 CHAPTER XVI It is the low man thinks the woman low. Tennison. Thou hast met, found, and seized me, and knowest what my ways are. Hold me, hold a shadow, the wings, as they quiver. Hold me, hold a dream, smoke, a track, on the river. Theodore Prodenus. John Rose was one of those people to whom one may surrender a confidence and never repent it. To say, John Rose had a rare nature, and therefore one which educated him for the peculiar draughts upon delicacy of organization involved in the calling of a Christian preacher. At the outset of his work in Harmouth he had adopted a plan never, to my knowledge, put in use by a pastor in precisely this form, in more than one other instance. Doubtless there are others unknown to me. The experiment resulted from a chance word of his wife's. Coy, with the grasping capacity for self-exhaustion characteristic of the New England girl, had married the profession with the man. She always said, Our work, our people, our pulpit, and our salary. She flew from the nursery to the prayer meeting, from the mission school to the commencement dinner, from the church fair to the Italian class. Young married ladies losing caste and Harmouth if they do not maintain a palpable connection with that sad, forsaken world which has no baby, poor thing, to interfere with its course of reading. Coy, who had never been considered religious before her marriage, and who sorely felt her lack of clear theological acumen, said one day, John, a minister's business is precisely—what?—when we talk about saving people we mean exactly— I don't answer conundrums for any other minister, said the Reverend John, thoughtfully calculating the distance from hand to eye between the baby's head and the ceiling, as he stood playing his after-dinner game of human pitch-penny with that remarkable infant. But I consider my business a very simple affair. The human animal seems to have been, for what inscrutable purpose, you young porpoise, I'll not attempt to say, and you'll never grow up to prove if you jerk yourself over my lame shoulder like that. Endowed with what we find convenient to call, for lack of a better term, an immortal soul. John, said wife, in the tone she used at tea, treading on his toes under the table when he propounded some doctrine that savored of laxity, with a conservative supply spending the Sunday. What's the matter now? asked John, giving the baby a double twist that the offspring of any less muscular Christianity would have resented. Have I said anything heretical again today? I think not. It sounds right on the whole," said Coy anxiously. But I never know where you'll turn up, John. An immortal soul is all right so far as it goes, of course, John Deere. But the trouble I have with theology is I never know what's coming next. And your theology especially, somehow, John, is— You know, I like to have you make it very plain, because the baby is usually mixed up in it a little—there you'll bump her head. Or else, you see, I find it hard to fix my mind when I'm being kissed. If I'd been intellectual, like Avis, I suppose I shouldn't mind. Certainly it is quite true about the immortality of the soul. But old Mrs. Bobly—you know the old lady behind the last pillar who always cries in the wrong place, with the ironed purple strings to her bonnet—asked me yesterday what I thought were your views as to the precise nature of the ministerial vocation. I told her I'd ask. She said, she hoped you realized, for you were so very young, the awful responsibility which rested on a minister if a single soul in his congregation had never been worried. No, never been warned, that was it, by his pastor. I said I supposed so. And then she asked me if I knew a good recipe for Parker House rules. But now, John Deere, I'll tell you what I think a minister is. He's a kind of doctor, John, don't you see? A soul doctor. I don't pretend to understand about sin. I suppose that's because I've never associated with wicked people. But it seems to me like an awful disease, like scarlet fever. People's souls are sick—sick, sick, all about us, John. And if you can cure them, you know. Amen," said John gravely. Or if you can only ease them a little. Amen," said John again. Of course I don't mean quite by yourself, unless anybody greater were behind, said Coy quickly, slipping with the characteristic reticence of the atmosphere in which he had been bred, from explicit expression of the more vital elements of religious feeling. But I've been thinking, John, why shouldn't a minister have an office system, like a doctor, and be, at home, so many hours a day, to aching people? It was this suggestion which John rose, in carrying out almost to the letter, had made so memorable a feature in his harmeth work. He announced, not only from the pulpit, and in the vaguely polite ways, usually thought sufficient to relieve the ministerial conscience, but literally upon his modest doorplate, like a physician of the body, that he who assumed to prescribe for the health of the soul would be within to patients from such an hour to such an hour, making it in due time quietly understood among the heterogeneous population of the town, that he held himself answerable to the call of any creature in any lack, word of a friend or a pillow, word of heaven or a dinner, word of forgiveness or flannels. In the course of six months from the inauguration of this project, the young minister's heart and hands were overwhelmed with what Coy called the aching people. The aching people of a place in which the intelligence of society is almost wholly absorbed in the apartment and the reception of intellectual culture, have a certain bitterness in their capacity and ability to ache, not to be matched in communities of broader and more human interests. John rose received into his healthy young heart, as within the walls of a newly consecrated temple, these refugees of human fate, on an average, perhaps, to the number of twenty souls each day. This method of labour brought him into contact with what we are wont to term the dangerous classes of society. The walls of that little study listened to strange histories, not often in the chance of human lots, brought across the threshold of delicate homes. Strange figures not known to the pew-roll of the central church, skulked in on Sunday evenings, and stood, savage, unkempt, like centaurs up and down the crowded aisles. The heavy pew-owners were gratified, and proposed a mission church. "'If these men and women go, I go with them,' said John Rose, in a deep voice with which his deacons were not familiar. Turn them out into a mission church, if you will, but you turn me there, too.' So the rich and the poor met together in this young prophet's church, for the Lord's sake, who was the maker of them all. And John Rose bent to his sacred work with odd and humble eyes, seeking only on the knees of his heart to know wherefore he had been found worthy of that fate, than which neither life nor death has more glorious to give the Christian pastor, that the common people heard him gladly. That supervision of suffering and sinning homes which his theory of Christian service involved, he assumed at the start, in person, to an extent which experience compelled him to retrench, but which served to form a peculiar tie between himself and his clientele. He had often invited Mrs. Ostrander to accompany him upon one of these visiting tours at the lower end of the town, and one day she went. It had been an uncomfortable day. The child had cried a great deal. Company had come from out of town just as she had, for the first time for weeks, locked her studio door behind her. The weather was extreme, and it was not so easy as usual to be patient with the heat, to which she was, at best, almost morbidly sensitive. They had taken no vacation this year—at least she had not. Her husband ran down to the beach for a week or so, as usual, with a harmeth party, the Hogarths and Allens and so on, but boarding at a watering-place with a three-months baby is a modified form of human bliss, which Avis had felt compelled to decline. On this evening she was alone. Philip was out on faculty business. She trod the hot pavement to Coy's home with that restlessness which is the keenest element of physical distress in a New England July day. Coy was busy. It was something about the mosquitoes, but whether they had killed the baby or the baby had killed the mosquito, Avis did not distinctly understand, and did not offer to stay and discover. The fire of the outer air was preferable to the smoldering atmosphere of the house. She joined John Rose gladly, and they descended into the inferno, in which the dregs of a large town are to be found upon a July night. It is not to the purpose of this story to dwell upon the sights, which, for the first time in a refined and sheltered life, passed at a town's breadth from them, met Avis's young eyes that night. They were the eyes of a woman tender and true, but they were those of an artist, to whom it had been mercifully given, while her visions were young, inchoate, and quick to dissolve, to be a little colorblind to misery for beauty's sake. It is enough to say that Avis understood that night how the insight of a single hour, like a torch, may flare out across the width and breadth of a life's work. She understood how great men have seen the drawing of great purposes, the body-color of great inspirations, gone false in the revelation of such hours. She understood how Frère can exhaust an inspiration upon the muscle in the cheek of a sewing-girl starving in an attic, and how Millet was exiled from Paris for daring to paint the misery of a present life. Certain sights which she saw that night in the tenement houses of Harmouth pursued her for years with the force of vocal cries. She felt that, when she was at work again, they would syllable themselves of sheer necessity in some form. It was still a long time, however, before she recognized in herself what she could resume to call a passion to express the moan of human famine. One other case, said John Rose, as they turned from the furnace of an attic room in which three families dwelt and damned themselves as comfortably as they might. Just one more, and we will go. Coy bad me, be sure, and see this woman. Up three flights across the court, if you can make it. The last we heard of her she could not get about, and so her business was falling behind. But we are not to understand that she was knocked down and trampled on. She fell. It is surprising how insecure a foot women with drunken husbands as a class are found to be. She is a very respectable woman, from the country. I got her a little book agency a good while ago, and he doesn't get home very often, and so she gets along, and Coy sent her away for a vacation last year. But I'll just run up and ask how it goes with her. At that threshold Avis shrank instinctively, begging John Rose to go in without her. The woman came out, however, into the stifling entryway when the young minister had completed his errand, and gravely said, "'Will you not come in?' She was a dark-eyed, rather delicate, creature, with a scar across her forehead. "'This is Mrs. Ostrander,' said John Rose. "'Yes,' said the woman after a pause. "'Will not Mrs. Ostrander step into my room?' "'I was a stranger,' replied Avis, giving her hand, which the other, after a moment's hesitation, coldly touched. "'I did not feel that I had any right to intrude upon you.' "'No,' said the woman again, "'you had not. That is true, but every one is not so ready to see what is right.' An uneasy sympathy with a sorrow, more impressive because so foreign to her fancy, led Avis to turn as she went down, and say in her pleasant womanly way, "'If I can be of any use to you, I hope you will some time come to see me as well as Mrs. Rose.' The woman did not reply, but stood and watched them as they felt their way down the dark stairs. She had noticeable eyes, not so much because of their darkness, and they were very dark, as because of their deadness. They seemed either to have lost, or never to have had, the refractive power. They were the colour of cold coal when it is in shadow. They were the sort which gave an uncomfortable sensation of having been once familiar with them, but of having been disgracefully forgotten the where or the when. Avis was dully conscious of such a superstition as she crept down the stairs and out into the oppressive night. She asked John Rose more particularly about the woman, thinking that possibly, when Philip published that textbook which had been coming so long, but never came, he might be able to put the poor thing in the way of some slight increase to her precarious business. But when she spoke to Philip about it, she did not succeed in exciting his interest in the matter, and the chapel bell was ringing him away. Her husband's interests and many things seemed to her somehow less vivid than they were. It was while the incidents of the evenings spent among John Rose's patients were still cutting keenly upon her memory, that word was brought to her one morning that a book-agent had called. Something was wrong that day. The baby was sick, perhaps, or she herself was overworn, and she reminded the servant with some emphasis of the rule of the house touching the admission of peddlers. "'It's not so much a peddler, ma'am, as a lady,' replied Mary Ann, hesitating, and she's been badly hurt upon the forehead, ma'am." This put down the baby. She remembered afterwards that the child clung to her with an irritable persistence. She took his little hands forcibly from her neck, and went. She recognized the woman at once, the scar, the cold, cold eyes, and a certain dignity that held itself through her meager dress, as well-developed muscles do through obedient tissue. The woman wore gray clothes, and carried a little agent's bag. "'I am glad you are able to be out,' began Mrs. Ostrander at once. Mr. Rose told me you had been ill. Pray do not stand.' "'I prefer to stand,' the woman said, waving away the easy chair which Avis rolled towards her. There was an awkward pause, which her visitor made no motion to break. Avis said kindly, "'Can I serve you in any way? Have you a book to show me to-day?' "'I did not come to sell you any book. I came to say good-bye. I am going away. I wanted to see you once before I go. I am going to Texas. My husband has come home, and taken the notion to go to Texas. The law compels me to go with him, as if I were a horse, or a cow. Women don't think of such things when they marry. I've had a hell of a life with my husband.' The woman brought these words out monotonously, as if she spoke of a matter of course, as if she had said, I've walked half a mile, or I have had my breakfast. "'I am sorry—indeed, I am sorry for you,' murmured Avis, at a dead loss how to conduct a scene like this. "'My name is Jessup,' proceeded the book agent in the same tone. "'Susan Jessup. I didn't like the man when I married him. I loved another man. But I've got long past that. I never told this before. You're wondering why, in God's name, I've told this to you, Mrs. Ostrander. In God's name, then, I don't know. I didn't mean to. Upon my word, I didn't. Is your husband at home?' The excitement of this Mrs. Jessup's manner had so visibly and suddenly increased that Avis found herself faintly disturbed by it, and stood wishing that John Rose were at hand to take care of his own patients. It was with a perceptible dignity, though gently enough, that she said, "'My husband is out this morning. I'm sorry. Could he have done anything to help you? Do you wish to see him?' "'No,' said the woman abruptly. He could not help me, and I do not wish to see him. I'm glad he's out. I thought I'd like to know he was out.' "'Perhaps you've heard, Mrs. Ostrander, that I used to know your husband, before he was married. My name was Susan Wanamaker. I lived in New Hampshire, in the same town with him.' "'Why—' "'Yes,' said Avis slowly. "'Yes, I remember. I have heard Professor Ostrander speak of you. We were great friends once—your husband and I.' Pursued her visitor with a narrow look at her. "'I remember to have heard him—' "'To have heard him say some such thing himself,' replied Avis. Her lips had become quite dry, so that she moved them with difficulty, and her words went clumsily. A similar stiffness seemed to have settled upon the action of her mind. Contingencies to which she would not have stooped to give a name, pressed in upon her, and seemed to exert a compelling influence upon her speech. She was conscious of choosing her words with a terrible exactness. "'Oh! He's told you, then, Hazy,' said Mrs. Jessup sharply. "'You knew that I once expected to marry him. I suppose some husbands do tell their wives everything. I never expected that Philip Ostrander would make such a husband.' "'We have spoken together of you,' said Avis slowly. In the pause of her voice, the baby's cry came from overhead. She put out her hand to hold herself by the chair which her visitor had refused. She spoke to this stranger with the ceremonious reserve which the circumstances would seem to warrant. But that sensitively responsive sympathy of hers, which no personal exigency could blunt, led her on to say, "'You should have told us, my husband and me, that you were so unhappy in such need. You must have been most miserable, Mrs. Jessup, to have exposed yourself or me to a conversation such as this. What then—what now can I do for you to make it worthwhile for either of us that we should—speak in this way?' "'I saw you at the funeral,' proceeded the other abruptly, disregarding Avis's word as if the force of her own reflection had deadened her power of hearing. I was up there on a visit, to get away from Jessup for a while. I was there with my old friends. I used to be very fond of Mrs. Ostrander. She wanted it all to go on, before I married Jessup. She thought Philip didn't know his own mind. He wasn't always apt to. Then once I met him here in Harmouth, in a snowstorm, before he married you, and once I went to the chapel church to see you. I don't blame him. Why, I shall see that face of yours till I die. And I'm a woman. He was a man. Oh, you think I've come to taunt and torment you. Women do such things. You think I'm an insolent creature. Some of us are. But I'm not that kind. I'm not jealous. I'm only desperate. I'd like to see the man that was worth down at the core of him, worth a woman's getting jealous for. The sort of life I've led spreads over you like ivy poison. You distrust the whole lot of him because one bad man brushed against you. When I knew him, he was such a handsome boy. Oh, you've got him. And I've got such a brute. That's the difference between us. It's a monstrous difference. It's a monstrous difference. She unfolded her thin hands from the old shawl in which she had held them wrapped while she stood talking, and bringing them together at the knuckles, opened their palms, and spread them out slowly and impressively before Avus, as if they had been fact-patent to the conversation. There is a force peculiar to itself in the mere anatomical appeal of an emaciated hand. It is difficult to believe in the grand despair of a person with plump fingers. Avus felt herself growing paler and paler under this pressure. She tried to speak, but words looked distant and small, too small to be gathered up. Married women don't often look happier than you do," proceeded Susan Jessop a little wildly. I didn't think Philip Ostrander could make anybody look so happy. He got tired of me. I thought he would get tired of every other woman. We will not discuss my husband any more this morning, if you please," said Mrs. Ostrander, collecting herself, not with severity but with a touch of statelyness. And I think, Mrs. Jessop, if there is really nothing I can do for you, it'll be best for both of us to put an end to a scene which cannot be fully agreeable to either of us. You do it gracefully," said Susan Jessop with a bitter smile, which, however, subsided instantly. When I found what I'd said, I expected to be sent at once. I hope you'll believe, Mrs. Ostrander, that I didn't come here meaning to make trouble. I didn't even mean to speak about it when I came in, and I'm glad he had the grace to tell you. She turned with her hand upon the door, lifting her face slowly. Avus saw that it might once have been a rather pretty, uneventful country face. I don't know why I came," she said, rather pitifully. Why does a woman trust herself to do anything when she's beside herself with things she can't speak of? That's the worst of being a woman. What you go through can't be told. It isn't respectable for one woman to tell another what she has to bear. When I saw you last week, I wanted to pull you into my room and cry in your arms. But I can't cry. Some expression of sympathy hung confusedly upon Mrs. Ostrander's lips, but she was not sure if she uttered it. She felt herself turning dizzy and faint, and the wild figure in the grey shawl blurred before her eyes. She remembered, however, holding out her hand, and that the other took it with a passionate movement, and held it for a moment like a screen before the embers of her eyes, before she closed the door, and trod heavily across the hall, and out. Susan Jessup trod heavily, but her heart was at that moment light with a certain noble joy. We hear much of the jealousy and scorn of women among themselves. It is not often that we are reminded of the quickly flashing capacity for passionate attraction and generous devotion which renders the relation of woman to woman one of the most subtle in the world, and one exposed most to the chance of what we call romantic episodes. This little wretched, excited creature turned her face from avus with a sense of having divinely outwitted her. She knew perfectly well that Philip Ostrander had never told his wife of that affair, but his wife should never know that she knew it. That day passed much like other days. Ostrander was very busy, and if his wife were a shade more quiet than usual, he was not likely to notice her. He dined with John Rose, and ran in for a little music at the Allens in the evening, and it was late, when at last, the child being well asleep, and the women of the house in bed, Avus told him that she wished to talk with him. He said, "'What is it, my dear?' He was pacing the room, their own room, looking more than usually comfortable. He was in his richly colored dressing-gown, that Avus thought became him. He had an indefinably masculine air of mastery over his circumstances, and enjoyment in them, which it is impossible to put into words, but to which a woman is very sensitive. At that moment, when, drawing his hand easily out of his pocket, he came up and touched his wife under the chin, lifting her face, Avus felt a dull sense of displeasure. It seemed to her excited thought that he touched her lightly, much as he twirled the great blue silk tassel of the dressing-gown, as if she were, in some sense, the idle ornament of a comfortable hour. She drew her face back, and said with grave abruptness, "'Philip, something has occurred which I must tell you at once.' "'Very well, my dear,' said Philip, smiling down. "'There was a book-agent here this morning. Her name was Susan Wanamaker.' "'Has Susan Wanamaker been here?' said Ostrander, standing still. "'And told me, Philip, in my own house, that she was once engaged to be married to my husband.'" Ostrander slowly removed the hand with which she had sought to caress his wife's withdrawing face. The lordly silk tassel itself seemed to shrink somehow, as it hung from his side. He took a step back, and thrust both hands again into his pockets. Avus did not look up at him. At that moment a deep instinct forbade her to meet her husband's eyes. It was as if she thus saved herself and him from some vague disgrace or grief. Whatever it was, whatever it could be that flitted across them, her husband should never have it to remember that his wife had surprised his eyes by a stratagem. She would almost as soon surprise his soul. When she had thus given him time, she lifted her own, dim with her sweet sense of honour, but in his she saw then only that darting, scattered gleam, the quick silver look. In a deep, displeased voice, he said, and my wife discussed such a matter with a strange woman, a book-peddler, before consulting me. "'You wrong your wife,' blazed Avus, springing to her feet and holding herself grandly. "'I am afraid you have wronged me from the beginning. I am afraid you do not see. My husband does not see. What is wrong and what is right? I don't understand you, Philip.' "'I don't see what could have possessed Susan,' said Philip Ostrander. Perhaps nothing in the range of the English vocabulary would have struck Avus so drearily just then as those few words. She could not conceive of any others which would have so emphasised the distance between the temper of her thought and his. It was a sense of this distance and difference which oppressed her to an extent, that, for the moment, obliterated the admission which the words themselves implied. And with his characteristic quickness, Ostrander's manner suddenly changed. He shook his bright hair impatiently, as if shaking off a temporary annoyance, and swiftly turning, threw himself upon the lounge, and held out his arms. "'Come, Avus,' he said in his usual voice, "'come and hear my story now.'" The slight arraignment of her justice in this appeal touched Avus's delicate sense of honour. True, she had not heard his story. She stirred slowly towards him, and sat down at the other end of the sofa. "'Come,' he repeated, still holding out his arms. "'I can't talk to you over there.' "'No.'" Well, then, perhaps I deserve it. But upon my honour, Avus, there is so little in this affair that it never occurred to me to tell you. I suppose Susan Wanamaker did think she was going to marry me once. She was eighteen, a country school girl, and I was just past twenty, a college boy. I found I did not love her, and I told her so. Was there anything dishonourable in that? You see it once the dishonour would have been in going on with the affair. The dishonour lay, began Avus, but stopped. She could not bring her lips to say that dishonour lay in her husband. "'The mistake lay,' she went on, "'permit me one minute,' interrupted Ostrander, till you have heard me out. Grant, that I had a boy's fancy for this girl, is that such a crime, Avus? Has a man never blundered with a pretty face before? Very well, then. Grant, that I did not tell you, and so blundered again. I was wrong. I perfectly admit it. I see it now, if I never saw it before. Poor Susan has made a mess of it, for which I am outrageously sorry. I wouldn't have had you so mortified for the world. It's a confounded faux pas." "'She does not know,' said Avus, more gently. I told her we had talked of you. She thinks you had told me. But the mortification was the least of it, Philip. The mortification was the most of it on Ostrander's face at that moment. His lips murmured some phrase of relief, but his heart took little comfort in it. Susan was not dull, and Avus's marble rectitude of speech was not calculated to make the most of a matter. Who could have thought that Susan would have turned up in this way? Women needed to be guarded against the accidents of their relations to each other as much as against graver and discretions, though he must admit that his wife seemed to have held herself with admirable prudence throughout a very awkward position. Before Avus, how solitary she looked over at the end of the sofa, across the colour of the cushion. Ostrander at that moment wished with all his heart that his wife might have loved some better fellow. He wished he had that talent for openness, which a perfectly honourable man may yet lack, but of which he felt the want keenly in an emergency like this. He said with genuine agitation, "'I was wrong, Avus, quite wrong. I ought to have told you all about that affair.' "'And it's not quite true, perhaps,' he added frankly. Had it never occurred to me to tell you, I think it did, it must have, but I was having such extra hard work of it to win you, do me the justice to remember, and a breath would have blown out my chance. Perhaps the plain truth was I didn't dare talk about it. You were not in a state to be tolerant of a lot of boyish nonsense, and I knew I had nothing wrong or base to hide from you, and every other woman seemed so far away from me after I knew you, and all other feelings so false.' Her husband spoke with a tremulous passion which he did not often look to hear now, in the stress and haste of daily care into which marriage seemed to resolve itself, in which it seemed a man and woman must take their love for granted to save time. She yielded to the stir of feeling like a harp to a hand. When Philip said with a delicate reproach in his voice, "'After all, Avus, I think I have the worst of it. You have nothing to repent.' She crept towards him across the rose-coloured cushion with a long, exhausted sigh. She was perplexed at finding herself, at the very moment when her nature had risen most emphatically in rebuke of his, most weakened with the need of his love. Was there always an incalculable element in the radical metamorphosis which waifood wrought? Was this one of the ambuscades of nature against which a strong woman must perforce go fortifying herself to the end of life? She hid herself. She would have hidden herself from her own consciousness just then, upon her husband's breast. For him, he bowed his head over her in a solemn and solitary shame. He could not know what was in her guarded heart. He felt that he had, in a dim sense, lost the right to know. They sat clinging, but separate. Presently he began to talk to her again of what they had been saying, thinking at most natural and best. He spoke of the night in which he had met poor Susan in the streets of Harmouth. He dwelt upon every detail of the affair which he could recall. The process gave him a late, agreeable sense of candour. He went farther. He told his wife that he supposed he had been a susceptible boy. His fancy, he said, had been a gusty thing till he found her. He had never felt quite sure that he was capable of a permanent feeling, till he loved her. He spoke sadly, as we speak of a misfortune of the nature as distinct from a fault. Aristotle ranks confidence as one of the passions. Avis felt rather sorry for her husband, and feared she had been too harsh. And then the baby cried, and she went to him, and Philip went down to finish the article on the electric battery. It was late when he came upstairs again. He found Avis fallen asleep upon the lounge, half-wrapped in the shoulder-robe from the hammock. The rose-and-white silk was fading, like all the other little fancies about the house. His wife's face, too, seemed to have faded with the rest of the bridal brightness. She had thrown herself down with the especial grace which great exhaustion gives to a lithe figure. Avis was too much of an artist ever to choose an awkward pose. She would have writhed under one, he thought, had she been dead. If she had been alone in the universe, she would have thrown that firm hand of hers, upon which no eye should ever rest, with just that slowly surrendered outline across the happy pillow. Her hand was a trifle worn, too, like her cheek. Her husband stood, looking down. They're swept and gathered upon his face, an expression which it was as well for both of them, perhaps, that Avis did not see. Whether it were most of self-approach or self-pity, of tenderness or terror, it were hard to say. Whether he the more distrusted himself at that moment, or the more believed in her, perhaps Philip Ostrander could not, for his soul's sake, have answered. He stooped and kissed her. He was more in love with his wife just then than a busy man can afford to be every day in the year. Avis stirred, and lifting her hand, gravely drew his face beside hers on the pillow. She did not tell him that she had not been asleep. She listened to the faint tapping of the elm-bow upon the window, a dreaming bird chirped in its nest somewhere in the summer night. In the sensitive, windless distance the college boys were singing kinkles, soldiers farewell. The wildly swelling words came up, how can I bear to leave thee? The mournful monotone of the frogs piped from the meadows beyond the town, and under all fitful music she heard the chant of the eternal sea. Afterward she wondered how it would have been, daring to wish that they had died that night, they too, dumb with the sweetness of reconciliation and resolve, nay, they three, Philip with the boyish love and laughter in his eyes, and the baby sleeping in the crib, and she herself just then content to have it so. It was Philip who was wakeful that night. Visions which he would have just then gone blind to forget, electro-typed themselves upon the half-lit room. Long odorous country twilight's, the scent of honeysuckle about a farmhouse door, the pressure of confiding fingers on his arm, the uplifting of a young face, the touch of trustful life, pursued him rather with the force of sensations than reflections. With these came other ghosts, incoherent fancies, aimless fevers, nameless dreams. He shielded his eyes from the nursery lamp, watching the unconscious face of his wife with a fine envy which only a noble soul, or the nobler side of an inharmonious soul, could have commanded. She, she only of themselves, he said, was the truly married. He could think of no lesser joy which he would not have sacrificed just then if he could have brought to her that absolutely un-mortgaged imagination which she had brought to him. He drank the ashes of his own nature in silence, as soldiers swallow in their wine the cinders of their worn-out colors before unfurling new. Faint and more faintly in the distance, from the now dispersing boys, the cry came up, Farewell, farewell, my own true love. Men think that it is ungrateful to the Creator to say that it is the design of providence to keep us in a state of constant pain, but were our joys permanent, we should never leave the state in which we are, we should never undertake ought anew. That life we may call happy which is furnished with all the means by which pain can be overcome, we have in fact no other conception of human happiness. Kant. The worst of it is the babies, said Aunt Chloe, giving a severe twist to her flower-pots that would have estranged the devotion of anything else than the verbenas. But verbenas are not sensitive—one knows about how far one can go with them. I don't see but the worst of it always is the babies in this world," she proceeded, and prayed next minute to be forgiven for so unevangelical a sentiment. Aunt Chloe was so stubborn to the advance of civilization that she still held that the Lord never sent more mouths than he could fill. She would have thought it very unwombly to confess to Avus her conscious lack of enthusiasm at the birth of this second child. She blamed herself that in her honest heart poor Avus's experience of motherhood gave her so much more anxiety than pleasure, and attributed it all to the fact that Mr. Ostrander would use homeopathic remedies for the group. And now—who is going to prepare Avus for this?—asked Aunt Chloe, turning her back on the verbenas without ceremony, and standing on tiptoe laboriously to remove a bit of lint from her brother's coat-collar while she spoke. It was not necessary that they should meet each other's eyes. When a literary man is in any kind of trouble, he does not want his women folks to know too much about it. That Aunt Chloe thought might be easily understood, even in a business family. When the professor said shortly, I suppose I must tell her myself. Going out and letting the wind take the door behind him, she said, Poor Hagel! and wondered if the Arbutalin overheard her. And then she went to start a lemon-cream for his dinner. She remembered that she gave him lemon-cream the day the president vetoed that plan about the postgraduate courses, and what a comfort it seemed to be to her brother. And then perhaps poor Avus would taste of it, and there really was no hurry about the child's shirts. Aunt Chloe, like the rest of the world, had expended all the poetry of her allegiance upon the first baby. It did not seem so necessary to crochet the edges of things for this one, poor little Lassie, and she had put fully five cents a yard less into the flannels. Mrs. Ostrander's little girl was four weeks old, four weeks that very day, as the professor, Heaven knows how, chanced to remember on the way to his daughter's house. She was rather proud of himself for thinking of it, and made the most of the little matter. He was nervous over what he had to say. He thought he had never seen Avus looking so poorly. He took the child from her, for she held it rather listlessly across her arm upon the rose-red lounge. He lifted the little maiden upon his knee well niestenderly as if she had been a leaf from the rhetoric, or poetic, in the original autograph. When the boy ran in, he gave him a cough lozenge, and said, How is Van Dyke today? with a sense of unusual originality of expression. In his heart the professor was rather glad that day that the boy had not taken a family name. Avus had never been heard to express a wish to name her son for his father. She did not try to explain either to herself or to another why this was. We do not always remember that a woman seeks and finds two perfectly distinct beings in one and the same man. For herself she can afford to love a human creature. For the father of her child she demands a God. That very weakness in his nature upon which she will abnegate herself, which perhaps she will lower the tone of her own soul to idealize into a perversion of strength, she will defy like a lioness in its transmission to her son. But Avus did not talk, even to her own husband, much about her children. There were throes of the soul in her strong motherhood, which it was no more possible to share than to share a physical pang. When the professor had repeated, and how is van? And asked the four-weeks baby, in the anxious tone of a man who expects a reply, if she were sitting quite comfortably, he found that he had exhausted his nursery vocabulary, and when he had said helplessly, Are you quite well to-day, my dear? And when Avus replied that she was gaining slowly every day, his mind proved to be perfectly barren of any further phrases logically consequent upon the premise formed by the morsel of humanity upon his knee. He began, therefore, at once, but with a certain hesitation, to which Avus's transparent face became magnetically alive. I came for a special purpose to-day, Avus. I want to have a little talk with you about—your husband." Van! said his mother immediately, run into the nursery. Sheep spoke to her two years' baby in a tone which assumes both intelligence and obedience in the listener. Mary Ann, take the child. Take both the babies, and do not bring them back till they are sent for. Now, father, what is it? What has Philip done? She raised herself upon the pillow with a sharp motion. The deep circles about her eyes seemed to widen, like the circles in the sea into which a blazing jewel is sinking. He has not done anything, said the professor nervously, and that is exactly the trouble. Do you mean—asked Avus in a rapid, business-like tone—that my husband is not giving satisfaction in the university? Somebody must tell you, pleaded the poor professor. I thought you would rather—perhaps—it would be I. Walk the floor, father, said Avus, after a moment's silence. You will feel a great deal more comfortable. Don't mind me. The professor with a sigh of relief thrust back his chair and trod heavily to and fro. The floor of the room shook beneath its faded roses. Now, said Avus, after a slightly longer pause than before, now tell me all about it. I am quite ready to hear. Stop! To begin with. Does Philip know this? I do not know. Probably not. There has been no direct expression of dissatisfaction made to him as yet. How sensitive he is to the indirect command of the situation, it is not possible to say. There is a committee of the board in town to-day. That is why I have annoyed you with it. Probably the matter will be taken up at once in some form. I thought you would prefer—and he—that you should be forewarned. Thank you, sir," said Avus, in a low voice. The trouble is," began the professor, and stopped. The trouble is," prompted Avus gently. That your husband does not attend to his business," said her father desperately. The department is running behind. It ought to be one of the most brilliant in the college. After Professor Cobin's date acquired a prestige, which, of course, makes it difficult for a younger man, any younger man—I thought Mr. Ostrander was equal to these difficulties. He is not. That is about all. Still, I don't understand," urged Avus. Is not Philip enough of a man for the position? Did you overestimate his ability to start with? In plain words, has he not the brains for it? He has the brains for anything," exclaimed the professor irritably, that he chooses to apply himself to. It is not his ability that has been overrated. What, then? insisted Avus. Does my husband shirk? She brought the ugly word out with a keen emphasis with which it was not possible to parley. Certainly, she added with a momentary flash, he is not an idle man, he works hard. Philip is rather overworked than underworked. I think he is always busy. I do not in the least understand where all this activity is gone to if it is not gone into the department. It is not easy to say where it is gone," replied her father nervously. I doubt if he knows himself. It is not quite fair to call a man a shirk, perhaps, while he is occupied in so many. But the trouble is they are not the right directions. He bends himself to too many things. Now it is electricity, now it is magnetism, then it is a process for utilizing coal gas. This now is a new method for blowing up caterpillars, blowing up fiddle-sticks. His business is in his classroom. He ought not to see one inch beyond the faces of those boys this five years. He ought to absorb that morning recitation as the old Hebrew prophets swallowed the scroll on which the word of God was written. Every fossil ought to be a poem to him. He shouldn't be able to say, old red sandstone without a thrill. He should have conquered his lecture room by this time. There is a soul in science. He should have handled her body reverently for her soul's sake. He should have overwhelmed that class with his inspirations as the deluges of overmaster the mountains. When every man in it worth educating could get an enthusiasm out of a chip of granite, when a man he'd marked down on examination would hazzah for him in the street, when the college papers were frayed to lampoon him, then he might have taken to his magazine writing, and his what-not, and the more welcome. When the college could afford to be proud of him was the time to let the world know that such a man as Philip Ostrander was in it. Well—the professor brought himself up short before his daughter's sofa with burning eyes. I am tiring you, Avis. It is a great pity. It is all a pity. Then Philip has done none of this, preceded Avis authoritatively. He has been impatient, volatile. He has—she paused. He has shirked the drudgery of the classroom, said her father in a lower and calmer tone. He got weary of it. He has dissipated himself in unconsequent ways. He has no more business to be giving popular lectures on physiology or writing poetry for the newspapers than I have to set up a milliner's shop on the college green. It is too bad—too bad. But my dear, I am tiring you. The trouble began, Avis, hesitating. The trouble with your husband, my child, said the professor with something of gathering enthusiasm in his manner, as though he propounded a well-involved metaphysical problem to a rather superior class. The trouble is an extraordinary lack of intellectual constancy. It—it really is nothing worse, my dear," he added soothingly. It does not prevent him from possessing all those domestic virtues which have doubtless endeared him to you. I must say, tremulously, to myself as well. I have been very much drawn to the young man, as to a son. After we have adjusted ourselves to this blow, my dear, something else will open for him. I see no reason for indulging in any undue regrets. As for yourself? Should Philip resign at once? Demanded Avis in the metallic tone which resolutely suppressed feeling gives to a tender voice. It may be. I cannot tell till after the meeting of the board. It is impossible to say what will be done or when about a successor. But it will not be expected that his resignation shall take effect before the end of the year. That will give us six months to look about us in," added the Professor, rather miserably. He came and stood beside his daughter, looking compassionately at her. He did not seek to offer her a consolation which her nature would inevitably reject. Her lip did not tremble. She had the half-forcoiling but wholly patient look of one who was adjusting herself to a familiar experience in a slightly altered form. She put up her hand and said only, Thank you, Father. And he said, There, there, my dear. And then the little boy ran in, with Marianne and the baby behind him. Avis gathered both the children in her arms with a quick and passionate motion. Her heart said, Oh, what have we done to bring them into this world? What have we done? What can we do? But her lips said nothing at all. The little folks interfere with the studio just now," said the Professor awkwardly, coming back when he was across the threshold of the room. He was sick at heart to say some tender word. If her mother had lived, he thought, this might somehow have been spared. Whenever Avis was in any trouble he always said, If her mother had lived. The great Professor was as unconscious of any logical flaw in this sweetened consequence as the lover is of the laws regulating the circulation of the blood in the lip he kisses. Yes, Papa," said Avis, falling back into the pretty girlish fashion of speech that she had scarcely outgrown before her marriage. But as soon as you are about again, and the little girl begins to grow, we shall have some more pictures, I hope, my dear. Yes, Papa," patiently, but she said nothing more. It did not seem to help anything to talk about it. But then the baby began to cry, her little daughter, her woman-child. Avis looked at her and said, You too, you too! It seemed to her just then more than she could bear to know that she had given life to another woman. When her husband came to her with the news a day or two after, she had so far adjusted her mind to it that she was able to receive its announcement from himself in the only way which, long after, she could have recalled without regret. He came in looking very pale. She had heard him coughing in the hall. The day was damp. He threw himself heavily upon the lounge and said, Has your father told you what has happened? Yes, Philip. How long since? On Tuesday. Some way or other," said Ostrander irritably, I have offended Coben. He has been more or less cavalierly in his treatment of me this long while. When it's time for a man to die he can never understand why other men are alive. He opposed me about the museum. He complained of my star-course lectures. I haven't raised a point in faculty meeting this year that he hasn't voted down. I attribute this disaster entirely to the cause which has ruined so many a young man with the jealousy of his senior colleague. Avis made no reply. She could not speak just then. It did not seem a sane expense of words, which at best must be hard to choose. She let him dribble on petulently for a few minutes. Her boy at her knee was vociferously claiming at an evidence of extraordinary maternal depravity that his little sister was not allowed rubber boots with which to go to walk with him. The child's voice and his father's chimed together oddly. She stood apart from them, these two intensely wrought male personalities, with whose clamour selfism it was impossible to reason. It struck her unpleasantly at that moment that Van might be like his father if he lived to grow up. She pushed the boy a little away from her, then drew him penitently back. What in heaven's name is going to become of us? Philip was saying, is more than I can see. The mere mortification of it is enough to kill a stronger man than I am. Never mind, dear," said Amos, exactly as she spoke to the child. She came up and bent over the lounge, passing her strong hand across his forehead and hair, with the magnificent maternal motions which her fingers had learned more slowly than those of most women, but more passionately. Then he said, my head aches horribly. She stooped and kissed him and said, my poor boy. It was impossible for her to render anything more reasonable than tenderness to a humiliated man. It is hard for you, coming just now, said Ostrander rather as an afterthought. I wish that children were not both babies. It's a confoundedly tough thing for a man with a young family to be turned adrift in this way. I should have thought, irritably, that your father's influence might have prevented it. But it seems he couldn't or didn't exercise it. I shall write my resignation to-morrow to get it off my mind. Aught you to stand so long, Avis. It does not hurt me. But she sank wearily down upon the edge of the lounge. Philip did not move to make room for her, but lay with his brows knotted with pain and his restless eyes flitting about the room. She slipped down upon her knees and so knelt, crouched and cramped, till the life of her sensitive hand had spent itself upon him. The pain is gone, thank you," he said at last politely. Avis rose at once and took a chair. In these days, if she caressed her husband, it was with a sufficient and distinct reason. The time had tripped by when he expected her to sit within reach of his hand, within vibration of his breath, within the maze of all that sweet young folly which is wiser than the love of the ages to those who love. It was so with all married people, she supposed. Whatever began, Philip, is to turn up next. Whatever we do next, I hope we shall be able to persevere in it," suggested Avis gently. She was not a woman of reproaches. Philip Ostrander's wife never nagged him. He shrugged his shoulders now and said, "'Perhaps it is all for the best. I was worn out with that eternal classroom,' rather sullenly. Then he complained of the draught and said that he had taken cold, and asked what on earth the baby was crying about now. Avis's heart brooded over him. Seeing him so irritable and weak, as if he had been a wounded thing. She drew a little nearer and began to plan and purpose for him, as she would for an excited boy who had gotten to a scrape. She brought the whole machinery of her superb imagination to bear upon their future. She presented it to him in the colours of courage, and the ardours of hope. She spoke with a cheer and assurance that rang hollow to her own forebodings. Ostrander warmed at this tremulous fire. He talked of his command of the languages, of his medical education. He thanked heaven that he had never been a man of one idea, and now whatever versatility it had pleased Providence to endow him with would serve them through this emergency till another position offered. Avis listened and said, "'Yes, Philip.' She sat with her face turned from him. "'Of course it will be impossible to meet the first annoyance of this by living along here,' said Ostrander, in a tone that admitted of no reply. "'I must get abroad for a month or so at the end of the year, but I think we can manage that. And as soon as I return I shall take to lecturing. It is impossible that we should get into a very tight place. I am not sure that the freedom of such a life will not be better for my health. Whenever I get strong enough to go under the harness of all this drudgery again, some other college will be ready for me. At least a good American can always go west. We won't give up the ship for one blunder, Avis.' He put out his hand to her affectionately. He thanked her for her courage and consideration. He was afraid he had overweared her in her state of health. His spirits and his tenderness rose together, and Avis to herself said, with a leap of her strong heart, "'No, we will give up nothing, not for many blunders.' She gathered him under the wing of her great love with a kind of fierce maternal protection. Her husband, the man who had won her lost freedom from her, the life of her life and soul of her soul, hers and his weakness as once in his glittering strength, hers in the fault and folly as in the beauty and brilliance of his nature, still hers, for still he loved her. Nothing could snatch that from her. Her one sure fact, abiding calm above the gusty weather of her life. Philip loved her. Let the rest go. Why should she fret?" "'It will all come right,' she said, letting her hand drop reticently into his. There are two of us, Philip, to try again.' She was glad to see him catch the glow of her strong spirit so quickly. She smiled when he got up nervously and walked the room, calculating the expenses of the European trip. It pleased her better, she said to herself, than if he had stayed where he was and stopped to fondle to her. And she never told him, when her strained nerves being too receptive, she caught the headaches which she had cured. She threw herself down wearily and watched him. She thought she could never have noticed before that uncertain curve in his delicate lips, perhaps that little something in the shape of his head which had always troubled her, was it a deficiency in the organ of tenderness? Either the cause or the effect, as Lovater would have put it, of some weakness in the nature. Ah well! Poor Philip! Her heart assumed a new burden, as if a third child had been born unto her. Was it possible that her soul had ever gone upon its knees before the nature of this man? So gentle had been the stages by which her great passion had grown into a mournful compassion, her divine ideal become this unheroic reality, the king of her heart become the dependent on its care, so quietly had this come about, that in the first distinct recognition of it all she felt no shock, only a stern, sad strain upon the muscle of her nature. There was indeed a certain manhood in her, it is latent in every woman, and assumes various forms. Avis possessed it only in a differing degree, not in differing kind, from most other women, an instinct of strength, or an impulse of protection, which lent its shoulders spontaneously to the increasing individuality of her burden. She spoke to her husband out of a deepening self-restraint, down whose solitary quarters she did not suffer herself to look too closely. She bowed to the great and awful law of married story, by which so surely his life and love shall one day wear themselves to death and calm. We may know that it shall befall the stronger to wear the yoke of the weaker soul. But late that night, when the wind was high about the house, and the fire-light dying flung wild shapes upon the walls, Avis got up, and went into the little room where her children were, to think it all over alone with them. She could not sleep. The shadow of their disordered future, of her own dishonored aspiration, of bedraggled ideals, of clambering fears, sat heavily upon her. Her thought flickered confusedly, now upon her own unfitness for the cares of motherhood, now upon the lapse of time before they should have banned school-bills to pay. Then as the child stirred, coughing slightly, she must sit mourning about it, and wondering what else he had inherited from his father besides his delicate lungs. Then her imagination flew like a bird into a clouded sunrise, across the future of her little daughter. She turned from one little face to the other. She gathered them under her knotted arms half savagely, as if she would shut them in from the chance of this awful gift called life, which she had imposed upon them. It seemed to her a kind of mortal sin that she should have bestowed upon her children a father whom she might not bid them kneel to worship. She felt a sense of personal guilt for every pain or peril that was in store for these two poor little confiding creatures—her children, their children—to be reared in a sick and poor and struggling, and perhaps, heaven only knew, an inharmonious home. Nothing can make this right, she said, and fell upon her knees beside them, constrained by that mute prayer without ceasing, through which all lofty motherhood draws the breath of its strong life. CHAPTER XVIII The effects of weakness are inconceivable, and I maintain that they are far vaster than those of the most violent passions. It is said that Greenland, five or six centuries ago, was temperate. Parts of Siberia were once mild. Sulphur passed the point of fusion at a higher degree of temperature, consolidates again. Perhaps most married people reach a point where, for the time being, they consider their union with each other to be the greatest mistake of their lives. Fortunate are they who pass this period, as the younger and more irritable passion may, within a year or two after the wedding-day. It is the slowly growing divergence, as it is the slowly gathering attraction, which is to be feared. That tether galls most terribly from which the satan surface is longest in wearing down. Christmas and Philip Ostrander had been married three years and a half. She was thinking of this one night rather sadly, more leisurely indeed than she might often think of anything in that care-worn summer. Beneath the pressure of their increasing anxieties, and the more clamorous strain of the nursery, her elastic strength had at length surrendered. For the first time in her life she had been dangerously ill. Stung with the immediate needs of their position, in the heart of July she had put the newborn baby off her knee, and gone up into the hot attic studio to finish a portrait. Then came the old and commonplace story—any woman knows it. Why the children must need select that precise time to have the whooping cough? Why the cook must get married the week before commencement? Why Philip must just then and there have an attack of pleurisy? Why the New York relatives unheard of for years should come swarming in on class-day? Why she herself should come down with diphtheria the evening that Philip's resignation was accepted? Such questions eternity alone can be long enough to answer to the satisfaction of some of us. A fig for the mysteries of fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, the origin of species or pre-ademic man. When in teeth of it all flat comes the professor with rheumatism, and Aunt Chloe even cannot be spared to High Street. It was very kind in Barbara Allen to make the offer. Fortunately there was no one else to be had, and Barbara was always kind. She certainly had a genius for the sick-room, as Philip and Avis agreed. Avis accepted the attention gratefully, dropped her household and Barbara's hands as gladly as the escaping soul may drop the dying body, and proceeded immediately to be as ill as she knew how. Her sickness was characteristically intense, and culminated rapidly. Stirring one day out of the famine of exhaustion which renders that disease when fatal, a peculiar prolongation of the agony of dissolution, she caught an expression upon her husband's face which absolutely aroused her. "'Philip,' she said, "'am I going to die?' "'Oh God knows,' he had cried, before he could be silenced. Avis had not thought of it before. She lay a few moments perfectly quiet. She did not, like that great creature to whom late happiness brought an early death, to whose genius love was super-added, only that both might mercifully sleep before the conflict of ages should befall which had set these two at odds in women. She did not cry out, "'God will not separate us. We've been so happy.'" No. Not that. Afterwards, she remembered that she did not think about her husband at all. In one supreme moment the whole future of two motherless children passed before her. One of those clairvoyant flashes which sometimes seemed to make motherhood a form of prophecy, flared out across these unconscious lives for whose creation she was responsible. Oddly enough the thing presented itself to her in isolated pictures, as if she had been turning the leaves of an illustrated book. She saw Van, a large boy in jackets that did not fit, come home with his rubber boots wet. Nobody told him to change them. So he had the lung fever, and the nursing was poor, so he got the cough. As distinctly, she saw him skulking in from college one night, a moonlit night. He swore as he came up the steps. There was something wrong, but he did not tell his father. Van would never confide in his father. Then she saw her little daughter. Avus was sure that she knew what her daughter was like before the child was a weak old, a reticent, solitary little girl, hating her patchwork, always down by the sea, as full of dreams as a dark night, and as impenetrable. Her daughter, brought up by another woman. There probably would be a step-mother. Rather a pretty woman, Avus thought she would be, Philip's taste was fastidious. All bread and a little dressy, a member of a harmless reading club, but without a career. Probably her bread would always rise, and she would turn the studio into an excellent lumber room, with everything done up in camphor, and carefully shaken twice a year on account of the moths. "'Doctor,' she repeated, "'is it death that is the matter with me?' The baby, as her mother spoke, began to cry from the adjoining room, not crossly as the boy used to, but with a low confiding wail. Avus could never be impatient with her little girl's cry. Van, too, came trotting up vociferously, demanding behind the sick room door to be let in and ask mamma why he couldn't get the kitty through the ice-cream-freezer. His voice, as his father hushed him, died away rebelliously. A singular upheaval of a moral nature seemed to Avus to take place in herself, something stronger, because more vital than the revolt of the will, or the physical recoil against death. Her children assumed the form of awful claims upon her conscience. They presented a code to her—absolute, imperious, integral with the law of God. "'It is wicked,' she said aloud, "'it is wicked for the mother of two little children—babies to die. "'Doctor, you should have told me I was in danger of committing such a mistake. I will not do it. Do you understand? I will not die. Call in my husband. Tell him to kneel down there and pray. God understands about this. It is my duty to live.'" Magnificently she set herself moment by moment to conquer death. She counted the dropping of the medicine which she could not swallow, the passing of her pulse, the beating of her heart, the ticking of the watch. She cast the whole force of her nature upon that die. Her will rang iron to the crisis. She repeated at intervals, "'It is my duty to live.'" She continued the struggle for three days, growing weaker. On the fourth she swallowed brandy. On the next her medicine—beef juice—on the next. Every physician knows such cases. The soul makes her own body," said the great physician Stahl. Avis recovered rapidly. Perhaps the inevitable reactions of convalescence told more heavily upon Ostrander than upon most people. His mercurial sensitiveness to discomforts rose as the excitement of danger ebbed. The annoyances of sickness acted upon him like cologne upon a blooded dog. If any reader failed to understand the force of this simile, let him put the experiment in practice. Ostrander had never been able to remain within hearing of the children's cough. Once when the boy was ill long ago, worn with watching, Avis had asked him to take the baby awhile. He said, "'Oh, certainly,' and paced the floor with Master Van, who was black in the face with vocal disapprobation of the arrangements, for half an hour. Then Avis heard Phillips say, through his clenched teeth, "'I'll get a nurse for this child to-morrow if it costs twelve dollars a week.'" She never asked him to take the babies again. On this particular night, when it occurred to Avis to lie thinking just how long they'd been married, he had come up after tea and said, "'Nicely to-night, Avis?' and she had said, "'Thank you, Philip,' and he had asked, "'If we leave the doors open, will it not rest you to hear a little music before I go out?' and she had repeated, "'Thank you, Philip,' and then he had said, "'Polay makes a mistake using so much camphor in your case,' and had kissed her forehead and gone away. She tore the bandage off her throat when he had gone. Philip was always fastidious about sense. No wonder this kept him out of the sick-room so much. She felt a little solitary, listening to Barbara's fine execution downstairs as the twilight came on. But she was glad and grateful to have Philip amused. Barbara was playing the Adelaide, then the operas, Trovatore, Lucia, Faust. Everything she touched to-night had the sway of familiarity. Everything was full of arias, of—it was not easy to say what. Barbara was not a woman of strong emotions. She possessed, however, abundant sensitiveness to strong effects. Avis thought how long it was since her husband had asked her to play to him. She remembered the day when he had said beneath his breath, what a touch. But now Barbara had begun to sing. She sang, "'Oh, dinny you mind, young man,' she said, when the red wine you were spilling, how you made the cup gay round and round, and slighted Barbara Allen." Barbara was still playing. When, pliant to the quiet temper of returning strength, Avis fell asleep. When she waked, it was late, and the house was still. The door was open into the hall. Philip in coming up must have forgotten it. He usually came in, but now that she was so much better, sometimes merely looked in, on his way to the little blue room which he occupied. Avis rose to shut the door. As she did so, she glanced at her watch. It was two o'clock. The gas and the hall was still lighted, and they could not afford to waste gas in these days. Thinking it a pity to wake the nurse, and feeling her strength rather rising than falling with the exertion, Avis flung over her wrapper a shawl, the Carmine one, folding it about her face and head, and crept along, hand over hand upon the balusters, clinging with care. Her bare feet made no sound upon the carpeted stairs, not a board creaked beneath her tread she noticed as she crawled down. Halfway down the stairs, she was surprised to hear the sound of a voice, low and irregularly articulate. No. Voices. Two. The sound came from the parlor, and then she saw that the parlor door too was open, and that the room was still lighted, like the hall. She was for the moment slightly startled. There was usually a little tramp and burglar panic and harm within the early autumn nights, and usually with some reason. Then she remembered that Philip had said something of an appointment with an Englishman, with a notion about making telegraphy subservient to audible speech. But she crept on to make quite sure and safe, staggering a little, holding by the wall, and so into the doorway. It was not the Englishman. CHAPTER XIX How long remained the fickle true to thee? Epi. Her vision still is true, to his ever near me. Barbara Allen sat on the piano stool, leaning backward, one elbow upon the music rack, and the poise of her pleasant figure resting upon the bruised white keys. The sheets of music lay scattered about. One or two had fallen to the floor. They lay with disordered leaves. A hand surprised by some momentary disturbance would have dropped them so. Barbara's touch was habitually self-possessed, that a few women more so. Barbara's head was bent. Her bronze curls fell against her cheek, sweeping clean that fine profile from the comb to the curve of the neck. There were traces of agitation upon her face. Philip Ostrander sat beside her. He had drawn his chair so that its edge and the edge of the piano stool collided. The hardly acquired housekeeper's impulse in Avus noticed this, even at that moment, and she thought how the varnish was getting rubbed. One of Ostrander's arms was stretched out, his hand resting upon the base keys. It could not be strictly said that it encircled Barbara's waist, but there was no back to the piano stool, and Barbara was tired. In his other hand he held, alas! He held her own. There were dimples in Barbara's fingers. She had cool, clear-cut, conscious nails. She had put her hand in Ostrander's, so that the profile of the thumb and first finger was presented to view. A constitutional amendment on nature, which a hand not altogether of the smallest may surely find legitimate. Nature had as yet suffered no such surprise in Barbara as to enable her to forget this. But then Barbara had never allowed a man to hold her hand before. Ostrander's eyes were fastened upon Barbara's face. They wore the look which a woman accustomed to the admiration of men would feel, whether through the lid of her eye or her coffin. You think you can watch a woman as you will, sir, because she happens to be at the other end of the room, transfigured in conversation with the hostess, netted in the labyrinth of a crocheted shawl-strap, up to the ears of her soul in the poem or the sonata, promising the next polka to your rival, or adoring the tinteretto with her cool round shoulders to you? Do you fancy that you can lift an eyelash that she will not know it, any more than you can pass a comment on the weather that she will not hear? Barbara's lashes swept her flushed cheek, but she would have seen Ostrander's look through her back hair. Ostrander's face wore a peculiar illumination when he admired anything, a statue, a picture, or a woman. The corners of his mouth quivered a little, and his lips parted in a smile beside whose silent homage a spoken word would have seemed a definite rudeness. There was a refined, cool light in his eye, too, which Barbara exceedingly admired. She had never seen a man look just like that. His whole bearing was that of one swayed by a delicate intoxication in which all that was noblest, calmest, and most permanent in himself, deferred to the object which had excited it. It was this look which his wife, years past now, there in the garden studio when the apple blossoms fell about them, used to surprise looking up suddenly from her painting, and then sit lifting her beautiful head gravely beneath it. It was this look which his wife surprised now. Philip Ostrander was called a man of great discretion in his relations to women. It is doubtful if his most wayward fancy had ever betrayed him into a positive social imprudence before. What then would he have done with Barbara's hand? When Avis saw him lift it, prisoned there like a bird against his leaning shoulder, she stirred and would have uttered his name. Her lips made no sound, but her trailing dress rustled upon the floor. Philip turned slowly around. His wife in the doorway, haggard from her mortal sickness, stood colossal. She was paler perhaps than need be in that red drapery. She gathered it, for it had fallen almost to her knee, in one hand. The other was thrust into the empty air. She had never reminded him of her great venous as she did at that moment. In the blind action of her arm and figure was something of the same shrinking as of a creature from whom a shield had been torn away. The real or fancied similarity in her features, too, was emphasized by the way she held her head. By degrees her paler deepened dreadfully. Her features seemed to grow thin and sheer like a marble medallion of a spirit. Philip Ostrander looked from her to Barbara's curls, and his eyes dropped like a falling star. Barbara drew away her hand swiftly. He would not have had her do this. It was an implication which, he began angrily to say to himself, the circumstances did not call for. He roused himself at this, and said in his easy way, Why, Avus? But Barbara said nothing. Avus also said nothing—nothing at all. She advanced a step or two into the room, and in silence pointed to the little Egyptian clock upon the mantelpiece, whose bronze sphinx told the hour seven minutes past to a clock. With the other hand she pointed to the door. Barbara arose at once. She said she had no idea it was so late. She muttered something about being very sorry, and that she was afraid Avus would take cold. Barbara had never gotten to such a straight before. She was frightened. Avus did not stir when Barbara left the room, but stood, still pointing with a grand sweep of her arm to the open door. Perhaps never in her youth and joy and colour had she possessed more beauty than at that moment. It was undeniable. Explain it as you will, that Ostrander's most conscious emotion just then was one of overpowering admiration for his wife. He felt a kind of terrible, taunting pride in her. He did not believe there was another such woman in the world. He could have flung himself at her feet, if he had dared. His eyes, as hers transfixed them, seemed suddenly to reel. Then came on their dead, dense look. He appeared to watch her from a vast distance like a being from another sphere, as a dumb animal watches a human face, or the victim of some pitiable mania regards the same. Don't be offended over a little thing, Avus. He began, collecting himself, stumbling into the weakest thing he could have said. He wished hotly that she would have burst into reproaches, accusations, into a passion of repulse or rebuke. The woman who does this puts herself at radical disadvantage with most men. Just mangled with the unworthy consciousness of this little psychological fact, a nobler impulse stirred in Ostrander's heart. Perhaps he knew that he deserved the worst she could have given, and it might have been a certain relief to him just then, to get what he deserved. But Avus answered him not a word. Her lip curled slightly, his wife's lip, curled above him as she stood looking down. A single articulate syllable would have broken the exquisite edge of her scorn, but she did not utter it. He felt under her silence as men may under crucifixion, which does not permit the victim even to writhe. You are making a mountain out of a mole-hill, he said irritably, rising with his fugitive look, determined to put an end to this dumb and dangerous scene. And it is a terrible imprudence for you to be here in the cold. You will have a relapse to-morrow. Let me help you up the stairs." Advancing he put out both hands, and would have touched, supporting her. And Avus, with a slight imperious gesture, waved him away. Very well, he said, habit as you will. He stood to watch her from the bottom of the stairs, anxious for her, till he should see her safely up. She had swept by him with a certain strength, but tottered on the first stair. He sprang and caught her, held her for one moment so impetuously, that his trained ear detected the irregular sluggish beating of her heart, a paralytic beat. It alarmed him, and he said hurriedly, "'You are not fit to get up by yourself. Don't be so hard on a man, Avus.' But she disengaged herself and crawled up alone. He followed at a little distance to catch her, if she fell. Thus they reached the landing, and she went on into the faded rose-red room and shut the door. The wind was rising as she went in. She crawled weakly into bed, and lay with her hands crossed, listening to it. It blew all night, fitfully, like the resolve of some great, live, lawless nature. But it rose perceptibly from hour to hour. Towards morning it lulled. In the morning Aunt Chloe came over, and Barbara sent up word that if she could be spared, perhaps she had better go home. Avus replied that she should like to see her. Barbara came awkwardly enough. She had been crying, and her front hair was out of crimp. Avus looked at her with gaunt insomniac eyes. It was evident that she had not slept, but she was quite at ease. She thanked Barbara for all her kindness, and bad her aggrave good-bye. Barbara looked sullen for a minute. Then a quiver ran through the bronze curls. She began to sob. "'Pray don't,' said Avus, wearily. I am not quite strong enough to—' See, people cry. But I understand your feeling. It is so dangerous for a woman to commit an endochorum. Society does not excuse her as it does a man. Will you ask Aunt Chloe to bring the children up?' Avus spoke gently. A certain terror fell upon her at finding in her own heart no sting sharper than that of a sad scorn. She had rather hoped that she might find herself a little jealous of Barbara. She hung over her love for her husband as we hang over a precious diseased life, of which we have not the courage to despair. She fanned it wildly—better fire than frost—better the seething than the freezing death. But all her soul was numb. She looked calmly at Barbara's curls and fresh maiden-colors and attitudes. She could not be jealous of so slight a thing. With a sickening dismay she perceived that Philip, he too, began to seem to her small and far like a figure seen in the valley of an incoherent dream. She felt as if she had suddenly stepped into a world of pygmies, and had a little effusion code to learn before she could take up the duties of citizenship therein. Barbara stopped crying. She stole downstairs with dry, startled eyes. An indecorum? Society? Excuse? Barbara repeated the words confusedly. Two weeks ago she would have regarded the supposition that any human lip would ever tell her she had been in decorous, with a pleasant unconcern, like that with which she regarded the habits of the cavemen, or the subject of unconscious celebration. Barbara thought she ought to see Philip Ostrander at once, and asked him if he thought any harm was done. But he was in the study, and the door was locked. When he came out he asked where she was, and his little boy told him she had gone. Now Barbara forgot to take her son umbrella. It was the middle of the afternoon before Ostrander sought a pretty purple silk toy hanging by the clutch of a little ivory hand upon the hat-tree. Ostrander sought, and thought he had better carry it over to her. He must walk somewhere. Under the circumstances it would be more fitting that Barbara should not come for it. It would be pleasanter, indeed, for Avis, he said to himself, and Avis had expressed no wish to see him to-day. He put on his hat and strolled out, carrying the parasol. A delicate perfume hung about it, something that he had never known any woman but Barbara to use. He remembered that he fancied it when she was taking care of that gunshot wound. Barbara had certainly been very kind to them both. It was not right that his wife's overscrupulousness should act unpleasantly upon her. The least that a sense of honor demanded of him now was to see to it that Barbara should not in any manner suffer from his folly. If he did not guard her, nobody would. No man with a spark of chivalry in him would allow the woman whom he had so unfortunately drawn into a trifling imprudence to meet the consequences of it, unworned or unshared. Then too he would not be misunderstood himself in the affair, if he could help it. If he had said anything that sounded indiscreet, and he could not remember that he had, it would be better to explain to Barbara precisely what he did mean. There should be no mistake in the thing anywhere. There was no need that any man with a sound head should get into that fog bank of relations in which men and women were always going astray for simple lack of a clear understanding each of what the other wanted. He thought the sooner he had to talk with Barbara, the better. He went to her brother's house, and she presented herself at once. Her eyelids were still delicately discolored, like rain-beaten flowers, with tears. Ostrander did not go in, but stood in the hall, hesitating. He said, Here is your parasol. And Barbara thanked him, and then there was an awkward pause. I want to see you, a few moments, said Ostrander gravely. There is company in the parlor, replied Barbara with downcast eyes. It is pleasant on the beach this afternoon, urged Ostrander impulsively. It did not seem quite possible now to go home without seeing Barbara alone. Barbara said, Just as you like. She got her hat, and they went out in silence together into the hot summer afternoon. When they reached the beach, he said, It will be cooler on the water. Nothing but common place has occurred to him. He pushed down the boat, his wife's little dory, and helped Barbara in. She slipped, and he caught her, but neither spoke. She released her hands slowly. An old fisherman stood on the beach, hauling his dirty boat with a rasping noise across the coarse gray sand. I wouldn't put up that ther sail if I was you, he said. And why not? argued Ostrander, glad to have something to smile at just then. Avis and he had always differed about that sail. She never used it. The emotes well put spurs on to an angel as a sail on to a dory. Observed the fisherman, dogmatically moistening his hands for another tug at his boat. Tainted the nature of a dory to stand it, there is nature in boats likewise as there is nature in fishes and folks. No use rowing again tied in now of us. A dory now knows what she wants done as clear as you do, or the lady. If I was you I wouldn't cross her. I wouldn't either, said Barbara. So Ostrander took the oars. He rode hard, but composedly, with the long, virile, harmless stroke. He rode quite into the heart of the harbour, but few boats were in sight. He drew in his oars, and they drifted beneath the blazing sky. Barbara put up the sun umbrella, and they sat under it in a purple light. The breeze struck pleasantly across the bay, and the sun dipped. The wind lifted one of Barbara's curls and blew it softly against his cheek. He looked at her, but she did not return his look. She sat quite still. I am very sorry, he began, and stopped. What in the name of reason was he to say he was sorry for? Barbara came to his aid. She turned her head. The wind was at her back, and carried all her hair forward, so that her face looked out of a soft oreola. She said, Avis was very much annoyed. I suppose so, answered Ostrander irritably. Do you think, asked Barbara timidly, that any—anything unpleasant, any harm will come? Harm cannot come where there is no harm, said Ostrander, suddenly remembering that this was the thing to say. Probably not, replied Barbara more courageously. The whole world is welcome to hear anything that I have ever said to you, Miss Barbara. He went on in a confident clear tone. Why, of course, said Barbara. It seemed for the moment to make quite sure of it, that he should say it, and that she should assent to it. He took up the ores with a sigh of relief, and instinctively perhaps made toward the shore as if it were safer to let this scene end just where it was. The tide, while they drifted, had turned. He rowed a few minutes in the hot sun laboriously, and then laid down the ores. He came and sat under the sun umbrella. Barbara's face looked unusually tender in the purple light. Their eyes met. Necessarily they sat so near that he could perceive the agitated fluctuation of her breath. The man was right, he said in a low tone. It is of no use to row against the tide. Oh, hush! said Barbara. It is possible to say a very dangerous thing in a perfectly safe way. Ostrander's readiness both of the lip and the fancy at once exposed and protected him in the possession of this perilous power. When he said, it is of no use to row against the tide, he certainly was not altogether thinking of the tides of Harmouth Harbour. But when Barbara not only perceived that he was not, but committed the mistake of letting him know that he perceived it, he fell back at once upon the literal significance of his words. Instinctively he had provided himself with a barricade of such significance. If one trench had failed he would have withdrawn to another, strictly in his own view at least, on terms of honourable retreat. This is one of the accidents liable to a lithe mind, and may fasten itself upon a nature of great delicacy, in rare cases upon one of real rectitude. Ostrander regarded Barbara with a certain gentlemanly surprise, and sang in his usual voice, However, we will try again—took up the oars. But the tide set sternly against him, and he perceived now how far they had drifted. His friend the fisherman was abreast of them. He sat in the sun, hauling out his nets, still as a figure in the foreground of a marine picture. With your permission, said Ostrander, after a few minutes very unplatonic hard work, I think we will put up the sail. There is not wind enough to trouble a nautilus. He put it up, and they glided along quietly. The swifter motion at once rested and excited him. When Barbara said, How pleasant it was! His deepening voice and eyes answered, I am afraid it is too pleasant. But Barbara did not say, O hush! She knew better this time. They were sitting so, she leaning over the gun-wail like a violet, with the purple light over her white dress, when a slight stir struck the perfectly calm water, as if the feet of an unseen spirit trod across it. Then the whole bay seemed to gather her bright shoulders and shiver a little. Then the near waves crinkled and curdled, as flesh does with fear. Ostrander sprang to wrench the little mast out of its socket, just as the dory reeled. He was too late. As he went down, he saw the fisherman leaning, gun-wail to the water's edge, the fine lines that his black net made against the sky, and the wreath of smoke from his pipe. Instinctly he thought what a good sketch Avis would make of it. Then he thought how the bay looked like a lake of blue fire, and how he and Barbara were going into it together. The last thing that occurred to him was, we have been struck by a white squall. By the time that he had begun to ascend, he was not conscious of any coherent idea, except that if he and Barbara were drowned, then and there, together, his wife would believe him a rascal to the end of her life, and then he knew that the mere fact of dying was only an incident in that supreme despair. He struggled up and struck out madly. Barbara was clinging to the bottom of the dory. She was calling to him. He seemed a great way off. The water between them, calm now as outworn feeling, was a cold and deadly blue. Once more he thought of the lake of fire, and of those terrible old Bible metaphors that played upon it in such a ghastly way. He made his way rather weakly. Who would have believed that the blazing summer sea could hold so cold a heart? The fisherman was coming with long, sharp, agitated strokes. The water reeled under his blows. Ostrander's head reeled, too. He was growing very cold, a paralytic thickening of the tendons, and stiffening in his muscles had crept upon him. My God! he said aloud, am I going to have the cramp? Then the boat made a great leap, and recoiled on itself like a jaguar, and snatched him up. You took me before the lady," cried Ostrander, horror-struck. The lady does very well, said he of the sea imperturbably. As long as they can screech they ain't cramped. Just you stay where you be, you won't be took in again, and she's pretty solid. I'll haul her in." Barbara was hauled in, hand over hand, like a mackerel net. The dory was rited and taken in tow. Possibly the whole thing had taken seven minutes. The fisherman had not removed the pipe from his mouth. Winter and Barbara sat awkwardly and miserably in the dirty boat. When the fish flopped in the net and an eel in the struggle for existence jumped into Barbara's lap, Ostrander felt as if he were watching the blue devils in the last act of some second-rate opera. The purple umbrella was gone. High in the western heavens the holy sun peered into their faces. His fastidious fancy revolted from this grotesque satiric ending to a highly wrought experience. He found it hard to explain why he felt as if it must be, somehow, Barbara's fault. He could not imagine his wife, for instance, in the same boat with an eel. At all events she would not have shrieked at it. He was surprised to find how it altered Barbara's appearance to have her curls washed straight. The fisherman took the pipe from his mouth as they grated on the solitary beach. "'Maybe,' he said, "'you'll remember next time not to hurt the feelings of a dory?' "'A dory's like a lady, sir. The man that slides it has to pay for it, fast or last. She's tender in the feelings a dory is.'" He had landed them, as chance would have it, just off the lighthouse-reef, and Barbara and Ostrander walked up through the divorced gorge together. Barbara did not understand the expression which his face had assumed. She thought him very cross. He, for his part, was not thinking about Barbara at all. He and Barbara parted miserably enough at the edge of the town. They agreed that it was better so. Barbara protested that she was not very wet, and preferred to take care of herself. When he said that he supposed it would attract less attention, she assented decidedly. She said she was sorry that they went to row. She asked him if he were going to tell Avus. Barbara was thoroughly alarmed. Ostrander quickly went home. As he passed his wife's room she called him. The door was open. Avus sat upon the edge of the bed, partly dressed. She had thrown a thick shawl about her, and her bare feet, with which it seemed she had been trying her strength, hung weakly just touching the floor. Something in her attitude, whether it were the weakness or the strength of it, its courage or despair, affected Ostrander powerfully. He stopped in the doorway feeling disgraced and miserable. He did not cross the threshold of his wife's room. She said rapidly, "'What has happened, Philip?' I was out in the door and got struck by a white squall. That is all except that I had the cramp and a mackerel-boat picked me up. Ostrander brought the words out stolidly. He did not exactly mean to appeal to her fear or sympathy, yet he felt conscious of some disappointment that she exhibited no sign of either. She said, "'Was Barbara with you?' "'Yes,' said Ostrander doggedly. His quick sense of irritation rose. He was not going to stand and defend himself like a schoolboy. There was a long silence. "'Well,' he said, breaking it uneasily, I must go and get out of these wet things. "'It will be best for both of us,' said Avus, in a low voice after yet another pause, in which she had sat with her eyes upon the floor, but rising now and slipping to her feet. "'If this thing is to go on, if you wish to indulge platonic friendships with other women, that your wife should not be unnecessarily insulted by it, you would agree with me I am sure that I had better take the children and go to fathers for a while.' When he was gone she crawled back into bed. The words of the woman Susan Jessup had dogged her thoughts that day. He got tired of me. I thought he would get tired of every other woman. Oddly, beside them, stepped in that hideous old rhyme of Gertas. The false one looked for a daintier lot. The constant one wearied me out and out. These pursued her like the jingle on the hand-organ that follows us seven squares away. Gertas hated her own heart for giving hospitality to such words. The children were laughing in the nursery. Birds broke their hearts for joy upon the window-ledge. She shrank as she listened, turning wearily in the bed. All sweet sounds in life seemed to have fallen suddenly a semitone too high or too low for her, so that harmony itself became an exquisite ingenuity of discord. She seemed to herself like that afflicted musician, to whose physical ear this happened, or like that other, who stood stone-deaf in the middle of his orchestra. How could they ever hear, she and Philip now, the perfect music of a happy home again? She struggled with the unique dismay which overtakes the woman who first learned that she is married a capricious man. Avis thought that if her husband had committed a forgery or been brought home drunk, she should have seen more distinctly, at least more clearly, where her duty lay. She was sure that she should have gone on loving him in fierce proportion to the depth of his fall, till death had resolved all love to elements so simple, that it knew no code of duty and needed no spoken bond. But then he would have loved her. She could not spend herself for the husband whose tone and touch had hardened to her. She could not cast away the pearls of waifud, that were to commit the unpardonable sin of married story. But Ostrander came back presently, manfully enough, to his wife's room. He was startled by what she had said, and touched by the gentle dignity with which she had said it. Then the consciousness of clean linen is in and of itself a source of moral strength, only second to that of a clean conscience. A well-ironed collar or a fresh glove has carried many a man through the emergency in which a wrinkle or a rip would have defeated him. Ostrander came in looking very clean and comfortable, shut the door, and sat down by his wife on the edge of the bed. He leaned, putting one arm over her where there was room to support himself, upon his hand. Avis stirred uneasily, and he removed it. "'You have given me no chance, Avis,' he began, "'to explain myself. I don't see, but I must take it.' "'What is the use?' asked Avis drearly. "'I don't understand your disinclination to discuss the matter,' said Ostrander, flushing slightly. "'There is nothing to discuss,' said his wife, turning her head from side to side upon the pillow, when a man has ceased to love his wife that is not a subject of discussion between them. "'Upon your own lips rests the shadow from those words,' he cried with a heroic air. "'I did not utter them. I scorned to deny that I have ceased to love my wife.' "'You adopt a singular method of expressing your affection,' said Avis. She was terrified at her own words as soon as they were spoken. Roots of bitterness and blight seemed to be fastening upon her soul, like a fungoid disease upon the flesh. "'Well, admit, then,' he said, with a peculiarly winning air of patient sadness, that my love is not quite the same as it was, that it has assumed with time a different form and different force. "'Oh, hush,' cried Avis. She could not help it. The imperious impulse of the woman overswept her. When her husband understated in her ears, that which her own voice had underscored, she felt as if she had plunged a knife into a dissolving ghost and drawn it back, reeking with human blood. All was over now, she thought. They never could look at each other with tender fictions in their glance again. Their four lips had spoken in the terrible truth. In their eyes forever would be the memory of it. "'I am sorry,' continued Ostrander, sadly, but my peculiar temperament has brought to you into suffering. I ought to have foreseen it, but I had more confidence in myself than events have warranted. "'Do you care for—' "'Do you love Barbara?' asked Avis abruptly. Her voice rang foreign to her own ears. The whole scene moved on dimly to her as if they sat on some solemn historic tribunal, weighing the fate of two strangers whose life hung in their trembling hands. "'Love her?' "'No,' thundered Ostrander, recoiling. "'What is it like, I wonder?' asked Avis. "'To feel as you do. I am not made so as to understand it, Philip. "'You may thank heaven, you are not,' murmured Ostrander, exactly as if she had inquired of him touching the sufferings consequent upon some physical deformity. "'Is it friendship you seek?' went on Avis simply. "'My husband was my friend. I needed no other. "'That is your temperament,' said Ostrander. "'Mine is different. I am sorry it is so. I don't know what more I can say.' It is impossible to convey the absence of self-insistence and presence of gentle regret by which Ostrander contrived to transfigure these feeble words. They seemed as he uttered them to be the outgrowth of a delicate and forbearing reticence, in itself the index of essential strength. Avis lay for a few moments with a pathetic confusion on her worn face. Her husband made her feel as if she were dealing with an afflicted man. "'It is harder to be the subject than the object of an infirmity,' he went on. "'Do me the justice, Avis, to remember that I must suffer more in discovering that my affection is capable of change than you can in the consequences of such a fact.' "'That will do,' said Avis faintly, after a silence. "'It is a waste of strength for us to talk. We do not understand each other.' "'I repeat,' he said more earnestly, that I am sorry for the whole thing. You shall not be annoyed again. Don't take the children to fathers just yet.' He leaned over her, smiling, but her soul sickened within her. He had rather expected to kiss her, but the expression of her mouth deterred him. He would as soon have dared to kiss the Mellian Venus. How could he know that a great impulse came upon her to throw herself upon his heart and sob her misery out? It seemed incredible that Philip could not help her to bear it. They had been so dear to each other for so long. Then she thought how he would soothe her, and how she should writhe to remember it. He did not love her. He was her husband. Humiliation beyond humiliation for ever now lay in his caress. She gave him her hand gravely, like a courteous acquaintance. She thought, I would have clung to you. But she said only, Well, Philip, we must make the best we can of it. After a silence she added, We shall always need each other's forbearance, though—she could not bring herself to say—though we have lost each other's love. And then van ran in, radiant and indescribable. He had invited Mary Ann and the kitty to a party. He had been dressing his hair, with the prepared glue. Barbara that afternoon curled her hair, with cheeks hotter than the seething tongs. She had made up her mind that it would be best for her to marry before long. She thought perhaps she had amused herself with men about long enough. Barbara was exceedingly disconcerted at what had happened. She hoped that there would be no talk. Barbara could think of nothing worse than to be talked about. She had never forgotten herself before. In Barbara's set and harmeth young ladies did not flirt with married men. Barbara had never been the least in love with Philip Ostrander. But strictly speaking, it could not be said that she had ever quite forgiven him for not having fallen in love with herself before he married Avis. Yet she knew it was expecting too much of the masculine perception that he should understand all that. Probably he would go to his grave supposing that she cared. No more subtly confusing type of woman than Barbara is as yet rudimentary in the world. That man must have a keen and modest eye who will distinguish her vanity from her tenderness or her love of his admiration from her love of himself. Barbara thought she should marry a minister. One day not long after John Rose ran over to High Street, there was a poor fellow who could not get a scholarship, and Mrs. Ostrander had promised some flannels to those Pinkham babies, and Coy sent over a taste of snow-pudding, and so on. But when he went away he put one finger upon Ostrander's arm with a delicate yet deepening pressure. Ostrander followed him at once to the street. I suppose you know, began John Rose, hesitating gravely. At least I thought I had better call your attention to the fact that Harmouth is very much occupied just now with—that accident in the dory. The mischief it is, said Ostrander, stopping short. There was a silence in which the two young men walked up and down in front of the gate. Avis watched them from the windows contentedly. She always liked to see her husband and John Rose together. She thought, or rather she felt, that John's must be one of the golden natures of which it would be possible to say, as was said of one of the grandest of our time, the noblest words that can be spoken of any human life. There never lived a truer friend. Ostrander put his hand upon the other's shoulder as they walked, and leaned upon it heavily. "'Seriously so,' Rose?' he asked. "'Not unkindly so, I think,' said Rose thoughtfully. But there is some unnecessary and annoying gossip. It will soon blow over. But I thought—excuse me, Phil—it would be as well for you to understand it at the outset.' John, said Ostrander after a longer silence than before, "'If it be possible, you will help me, old fellow, I know. I hope my wife may never hear of this.' She never did." End of chapter nineteen