock in his pocket,–and he would all but say his prayers to her. But all that would not keep him from openly discountenancing her judgment before people. She could imagine him putting off a suggestion of hers with that patient married tone which husbands assume when they discover too much independent cerebration on the part of their wives.

“I couldn’t stand that,” she inwardly declared, as she let him think that he was assisting her from the car. “If any man ever used that patient tone to me, I’d murder him!”

She couldn’t keep back her sardonic chuckle.

“What are you laughing at?” he asked irritatedly.

“At the mad world, master,” she answered.

“Where is this dance-hall?” he demanded, as if he suspected her of concealing it.

The tone was precisely the “married” one she had been imagining, and she burst out with a laugh that made him stop and visibly wrap his dignity about him. Nothing was more evident than that he thought her silly. But as she paused, too, standing beneath the street-lamp, and he saw her with her nonchalant tilt of her head,–that handsome head poised on her strong, erect body,–her force and value were so impressed upon him that he had to retract. But she was provoking, no getting around that.

At that moment another sound than laughter cut the air–a terrible sound–the shriek of a tortured child. It rang out three times in quick succession, and Kate’s blood curdled.

“Oh, oh,” she gasped; “she’s being beaten! Come, Ray.”

“Mix up in some family mess and get slugged for my pains? Not I! But I’ll call a policeman if you say.”

“Oh, it might be too late! I’m a policeman, you know. Get the patrol wagon if you like. But I can’t stand that–“

Once more that agonized scream! Kate flashed from him into the mesh of mean homes, standing three deep in each yard, flanking each other with only a narrow passage between, and was lost to him. He couldn’t see where she had gone, but he knew that he must follow. He fell down a short flight of steps that led from the street to the lower level of the yard, and groped forward. He could hear people running, and when a large woman, draping her wrapper about her, floundered out of a basement door near him, he followed her. She seemed to know where to go. The squalid drama with the same actors evidently had been played before.

Mid-length of the building the woman turned up some stairs and came to a long hall which divided the front and rear stairs. At the end of it a light was burning, and Kate’s voice was ringing out like that of an officer excoriating his delinquent troops.

“I’m glad you can’t speak English,” he heard her say, “for if you could I’d say things I’d be sorry for. I’d shrivel you up, you great brute. If you’ve got the devil in you, can’t you take it out on some one else beside a little child? You’re her father, are you? She has no mother, I suppose. Well, you ‘re under arrest, do you understand? Tell him, some of you who can talk English. He’s to sit in that chair and never move from it till the patrol wagon comes. I shall care for the child myself, and she’ll be placed where he can’t treat her like that again. Poor little thing! Thank you, that’s a good woman. Just hold her awhile and comfort her. I can see you’ve children of your own.”

Ray found the courage at length to peer above the heads of the others in that miserable, crowded room. The dark faces of weary men and women, heavy with Old-World, inherited woe, showed in the gloom. The short, shaking man on the chair, dully contrite for his spasm of rage, was cringing before Kate, who stood there, amazingly tall among these low-statured beings. Never had she looked to Ray so like an eagle, so keen, so fierce, so fit for braving either sun or tenebrous cavern. She dominated them all; had them, who only partly understood what she said, at her command. She had thrown back her cloak, and the star of the Juvenile Court officer which she wore carried meaning to them. Though perhaps it had not needed that. Ray tried to think her theatrical, to be angry at her, but the chagrin of knowing that she had forgotten him, and was not caring about his opinion, scourged his criticisms back. She had lifted from the floor the stick with its leathern thong with which the man had castigated the tender body of his motherless child. She held it in her hand, looking at it with the angry aversion that she might have turned upon a venomous serpent. Then slowly, with unspeakable rebuke, she swung her gaze upon the wretch in the chair. For a moment she silently accused him. Then he dropped his head in his hands and sobbed. He seemed in his voiceless way to say that he, too, had been castigated by a million invisible thongs held in dead men’s hands, and that his soul, like his child’s body, was hideous with welts.

Kate turned to Ray.

“Is the patrol wagon on its way?” she inquired.

“I–I–didn’t call it,” he stammered.

“Please do,” she said simply.

He went out of the room, silently raging, and was grateful that one of the men followed to show him the patrol box. He waited outside for the wagon to come, and when the officers brought out the shaking prisoner, he saw Kate with them carrying the child in her arms.

“I must go to the station,” she said to Ray, in a matter-of-fact tone that put him far away from her. “So I’ll say good-night. It wouldn’t be pleasant for you to ride in the wagon, you know. I’ll be quite all right. One of the officers will see me safe home. Anyway, I shall have to go to the dance-hall before the evening’s over.”

“Kate!” he protested.

“Oh, I know,” she said to him apart softly while the others concerned themselves with assisting the blubbering Huniack into the wagon, “you think it isn’t nice of me to be going around like this, saving babies from beatings and young girls from much worse. You think it isn’t ladylike. But it’s what the coming lady is either going to do or see done. It’s a new idea, you understand, Ray. Quite different from the squaw idea, isn’t it? Good-night!”

An officer stood at the door of the wagon waiting for her. He touched his hat and smiled at her in a comradely fashion, and she responded with as courteous a bow as she ever had made to Ray.

The wagon drove off.

“I’ve been given my answer,” said Ray aloud. He wondered if he were more relieved or disappointed at the outcome. But really he could neither feel nor think reasonably. He went home in a tumult, dismayed at his own sufferings, and in no condition to realize that the old ideas and the new were at death grips in his consciousness.

XXVI

Karl Wander rode wearily up the hill on his black mare. Honora saw him coming and waved to him from the window. There was no one to put up his horse, and he drove her into the stables and fed her and spread her bed while Honora watched what he and she had laughingly termed “the outposts.” For she believed she had need to be on guard, and she thanked heaven that all of the approaches to the house were in the open and that there was nothing nearer than the rather remote grove of pinon trees which could shelter any creeping enemy.

Wander came on at last to the house, making his way deliberately and scorning, it would seem, all chance of attack. But Honora’s ears fairly reverberated with the pistol shot which did not come; the explosion which was now so long delayed. She ran to open the door for him and to drag him into the friendly kitchen, where, in the absence of any domestic help, she had spread their evening meal.

There was a look in his face which she had not seen there before–a look of quietude, of finality.

“Well?” she asked.

He flung his hat on a settle and sat down to loosen his leggings.

“They’ve gone,” he said, “bag and baggage.”

“The miners?”

“Yes, left this afternoon–confiscated some trains and made the crews haul them out of town. They shook their fists at the mines and the works as if they had been the haunt of the devil. I couldn’t bring myself to skulk. I rode Nell right down to the station and sat there till the last carload pulled out with the men and women standing together on the platform to curse me.”

“Karl! How could you? It’s a marvel you weren’t shot.”

“Too easy a mark, I reckon.”

“And Elena?”

“Lifted on board by two rival suitors. She didn’t even look at me.” He drew a long breath. “I was guiltless in that, Honora. You’ve stood by through everything, and you’ve made a cult of believing in me, and I want you to know that, so far as Elena was concerned, you were right to do it. I may have been a fool–but not consciously–not consciously.”

“I know it. I believe you.”

A silence fell between them while Honora set the hot supper on the table and put the tea to draw.

“It’s very still,” he said finally. “But the stillness here is nothing to what it is down where my village stood. I’ve made a frightful mess of things, Honora.”

“No,” she said, “you built up; another has torn down. You must get more workmen. There may be a year or two of depression, but you’re going to win out, Karl.”

“I’ve fought a good many fights first and last, Honora,–fights you know nothing about. Some of them have been with men, some with ideas, some of the worst ones with myself. It would be a long story and a strange one if I were to tell it all.”

“I dare say it would.”

“I suppose I must seem very strange to a civilized woman like you, or–or your friend, Kate Barrington.”

“You seem very like a brave man, Karl, and an interesting one.”

“But I’m tired, Honora,–extraordinarily tired. I don’t feel like fighting. Quiet and rest are what I’m longing for, and I’m to begin all over again, it appears. I’ve got to struggle up again almost from the bottom.”

“Come to supper, Karl. Never mind all that. We have food and we have shelter. No doubt we shall sleep. Things like that deserve our gratitude. Accept these blessings. There are many who lack them.”

Suddenly he threw up his arms with a despairing gesture.

“Oh, it isn’t myself, Honora, that I’m grieving for! It’s those hot-headed, misguided, wayward fellows of mine! They’ve left the homes I tried to help them win, they’ve followed a self-seeking, half-mad, wholly vicious agitator, and their lives, that I meant to have flow on so smoothly, will be troubled and wasted. I know so well what will happen! And then, their hate! It hangs over me like a cloud! I’m not supposed to be sensitive. I’m looked on as a swaggering, reckless, devil-may-care fellow with a pretty good heart and a mighty sure aim; but I tell you, cousin, among them, they’ve taken the life out of me.”

“It’s your dark hour, Karl. You’re standing the worst of it right now. To-morrow things will look better.”

“I couldn’t ask a woman to come out here and stand amid this ruin with me, Honora. You know I couldn’t. The only person who would be willing to share my present life with me would be some poor, devil-driven creature like Elena–come to think of it, even she wouldn’t! She’s off and away with a lover at each elbow!”

“Here!” said Honora imperatively. She held a plate toward him laden with steaming food.

He arose, took it, seated himself, and tried a mouthful, but he had to wash it down with water.

“I’m too tired,” he said. “Really, Honora, you’ll have to forgive me.”

She got up then and lighted the lamp in his bedroom.

“Thank you,” he said. “Rest is what I need. It was odd they didn’t shoot, wasn’t it? I thought every moment that they would.”

“You surely didn’t wish that they would, Karl?”

“No.” He paused for a moment at the door. “No–only everything appeared to be so futile. My bad deeds never turned on me as my good ones have done. It makes everything seem incoherent. What–what would a woman like Miss Barrington make of all that–of harm coming from good?”

“I don’t know,” said Honora, rather sharply. “She hasn’t written. I told her all the trouble we were in,–the danger and the distress,–but she hasn’t written a word.”

“Why should she?” demanded Wander. “It’s none of her concern. I suppose she thinks a fool is best left with his folly. Good-night, cousin. You’re a good woman if ever there was one. What should I have done without you?”

Honora smiled wanly. He seemed to have forgotten that it was she who would have fared poorly without him.

She closed up the house for the night, looking out in the bright moonlight to see that all was quiet. For many days and nights she had been continually on the outlook for lurking figures, but now she was inclined to believe that she had overestimated the animosity of the strikers. After all, try as they might, they could bring no accusations against the man who, hurt to the soul by their misunderstanding of him, was now laying his tired head upon his pillow.

All was very still. The moonlight touched to silver the snow upon the mountains; the sound of the leaping river was like a distant flute; the wind was rising with long, wavelike sounds. Honora lingered in the doorway, looking and listening. Her heart was big with pity–pity for that disheartened man whose buoyancy and self-love had been so deeply wounded, pity for those wandering, angry, aimless men and women who might have rested secure in his guardianship; pity for all the hot, misguided hearts of men and women. Pity, too, for the man with the most impetuous heart of them all, who wandered in some foreign land with a woman whose beauty had been his lure and his undoing. Yes, she had been given grace in those days, when she seemed to stand face to face with death, to pity even David and Mary!

She walked with a slow firm step up to her room, holding her head high. She had learned trust as well as compassion. She trusted Karl and the issue of his sorrow. She even trusted the issue of her own sorrow, which, a short time before, had seemed so shameful. She threw wide her great windows, and the wind and the moonlight filled her chamber.

* * * * *

Two days later Karl Wander and Honora Fulham rode together to the village, now dismantled and desolate.

“I remember,” said Karl, “what a boyish pride I took in the little town at first, Honora, to have built it, and had it called after me and all. Such silly fools as men are, trying to perpetuate themselves by such childish methods.”

“Perpetuation is an instinct with us,” said Honora calmly, “Immortality is our greatest hope. I’m so thankful I have my children, Karl. They seem to carry one’s personality on, you know, no matter how different they actually may be from one’s self.”

“Oh, yes,” said Karl, with a short sigh, “you’re right there. You’ve a beautiful brace of babies, Honora. I believe I’ll have to ask you to appoint me their guardian. I must have some share in them. It will give me a fresh reason for going on.”

“Are you a trifle short of reasons for going on, Karl?” Honora asked gently, averting her look so that she might not seem to be watching him.

“Yes, I am,” he admitted frankly. “Although, now that the worst of my chagrin is over at having failed so completely in the pet scheme of my life, I can feel my fighting blood getting up again. I’m going to make a success of the town of Wander yet, my cousin, and those three mines that lie there so silently are going to hum in the old way. You’ll see a string of men pouring in and out of those gates yet, take my word for it. But as for me, I proceed henceforth on a humbler policy.”

“Humbler? Isn’t it humble to be kind, Karl? That’s what you were first and last–kind. You were forever thinking of the good of your people.”

“It was outrageously insolent of me to do it, my cousin. Who am I that I should try to run another man’s affairs? How should I know what is best for him–isn’t he the one to be the judge of that? patronage, patronage, that’s what they can’t stand–that’s what natural overmen like myself with amiable dispositions try to impose on those we think inferior to ourselves. We can’t seem to comprehend that the way to make them grow is to leave them alone.”

“Don’t be bitter, Karl.”

“I’m not bitter, Honora. I’m rebuked. I’m literal. I’m instructed. I have brought you down here to talk the situation over with me. I can get men in plenty to advise me, but I want to know what you think about a number of things. Moreover, I want you to tell me what you imagine Miss Barrington would think about them.”

“Why don’t you write and ask her?” asked Honora. She herself was hurt at not having heard from Kate.

“I gave her notice that I wasn’t going to write any more,” said Karl sharply. “I couldn’t have her counting on me when I wasn’t sure that I was a man to be counted on.”

“Oh,” cried Honora, enlightened. “That’s the trouble, is it? But still, I should think she’d write to me. I told her of all you and I were going through together–” she broke off suddenly. Her words presented to her for the first time some hint of the idea she might have conveyed to Kate. She smiled upon her cousin beautifully, while he stared at her, puzzled at her unexpected radiance.

“Kate loves him,” she decided, looking at the man beside her with fresh appreciation of his power. She was the more conscious of it that she saw him now in his hour of defeat and perceived his hope and ingenuity, his courage and determination gathering together slowly but steadily for a fresh effort.

“Dear old Kate,” she mused. “Karl rebuffed her in his misery, and I misled her. If she hadn’t cared she’d have written anyway. As it is–“

But Karl was talking.

“Now there’s the matter of the company store,” he was saying. “What would Miss Barrington think about the ethical objections to that?”

Honora turned her attention to the matter in hand, and when, late that afternoon, the two rode their jaded horses home, a new campaign had been planned. Within a week Wander left for Denver. Honora heard nothing from him for a fortnight. Then a wire came. He was returning to Wander with five hundred men.

“They’re hoboes–pick-ups,” he told Honora that night as the two sat together at supper. “Long-stake and short-stake men–down-and-outs–vagrants–drunkards, God knows what. I advertised for them. ‘Previous character not called into question,’ was what I said. ‘Must open up my mines. Come and work as long as you feel like it.’ I haven’t promised them anything and they haven’t promised me anything, except that I give them wages for work. A few of them have women with them, but not more than one in twenty. I don’t know what kind of a mess the town of Wander will be now, but at any rate, it’s sticking to its old programme of ‘open shop.’ Any one who wants to take these fellows away from me is quite welcome to do it. No affection shall exist between them and me. There are no obligations on either side. But they seem a hearty, good-natured lot, and they said they liked my grit.”

Something that was wild and reckless in all of the Wanders flashed in Honora’s usually quiet eyes.

“A band of brigands,” she laughed. “Really, Karl, I think you’ll make a good chief for them. There’s one thing certain, they’ll never let you patronize them.”

“I shan’t try,” declared Karl. “They needn’t look to me for benefits of any sort. I want miners.”

Honora chuckled pleasantly and looked at her cousin from the corner of her eye. She had her own ideas about his ability to maintain such detachment.

He amused her a little later by telling her how he had formed a town government and he described the men he had appointed to office.

“They take it seriously, too,” he declared. “We have a ragamuffin government and regulations that would commend themselves to the most judicious. ‘Pon my soul, Honora, though it’s only play, I swear some of these fellows begin to take on little affectations of self-respect. We’re going to have a council meeting to-morrow. You ought to come down.”

That gave Honora a cue. She was wanting something more to do than to look after the house, now that servants had again been secured. It occurred to her that it might be a good idea to call on the women down at Wander. She was under no error as to their character. Broken-down followers of weak men’s fortunes,–some with the wedding ring and some without,–they nevertheless were there, flesh and blood, and possibly heart and soul. Not the ideal but the actual commended itself to her these days. Kate had taught her that lesson. So, quite simply, she went among them.

“Call on me when you want anything,” she said to them. “I’m a woman who has seen trouble, and I’d like to be of use to any of you if trouble should come your way. Anyhow, trouble or no trouble, let us be friends.”

In her simple dress, with her quiet, sad face and her deep eyes, she convinced them of sincerity as few women could have done. They bade her enter their doors and sit in their sloven homes amid the broken things the Italians had left behind them.

“Why not start a furniture shop?” asked Honora. “We could find some men here who could make plain furniture. I’ll see Mr. Wander about it.”

That was a simple enough plan, and she had no trouble in carrying it out. She got the women to cooperate with her in other ways. Among them they cleaned up the town, set out some gardens, and began spending their men’s money for necessaries.

“Do watch out,” warned Karl; “you’ll get to be a Lady Bountiful–“

“And you a benevolent magnate–“

“Damned if I will! Well, play with your hobo brides if you like, Honora, but don’t look for gratitude or rectitude or any beatitude.”

“Not I,” declared Honora. “I’m only amusing myself.”

They kept insisting to each other that they had no higher intention. They were hilarious over their failures and they persisted in taking even their successes humorously. At first the “short-stake men” drifted away, but presently they began to drift back again. They liked it at Wander,–liked being mildly and tolerantly controlled by men of their own sort,–men with some vested authority, however, and a reawakened perception of responsibility. Wander was their town–the hoboes’ own city. It was one of the few places where something was expected of the hobo. Well, a hobo was a man, wasn’t he? The point was provable. A number of Karl Wander’s vagrants chose to prove that they were not reprobates. Those who had been “down and out” by their own will, or lack of it, as well as those whom misfortune had dogged, began to see in this wild village, in the heart of these rich and terrific mountains, that wonderful thing, “another chance.”

“Would Miss Barrington approve of us now?” Karl would sometimes ask Honora.

“Why should she?” Honora would retort. “We’re not in earnest. We’re only fighting bankruptcy and ennui.”

“That’s it,” declared Karl. “By the way, I must scrape up some more capital somewhere, Honora. I’ve borrowed everything I could lay my hands on in Denver. Now I’ve written to some Chicago capitalists about my affairs and they show a disposition to help me out. They’ll meet in Denver next week. Perhaps I shall bring them here. I’ve told them frankly what my position was. You see, if I can swing things for six months more, the tide will turn. Do you think my interesting rabble will stick to me?”

“Don’t count on them,” said Honora. “Don’t count on anybody or anything. But if you like to take your chance, do it. It’s no more of a gamble than anything else a Colorado man is likely to invest in.”

“You don’t think much of us Colorado men, do you, my cousin?”

“I don’t think you are quite civilized,” she said. Then a twinge of memory twisted her face. “But I don’t care for civilized men. I like glorious barbarians like you, Karl.”

“Men who are shot at from behind bushes, eh? If I ever have to hide in a cave, Honora, will you go with me?”

“Yes, and load the guns.”

He flashed her a curious look; one which she could not quite interpret. Was he thinking that he would like her to keep beside him? For a second, with a thrill of something like fear, this occurred to her. Then by some mysterious process she read his mind, and she read it aright. He was really thinking how stirring a thing life would seem if he could hear words like that from the lips of Kate Barrington.

XXVII

It had been a busy day for Honora. She had been superintending the house-cleaning and taking rather an aggressive part in it herself. She rejoiced that her strength had come back to her, and she felt a keen satisfaction in putting it forth in service of the man who had taken her into community of interest with him when, as he had once put it, she was bankrupted of all that had made her think herself rich.

Moreover, she loved the roomy, bare house, with its uncurtained windows facing the mountains, and revealing the spectacles of the day and night. Because of them she had learned to make the most of her sleepless hours. The slow, majestic procession in the heavens, the hours of tumult when the moon struggled through the troubled sky, the dawns with their swift, wide-spreading clarity, were the finest diversions she ever had known.

She remembered how, in the old days, she and David had patronized the unspeakably puerile musical comedies under the impression that they “rested” them. Now, she was able to imagine nothing more fatiguing.

They had an early supper, for Karl was leaving for a day or two in Denver and had to be driven ten miles to the station. He was unusually silent, and Honora was well pleased that he should be so, for, though she had kept herself so busily occupied all the day, she had not been able to rid herself of the feeling that a storm of memories was waiting to burst upon her. The feeling had grown as the hours of the day went on, and she at once dreaded and longed for the solitude she should have when Karl was gone. She was relieved to find that the little girls were weary and quite ready for their beds. She watched Karl drive away, standing at the door for a few moments till she heard his clear voice calling a last good-bye as the station wagon swept around the pinon grove; then she locked the house and went to her own room. A fire had been laid for her, and she touched a match to the kindling, lighted her lamp, and took up some sewing. But she found herself too weary to sew, and, moreover, this assailant of recollection was upon her again.

She had once seen the Northern lights when the many-hued glory seemed to be poured from vast, invisible pitchers, till it spread over the floor of heaven and spilled earthward. Her memories had come upon her like that.

Then she faced the fact she had been trying all day not to recognize.

It was David’s birthday!

She admitted it now, and even had the courage to go back over the ways they had celebrated the day in former years; at first she held to the old idea that these recollections made her suffer, but presently she perceived that it was not so. Had her help come from the hills, as Karl had told her it would?

She sat so still that she could hear the ashes falling in the fireplace–so still that the ticking of her watch on the dressing-table teased her ears. She seemed to be listening for something–for something beautiful and solemn. And by and by the thing she had been waiting for came.

It swept into the house as if all the doors and windows had been thrown wide to receive it. It was as invisible as the wind, as scentless as a star, as complete as birth or death. It was peace–or forgiveness–or, in a white way, perhaps it was love.

Suddenly she sprang to her feet.

“David!” she cried. “David! Oh, I _believe I understand!_”

She went to her desk, and, as if she were compelled, began to write. Afterward she found she had written this:–

“DEAR DAVID:–

“It is your birthday, and I, who am so used to sending you a present, cannot be deterred now. Oh, David, my husband, you who fathered my children, you, who, in spite of all, belong to me, let me tell you how I have at last come, out of the storm of angers and torments of the past year, into a sheltered room where you seem to sit waiting to hear me say, ‘I forgive you.’

“That is my present to you–my forgiveness. Take it from me with lifted hands as if it were a sacrament; feed on it, for it is holy bread. Now we shall both be at peace, shall we not? You will forgive me, too, _for all I did not do_.

“We are willful children, all of us, and night over-takes us before we have half learned our lessons.

“Oh, David–“

She broke off suddenly. Something cold seemed to envelop her–cold as a crevasse and black as death. She gave a strangled cry, wrenched the collar from her throat, fighting in vain against the mounting waves that overwhelmed her.

Long afterward, she shuddered up out of her unconsciousness. The fire had burned itself out; the lamp was sputtering for lack of oil. Somewhere in the distance a coyote called. She was dripping with cold sweat, and had hardly strength to find the thing that would warm her and to get off her clothes and creep into bed.

At first she was afraid to put out the light. It seemed as if, should she do so, the very form and substance of Terror would come and grip her. But after a time, slowly, wave upon wave, the sea of Peace rolled over her–submerging her. She reached out then and extinguished the light and let herself sink down, down, through the obliterating waters of sleep–waters as deep, as cold, as protecting as the sea.

“Into the Eternal Arms,” she breathed, not knowing why.

But when she awakened the next morning in response to the punctual gong, she remembered that she had said that.

“Into the Eternal Arms.”

She came down to breakfast with the face of one who has eaten of the sacred bread of the spirit.

* * * * *

The next two days passed vaguely. A gray veil appeared to hang between her and the realities, and she had the effect of merely going through the motions of life. The children caused her no trouble. They were, indeed, the most normal of children, and Mrs. Hays, their old-time nurse, had reduced their days to an agreeable system. Honora derived that peculiar delight from them which a mother may have when she is not obliged to be the bodily servitor and constant attendant of her children. She was able to feel the poetry of their childhood, seeing them as she did at fortunate and picturesque moments; and though their lives were literally braided into her own,–were the golden threads in her otherwise dun fabric of existence,–she was thankful that she did not have the task of caring for them. It would have been torture to have been tied to their small needs all day and every day. She liked far better the heavier work she did about the house, her long walks, her rides to town, and, when Karl was away, her supervision of the ranch. Above all, there was her work at the village. She could return from that to the children for refreshment and for spiritual illumination. In the purity of their eyes, in the liquid sweetness of their voices, in their adorable grace and caprice, there was a healing force beyond her power to compute.

During these days, however, her pleasure in them was dim, though sweet. She had been through a mystic experience which left a profound influence upon her, and she was too much under the spell of it even to make an effort to shake it off. She slept lightly and woke often, to peer into the velvet blackness of the night and to listen to the deep silence. She was as one who stands apart, the viewer of some tremendous but uncomprehended event.

The third day she sent the horses for Karl, and as twilight neared, he came driving home. She heard his approach and threw open the door for him. He saw her with a halo of light about her, curiously enlarged and glorified, and came slowly and heavily toward her, holding out both hands. At first she thought he was ill, but as his hands grasped hers, she saw that he was not bringing a personal sorrow to her but a brotherly compassion. And then she knew that something had happened to David. She read his mind so far, almost as if it had been a printed page, and she might have read further, perhaps, if she had waited, but she cried out:–

“What is it? You’ve news of David?”

“Yes,” he said. “Come in.”

“You’ve seen the papers?” he asked when they were within the house. She shook her head.

“I haven’t sent over for the mail since you left, Karl. I seemed to like the silence.”

“There’s silence enough in all patience!” he cried. “Sixteen hundred voices have ceased.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Cyclops has gone down–a new ship, the largest on the sea.”

“Why, that seems impossible.”

“Not when there are icebergs floating off the banks and when the bergs carry submerged knives of ice. One of them gored the ship. It was fatal.”

“How terrible!” For a second’s space she had forgotten the possible application to her. Then the knowledge came rushing back upon her.

She put her hands over her heart with the gesture of one wounded.

“David?” she gasped.

Karl nodded.

“He was on it–with Mary. They were coming back to America. He had been given the Norden prize, as you know,–the prize you earned for him. I think he was to take a position in some Eastern university. He and Mary had gone to their room, the paper says, when the shock came. They ran out together, half-dressed, and Mary asked a steward if there was anything the matter. ‘Yes, madam,’ he said quietly, just like that, ‘I believe we are sinking.’ You’ll read all about it there in those papers. Mary was interviewed. Well, they lowered the boats. There were enough for about a third of the passengers. They had made every provision for luxury, but not nearly enough for safety. The men helped the women into the boats and sent them away. Then they sat down together, folded their arms, and died like gentlemen, with the good musicians heartening them with their music to the last. The captain went down with his ship, of course. All of the officers did that. Almost all of the men did it, too. It was very gallant in its terrible way, and David was among the most gallant. The papers mention him particularly. He worked till the last helping the others off, and then he sat down and waited for the end.”

Honora turned on her cousin a face in which all the candles of her soul were lit.

“Oh, Karl, how wonderful! How beautiful!”

He said nothing for amazement.

“In that half-hour,” she went on, speaking with such swiftness that he could hardly follow her, “all his thoughts streamed off across the miles of sea and land to me! I felt the warmth of them all about me. It was myself he was thinking of. He came back to me, his wife! I was alone, waiting for something, I couldn’t tell what. Then I remembered it was his birthday, and that I should be sending him a gift. So I sent him my forgiveness. I wrote a letter, but for some reason I have not sent it. It is here, the letter!” She drew it from her bosom. “See, the date and hour is upon it. Read it.”

Karl arose and held the letter in a shaking hand. He made a calculation.

“The moments correspond,” he said. “You are right; his spirit sought yours.”

“And then the–the drowning, Karl. I felt it all, but I could not understand. I died and was dead for a long time, but I came up again, to live. Only since then life has been very curious. I have felt like a ghost that missed its grave. I’ve been walking around, pretending to live, but really half hearing and half seeing, and waiting for you to come back and explain.”

“I have explained,” said Karl with infinite gentleness. “Mary is saved. She was taken up with others by the Urbania, and friends are caring for her in New York. She gave a very lucid interview; a feeling one, too. She lives, but the man she ruined went down, for her sake.”

“No,” said Honora, “he went down for my sake. He went down for the sake of his ideals, and his ideals were mine. Oh, how beautiful that I have forgiven him–and how wonderful that he knew it, and that I–” She spoke as one to whom a great happiness had come. Then she wavered, reached out groping hands, and fell forward in Karl’s arms.

* * * * *

For days she lay in her bed. She had no desire to arise. She seemed to dread interruption to her passionate drama of emotion, in which sorrow and joy were combined in indeterminate parts. From her window she could see the snow-capped peaks of the Williston range, rising with immortal and changeful beauty into the purple heavens. As she watched them with incurious eyes, marking them in the first light of the day, when their iridescence made them seem as impalpable as a dream of heaven; eyeing them in the noon-height, when their sides were the hue of ruddy granite; watching them at sunset when they faded from swimming gold to rose, from rose to purple, they seemed less like mountains than like those fair and fatal bergs of the Northern Atlantic. She had read of them, though she had not seen them. She knew how they sloughed from the inexhaustible ice-cap of Greenland’s bleak continent and marched, stately as an army, down the mighty plain of the ocean. Fair beyond word were they, with jeweled crevasses and mother-of-pearl changefulness, indomitable, treacherous, menacing. Honora, closing weary eyes, still saw them sailing, sailing, white as angels, radiant as dawn, changing, changing, lovely and cold as death.

Mind and gaze were fixed upon their enchantment. She would not think of certain other things–of that incredible catastrophe, that rent ship, crashing to its doom, of that vast company tossed upon the sea, of those cries in the dark. No, she shut her eyes and her ears to those things! They seemed to be the servitors at the doors of madness, and she let them crook their fingers at her in vain. Now and then, when she was not on guard, they swarmed upon her, whispering stories of black struggle, of heart-breaking separation of mother and child, of husband and wife. Sometimes they told her how Mary–so luxurious, so smiling, so avid of warmth and food and kisses–had shivered in that bleak wind, as she sat coatless, torn from David’s sheltering embrace. They had given her elfish reminders of how soft, how pink, how perfumed was that woman’s tender flesh. Then as she looked the blue eyes glazed with agony, the supple body grew rigid with cold, and down, down, through miles of water, sank the man they both had loved.

No, no, it was better to watch the bergs, those glistering, fair, white ships of death! Yes, there from the window she seemed to see them! How the sun glorified them! Was the sun setting, then? Had there been another day?

“To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow–“

Darkness was falling. But even in the darkness she saw the ice-ships slipping down from that great frozen waste, along the glacial rivers, past the bleak _lisiere_, into the bitter sea, and on down, down to meet that other ship–that ship bearing its mighty burden of living men–and to break it in unequal combat.

Oh, could she never sleep! Would those white ships never reach port!

Did she hear Karl say he had telegraphed for Kate Barrington? But what did it matter? Neither Kate nor Karl, strong and kind as they were, could stem the tide that bore those ships along the never-quiet seas.

XXVIII

So Kate was coming!

He had cravenly rebuffed her, and she had borne the rebuff in silence. Yet now that he needed her, she was coming. Ah, that was what women meant to men. They were created for the comforting of them. He always had known it, but he had impiously doubted them–doubted Her. Because fortune had turned from him, he had turned from Her–from Kate Barrington. He had imagined that she wanted more than he could give; whereas, evidently, all she ever had wanted was to be needed. He had called. She had answered. It had been as swift as telegraphy could make it. And now he was driving to the station to meet her.

Life, it appeared, was just as simple as that. A man, lost in the darkness, could cry for a star to guide him, and it would come. It would shine miraculously out of the heavens, and his path would be made plain. It seemed absurd that the horses should be jogging along at their usual pace over the familiar road. Why had they not grown shining wings? Why was the old station wagon not transformed, by the mere glory of its errand, into a crystal coach? But, no, the horses went no faster because they were going on this world-changing errand. The resuscitated village, with the American litter heaped on the Italian dirt, looked none the less slovenly because She was coming into it in a few minutes. The clock kept its round; the sun showed its usual inclination toward the west. But notwithstanding this torpidity, She was coming, and that day stood apart from all other days.

That it was Honora’s desperate need which she was answering, in no way lessened the value of her response to him. His need and Honora’s were indissoluble now; it was he who had called, and it was not to Honora alone that she was coming with healing in her hands.

He saw her as she leaped from the train,–tall, alert, green-clad,–and he ran forward, sweeping his Stetson from his head. Their hands met–clung.

“You!” he said under his breath.

She laughed into his eyes.

“No, _you_!” she retorted.

He took her bags and they walked side by side, looking at each other as if their eyes required the sight.

“How is she?” asked Kate.

“Very bad.”

“What is it?”

“The doorway to madness.”

“You’ve had a specialist?”

“Yes. He wanted to take her to a sanatorium. I begged him to wait–to let you try. How could I let her go out from my door to be cast in with the lost?”

“I suppose it was David’s death that caused it.”

“Oh, yes. What else could it be?”

“Then she loved him–to the end.”

“And after it, I am sure.”

He led the way to the station wagon and helped her in; then brought her luggage on his own shoulder.

“Oh,” she cried in distress. “Do you have to be your own stevedore? I don’t like to have you doing that for me.”

“Out here we wait on ourselves,” he replied when he had tumbled the trunk into the wagon. He seated himself beside her as if he were doing an accustomed thing, and she, too, felt as if she had been there beside him many times before.

As they entered the village, he said:–

“You must note my rowdy town. Never was there such a place–such organized success built on so much individual failure. From boss to water-boy we were failures all; so we understood each other. We haven’t sworn brotherhood, but we’re pulling together. Some of us had known no law, and most of us had a prejudice against it, but now we’re making our own laws and we rather enjoy the process. We’ve made the town and the mines our own cause, so what is the use of playing the traitor? Some of us are short-stake men habitually and constitutionally. Very well, say we, let us look at the facts. Since there are short-stake men in the world, why not make allowances for them? Use their limited powers of endurance and concentration, then let ’em off to rest up. If there are enough short-stake men around, some one will always be working. We find it works well.”

“Have you many women in your midst?”

“At first we had very few. Just some bedraggled wives and a few less responsible ladies with magenta feathers in their hats. At least, two of them had, and the magenta feather came to be a badge. But they’ve disappeared–the feathers, not the ladies. Honora had a hand in it. I think she pulled off one marriage. She seemed to think there were arguments in favor of the wedding ceremony. But, mind you, she didn’t want any of the poor women to go because they were bad. We are sinners all here. Stay and take a chance, that’s our motto. It isn’t often you can get a good woman like Honora to hang up a sign like that.”

“Honora couldn’t have done it once,” said Kate. “But think of all she’s learned.”

“Learned? Yes. And I, too. I’ve been learning my lessons, too,–they were long and hard and I sulked at some of them, but I’m more tractable new.”

“I had my own hard conning,” Kate said softly. “You never could have done what I did, Mr. Wander. You couldn’t have been cruel to an old father.”

“Honora has made all that clear to me,” said Karl with compassion. “When we are fighting for liberty we forget the sufferings of the enemy.”

There was a little pause. Then Karl spoke.

“But I forgot to begin at the beginning in telling you about my made-over mining town. Yet you seemed to know about it.”

“Oh, I read about it in the papers. Your experiment is famous. All of the people I am associated with, the welfare workers and sociologists, are immensely interested in it. That’s one of the problems now–how to use the hobo, how to get him back into an understanding of regulated communities.”

“Put him in charge,” laughed Karl. “The answer’s easy. Treat him like a fellow-man. Don’t annoy him by an exhibition of your useless virtues.”

“I never thought of that,” said Kate.

They turned their backs on the straggling town and faced the peaks. Presently they skirted the Williston River which thundered among boulders and raged on toward the low-lying valley. From above, the roar of the pines came to them, reverberant and melancholy.

“What sounds! What sounds!” cried Kate.

“The mountains breathing,” answered Wander.

He drove well, and he knew the road. It was a dangerous road, which, ever ascending, skirted sharp declivities and rounded buttressed rocks. Kate, prairie-reared, could not “escape the inevitable thrill,” but she showed, and perhaps felt, no fear. She let the matter rest with him–this man with great shoulders and firm hands, who knew the primitive art of “waiting on himself.” Their brief speech sufficed them for a time, and now they sat silent, well content. The old, tormenting question as to his relations with Honora did not intrude itself. It was swept out of sight like flotsam in the plenteous stream of present content.

They swung upon a purple mesa, and in the distance Kate saw a light which she felt was shining from the window of his home.

“It’s just as I thought it would be,” she said.

“Perhaps you are just the way it thought you would be,” he replied. “Perhaps the soul of a place waits and watches for the right person, just as we human beings wander about searching for the right spot.”

“_I’m_ suited,” affirmed Kate. “I hope the mesa is.”

“I know it well and I can answer for it.”

The road continued to mount; they entered the pinon grove and rode in aromatic dusk for a while, and when they emerged they were at the doorway.

He lifted her down and held her with a gesture as if he had something to say.

“It’s about my letter,” he ventured. “You knew very well it wasn’t that I didn’t want you to write. But my life was getting tangled–I wasn’t willing to involve you in any way in the debris. I couldn’t be sure that letters sent me would always reach my hands. Worst of all, I accused myself of unworthiness. I do so still.”

“I’m not one who worries much about worthiness or unworthiness,” she said. “Each of us is worthy and unworthy. But I thought–“

“What?”

“I was confused. Honora said I was to congratulate you–and her. I didn’t know–“

He stared incredulously.

“You didn’t know–” He broke off, too, then laughed shortly. “I wish you had known,” he added. “I would like to think that you never could misunderstand.”

She felt herself rebuked. He opened the door for her and she stepped for the first time across the threshold of his house.

* * * * *

Half an hour later, Wander, sitting in his study at the end of the upper hall, saw his guest hastening toward Honora’s room. She wore a plain brown house dress and looked uniformed and ready for service. She did not speak to him, but hastened down the corridor and let herself into that solemn chamber where Honora Fulham lay with wide-staring eyes gazing mountain ward. That Honora was in some cold, still, and appalling place it took Kate but a moment to apprehend. She could hardly keep from springing to her as if to snatch her from impending doom, but she forced all panic from her manner.

“Kate’s come,” she said, leaning down and kissing those chilly lips with a passion of pity and reassurance. “She’s come to stay, sister Honora, and to drive everything bad away from you. Give her a kiss if you are glad.”

Did she feel an answering salute? She could not be sure. She moved aside and watched. Those fixed, vision-seeing eyes were upon the snow-capped peaks purpling in the decline of the day.

“What is it you see, sister?” she asked. “Is there something out there that troubles you?”

Honora lifted a tragic hand and pointed to those darkening snows.

“See how the bergs keep floating!” she whispered. “They float slowly, but they are on their way. By and by they will meet the ship. Then everything will be crushed or frozen. I try to make them stay still, but they won’t do it, and I’m so tired–oh, I’m so terribly tired, Kate.”

Kate’s heart leaped. She had, at any rate, recognized her.

“They really are still, Honora,” she cried. “Truly they are. I am looking at them, and I can see that they are still. They are not bergs at all, but only your good mountains, and by and by all of that ice and snow will melt and flowers will be growing there.”

She pulled down the high-rolled shades at the windows with a decisive gesture.

“But I must have them up,” cried Honora, beginning to sob. “I have to keep watching them.”

“It’s time to have in the lamps,” declared Kate; and went to the door to ask for them.

“And tea, too, please, Mrs. Hays,” she called; “quite hot.”

“We’ve been keeping her very still,” warned Wander, rejoicing in Kate’s cheerful voice, yet dreading the effect of it on his cousin.

“It’s been too still where her soul has been dwelling,” Kate replied in a whisper. “Can’t you see she’s on those bitter seas watching for the ice to crush David’s ship? It’s not yet madness, only a profound dream–a recurring hallucination. We must break it up–oh, we must!”

She carried in the lamps when they came, placing them where their glow would not trouble those burning eyes; and when Mrs. Hays brought the tea and toast, whispering, “She’ll take nothing,” Kate lifted her friend in her determined arms, and, having made her comfortable, placed the tray before her.

“For old sake’s sake, Honora,” she said. “Come, let us play we are girls again, back at Foster, drinking our tea!”

Mechanically, Honora lifted the cup and sipped it. When Kate broke pieces of the toast and set them before her, she ate them.

“You are telling me nothing about the babies,” Kate reproached her finally. “Mayn’t we have them in for a moment?”

“I don’t think they ought to come here,” said Honora faintly. “It doesn’t seem as if they ought to be brought to such a place as this.”

But Kate commanded their presence, and, having softly fondled them, dropped them on Honora’s bed and let them crawl about there. They swarmed up to their mother and hung upon her, patting her cheeks, and investigating the use of eyelids and of ropes of hair. But when they could not provoke her to play, they began to whimper.

“Honora,” said Kate sharply, “you must laugh at them at once! They mustn’t go away without a kiss.”

So Honora dragged herself from those green waters beyond the fatal Banks, half across the continent to the little children at her side, and held them for a moment–the two of them at once–in her embrace.

“But I’m so tired, Kate,” she said wearily.

“Rest, then,” said Kate. “Rest. But it wouldn’t have been right to rest without saying good-night to the kiddies, would it? A mother has to think of that, hasn’t she? They need you so dreadfully, you see.”

She slipped the extra pillows from beneath the heavy head, and stood a moment by the bedside in silence as if she would impress the fact of her protection upon that stricken heart and brain.

“It is safe, here, Honora,” she said softly. “Love and care are all about you. No harm shall come near you. Do you believe that?”

Honora looked at her from beneath heavy lids, then slowly let her eyes close. Kate walked to the window and waited. At first Honora’s body was convulsed with nervous spasms, but little by little they ceased. Honora slept. Kate threw wide the windows, extinguished the light, and crept from the room, not ill-satisfied with her first conflict with the dread enemy.

* * * * *

Karl was waiting for her in the corridor when she came from Honora’s room, and he caught both of her hands in his.

“You’re cold with horror!” he said. “What a thing that is to see!”

“But it isn’t going to last,” protested Kate with a quivering accent. “We can’t have it last.”

“Come into the light,” he urged. “Supper is waiting.”

He led her down the stairs and into the simple dining-room. The table was laid for two before a leaping blaze. There was no other light save that of two great candles in sticks of wrought bronze. The room was bare but beautiful–so seemly were its proportions, so fitted to its use its quiet furnishings.

He placed her chair where she could feel the glow and see, through the wide window, a crescent moon mounting delicately into the clear sky. There was game and salad, custard and coffee–a charming feast. Mrs. Hays came and went quietly serving them. Karl said little. He was content with the essential richness of the moment. It was as if Destiny had distilled this hour for him, giving it to him to quaff. He was grave, but he did not resent her sorrowfulness. Sorrow, he observed, might have as sweet a flavor as joy. It did not matter by what name the present hour was called. It was there–he rested in it as in a state of being which had been appointed–a goal toward which he had been journeying.

“What’s to be done?” he asked.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Kate, “that we had better move her from that room. Is there none from which no mountains are visible? She ought not to have the continual reminder of those icebergs.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” he cried with vexation. “That shows how stupid a man can be. Certainly we have such a room as you wish. It looks over the barnyard. It’s cheerful but noisy. You can hear the burros and the chickens and pigs and calves and babies all day long.”

“It’s precisely what she needs. Her thoughts are the things to fear, and I know of no way to break those up except by crowding others in. Is the room pleasant–gay?”

“No–hardly clean, I should say. But we can work on it like fiends.”

“Let’s do it, then,–put in chintz, pictures, flowers, books, a jar of goldfish, a cage of finches,–anything that will make her forget that terrible white procession of bergs.”

“You think it isn’t too late? You think we can save her?”

“I won’t admit anything else,” declared Kate.

The wind began to rise. It came rushing from far heights and moaned around the house. The silence yielded to this mournful sound, yet kept its essential quality.

“It’s a wild place,” said Kate; “wilder than any place I have been in before. But it seems secure. I find it hard to believe that you have been in danger here.”

“I am in danger now,” said Karl. “Much worse danger than I was in when the poor excited dagoes were threatening me.”

“What is your danger?” asked Kate.

She was incapable of coquetry after that experience in Honora’s room; nor did the noble solitude of the place permit the thought of an excursion into the realms of any sort of dalliance. Moreover, though Karl’s words might have led her to think of him as ready to play with a sentimental situation, the essential loftiness of his gaze forbade her to entertain the thought.

“I am in danger,” he said gravely, “of experiencing a happiness so great that I shall never again be satisfied with life under less perfect conditions. Can you imagine how the fresh air seems to a man just released from prison? Well, life has a tang like that for me now. I tell you, I have been a discouraged man. It looked to me as if all of the things I had been fighting for throughout my manhood were going to ruin. I saw my theories shattered, my fortune disappearing, my reputation, as the successful manipulator of other men’s money, being lost. I’ve been looked upon as a lucky man and a reliable one out here in Colorado. They swear by you or at you out in this part of the country, and I’ve been accustomed to having them count on me. I even had some political expectations, and was justified in them, I imagine. I had an idea I might go to the state legislature and then take a jump to Washington. Well, it was a soap-bubble dream, of course. I lost out. This tatterdemalion crew of mine is all there is left of my cohorts. I suppose I’m looked on now as a wild experimenter.”

“Would it seem that way to men?” asked Kate, surprised. “To take what lies at hand and make use of it–to win with a broken sword–that strikes me as magnificent.”

She forgot to put a guard on herself for a moment and let her admiration, her deep confidence in him, shine from her eyes. She saw him whiten, saw a look of almost terrible happiness in his eyes, and withdrew her gaze. She could hear him breathing deeply, but he said nothing. There fell upon them a profound and wonderful silence which held when they had arisen and were sitting before his hearth. They were alone with elemental things–night, silence, wind, and fire. They had the essentials, roof and food, clothing and companionship. Back and forth between them flashed the mystic currents of understanding. A happiness such as neither had known suffused them.

When they said “good-night,” each made the discovery that the simple word has occult and beautiful meanings.

XXIX

At the end of a week Honora showed a decided change for the better. The horror had gone out of her face; she ate without persuasion; she slept briefly but often. The conclusion of a fortnight saw her still sad, but beyond immediate danger of melancholy. She began to assume some slight responsibility toward the children, and she loved to have them playing about her, although she soon wearied of them.

Kate had decided not to go back to Chicago until her return from California. She was to speak to the Federation of Women’s Clubs which met at Los Angeles, and she proposed taking Honora with her. Honora was not averse if Kate and Karl thought it best for her. The babies were to remain safe at home.

“I wouldn’t dare experiment with babies,” said Kate. “At least, not with other people’s.”

“You surely wouldn’t experiment with your own, ma’am!” cried the privileged Mrs. Hays.

“Oh, I might,” Kate insisted. “If I had babies of my own, I’d like them to be hard, brown little savages–the sort you could put on donkey-back or camel-back and take anywhere.”

Mrs. Hays shook her head at the idea of camels. It hardly sounded Christian, and certainly it in no way met her notion of the need of infants.

“Mrs. Browning writes about taking her baby to a mountain-top not far from the stars,” Kate went on. “They rode donkey-back, I believe. Personally, however, I should prefer the camel. For one thing, you could get more babies on his back.”

Mrs. Hays threw a glance at her mistress as if to say: “Is it proper for a young woman to talk like this?”

The young woman in question said many things which, according to the always discreet and sensible Mrs. Hays, were hardly to be commended.

There was, for example, the evening she had stood in the westward end of the veranda and called:–

“Archangels! Come quick and see them!”

The summons was so stirring that they all ran,–even Honora, who was just beginning to move about the house,–but Wander reached Kate’s side first.

“She’s right, Honora,” he announced. “It is archangels–a whole party of them. Come, see!”

But it had been nothing save a sunset rather brighter than usual, with wing-like radiations.

“Pshaw!” said Mrs. Hays confidentially to the cook.

“Shouldn’t you think they’d burn up with all that flaming crimson on them?” Kate cried. “And, oh, their golden hair! Or does that belong to the Damosel? Probably she is leaning over the bar of heaven at this minute.”

In Mrs. Hays’s estimation, the one good thing about all such talk was that Mrs. Fulham seemed to like it. Sometimes she smiled; and she hung upon the arm of her friend and looked at her as if wondering how one could be so young and strong and gay. Mr. Wander, too, seemed never tired of listening; and the way that letters trailed after this young woman showed her that a number–quite an astonishingly large number–of persons were pleased to whet their ideas on her. Clarinda Hays decided that she would like to try it herself; so one morning when she sat on the veranda watching the slumbers of the little girls in their hammocks, and Miss Barrington sat near at hand fashioning a blouse for Honora’s journey, she ventured:–

“You’re a suffragette, ain’t you, Miss?”

“Why, yes,” admitted Kate. “I suppose I am. I believe in suffrage for women, at any rate.”

“Well, what do you make of all them carryings-on over there in England, ma’am? You don’t approve of acid-throwing and window-breaking and cutting men’s faces with knives, do you?” She looked at Kate with an almost poignant anxiety, her face twitching a little with her excitement. “A decent woman couldn’t put her stamp on that kind o’ thing.”

“But the puzzling part of it all is, Mrs. Hays, that it appears to be decent women who are doing it. Moreover, it’s not an impulse with them but a plan. That rather sets one thinking, doesn’t it? You see, it’s a sort of revolution. Revolutions have got us almost everything we have that is really worth while in the way of personal liberty; but I don’t suppose any of them seemed very ‘decent’ to the non-combatants who were looking on. Then, too, you have to realize that women are very much handicapped in conducting a fight.”

“What have they got to fight against, I should like to know?” demanded Mrs. Hays, dropping her sewing and grasping the arms of her chair in her indignation.

“Well,” said Kate, “I fancy we American women haven’t much idea of all that the Englishwomen are called upon to resent. I do know, though, that an English husband of whatever station thinks that he is the commander, and that he feels at liberty to address his wife as few American husbands would think of doing. It’s quite allowed them to beat their wives if they are so minded. I hope that not many of them are minded to do anything of the kind, but I feel very sure that women are ‘kept in their place’ over there. So, as they’ve been hectored themselves, they’ve taken up hectoring tactics in retaliation. They demand a share in the government and the lawmaking. They want to have a say about the schools and the courts of justice. If men were fighting for some new form of liberty, we should think them heroic. Why should we think women silly for doing the same thing?”

“It won’t get them anywhere,” affirmed Clarinda Hays. “It won’t do for them what the old way of behaving did for them, Miss. Now, who, I should like to know, does a young fellow, dying off in foreign parts, turn his thoughts to in his last moments? Why, to his good mother or his nice sweetheart! You don’t suppose that men are going to turn their dying thoughts to any such screaming, kicking harridans as them suffragettes over there in England, do you?”

Kate heard a chuckle beyond the door–the disrespectful chuckle, as she took it, of the master of the house. It armed her for the fray.

“I don’t think the militant women are doing these things to induce men to feel tenderly toward them, Mrs. Hays. I don’t believe they care just now whether the men feel tenderly toward them or not. Women have been low-voiced and sweet and docile for a good many centuries, but it hasn’t gained them the right to claim their own children, or to stand up beside men and share their higher responsibilities and privileges. I don’t like the manner of warfare, myself. While I could die at the stake if it would do any good, I couldn’t break windows and throw acid. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to me quite logical, as the damage is inflicted on the property of persons who have nothing to do with the case. But, of course, I can’t be sure that, after the fight is won, future generations will not honor the women who forgot their personal preferences and who made the fight in the only way they could.”

“You’re such a grand talker, Miss, that it’s hard running opposite to you, but I was brought up to think that a woman ought to be as near an angel as she could be. I never answered my husband back, no matter what he said to me, and I moved here and there to suit him. I was always waiting for him at home, and when he got there I stood ready to do for him in any way I could. We was happy together, Miss, and when he was dying he said that I had been a good wife. Them words repaid me, Miss, as having my own way never could.”

Clarinda Hays had grown fervid. There were tears in her patient eyes, and her face was frankly broken with emotion.

Kate permitted a little silence to fall. Then she said gently:–

“I can see it is very sweet to you–that memory–very sweet and sacred. I don’t wonder you treasure it.”

She let the subject lie there and arose presently and, in passing, laid her firm brown hand on Mrs. Hays’s work-worn one.

Wander was in the sitting-room and as she entered it he motioned her to get her hat and sweater. She did so silently and accepted from him the alpenstock he held out to her.

“Is it right to leave Honora?” he asked when they were beyond hearing. “I had little or nothing to do down in town, and it occurred to me that we might slip away for once and go adventuring.”

“Oh, Honora’s particularly well this morning. She’s been reading a little, and after she has rested she is going to try to sew. Not that she can do much, but it means that she’s taking an interest again.”

“Ah, that does me good! What a nightmare it’s been! We seem to have had one nightmare after another, Honora and I.”

They turned their steps up the trail that mounted westward.

“It follows this foothill for a way,” said Wander, striding ahead, since they could not walk side by side. “Then it takes that level up there and strikes the mountain. It goes on over the pass.”

“And where does it end? Why was it made?”

“I’m not quite sure where it ends. But it was made because men love to climb.”

She gave a throaty laugh, crying, “I might have known!” for answer, and he led on, stopping to assist her when the way was broken or unusually steep, and she, less accustomed but throbbing with the joy of it, followed.

They reached an irregular “bench” of the mountain, and rested there on a great boulder. Below them lay the ranch amid its little hills, dust-of-gold in hue.

“I have dreamed countless times of trailing this path with you,” he said.

“Then you have exhausted the best of the experience already. What equals a dream? Doesn’t it exceed all possible fact?”

“I think you know very well,” he answered, “that this is more to me than any dream.”

An eagle lifted from a tree near at hand and sailed away with confidence, the master of the air.

“I don’t wonder men die trying to imitate him,” breathed Kate, wrapt in the splendor of his flight. “They are the little brothers of Icarus.”

“I always hope,” replied Wander, “when I hear of an aviator who has been killed, that he has had at least one perfect flight, when he soared as high as he wished and saw and felt all that a man in his circumstances could. Since he has had to pay so great a price, I want him to have had full value.”

“It’s a fine thing to be willing to pay the price,” mused Kate. “If you can face whatever-gods-there-be and say, ‘I’ve had my adventure. What’s due?’ you’re pretty well done with fears and flurries.”

“Wise one!” laughed Wander. “What do you know about paying?”

“You think I don’t know!” she cried. Then she flushed and drew back. “The last folly of the braggart is to boast of misfortune,” she said. “But, really, I have paid, if missing some precious things that might have been mine is a payment for pride and wilfullness.”

“I hope you haven’t missed very much, then,–not anything that you’ll be regretting in the years to come.”

“Oh, regret is never going to be a specialty of mine,” declared Kate. “To-morrow’s the chance! I shall never be able to do much with yesterday, no matter how wise I become.”

“Right you are!” said Wander sharply. “The only thing is that you don’t know quite the full bearing of your remark–and I do.”

She laughed sympathetically.

“Truth is truth,” she said.

“Yes.” He hung over the obvious aphorism boyishly. “Yes, truth is truth, no matter who utters it.”

“Thanks, kind sir.”

“Oh, I was thinking of the excellent Clarinda Hays. I listened to your conversation this morning and it seemed to me that she was giving you about all the truth you could find bins for. I couldn’t help but take it in, it was so complacently offered. But Clarinda was getting her ‘sacred feelings’ mixed up with the truth. However, I suppose there is an essential truth about sacred feelings even when they’re founded on an error. I surmised that you were holding back vastly more than you were saying. Now that we ‘re pretty well toward a mountain-top, with nobody listening, you might tell me what you _were_ thinking.”

Kate smiled slowly. She looked at the man beside her as if appraising him.

“I’m terribly afraid,” she said at length, “that you are soul-kin to Clarinda. You’ll walk in a mist of sacred feelings, too, and truth will play hide and seek with you all over the place.”

“Nonsense!” he cried. “Why can’t I hear what you have to say? You stand on platforms and tell it to hundreds. Why should you grudge it to me?”

She swept her hand toward the landscape around them.

“It has to do with change,” she said. “And with evolution. Look at this scarred mountain-side, how confused and senseless the upheavals seem which have given it its grandeur! Nor is it static yet. It is continually wearing down. Erosion is diminishing it, that river is denuding it. Eternal change is the only law.”

“I understand,” said Wander, his eyes glowing.

“In the world of thought it is the same.”

“Verily.”

“But I speak for women–and I am afraid that you’ll not understand.”

“I should like to be given a chance to try,” he answered.

“Clarinda,” she said, after a moment’s pause, “like the larger part of the world, is looking at a mirage. She sees these shining pictures on the hot sand of the world and she says: ‘These are the real things. I will fix my gaze on them. What does the hot sand and the trackless waste matter so long as I have these beautiful mirages to look at?’ When you say that mirages are insubstantial, evanishing, mere tricks of air and eye, the Clarindas retort, ‘But if you take away our mirages, where are we to turn? What will you give us in the place of them?’ She thinks, for example, if a dying soldier calls on his mother or his sweetheart that they must be good women. This is not the case. He calls on them because confronts the great loneliness of death. He is quite as likely to call on a wicked woman if she is the one whose name comes to his flickering sense. But even supposing that one had to be sacrificial, subservient, and to possess all the other Clarinda virtues in order to have a dying man call on one, still, would that burst of delirious wistfulness compensate one for years of servitude?”

She let the statement hang in the air for a moment, while Wander’s color deepened yet more. He was being wounded in the place of his dreams and the pang was sharp.

“If some one, dying, called you ‘Faithful slave,'” resumed Kate, “would that make you proud? Would it not rather be a humiliation? Now, ‘good wife’ might be synonymous with ‘faithful slave.’ That’s what I’d have to ascertain before I could be complimented as Clarinda was complimented by those words. I’d have to have my own approval. No one else could comfort me with a ‘well done’ unless my own conscience echoed the words. ‘Good wife,’ indeed!”

“What would reconcile you to such commendations?” asked Wander with a reproach that was almost personal.

“The possession of those privileges and mediums by which liberty is sustained.”

“For example?”

“My own independent powers of thought; my own religion, politics, taste, and direction of self-development–above all, my own money. By that I mean money for which I did not have to ask and which never was given to me as an indulgence. Then I should want definite work commensurate with my powers; and the right to a voice in all matters affecting my life or the life of my family.”

“That is what you would take. But what would you give?”

“I would not ‘take’ these things any more than my husband would ‘take’ them. Nor could he bestow them upon me, for they are mine by inherent right.”

“Could he give you nothing, then?”

“Love. Yet it may not be correct to say that he could give that. He would not love me because he chose to do so, but because he could not help doing so. At least, that is my idea of love. He would love me as I was, with all my faults and follies, and I should love him the same way. I should be as proud of his personality as I would be defensive of my own. I should not ask him to be like me; I should only ask him to be truly himself and to let me be truly myself. If our personalities diverged, perhaps they would go around the circle and meet on the other side.”

“Do you think, my dear woman, that you would be able to recognize each other after such a long journey?”

“There would be distinguishing marks,” laughed Kate; “birthmarks of the soul. But I neglected to say that it would not satisfy me merely to be given a portion of the earnings of the family–that portion which I would require to conduct the household and which I might claim as my share of the result of labor. I should also wish, when there was a surplus, to be given half of it that I might make my own experiments.”

“A full partnership!”

“That’s the idea, precisely: a full partnership. There is an assumption that marriages are that now, but it is not so, as all frank persons must concede.”

“_I_ concede it, at any rate.”

“Now, you must understand that we women are asking these things because we are acquiring new ideas of duty. A duty is like a command; it must be obeyed. It has been laid upon us to demand rights and privileges equal to those enjoyed by men, and we wish them to be extended to us not because we are young or beautiful or winning or chaste, but because we are members of a common humanity with men and are entitled to the same inheritance. We want our status established, so that when we make a marriage alliance we can do it for love and no other reason–not for a home, or support, or children or protection. Marriage should be a privilege and a reward–not a necessity. It should be so that if we spinsters want a home, we can earn one; if we desire children, we can take to ourselves some of the motherless ones; and we should be able to entrust society with our protection. By society I mean, of course, the structure which civilized people have fashioned for themselves, the portals of which are personal rights and the law.”

“But what will all the lovers do? If everything is adjusted to such a nicety, what will they be able to sacrifice for each other?”

“Lovers,” smiled Kate, “will always be able to make their own paradise, and a jewelled sacrifice will be the keystone of each window in their house of love. But there are only a few lovers in the world compared with those who have come down through the realm of little morning clouds and are bearing the heat and burden of the day.”

“How do you know all of these things, Wise Woman? Have you had so much experience?”

“We each have all the accumulated experience of the centuries. We don’t have to keep to the limits of our own little individual lives.”

“I often have dreamed of bringing you up on this trail,” said Wander whimsically, “but never for the purpose of hearing you make your declaration of independence.”

“Why not?” demanded Kate. “In what better place could I make it?”

Beside the clamorous waterfall was a huge boulder squared almost as if the hand of a mason had shaped it. Kate stepped on it, before Wander could prevent her, and stood laughing back at him, the wind blowing her garments about her and lifting strands of her loosened hair.

“I declare my freedom!” she cried with grandiose mockery. “Freedom to think my own thoughts, preach my own creeds, do my own work, and make the sacrifices of my own choosing. I declare that I will have no master and no mistress, no slave and no neophyte, but that I will strive to preserve my own personality and to help all of my brothers and sisters, the world over, to preserve theirs. I declare that I will let no superstition or prejudice set limits to my good will, my influence, or my ambition!”

“You are standing on a precipice,” he warned.

“It’s glorious!”

“But it may be fatal.”

“But I have the head for it,” she retorted. “I shall not fall!”

“Others may who try to emulate you.”

“That’s Fear–the most subtle of foes!”

“Oh, come back,” he pleaded seriously, “I can’t bear to see you standing there!”

“Very well,” she said, giving him her hand with a gay gesture of capitulation. “But didn’t you say that men liked to climb? Well, women do, too.”

They were conscious of being late for dinner and they turned their faces toward home.

“How ridiculous,” remarked Wander, “that we should think ourselves obliged to return for dinner!”

“On the contrary,” said Kate, “I think it bears witness to both our health and our sanity. I’ve got over being afraid that I shall be injured by the commonplace. When I open your door and smell the roast or the turnips or whatever food has been provided, I shall like it just as well as if it were flowers.”

Wander helped her down a jagged descent and laughed up in her face.

“What a materialist!” he cried. “And I thought you were interested only in the ideal.”

“Things aren’t ideal because they have been labeled so,” declared Kate. “When people tell you they are clinging to old ideals, it’s well to find out if they aren’t napping in some musty old room beneath the cobwebs. I’m a materialist, very likely, but that’s only incidental to my realism. I like to be allowed to realize the truth about things, and you know yourself that you men–who really are the sentimental sex–have tried as hard as you could not to let us.”

“You speak as if we had deliberately fooled you.”

“You haven’t fooled us any more than we have fooled ourselves.” They had reached the lower level now, and could walk side by side. “You’ve kept us supplemental, and we’ve thought we were noble when we played the supplemental part. But it doesn’t look so to us any longer. We want to be ourselves and to justify ourselves. There’s a good deal of complaint about women not having enough to do–about the factories and shops taking their work away from them and leaving them idle and inexpressive. Well, in a way, that’s true, and I’m a strong advocate of new vocations, so that women can have their own purses and all that. But I know in my heart all this is incidental. What we really need is a definite set of principles; if we can acquire an inner stability, we shall do very well whether our hands are perpetually occupied or not. But just at present we poor women are sitting in the ruins of our collapsed faiths, and we haven’t decided what sort of architecture to use in erecting the new one.”

“There doesn’t seem to be much peace left in the world,” mused Wander. “Do you women think you will have peace when you get this new faith?”

“Oh, dear me,” retorted Kate, “what would you have us do with peace? You can get that in any garlanded sepulcher. Peace is like perfection, it isn’t desirable. We should perish of it. As long as there is life there is struggle and change. But when we have our inner faith, when we can see what the thing is for which we are to strive, then we shall cease to be so spasmodic in our efforts. We’ll not be doing such grotesque things. We’ll come into new dignity.”

“What you’re trying to say,” said Wander, “is that it is ourselves who are to be our best achievement. It’s what we make of ourselves that matters.”

“Oh, that’s it! That’s it!” cried Kate, beating her gloved hands together like a child. “You’re getting it! You’re getting it! It’s what we make of ourselves that matters, and we must all have the right to find ourselves–to keep exploring till we find our highest selves. There mustn’t be such a waste of ability and power and hope as there has been. We must all have our share in the essentials–our own relation to reality.”

“I see,” he said, pausing at the door, and looking into her face as if he would spell out her incommunicable self. “That’s what you mean by universal liberty.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“And the man you marry must let you pick your own way, make your own blunders, grow by your own experience.”

“Yes.”

Honora opened the door and looked at them. She was weak and she leaned against the casing for her support, but her face was tender and calm, and she was regnant over her own mind.

“What is the matter with you two?” she asked. “Aren’t you coming in to dinner? Haven’t you any appetites?”

Kate threw her arms about her.

“Oh, Honora,” she cried. “How lovely you look! Appetites? We’re famished.”

XXX

Another week went by, and though it went swiftly, still at the end of the time it seemed long, as very happy and significant times do. Honora was still weak, but as every comfort had been provided for her journey, it seemed more than probable that she would be benefited in the long run by the change, however exhausting it might be temporarily.

“It’s the morning of the last day,” said Wander at breakfast. “Honora is to treat herself as if she were the finest and most highly decorated bohemian glass, and save herself up for her journey. All preparations, I am told, are completed. Very well, then. Do you and I ride to-day, Miss Barrington?”

“‘Here we ride,'” quoted Kate. Then she flushed, remembering the reference.

Did Karl recognize it–or know it? She could not tell. He could, at will, show a superb inscrutability.

Whether he knew Browning’s poem or not, Kate found to her irritation that she did. Lines she thought she had forgotten, trooped–galloped–back into her brain. The thud of them fell like rhythmic hoofs upon the road.

“Then we began to ride. My soul
Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll Freshening and fluttering in the wind. Past hopes already lay behind.
What need to strive with a life awry? Had I said that, had I done this,
So might I gain, so might I miss.”

She wove her braids about her head to the measure; buckled her boots and buttoned her habit; and then, veiled and gauntleted she went down the stairs, still keeping time to the inaudible tune:–

“So might I gain, so might I miss.”

The mare Wander held for her was one which she had ridden several times before and with which she was already on terms of good feeling. That subtle, quick understanding which goes from horse to rider, when all is well in their relations, and when both are eager to face the wind, passed now from Lady Bel to Kate. She let the creature nose her for a moment, then accepted Wander’s hand and mounted. The fine animal quivered delicately, shook herself, pawed the dust with a motion as graceful as any lady could have made, threw a pleasant, sociable look over her shoulder, and at Kate’s vivacious lift of the rein was off. Wander was mounted magnificently on Nell, a mare of heavier build, a black animal, which made a good contrast to Lady Bel’s shining roan coat.

The animals were too fresh and impatient to permit much conversation between their riders. They were answering to the call of the road as much as were the humans who rode them. Kate tried to think of the scenes which were flashing by, or of the village,–Wander’s “rowdy” village, teeming with its human stories; but, after all, it was Browning’s lines which had their way with her. They trumpeted themselves in her ear, changing a word here and there, impishly, to suit her case.

“We rode; it seemed my spirit flew, Saw other regions, cities new,
As the world rushed by on either side. I thought, All labor, yet no less
Bear up beneath their unsuccess. Look at the end of work, contrast
The petty Done, the Undone vast, This present of theirs with the hopeful past! I hoped he would love me. Here we ride.”

They were to the north of the village, heading for a canon. The road was good, the day not too warm, and the passionate mountain springtime was bursting into flower and leaf. Presently walls of rock began to rise about them. They were of innumerable, indefinable rock colors–grayish-yellows, dull olives, old rose, elusive purples, and browns as rich as prairie soil. Coiling like a cobra, the Little Williston raced singing through the midst of the chasm, sun-mottled and bright as the trout that hid in its cold shallows. Was all the world singing? Were the invisible stars of heaven rhyming with one another? Had a lost rhythm been recaptured, and did she hear the pulsations of a deep Earth-harmony–or was it, after all, only the insistent beat of the poet’s line?

“What if we still ride on, we two, With life forever old, yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree, The instant made eternity,–
And Heaven just prove that I and he Ride, ride together, forever ride?”

What Wander said, when he spoke, was, “Walk,” and the remark was made to his horse. Lady Bel slackened, too. They were in the midst of great beauty–complex, almost chaotic, beauty, such as the Rocky Mountains often display.

Wander drew his horse nearer to Kate’s, and as a turning of the road shut them in a solitary paradise where alders and willows fringed the way with fresh-born green, he laid his hand on her saddle.

“Kate,” he said, “can you make up your mind to stay here with me?”

Kate drew in her breath sharply. Then she laughed.

“Am I to understand that you are introducing or continuing a topic?” she asked.

He laughed, too. They were as willing to play with the subject as children are to play with flowers.

“I am continuing it,” he affirmed.

“Really?”

“And you know it.”

“Do I?”

“From the first moment that I laid eyes on you, all the time that I was writing to Honora and really was trying to snare your interest, and after she came here,–even when I absurdly commanded you not to write to me,–and now, every moment since you set foot in my wild country, what have I done but say: ‘Kate, will you stay with me?'”

“And will I?” mused Kate. “What do you offer?”

She once had asked the same question of McCrea.

“A faulty man’s unchanging love.”

“What makes you think it will not change–especially since you are a faulty man?”

“I think it will not change because I am so faulty that I must have