THE
MARRIAGE VERDICT

A NOVEL

BY
FRANK H. SPEARMAN

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1923

“No, Mrs. Simms,” interposed Mrs. Harrison, in the low, surprised, and distinct manner of speaking which she quite understood how to make irritating. “You are entirely wrong. Henry Janeway is under, not over forty—and well under!”

Mrs. Simms tossed her head.

“He can’t be very much under,” she persisted, unabashed, and temperamentally pugnacious. She was ready to say more—had it, in fact, on the tip of her tongue—but Mrs. Harrison, whose position in the Durand circle, together with her gray hair and equally positive disposition, demanded precedence, had no scruples about cutting her off. It was done, of course, in a courteous but in a cruelly effective manner.

“Henry,” observed Mrs. Harrison, continuing with dignity to address the three younger women with whom she was drinking tea at Mrs. Robert Durand’s, in Fond du Lac, “is exactly thirty-five years old—for all his great reputation.” The last 4words were barbed for Mrs. Simms. Jacob Simms, her husband, and Henry Janeway were rival lawyers, both widely and favorably known in and about Chicago and Fond du Lac. “He was born,” explained Mrs. Harrison, who usually referred to her husband as the Judge, “in Fond du Lac, the winter of the big snow, 1881. I remember distinctly, because his father gave Judge Harrison a dog that winter, and the dog ate up all of the Judge’s underwear.” Young Mrs. Robert Durand, Gertrude Durand, and Mrs. Simms exclaimed in a chorus.

“He was a ferocious animal,” Mrs. Harrison went on evenly. “The dog’s mother ate all her puppies in that litter except this particular one; I was naturally sorry that he escaped. He would plunge into the snow and tear the Judge’s underwear off the clothes-line with the utmost fury, week after week—he seemed to hate red—and the poor laundress couldn’t chase him through the drifts. So when the snow and ice went off in the spring, we found red scraps and remnants scattered all the way down the hill; my husband really dates his sciatica from that awful winter.”

“But,” demanded young Louise Durand—Robert’s wife—with a bubbling laugh, “why didn’t you get rid of the horrid creature?”

“My dear!” Mrs. Harrison’s face set in amiable surprise. “Evidently you are not familiar with the etiquette governing the presentation of puppies. I couldn’t. Mr. Janeway’s father and the Judge were great friends. Happily the brute was accidentally 5shot by an exasperated neighbor, while making off with a boiled ham that had been set outside the kitchen door to cool. So I know,” asserted Mrs. Harrison, quite calmly confident, “that Mr. Janeway is exactly thirty-five. No, dear,” she added, in a motherly way, to Louise, “no more tea.”

Mrs. Simms saw the hopelessness of contending with so experienced a swordswoman. “I wonder,” she ventured to purr, in retreat, “whether his father’s fondness for savage brutes could be responsible for Mr. Janeway’s being so pugnacious.”

Mrs. Harrison only followed up her victory.

“Oh, my dear,” she objected, “don’t imagine that Henry’s father loved bloodthirsty dogs; he was quite an academic person; the bulldog was merely an incident. Judge Harrison and Mr. Janeway one evening fell disputing the authorship of a verse in praise of bulldogs. It proved to be, as Henry’s father had asserted, one of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s—and to assuage my husband’s humiliation at having ascribed it to some one else, Mr. Janeway very handsomely presented us with this rare bull puppy. But he loved and had all sorts of dogs. He once gave me the dearest little Skye terrier.”

“Well, is it true,” asked Louise Durand of Mrs. Harrison, “that Mr. Janeway always wears a long linen duster when he’s trying a case before a farmer jury?”

“He wasn’t wearing one yesterday,” replied Mrs. Harrison, unperturbed. “I drove to court with Judge Harrison in the afternoon. He said he 6thought I ought to hear Henry’s closing; and I thought Mr. Janeway the best-dressed man in the room.”

“He must be very odd, to have so many stories told about him,” said Louise, to make talk. “Where does he live?”

“Until his mother died two years ago, he kept a home for her here in Prospect Street. In Chicago he lives at the Chicago Club. He has always kept his membership here in the Country Club, of course. And after his mother’s death he fitted up one of those new apartments in Court House Square.”

“And a bachelor,” mused Louise—not as one interested, but as if lacking a new topic for comment.

“I’ve heard,” interposed Gertrude Durand, Robert’s unmarried sister, a pleasing young woman, most intense and energetic in manner, “that he had a love-affair when he was young. The story was he was engaged to a young girl. She had incipient consumption. He did everything he could to save her, but she died, and he never married.”

“He must be queer,” Mrs. Durand remarked, as if wanting to dismiss the subject.

But Mrs. Harrison firmly shrugged her shoulders. “Who told you that story, Gertrude?” she asked.

“Jim Kennedy.” Kennedy was understood to aspire to Gertrude’s hand, and Mrs. Harrison took measure accordingly.

“I am sure Jim is a reliable authority on most topics,” she observed prudently, “but I can’t vouch for that story. And I knew Henry all the time he 7lived with his mother in their old home.” The telephone bell rang. “I wonder, my dears,” asked Mrs. Harrison, listening, “whether that can be a verdict?”

It proved to be, as the maid presently announced, only a message from Mrs. Harrison’s husband, saying that he was driving up to take her home.

But, in matter of fact, newsboys were crying the evening extras, with the verdict in the dynamiting case, just as Judge Harrison’s car turned from his office into College Avenue. Without stopping for the newspapers, he directed the chauffeur to drive to the home of Robert Durand.

The day had been raw and the wind still blew off the lake, where great piles of anchor-ice, loosened and driven in by a dying gale, lay in fantastic heaps, as far as the eye could reach, along the frosted beach.

The home of the Durands—a young and childless couple of the very prosperous class—stood well back from the Shell Bay Road, on the bluff skirting the lake north of the town. The house, white and of a symmetrical design, with a Florentine façade, had been built to the fancy and under the direction of the wife, Louise Durand, when she had come to Fond du Lac four years earlier, a bride. As a departure from the Colonial, the English, and the non-descript types of better homes along the road, the Robert Durand home was distinctive. The few who refused to like it laid its singularity to the California rearing, and what they termed the California temperament, of Louise Durand, its mistress, only now reaching twenty-three years of age.

8

When Harrison walked into the Durand living-room, his wife, the gray-haired matron who had been so positive about Henry Janeway’s age, was chatting, on a davenport, with Louise. And Mrs. Simms—a vivacious brunette—her husband, the general attorney of the Durand Companies, was recounting an incident, in her lively manner, to Gertrude Durand, Robert’s sister.

Judge Sidney Harrison—so titled because early in life he had occupied a seat on the circuit bench—made his entry with an accustomed deliberation of step. He was above average height, rather tall, indeed; spare in figure and with a slight, curious stoop just at the top of the shoulders; this threw his head a little forward. He still retained from life’s unequal battle a little shock of hair, running front and back, very like a cockscomb; but for the most part he was conspicuously bald. His face, marked by keen and somewhat deep-set eyes, was not large. His features were only vaguely dried and wrinkled, and his complexion being of a tolerable hue, contributed to an agreeable expression—one strengthened by a quiet voice and an easy manner of speaking.

The women, with the exception of Mrs. Harrison, sprang up the moment they saw him.

“The news! The news!” cried Gertrude Durand. “What’s the news? Now, Uncle Sid, don’t be exasperating—what is the news?”

He regarded his questioners quizzically. “Am I as bad as that? Well, I have news—news of great 9pith and moment. The verdict is in, and the men that blew us up are convicted and will be sentenced shortly.”

Under the shower of congratulations, Judge Harrison settled himself in an easy chair. Louise took one close to him, and Harrison recounted the crowded court-room details. As he began, he drew from a waistcoat pocket his almost invariable and affectionate companion, a long and slender cigar which he did not venture to light—hardly bulkier than a lead-pencil—which, whether lighted or unlighted, was oftener in his fingers than between his lips. If he smoked, he smoked contemplatively, and his entire manner was at one with this trait; normally he was poised, drily laconic, and reservedly confident. As he spoke now rather directly to Louise, her youthful freshness stimulated him, and he drew from her alive and inquiring eyes the energy he needed to answer her eager questions in his most agreeable manner—this both to please Louise and to maintain an elderly masculine credit with an attractive young woman.

“Of course, I remember the first dynamiting at the North Mill,” said Louise, answering him in turn, as he went into the history of the case. She was sitting attentively forward and looking at the legal head of the family circle as he liked to be looked at, with an interest sincere enough to seem deep. “I’m not likely to forget that,” she added, with a little moue. “It happened just after Robert and I left for England last year to get the contracts.”

“Two of the men were caught in San Francisco 10soon after you left,” Harrison went on, “and two in Chicago. One we haven’t got yet. It took a long time to bring them to trial. Then we had a hung jury”—Harrison made a wry face, expressive of the legal difficulties endured. “Finally,” he went on, with returning satisfaction, “we got Janeway into the thing.

“Our prosecuting attorney was ill—is yet, in fact—unfortunately, poor fellow, for him, fortunately for us. The Governor took my view that for this particular job Janeway was good material, and appointed him as temporary prosecutor.” Judge Harrison coughed delicately to deprecate a possible impression that any influence of his had contributed more than the merest suggestion to the arrangement.

“And to-day,” he continued calmly, “after the longest trial ever staged in Fond du Lac County, the jury returned a verdict convicting all four defendants. It was a fight. Any lawyer,” remarked Harrison reflectively, “that goes before a Fond du Lac jury nowadays with the name of ‘Durand’ tagged to his case could be persuaded without much difficulty to trade it off for a millstone to be hanged about his neck.”

Louise listened, and a far-off expression revealed itself for a moment in her eyes. Then she smiled. “I’m sorry we’re so unpopular.”

“It’s all Bob’s fault,” burst out Gertrude Durand. “Father used to get along with the men.”

Harrison sat unruffled. “Your father had different 11men to get along with,” he said. “Though Bob, it’s true, is unlike his father in many respects. However, he’s certainly a steel maker.”

Mrs. Harrison and Mrs. Simms put in question and comment on the gratifying conviction of the dynamiters—for no one, they said, had thought they could ever be convicted by a Fond du Lac jury—and Judge Harrison was in good mood to make answer and return comment. As general counsel for the steel companies under the principal ownership and entire management of Robert Durand, his nephew by marriage, he had, after a long and bitter struggle, started for the penitentiary the men who had applied force as their last word in a long labor argument, and blown up a portion of the Durand Fond du Lac plant.

“And where did you get hold of Mr. Janeway?” asked Gertrude.

“He’s a Fond du Lac boy; went to Chicago some years ago——”

“A boy, Judge Harrison!” gushed Mrs. Simms, with snappy eyes. As wife of the general attorney of the Durand Companies, it was generally believed that her nose had been put slightly out of joint by the admission, so to speak, of Janeway into the Durand official family. “Why, we’ve just been talking about his age—if you set him back much further, we shall have to put him in knee pants!”

Judge Harrison pursued his thought on an even keel. He recollected that Simms had fought and lost more than one important case for the corporation, 12and that Janeway’s success had created a somewhat delicate situation. The Judge had, in fact, taken one case out of Simms’s hands after his failure to sway a jury; he never followed a loser.

“I’ve known Janeway since he was a boy,” he explained placatingly. “He read for a while here in my office and practised here. When he decided to try his fortunes in Chicago, I gave him a letter to Levi Stearns, counsel for the Standard Oil Company. He was in, toward the end, on that thirty-million-dollar-fine case. Your husband”—Judge Harrison, looking at Mrs. Simms, impaled her rather remorselessly on the point of his remark—“told me the gossip was—and I happen to know it’s so—that a point raised by Janeway in the case secured the reversal. Of course, Janeway was just a kid, and Levi stole the credit. I’ve often thought what a blessing it is to mankind that Levi wasn’t camping at the foot of Mount Sinai the night Moses brought down the stone tablets. If that had happened Levi and not Moses would have been the prophet of the Ten Commandments. Janeway figured, too, in the dissolution case. But I’ve known him so long, I always think of him as a boy,” added the Judge, with leisurely satisfaction.

“I’ve heard he’s Irish,” ventured Mrs. Simms.

“He well might be,” returned Harrison, unmoved. “Greeks and Celts have exasperatingly subtle minds. But he isn’t. There are just a few plain Americans left, you know.”

Mrs. Simms made her excuses and got away. Not 13until she had left did Judge Harrison show any irritability.

“Was Mrs. Simms born here?” he asked of Gertrude.

“No, indeed,” said Gertrude, “she is not a native.”

“She seems to know so many things about Janeway that aren’t so,” complained the Judge. “She told somebody that Bob got Janeway into this case.”

“Oh, Uncle Sidney,” exclaimed Louise, “it was I—she told me that——”

“Well, Bob didn’t get him,” averred Harrison.

“Mr. Simms?”

“No, not Mr. Simms,” Harrison went on drily. “Janeway professes to feel under some obligation to me for the worthless advice I used to impose on him; and for the letters I gave him when he packed his bag for Chicago. So when we needed him, I thought I had a pull.”

“Mr. Janeway’s a great reader,” observed Mrs. Harrison in a sage aside to Louise.

“I can’t hand him much credit for that,” remarked Judge Harrison. “The fellow has a facility that way. He grabs the meat of a page at a glance. It’s very curious to see him open a law book; nine times out of ten it will be at the very heart of the subject.”

“But, Sid,” drawled Mrs. Harrison, “tell how you ‘got acquainted’ with him, as you expressed it, after he began to practise here for himself.”

Harrison demurred, but his wife persisted.

“That was a railroad case,” said the elderly lawyer, 14at length. “We had to take a strip of land in town here that belonged to the Catholic Bishop. We condemned. I was attorney for the railroad, Janeway represented the Bishop. Janeway raised the point that the strip we wanted took a section corner from his client.”

Louise listened, trying to appear interested. “What’s a section corner?” asked Gertrude.

“It’s really nothing at all,” remarked the Judge. “A mere surveyor’s mark; a stone, or a stake, to designate areas of land divided into sections of six hundred and forty acres by the government. That’s the way all the newer portion of our country is surveyed; there must be several million section corners in the United States.

“But Janeway mapped out that precious section corner, photographed it, exploited it, pleaded it, enlarged on the enormity of the idea of a corporation’s forcibly taking a strip of land that included a section corner belonging to a wholly innocent and poverty-stricken client—who comprised, by the way, all in himself another powerful corporation—till he had the jury almost in tears over that blamed section corner. I may say his jury, for before he finished he owned it. There was no more sense in his contention that we were irreparably injuring the Bishop by taking a section corner away from him,” complained Harrison patiently, “than there would have been if we had proposed to move a home-made mail-box ten feet on a man’s fence—not nearly so much. But to hear Janeway lay it out, you would 15have thought the Washington Monument, Taj Mahal, St. Peter’s, and the ruins of the Parthenon all rested on that precious section corner, and that for a railroad to take the land that included it would ruthlessly subvert every principle of American liberty—the liberty for which our Pilgrim fathers fought so hard and so long! The strip was actually worth about twenty-five hundred dollars. They gave him a verdict for twenty-five thousand. Of course, I appealed. But the company wanted the land in a hurry, and he made us pay good and plenty for it before we got through.”

At that moment Robert Durand, just from the office, walked briskly in on the group.

Durand was in the greatest good-humor. He was a man of athletic build, with liquid brown eyes, a high forehead, and the alert air of the absorbed American business man. His face reflected traces of good living, and his underlip was rather full. Yet his general expression was a pleasant one, and his frank, open manner, simulating impulsiveness, made friends—though Durand sometimes failed to hold them.

Receiving congratulations from the women on the verdict, he turned, with a long breath, to Harrison.

“It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever put over on the labor bunch,” he exclaimed. “We’ve got those fellows cowed now for a good ten years—haven’t we, Uncle Sid?” He threw the question at Harrison with bullet-like intensity.

Harrison responded without quite echoing Durand’s 16intensity. “Ten years is a good while,” he observed.

Durand threw out his hand toward his uncle. “Hang on to Janeway,” he said warningly. “We don’t want to let that fellow get away.”

Harrison fenced. “He’s a high-priced man,” he observed calmly.

“Not too high-priced for what’s ahead of us,” returned Durand, without an instant’s hesitation. “I’ve more news,” he added. The women were eager to hear it. “I signed a new munitions contract to-day with the British Government.”

“Nice boy!” laughed Mrs. Harrison, amid the comments.

“We’ll be in this thing ourselves before another six months,” continued Durand, with snapping eyes. “That means more orders than we can possibly take care of—and a big sellers’ market.”

He suggested a drink to his uncle, and they adjourned to the dining-room. While Durand was mixing what was called for, he again spoke to Judge Harrison about making sure of Janeway.

“Of course Janeway’s training, while tolerably wide, has been more particularly that of a trial lawyer,” said Harrison, who understood quite well how to raise difficulties that he meant should count for his own real intention. “We should have to use him as a corporation lawyer.”

Durand brushed aside all objections. “Why, that fellow can handle anything, they tell me in Chicago. Did you ever hear him talk?”

17

“A good while before you did,” remarked Harrison drily. “He’s coming up for dinner to-night. Bring Louise over and we’ll talk to him this evening.”

Durand told his wife of the arrangement. She demurred. “I’m going to Gertrude’s again this evening. Bishop Marion and his sister are bringing a guest, and I promised to come over to meet her.”

“I want you with me.”

“But, Bob, I don’t want to disappoint Gertrude.”

“Oh, hell!”

“And her guests.”

“I want you to meet Janeway.”

Louise knew pretty well from experience where discussion of a request made in that tone—long familiar to her—would end. But she had grown less sensitive to consequences. “Why should I meet Mr. Janeway? I’ve heard nothing but Janeway to-day. I don’t care to meet——”

“I want you along!” exclaimed her husband, silencing her with a curt expletive. “Get ready and come.”

It was more tedious, Louise told herself, not to talk to her neighbor at dinner than to make the effort to do so. Moreover, people of sensitive disposition do not like to seem discourteous even to those they imagine they will not like. The guests at the Harrisons’ included Durand and his wife, with George Fargo, Louise’s only brother, a young lawyer then in Harrison’s office. Janeway was seated at Mrs. Harrison’s right, with Louise next. There was no lack of conversation; all six were equal to anything when occasion demanded. But Janeway at the start was silent—rather like a man tired—and let the others hold forth. He likewise paid little superfluous attention to Louise, but this she did not resent.

“Uncle Sidney has been telling me stories about you,” she said to him, when something presently seemed required.

“Mean ones?”

“One was mean.”

“Let me have that first.”

“The mean one was about a time you were trying to defeat somebody for speaker of the legislature. 19You were a railroad attorney then, Uncle said, and were moving heaven and earth to beat this man, and hadn’t succeeded. And when all the members were seated in session and the vote was about to be taken, you walked, in full sight of everybody, down the middle aisle of the assembly chamber to where the poor fellow sat, and whispered something in his ear. And then everybody voted against him!”

“That ‘poor fellow’ was an out-and-out crook,” replied Janeway very bluntly. “I suppose your uncle told you, too, how I robbed him in a condemnation suit?”

“He told us that this afternoon.”

“If he has told you those two stories you know the worst of me—as far as his information goes.”

“But I can’t understand,” continued his questioner, “how a lawyer, like Uncle Sidney, can enjoy telling a story about getting beaten.”

“It’s like a game of chess,” explained Janeway. “A keen player—and Judge Harrison plays everything keenly—is always interested in a new move, even when made by an inferior opponent, and even if it defeats him.”

“But if law is a game, where does justice come in?”

“Don’t confuse law—or the application of law—and justice.”

“I thought law and justice were supposed to be the same thing.”

“That’s why so many people abuse the profession of law. Justice is an abstraction, an elusive thing, 20often difficult to apply to particular circumstances. You invoke law and you hope for justice. You don’t always get it.”

“Does any one ever get it?” asked George Fargo, listening across the table. George at twenty-five, blue-eyed and mild—most of the time—was a Socialist and an aggressive one.

Janeway looked at him, undisturbed. “As often, it is safe to say, as any one gets anything he’s entitled to in this sorrowful world. Human justice is a compromise; it is nothing fixed, nothing absolute. A man should put no more faith in it than he does in a trade. True, we are sometimes forced to appeal to human justice, whereas we are not always forced to trade. But we should make the appeal with the trading spirit, rather than with childlike confidence—always bearing in mind, as in a trade, that we may be worsted, and accepting the result with a mild cynicism, not a bitter disappointment. The mistake is ever relying on so frail a reed in the beginning.”

Louise cut off her brother’s retort. “And are you coming back to Fond du Lac to live?” she said to Janeway.

“I haven’t decided to. Judge Harrison and your husband seem conspiring to that end.”

“I suppose everybody’s been showering compliments on you over your victory. I shan’t offer any.”

“Thank you.”

“No doubt these men were guilty,” continued 21Louise. She was resolved to express herself, and meant to add that she was sorry for their families, but Robert Durand caught and cut off his wife’s remark. “What’s the difference?” he asked sharply.

Janeway did not hesitate to interpose a flat comment. “I should say, a material difference.”

“Oh, come,” protested Durand. “You’re the lawyer; you have to talk to a jury. All we wanted was to get a part of that Union bunch—any of them—sent up, to scare the rest. They ought all to be locked up,” he added, dropping his voice as if bored with the effort. “They’re all crooks.”

Janeway did not look pleased. Louise, watching him, smiled. “Law,” she quoted, “is a game, anyway.”

He turned on his critic. “Why do you say that?”

“Because you said it.”

“Not at all,” he objected promptly. “I likened law to a game of chess. All figures of speech are misleading.” Without the slightest note of apology in his expression, he bent his eyes for the first time on Louise; they struck her as penetrating. Neither was there apology in his tone; only bluntness. “I shall, no doubt, surprise you in one respect,” he continued. “Law may be a game; but if I hadn’t been dead sure these men were guilty, I certainly shouldn’t have prosecuted them; I detest criminal cases, anyway.”

“Listen to that from an eminent corporation counsellor,” laughed George Fargo.

22

Janeway retorted without a hitch. “Don’t fasten such a stigma on me yet. I have no claim to it, George. And you’re a Socialist, anyway.”

“That designation is a badge of honor, Mr. Janeway.”

“As well as a sanction among young persons for loose speaking,” returned Janeway.

Louise was somewhat in doubt concerning the straight, heavy brows that followed the arch closely and guarded her neighbor’s deep-set eyes. She noticed that in talking, Janeway was inclined to throw back his head, and at such times his brows were even more striking. If not aggressive they suggested mental attitudes that might be very stubborn. Such qualities did not seem unpleasantly reflected in his manner, but the discrepancy made her suspicious of the newcomer into the social circle.

He had not been described, except by Mrs. Simms—not good authority to Louise—as a fighter, yet his voice suggested stiff mental reservations; it was dry in quality and not always as complacent as his words. Often at the end of a sentence it dropped oddly, almost humorously, as if conceding that life, after all, was not to be taken too rigidly. His nose was ample and straight, with a rounded tip separating full nostrils. These served partly to shade an irregular mustache, one that described at each end an independent angle; it was a development evidently neglected—at least to the extent of being allowed, among better-ordered features, to make its own way in the world. But with all its irregularity, it served 23to modify the expression of a mouth beyond doubt uncompromising.

Louise noticed as the dinner progressed that her neighbor drank freely but rather carelessly—as if without regard to quantity rather than really greedy of wine; yet as concerned the filling of his glasses the result was much the same. However, Louise was used, at her own table and the tables of her friends, to free drinking.

If Janeway’s impressions of Mrs. Durand could have been recorded they would have been nebulous, as a man’s impressions on the mere meeting of an attractive woman usually are. The delicate contour preserved from her head to her feet; the pleasing rather than distinctive lips, and the smile pleasantly parting them; the cheeks without much color, yet little troubled by the aids of society; the straight, slender nose, and the not too thin-cut but sensitive nostrils—these combined to set Louise’s frank eyes very honestly before him.

If critical he might have pronounced her cheek-bones high—they lengthened rather than rounded her face—and her chin, though enough, might have carried more emphasis. But of these canons of objective criticism Janeway was ignorant, and would have professed himself content to remain ignorant. What mattered was that her hands were unobtrusively rather than conspicuously jewelled, and that graceful feminine fingers held in his field of vision a suspended fork, while gray-blue and somewhat imperious eyes demanded his own eyes, and fast-moving, feminine lips poured out a flow of agreeable 24words, whether good-natured or critical, that were meant for him and no one else. All this tended to make him satisfied with himself and considerate of a passing acquaintance.

Had he been asked whether he liked Louise, Janeway would have said—had he consented to say anything—that he did like her. But not all of our impressions are at once defined, even by ourselves, particularly at moments in which our mind is actively engaged in several directions.

Janeway knew Robert Durand less than he knew Harrison and Jacob Simms. As heads of Durand’s legal staff, both Harrison and Simms had been in contact with Janeway more frequently than Durand himself. But Durand and Janeway were nearly of an age, and Harrison, from this, had reasoned that the two men might find things in common to make their personal relations agreeable; he was too experienced a diplomat not to calculate the importance of some sort of community of tastes, in work and play, between associates charged with serious business responsibilities.

Durand, as he sat at the table, made an agreeable figure. He was just now in excellent humor—the bitter fight to convict the men that had blown up his mill had been won, against the gloomy predictions of failure that had persisted about him. Whatever discredited the agitators among his men gratified him, and the dinner fittingly closed a period covering weeks and months of continuing apprehension and irritation. All the physical characteristics 25of the energetic young American man of business were presented in Durand: the straight, sleek hair—Durand’s was abundant and of a light brown—and the cleanly shaven features. Sustained by an easy voice and humorous tone in speaking, he could always entertain—provided he felt so inclined, as he did now.

Louise continued to talk to Janeway. “You used to live here,” she said.

“I spent the best years of my life in this little town.”

She looked amused. “Pray, what were they?”

“From eight to eighteen.”

She laughed. “And you call those the best years of your life?”

Janeway seemed indifferent to the sceptical note. “Thus far,” he answered, unabashed.

“You weren’t born here, then?”

“No.”

“Your father, Henry,” interposed Mrs. Harrison, “came from my State, you told me—Delaware.”

“My people all came from Delaware and Maryland.”

Louise continued to be polite. “So far away?”

“My grandfather lost a young wife. He manumitted his slaves and fared away to forget things—as well as to mend his fortunes—married again, saw Fond du Lac, and rested.”

“Janeway,” interposed Durand, speaking loud enough to cut off the conversation across the table, “eat a good dinner.”

26

“I’m doing very well,” responded Janeway.

“You’re eating hardly anything,” complained Mrs. Harrison.

“After some days in court, my appetite deserts me,” returned Janeway, in defense.

“I’m giving you the advice,” continued Durand, “because the talk this afternoon is, you’re going to be dynamited.”

“Robert!” protested his wife.

“It may be I deserve it,” suggested Janeway.

“That’s the talk among the strikers,” persisted Durand. “You’re not to be allowed to enjoy the fruits of your victory.”

“Others will,” returned Janeway philosophically.

Mrs. Harrison was not pleased. “Well, do let Mr. Janeway enjoy them——”

“Until the explosion?” smiled Janeway.

“At least until the dinner is served,” said Louise, with some resentment.

“If that’s a challenge to my table efforts,” observed Janeway, speaking to Durand, “I’m going to do better from now on.”

“Those fellows are dead sore,” Durand continued. “But we’ll see you have a good funeral.”

“Dynamiting itself would constitute a pretty complete one, wouldn’t it?” asked Janeway.

“Dynamiting itself condemns our whole social order,” remarked George Fargo.

“It does, George,” returned Janeway, in the manner of one averse at the moment to an effort. 27“And,” he added, “when used strictly as a social argument, it condemns itself.”

“Present-day society,” retorted Fargo, “is a failure.”

“So is dynamite as a remedy,” rejoined Janeway impassively.

“But dynamite is only a symptom.”

Janeway manifested no impatience. “Neither man nor his works can hope to escape symptoms,” he observed. “If we set up your Socialistic state, we shall only be jumping from the frying-pan into the fire.”

“You assert, Mr. Janeway.”

“Because you assume, Mr. Fargo. You offer the most monstrous of all human assumptions, namely, that when all men have a fair chance—which they don’t have now—all men will behave themselves.”

“Is there any reason why they shouldn’t?” asked Louise.

“Experience,” declared Janeway, collected as against one or more inquisitors, “is against the assumption. Even I have seen all manner of men, with all manner of opportunities, and they have not behaved themselves, and would not behave themselves.”

“Why?” asked Louise, without much more of an idea than to hear what this positive man had to say.

“Now you are getting to the core,” he continued. “Because it’s human nature, I guess. I grew up in this town under an old-fashioned Congregational minister. He was strong on one point——”

28

“Hell-fire,” suggested Fargo contemptuously.

“Nothing so academic as that; not hell-fire, but original sin. Hell-fire is, at worst, a long-distance menace. But who can escape in this life daily exemplification of the cussedness of human nature implanted by original sin? And incidentally, why quarrel with the idea of hell-fire, George? Are you willing to concede nothing to the longing of the human heart for retributive justice? Most people in this world don’t get all the hell that’s coming to them—at least, not in the opinion of their relatives.”

“But I hope,” interposed Fargo, with impatience, “you don’t bring all this ridiculous stuff into social argument.”

“Unhappily, George, original sin was brought into social argument long before my brief hour. I never got very far in theology, but on that dogma I was pretty well grounded. My old minister died—Fond du Lac could better have spared many another man—but his weekly hammerings fixed themselves in my mind. I have tested them in the severest school I know anything about—experience—and they have stood the test. Men know what is better; yet they do what is worse. Other men have so done; I have so done. If my experience is credible, if my consciousness is credible——”

“And your assumption of what’s better and what’s worse is credible,” interjected Fargo.

“I accept, incorporate your suggestion, and add,” said Janeway, “—then my old preacher was right. 29And I go even further. If there were no such dogma, it would be necessary to invent one——”

“As that was invented,” persisted Fargo.

“I shan’t quarrel over a word. Invented ‘as that was,’ if you wish, to explain the downright cussedness in human nature. And it’s precisely that, George, that has upset and will upset all ideal commonwealths. Your Socialistic state will be a failure for the same reason that society to-day is a failure—because tainted human nature, which is the basis of both, is a failure. Your Socialism urges against our society its injustice; Christian Science urges against the doctors their blunders; but prudent people will continue to call in blundering doctors just the same. We must do the best we can with the injustices and the blunders—try to correct and avoid them as long as it is human to err. When you show me fundamentally different men and women, I’ll be a Socialist with you. All human government is contemptible, anyway.”

After dinner Durand went down-town. Louise, in the living-room, continued to draw out Janeway. “Brother George,” she said, “told me yesterday that if you come here, he may be in your office—so Judge Harrison told him.” She spoke as if feeling for a comment on her brother. Janeway did not refuse it.

“Your brother is a likable boy,” he responded, “and very bright. I think, if the Judge sends him to me, we shall get on.”

“When he came back from college a Socialist,” Louise went on, as if in a somewhat pathetic confidence, 30“it broke my father’s heart. ‘I sent them good material for an American citizen,’ he said to me before his death, mournfully, ‘and they sent me back an atheist and a madman.’”

“Boys are certainly a difficult proposition to-day—everything is changing so—everything a flux. Look at the poor Europeans! If I were bringing up a boy nowadays to be a king, I should begin by teaching him a trade.”

She watched Janeway narrowly while he spoke; it was not difficult for him to perceive how closely her heart was bound up in this brother. And she was already conscious of the influence that the new acquisition to the Durand legal forces was exercising on her brother, and was feeling her way into Janeway’s views and into some estimate of his character. “I do hope,” she went on, almost uneasily, “you are not a Socialist.”

“I haven’t said anything to lead you to think so,” he returned, almost without concern.

She tried to laugh it off. “That’s precisely it. So many people nowadays say things they don’t really mean. George sometimes brings in a friend that talks clever paradoxes and actual absurdities. I can’t always tell what to make of what men say.”

“What could possibly have led you to suspect me for a Socialist?” asked Janeway, with mild curiosity.

“Well, for one thing, you said all human society is contemptible.” Janeway made no response. “Why did you say that?” she persisted.

“I didn’t say it. I said all human government is 31contemptible. And I said it because it’s so. And I said it,” he added, as if explaining to a young and perhaps intelligent pupil, “sort of by way of confession and avoidance. I admitted what your brother said and introduced new matter to break the force of his argument. I haven’t the least taint of Socialism about me. Though George would object to calling it a ‘taint,’ wouldn’t he?”

“Are we going to get into the war?” she asked.

“I hope not.”

“Why do you hope not?”

“If we do, it will be too late.”

“How so?”

“We should have been preparing for such a war in 1913—earlier would have been better.”

“Janeway and Robert don’t seem to hit it off very well,” remarked Mrs. Harrison to her husband, after her guests had gone.

Harrison, not liking the observation, put in an objecting question. “How so?” he asked shortly.

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just the impression I got at dinner. Bob is always saying something malapropos. Henry didn’t like the dynamiting joke. He carried it, but he wasn’t pleased—neither was Louise, for that matter.”

Fond du Lac, one of the older manufacturing towns bordering on Lake Michigan, began with New England people and traditions, but it was gradually overrun in tone and appearance by the influence of Irish and German immigration. This element filtered into the Middle West slowly, and was assimilated gradually and comfortably, because the foreign-born came in poverty and served as the village and farm hewers of wood and drawers of water. Friction was perhaps felt at times, but it found the necessary relief in merely “damning the Dutch” in native moments of exasperation. It was only after the poor had become, with their large families, the well-to-do, and the New England stock had pretty well petered out, that the town, as many another American Middle West community, realized that the new element owned and ran things.

Even after this transformation Fond du Lac lived a comfortably sleepy life until the next notable invasion. This came in the form of manufacturers, seeking, with the phenomenal development of Chicago as a distributing centre, convenient points adjacent to the focal city for their factory units. The first great mills to come to Fond du Lac, for the 33particular advantages it offered for the making of steel, were those of the Durand Steel Corporation, and the families of the owners and their associates brought a new and highly sophisticated element into the social life of the town.

The steel people, as they were soon known in the community phrase, were city people, and waked up the tradesmen with new and extraordinary market demands. The old townspeople—such, at least, of the pioneers as had survived their race-suicide progenitors—lived a life comfortably apart from that of these newcomers. The mill owners and the manufacturers who followed the Durands with various industries, and who invaded the naturally beautiful town almost within a decade, were likewise people with habits and requirements quite foreign to those governing the lives and affairs of the townspeople. The luxuries of the townspeople were the necessities of the later arrivals.

The industrial growth of the town into something of a city came fast after the blast-furnaces and rolling-mills were located near it. Manufactures followed with almost bewildering rapidity. But the bulk of the new population now added consisted largely, as was inevitable, of laboring people; so fast, indeed, did this element pour in, that Bishop Marion—Bishop of Fond du Lac and a client of Janeway’s on at least one occasion—told the latter that more than once the arrival of a shipload of southern-Europe immigrants had put the population of a whole new parish on him overnight.

34

The heads of the manufacturing interests did not as a rule coalesce socially with one another. Almost all of them made their own social circles, confined chiefly to those families whose business interests drew them together. The automobile makers, the packers, the starch manufacturers, even the brewers, had their own sets. These met sometimes in common at the country clubs, but their social activities were distinct. And even the country clubs saw little of the higher-ups in the manufacturing world; the country clubs were patronized chiefly by the actual working managers of the industries—the families of the superintendents, department heads, and junior partners. In matter of fact, the actual owners clung mostly to Chicago as a social base, and turned to Chicago for many of their pleasures. The winter season found all of them in their lake-shore apartments for the city’s diversions, and their Fond du Lac homes served the women chiefly as rest-cures and summer retreats.

In the steel circle the Harrison family was an exception to what has been said of their associates, in that they had lived for many years in Fond du Lac. The Simmses had come to Fond du Lac from the North Side in Chicago, because it was Simms’s interest to keep close to Durand. And as Durand was charged by his associates with the operation of the Fond du Lac plant, he necessarily spent a good deal of his time in Fond du Lac, or, rather, between Fond du Lac and Chicago; he had varied social and business interests in both places.

35

Judge Harrison, however, had begun in Fond du Lac. It was only with the growth and importance of his practice that he had gone perforce to Chicago to pursue his legal career. The elder Durand—Robert’s father—meeting Judge Harrison’s sister at the Fond du Lac home, which Judge Harrison and his wife had always maintained, married her and established a relationship between the two families, and these, with their connections, made up the steel set, which was small but exclusive.

Jacob Simms, a Chicago lawyer, nearing forty, had been a college chum of Robert Durand’s, and afterward a club chum. Both men were exemplars of the life pursued by prosperous young American men of convivial tastes—men interested in athletics, sports, and club life and in well-shaped women who were equal and not averse to late suppers. Simms, with more talent in some directions than Durand, was a leader in what centred in the kaleidoscopic Chicago world. Possessed of an excellent physique, good taste in dress, and a tactful disposition, he had had no difficulty in securing from Robert Durand, when the latter took the management of the steel business after his father’s death, the position of general attorney, under Harrison, for the Durand Corporation. It was only after the phenomenal expansion of the business founded by Durand, Senior, and the consequent rise of corporation questions calling for the keenest order of legal ability, and particularly after the failure of Simms in various instances to secure results, that Judge Harrison took things in his own 36hands, and began to search for another active legal head for the corporation interests. Simms was kept as general attorney, but Harrison offered to Janeway the position of counsel for the various Durand corporations.

Into this little circle of men and women of Middle West business life Louise Durand had come from San Francisco a very youthful bride. She once told Janeway the story of her girlhood and the circumstances leading to her early marriage; it need not be anticipated here. But the very considerable fortune she brought from her father’s estate to Durand had accounted for the material expansion in 1913 of the steel companies of which he was the new head; and this expansion, in turn, supplied the foundation for the extraordinary success that opened for the Durand Companies at the beginning, in 1914, of the World War. An almost reckless building programme gone into by Durand—who was young, energetic, and fond of the limelight—in dangerous excess of normal plant requirements, and undertaken—as was perhaps enviously said by more conservative steel men—because his wife had too much money—was transformed in a twinkling into an unexampled readiness to supply the urgency of Allied munitions demands at unheard-of profits.

From a monetary aspect, therefore, Durand’s marriage could hardly have been more successful. Louise, on the merits of her personality, would have been accorded a favored place among any new relatives at all well-disposed; but her début in the 37Durand circle was made under the most felicitous circumstances. Less could be said, as far as her own happiness was concerned, regarding this most important step in any woman’s life. The girlish pride in the passing glamour of the preparations and the well-appointed wedding, the new home overlooking Lake Michigan, the novel responsibilities and the new friends had hardly worn off before she realized that she, herself, really meant very little in Durand’s life. It was not alone that she realized she was only one of his interests—and a perceptibly lessening one. He not only had other interests, such as fast friends, but at least one of these other interests centred upon other women, and of late, particularly, on one other woman.

Almost a complete realization of this domestic situation had come to Louise at the time of the dynamiting of the rolling-mills. The excitement and the fears aroused by this shocking event—for besides the material damage, the loss of life had been considerable—had called, as it were, for a truce as to the domestic relations of Louise and her husband; but neither the untoward event nor the frequent threats made against Durand’s life had had more than a temporary effect on his conduct, which he insisted was nothing new, only usual. And by the time the dynamiters had been convicted and this story opens, Durand was again in the swing of his natural bent.

On the night of the Harrison dinner, coming home late, he went to his wife’s rooms. A fire was burning in the grate, and Louise was reading in the evening 38paper the day’s story of the trial, with its excerpts from Janeway’s closing speech; as victor in the legal battle he had been featured. Durand, lighting a cigarette, sat down, and Louise read paragraphs from the closing.

“I want Janeway here to dinner when I get back from Chicago next week,” said Durand, after discussing the exciting events of the day. Louise asked whom else he wished to have. He gave her the names and ended with those of the Simmses and a friend of theirs—and his—Mrs. Montgomery.

“The Simmses, yes,” assented Louise. “Not Mrs. Montgomery.”

“She’ll do for Janeway. You’ve nobody else.”

“In a small company Mr. Janeway will take very good care of himself.”

He showed his overbearing impatience. “Mrs. Montgomery is a lifelong friend of Janeway’s.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“What are you talking about? Janeway introduced me to her. Anyway,” he said angrily, “I want Mrs. Montgomery included.”

“I’m free to say I don’t care for her.”

“Does that mean you won’t invite her?”

Louise discussed Mrs. Montgomery with her husband pretty freely. Each knew the real reason for her refusal to have Mrs. Montgomery at her table, but neither was in a position to uncover it. Durand, obstinate now, and incensed, persisted that she be included. “I suppose I’ll have to invite her myself,” he grumbled at last.

39

Louise was cold. “I’ve no doubt she’d come on such an invitation,” was all she said.

“Look here, Louise,” exclaimed Durand, flinging his cigarette into the fireplace, “it’s time for you and me to have an understanding.”

“We have reached a clear one on that point.”

She had blanched a little in her defiance. And she spoke hurriedly, with a nervous tremor, but she looked at him with determined eyes. Durand was much surprised. He could hardly believe his senses; for the first time in their married lives his wife had unhesitatingly traversed a decision he had made, and was not to be bullied into receding. Louise herself was hardly less astonished at her temerity. But there had been ample preparation for her stand; many givings-in, many useless pleas, many tears, and many bitter reflections. There were no tears now, not even an inclination, but there was much accumulated resentment and doggedness of purpose. Durand tried again.

“What have you got against Mrs. Montgomery?” he demanded.

She could not bring herself to accept his brutal challenge. She had no proof, anyway—only suspicions; but suspicions that burn a woman’s heart and sensibilities to ashes, when she realizes she is being unlawfully supplanted.

“I don’t like her,” she replied, controlling herself, and with hard, helpless tones. “I have invited her here before to please you. I won’t have her here again.”

40

“Nothing that pleases me pleases you,” he snorted, as if expressing a final conclusion. “You don’t like my friends. You don’t care any more about me, for that matter. But don’t imagine that’s going to break my heart.” He spoke in a tone of forbearance, tempered by disgust with an intractable partner. His wife, being young and inexperienced, would not leave the situation to stand where he had fixed it. She thought she ought to defend herself—which was only bringing fuel to his fire.

“You know that isn’t true, Robert,” she protested. “And you know you ought not to insist on including that woman among my guests.” She looked at him so pointedly that her meaning was unmistakable.

He grew more stubborn. “The trouble with you is,” he remarked with finality, “you’re too old-fogy; Maymie Montgomery is right up-to-date—she’s for fun and a good time. She’s a man’s woman—that’s why you don’t like her.”

Louise was desperate. Though knowing she was right in her stand, her collected antagonist was still torturing her, and doing it, despite all she could urge, with an air of injured innocence.

“I don’t like her for more reasons than that,” she retorted. “But I give her credit for one thing: she doesn’t sail under false colors; she doesn’t even counterfeit decency.”

Durand laughed. He had the situation well in hand. “Still harping on the old string—‘decency’!”

“Decency is a trifle older than indecency,” said his wife, trembling with anger, “but only a trifle.”

41

“Well, I’ve always lived my life without blue laws, and I expect to continue to do so. I’m beginning to think you’re as much of a crank on decency as that boob Socialist brother of yours is on everything else. I’ll serve final notice on you now that I intend to choose my friends, and give you the same privilege. I’m not jealous. But if you expect to run my house you’ll entertain people I like when I say so.”

Louise only buried herself behind her newspaper. The fires of a long endurance had flared up in her, and she was set in her attitude beyond all of his influence. Grievances raked up and grievances invented by Durand in his abuse of her had no effect on her rigidity. He pricked her sensibilities with taunts and reproaches, but she would not even reply. Angry in turn at his inability to tempt her to wrangle, he started to leave the room.

“Robert!” She spoke just as he reached his door. He turned. She had risen. “You say we’ve reached the parting of the ways. We have. You’ve long been wanting to be rid of me. You’ve been asking why I don’t go to France, to Italy, since I am always talking about it. Now I’m going. In just as few months as I can arrange my affairs and secure passage, we will part company for all time. You’ll have a free rein then with your Athletic Club companions—and with Maymie Montgomery. But I warn you now, Robert Durand, if you ever try to drag me into a divorce court, I’ll fight you as long as I have life left to fight with!”

He had driven her to the point to which he had 42long tried to drive her—the point at which she would get out of his way until he could entirely rid himself of her—and he went to his room in a complacent frame of mind.

Judge Harrison had a town house in Fond du Lac, and on out the Shell Bay Road, just northwest of the city, a country place to which he made his escape, to use his own words, at the first sign of spring. Accordingly, every spring he watched with jealous eye for the coming of the first robin. There was a perennial rivalry between him and Bishop Marion as to which should spot the earliest bird. March 10 was the date accepted by both as the most probable for the return of the winter truants, but the schedule of these red-breasted travellers was subject to many contingencies.

Nor were they fastidious as to their first stopping-place. Bishop Marion, who lived in a big, smoke-grimed, red-brick house next the old procathedral, in the lower town, maintained that the Judge, living amid maples and elms, in the exclusive part of the town, enjoyed an advantage. Judge Harrison—never without resource—pointed out, on the other hand, that robins are not aristocrats, and urged that the Bishop often snatched victory from his own grasp through his habit of getting up earlier in the morning; and that to equalize opportunity, the Bishop should either rise later, or should not, in 44fairness, look out of doors until he had massed and breakfasted, as Judge Harrison expressed it.

However it was, as to advantage, the Bishop was quite as often victor in the contest as to which should call the other up to announce the first robin as Harrison in his more attractive surroundings up-town. Between the two men it was an affair of honor; each accepted without question the word of the other over the telephone, even in midwinter, when it was assumed by both—in the event of a stray bird’s appearance being spotted by either—that the unfortunate had trusted to the promise of a mild season, or had been hampered pecuniarily in his plans for getting south. But if any one else in the community, even members of their own households, announced a robin out of season, the Bishop and the Judge presented to the claimant the united scepticism of experienced observers, and frowned together on sensational and unauthenticated reports.

The coming of the robin always gave to Judge Harrison the initial impulse to desert the city house for The Farms, as he modestly termed his handsome estate. Elizabeth, his wife, had called it after the old Delaware home of her father, Eagles Nest. The Judge’s objection to this was that he had never, even as a boy, seen an eagle within a hundred miles of the place. But this difficulty did not deter Mrs. Harrison. And her choice of a name appeared on the road pillars at the entrance, and as well in the society columns.

Judge Harrison had a second spring token to lure 45him from town. His old man servant, Oliver, survivor of many combinations of serving men and women in the Harrison ménage, had been from time long gone accustomed to search the Big Woods, as the hills on the extreme northwest corner of The Farms were called, for the first arbutus blooms. When Oliver wanted new rubber boots, he was not infrequently “stood off” by the Judge in his requisition. But, familiar with his master’s crotchets, the venerable darky learned to wait till winter was on the wane. When he told the Judge he needed new boots to look for arbutus, permission to buy them was never long deferred. In this way Oliver became an arbutus authority, as his master professed to be a first-robin authority. At the earliest sign of a spring-like sun, that might warm the melting snows and encourage the tiny pink-white blossoms to peep forth, Oliver was tramping the depths of the Big Woods and spying upon the openings to bring in the coveted flowers.

It meant for him a ten-dollar bill—and one much easier to get than at other times a one-dollar tip for more important adventuring. Thus Oliver always outdistanced neighboring and jealous gardeners in the arbutus race, and appeared occasionally with the welcome prize so early that the Judge accused him of having a private supply in the hothouse.

Some three months after the close of the dynamiting trial, Janeway was to come to the Harrisons’ for a week-end. Negotiations looking toward his assuming control of the Durand Corporation legal affairs 46had been going forward during the interval. Durand, in particular, seemed to have taken Janeway up strongly. Janeway had more than once been a guest of Durand’s at his home, where, despite the domestic strain and the humiliations put on her by the entertaining of Durand’s convivial friends, Louise resolutely maintained her position as hostess until she should leave for good what she had once fondly thought to be really her own home. Janeway, at these little drinking parties of Durand’s, conducted himself with reserve, never leading; rather as one just outside the boisterous fun that characterized some of the entertainments.

Janeway had not, however, seen Judge Harrison’s country place for over a year. On the afternoon he arrived from Chicago—a day behind schedule—Harrison took him out to show him what he had done in the interval. For one thing, he had built a new house.

The Judge took his guest through bypaths down to the entrance to the grounds, and, turning to secure an effect, walked him up the formal avenue leading to the residence. “Elizabeth,” he observed, “thought the French traditions of this part of the country would justify something in the château style. It’s too formal, but Elizabeth likes it.”

“Don’t you?”

“As much as I like any new-fangled thing. The truth is, Janeway, I’m sick to death of fuss and feathers. I’d like to live, like my grandfather, in a log cabin. When I talk simplicity my friends laugh 47at me. But I mean it. I used to think the loss of money a stupendous calamity. I don’t any more; I’m beginning to regard it with equanimity—especially if it’s the other fellow loses it. I don’t fancy a stone house, myself,” he explained in his pseudo deprecatory fashion—an inoffensive affectation. “The only stone house in Appleton, where I got my early impressions of life, was the county jail. The association of ideas has always sort of spoiled a stone house for me, but Elizabeth got to talking with an architect, and this is the outcome. It has its compensations, for when the Socialists come in we lawyers will all be living in stone houses with the sort of Michael Angelo windows they had on our county jail. And I shall be accustomed to it.”

He pointed across the wide slough that bore the name of The Skokie, and cut through one corner of his holdings. “I’ve added that ‘forty’ since you’ve seen the place,” he went on. “You know all this land—all this part of the country, in fact—belonged once to my grandfather; that’s why I wanted it back. I was brought up here. My father had to sell this place to educate the boys. He took us to Appleton. And that was the end of my farming.

“But I’m just naturally a farmer, Janeway. I love it. Why, sometimes I get on a train and run out to my Nebraska ranch just to see them turn over a new piece of sod——”

“Still got that Nebraska land?”

“Some of it—about ten sections—little over six thousand acres. It was railroad land, you know, 48and I got it for a song. You were in the office when I picked it up; I wanted you to buy some——”

“I never was cut out for a millionaire, Judge, was I?”

“Well, sir, I just enjoy seeing them turn that virgin soil over with a sod plough. Think of it—soil that never since the creation of the world has been touched by the hand of man. My grandfather”—Judge Harrison pointed to the grass under their feet—“did the same thing right here that I am doing in Nebraska——”

“With this difference,” interposed Janeway, “that your grandfather did it himself; you’re hiring somebody to do it for you.”

“A generation from now no American will be able to see that done in his own country,” continued Harrison, unperturbed. “It’s filling up too fast—too fast. The Russians have overrun that part of the country where I am, out there—trying all the time to cut roads through me and all that——”

“Not willing to drive a couple or eight miles around——”

“Janeway,” exclaimed the Judge with conviction, “speaking as an American—not as a steel maker—I’d like to put up the bars and keep every blamed emigrant out of this country for the next hundred years.”

Janeway raised his hand as if to say: “Stop right there.” “Judge,” he said with emphasis, “you’ve told me a great many things in my day. Now I am going to tell you one: The very day that the stream 49of our European emigration stops, that day the tide of our material greatness turns; that day it touches high-water mark, and from that day it will steadily and inevitably recede.

“Nothing—not all our fine words, our fine boasting, will avert that consequence. We owe our nation’s present material greatness to the fact that it has been fed by a constant stream of European emigrants to do our work. Americans don’t work any more—don’t you realize that? We haven’t used our hands for two generations. Whoever is turning your Nebraska sod, whether Swede, or Slav, or German, you may be sure it’s neither Leatherstocking nor an Indian brave. The Indian has too much sense to touch a plough, and Leatherstocking’s “gifts” have been developed entirely in the direction of getting somebody else to do his work for him. Poor men from Europe, as able physically as we ever were and as clean morally, have dug our canals, built our railroads, manned our factories, worked our mines, and tilled our farms. Shut your gates as soon as you please—I don’t care anything about that. But when you do, remember you pay that particular price for doing it.

“Think a minute, Judge. There is one part of our country, and only one, that has never been fed by that European stream. The penniless emigrant had no chance to get a job there, because the cotton, tobacco, and corn were picked by slaves. There was no free land there when our West was new. So the Irishman and the German, the Swiss and the 50Scandinavian went to Illinois and Wisconsin and Iowa and Minnesota. What is the result? The part of our country which missed that stream is to-day the poorest part of it materially, and the most pitiful politically—whole communities, States in fact, given over voluntarily to illiteracy and steeped in ignorance and bigotry. And yet that part of our country once held the highest and best of our nation’s traditions——”

“You’re forgetting the Civil War, Janeway——”

“No, I’m not. But if you want to see what Americans left to themselves, pure and undefiled, have done, look to the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, where moonshine and in-breeding stalk hand in hand. They don’t get any immigration down there—they don’t want any.”

“Well, shut up, Janeway, anyway, and listen to me. I didn’t bring you out here to talk to me; I brought you out here to talk to you. Let us contemplate the restfulness of this landscape and let our shortcomings momentarily be forgotten.

“When I got hold of this place again Elizabeth asked me to suggest the best way to ‘treat’ it. I said: ‘Let it alone.’ Then she consulted a man from Boston and proceeded to ‘landscape’ it. See that old barn, the other side of the garage? They wanted to scrap that, Janeway. I said: ‘No! You can spoil the rest of the four hundred and sixty acres as much as you like—not that. I reserve that for my own.’” He spoke parenthetically and apologetically. “That barn was on the place when my father lived 51here. I can remember the hay-loft, and the cutter up there in the summer, and the horse and cow stalls down-stairs—and at one end the chicken yard, you know.

“Well, I’ve got the same thing now. A hay-loft—hay forty dollars a ton! And the riding-horses and cows down-stairs, and chickens, by gum!—my own chickens. How many? Eighteen—hens—widows at that. Elizabeth complained the roosters kept her awake, so we soft-boiled them. About half the time I feed the hens myself. And I get the eggs myself. They hide their nests—exactly the way they used to when I was a boy. Sometimes I stumble on a surprise nestful of eggs; well, sir, you wouldn’t believe how rich that nest of eggs makes me feel. It’s the nearest sensation to getting something for nothing I ever experience. Sometimes I get caught for five or ten thousand dollars at a clip in Steel. But if I happen next day to find a nest of eggs, painstakingly hidden away by a thrifty old hen, I feel as prosperous as all-get-out again.”

Mrs. Harrison joined her husband and her guest. The Judge pointed once more.

“That’s my vegetable garden over there. The real millionaire, Janeway—rich or poor, I don’t care whether he’s got money in the bank or not—is the man who can grow his own vegetables and fruits, and eat them the day they’re picked. These infernal market-growers cultivate, not fruits that taste good, but fruits that’ll keep. They’ve got that market quality down so blamed fine their berries aren’t fit 52to eat; they’d keep forever. But I like the green stuff from the garden. As I get older I grow more like Nebuchadnezzar—my taste runs to grass—system seems to require it. Now, this is that kind of an old-fashioned vegetable and fruit garden where I grow things that taste the way they used to taste.”

“Take care of it yourself?” asked Janeway, looking at the well-kept plot through the smoke rising from his cigar.

“Oh, I get out into it once in a while,” asserted the Judge, but in the half-hearted tone of a man knowing that he faces immediate exposure.

His wife burst into a laugh. “Sidney Harrison!” she exclaimed. “What a story! Don’t you ever believe that, Mr. Janeway. His gardening is a perfect joke. What he does do every once in a while is to drive up and down Kinzie Street in Chicago, stop at all the seed stores, and buy every rake and tool and hoe they show him——”

“Labor-saving devices,” muttered the Judge, feebly defensive.

“—and store them away in that rickety old barn. He won’t even let the gardeners use them. There they lie, rusting their weary lives away.”

Her husband stood his ground. “The point is, Janeway,” he maintained firmly, “they are there. The tools are there, the garden’s there, if I take a notion to hoe something the hoe’s there, and the thing’s there to be hoed—hm?”

Elizabeth spoke to Janeway in a confidence. “I’m going to have a grand auction some day.”

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“Don’t you touch anything in that barn,” interposed her husband. “A tramp came along last summer, and Elizabeth, passing all my old shoes, gave him the only new pair I had in the world.”

“Does he still look to the robins for his spring calendar?” asked Janeway of Mrs. Harrison.

“He does. But I don’t. I’ve a much better calendar than that. I always know when spring is near, whether the robins come or not, for when the days begin to grow the least bit longer Sidney invariably begins to talk about moving that old barn. He ought to have respect for its age, but he hasn’t. He moves it every spring, regularly. I call it his barn de luxe. It must cost him more than the house to keep it going. I suggested putting the thing on wheels. But every time he moves it, he sets it down on a stone foundation that would hold up the Masonic Temple.”

“Ever make tunnels in the hay, Janeway?” asked the Judge, pushing the conversation along. “If you feel like it to-morrow morning, go to it; the hay’s there.”

“Why, to-morrow’s Sunday!” exclaimed his wife, simulating a shock.

“Very good. Comb the hay out of his hair, the way my sister used to comb it out of mine, and send him to Sunday-school,” responded Harrison, unruffled.

When they got back to the house Gertrude Durand was there with Jim Kennedy. Kennedy was a young lawyer in Janeway’s Chicago office, a poor Fond du 54Lac boy whom Janeway had trained and taken to the city, and who had recently astonished his home town, enraged Robert Durand, and amazed his own happy mother by winning the favor of the richest girl in it, Gertrude Durand. Kennedy and Gertrude stayed to dinner. The talk turned to steel and to the phenomenal expansion of the Durand business.

“But, Uncle Sidney,” asked Gertrude imperiously, “when are we going to get another one of those nice extra dividends?”

Judge Harrison pursed his mouth. “By jing, you’ll have to ask Bob about that. I don’t know any more. I guess labor’s getting the extra dividends these days.”

“Oh, dear!” exclaimed Gertrude, in despair. “And here I’ve made poor Jim put all his savings into Steel, with the idea that he’d have no end of extras!”

The Judge looked at Kennedy grimly. “The only consolation Jim will have is that he’s in the same boat with the rest of the rich men.”

“I arrive always and everywhere too late,” retorted Kennedy. “Now that I join the ranks of the rich they all get poor.”

“It’s really got so now,” continued the Judge, “that it’s the rich man who has to hustle to pay his bills. Simms was growling the other day about the high prices of everything, from butter and eggs to barbers and hotels; he kicks at the awful hotel tariffs.

“‘What’s happened, Simms,’ I said to him, ‘is that the small fry have paid us the compliment of imitating us. We began it; we pointed the way. To-day 55every producer, whether he sells lumber or prunes or just plain sand, is in touch with every other producer of lumber or prunes or sand to “regulate” production and prices. In every territory manufacturer meets manufacturer, jobber meets jobber, to “regulate” prices; the meanest retailer combines with the other meanest retailer to “stabilize” the price of peanuts; it is a hard-and-fast combine every step of the way from the cradle to the grave. Of course, these birds all camouflage their real objects. The lumbermen meet as “What-Nots,” the bartenders as “Eagles,” the hucksters as benefactors of society. The result is always the same. These conventions of philanthropists may be entertained by great humorists, enlivened by the cavorting of short-skirted women, decorated beautifully with flowers. But it’s like a wake and a funeral—and after the feasting and under the flowers there lie the remains of that enemy to prosperity and progress—competition.’

“It reminds me of a book I read recently, ‘The Personal Recollections of Bill Jones.’ Bill announced in Chapter One that his ambition, from his earliest years, had been to make the world better for his having lived in it. This sounded like a fair proposition—one of the fair kind Janeway would put up to a jury. But when I got through the book and had digested Bill’s efforts—and they were interesting—I saw they had indeed been aimed at making the world better; but it was in the direction, more particularly, of making it better for Bill Jones.”

After dinner the two men adjourned to the library. The evening was cool and a fire burned in the grate. Between Janeway and Judge Harrison there existed a bond of sympathy that draws men together and holds them together better than most common traits, namely, a freemasonry of brains.

They discussed, with the reserved diplomacy in which both were experienced practitioners, the figures at which Janeway could be induced to accept the proffered position of general counsel for the Durand Companies, and the details of the arrangement—and drifted from the more important topic to the current political situation. Judge Harrison, as National Republican Committeeman for the State and a member of the executive board, always kept in touch with national affairs, because the national policies had a very direct bearing on the steel business. He liked politics, anyway, and enjoyed the share of power that fell within his sphere of influence. Janeway himself had always felt the force of the Judge’s views, and drawn from them many of his own ideas of American polity. But Janeway wanted now to make, and did make it very clear that his duties as counsel should include no political obligations of any sort.

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“It is not necessary they should,” said Harrison, quite serene in his programme. “I shall turn over to you everything except political responsibility. So far as Republican policies are concerned, I, myself, shall try to keep track of them; and Simms is very useful with the powers at Washington; he and Bob are hand-in-glove with the departments. And nobody pays any attention to Congress lately, anyway—the cheapest men, in the House especially, that have ever met in Washington.

“I don’t know whether it’s a sign I’m getting old, Janeway,” continued Harrison, “but I notice almost every time I come in contact with them what an inferior set of men, in Congress and out, make our laws. You see it strikingly, too, at a national political convention. Where are the equals of the last generation of politicians and lawmakers? Our own profession is the sole exception, and it is an exception only at the top.”

“What has happened,” responded Janeway, weighing Harrison’s remark, “is that business is taking all the American brains that used to supply our political life. Business is as voracious as the twin daughters of the horse leech. Our great rewards are not in politics to-day—that’s the trouble; they are in business. It’s inevitable,” continued Janeway, “that talent should seek the avenues of greatest reward. When Michael Angelo wrought and Leonardo painted, the highest honors of their time and place went to painters and architects and sculptors. Leonardo nowadays would be an aeronautical engineer, or 58transforming the snows of the Sierras into hot-point electric irons for thrifty women to start disastrous fires with in hotels and apartment-houses.”

“I shouldn’t mind the beggarly politicians so much,” persisted Harrison, “if the people had held up. When I was a young man and lived up north we used to ride to Chicago in the day coaches of the train. There was a parlor-car at the hind end, but it was mostly empty. I rode among the people, because my business came from them; so did Matt Carpenter, our United States Senator. More than one wintry morning I’ve seen Tim Howe, Postmaster-General of the United States, after getting out at Green Bay for the six-o’clock morning train, curled up on the last seat of a day coach, next to the Baker heater, in his ulster, for an after-daylight nap. It was a thousand times more interesting to sit out in the day coach and talk to the people than it was to isolate yourself in the parlor-car.

“I used to ride—I have ridden—everywhere on the train except on the cow catcher—and enjoyed it. I’ve talked with the engineer in the cab—and he was always a stalwart American. In the baggage-car I’ve watched an old, gray-bearded express messenger surreptitiously open a barrel of black bass, put on at Oshkosh for South Water Street, filch one out of the ice for his Sunday dinner, nail up the barrel again—and called him an honest man; I’d have trusted him with every dollar I had in the world. He knew the fish were netted outside of the law, and took his private toll out of them on the way to market. We 59didn’t think it a serious malfeasance—and I was the railroad attorney myself at that time.

“To-day I ride to the city in a train of parlor-cars; I talk to no one, unless it is to some millionaire who takes not a blamed bit more interest in me than I do in him. If I have to take a train of day coaches, I’m shocked at the people that ride in them—ignorant of everything, impossible to talk to—Huns, Polacks, Greeks, Letts, dagoes—specimens of every savage tribe of Europe and Jews from every conceivable European haunt of the ten tribes. I’ve encountered in those day coaches Spanish Jews from Constantinople, Syrian peddlers from Lebanon, wild men from every jungle in the Balkans—but fewer and fewer of our old-fashioned Americans. Where are they? What’s become of our ancestors? We’ve run the population up to one hundred and ten millions. But—the quality! Janeway,” demanded Harrison sternly, “have you faith, in the face of it all, and with such mongrel crews as we gather in Washington, in the stability of our political institutions?”

“Faith in them as the best yet devised by man.”

“That’s no answer.”

“I have hope in them.”

“In the ability of people to govern themselves?”

“Better than anybody else can or will govern them.”

Harrison shook his head. “They’re not making much of a job of it to-day,” he growled.

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“They’re not governing themselves to-day. They’re being governed by a minority of one.”

“What’s the remedy?”

“Pare the presidential patronage claws.”

“There’s too much liberty, anyway.”

“Not enough, Judge. When abuses in popular government arise, the remedy should always be the same; instead of restricting the power of the people, add to it; I’m for the referendum.”

“Mob law!” said the Judge grimly, but without releasing his cigar from between his teeth.

Janeway was at no loss for a retort. “Our mob is a pretty good one yet.”

They heard voices in the hall. A tapping on the open door of the room interrupted the conversation, and Gertrude Durand, with Kennedy, walked in on them.

“What wickedness are you two plotting in this darkened room?” demanded Gertrude, as she stopped at her uncle’s chair and threw her arm about his neck.

“Why, mostly trying to save the country,” exclaimed Janeway, looking with approval on Gertrude’s shining dark eyes. “Hello, Jim.”

“That’s what everybody’s doing,” complained Kennedy, in the dry tone that profitably characterized his speech in court and out, “except me. I’m only trying to save my salary—and making a poor job of that. Judge,” he continued, “they sustained your demurrer to-day in the Telephone Case. Simms had a message.”

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Harrison, pleased, gave only indirect evidence of it. “You two didn’t come out here to tell me that,” he said, eying the couple with approving distrust.

“No,” confessed Gertrude, “I came out to coax my adorable auntie to come to my house, without fail, Tuesday afternoon. The women are to meet to talk over the Children’s Hospital bazaar.”

“It will take exactly one thousand bazaars to get that Children’s Hospital going, Gertrude,” prophesied Harrison, in sceptical mood.

“Now don’t you be pessimistic, Uncle Sidney,” said Gertrude reprovingly. “We are going to get it going. And we should be delighted to have you and Mr. Janeway——”

“But greatly surprised,” suggested Janeway, “if we appeared.”

Gertrude had a rejoinder ready. “Bishop Marion is going to be there.”

“No credit to him,” returned Janeway. “He has to be.”

“I hope you two are not out without a chaperon,” said the Judge.

Gertrude laughed. “For a wonder, we’re not. Louise came over to help us coax.”

Harrison pricked up his ears. “Louise? Where is she?”

“Down-stairs with Auntie.”

“We’ll go down,” said her uncle. “Two pretty women here at once demand our best attention.”

After the discussion of the hospital benefit—a set charity idea of Gertrude’s and an annual fixture—had 62subsided, Janeway walked over to where Louise was talking with her aunt.

“I was coming over to-night,” he said to her, when Mrs. Harrison left them, “to call on you and Mr. Durand, but Judge Harrison got me into the library and I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—shake loose from him.”

“You’d have missed Robert,” responded Louise. “He’s in Chicago to-night.”

“But I’m coming very soon,” continued Janeway.

“We shall be glad to see you any time; and I hope before I go away.”

“You are going away?”

“To Italy.”

He looked at her very deliberately and with unconcealed surprise. They were standing now. Janeway asked her to sit down, and, drawing a chair, sat before her. “You’re not afraid of the submarines?”

She said not. He gazed at her reprovingly. “You ought to be,” he remarked at length.

“I’m not,” she insisted, but without any attempt to convert him to views of her own.

He continued to regard her with surprise, but his eyes were not unsympathetic.

“You’ll think better of that,” he predicted. “Your husband will hardly let you expose yourself in that way.” He used a tentative tone, but since he did not put the remark in the form of a question, Louise avoided an answer. “Uncle Sidney,” she said, instead, “told us you, yourself, were very nearly a passenger on the Lusitania.”

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“I cancelled passage the day before it sailed—fortunately.”

“Was it the warnings?”

He almost ignored the implication. “I’m sure I should have cut a poor figure swimming in Irish waters at any season of the year. But men charged with business matters have less choice in their movements than women of leisure.”

Louise shrugged her shoulders slightly. “Doesn’t everything depend on what we consider our responsibilities and our situations?”

The question failed to draw him out. “How long are you to be gone?” he asked.

“That doesn’t even remotely answer my question, does it?” she objected.

“About situations, responsibilities, no. The reason I didn’t respond is because I hope you haven’t any exaggerated ideas about being needed over there—wild ideas on that point prevail so now among American women—and men, too, for that matter. But you don’t impress me as being of the hysterical type that nourish delusions or fall for silly propaganda.” He spoke with little of tactful or gentle endeavor to win her to his views—rather, his tone and manner, like his words, were blunt. Only a blend of honest concern for her welfare redeemed them from unpleasantness. “They seem to think they are called on personally,” he continued, “to get into the limelight and save the world; Atlas himself had nothing on their conception of their job.”

“I’m as innocent as a baby of anything like that,” 64protested Louise. “My trip is purely a personal desire for a change.”

His eyebrows rose. “Great heavens!” he exclaimed. “For a change!”

She saw her mistake and flushed. “Oh, I shouldn’t say that, should I? No matter!” There was impatience in her tone. “Call it a whim, anything you like—I’m just going.”

“Then I have the less hesitation,” he returned gravely, “in trying to dissuade you from going. If you were a mere female with a mission I should keep still; that kind ought to go—Europe just now is the place for them. But not for those who would be a loss to—” He was suddenly conscious of a sensation of floundering.

It did not escape Louise. She smiled in revenge. “To whom?” she asked coolly.

“To those to whom they are dear,” he returned collectedly.

“Or ought to be,” she suggested, with a sceptical laugh. Yet the quality of her laugh was not unpleasant. They were looking directly into each other’s eyes, and their exchanges were animated. “I hope,” he returned, “you wouldn’t expect me to approve such a qualification. And I renew my own question—how long are you going to be gone?”

“Indefinitely.”

“Jingo!” He paused for a minute. “And no protests will change your determination?”

“You are the first to utter any.”

“The first?”

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Both the tone and the manner of his question warned her. “Well, it so happens you are my first confidant,” she rejoined.

“Oh, I see. You’re really not going at all, then.”

“But I am.”

“Your husband will never let you.”

She only rose to her feet as if the discussion were profitless, laughing again—not significantly or covertly, just naturally, at his seriousness. But her laugh again fell pleasingly on Janeway’s ears.

He was reluctant to give up. “I’ll lay a wager you don’t go,” he exclaimed, rising in turn, and refusing to be dismissed.

Louise, smiling reservedly, paused. “What shall it be?”

“Whatever you like,” he answered, betrayed into something like eagerness.

She hesitated just long enough to dismiss him. “Whatever it might be, I couldn’t honestly take it—for,” she declared, with deliberate emphasis and meeting his eyes unafraid, “I’m going.”

Sunday morning Judge Harrison and Janeway played golf at the Country Club.

“Mrs. Durand tells me she is going to Italy,” said Janeway, while the two men, sitting on a bench, were waiting at a tee.

Judge Harrison, watching with contemplative interest the teeing of a ball by a player ahead, made no comment on the remark. “Why any sane woman,” continued Janeway, in the absence of response, “should want to get into that mess, I can’t imagine. Has she said anything to you about it?” he asked, when there was still no comment.

Grizzled and thin in his jersey, the Judge spoke with reluctance, but as if of something that had to be faced. “She told me last night. I’m sorry, of course,” he went on. “I said what I could to dissuade her; guess it’s no use. Louise is sane enough, as far as that goes; she’s too sane—that’s part of the difficulty. The fact simply is, Bob is a pretty free-liver. I don’t pry into his affairs, but I guess he usually has some woman on the string. Louise isn’t used to that kind of thing; it doesn’t set well with her. Just recently I understand it’s a woman that used to live here, named Montgomery. I imagine the reason Louise is going away is because she and Bob have agreed to disagree.

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“No use,” continued the Judge. “When things get that bad, if a woman’s sensitive and high-strung, it’s better to quit. Your honor, Janeway. What did I make this hole in before?”

So many things were to be discussed by the two men concerning the legal affairs of which Janeway was to take hold for the Durand Companies, that Janeway spent most of the week at Eagles Nest. Tuesday afternoon the Judge and he played golf again. On their way home they drove around by Gertrude Durand’s, to pick up Mrs. Harrison.

Gertrude lived in the old Durand home. The house had been built by her father when he went to Fond du Lac to live; it represented a period in the progressive story of Fond du Lac architecture when towers were the distinctive feature of the few so-called rich men’s houses. A tower in the design of a pretentious Fond du Lac residence was as inevitable as a steeple on a Fond du Lac church, and the Durand tower, being the aggressive expression of the biggest man to come to town during the tower obsession, was a little worse than its earlier and less elaborate neighbors.

But the house was comfortable. The high ceilings were a difficulty and the extravagant panelling was an eyesore, but Gertrude was, first of all, loyal to the old home. She had time and taste and ample means, and spent all three earnestly in successive campaigns of what her Uncle Sidney termed “remuddeling” her father’s house.

The golfers, entering Gertrude’s living-room, found 68the bazaar meeting ended and tea being served to the committee, which included, among others, Louise and Bishop Marion, who seemed, not very successfully, trying to make his escape when Harrison and Janeway arrived. Heartened by the coming of two more men, the Bishop took fresh courage and fell to talking with Judge Harrison. Janeway sat down by Mrs. Harrison.

“You remember Bishop Marion, of course,” said Mrs. Harrison to Janeway.

“Very well,” returned Janeway, “though I haven’t seen him for some time. When he came to Fond du Lac I was living here.”

“We are all fond of his sister. She keeps house for him, you know,” continued Mrs. Harrison. “They are from the East, I believe.”

“No, the South,” said Janeway. “He was sent to this part of the country originally for his health. He’s not really rugged yet, but it seems to have built him up. He comes from South Carolinian stock, the Legarés—the ‘fighting Legarés’; there was a considerable Huguenot element, he has told me, in South Carolina.”

“From the fighting Legarés!” exclaimed Mrs. Harrison. “Then he has degenerated, for he’s the mildest-mannered man in the world.”

“Don’t be deceived,” observed Janeway. “The fighting qualities may be under discipline, but they’re there. He made a good client.”

Mrs. Harrison asked questions about the Legarés. Janeway gave her what he could, even to speculating 69as to whether Mrs. Stowe took her name for Simon Legree from the famous Carolinian family. But Janeway had more than the Legarés on his mind, and when he could, got nearer to Louise.

She stood at that moment talking on the edge of the circle to which Janeway had been introduced. The lines of her figure profited by the simplicity of a tailored costume and a turban heightened by an aigrette, and she stood so erect that even her head and shoulders added to the impression of decision conveyed by her eyes. It was only as she sat down, at his request, that Janeway noticed how well her slender ankles matched her well-shaped feet.

“I see you are going,” he remarked abruptly and no more loudly than necessary, but in a tone intimating reproach.

She looked at him in mild surprise. “What do you mean? How can you ‘see’?” she demanded.

“It’s written,” he responded, with leisurely confidence. “You look trim as a baby battleship already.”

“I don’t know what a ‘baby battleship’ looks like,” she smiled, “but I wish I felt like some sort of a fighting craft. I’ve been having a touch of what you men call ‘cold feet’ about venturing abroad. But I’m going.”

“I was sure you were,” he declared, in amiable banter; “no one ever takes my advice.”

“Oh!” she protested, lifting her eyebrows as she looked at him. “How can that be? I hear that many people seek your advice.”

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“Not quite the same thing, but no matter; I want to inflict at least a suggestion on you.”

“That’s very kind.”

“But may I?”

“I’m in a mood to listen to anything. Of course, you mustn’t tell me I can’t go.”

“It’s the submarines, and I’ve been wanting to tell you——”

“Thinking of my danger?”

“Of you and your danger,” he retorted. “But on your part you mustn’t make fun of me. There is a line of French steamers running from New York to the Mediterranean; I don’t know the name of it at the moment, but I can get it for you. You are going to Italy—take that line. Those steamers are not molested by submarines.”

“How extraordinary!” she exclaimed, with wide-open eyes. “How can that be?”

“It is the line of travel to and from Rome, kept open for those whose necessities take them to and from the Vatican. I imagine the Germans dare not sink those boats—or do not; they have rows enough on their hands as it is.”

Louise drew a long breath. “Well,” she said, with relief, “that should prove a very valuable suggestion. Will you really let me know about it?”

He was ready to continue the conversation, but she turned to ask an irrelevant question of Gertrude. Gertrude was talking with the Bishop, and now took occasion to tell Janeway that Bishop Marion had spoken that afternoon before the Woman’s Club.

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“What did you talk to the women about?” asked Janeway of the Bishop.

“He gave us a perfectly wonderful talk,” declared Gertrude.

“I don’t know how palatable it was,” said the Bishop, “but the ladies were kind enough to receive it politely. I ventured to call attention to what I conceive to be the debt woman owes to Christianity; I reminded them of a few of her tribulations before our Christian era, and of some of the things Christianity has done to relieve her of them and to elevate her in her relation to men; how our Divine Lord, in choosing the Blessed Virgin for His mother, had set up a new type of womanhood and motherhood. And how innocently ungrateful it seemed to me for women nowadays—enjoying the privileges and liberties Christianity has brought them—to march up and down the land abusing Christianity, which they do in the most irresponsible manner possible. I referred to what Christianity had done to keep our women from living in Moslem harems. I recalled how a saint and a pope, aided only by Venice and Spain, with France and England very deaf to his appeals, had organized the defense of Europe at a time when the Turk was well on his road to overwhelm it. I spoke of the battle of Lepanto——”

“New ‘stuff’ for a woman’s club,” suggested Harrison.

“But I brought it up to date,” continued the Bishop, apologetically, “by linking it with Chesterton’s poem, and I only instanced that the Gulf of 72Lepanto was the point at which was once decided the question as to whether Europe should be Christian or Moslem; and ventured to add,” he continued, with delicate emphasis, “that east of Lepanto there still are no women’s clubs.”

“But, Bishop,” exclaimed Gertrude, “I can’t imagine who inflicted that awful woman on us to talk on divorce after you, or, rather, at you.”

“It was only that she wanted very much to bring me to her way of thinking,” suggested the Bishop composedly.

“Why, she positively ranted,” said Louise.

“I didn’t mind that much,” said Bishop Marion, “but I confess I’m always sorry to hear a woman defending the divorce and remarriage evils of to-day. It isn’t that it’s so revolting; but it always seems to me, when I think of what Christ has done for woman, like biting the hand that feeds you. Of course, they do it without realizing what they do.”

Judge Harrison spoke from his corner. “The only objection I have to this divorce business is that it throws too many cold-storage women on the market. I’ve got a client now with two daughters—fine girls. He claims he can’t get ’em married; the second-hand females grab off the boys.”

“Don’t be too hard on the poor women, Judge,” rejoined the Bishop. “They are the prime sufferers through divorce. Humanly speaking, I sometimes feel I might be reconciled to irresponsible divorce and equally irresponsible remarriage, if woman could 73be benefited by it. I think my own Lawgiver had it in mind that they could not, when he restricted men in this regard. He saw what any intelligent man may now see, that woman is the victim and man the sorry profiteer by the divorce court. Small wonder that after being preyed upon these unfortunates turn again to prey on men.”

Louise listened intently.

“Bishop, you’re too soft-hearted,” interposed Mrs. Harrison. “You haven’t had enough experience with women.” While Bishop Marion looked in subdued humor at Mrs. Harrison, Judge Harrison spoke again.

“Janeway ought to be able to give us points on this,” said he. “Have you found divorcées troublesome, Janeway?”

“I agree with Bishop Marion whenever I can,” remarked Janeway diplomatically. “I certainly agree with him,” he added, with characteristic emphasis, “that woman is the divorce victim in the great run of cases. Woman is naturally more decent than man. There are a few innocent women that profit by release from a brute; there are also female vampires that profit by divorce, because it extends the scope of their operations; the divorce court is to them what a bank is to a business man. These creatures get their line of credit—such as it is—from our divorce courts, and transact their business of ‘vamping’ under legal auspices.

“But excluding these two classes and coming to the great majority of cases, divorce is now only a 74legalized means of wife desertion, and our unfortunate girls are its victims.

“Our poor boys are in just as bad a way,” objected Harrison. “This client with the daughters is a railroad executive. He has a son also. ‘If I send him to college,’ he says to me, ‘a lot of half-baked professors—gas-bags that couldn’t earn an honest living outside of an endowed institution—will make a Socialist of him. There’s no use trying to make a business man of him; business to-day, if it’s anything more than running a peanut stand, is discreditable. An American business man, if his turnover reaches a million, is looked on as a thief.’”

“You know, Bishop,” interposed Gertrude, “I’m just a hot-blooded little pagan, but I really did appreciate every word you said. And he had a most wonderful woman there with him and his sister, as a guest,” she continued, speaking with characteristic energy to Janeway. “I wish you could have met her. By the way,” she added, looking accusingly at the Bishop, “you said she had a story, and you promised to tell it.”

“You mean Miss Virginia Hampton? Her story is unusual,” said the Bishop.

“At the beginning of the French Revolution,” he continued, “a French noblewoman, the Countess de Large, found herself stranded in the Netherlands. Europe was seething over the outbreak in France, and the Countess conceived it to be her duty to rejoin her sovereigns in Paris. She had been a favorite at the French court, and the Princess de Lamballe, 75companion of Marie Antoinette, had been godmother to her daughter and only child, a little girl of six. By the time the Countess reached Paris, the flames had so spread that she found she would be very fortunate if she could get out of France with her head on her shoulders. After much hardship and difficulty and by bribing the mistress of Talleyrand with a necklace worth a king’s ransom, the Countess got a permit to leave France. Accompanied by a faithful maid and her little girl, she made her way in constant peril to Marseilles; there she arranged for passage on a ship to North America.

“The flight across the harbor to the ship had to be made at night. In the darkness and confusion, among other escaping refugees, a tragedy occurred: the maid and the little girl, put into one boat, were taken to the ship for Boston. The Countess, in another boat, was put aboard a French ship bound for the Brazils.

“This French ship, on its way to South America, was captured by a Spanish cruiser—Spain being then at war with France. The Countess, as a passenger and an emigrée of distinction, was treated with the utmost consideration, and placed by the Spanish court in the care of the Countess of Montijo, mother, by the way, of the ex-Empress Eugénie.

“The Countess de Large, overwhelmed by the loss of her child, remained for years with her protectors in Spain. The maid in charge of the little girl reached Boston, but without being able to speak one word of English or knowing a soul in the whole 76of North America. She proved, however, a remarkably resourceful maid, and turning to a trade she had learned in her youth, she opened a millinery shop; with her earnings she thus provided for her young charge and herself. When the little one reached school age, the maid-milliner sent her to the best private school in Boston, where one of her school-mates was Theodosia, daughter of Aaron Burr.

“Meantime things were happening in France. Ten years had elapsed and Napoleon was firmly in the saddle. Wishing to add lustre to his rather miscellaneous court, he invited the exiles of the French nobility to return to France, and the Countess de Large, aged by her troubles, returned to Paris. The alert little Boston milliner got wind of what was doing, and, converting her resources, made arrangements to return with her charge, now a girl of sixteen, to France. So effective was her diplomacy that she got the little girl and herself under the wing of the Minister we were then sending to the French court—John Jay. Minister Jay numbered in his diplomatic suite a young man from Charleston, South Carolina, son of a distinguished Revolutionary general, after whom Fort Sumter was named. You remember, Judge, we had two able men in South Carolina in Revolutionary times—Marion, the Swamp Fox, taking his nickname from the theatre of his operations along the coast—and not an ancestor of mine, by the way—and Sumter, operating in the hills. Sumter was known as the Game Cock.

“On the voyage young Sumter fell violently in 77love with the youthful aristocrat, but her chaperon held him sternly aloof. On reaching Paris, to the joy of all concerned, the Countess de Large and her daughter were reunited. Young Sumter pressed his suit. There were differences in religion to be considered, but these were not prohibitive. It was, however, a matter of the gravest concern to the Countess de Large to ascertain just who the Sumters were in South Carolina. Some of the French letters making these inquiries are in the hands of her descendants in Charleston to-day. The two were married.

“Sumter, advancing in the diplomatic service, was in time sent as our Minister to Brazil. There a daughter was born to the Sumters; she was named Brazilia Sumter. Brazilia, in due time, married a gentleman of a Carolinian family, to whom she bore a number of daughters. These children came along during and after the time that our Civil War had laid waste to the South. The family, as all our families, was reduced to new and disastrous straits. But, like brave Southern women, three of these sisters set about to earn their living and take a place in the new world about them. They started a girls’ school in Washington and made a complete success of their undertaking. The youngest sister, now retiring, having saved up from her years of hard work and devotion to the training of American gentlewomen, a little capital, now plans to take it to the relief of her distressed French relatives—whom none of the American branch now living has ever 78seen—and to give herself—literally—for she will undertake the hardest kind of nursing and, I fear, never come back—to the cause of France. This is Miss Virginia Hampton, whom you saw with my sister this afternoon,” explained the Bishop to Gertrude. “They would both have been here with me, but for passport exigencies that took them to Chicago on the five-o’clock train.”

“What a splendid woman,” murmured Louise intensely.

“And going to brave the submarines!” exclaimed Gertrude.

“She will accompany me and my sister on my ad limina visit to Rome. And from Italy we can get her into France.”

Of all the listeners in the Bishop’s circle Louise seemed most absorbed. The party was breaking up. Conversation became general, but Louise sought the side of the Bishop and kept close to him. Leaving, she managed to engage him for a moment apart. “You are going to Italy, Bishop Marion?”

“In about a fortnight, Mrs. Durand.”

“You are taking your sister and a friend?”

“Yes.”

“Bishop Marion, I want to ask a very great favor—may I, too, go with you?”

He mastered his complete surprise with another question. “You are not serious?”

“Quite serious, Bishop Marion.”

“You don’t really mean you are going to Italy?”

“I certainly am.”

79

“But your passport? You know they are impossible to get, either to France or Italy, except under the gravest showing, and then only after interminable delays.”

She faced him quite collectedly and with the utmost determination reflected in her bearing. “Mr. Simms is attending to that. He gets anything we need from Washington,” she smiled. “And just now, when I heard you say you and your sister and Miss Hampton were going! I can’t tell you,” she exclaimed, “how I felt. It just seemed like a special Providence!” He perceived the restraint she spoke under—he saw how deeply she was moved; it was written all over her manner. “‘What an opportunity,’ I said to myself!” She spoke rapidly on. “If I may go with you—I mean, provided, of course, it would be agreeable to the ladies, after you have talked with them—it will be the greatest kindness you could possibly do me.”

“Indeed,” declared the Bishop, recovering from his astonishment, “I shall be greatly pleased to have you join our party. And I think I can safely speak for my sister and our guest. I will let you hear from me to-morrow. But your passage,” he asked, in perplexity. “Can you possibly secure it now?”

No difficulty gave her any pause. “I will manage all that—somehow—if only I may go.”

Mrs. Maymie Montgomery had but one grudge against fortune: she had been born in a small town and of people in extremely moderate circumstances. To her credit, however, it should be added, in passing, that once embarked on her career she made every effort to overcome these twin disadvantages. Her father had been a local sign-painter, and this, in Fond du Lac, at least, did not spell affluence. As to her own endowments, Maymie had no disposition to rail at fate; regardless of how others viewed them, Maymie was both contented and defiant. She was possessed of that sort of intelligence which, tinctured with cunning, passes at times for sagacity, and in the mild phrase of her mild father, whose quiet habit of chewing tobacco contributed to his taciturnity, Maymie was “a smart girl.”

Proving, even from babyhood, a good camera subject, Maymie had been assiduously and effectively photographed; and her father had taught her the art of posing. At seventeen, Maymie, by sheer force of moderately good looks and an aptitude for tasteful dressing on a slender outlay, had fought for and established for herself a social place in Fond du Lac. She secured perhaps more than her share of 81attention from the young men, and was thoroughly disliked by the girls. In these circumstances, urged by a growing ambition, Maymie decided it time to wake up what she esteemed slow Fond du Lac society. At a church fair she consented to pose in a series of tableaux in the Greek—whatever that may mean.

But whatever it might have meant, worthy women present, of the congregation, thought they knew perfectly well what it did mean, and raised a riot then and there. One tableau was enough—for the women, at least; Maymie woke up, not alone the spectators but the whole town. The church was split. Everybody took sides. While the excitement was at its height, Maymie announced her engagement to a sympathetic admirer—one of those that thought the church prudes too hard on Maymie’s art. And at eighteen her marriage to this rising young dry-goods merchant of Fond du Lac, Jerry Montgomery, followed as a matter of course. It might have been successful, except that it unluckily gratified Maymie’s paramount ambition, an ambition to see something of Chicago. Her husband, an exception—and in this case an unfortunate exception—to most country merchants, took his wife to Chicago sometimes on his buying trips. This familiarized his wife with the attractions of the city and with his business friends.

At twenty, Maymie was already done with Fond du Lac and small-town married life; the taste of the city’s opportunities was like the scent of blood to 82an awakened tigress. Her first shock, after getting her divorce, came when she found that the travelling man on whom she had reckoned as an anchor to windward was a married man. Not alone that, but he had a wife in no wise minded to divide the husband’s salary or surrender him to a divorcée. In point of fact, she scared the life out of Maymie, as Judge Harrison once expressed it to Janeway—and was the only woman, or man, he added, as far as he knew, that ever did.

Maymie, undaunted by this reverse, found work in a North Side photographic establishment in Chicago, where both portrait work and unusual art studies were turned out. She left this place before, not after, the postal authorities had begun unwelcome inquiries into its chief source of revenue. But this was, after all, the game of pikers, and the clever woman landed a job—to quote Harrison again—as assistant manager and saleswoman in a high-class and reputable Michigan Avenue art store.

She was almost particularly fortunate in selling high-priced pictures to well-to-do men with a taste for art. And though she was not able to hold a customer very long, she made hay rapidly and always left, if I may once more quote Harrison, a memorable dent in a man’s pocketbook.

By the time she had been made manager and changed the name of the store to the Michigan Avenue Art Galleries the proprietor’s wife had divorced him, but this was the merest sort of a fleeting episode in Maymie’s life. She by this time knew 83precisely what she wanted; she wanted, like many a wise and energetic merchant, to retire from business before getting old—in time to enjoy some of the good things of life. And when, one day, Robert Durand happened into the galleries, she decided that he would do to retire on.

It was in that store that Durand first met and talked art with Maymie. The subject seemed large to be covered in a single interview; subsequent visits to the galleries only confirmed Durand’s impression that a topic elevated and engrossing needed for profitable deliberation an atmosphere somewhat more removed from the commercial tang of a place in which pictures were sold.

Slow progress was made by Durand in this direction, however, since for him the astute saleswoman dealt only in rigidly scrupulous art. On the other hand, Durand, an experienced swordsman, held well on to his pocketbook; he did not part recklessly with ten-thousand-dollar checks; in fact, he did not part with them at all. Nor did Maymie part with her scruples. And this situation, paradoxically enough, stimulated both sides to fresh dispositions for the contest.

At length, by a happy chance, and to show Maymie how sincere he was in visiting the galleries purely as an interested amateur, Durand one day took Simms and Mrs. Simms into the place to look at a picture, while he looked at the difficult feminine manager. To their mutual surprise, Mrs. Montgomery and Mrs. Simms found in each other girlhood 84Fond du Lac friends. Congratulations and renewed introductions afforded pleasure to all. A luncheon was not hard for the two ladies to arrange, and this was followed by a week-end party at the Wheaton farmhouse of a sister of Mrs. Simms—a farmhouse where congenial, if sophisticated, friends sometimes met, and where Durand thereafter sometimes drove when too busy to get home to Fond du Lac. In the weeks following, art topics were occasionally taken up with the Simmses and with Durand at Wheaton, where a spice of amateur midnight cookery and Durand’s travelling cellaret added zest to the parties. And with the ice thus cracked, if not broken, subjects of mutual interest were discussed later under the subdued light of golf-club candles, where quiet contributed to a calmer judgment on mooted topics.

Maymie was nothing if not fastidious, being at times grieved over neglected opportunities; it seemed now so easy. But under the spell of kindly advice in her business affairs from a highly successful exemplar of big business itself, further study of art for art’s sake was definitely transferred from the galleries to the laissez-courre atmosphere of Michigan Avenue club and hotel supper life—the Simmses serving as a buffer to overcome Maymie’s instinctive timidity in familiarizing herself with these new surroundings—surroundings often eagerly talked of by her, frequently enviously heard of, but never before by her actually achieved.

Only one cruel uncertainty remained for her in 85the situation, and it had not seemed wise on this subject to consult the oracle earlier. However, in the seclusion of a private dining-room not too far removed from the Art Institute, she one night summoned courage, the Simmses being present, to ask Durand a dreaded question. The evening was a sort of epochal occasion, for Maymie had promised to pose that night in the Greek for her dear friends, and expectations ran high. But despite the fact that she had brought her costume along in her hand-bag, she seemed not precisely in the vein.

And oddly enough—it would appear to one not versed in feminine strategy—she now chose the moment before retiring to dress for the tableau to put her long-deferred question. All the evening she had been distrait. Wine, usually so subtle in relieving her moods of depression, was this night of no avail. She drank generously, but her sadness persisted, and at length she looked courageously at Durand across the disordered table, and asked him point-blank whether he was a married man; and Durand told her point-blank that he was a married man, and point-blank added that she knew —— well he was a married man.

The Simmses defined what followed as a scene. It was a scene. Maymie had not only flung her gauntlet at the head of the young steel king, but he had volleyed it rudely back into her face.

Neither was a tyro at the game they were playing. Maymie perceived that the situation called for a display of force, and she supplied it with a vengeance; 86even Durand was taken aback. Reproaches led to the recriminations quite conventional in such circumstances. Maymie, in a burst of tears, declared her settled horror of all married men, and essayed, albeit not too harshly, to reproach Mrs. Simms, thus leading to a few tart exchanges between devoted friends, but closing with an affectionate exoneration of Mrs. Simms by Maymie, now the front and picture of unprotected distress.

This opened the way for Mrs. Simms to essay oil on the troubled waters, though naturally rather vainly. However, at all costs, a public disturbance was to be avoided; this was Simms’s business. In the curt but useful phrase, he read the riot act impartially to both contestants for the mastery. He skilfully divided his abuse, and afterward gave way to personal indignation—just enough to dominate the noise—at being mixed with his wife in such a scene. However, the affair was a real bout for points; and Mrs. Simms was compelled to act as nurse, and Simms, much to his disgust, as stretcher-bearer.

The evening ended in a draw, both parties retreating to previously prepared positions. Fresh libations were poured before the altar of platonic friendship. But Maymie did not pose.

For the brave little woman some anxious days followed. Would Durand come back? He would not; and did not. Would the telephone ring, while she hastened to it and the now familiar dialogue follow: “Is this the Michigan Avenue Art Galleries? 87Mrs. Montgomery? One moment, please. Mr. Durand is on the wire.” For the next few days, while the telephone often rang, it never brought those welcome words; Durand did not call up. But when, after a fortnight of “standing pat” all around, the art telephone did ring, and Mrs. Simms, after tender greetings, invited Maymie to her sister’s Wheaton farm for the week-end, not hope, but certainty, filled Maymie’s breast. She knew beyond a reasonable doubt that Durand would drop in at the suburban home—as he did.

Far from any unpleasant recollection of the scene at the club, no one apologized, no one was angry. No one’s feelings had been hurt, because no one had any to hurt; it was only to shuffle the cards and deal again. A proper degree on Maymie’s part of resentment, tempered by reserve, at the now unfortunate situation in which she found herself—of getting mixed up with a married man—a situation that it seemed nobody could remedy—was natural and was conceded. It was too late to ask who was to blame. Certainly, she felt, not Maymie. The dread of breaking up a home, she confided to Mrs. Simms, had been her guiding star in resolutely keeping aloof, unprotected as she was, from married men. Mrs. Simms was consolatory, because she sneezed when Durand took snuff. And this fancy of Durand’s for Maymie’s company, she in turn assured Maymie, was only a whim and meant no harm—the little parties were only a distraction from the cares of business. This well-meant suggestion—parenthetically—went 88the wrong way with Maymie, for she had, since it was inevitable, no idea of letting it go at a whim. But she declared herself interested to learn that Durand’s craving for diversion was due not only to too close attention to business, but likewise to an unbalanced ration.

Durand felt that a complete reconciliation could best be achieved by another supper in town, from which the Simmses, as a possible disturbing factor, might be eliminated. Although this was at first a shock to Maymie, she felt, in the end, that it might be better to leave them out; indeed, she could hardly now face Mrs. Simms at a private supper with a married man; Durand had involved Maymie in a trying situation in ever getting married at all before he met her; but as evidence of penitence on his part, on the day before the supper, a set of sables arrived at Mrs. Montgomery’s apartment, and the untoward incident of his marriage was regarded as atoned for.

The supper, as it progressed, established at least a declaration of devotion on Durand’s part, and of aims on Maymie’s part. She proclaimed her intentions honorable and marriage her cherished goal—not marriage to a rich man or a famous man, but just to a man who would give her the tender, true comradeship she had long but ineffectively sought. Durand was pushed into more promises than he had intended to make, but under pressure made them, for Maymie could and did talk plainly to him of his wicked behavior, only confessing, unsteadily, her own miserable weakness in not being able to resist 89listening now, after having grown too deeply attached to him before the awful truth had been made known.

She then gave herself up to gaiety and kept Durand in a merry mood. When she stepped with him into the closed car waiting for them at the street curb, her spirits receded again. Durand was sensible of the change.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “You don’t act very crazy about this car.” He had just told her the car and the man that drove it were hers.

Maymie made no answer. She only looked seriously ahead, into the blinding headlights that streamed down Michigan Avenue.

“Is it the car or your furs that don’t suit you?” asked Durand, his heavy voice cracking a little in reaching unsuccessfully for a note of tenderness.

Maymie, sinking into the cushions, her little peachblow face framed by the sables, drew a deep sigh. “Oh, Bob,” she murmured, “they are both lovely—just lovely. But, Bob, don’t be angry with me, will you?”

Bob was practical; he did not commit himself. “That depends,” he croaked, with raven uncertainty.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “I’m sorry, but somehow I feel as if we ought not to meet again after to-night.”

Durand could be rude. “What does that mean?” he asked harshly. “More money?”

“Oh, you vile man! Do you measure everything 90by money? No, a thousand times! It’s because I get so blue sometimes. I can’t help it. I try to be brave.” Durand responded with a slight and unenthusiastic grunt. “But it’s wrong, Bob,” she persisted conscientiously, “absolutely wrong. Poor boy! We’re getting too fond of each other, and neither of us has the courage to say so. Oh, why is every happy thing in this world wrong?”

“You’re cuckoo!” was Durand’s unsympathetic comment. “Stay with me and you’ll wear diamonds.”

“When I’m with you,” she confessed, with a touch of shamefacedness, “I’m just happy—absolutely. Every woman, I suppose, gets lonesome when she’s away from”—she looked shyly up—“the only person in the world she cares anything about—and the only one that cares anything in the world about her. Oh!” She sprang forward from the cushions with a hysterical little laugh—as if to drag gaiety from the very teeth of fell despondency. Durand slipped his arm behind her, to encourage this flash of lightheartedness. “Didn’t Mr. Simms,” she bubbled, “look funny at Wheaton Sunday night, eating that half-raw ravioli and sputtering talk all the while! That man’s certainly a scream.” Whereupon Maymie gave a spirited and excellent imitation, to Durand’s great enjoyment, of Simms. “Oh, dear!” she exclaimed, putting the strong right arm resolutely from her waist, and shaking her shoulders as she nestled back into the down and looked out of the side window at the blur of passing cars.

91

“What the devil’s the matter?” demanded Durand. “I don’t like freaky women!”

“I’m sad, Bob, that’s all. What about?” she asked, echoing his question, but without the expletive pointing it. “Oh, everything. Here I am, almost without friends——”

“The Simmses are good enough friends, aren’t they?”

“Only because they want to do what you want done, Bob. They wouldn’t look at me, if it weren’t for you! My own friends will all be cutting me, as soon as I’m seen out with you. What has a poor girl got nowadays but her reputation?”

Durand grunted. His companion flamed, and he had to come through, as Judge Harrison would say.

“Haven’t I said I’d marry you when I get a divorce?” he demanded, drawing her to him.

“Then there’s poor Louise,” she murmured resignedly in his arms. “What about her?”

He appeared to feel not even annoyance at the infamy of his wife’s name on his trull’s lips. “What about poor me?” he blurted out. “Haven’t I told you I’d take good care of her?”

“But how does little Maymie know you wouldn’t want Louise back when you’re tired of Maymie? Oh, Bob!” She threw her entire remaining store of reluctance into her appeal. “Give me up!”

“You’re cuckoo,” he said soothingly. “Get over it.”

He made little of her now feeble attempts to resist his importunities. She only managed to protest 92he was terrible and to beg him to go back to his wife.

Facilis descensus Averni. Particularly after the first few trips.

In June, 1919, Janeway’s Fond du Lac offices occupied space embracing the northeast corner of the eighth floor of the Durand Building, in which the legal department and the executive offices of the Durand Companies were housed. As the first so-called skyscraper—though only an eight-story building—built in Fond du Lac, the Durand Building was noticeable in the business district for its cream-white terra-cotta exterior and marble interior. It stood as a substantial monument to the success of the steel industry in Fond du Lac, and to the progressive ideas of Robert Durand, who had been responsible, just prior to the great war, for the elegance of the building.

Janeway’s private office had the advantage of a corner facing the lake on two sides, and of profiting by the sun and the lake breezes. The room itself reflected the surroundings of a successful corporation lawyer. The doors and trim were mahogany, the walls beige, and the Mauresque rug green. The furnishings were simple. In the centre of the room—which was large—and facing the door stood a substantial and commodious mahogany table. Above the fireplace hung autographed portraits of two ex-Presidents; 94a portrait of the Chief Justice of the United States, autographed, hung between them. Against an inner wall stood a simple bookcase, filled not with law-books, but with books that had been read and given a place of honor higher than one in the general library or in the law libraries of the outer offices. Janeway was one of those professional men that know books and talk books that are outside their professional reading-ground. They talk them to their friends and clients. They thus make the source of pleasure they derive from general reading an asset in their business equipment. For to know or seem to know what the world is talking and reading about is, among successful American business men, an asset.

On the table lay a leather-covered blotting-pad. A telephone, a buzzer, an ink-well, and a slender silver rose vase, without a rose, comprised the rest of the table furnishings. Janeway’s revolving chair, at the back of the table, stood at an angle to the two office entrances—one from a private corridor, the other from the outside offices. Three other chairs, available for conference, were placed against the walls. The effect of the room was one of coldness and formality, and its aspect was in tone with the spirit of its deliberations.

On the first morning in June, Kennedy, standing at the table and alone in the room, was laying Janeway’s mail, opened, together with files of newspaper clippings, on the table, when the outer office door opened and Gertrude Durand came in, closing the 95door hastily behind her. Gertrude, in a white corduroy suit, with a black sport hat, looked very prosperous, but a little upset; her excitement showed in her wide-open eyes and the heightened color of her cheeks. She hastened to Kennedy, exclaiming: “Oh, Jim!”

Kennedy, never seriously disturbed, promptly kissed her, and pausing with the letters he was distributing, spoke calmly. “Has your cook struck, honey? What got you up so early?”

“Have you seen the morning papers, about the fight at the meeting last night?”

He pointed. “The stuff’s all here.”

“After what’s happened,” declared Gertrude, “Mr. Janeway and Bob are certain to quarrel.”

“Make no mistake,” returned Kennedy, with poise. “Mr. Janeway and Big Brother have quarrelled. At ten minutes past ten o’clock last night, to be precise, I placed Mr. Janeway’s resignation as counsel for the Durand interests in Robert’s hands—and let me tell you he was full angry when he read it—with Simms and with me and Janeway and everybody else.”

“And Mr. Janeway,” said Gertrude, still looking wide-eyed at her fiancé, “had more influence with Bob than any man living.”

“Always and honorably excepting Mrs. Maymie Montgomery, baby.”

“But she’s not a man.”

“Sometimes I think she is; sometimes I think she isn’t. I read once about a Frenchman, who, by 96usurping the privileges of the opposite sex, inspired some doubt concerning his own. Maybe Maymie’s doing things in disguise.”

“But for us to lose Mr. Janeway now——”

“We haven’t lost Mr. Janeway. Far from it.”

“But he has lost his influence with Bob——”

“Wrong again. The head of the Durand Steel Corporation will pay even more attention to what Henry Janeway says as an enemy than he would as a friend. Brother Bob is afraid of Janeway. I hate to say it of as big a figure as our own Brother—for he’s my brother as well as yours, Trudie—he can’t lose me,” insisted Kennedy. “I’m going to marry you. I promised my mother I would, and I’m going to keep my word.”

“Stop your everlasting nonsense, and tell me about this fight. What did happen?”

Kennedy adjusted himself to the recital with the precision of a careful man in telling a story to a woman—a precision meant to forestall unnecessary questions. “What did happen,” said he, “was only this. The Merchants’ Association called a citizens’ meeting last night to consider means to avert ‘our’ strike. Brother, they claim, won’t listen to reason, and the strike, you might say, is on right now. Bishop Marion was asked by the Merchants’ Association to preside at this meeting. The men agreed; Simms was asked; he agreed to it. He was strong for the Bishop as a peacemaker, and appealed personally to the Bishop to act.

“But the Bishop was suspicious of Simms and 97his overtures. He wouldn’t promise. So Simms and Brother coaxed Janeway to ask the Bishop, which he did—and the Bishop consented. But after it was all settled, Simms found the Bishop was out for three shifts and eight hours—while ‘we’ are for two shifts and twelve hours, so Brother made up his mind to trim Mr. Bishop. He asked Janeway to go to the meeting. Janeway didn’t fancy the idea, and didn’t hesitate to say so, but he finally agreed to go. Because he’s pretty well liked, Brother wanted him to represent the corporation and say a word for the company side, see?

“So Mr. Janeway went. But Brother also told Simms to be at the meeting with a bunch of strong-arm men, and told him to see that the meeting went ‘our’ way.”

Gertrude uttered an exclamation.

“When the Bishop was nominated for chairman, Simms reneged. He bobbed up and nominated a stool-pigeon of his own. He made a speech and got a laugh going—among the strong-arms. The Bishop then proposed to withdraw in favor of Simms’s man. The Merchants voted Simms down and put in the Bishop. When Simms saw the talk was going against the company, he began to row. He’d had a pretty good dinner, anyway. Pretty soon his men started to break up the meeting—they were half full, that’s about the size of it. Now some say Janeway was in the hall when it happened, some say he came in just about the time Simms’s men started to rush the Bishop. They claim Simms told ’em to; this morning, 98according to The Tribune, he ‘indignantly’ denies it. Anyway, they tried to urge the Bishop on a fox-trot through a second-story window, and it started the biggest row ever pulled in Fond du Lac since the night Jimmie Gentry threw the bantam fight at the armory.”

Gertrude followed the recital with bated breath. “Then what?” she asked, as Kennedy paused.

“Well, when Henry Janeway got to the Bishop and got a chair into action, the Bishop withdrew in good order to his second line. Then some of the rolling-mill men got into the hall and went at Simms’s strong-arms. A dozen or so huskies got mussed up pretty bad. That’s all there was to it.”

Gertrude drew a breath. “Great heavens, it’s enough! It means a terrible break between Bob and Janeway.”

“It certainly looks as if Brother had spilled the beans.”

“Without Mr. Janeway I’ll never get Bob’s consent to marry you,” said Gertrude gloomily.

Kennedy regarded her quietly. “I had to go to France, didn’t I? I promised Brother if I got killed I wouldn’t marry you. But I didn’t promise him I would get killed. I’m back four months now, and we’re going to get married, quarrel or no quarrel, strike or no strike, Brother or no Brother. There’s nothing else to it.”

The corridor door, responding to the action of a pass-key, opened, and Janeway walked into the room. His eyes lighted at the sight of Gertrude. 99Three years had changed him little. He carried himself as stiffly as ever, and in the variations of the years had lost nothing of his positive air—an air that now rarely disappeared completely, even when pleading before a court. His expression was usually one of indifference and preoccupation, and at thirty-eight he was only somewhat worse than at thirty-five.

Yet Janeway understood courtesy, and when he had a mind to do so, could extend it. Always carefully dressed, for business reasons as well as from choice, he was of the type of men that are described as hard on their clothes, and on this morning his tweed suit, with its soft roll sack coat, showed he had forgotten to lay it aside.

“Mr. Janeway!” exclaimed Gertrude. “Jim’s been telling me about the fight last night. Why, it must have been awful!”

Janeway laughed. Kennedy took his hat. “Thank you, Jim. Why, Gertrude”—he turned toward her with little concern—“there was nothing to it.”

“But the newspapers!”

“Never believe the newspapers. Did they tell you,” asked Janeway, “that Jim saved my life and covered our retreat?”

Gertrude looked at Kennedy in amazement. “You never even told me you were there! Jim Kennedy, you can explain this evening.”

“There was no retreat to cover, believe me, Trudie,” returned Kennedy. “It was as fast going for 100three minutes as you’d want to see; but when Simms’s death battalion broke, it was a débâcle.”

“Jim,” interposed Janeway, “is a blood relative of the Irishman that saw a fight in the corner of a saloon, and asked whether it was a private affair, or if anybody might mix in. Sit down, Gertrude.”

“I can’t stay.”

“You must. And you must excuse me just long enough to write a short note.”

Kennedy was attentive. “Shall I send Miss Blenkiron, Mr. Janeway?” he asked, providing a chair for Gertrude.

“I’ll write this myself,” said Janeway, seating himself.

He reached for note-paper, which Kennedy placed near his hand. While writing in a deliberate and somewhat awkward fashion, he spoke to Gertrude. “How’s your baby club coming on?”

“The Day Nursery? Perfectly fine—the only trouble is to find babies for it. I suppose,” she added ruefully, “their mothers hate to trust them with any institution a Durand’s connected with. I’m interrupting your note,” she said as Janeway paused.

“This is not important—only a little surprise for your brother, Bob. Not much of a surprise, either, I guess,” he added.

“Well, I have a surprise for him, this morning,” remarked Gertrude, with an air of importance.

“Jim,” said Janeway, folding and enclosing his note, “I want this to go up-stairs now, to Mr. Durand’s 101office. Don’t send it; take it yourself. If he’s there, hand it to him yourself. If he’s not, give it to his secretary to be delivered, without fail, when he comes in. Did you get Simms?”

“I did. He said he’d be here by ten-thirty; it’s nearly that now.”

Kennedy left with the note. Janeway turned to Gertrude. “Now for your surprise for your brother. I hope it’s not that you’re going to break your engagement and didn’t want Jim to hear about it?”

Gertrude liked Janeway when he threw off seriousness. “Don’t ever believe that,” she laughed.

“What is it, then?”

“Louise is back.”

With these simple words Gertrude achieved an unlooked-for effect. Janeway, a man under pretty good control, and on familiar terms with alarum, straightened perceptibly. “What do you mean?” he asked, almost involuntarily.

“Just what I say.”

“Mrs. Durand here?” She heard in his dry, hard tone the effect of her news. “In Fond du Lac?” he asked, almost irritably. “When did she come?”

“Just last night. And had to come in the midst of this riot!”

Janeway regarded his informant as he would a witness. “Where is she from?”

“Paris.”

“You hadn’t heard from her for a long time?”

“Not for months. Nobody had heard from her—not even her brother, George—not the bank.”

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His eyes, which had regarded her searchingly, were almost half closed a moment under his stubborn brows. Then he looked suddenly up. “Where is she staying—not in her own house?”

“With me.”

Each question, coming slowly, seemed as if just occurring to his mind. “She’s well?”

“Quite.”

“Changed?”

“No—though I don’t know that I should say that, either,” added Gertrude, correcting herself. “She’s just the same, yet in some way she’s different. I can’t say just exactly how,” she went on, perplexed, “but”—Gertrude sustained the inflection an instant—“she has changed a little.”

“The war and her contact with it would account for that,” hazarded Janeway. “The war changed everybody,” he added dogmatically. “All of us. Even those who opposed it the most—nobody escaped. But if the war has changed Mrs. Durand”—he went on, with his usual bluntness—“it must be for worse. It could hardly be for better.”

“I’m glad to hear you stand up for her,” said Gertrude stoutly. “Bob has treated her shamefully. And she’s worried to death now over his divorce suit; that’s one reason why I came this morning to see you, Mr. Janeway. If she knew, she wouldn’t approve of my speaking to you at all. But I just know you want her to have fair play—just as I want her to.”

Janeway regarded Gertrude’s resolute air with 103contemplative interest. “You’re not afraid of anybody, are you?”

“Uncle Sid probably told you that. Well, this is what I want to say: She’s going to consult some lawyer—some one to protect her interests.”

“Why, Simms engaged old Mr. Johnson to represent her.”

“But that poor man is doddering!”

“Mr. Johnson”—Janeway paused drily—“is certainly no longer aggressive.”

“Whom can she consult?” asked Gertrude anxiously. “I don’t know, of course; and I asked Jim, and he said he’d talk it over with you. But there’s no time to lose.”

Janeway paused again. “Advise her not to consult any one,” he said at length; “at least, not to-day. Her interests will not suffer. Tell her I say so, and assure her I’ll be responsible for what I say.”

Gertrude rose, relieved. “Then I ought to see her before she goes out this morning.”

“Do,” assented Janeway, rising in turn. A file clerk opened the office door.

“Mr. Simms, Mr. Janeway.”

“He may come in.” Janeway, walking after Gertrude, opened the corridor door. They encountered Kennedy returning from up-stairs. “Did you deliver the note?” asked Janeway.

“Mr. Durand hadn’t come in. I gave it to his secretary.”

“Will you intercept Mrs. Durand and tell her 104what I said?” asked Janeway, turning to Gertrude.

“If I’m not too late.”

“Don’t be too late,” he urged peremptorily. “I’ll call on you both this afternoon.”

“About what time?”

“Say four o’clock.”

He was back at his table when Simms walked in. Simms, past forty, was portly, tall, and muscular, with the jocular manner known to American business men as that of a “mixer.” Usually alert and voluble in utterance, he was a man with a wide circle of those acquaintances not properly termed friends. His utterance was jerky. He wore a soft black hat of the sort affected by congressional statesmen and country lawyers, and as a reinforcement to professional dignity, a double-breasted frock coat, the tails of which bobbed with his brisk steps. His face and brown eyes bore traces of whiskey—though not much—and a closely trimmed mustache gave his mouth a cropped appearance.

He tossed his hat and laid his cane on the table, and greeted Janeway with a laugh, harsh but unctuous.

“Well, Henry, you played the devil last night; you certainly did. And you can do it. Seen Durand this morning?”

Janeway’s response was of an indifferent sort. “Not yet. Sit down.”

“Kennedy telephoned you wanted to talk to me. About the riot, eh?” Simms broke into a laugh.

“No,” said Janeway, cutting him off almost impatiently. 105“It’s about this divorce suit of Durand’s.”

“Well, what about it?” asked Simms briskly. There was a note of suspicion in his tone and manner.

“I spoke to you yesterday,” said Janeway, “about the unpleasant allegations in his bill—allegations that were not only unnecessary but bad for public effect and of a nature to reflect on Mrs. Durand—her cruelty, for example; her absenting herself from her home—neglecting it. Why drag that bunk into it?” Janeway sat back in his chair with his head inclined forward; his chin rested on the bow of his cravat. He thus regarded Simms from under overhanging eyebrows, and spoke in a manner indicating not alone that the subject was distasteful, but that he was very angry.

“Have you substituted me out of the case?” he demanded shortly.

“Not yet, Janeway. You only asked me to yesterday afternoon. I told Durand last night you had made such a demand. I’ll attend to it.”

Simms was ready for an encounter. Naturally afraid of Janeway, whose influence as the chief legal reliance of Durand he feared, Simms had now remembrance of the events of the evening before to embolden him; and though without knowledge of the resignation, he felt that he knew what Janeway’s conduct must precipitate. “Look here,” he continued, with just enough pause to stiffen his utterance, “can I ask you a fair question?”

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“You might try,” suggested Janeway, in a contemptuous utterance.

Simms was too intent on the matter in hand to take notice of the retort.

“Doesn’t it look almighty queer for you”—Simms went on—“Durand’s own lawyer as much as I am——”

Janeway broke in with delicate shading: “Not quite as much.”

Simms pushed harder. “For you, his own general counsel, to be calling me down, his personal attorney, on a bill that I file for his divorce? Say!”

Janeway showed no impatience. “I don’t feel I can have an unfair bill railroaded through against Mrs. Durand. And what’s flat,” he added, with cattish emphasis, “I won’t.”

Simms brought fresh energy into play. “Hell’s delight, man! Hasn’t Johnson got the case in hand for Mrs. Durand? Wasn’t Mrs. Durand consulted about it—notified by Johnson the bill had been filed, and didn’t she cable him to look out for her interests?”

Janeway shrugged his shoulders. “Johnson is a cipher. You know that. And you rigged his appointment.”

“Rigged it! On her cabled assent? Janeway, I don’t understand you!”

Janeway became increasingly contemptuous. “I understand you—that’s enough. Mrs. Durand is not to be slandered in a bill brought by you or any one else. She is entitled to respectful treatment 107at the hands of every one—including her own husband.”

“She refused to live with him, didn’t she, when she went to Europe?”

“Would you live with him?”

Simms coughed. “Hem—er—I’m not on the witness-stand, am I, Janeway?”

“You’re not making a stump speech, either. What’s the present status of this suit?”

Simms seemed both placated and placating. “The decree will be entered this morning.”

“What sum has been named for her in the settlement?”

Simms, as if scenting objection, adopted a frank and manly tone. “I had quite a time,” he began, “bringing Durand around to a suitable figure.”

“I told him, myself, at the time he asked me, what he ought to do,” interposed Janeway, with no effort to conceal his impatience, if not disgust.

Simms hastened on as if aware there were rapids to shoot. “I know that; I know it. But he kicked when it came up, Henry; he certainly kicked.”

“Name the sum.”

“Well—er—in addition to the large amount representing her estate from her father—you asked, you know, to have that fixed after negotiation with Fargo—Durand now adds the further sum of fifty thousand dollars.”

“Fifty thousand dollars!” Janeway jumped in his chair. His face grew dark as it flushed, and his unruly hair flopped forward. “What do you mean?” 108he demanded explosively. “She should have ten times that.”

Simms was not unused to outbreaks against injustice. “Easy, easy! Why get excited? Why——”

Janeway, standing over his table, pressed the buzzer angrily. “Of all the contemptible things that scoundrel has been guilty of!”

Simms sat down, not unhappy over the outbreak. Kennedy opened the office door. Janeway was as cold and cracky as ice again, but Kennedy knew his turns so well that he saw his anger. “Kennedy!” he snapped, “You said Durand had made me an attorney of record in this Durand-Durand case?”

“I did, Mr. Janeway.”

“Get Judge Bellows on the ’phone before court opens,” Janeway went on. “Ask him to take no further action in the case until I can see him. Report to me, please, Kennedy.”

“Yes, Mr. Janeway. Bishop Marion is in the office.”

“Show him in,” directed Janeway instantly.

Simms looked alarmed, being in no wise minded to encounter the Bishop. He rose and stood in front of the table. “It isn’t enough; I know that; but you know what kind of a man Bob is to handle.”

“He’ll mend his ways before he gets what he wants in this case.”

“And look here, Henry.” Simms leaned forward in friendly fashion. “Durand is coming in here this morning. There’ll be pretty hard words flying. Don’t say anything to hurt me with Durand. Nothing about any—er—old matters, eh?”

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Janeway gave assurance indifferently. “You need feel no uneasiness.”

But Simms was really solicitous. “Honor bright?”

“Are you afraid of my word?” asked Janeway sharply.

“No, no. No, no. Your word’s enough. Well!” Simms laughed sardonically. “Things are mixed; they’re pretty well mixed! Happy days!” And picking up his hat and stick, he walked quickly to the corridor door and was gone.

Bishop Marion came toward Janeway half laughing, and with a questioning expression, as one might greet another after a mutual shock.

“Mr. Janeway, you have put me very much in your debt,” declared the Bishop.

Janeway regarded him gravely. “I hope you are not given to sarcasm, Bishop?”

“Sarcasm?” echoed Bishop Marion, in surprise.

“Never,” exclaimed Janeway, cutting off the Bishop’s further words, and speaking in wrathful emphasis, “have I been so humiliated as I was by the deception practised on me last night—and on you. I hope you believed my assurances——”

Bishop Marion only laughed, pointing to himself. “Isn’t my presence excellent evidence of that? I came precisely to tell you that I needed no assurance of your entire good faith in the circumstances, and, I repeat, I am in your debt.”

Janeway, regarding his visitor closely, showed that he felt more at ease. “I can’t explain it,” he said, in lighter vein. “No doubt I ought to be ashamed to admit it. But I love a riot—especially in a room where there are a few things loose. That kind of a situation affords the closest chance to an honest expression 111of opinion that a corporation lawyer ever gets.” Janeway waved his hand to a chair. “Be seated, Bishop.”

“My bones aren’t of great value,” continued Bishop Marion, sitting in the chair Simms had just left, “but when men desert me after having urged me into a mess—to have you come to my rescue as you did last night with a good right-and-left——”

“Pardon, Bishop,” interposed Janeway. “Honor to whom honor is due—it was a chair.”

“But I feared that last night’s affair might be your undoing,” the Bishop went on, more seriously, “so I came this morning to proffer my poor friendship and poorer counsel. I even thought I might myself go to Mr. Durand and tell him how badly his real interests are being managed in this trouble with the men—tell him the truth.”

Janeway, contained, indulged his vein of contemptuous irony. “Why tell the truth, Bishop? Why tell the truth when you know it is always an injury to society? Constant annoyances are caused by the obstinacy of people in telling the truth.”

“What should you tell—lies?” asked the Bishop, with a patient smile.

“Not at all,” returned Janeway blandly. “Tell what ought to be the truth—tell that which prevails, that which is accepted among our best people, our thinkers, our educators, our men of letters, as the truth. Why try all the time, or any of the time, to overturn veridical conventions—why stir things up?”

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“Particularly,” assented the Bishop, amused, “if—as is usually the case nowadays—the stick you stir with is no closer to the truth than the conventions you disturb.”

“The truth,” continued Janeway, “is like the news. No newspaper gives you the news; it gives you what the proprietor thinks you need for news. Of course,” he added, “I wouldn’t for one moment assume to say what you should or should not do, about seeing Durand. But so far as concerns myself, I may say—very frankly—that you need not give what happened last night a thought. It could not possibly in any way be, as you express it, my undoing. But quite aside from that, I really shouldn’t attempt, if I were you, to see Mr. Durand; you would only expose yourself to insult. He is very bitter against you. The roots of what you fear may be my undoing go far back of last night’s events.

“Some time ago I signed a pardon application for one of our convicted dynamiters. He was guilty enough, but without the vicious character of the other three fellows, who used him as a tool. And the doctors said recently he was dying of tuberculosis.

“His wife had been haunting me for months; she said my signature would carry her petition. Once she brought the three children along—all little tots—darned and mended to the last stitch, and scrupulously clean; she’s a good woman—a victim of the sins of others. I always refused her, but she always came back. Kennedy, I suspect, abetted her—the 113fellow has a sneaking pity for the forlorn; and I knew he was in it, for she never appeared at inopportune moments—never when I was ill-tempered or under pressure. And there never were any demonstrations at my refusals; no tears, very few words at any time, just a mute appeal of the eyes; and when I said ‘No,’ silent departure. If she’d quarrelled with me it would have made it easier to turn her down.

“Finally, to be rid of her, I laid down what I thought an impossible condition. ‘If you’ll bring me your husband’s written confession of his part in the affair and it strikes me as the truth, I’ll sign your application.’

“She went away downhearted. But in a week she was back. What won’t a woman do for love of a man! She had been to the penitentiary herself, coaxed the truth from her husband—think of how she must have pleaded!—written it down herself—and it was beautifully written—and placed it in my hands—only asking that I make no public use of it.

“I read the story, handed it back to her, asked her for her petition, and signed it. Through our traffic department I then arranged transportation for the whole family to Arizona.

“After all those months, those pitiful failures, those constant rebuffs, she never broke till that moment. I was never so upset in my life. She caught my hands, dropped on her knees and kissed them in a frenzy of tears.”

“When the end comes, Mr. Janeway,” said the 114Bishop simply, “that is a moment that should console you.”

“It doesn’t console me just now,” continued Janeway. “I keep thinking I may have held out too long; I worry for fear the cuss will die. Not that I care for him—but that would make her victory a barren one. ‘Now, go to it,’ I said to her rather shamefacedly. ‘Beat the doctors if you can.’

“You’d hardly believe it, but Durand was violently angry with me for signing that petition. He got it all from the newspapers, of course. It was our first open rupture. I took the position that the responsibility was purely mine; I had secured the man’s conviction. Every one concerned felt that justice had been satisfied in the fellow’s case; I was the last man holding out. I made no apologies to Durand; in fact, I talked pretty sharp to him for abusing me. It was a minor incident, but it only showed he and I never could get along.”

“I knew a little of that case,” said Bishop Marion, “together,” he added, “with certain incidents you have not recounted. She told me of the check you gave her to ‘get her on her feet,’ as you expressed it, in Arizona. It was that that broke her down. And why,” said the Bishop again, “shouldn’t I confess that there was, besides Kennedy, a further conspirator in her persistence in dogging your steps? I am afraid it was Kennedy and I together who told her that if she would be patient—you would not ultimately refuse her.”

Janeway, laughing rather cynically, tossed his 115head. “Wheels within wheels; conspiracies on every hand,” he remarked, slowing down. “And we think, each of us, that nobody fools us!”

“This unhappy man,” continued the Bishop, “was one of my own stray sheep—not of my immediate flock, for, of course, strangers are sent in to do jobs such as that. But he was, or should have been, a Catholic, and his poor wife is an exemplary one. She came here to Fond du Lac during his trial and has lived here ever since, supporting herself and her children by doing washing.”

Something in the Bishop’s words woke Janeway up. He looked suddenly at his visitor and pointed his finger at him. “Tell me, Bishop Marion, do you and your fellow bishops feel no culpability in not advocating your own labor-unions for your working men? Don’t you to-day, in effect, force your own men—in order to protect themselves from capitalistic greed—to join unions where there is care neither for God nor man?—unions infested with thugs and teeming with extortioners and murderers, as American labor-unions are to-day? Doesn’t every criminal act of remorseless union-labor villainy point its finger at the shepherds who virtually condemn their sheep to such associations? You warn your people to beware of evil communications, and practically condemn your Christian working-man to take hands with villainy and crime.”

“My dear Mr. Janeway,” returned the Bishop, unhesitatingly, “your views and mine are too closely alike on that subject to leave room for discussion. 116Some day a Ketteler will arise among us to tackle that problem—along with our many others.”

“My difficulties with Mr. Durand,” continued Janeway, reverting in composed fashion to the subject of the Bishop’s solicitude, “really originate in a fundamental difference of opinion concerning the labor policy of the corporation—a difference in principle—which, as you know, is always a serious matter. Have you ever noticed,” he continued, as if for a moment digressing, “that radical men grow more conservative as they grow older? And that conservative men, being older, grow more radical?

“I think something like that has happened to me,” Janeway went on, without giving chance for answer. “I grew up on Adam Smith and Bentham and the laissez-faire school of political economists. But I’ve left them.”

“And where are you now?” asked the Bishop.

Janeway did not even shrug his shoulders. “Nowhere,” he said, with contempt in his tone.

“Like too many others, I fear,” returned the Bishop.

“But I do,” resumed Janeway, with characteristic decision, “recognize in your Church—though far from my ken—a real constructive element of the only civilized society we know by experience anything about—our own. I recognize in it—as many thinking men do—a bulwark of social order. I don’t mean Mark Hanna’s social policeman—I mean a counter-check, a poise, a pretty good code to back up against. And if Christianity with a voice of 117authority can’t step in between capitalistic hogs like Durand and corrupt labor leaders such as we are cursed with nowadays, we may as well give up our ideas of civilization and all go to making bombs. In the social warfare of to-day there’s no half-way between Christianity and dynamite.”

Bishop Marion listened attentively. “Newman once said,” he remarked, “that if men would define their terms, discussion would cease. But it would put you too far afield to ask you to define Christianity. There’s another thing about you that puzzles me,” he observed. Janeway only looked at him. “To the prosperous man whatever is, is right; to the unfortunate man whatever is, is wrong. You puzzle me a little, because my rule doesn’t quite work with you.”

The office door opened. A clerk stepped into the room. “Mr. Durand, Mr. Janeway.”

“I’ll see him presently,” snapped Janeway.

The clerk, as if not knowing whether to say more, paused doubtfully. “He seems somewhat in a hurry,” he ventured.

“He usually does,” returned Janeway, unmoved. “What’s your haste?” he asked, with a suspicion of impatience, as the clerk retired and Bishop Marion rose. “There’s not the slightest reason for any.”

“He shouldn’t meet me here,” said the Bishop seriously. “If what you tell me is correct, it would only get you into more trouble.”

Janeway laughed. “There the question of ‘terms’ 118bobs up again! But in point of fact, nothing could get me into more ‘trouble.’ Sit down, do.”

“No,” returned the Bishop, resolved to withdraw, “I have really said all I have to say; except, perhaps,” he added, and he paused with a questioning expression as he regarded the lawyer, “to ask——”

“Go ahead,” said Janeway.

“Why men like you, while professing to admire Christianity, stand so comfortably aloof from it?” The Bishop was retreating toward the corridor door.

“By my word!” exclaimed Janeway, signalling with the buzzer for Durand’s admittance, and following Bishop Marion in a leisurely manner. “I hardly expected, so soon after the episode of the chair, to be accused of standing aloof from Christianity!”

“You know what I mean,” returned Bishop Marion, in like vein, “and it applies, Mr. Janeway, to men like you!”

“I suppose,” responded Janeway lazily, “I’m like the man that was hard up. His minister complained he ought to be doing something for religion. ‘It’s a debt you owe the Lord,’ he urged. ‘I know it,’ admitted the man. ‘I’d like to do something. But the Lord isn’t pressing me as hard as the rest of my creditors.’”

Robert Durand flung open the office door. In his keen glance at both men he made no effort to conceal his hostile attitude.

“Interrupting your conference, I’m afraid,” he said harshly.

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Janeway stood quite unruffled. “It is closed.”

Durand, evidently laboring under pent-up wrath, glared at the Bishop. “I congratulate you on securing the co-operation of Mr. Janeway in your efforts to make trouble among my men.”

The challenge could hardly be ignored; indeed, Bishop Marion made no effort to ignore it, though he spoke without feeling. “Much as I prize Mr. Janeway’s good-will, I must say I need yours even more, Mr. Durand, in any effort, not to make trouble among your men, but to avert industrial warfare in this community.”

“What I hate to see, in any kind of a fight, is hypocrisy,” said Durand, under control, but biting off his words with emphasis. “You agitate under the lying pretense that your own people are affected. Less than one-third of our men, by actual count, belong to your church.”

“They all belong to humanity, to God. They are men with wives, children, souls.”

“All possible dupes and supporters for fat priests who won’t work themselves.”

The Bishop eyed his accuser calmly until he had done speaking; then he regarded rather deprecatingly his own lean proportions. “Perhaps I deserve no credit for not being fat; I am personally somewhat the victim of a faulty assimilation. But what would it really avail me, Mr. Durand, to retort in kind, and speak of fat dividends and the scandalous profiteering of the last three years? My fight, if you deem it such, against working men twelve hours a day and 120seven days a week is the fight of humanity as well as of Christianity. Your methods breed human hyenas. And if you don’t lift them above their ferocity, they will one day tear you and your class limb from limb. It is men like you,” said the Bishop, without either haste or undue feeling, “as well as other men—that Christianity strives to protect from the certain consequences of their own folly.”

“And this,” remarked Durand, looking at Janeway as the Bishop passed through the door and closed it behind him, “is the sort of Socialistic eloquence that finds sympathy with a man who draws fifty thousand dollars a year——”

“My salary,” retorted Janeway, “paid by the corporation of which you are president, was fixed at your suggestion—not at mine. And remember—you came to me—not I to you.”

“—who draws fifty thousand a year to look after my legal interests,” persisted Durand bitterly.

“But not one dollar to look after your illegal or inhuman interests,” interrupted Janeway evenly.

“Fine discrimination,” commented Durand, not repressing his sneer.

“Fine discrimination,” returned Janeway composedly, “keeps many capitalists out of the penitentiary.”

Durand had ample reason to know that his counsel was a difficult antagonist in such an encounter as he was persisting in, but his anger made him reckless. “It’s time for you and me to have an understanding,” 121he blurted out. The very realization of his helplessness at Janeway’s hands enraged him the more; he was like a bull faced by a toreador.

“I agree with you,” returned Janeway.

“Men on the staff of the corporation,” said Durand, regaining, with the hackneyed pronouncement, something of his dignity and pompousness, “may honestly differ with me in my policies. But I will have strict loyalty from them, or their resignations.”

“My resignation was placed in your hands last night. And it has been there before, you know,” added Janeway.

“This is the second time you’ve played traitor to me.”

“I think it’s the third,” said Janeway. “The first was when you asked me to help send Simms to the United States Senate.”

“You refused a year ago to get my divorce for me.”

“Getting a divorce, tainted with fraud, for the President is no part of the duties of the general counsel of the Durand Steel Corporation.”

Durand burst into a rage. “General counsel of hell and damnation——”

“Something like that,” interposed Janeway.

“When you refer to my divorce bill as tainted with fraud, you say what is absolutely false.”

Janeway regarded him with a more malevolent look than had heretofore entered his eyes. “Were I your wife’s advocate,” he said, “I should correct you even on that point. No fraud?” he echoed, stirred by Durand’s denial. “No fraud? You signed 122my name to this complaint as attorney, making me in effect party to your contemptible charges.”

“You were my attorney!” roared Durand.

Janeway almost rose in his chair. “Not your attorney; never your attorney. I told you that a year ago. You had no right to join me as your attorney without my consent. You had no right to file with my name on it a complaint I never saw. Fraud?” repeated Janeway with stinging emphasis, “your hands are dripping with fraud! I warn you, Durand, in so far as you have attempted to mix me in it, this injustice to your wife shall be righted.”

Durand, too angry for prudence, kept on. “If it wasn’t too late,” he almost shouted, “I’ll guarantee you’d take her case against me.” The retort that it might not be too late was on Janeway’s lips, but he suppressed it. Durand, mistaking his silence, blundered ahead. “It wouldn’t surprise me, if after acting as my legal adviser, you’d stoop to anything.”

“Since you mention it,” agreed Janeway, looking coolly out of the window, “it wouldn’t greatly surprise me, either.”

“A man,” exclaimed Durand, “that will take from me fifty thousand a year, and get up as you did last night, in a public meeting, and defend this meddling Bishop—the worst agitator in Fond du Lac—a man that’s a traitor under cover to every legitimate business enterprise in this town—why, I wouldn’t call myself a man to do it!”

Cumulative abuse, even if stupid, sometimes bores 123into an antagonist. Janeway’s eyes lighted again with anger. “Don’t call yourself a man, Durand!” he said, pounding in his words with his heavy voice. “It would spoil the one word that decency may still lay claim to! Before you agreed to this meeting, you asked my advice. I warned you what was coming. I told you I’d never defend a twelve-hour day, seven days a week. You followed other counsel. Then you asked me to use my influence, when Simms had failed, to arrange this meeting and have Marion there, promising me everything should be open and aboveboard.

“I did my part. And you didn’t keep your word. That’s the trouble with you, your word is never dependable. You went to work and packed the meeting—a public meeting called to urge arbitration to avoid a disastrous strike. You packed it with your own thugs, to assault the Bishop and those that opposed you—you’ve been known to boast you’d drive him out of town. I told you what would happen if you attempted violence.

“By Heaven, I sometimes wonder what you take me for. Because I sent the union-labor dynamiters from this town to the penitentiary, you seem to expect me to countenance methods of yours as vicious as theirs.

“Durand,” persisted Janeway, ignoring interruptions and forcing his words on Durand with savage energy, “I’m no longer speaking to you as your legal and friendly adviser. But if I were, I couldn’t tell you other than this: You can’t safely use force and 124violence in this country toward men that don’t happen to agree with you. This isn’t Europe—this is America, and you can’t enslave men or hire brutes to beat up those that oppose your rapacity, without sometime paying the penalty. I don’t know and don’t care how much money you’ve made in the last three years, but with your stupendous profits you can ill afford to stick out in a labor fight, even if your men become infected with some of your own monstrous greed—and I can’t see but that they have much right in this quarrel on their side. And don’t be too sure of beating this shabby Bishop. He’ll give you a man’s fight before you’re done; you’re not dealing now with a defenseless woman!”

It was Durand’s opportunity to sneer again. “It’s a pity, Janeway,” he said coolly, “you couldn’t befriend her, too!”

The lawyer’s head jerked with the violence of his anger; his head fell forward and his eyes shot fire.

“If she ever so much as raised her little finger to me for help,” he exclaimed, throwing himself viciously into his words, “I’d befriend her, too quick!”

“Simms,” Durand blustered on defiantly, “tells me you’ve ‘demanded’”—he gave an unpleasant emphasis to the word—“to be substituted out of my case. I want to tell you I’m glad of it. Don’t plume yourself I need you in any way. I’ll have my divorce just the same. And you can act as anybody’s attorney you dashed please.” He flung the words at his former associate with the air of a man who, casting off the last shackles of prudence, says 125exactly what he wants to say to a man thoroughly hated.

Janeway’s chair, after his recent explosion, had been turned sidewise, and he was gazing wrathfully out on the peaceful waters of Lake Michigan. Listening to Durand’s contemptuous words, he swung gradually around to face him as he ceased speaking, and regarded him for an embarrassing instant intently but silently. Then he pushed a letter-head slowly across the table. “I suppose,” he remarked questioningly, “you mean what you say?”

Durand, an experienced poker player, “stood” on his hand. “I usually mean what I say!” he retorted insolently.

Janeway was not to be moved from his composure. “I’ve no desire,” he said, “to take advantage of an angry moment”—he spoke the words with his accustomed deliberation. “But if you really are equal, for once, to sticking to a statement, Durand, put that in writing.”

Unwilling to “take water,” as Kennedy would have expressed it, Durand snatched the pen from the ink-well and wrote out the substance of his words. He signed the statement with a flourish. Janeway had more than once, and in all sincerity, complimented Durand on his clean, clear handwriting. He refrained from doing so now.

Durand tossed the paper back with further bitter recriminations—but to these Janeway made not the slightest response. He picked the paper up just as Kennedy opened the office door. Perceiving Janeway’s 126attention bent on the clearance in his hand, Kennedy hesitated. “What is it, Kennedy?” Janeway asked, his voice falling back to its usual dryness.

Kennedy looked nonplussed at Durand. But Janeway’s impatience called for a categorical answer. “Mrs. Durand, Mr. Janeway,” he said, as if casting on the two angry men before him responsibility for any possible scene.

“I will see her at once,” said Janeway instantly.

Durand, taken completely by surprise, and with words now sounding ominous in his ears, reached for his hat as if accepting a challenge. “Don’t let me interfere.”

“As far as I’m concerned, you wouldn’t interfere in the least,” retorted Janeway, injecting as much contempt as he possibly could into his words. “Kennedy,” he snapped, “show Mr. Durand out through the corridor.”

He had been standing at the side of his table. He stood now truculently watching Durand follow Kennedy, who went through the form of his orders with becoming dignity. “Never you mind,” said Durand angrily. “I’m quite equal to finding my way out of this office.”

Alone, Janeway turned once more toward his chair, passed his hand nervously over his disordered hair—what Harrison irreverently termed his jury hair—and, sitting down, picked up the paper Durand had signed, and adjusted his nose-glasses. He glared at it an instant, opened a private drawer and flung 127the paper into it, dropped his glasses on the blotting-pad in front of him, turned sidewise, and, flattening one hand abruptly on the table, stared again stolidly out on the lake.

The sound of footsteps brought Janeway to his feet; Gertrude Durand was entering the room. Through the open door behind Gertrude he saw Kennedy with Louise, as the two, talking, came slowly forward.

Gertrude sought Janeway impulsively. “Jim didn’t promise me all of this,” he smiled.

Gertrude, too, was in good mood. “You say nice things, sometimes—for a bachelor.”

“Bachelors,” he responded, “are less masters of the situation than married men; they have to keep in practice.”

“I found her at home,” murmured Gertrude, speaking in rapid undertone, “and brought her directly up. Jim said Bob was with you, so I told him not to mention me. Now, Mr. Janeway, I’ve made Louise come to you. If you’re not nice to her I’ll never speak to you again.”

She had barely time to say this much when Kennedy and Louise joined them.

“I’ve only just learned you were back,” said Janeway, advancing quickly to meet Durand’s wife. “How welcome you are, I won’t undertake—all at once—to say!”

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Louise met his smile with a suspicion of reserve. “You’ve been away a long time,” he added, more seriously, taking his cue from her own restraint. Her eyes, he thought, were graver, but her long absence had left her much the same. He was looking at her rather earnestly, and she smiled only slightly at his words. “It has been a long time,” she assented.

“And it must have been a very exciting and very remarkable time,” Janeway continued, perceiving she was disinclined to bandy formalities. “Some time I hope to hear a lot about it.”

She had spoken exactly six words to him. Yet the very sound of those inconsequent words had summoned again the pleasantest moments of his life. In an instant of self-consciousness he addressed an anecdote to Gertrude. “I was caught once in the woods in a blinding thunder-storm,” he said, “with a little girl. We had no shelter, and though I was uneasy myself, I was trying to comfort her with reassuring words. To my amazement she looked up at me and said: ‘I’m just tickled to death ’bout thunder an’ lightnin’!’ I’m thinking right now,” he added, looking at Louise, “that everybody will be just tickled to death to see you safely back from the wars. Why run?” he asked of Gertrude, who, with Kennedy, was drawing away.

“My hairdresser is waiting,” professed Gertrude. “I’ll leave the car here, Louise,” she said to her companion. “You’ll be back for lunch,” she added.

Janeway, standing by the table as Kennedy and 130Gertrude withdrew, pointed to a chair. “Be seated, Mrs. Durand, do.”

Louise sat down on the edge of the chair. She looked very slight in her veiled toque. Seating himself in turn, Janeway regarded his caller with benevolent interest, and drew a long breath. “What hasn’t happened since I saw you last—what water over the world’s dam! And your brother—have you seen your brother, George? No? He deserted the law for journalism. Oh, yes, it must be two years ago. And he has been in Washington all winter, acting as a correspondent. George,” he smiled, “is a very militant Socialist.”

“I quite lost touch with him,” said Louise, “as I did with every one for a long time, you know. But I hope to see George soon. Gertrude,” she added, returning to the more serious affair, “has explained that she is responsible for my coming to you this morning.” Louise regarded Janeway doubtfully.

“She has explained. I’m very glad you’ve come. And I’m looking”—he took up his glasses from the table as if to point his words—“with simple Fond du Lac curiosity for those French decorations I’ve heard about.”

“Oh, I don’t wear them often,” she said, as if taken not unpleasantly by surprise.

“But you ought to,” he returned. “It should be a matter of pride——”

Her manner changed. “I no longer have any pride, Mr. Janeway,” she said simply, and as if to have it out and over. “My humiliations have been 131quite enough to chasten it.” She did not continue, and both paused as they regarded each other. With a suspicion of resentment in his tone he asked a question: “Have you deserved them?”

She was too taken aback to make reply, and Janeway did not really wait for a reply. “The question answers itself,” he continued, “and since wholly undeserved, they are no proper blow to a reasonable pride for duties well done. Let’s have a very frank talk—and you tell me freely whatever is on your mind.”

“To be perfectly frank, then, Mr. Simms notified me some time ago that my mother’s lawyer would represent me in the court proceedings here.”

“Yes.”

“And perhaps it’s as well to say to you directly what Mr. Simms would repeat to you from me—since neither he nor my husband make any move without your sanction.”

He tried to laugh as he entered a sardonic disclaimer. “I’m afraid you’re under some misapprehension.”

“Not, I think, in that respect,” persisted Louise, yielding nothing. “And since you know fully the situation, we may dispense with unnecessary compliments——”

“Oh, please!” Janeway, slightly disconcerted, raised his hand. “Not so fast, I beg. You must let me say, at least, that I have known no more—until very lately—than that a suit for divorce had been brought——”

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“—and having a specific message to send to my husband, Gertrude said I ought to come directly to you with it.”

Janeway tried again to bring a feeble smile to his defense. “You speak,” he protested, but in his most engagingly quiet manner, “as one who had come resolved to say certain things, and feels they must be said—which is all right. But I know we shall understand each other when the ground is cleared. You have your own counsel, of course—” He felt it a little cruel to frame the remark so craftily, since he only hoped she had none; but he wanted to avoid humiliation if she had other counsel, and justified his reserve by his real feelings.

“I am but just landed from Paris,” she replied. There seemed a note of woman’s helplessness in the evasion. It pleased him because it brought her closer, but he continued his probing with professional thoroughness. “I mean,” he explained in his very bland way, “you have retained counsel to protect your interests as they arise.”

“I have retained no one and done nothing,” she returned openly.

“You should have an attorney and a careful one,” said Janeway, but she cut him off from saying more.

“I can say all that I have to say now, to you,” she maintained, determined to speak. “I don’t care what Mr. Durand does with my money. It was put very foolishly under his control by my mother, and I have no desire to fight with him over that—unless he persists in this action. But if he drags me into a 133divorce court to defend charges against myself, I will fight for my money, as well as against any decree for him.”

Janeway appeared to reflect. “He has already dragged you, as you express it, into a divorce court,” he remarked, thinking.

But Louise’s impulse to say all was strong upon her. “It should be enough that he has enjoyed practically all of my father’s estate, except George’s share,” she went on, with some emotion. “What have I done to him? What crime have I been guilty of?”

Janeway, occupied with his thought, spoke abstractedly. “In some circumstances,” he said drily, “mere decency constitutes a crime.”

“Gertrude cabled me that Robert’s suit for a divorce would be heard soon, and that I ought to see that my rights were somewhat protected. I lost a boat at Cherbourg—and everything conspired to delay me. Do you know when the decree is to be granted?”

His seeming mental torpor persisted; it was only seeming; his head was in reality busy, but he answered impassively: “To-day.”

She rose to her feet. “He will disgrace me in spite of everything!” she exclaimed with restraint; only her tone betrayed her feeling. “I am too late!”

“No, no!” objected Janeway, persuading her to be again seated. “Not too late to take any measures to safeguard your rights or your good name. Mr. 134Durand has sued for a decree on the ground of desertion. And knowing nothing whatever about it”—he emphasized the words slightly but fittingly—“I supposed that this was agreed upon between you and him. And that you would not contest a decree on that ground. But you should know”—he threw another sort of emphasis into these words—“that you have grounds for securing a decree on a cross bill.”

“I had no objection to a separation; he wished to be free.”

“This decree,” he observed quietly, “should make you both free.”

“But I did not consent to being put in the fight of having neglected my home and deserted him, as Gertrude tells me the newspaper say,” she protested, with a touch of bitterness.

“You have been away, you must remember, three years.”

“He asked me to go away.”

“And turned your absence, of course, to his purpose,” he commented coldly. “However, even that is a slight matter. Should you desire the record cleared of any such imputation, I will see that it is cleared.” Then he paused, toying with his glasses under his hand, and seeming to speak after he had weighed something and reached a decision. “But will you,” he asked at length, “let me be your adviser in the matter?”

She regarded him, frankly distrustful and somewhat surprised. “I can scarcely understand,” she 135remarked quietly, “how the head of my husband’s legal forces could be my adviser.”

Janeway made an impatient gesture, but spoke placatingly. “One reason,” he smiled, “is because you need advice; another is that I am no longer head of your husband’s legal forces; and a third is that, perhaps, I am as well qualified in the circumstances as another to give it to you. Lastly, you could have no one to advise you more honestly than I shall try to do. Do not, Mrs. Durand, oppose this suit. I know the suggestion displeases you. But, I repeat—and I speak as your friend—let Mr. Durand, under proper conditions, have his divorce and you have yours.”

“You naturally have his interests very much at heart.”

He squirmed slightly, but spoke again openly. “I realize that I have a mountain of distrust to overcome. But I shall do it.” He leaned forward just enough for the emphasis of the words: “It is your interests that I have very much at heart.”

Wholly unprepared for such a declaration, Louise retired behind a screen of irony. “And you Mr. Durand’s closest adviser!”

“You are persistingly mistaken,” he returned, his voice showing the restraint of impatience. “I am not Mr. Durand’s closest adviser. I am no longer connected in any way with Mr. Durand’s interests. I speak to you not at all as his friend. I speak as yours.”

It was impossible for her not to realize that some 136unexplained feeling lay behind his declaration. She felt bewildered but in some way less apprehensive. “Then if you are no longer connected with his interests,” she exclaimed, “surely I can appeal to your mere sense of justice, of right, of everything, Mr. Janeway, to confirm my claim that I have done nothing that entitles him to a divorce, or to charge me with anything disgraceful, such as neglect of my home, and desertion!”

She spoke with deep feeling. For an instant her eyes glistened. “The only conceivable disgrace,” remarked Janeway, emphasizing the adjective bitterly, “would be not to desert him. You do not understand the distinction between desertion in its legal and its moral sense; it is that which confuses you.”

“It is you, Mr. Janeway, who confuse me. You surely have known me somewhat. You have been at my home, at my table. You say you speak as a friend. Yet my husband drags me into a divorce court, and you advise me not to oppose his detestable charges.”

“It is because I can’t bear to think of your being fettered longer to this man,” exclaimed Janeway, with contained energy. “Because this decree can be purged of such charges and made to set you free. And because,” he added, breaking finally from his long restraint, “I want to see you free.”

Gertrude took Louise to Green Lake to rest and think. And with her impulsive energy she urged Janeway’s view of what Louise ought to do. Janeway kept himself quite within the limits of fairness and professional dignity. He drove over to the lake and called formally at Gertrude’s cottage, but made no effort to overpersuade Louise. He made, in fact, no mention of the subject that had come up between them.

Kennedy, who resigned from the corporation staff to follow Janeway’s fortunes, had been charged with the opening of new offices for Janeway in Fond du Lac, and with reopening Janeway’s offices in Chicago. He joined Gertrude and Louise at the cottage for the week-end, tired out; Judge Harrison and his wife had driven over to spend the day.

Kennedy and Harrison talked over the difficult situation between Durand and Louise. Harrison said emphatically she must be divorced. Kennedy told Louise afterward how the Judge felt. He likewise represented to her, himself, the necessity for some action that should secure to her the remnants of the estate left by her father. “It’s always feast 138or famine in the steel business,” he said half cynically. “Now’s a good time to pull out. If I weren’t broke I’d pull out, myself.”

It was only after Louise had yielded to the views of her circle of friends that she perceived how strongly Janeway felt. He had held strictly aloof from Gertrude’s, going over to the lake for the second time only when he was sent for, and Louise, sitting with Gertrude, gave him authority to protect her interests in Durand’s suit. “I only want now to be free from Robert,” she said, “and as soon as I am, to go right back to France. There is work there for all of and more than my strength—here I’m not needed.”

After the return of the two women to Fond du Lac, Janeway called again to tell what he had done as to engaging counsel. But though the firm retained were quite competent, Louise’s natural timidity caused her to shrink from extending her circle of legal acquaintance. She preferred, under Gertrude’s protecting wing, to seek Janeway for such conferences as were inevitably necessary, and asked that she be spared discussing with other lawyers—other men, as she said—her intimate affairs.

On such occasions the personal note was naturally excluded from the talk. Janeway took cognizance of the precautions with which Louise hedged herself in bringing Gertrude with her, but gave no indication that it disturbed him. And he rarely met Louise elsewhere.

One afternoon she drove over to Mrs. Harrison 139to take her a purse from Paris. She found only the Judge at home. He was sitting alone on the west terrace, with a plate of fruit on a table. Louise, standing in the doorway, called to him: “What are you doing, Uncle Sid?”

Judge Harrison looked around. Louise was a favorite. “Come out, come out!” he called. “What am I doing? Eating a plum—come try one.” He drew a chair near to his own. “I’m eating a plum. And one that isn’t exactly right,” he continued, in his quaint manner, softened by the slight nasal quality that he let into his tones when quite pleased.

Louise sat down. “What’s the matter with it?”

“Can’t tell exactly what is the matter with it.” He held the plum gingerly in his fingers, as if analyzing a problem. “But,” he went on, “it’s not just right. So I keep eating—hoping with every bite it will get sweeter—and it doesn’t. That plum, Louise,” he added, gazing with half-closed eyes at the moiety left of the offender, “is like life; it isn’t exactly to our taste; yet we keep biting at it, and hoping, and biting—but the blamed thing doesn’t often get sweeter, does it?”

Louise looked at the wooded hills to the north. “What a beautiful day!” she exclaimed. “What a beautiful scene! And with nothing to do but sit here and enjoy it, you ought to be perfectly happy.”

“Most people, Louise, with nothing to do are perfectly unhappy,” responded Harrison, with the consideration of a father. “I’ll tell you the real secret of happiness—I’ve searched long for it and found it. 140Always have something to do; but don’t always do it.”

As he looked over at her he seemed to recollect himself; her teeth were so pretty as she laughed. “Now, all this talk about life not being quite ripe, isn’t for you, Louise,” he said apologetically. “You’re so young yet.”

“Oh, but it decidedly is for me,” she averred, with an effort at lightness. “It’s exactly for me. I wonder,” she added, “whether it’s for everybody? How’s the rheumatism, Uncle Sid?”

“Not very good.”

“Are you doing anything for it?”

“Doing everything. When the final break-up of my old ship comes and the doctor says do this, or do that, or do the other thing, I’ll have to say: ‘I’ve done it; there’s absolutely nothing more to do.’ All my life,” he continued, half grumbling, “I’ve been on the verge of having health. But at my age I can’t afford to contract any more good habits. I’ve got too many; I die the victim of them.”

He paused and regarded her with a fond look. His glance included everything, from her pumps to her hat. “I like to hear you call me ‘Uncle Sid,’” he went on, half musing. “Never call me anything else. No!” he declared, with just enough of gentle emphasis to point his thought. “My maunderings are not for you. And I’ll tell you why; the best of your life is still ahead.”

Louise made a hopeless gesture. “Oh, dear!”

He cut her off. “I mean it,” he insisted, and was 141about to go on, when his eyes fell on the doorway behind her. “Ah, Janeway!” he exclaimed. “Come out—too nice to stay indoors to-day.”

Janeway, nothing loath, ventured forward with a perfunctory apology.

“No interruption at all,” declared Harrison, pointing to a third chair. “Sit where you can look across the Skokie. I’ve always been fond of the afternoon sun, Janeway. The west has always had a particular attraction for me. It was the dream of my youth to lay my bones on the Pacific slope. Men feel most deeply, not on what they’ve done, but on what they’ve wanted to do.

“Janeway,” explained the Judge, speaking to Louise, who seemed somewhat like a quail ready for immediate flight, “is only here for a political pow-wow. There’s a subcommittee meeting in Chicago to-morrow which I have asked him to attend, because I couldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t,” corrected Janeway.

“And he could, because he’s going to be there anyway. Well, how do things look, Henry?”

The Harding-Cox campaign was in full swing. Harrison was responsible for his State. Janeway answered without hesitation: “It’s all Harding. He always tells me,” added Janeway, addressing Louise, “I know nothing about an election. That’s why I’m an authority just now; any political dub—as the Judge classifies me—can read the signs this time. I suppose,” he went on, “that to live up to my bad reputation I ought to predict Cox’s election. But I refuse.”

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Louise rose. Harrison protested. “Where’re you going? Sit still.”

Louise did not waver. “Aunt Elizabeth won’t be home for an hour. I’m going down to the swamp. I told Gertrude I’d bring some cattails home.”

“It’s wet down there,” objected the Judge. “Better get Chris to help you. He’s in the garden.”

Louise was sure she didn’t need any help. “I only want a few, anyway.” She started across the lawn. The two men watched her walk away. Her figure was lithe and her step sure. Her observers eyed her together, thinking the same thing, but with greatly differing view-points.

“What a shame,” mused Harrison, moved to resentment, “for Bob to throw over such a woman for Maymie Montgomery! Why, just to get one good look at that girl”—he nodded toward Louise’s figure disappearing down the hill—“would stir the pulses of a decent man on his death-bed. And Bob throws her over for a common rip! It would be interesting,” added the Judge, ruminating, “to know just what that man thinks of himself.”

“It might be appalling,” commented Janeway, masking the fire in his heart that Harrison was so unwittingly feeding. “It’s odd,” he went on, “how our views change. I didn’t use to think so much of good people—I used to think the bad most interesting. The longer I live, the more I think of saints—and the less I think of sinners—who, with a few honorable exceptions, are, after all, a damned busy, troublesome lot to get on with.”

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“I don’t know what’s got into Bob lately,” remarked Harrison. “I don’t mind a man’s being ugly when he’s crossed. But that man can’t be good-natured even when he’s having his own way.

“I’m sorry you’re leaving us, Janeway,” he went on, pressing another thought. “You’ve played the game straight with Bob—though I can’t allow you much credit for that. No man should be a crook till he’s past forty—and that reminds me, you’re nearing the danger-line. Until I was forty I could look any criminal boldly in the face. We’re going to miss you in nineteen-twenty and twenty-one. The steel business and every other business has got some big bumps coming to it the next year or two.”

“You can steer the Durand Companies past them,” said Janeway.

“But I don’t want to,” returned the Judge testily. “My business is to find other men to do my work; and Simms—well, you and Bob couldn’t hit it off. The trouble with Bob is,” observed Harrison, reflecting, “nobody can teach him anything. He’s immensely capable in manufacturing—but that’s the big end of his capability. I never was endowed, myself, with any phenomenal amount of intellect, but I’ve always been just smart enough to learn. Well,” he sighed philosophically, “as regards you and Bob, I made a mistake somewhere in my psychology.”

“You’re older than I am,” said Janeway. “You know more about men than I do. But one impression I’ve long ago fixed in my mind. No man,” he went on dogmatically, “that has got his head full of 144women ever liked me—and none ever will. I’ve tried it out again and again, among men high and low. It’s a cinch that if a man is chasing a woman he won’t set great store by me; and that if we cross each other’s paths often enough”—Janeway was gathering steam as he went on—“we’ll clash!” He finished with a snap.

“Clashing,” assented Harrison mildly, “is sometimes inevitable. But,” he continued, relapsing into lazy irony, “we’re counselled to forgive, Janeway as we hope to be forgiven——”

“True, Judge,” assented Janeway in turn, “true. But as far as my forgiving Durand is concerned, you must remember God can afford to take chances on a man long after it would be suicide for a corporation lawyer to do it.”

Harrison laughed silently. Janeway rose from his chair with the simulated indifference of a man merely tired of sitting. “Mrs. Durand may get bogged down there if it’s wet,” he remarked to his companion. “I’ll hunt Chris up and send him down to get what she wants.”

Harrison eyed him enigmatically as he walked away. In the affairs of men, as they related to the gentler sex, the Judge usually relied on Elizabeth for his impressions, and now, something she had recently hinted recurred to his mind. But Judge Harrison, his flair once supplied, was no common hound. “I’ll find Chris for you,” he called after Janeway, with a sudden show of activity—but only to confirm his nascent suspicion.

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Janeway half turned in his steps and raised his hand. “Not at all! Sit right where you are. If I don’t find him,” he added with brutal frankness, “I’ll walk down there myself.”

“Take care you don’t fall in yourself,” retorted Harrison darkly. Janeway started, without even a show of indifference, down the hill.

“What about our conference?” cried the Judge.

Janeway turned again unfeelingly. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

Harrison, ruminating on the curious things of life, watched Janeway stride away. So far as the Judge could determine, he did not even make a pretense of hunting up Chris. He was heading for an elm—Judge Harrison called it the finest in the county—that stood well down toward the swamp. Harrison saw him pass the rustic seat under it, and knew he was hunting, not for the gardener, but for Louise.

She was standing amid marshy ground, having found a tiny hillock. Cattails grew in front of her, and in her hand she held one. She was reaching for another when she heard a voice from behind.

“I came down to help.”

Louise had hardly need to turn to know it was Janeway.

“Thank you,” she said, elevating her tone to one of formal courtesy, “but I really don’t need any help.” Yet, to her embarrassment, as she partly turned to say the words, one foot slipped from her island foothold into the soft marsh.

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“You haven’t made much progress,” he remarked, looking at the lone cattail, as she recovered herself.

“It’s so wet here!” She balanced herself as she spoke.

“Cattails,” he observed unsympathetically, “don’t grow on dry ground.”

“And they’re so hard to get at,” she added, passing over his remark.

“Come this way,” he suggested, pointing; but his suggestions were always mandatory. “You can get all you want here.”

Louise shrugged her shoulders. “It’s wetter over there,” she objected.

“There’s a log to walk on right down among them.”

She reluctantly prepared to get off her island. Ignoring his extended hand, except for a mild “thank you,” as she sprang to where he stood, Louise began to throw out a light smoke-screen of talk—something unusual for her—so unusual that Janeway, who knew her better than she realized, remarked it as a symptom of apprehension. As a boy he had followed gun-shy birds along reedy margins, and knew something of their flutterings. He led the way, interposing only poised comments to Louise’s small talk, to where an old tree had fallen into the swamp.

“Do I know this place?” he echoed, in response to a sceptical inquiry, as they walked on. “Better than I know the law.” He stopped and faced her. “Would you listen to my first experience in this swamp?”

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Louise did not say she would, nor that she could not very well help herself. She merely stood at attention, with critical eyes bent on the cattail she held in her hand.

“That’s not at all a good specimen,” observed Janeway, interrupting himself and putting out his hand as if to take the cattail. She would not surrender. “What was your experience?” she asked politely.

“I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old,” he said, pausing beside her. “One Sunday, father and mother went to church and left me alone. I wandered over and joined the Ross boys. The Ross boys belonged to a poverty-stricken, gypsy-like family of fishermen, hunters, and vagabonds generally. But when I could get with the Ross boys my hunger for adventure was sometimes more than gratified. Afterward, when I took a sort of leadership among them, they became known as my Dutch brigade.

“That day I found the younger element of the family—there must have been a dozen boys and only one girl, Ann—bound for this swamp to get cattails. To youngsters a swamp is a place of adventure; there are always snakes here, and there were timber-wolves back of it in those days, with stories of bears that ate up bad boys. Even then I knew it was wicked to do things on Sunday—but the Ross gang wanted—as you do—cattails; we soaked them in kerosene to make torches of.

“I crawled out on an old log, lying like that one, 148half in the water. I couldn’t quite reach the cattail I was after, so I caught hold of a dead branch of the log, to stretch out after the prize. I grasped it. The branch broke. Down I went, head first, into the water. It couldn’t have been over a foot deep, but it scared me to death. The brigade pulled me out, and, to console me, told me there was a big moccasin snake right where I fell in! Ann wiped away my tears and stopped their scare stories, but when I got home, very miserable, the wet clothes had to be explained, and the wickedness of ‘breaking the Sabbath’ was brought home to me; I don’t mean by whipping; by very sober counsel. Whether it was from the talk or the fright, I don’t know, but from that day to this I’ve had a holy horror of seeking adventure Sunday mornings. And—isn’t it odd—I’ve never been down since to this swamp after cattails until just now.”

“Then how can you say you know it?”

“Why, I’ve trapped muskrats here, and mink, and all sorts of things, and shot snipe and dug out woodchucks, and cut fish-poles, and willow for whistles—” He halted in his steps. “Those cattails look pretty good,” he said, pointing. “And there’s the log to get them on. They’re much larger than this one, you see,” he said, taking from her hand the one Louise had. “What shall we do with this—throw it away?”

“I suppose you might as well.”

“No,” he said suddenly. “Small as it is, it has one merit; you picked it.” He laid it on the ground, 149stepped out on the half-submerged log heading into the water, and put out his hand. “Come on.”

Louise hesitated. “I’m afraid.”

“Oh, no.”

“I might get dizzy.”

“You won’t come to any harm if you do. Give me your hand.”

“Maybe there are snakes.”

“If there are, they’re bound to bite me first.”

He had his way. Step by step, her hand firmly in his, she followed him down the log to where he placed her on a hummock close to a luxuriant clump of the rushes. And while she took them one by one from him, balancing herself gingerly meanwhile, he cut the best of the supply. And, as if loath to lose it, prolonged the moment by talking, rewarded if he could coax from Louise brief or one-syllabled responses.

Nor had her instinct of caution deceived her. For never had Janeway been more contained in manner, more easy in utterance, or surer of his flow of negligible even if interesting comment.

One arm being comfortably filled with fine specimens, she stopped him. Taking her hand again, he piloted her, a step at a time, to dry land, not escaping without sinking a foot more than once into the bog, himself. Safely ashore, Louise looked at her watch.

“Mercy!” she exclaimed, preparing to move promptly on. “I’d no idea it was so late.”

“That’s the first remark you’ve volunteered for a 150long time,” he observed, picking up the first cattail where he had laid it down. “You’re particularly quiet this afternoon.”

She professed surprise. He asked to carry the cattails. She objected as long as she decently could and finally would not give in. But she broke the fall of her stubbornness with a more lively manner, and, looking satisfied over her armful, said: “I don’t see how I can ever thank you for helping me get these. And your shoes are all mud!”

“So are your pumps,” he retorted, looking at her feet. Louise’s feet, from the very first, had been greatly to his liking. “Young women shouldn’t hunt cattails in pumps—but they probably always will.”

They were approaching the seat under the elm. Janeway had bided his time.

“I want to talk to you just for a moment,” he said, pausing. “Will you sit down?”

She glanced up with deeply innocent eyes. “Oh, I’d love to, but it’s really too late, Mr. Janeway. I must get home to dress. Gertrude has guests for dinner to-night—I shall be late as it is. Really, it’s been awfully good of you to help me——”

“Really, it’s been nothing of the sort,” he said indifferently. “But——”

“But”—she took the word deliberately out of his mouth—“aside from little courtesies, you have been more than thoughtful in my big troubles. I do appreciate it, Mr. Janeway, but I know you’ll let me hurry home now.”

They were facing each other. Without speaking, 151he only regarded her professedly innocent but somewhat troubled eyes. A smile hid itself at the corners of his mouth—a serious smile—one of patient protest.

“I’ve done very little of anything for you,” he went on, at length. “Next to nothing—I know that. I only wish it could have been more—” She tried to interrupt. After the first few words she could not. Paying no heed to her disclaimers, he spoke quietly but unyieldingly on. It was his looking at her with such grave eyes that almost compelled her silence. She stood still. “Perhaps,” he said, “the little I’ve tried to do will plead now for a very few minutes, even if the soup should grow cold.”

She regarded him almost helplessly, but took the chance his words afforded to force a laugh. “I certainly didn’t mean to be rude—did I seem so?” she asked, as they walked to the bench.

He turned her subterfuge of words to his own advantage. “You couldn’t be rude. You might be unduly apprehensive.” Sitting down beside her, he noted the troubled expression on her face, as she looked up and waited for him to begin—and felt like a brute at compelling her to listen.

Her eyes now really were innocent—there was no innocence shammed in them. And they had, with their innocence, that concern, that expression of helpless fear he had more than once seen in the eyes of women on the witness-stand, when he took them for cross-examination. That it boded him no good he knew; but he did not know why.

“Any one else could do this better than I,” he began desperately. He looked down to collect himself. “I’ve been sort of supervising this troublesome—I mean troublesome only for you—affair that Mr. Durand has inflicted on you. You’ve had to come to see me at the office concerning it. You’ve always brought Gertrude. I approved, though I’d much rather have seen you alone; and you would have 153been just as safe from the intrusion of the slightest personal note into our talks. But now you will not seriously need to come again to my office for consultation. Your attorneys know just what to do—all that is over.

“Now that it is over, and that you are on the verge of being free, and that you say you are going right back to France—I must say something to you. You’ve always seemed afraid of me—I can’t tell why——”

She attempted to disclaim. He gave her no chance.

“And that has made me very much afraid of you,” he persisted, as if he had something to say and must say it.

“Why, Mr. Janeway!” she exclaimed, in an effort to avert the inevitable, “that’s extraordinary—” But her instinct told her what was about to break.

“It has made me self-conscious,” he said, with simple frankness, “and yet”—he looked fairly at her now and spoke without hesitation—“I’m continually filled with thoughts of you. Every time I see you,” he said, “I sink deeper. When my thoughts belong to myself and not to others, I think of nothing else—and no one else. I’ve wished to God a thousand times I might have met you before all this tragedy came into your life! But that’s idle. Only the present belongs to us.”

“Could you, do you think,” he asked, very quietly, “care anything whatever for me—trust me enough to let me try to make you happy?”

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All the fluttering, all the nervousness, was gone from her heart. Only a reality, terrible in its clearness, confronted Louise. She knew he was looking at her, waiting. She raised her eyes, as if she could not speak too quickly to relieve his suspense, but before she spoke he read his answer in them.

“How shall I explain?” she faltered, low and hurriedly. “What woman might not be proud to listen to what you have just said? But I shall never marry again. Do not say you have done so little for me; you have done so much! You have been the very soul of kindness. It is only my own position I can think of—not yours. Since I first knew you I have changed greatly; and if I ever had a thought of remarriage—though I never have—it would be far from me now. It is impossible for me to remarry while my former husband lives—I am a Catholic.”

How narrowly she watched his face as she spoke, to break the humiliation she knew would be his—no matter how she put it or what she said!

He started at her final word. “A Catholic?” he echoed.

“I thought you knew it,” she went on, crushing her handkerchief in her hand. “Gertrude knows it—I’ve not advertised the fact, but I supposed our circle were aware.”

He looked at her, completely surprised. “Were you brought up a Catholic?”

“No, no. I became one in France.”

“But suppose, for a moment, you were not—how should you feel then?”

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“Oh, Mr. Janeway! How can I be anything but perfectly honest with you? Is it quite fair to ask me to suppose what is not? To make me analyze impressions at best so newly formed—we’ve known each other so formally, so little——”

“You don’t like me.”

She repressed a quick protest, and unable to bear his scrutiny, now cold and searching, looked away. “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “I haven’t the slightest reason to complain. I am sorry—very sorry—I inflicted this on you.”

He moved as if to rise—at least to give her a chance to rise—but she did not stir. He watched her face in profile; her lip quivered; then she turned suddenly toward him. Her eyes were half blinded with tears. “Do remember,” she pleaded, “I have suffered much.” She seemed groping for words. “I am so weak when my emotions are stirred.”

“I know you have suffered; God forbid I should add to your suffering; I nourished hope that I might make it only a bad dream in your life. We can’t control an indifference to people, any more than we can our impulsions toward them. Believe me, I have no grievance. I’m only sorry to have cost you a tear. And you’ve become a Catholic!” he said, half to himself, half to escape the impasse. “How came that? You went over in the Bishop’s party,” he continued, his mind working fast. “Did Marion make a Catholic of you?” he demanded resentfully.

“I don’t know that he even knows I am one,” she answered. “He has been away most of the time 156since my return. It was France, war, the suffering, the dying—death. All of that, I know not what more, made me a Catholic. I saw how those men died—their shell-torn, patient enduring to the end; it was that, perhaps, that made me what I am.”

She drew a breath as if to take courage. “And here,” she went on, less tensely, “nobody will understand. I know that. I realized it all then. I hoped in those dreary days I might die; but I did not. So I’m trying to walk—as I expected to—alone.”

Her eyes made her only direct appeal to him for something of leniency, some suspension of harsh judgment.

They rose together and walked slowly, for a time without speaking. He told her he wanted, at least, some time to hear all—everything about France, about her in France, as he put it. Then he halted in the path. “Would you let me ask you just one question? It’s an easy one.”

She returned his gaze calmly. “What is it?”

“Would you let me go and just talk with Bishop Marion about this? You see,” he added, as she hesitated, “it’s all Greek to me—though nothing to fuss any one about, nothing to worry about. Only that I might just speak to him, and hear what he has to say?”

“I can tell you now what he will have to say.”

“Ah, but remember, do, I am a lawyer. I can’t take any evidence but the best. I know all you would say. I know that marriage is indissoluble in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Don’t tell me 157what he will say—let me go to him—may I just go to him?”

She turned her face to the evening sun. The sky, flecked by tiny white clouds, held the orb of life suspended in the clearest blue. In the stillness of the moment she looked at Janeway. Her expression revealed only her unaffected honesty.

“You are big and fine and strong, Mr. Janeway; I know that. I believe you are generous. But it is easy for you to ask more than you seem to ask. My poor head whirls when I try to think so fast. I can’t answer your question to-day.” She spoke almost pleadingly. “You know how much it implies. No matter which way I might speak, I should be placed in a false position.”

His slight laugh confessed his defeat. “Forgive me if I ought not to have asked it. But what will not a man do when he is fighting for his life—and you’re all of that to me. I may say, though,” he went on, in lighter vein, “that no matter how much I’ve ever taxed it, I’ve never caught that ‘poor’ head of yours napping very much.”

“Do my eyes look as if I’d been crying?” She turned to him for inspection as simply as a child. The confidence stirred him too deeply. “It’s not that I care for myself,” she added, “but for both our sakes I want this kept sacred.”

Her eyes, he confessed, did tell tales. And he decided that a swifter pace would quiet them. They made a détour to the garden, avoiding serious things in their talk, and spent some time there.

158

“Do you know,” he remarked, as they started again for the house, “you are endowed with one rare faculty? I’ve heard of bankers that could refuse a man money and send him away satisfied. You refuse a man life and leave him breathing. But it’s the magic of your presence that holds me up. When I leave you, it will be like coming out of the ether after the operation!”

They were at the foot of the steep ascent of the hill. He looked at her, trying faintly to smile, and doing so, held out his hand for the cattails. “Let me carry them now. You know the worst; you know you have nothing more to fear—as I have nothing more to hope. I’ll take the burden.”

Louise, clinging to her rushes, stood still. Something like a needle shot through her heart. In that sharp pain she realized the truth; in that moment she knew that already she loved this man who had called so strongly to her. She could not help it—something new in her life was there where only emptiness had been. “No!” She spoke the word clearly. “You shan’t take the whole burden; take half.” She let him gather a part of the rushes that lay on her arm. “We will divide it,” she said, not trusting herself to look up—“each carry our share.”

When Janeway stood again with Louise before Judge Harrison, the Judge surveyed them critically. In particular, while Louise threw out a calculated barrage of abuse for the difficulties of the swamp, the Judge scrutinized first her feet, then Janeway’s. When the adventurers took up their story together, his eyes wandered unobtrusively from Louise’s ruined pumps to Janeway’s shoes, which indicated something like trench service. Janeway understood perfectly well the suspicions hidden behind the expressionless gaze of his long-time associate, but showed no interest in his mental attitude.

“Fell in, didn’t you?” grumbled the Judge, addressing Janeway, while Louise continued a diversion.

Janeway decided it to be a good time to take all comers firmly in hand. He set his disreputable shoes well forward and looked at them approvingly, and then at Louise’s, with all composure. “Not so, Judge,” he replied, with deliberate emphasis, “I did not fall in.”

“Didn’t fall in, eh?”

Janeway eyed the old man calmly. “I jumped in.”

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“Jumped in,” echoed the Judge, in an uncomfortable nasal tone of bafflement. “I see.”

Janeway hoped he did not see, but could not be sure of it.

“I never in the world could have got such beauties, if Mr. Janeway hadn’t come to my rescue,” declared Louise, displaying her rushes. But Judge Harrison had the scent of bigger game; his curiosity had been roused, and the cattails were irrelevant to the larger issue.

While the three were talking, Mrs. Harrison joined the party. And while Mrs. Harrison held her in confab, Louise was dismayed to see Gertrude and Kennedy coming out of the house. “Gertrude!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

“What should I be doing anywhere else?” asked Gertrude.

“Haven’t you a dinner on to-night?” demanded Louise. “And haven’t I been on needles and pins half an hour, for fear I’d be late?” Either Janeway’s eyes were fixed mildly in reproach on Louise, or she imagined they were.

Gertrude regarded her with surprise. “To-morrow night, dear, to-morrow night,” she said gently, and turned to Janeway. “You could have told her that.”

“How, I?” asked Janeway. “I knew I was invited for to-morrow night, but I presumed you dine every night.”

“Yes, but to-night I dine out—down-town, with the Child’s Welfare League—to arrange for our hospital 161bazaar. And I brought you a telegram, Louise,” continued Gertrude, fishing in her hand-bag.

Louise read her message. “It’s from Brother George!” she announced. “He’s on his way from Washington, and will be here to-morrow.”

Judge Harrison sniffed political news from the capital and was content. Fargo reached Gertrude’s in time for lunch next day. He spent the afternoon with his sister, and in the evening Judge Harrison and his wife joined Gertrude’s dinner-party.

Fargo, fresh from Newspaper Row, was full of gossip, and Harrison, as soon as he decently could, began to quiz him on the campaign. Knowing that George hated all political parties with impartial candor, Harrison regarded him as an unprejudiced observer, and was much elated at hearing that in Fargo’s opinion the West was solidly Republican. “But the Socialists,” added George, “will poll the biggest vote in their history.”

“They do that every time they vote,” commented Harrison drily. “You’re a good authority, George,” he added, “on everything except Socialism—hm? What do you hear about Governor Cox?”

“Lots of our people will vote the Republican ticket to get even with the bunch that put Debs in prison,” declared George, with much personal resentment in his manner.

“And the sad feature of it,” remarked the Judge meditatively, “is that he ought to have been put in prison.”

“Instead of sending Debs to prison,” retorted 162George, “they ought to have sent the whining Allies to prison for obtaining American goods under false pretenses. They bunked us, Judge. They got our money and our men and our gush, and now our people have waked up to find their game was the same old game, played with the same old marked cards in the same old way. And this man”—George pointed accusingly at Janeway—“spent his time preaching to us to uphold the law—to obey the law—and let the thing be put over.”

“What else should you expect me to preach?” asked Janeway, unperturbed. “You say the laws are bad. You say, make the question of war a referendum—don’t leave it in the hands of dishonest politicians to determine. Very well; get your law put on a statute basis and I’ll obey it. But I’d rather obey bad laws or fool laws than overturn all law. The farmer that burned his barn to get rid of the rats was an exemplar of good reasoning compared to your reasoning, George. No matter what opinion I held of the laws or of the action of the President or of Congress, it was my business to obey when the laws were put on the books—and your business.”

“It’s not quite fair, George,” interposed the Judge, “to say Janeway spent all his time preaching that doctrine. Part of it was spent keeping you out of jail.”

“George!” exclaimed Louise, aghast. “I never heard anything of this—put you in jail!”

Janeway disclaimed. “It wasn’t quite as bad as 163that, Mrs. Durand,” he said, dismissing the subject mildly. “George annoyed the district attorneys occasionally when he got mad. But he usually managed to cool off at the psychological moment.”

“That’s all right,” persisted the Judge. “George is young. He doesn’t know who pulled the strings. I do.”

“Mr. Janeway certainly kept them off me,” said Fargo. “I ought to be grateful. I hope I am. But I think I’d respect myself more now if I’d gone to Leavenworth with the rest of the men that stood for their principles. There ought never to have been any necessity for pulling strings,” he added. “And there wouldn’t have been if we’d had a Congress in Washington to stand up for the right of free speech.

“But I shouldn’t expect too much of Congressmen, I suppose,” he continued. “As a newspaper man, I’ve had to mix with them. They struck me mostly as pitiful lawyers, men that have traded, in their so-called profession, on the contemptible vices of their fellow men; men that strive to throw a glamour of legality over sharp practice, smirk at crookedness, incite dishonest litigation, and then blossom out from their professional dunghills into public life. What, for instance, is to be expected of men who by a rising vote—so there should be no record—exempt themselves from a draft that sends their constituents to the rats and mud and shells and gas of European trenches? And when they vote taxes, filch candy pennies from the pockets of 164little children, in order to exempt their own salaries from income tax?”

“We can’t expect much from Congress, George,” said Janeway deprecatingly. “We must look to the press for better things,” he added, winking soberly at Louise.

Fargo laughed cynically. “The press!” he cried. “Untrammelled, free; palladium of our liberties, tribune of the people! We tried that bunk out during the war, too. Of course it couldn’t be anything but bunk. Every time you scratch a newspaper owner, you uncover a millionaire; nobody else can afford to run a newspaper, and nothing is so cowardly as a million dollars—except two millions.”

“I see Chicago is having its periodical row over the collection of the city garbage,” sniffed Judge Harrison. “Why don’t you suggest, George, that the municipal authorities are overlooking their hand in not letting that contract to the newspapers? Of course, I don’t mean your paper—I mean the papers that specialize in the daily collection of crime and social filth—the moral garbage. Their organization is so complete—so far-reaching—that practically none of it escapes them. Why not take advantage of such efficiency? Why not enlist this intelligent and highly trained agency, that might be put at the city’s disposal? Such an organization, it seems to me, could include the household refuse in their programme with slight additional expense, and thus collect the domestic and social garbage together.”

“You needn’t exclude my paper, Judge,” retorted 165Fargo. “We take second place to none in circulation and enterprise; in fact, we aim to lead. But to appreciate our moderation, Judge, you ought to see, not the stuff that we print but the stuff we keep out.”

On a June morning, with a blue sky and a northeast wind rippling the lake sunshine, the platform of the Lakeshore railway-station at Fond du Lac presents at train time an active scene. Fond du Lac is rather too far removed from Chicago to be a suburb, or to attract the year-in-and-out commuter; yet many Chicago business men make it and its vicinity their home for a good part of the year. It gives to the Board of Trade man, the La Salle Street man, the merchant of the larger class, and to the professional city man, a country life that complements admirably the short business hours of an exacting city day. About Fond du Lac they may have their country estates on one of the small lakes, or on the river, or on the bluffs of Lake Michigan itself, with many miles of restful country roads and lanes for riding and driving. At Fond du Lac they have their yacht-club and their golf-clubs; and their hothouse offspring have at least a counterfeit presentment of what real country life means to real boys and girls.

When the time for the fast morning trains to the city approaches, clean-shaven business men, erect in figure and alert in manner—regardless of how jaded they may really feel—gather on the lake-front platform to go to the city. They chat in groups, or 167stand singly, reading their papers or smoking, or both; those indisposed to talk or read walk briskly up and down, drinking in the tonic air, and pausing at times to look across and launch their schemes for continued achievement over the blue waters and golden horizon of Lake Michigan, or to watch lazy wavelets crawling in the morning sun up the sandy beach below the tracks.

There is but one further type of business man to be added to those in such a scene, and of these there are rarely more than two or three. They are thin of figure; usually the hair above the ears is fringed with gray. If there be a mustache it, too, shows the coming of gray. These men are less absorbed in thought and are not always reading. Their eyes are usually cast on the pavement as they walk, and they are quick to look up and solicit, as it were, deferentially, a nod of recognition or a word from the more successful. Their dress is neat, but it is the neatness of clothes well cared for, and a hat saved over from a last season. In a word, these are men whose hold on the life of success all about them has slipped, whose ventures have just failed of fruition, and who have had to “come down,” as the Irish say, in their circumstances and their hopes. They are always on hand at a funeral, or ready to call in kindly fashion on a successful man who has broken in health. In such catastrophes they experience a consolation, and serve thus as a minor link in the social chain. Nor are they ever wholly ignored by the men of action and achievement who have long known them.

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Awaiting the train on such a morning are also to be seen highly groomed, smartly tailored and hatted women, young for the most part, and possessed—at least apparently—of unlimited health and strength, city bound for a day’s shopping. With that art that conceals art, their costumes reflect only simplicity, but examined, their appointments are quite in keeping with those of women that have earned for Americans the reputation of being the best-dressed women in the world; if there be any strain on the purse of the provider, none is apparent in the appearance of the provided.

Every fashionable suburb of Chicago and the super-prosperous tributary towns outside the suburb zone reflect such railway-station scenes at almost any time of the year; for neither business as conducted in Chicago, nor shopping, as stimulated by fertile State Street brains, allow extended vacations to men of affairs or to women of society—fashion is as exacting as the pursuit of riches—or, more exactly, the pursuit of providing funds to keep up with one’s neighbors. But few such places could surpass in ensemble the equal of a June morning-train scene at the up-town railway-station of Fond du Lac.

Janeway was pacing this station platform alone on such a morning when Gertrude Durand’s car stopped near him, just as a Chicago train drew in. Kennedy, Gertrude, and Louise alighted from the motor. Janeway was in time to give both Gertrude and her guest his hand. The four walked directly to the train, which made no stops between Fond du 169Lac and Chicago, and was rapidly filling. In the parlor-cars they could find no seats together, and they retreated to the day coaches. The first one they entered was new, apparently just from the shops, and carrying that clean freshness of the painter and the decorator that makes a railroad-car attractive with the fragrance of new plush and hard varnish.

Janeway led the way into the coach. He paused before two empty seats. Louise, behind him, sat down next the window. Gertrude passed to the seat ahead and Kennedy followed her. Janeway stood in the aisle before Louise. “Is your brother on the train?”

“He went down last night.”

“Then let me sit here,” he said, indicating the seat beside her.

She half smiled at her situation, but said: “Do.”

They talked of George. He had found newspaper work exacting, Louise told Janeway, but he liked it. The conversation presently halted. Then Louise turned from the window to Janeway, who knew how to hold his peace as well as how to talk. “I never knew, while I was away, what trouble George’s radicalism got him into with the government. And nothing, of course, of all you did to get him out of it.”

“It wasn’t so much getting him out of it as keeping him out of it,” said Janeway. “George is naturally pugnacious, and it’s hard for him to keep still when it’s absolutely necessary to do so.”

170

“It makes me the more indebted to you. I was going to call at your Chicago office this morning——”

“Don’t make me sorry I met you.”

“—to thank you and”—she was searching in her hand-bag—“to give you this.”

With the words Louise handed him a cheque she had written out that morning. “You have been advising me,” she said, looking at him gravely, “and I haven’t given you any retainer. I asked Gertrude about it,” she went on, speaking rapidly, and as if a little fussed in carrying through her resolve, “and she said she thought about a thousand dollars would be right. Of course, I don’t know—and there are the other lawyers——”

She paused for breath. Janeway looked gravely at the cheque in his hand, carefully drawn in one place for one thousand dollars and in the other for ten dollars. “Don’t worry about the other lawyers,” he said without a smile. “As long as you keep me in funds I will pacify them. Of course,” he added, in a matter-of-fact way, “I don’t usually accept retainers on the cars—I don’t often have a chance to; and in practice Kennedy handles the cash in our offices. This beats me out of a call from a highly esteemed client—one whose confidence I trust always to retain—but I must say that although you don’t owe me anything yet, it’s bad luck for a lawyer to refuse money. So I’ll accept this as your trustee.”

Nearing Chicago, Gertrude and Kennedy joined in the conversation. Janeway asked them all to lunch with him. He suggested a favorite place of 171his, a State Street hotel, famous in the history of Chicago, but one that fashion had long since passed up. Louise pleaded much to do and a noon-hour appointment for a fitting; she would lunch, when she could find time, at Field’s. Janeway kept right on. “Why can’t we all lunch there at your convenience?” He looked at her with his appeal. She took alarm. Gertrude, not understanding, made light of her objections, but Janeway, better informed, abandoned his pursuit. It was not part of his design to harry Louise; rather he wished to proceed only as she could reconcile herself to his ambition. It was eventually agreed that if Louise could get through in time, she would join them at the hotel.

“What in the world possesses you to come to this place for lunch, Mr. Janeway?” demanded Gertrude, when she was seated with Kennedy and Janeway in the large dining-room on the second floor of the hotel.

“Wouldn’t an appetite be a reasonable excuse?” countered Janeway.

“But”—she shrugged her shoulders—“I thought everybody lunched in Michigan Avenue nowadays.”

“They do,” assented Janeway; “which is why I don’t. It was your uncle Sidney who gave me this habit. He used to come here when the place had a real landlord, and, knowing him, the Judge always kept it up. But think a minute. Where else could you find a dining-room like this?” He paused as Gertrude scrutinized the high ceiling, the amazing 172Victorian chandelier, and the horses frescoed in centrepiece. “It’s never hot in this room—it couldn’t be with a thirty-foot ceiling—though I really don’t know how high it is. But this hotel was built before money-making had been reduced to such an exact science. The rooms are large, the office large, the parlors wonderfully spacious—no modern hotel possesses these; ‘space’ means to them only a little more money to be squeezed out of the patron; so they crowd him in, with just enough room to turn around.”

Gertrude was looking about her. “That sounds like Uncle Sid,” she smiled.

“It is Uncle Sid,” agreed Janeway. “So I’ve learned to like this old place because of its associations. It will never be what it was when Willis Howe ran it. But the important reason why I come here is, because I don’t have to talk to anybody. If I go to the club for lunch, I can’t avoid talking to some one—it may be an important client—when I want to rest or think. And if I go to a fashionable hotel, I’m shown to a grill in the cellar, where you can cut the smoke with a knife, or into a glaring dining-room filled with young blades, and small tables and society folk, not to mention cloak-and-suit salesmen entertaining feminine buyers. And I never can tell the society women from the other kind—they all look alike to me. The tables are set so close together, and with such a mathematical eye to dividends, that you have to wriggle your way between them like an eel to a seat. Your neighbors 173are rubbing your elbows or scraping your back; you must either listen to their talk or talk louder than they do, plus drowning the continual clatter of the music and the dishes. Worst of all, you are served by a nervous, high-strung Austrian, posing, poor fellow, as a Swiss, whose mind is so obsessed concerning his prospective tip that it makes you nervous yourself. As Jim puts it—there’s nothing to it.”

“Especially,” interposed Jim, “to a man with a small income.”

“Now, here,” continued Janeway, “see—the dining-room is well filled, yet you’re well apart from everybody. The colored waiters don’t hurry; a darky never hurries; they only pretend to hurry. It’s a pleasure to watch their bluff. In fact, everything here caters to a lazy man.

“Besides, everybody here knows me. Robert, at the door, takes my hat with the deferential greeting of a well-mannered colored servant. He hands me my paper from his table and tells me it’s warm or cold or nice weather or stormy—really, half the time I shouldn’t know anything about the weather except for Robert. He never insults me by offering me an identification check for my hat and coat. Somebody stole one of my overcoats from him once. When I asked questions I learned Robert himself would have to pay—so I told him not to worry. Nobody should worry here.

“But they know me. The head waiter always wants to know where I would like to sit—not where he can stick me. He never puts me too close to a 174window in winter, nor too far from one in summer. The darky that waits on me tells me what is particularly good that day. The steward opens my oysters himself, or sees it done. I know his name; he knows mine; he has saved his money and is worth a hundred thousand dollars in Chicago real estate. You do the ordering, Jim.”

Kennedy was due in court at two o’clock. Janeway held Gertrude back even after he left the dining-room, talking of indifferent things, before releasing her to return to Field’s. With her at his side he walked in a leisurely way through the parlors to the elevators, and made her sit down with him. On the wall opposite them hung a painting by Gustave Bethune. It bore the title “Matinée Musicale.” A group of young women—five—were pictured in hats, veils, and wraps, seated at the matinée, the painter’s view-point so chosen that the five faces showed in three-quarter profile; Gertrude presently remarked on the excellence of the picture.

“I’m glad you like it,” said Janeway. “I often rest here a few moments to enjoy it. And knowing how innocent I am of design in what I do, you wouldn’t suspect I had a purpose in placing you here. But I wanted you to see that beautiful thing,” he continued, “and tell you a story. Study for a minute the second face from the right. Does it look like any one you know?”

Gertrude could not say that it did.

“Sometimes, frequently, indeed, resemblances are lost on us until pointed out,” said Janeway, “particularly 175if we have no vital interest in the thing resembled. The reason why I sit here, Gertrude, as I often do of late, and study that group of lovely young Frenchwomen, is because the one I have indicated—the one that stands out most to me—looks like Louise!”

Gertrude drew herself slowly up; she drew a corresponding breath, tinctured with amazement, and, with her lips closed, turned to Janeway. He sat low and relaxed on the ample divan, his gaze bent calmly on the face preserved by the art of a master. There was nothing revealed in his manner. It was one of complete indifference to Gertrude’s complete surprise; he seemed rather busy with his thoughts. There was no embarrassment, no smile, no levity reflected in his face or bearing—only the most matter-of-fact concentration.

“You’ll think,” he resumed, with Gertrude, flushed and suppressed, looking at him, but saying what he had to say with entire coolness, “after my giving you so many reasons why I come to this place that the secret is out—and that this is the real reason. Yet I was, and am, perfectly honest in what I said. I did not think of the picture when I was explaining—yet it is quite possible that this is a subconscious reason—for, Gertrude, the simple truth is—I love Louise.

“I want you to know it from me, because it’s fitting you should—and because, if you will give it to me, I shall need your help. I’ve a rocky road ahead——”

176

“Does she know it?” burst out Gertrude.

“She does. I’m the one in the dark yet. But I want you to know that my hands are clean. That’s old-fashioned, I know—but I’m old-fashioned and can’t seem to be anything else. The three years she was gone this magician often brought her back to me—she was in his country; and growing on me was the conviction—born of knowledge of her husband’s ways, that never again would Louise live with Robert. I knew what he wanted—only to be rid of her. It was impossible for me to think she could continue to love him; I refused to countenance the idea.

“Then she came back. You know how fast things have followed. I padlocked my lips, hung myself in chains, that I might not interfere with her decision as to what she should do. I don’t know her mind, or how much she divined, but she will bear me out in this—that never by word or by look, as far as I could control a look, have I tried to invade her heart; she herself could not say other than that. I sat here, in those days, with all that locked in my own heart—hoping, only hoping—no more.

“Then came her decision to permit the divorce. After that I laid my plans to win as carefully as if my life were at stake—as it is. But nothing that I planned could I carry out. I used to envy you and Jim, with everything understood, and both so happy. I couldn’t get up the courage to speak to her—I was ‘buffaloed.’ A dozen times I tried to make the opportunity and failed—and felt like a fool in the failing.

177

“But one day I met her at your uncle’s. She was going down to the swamp after cattails——”

“That day!” exclaimed Gertrude.

“That day,” echoed Janeway, unperturbed. “I looked at her,” he continued, “as she told her uncle what she was going to do. I wanted to go with her. She would not let me. But as she walked away from us, I said to myself: ‘Louise, before you come back, you shall hear and know everything.’ And she did.”

“What did she say?” asked Gertrude, struggling with her excitement.

Janeway did not speak at once. He was gazing at the face in the picture. “She said,” he answered, “there was nothing doing. Since that day, more than once I have sat here, before this presentment of her—sat here in this sordid atmosphere of depraved men and debased women—you know what they are—the kind that haunt these public places—and thought of this woman. I know men and women. I have studied her every minute I’ve been in her presence—lain awake thinking of just what she said and just how she said it.

“And I want such a woman as she is. I want her,” he said, “just to stretch out her hand to me!”

Too astonished at the unexpected confidence to collect her thought into coherent phrases, Gertrude sat silent.

“I ask you,” Janeway went on, “for a sympathetic attitude, in so far as I may seem to deserve it. I’ve just the feeling that Louise knows me much less than I know her, that’s all. And my difficulties may come through the merest misapprehensions on her part, misapprehensions I could correct if I knew them. The trouble is, she might never confide them to me. But you or Jim might correct them merely by challenging them. I bring no false pretenses to my effort to win her—What is it?” Gertrude had started and was looking responsively at him.

“I did challenge one,” she answered fast and impulsively. “She said Bob told her, almost when you first met Louise, that Mrs. Montgomery was a friend of yours—that you had known her for years, and that you introduced her to Bob.”

Janeway squirmed like a trapped animal. His face flushed, almost to Gertrude’s alarm. “That’s outrageous!” he exclaimed, struggling with his anger.

“I was perfectly sure it wasn’t so.”

“Truth and falsehood mixed in precisely the most 179poisonous proportions,” he continued doggedly. “I have known that woman for years; yet I don’t suppose I’ve exchanged a dozen words with her in as many years—not even since Bob picked her up. I never knew he was acquainted with her till he tried to introduce me to her! If Louise believes that! Perhaps she does,” he said moodily.

“She doesn’t unless she disbelieves me.”

“The human mind is a queer thing; once a doubt is instilled it sometimes takes a lot of work to eradicate it.”

He fumed in his exasperation all the way down to Field’s, whither he walked with Gertrude, leaving her at the Washington Street entrance, and returning thence to his office in Adams Street. The telephone operator reported that Judge Harrison had called from Fond du Lac and had asked to be called back; she got a connection shortly, and Janeway spoke to the Judge on the wire.

“About this strike, Henry,” said Harrison. “The men have gone out.”

“Well, Judge,” returned Janeway, “I’ve ‘gone out,’ myself, thank God. So there’s nothing up to me.”

Judge Harrison did not give way. “Something’s got to be done,” he said gravely, “or we may have civil war here in forty-eight hours. Bob is bringing in detectives and strike-breakers. I’ve got an arbitration committee, a good one, one that will work, arranged with the men’s grievance committee. But it calls for Marion. The men won’t accept a committee 180without him, and he refuses to act. This isn’t your funeral, Henry, but as a favor to me—perhaps to avert bloodshed as well—I want you to urge the Bishop to accept the chairmanship of this committee.”

“And have Bob Durand double-cross me again?” interposed Janeway grimly.

“There will be nothing whatever of that, Henry. This responsibility is mine. The only reason I drag you in is because you can do more than any one else with Bishop Marion—you are probably the only man in all the circumstances that can persuade him it’s his duty to act. And that if he acts it will be effective. I’ve been up all night with the men’s committee. I know their minds——”

“What about Durand? What will he do?”

Judge Harrison’s teeth clicked over the wire. That click was a familiar sound to Janeway. “Damn him!” snorted the Judge. “He’ll do as I tell him, or I’ll quit him cold. I’m not going to see our plants blown up again or turned into a shambles for forty Bobs. He’ll listen to reason, or I’ll break him. I’ve done everything I can. If you’ll do what you can—as a civic duty—and urge the Bishop to put aside personal feeling and do what he can, we shall avoid what Lee used to call ‘useless effusion of blood.’

“But it’s really past a joke, Henry. There never was a time in Fond du Lac when men needed more to keep their heads—and work hard to get other men to keep their heads—as much as now. Will 181you decide? Or will you think it over and call me soon?”

“If I can get an appointment,” answered Janeway, greatly to Judge Harrison’s surprise, “I’ll see the Bishop to-night.”

“That is very kind, Henry; though hardly less than I expected. Anyway, get an early train and see me first.”

Janeway called that night on Bishop Marion at his residence at eight o’clock. He laid Harrison’s plea before him, coupling with it his own view of the matter, namely, that for the Bishop it was a call to public duty. Bishop Marion’s objections were gradually reduced to one. “Mr. Durand will never agree to an arbitration board with me for chairman.”

Janeway leaned forward in his chair. “I am authorized, Bishop, to say to you that Mr. Durand will agree to you. Judge Harrison represents a powerful minority interest in the corporation; Durand dare not break with him; and he pledges himself to bring his nephew into line.”

“In that case,” said Bishop Marion, “it will be a duty to contribute any service I can to the adjustment of this quarrel; and you may so inform those at interest, Mr. Janeway.”

They were seated up-stairs in the Bishop’s library, which was likewise his office and den; a wood-fire in the grate relieved the chill of the evening.

Both men were smoking. Janeway looked around 182at the cases of books. “You have a large library, Bishop.”

“Bishops, like lawyers, are condemned—when not inclined—to much reading. You yourself have been a wide reader, I am told.”

“Who told you?”

“Well, Judge Harrison, for one; Mr. Simms, too.”

“By the way, is Simms a Roman Catholic?”

“In the sense that he was baptized one. I’m afraid,” added the Bishop, with a patient smile, “Mr. Simms now falls more nearly into the category of roaming Catholics.”

“Having been baptized one makes him a member, I suppose?”

“Having been baptized fixes his status for all time.”

“Does it make as much difference as that?”

“It certainly makes a vital difference.”

“With any one?”

“With any one.”

“Man or woman?”

“With any human being; but we don’t use the word ‘member’ precisely as you, in your churches, use and understand it.”

“Why do you say ‘my churches’?”

“I speak to you as one coming in youth, at least, from any one of several churches.”

Janeway led the talk, quite in a natural way, back to the well-laden shelves. “Baptism,” he echoed irrelevantly. “What have you over there?” he 183asked, indicating certain precise rows of rather formidable-looking volumes.

“Chiefly moral theology.”

Janeway mused a moment, or seemed to, for he was not precisely as somnolent-minded as he appeared. “They must in some sort resemble the tomes that excited Matthew Arnold’s interest in the British Museum.”

“You remember, then, his comment.”

“Some one has told me—or I’ve read—that your Church has paid particular attention to that science. It’s a large subject.”

“It embraces a vast range of what you lawyers call ‘case law,’ and what our critics reproach us with as casuistry—though casuistry is nothing more than cases of conscience that have cropped up for centuries, and will continue to crop up until the end of time. You know how your court decisions pile up into whole libraries every year.”

“Moral theology covers the relations of the sexes, doesn’t it?”

“All of that and much more.”

“Everything that can be, should be coded.”

The Bishop pointed to another row of books. “There, as it happens, is a quite new codification of the canon law of the Church.”

Janeway asked questions. He learned that the volumes were only recently off the press, and was told how long and at whose instance the committee charged with the task had been at work. “Take the question of marriage,” instanced the Bishop. 184“Material changes, affecting the status of marriage in this country, have been newly set forth in accordance with late papal decrees, such as the Ne Temere.”

Janeway had finally reached, almost without effort, the one question to which he had been leading his unsuspecting host. He rose and, crossing the room, stood before the formal tomes that held in their voluminous depths the answer to everything that life seemed now to hold for him, and his mind worked as he studied their appearance.

“I’m curious to make some acquaintance with an ecclesiastical code,” he remarked impassively. “Which of these volumes bears on marriage? I wonder,” he added, while the Bishop opened the bookcase doors, “if you would lend me one.”

“Unless you are fresh in your classics,” assented the Bishop, laying a volume in his hand, “you might find these difficult; they are in Latin, you see.”

Janeway scanned the pages open before him with disappointment. “That would undeniably be a difficulty,” he said. “Why are they in Latin? Are there no translations?”

“When you reflect that the Church is universal, you will realize the necessity of a statute language, a supreme-court language, that will answer anywhere in the world, to men of every tongue. And as a lawyer, you will appreciate the undeniable advantage of using as a medium for official pronouncements a dead language, because in a dead language the meaning of words remains fixed; it never changes. And if you knew what grievous blows Christianity 185has suffered because Christians could not or would not agree upon the precise meaning of words, you would say: stick to the unchanging.

“But there are translations. Possibly this entire code is not translated into English; parts of it are; digests are variously made into the vernacular, covering portions most needed for reference. I’ll see—if you are interested——”

Janeway eyed the Bishop calmly. “I am interested,” he echoed.

“I will look up what I can find for you on marriage. It is, I suppose,” said the Bishop, with method now on his own part, “for a bachelor purely an academic question?”

“Not purely,” replied Janeway. “And even then, you know,” he added, half smiling, “an academic question may change, at the slightest provocation, into a burning one.”

He went back to his apartment, filled with only one idea, namely, that he must see Louise as soon as possible. But how to do it. Attentions that might lead any one to suspect his feelings toward her would, he felt sure, not now, at any rate, please her.

He spent wakeful hours trying to figure out how he should manage. But a false impression had been fixed in her mind and must be corrected at once. The slightest feeling of distrust on her part would void all effort on his, and Gertrude had, he felt sure, given him the clew to one, and perhaps the only cause Louise had for distrusting him.

186

He did not go to Chicago next day. He decided to play golf, and going out at about eleven o’clock, with only a favorite caddy to talk to when he wanted to talk, he spent his working hours at the club, settling, meantime, his mind to telephone Louise and ask to call.

To his secret delight Gertrude, while he was lunching, walked past the door of the club dining-room with Louise herself. He tried to get them for luncheon, but they had lunched. “If you won’t lunch, will you invite me to go ’round with you?” he asked, without much hesitation.

“Louise will,” volunteered Gertrude. “I’m going to take a lesson before I start.”

“Why, Gertrude!” protested her companion. “You never said a word about a lesson! You dragged me out here to walk around with you.”

“Yes, but I must have a lesson first, and meantime you can play nine holes with Mr. Janeway.”

Louise would not play. She had not had a club in her hand for three years, and had no idea of playing. Janeway obligingly took the matter of finding the professional for Gertrude out of the hands of an attendant. He saw the man himself and arranged with him for the longest golf lesson on record. Louise protested she would not keep Janeway from playing, and that she would sit and watch the lesson. Janeway asked no more than permission to rest awhile after the morning round. Gertrude looked at him maliciously, and suggested he needed exercise after eating. But Janeway declared he 187could be as stubborn as other people, and told them bluntly they should not so easily be rid of him. He excused himself only long enough to call up Kennedy at the Fond du Lac office and tell him to come out and play a round with Gertrude.

“You said you were going to be gone all day,” objected Kennedy.

“I may be back earlier than I thought. Anyway,” said Janeway, in a tone that Kennedy never questioned, “never mind the office—come out.”

He rejoined Louise and the two watched the lesson. Gertrude complained presently that a gallery made her nervous, and asked hers to retire.

“I’ve been wanting very much to have a talk with you,” said Janeway, walking with Louise back to the club-house terrace. “For once in my life I’ve been too honest.”

“How so?”

“In saying you need make no more trips to the office I’ve cut off all opportunity of seeing you without leaving it to chance, or getting leave to call on you. And as I know you don’t want to see me, I’m reduced to chance alone. But I wouldn’t have had you come to the office one time more than necessary—for I know how unpleasant that necessity has been—if I had to wait a year to see you.”

“It isn’t quite right to say I don’t want to see you—as if that were not pleasant. It’s only that I don’t want to talk about what isn’t possible—and what, I am sure, would be a sad mistake if it were possible,” said Louise gravely. They sat down at a 188terrace refreshment table well apart from other tables. “Let us be good friends,” she urged quietly, “and put all else aside.”

Janeway squirmed. His head and shoulders swayed slowly from side to side as he gradually filled his capacious chest with breath. His head settled back proudly, while his stubborn face presented a perfect picture of defiance of the court.

It was almost all lost on Louise. She had fixed her eyes on the golf-course. If perhaps a little of Janeway’s attitude was reflected in the penumbra of her vision, she was the less prepared for his immediate assent.

“To be able to claim a friendship with you would be an asset in any man’s life,” he said. “I would rather be such a friend—if I might only be with you—than the husband of any other woman,” he continued calmly; though had Louise known him better she would have remarked that his voice changed oddly as he spoke, and most judges in Fond du Lac could have told her that this meant more was coming. “However, even friendship,” he went on, as disinterestedly as a professional adviser, “to be a friendship, must be free from doubts and misapprehensions. Let a friendship between a man and a woman be based, I should say, on understanding and confidence.”

She turned to look at him, perplexed but resolved. “I perhaps ought to say to you,” she returned, “just what I feel.” Her eyes were frank and clear, but they were also cold.

189

He met the challenge evenly. “There is no other way,” he remarked, “to reach any sort of friendship.”

Louise was beginning to have an uncomfortable impression that in her effort to let him down easy she was holding out her own hands for his persuasive gyves. Her instinct already warned her that this man would lead her again into forbidden places.

“I’ve no faith in men,” she said abruptly, and with her eyes, still quite unafraid, on his.

“I haven’t much, myself,” he assented. “Of course,” he added, “what you say isn’t really true, as would be easy to prove to you. But,” he continued, with tantalizing reassurance, “I know what you mean; indeed, I have very little myself.

“But that we may be friends”—the word sounded now almost ominous to Louise—“that we may be friends, let misapprehensions be done with. There is no good reason I know of why you shouldn’t have the faith of a friend in me. I said to Gertrude only the other day I felt that somehow I knew you much better than you knew me. It’s natural it should be so. Your mind is a very open one; you think and speak with singleness of purpose. I can’t always do that—no man can in dealing with men. I’m not doing it even now, as you vaguely realize and I well know. But this much believe of me—whenever I do speak to you, no matter in what roundabout way I may choose to travel—I’m forbidden, you know, to walk straight—there is always one underlying motive—consideration for you; respect, reverence, devotion—whatever 190you please to call it—the letters in each case spell only—you! So, to resume: I’ve sometimes thought—more recently—that this very woman who has clouded all our horizons may have been the cause of some of your distrust of me. Your husband would, naturally, perhaps, tell you that I knew her. It would be true; I have known her for years. In a town of this size twenty years ago every one knew every one else. She was quite bright enough. I was fond of skating as a young man.”

“I’ve heard you were a champion.”

“Among the blind the one-eyed are kings. She was a very little girl—possibly ten—and I twenty. She asked me to teach her to skate, and as I was very vain, I willingly did. Very soon—in a season or two—she skated better than I skated. I never saw her to speak to except as a child at the old skating-rink, or as I passed her in the street afterward. I never exchanged a dozen words with her after she was fifteen years old. And I never saw or heard of her after she married, when quite young, a dry-goods merchant, until Durand, with Mr. and Mrs. Simms, introduced her to me one evening at a Chicago club. I just wanted you,” he said in conclusion, “to know the facts—I wanted to clear my skirts of ever having been instrumental in any way in making her acquainted with any one—him least of all.”

“And now—I am told,” said Louise quietly, “he is to marry her.”

“For God’s sake, let him!” blurted out Janeway. “Cruel and unusual punishments were invented 191for cases such as his. Yet,” he added resignedly, “it seems that by men like him all men are to be judged. However, no man is willing to be judged—in this case it is equivalent to being hanged—without a protest. And you know now all that was in my mind when I said: ‘Don’t oppose this wretched man’s suit; be free.’

“I saw you his wife; he my business associate. But even then I’d have broken every bond of society, of convention, without a scruple—I’d have declared myself, pleaded, threatened, fought, and won or lost, had you been any woman other than you are. I wanted more than once to speak plainly—you’ve forgotten those days.”

“I’ve not forgotten. Nor have I forgotten that a few moments ago you were to put all that aside.”

He bowed his head; then he looked at her with droll humor.

“Deacon Tibbetts used to try to impress on us in Sunday-school that we must forgive our enemies. I practised it faithfully. I found I could easily forgive my enemies. But they wouldn’t stay forgiven; I never could get the recipe for keeping them forgiven. One day they’d be forgiven and the next day they wouldn’t.

“That’s going to be my trouble in being a good friend—part of the time I’m going to be fine at it. But I shall look to you”—he ventured to raise penitent eyes as he lowered his voice half a tone—“to remind me when I slip.”

192

Her silence, as she looked out on the course, was not reassuring; yet he pushed doggedly on. “I was only recalling old days,” he urged. “Surely, memories are not taboo. I remember there was one dangerous moment one night in your dining-room—that was a beautiful room, by the way—Durand, and his friends, and this woman—and stories and drinks——”

“As always——”

“You said something to me—I’ve racked my brains a thousand times to remember your exact words, but I was too wildly excited at the confidence to fasten them in my mind—it was about hating it all and wishing you were away from it. I said: ‘I hate it, too. Let’s get away from it.’ If you had risen at that moment from your chair—stepped then with me out of that room—it would all have been over. Instead of that, you silenced me.”

“You frightened me,” she said, in frigid retort.

“I must have realized it, for some instinct held me back from forcing words on you. I felt I should lose.”

He saw how, in spite of herself, she was stirred. “You would have lost,” she said coldly.

He closed one hand. “I knew it. Yet I hoped then—that if you could ever know me as I wanted to be known, you would learn to like me a little. But you have no word.”

“I am done with responses—as I am with appeals.”

Janeway took the verdict without resentment.

193

“You mean,” he replied simply, “you don’t believe me.”

“I did not say that,” she exclaimed petulantly.

“But you meant it.”

“And if I did believe you, it could make no possible difference.”

He spoke the gentlest of protests. “No possible difference? Louise, if you believed me, it would change this gray sky into a burst of sunshine—this dead landscape into a place of enchantment—roses would spring out of these stones—if you believed me!”

He watched her as a fowler might watch a bird struggling in his snare. She could not bear the strain. “I hope you don’t realize,” she said, with a quick effort, “how cruel all this is. But, no doubt, you can be as cruel as other men.”

Janeway hung his head. He clasped one hand tightly in the other. “I’m afraid I can,” he confessed. “Only, try to remember I’m fighting for my life.”

“And I,” she returned steadily, “for mine. When my mother lay on her death-bed Robert Durand asked to marry me. I refused him. He persisted—as you are persisting. Yet,” she added, as if with sudden recollection, “why should I couple you in anything with that man?

“He turned my head with his protests—swept me off my feet with his violence. I wasn’t to consent—I wasn’t to think—I was just to be the idol of his heart!”

194

She stopped for strength. “What sport!” she continued, when she could speak, framing each word with the bitterness of her awakening, “what sport we poor wretches are for the little holiday of men like Robert Durand!

“Even then I might have escaped—but while I resisted—and wavered—my poor mother urged me, begged me for her sake—leaving me, as she was, alone in the world—to marry him.

“Shall I tell you what my picture of marriage was?” The words, refusing now to be stilled, poured in a flood from her lips. “It was of walking in flowers and veil, in the silence of guests and to the strains of music, up to the altar. That was all I ever knew or pictured of marriage! You’ve seen something of my enlightenment!” She paused as if to escape the shackles of a dreaded memory.

“After the armistice,” she went on disconnectedly, “I broke. I went back to Italy. There I fell ill. I’ve never told you this. I was ill for a very long time. It was then that nobody heard from me. And I owe my life to Virginia Hampton, that brave little Southern woman I served with in France. She nursed me back to life. God knows I didn’t want to live. It is she alone—not the great doctors, not the great specialists—who is responsible for my being here now.

“She knew nothing of despair—but she knew how to minister to it. I knew nothing of religion. Sitting night after night with me when I couldn’t sleep—when I begged for some drug that would give me 195a last sleep—she told me of her Christianity. I was there—in Rome—with its beginnings under my feet. She gave me courage to live—she taught me humility in place of rebellion—she taught me her faith. When I went up to Switzerland—at Geneva—I took it for my own.”

“You’ve taken a faith that I more than once thought must make a strong appeal to a woman’s heart.”

“What I have done,” she hurried desperately on, “puts behind me all thought of remarrying. For me remarriage is impossible.”

“I am by no means so sure about that.”

“Because you’re not a Catholic.”

“You haven’t been one very long. I know the great Church is very strict. All I feel sure of is that her laws are not against reason nor against justice. All I need to know from you is this: what you, yourself, would say if you found yourself free. I know now—I realize it since you have told me all—that you are still weak from your long illness—for I know you would belittle even that. But only—give me a chance!”

He could see how difficult it was for her to control herself, how difficult it was for her as she spoke. “I long ago put aside all thought of another marriage. But I had once said to myself”—she paused for strength and words—“once I did think—that the only man I had ever met that I felt I could respect and like never could really care for me in the way—a woman—wants to be cared for——”

196

A single word rose in exclamation to his lips. But it was freighted with all the hope, all the tenderness, of a waiting heart. “Louise!”

“And now—too late—he comes into my life!”

For the days preceding Gertrude’s bazaar, Louise diverted her mind from her difficulties by training her energies in with those of Gertrude in preparation for it. Amazed a little at times at Gertrude’s being so completely engrossed in the minor difficulties and vexations incident to such affairs, Louise could only reflect that when we lack real troubles imaginary ones serve as our retainers.

The grounds of Gertrude’s old home had long been modernized and offered an excellent setting for a garden bazaar. And the weather, for once, as Gertrude almost grumbled, smiled on her labors. And her society friends, for once, as she added, responded to her appeal—the affair went well.

By the time Kennedy got out late from the city, to put in an early afternoon appearance, Gertrude’s face was wreathed with smiles. He found her in the living-room, meeting guests. Of course, he did not escape without some upbraiding.

“Couldn’t make it any sooner, honey,” he pleaded shamelessly. “Court. How’s your party?”

“Why, it’s nearly over, Jim.”

“Is Henry Dunning Janeway here?”

“He is. And having a good time. Louise is out there making the poor man spend all his money. I hope if Bob comes the two won’t clash.”

198

“Never fear. Simms claims that Bob bearded the lion in his office den that morning after the riot. If he actually did, I hope Brother won’t feel the royal beast’s claws in his domestic and financial gizzard before they’re through.” He scrutinized her rig as he spoke. “Well, baby girl! Some class to the little gown.”

“Do you like it?”

“Do you wear it?”

“I do.”

“I do.”

Gertrude glanced through the open doors of the terrace out at the gardens. Her guests circulated among the booths. “Mrs. Montgomery,” she said incidentally, “hasn’t come yet.”

“What did you invite her for, honey?”

“Bob made me, of course.”

“Dear Brother!”

“I told him it was a public affair, but he was stubborn. I think she made him ask for a special bid. She’s so sensitive, he says.”

“Mother o’ mine! Why was I not born sensitive? I might have married a steel magnate myself!”

“When I did invite her,” continued Gertrude, “she said she didn’t know whether I really wanted her to come or not.”

“She must be a detective,” hinted Kennedy.

“Awfully frank, I thought.”

“It isn’t Maymie’s practice to conceal—much.”

“Jim, I hate double entendre.”

“That’s only just plain United States entendre. 199Are you still game, birdie mine, for going ahead and getting married, no matter what Brother thinks?”

Gertrude looked at him with Durand determination. “I ordered my travelling suit to-day; it’s going to be a dear. What will Bob say?” she sighed.

“What he’ll say would probably put him in jail if it got into the mails. And by the great Jehovah, there she is, on the terrace with Brother, right now. Didn’t I tell you, Gertie, she wouldn’t hide anything you could speak of?”

Mrs. Montgomery, under Durand’s protecting wing, was, in fact, crossing the terrace toward the living-room.

A painstaking selection of beauty parlors kept Mrs. Montgomery in condition. She was perhaps just overgroomed, but her confident step was justified by the lack of noticeable encroachments that three years had made on her appearance. The family quarrels that had agitated the Durand circle on her threatened entrance into it, had left her unscathed by worries; no wrinkles had invaded her pleading eyes; she asked only for sympathy and forbearance. The worst that could be said of Maymie Montgomery was that she was happy and wanted everybody else to be happy, which Kennedy pronounced fair enough; forgetting that happiness is a joint-stock liability concern, in which neither man nor woman, neither husband nor wife, neither parent nor child can be selfish without making somebody, somewhere, pay the price in tears.

“I thought you were never coming!” exclaimed 200Gertrude, when her brother and Mrs. Montgomery entered the room.

“Dear girl!” murmured Mrs. Montgomery. “Are you dead?”

“Dead?” echoed Kennedy, as the greetings were exchanged. “Well, I hope not—yet.”

Mrs. Montgomery wore white. Her figure, with a tendency to plumpness, was under control, and though her utterances were at times stern, her voice was pleasant. “I’m so late,” she apologized, with real regret, “and it’s all the fault of this tyrannical brother of yours.” She was addressing Gertrude.

“Of ours, Mrs. Montgomery,” interposed Kennedy. “You can’t lose me in this family.”

“See here a minute, Kennedy,” said Durand, stepping away for a side confab.

Mrs. Montgomery, studying Gertrude’s gown with a critical eye—a study in which Gertrude, herself, was not at all behind—resumed complacently: “Isn’t Mr. Kennedy ‘inimicable’?”

Kennedy was just near enough to overhear. “What’s that?” he asked, starting.

Mrs. Montgomery pushed him away with her fan. “Listeners never hear any good of themselves.” Then to Gertrude. “You’ve had a perfect crush, Gertrude, haven’t you? I’ve never seen such a stream of cars up and down the hill. You must have sent out a raft of invitations.”

“Why, I didn’t send out any. It’s public. I couldn’t exclude anybody from a children’s hospital benefit.”

201

“Fortunate for me!” purred Mrs. Montgomery.

Gertrude was mildly shocked. “Mrs. Montgomery! I don’t understand! Would any one in Fond du Lac dream of leaving you out?”

“Dear girl! You know very well my position is a difficult one. But Bob! You know how he is; he simply must have his own way—don’t blame me, dear, for all of it. And I hear Louise is very, very sweet. But when two people can’t live happily together, it’s really a crime to make them—don’t you think so? Yet I certainly sympathize with her.” Gertrude was too hot to retort. She felt if she said anything it would be too much.

Durand, who was talking to Kennedy about the arbitration committee, was not holding him. Kennedy turned at the last words to Mrs. Montgomery. “Come right out into the garden, Mrs. Montgomery. We need sympathizers. Poor Gertrude had yesterday eighty-seven babies to feed—you may go as far as you like.”

Mrs. Montgomery had an indulgent smile for her prospective brother-in-law. “Lovely!” she drawled, turning again to Gertrude.

“They had the prettiest things in the booths,” suggested Gertrude encouragingly, “if they’re not all gone. Run along and I’ll join you in a minute.”

Mrs. Montgomery walked happily away with Kennedy. “Isn’t Gertrude dear?” she smiled.

“Just like her brother,” suggested Kennedy blandly. The touch was not lost on his companion.

202

“Don’t say mean things,” she objected. “You’re not a bit nice to me.”

“I must be the only man in town that isn’t.”

“There you go again. But I want to tell you, Jim Kennedy—and I never get the chance—that instead of my trying to influence Bob against Gertrude’s marrying you——”

“I never said you did.”

“I’ve tried to make him give in.”

“Does he do it?”

“Like a mule.”

“You mustn’t call Brother names.”

Maymie tossed her head. “He doesn’t hesitate to call me names; why, he even had the nerve to tell me if I hadn’t any manners I might copy some from his wife—wouldn’t that kill you? Maybe he’s getting tired of Maymie. But I ain’t afraid of him.”

“No more am I,” chimed in Kennedy. “Come on! You and I’ll be pals yet.”

Gertrude was talking with her brother. “When did you get back, Bob?”

“Day before yesterday. I haven’t had time to think yet. This infernal strike——”

“But that’s going to be settled now.”

“Settled!” snapped her brother. “Settled—with that man Marion running the committee! A fine show we’ll have! My brave uncle is responsible for shoving that down my throat. He’s got about as much fight in him as a sparrow. I think Janeway had a hand in it.”

203

“Bob, why worry about what can’t be helped? Why wear out your health and strength fighting all the time. My heavens!” Gertrude paused to let her words sink in. “Haven’t you got money enough, no matter what happens now? More than you ever dreamed of having? What do you care whether the strikers get a dollar a day more or not?”

Her brother looked no less saturnine. “I don’t like committees running my business. I don’t like to be beaten, either. I’ll get even with the whole bunch yet.”

Durand’s eyes, never quite still, were roving as he spoke; as if nothing within vision was to be lost. They now fixed on a couple at some distance on the driveway, below the lotus ponds. Durand recognized Janeway. This in itself would have annoyed him. But he looked also at the person standing with the man he regarded as his enemy. Her back was toward him, and he was trying to make out whether it was a young girl or a woman talking with the man he detested. Whoever it was, her figure, very satisfying in its lines, gave him no clew; it might have belonged either to a young girl or a woman of twenty-five. While Durand’s eyes were on them, Janeway’s vis-à-vis turned from him, apparently with some excuse, and tripped up a short flight of steps and through the pergola, where girls were serving tea.

Janeway, looking after the slight figure until it disappeared, stood until two bazaar salesgirls, coming up, claimed his attention.

204

“What’s Janeway doing here?” demanded Durand gruffly of his sister.

“Spending his money, I hope,” retorted Gertrude, undisturbed. “What should anybody be doing here?”

“I don’t like this idea of Louise’s staying here with you,” said Durand shortly. “Who’s that going up-stairs?”

Gertrude looked around; she knew her brother’s different tones so well that she knew when he was interested. And she saw through the open French doors of the terrace the feminine figure that had arrested Durand’s attention when his eye had caught Janeway. Gertrude suppressed a laugh. “What is it?” asked Durand testily. “What’re you laughing at?”

She regarded him as if not quite sure of his good faith. “Don’t you know your own wife when you see her?”

The figure disappeared on the mezzanine. “Was that Louise?” he demanded.

Gertrude was still laughing. “It certainly was.”

“Some style!” murmured Durand, still looking toward the stairs.

“Hasn’t she?” commented Gertrude maliciously. “Uncle Sid said she was the best-looking, the best-dressed woman at the Horse Show last week.”

“Paris has given her an air,” he snapped.

“Paris won’t give you an air unless it’s in you to begin with. Louise always had an air; you never realized it. Her figure is more rounded and her cheeks are fuller. There she comes again.”

205

The brother and sister were standing where they could see without being seen. Louise, purse in hand, was fairly tripping down the hall stairs. She crossed the terrace quickly and disappeared among the guests.

“Bob, you’ve cast off the best woman that ever came into your life,” said Gertrude indignantly. She knew her brother’s face and knew how the change in his wife had taken his breath. Physical feminine beauty made an appeal to Durand that nothing else in the world could quite equal, and, like all men of his temperament, he was usually a failure in choosing women.

“No use talking about that now,” he growled.

“That’s what every man says when he’s ashamed of himself.”

“I’m no parson. Louise knew that when she married me.”

“That’s not true.”

“Her mother knew, anyway.”

“And you’ve lost the best business adviser you ever had. When you were afraid to spend such an awful sum to rebuild the mills, who made you do it—and with her money, too!”

“I never said she didn’t have a good head for business.”

Gertrude seemed to welcome the chance to free her mind. “When you were ready to close down the mills and give up—and I was, too—she made you hold on. You ought never to have let her go.”

“It’s too late to switch back.”

206

“It was a mighty bad mistake, Brother.”

Guests approached to say good-by. Durand, greeting them absent-mindedly as they neared his sister, crossed the terrace and went out into the gardens. Mrs. Montgomery, deserted by Kennedy, caught sight of him. Durand joined her, and, making the round of the booths, Mrs. Montgomery spent liberally—even beyond what Durand liked. He told her so.

His admonition was capriciously taken and Mrs. Montgomery feathered a barb in return. “Your devoted sister is catty to-day, isn’t she?”

“Well, what the devil did you insist on coming for?” demanded Durand peevishly.

“Well, why the devil shouldn’t I come and go where I please, Bobbie dear?”

“You know she doesn’t like you.”

“That’s why I wanted to come.”

“You like a fight, don’t you?”

“No more than Bobbie does, do I?”

“Well, you’ve spent all the money I’ve got. Let’s get out.”

Mrs. Montgomery’s eyes fixed on some one in the pergola. “Oh, there’s Mr. Janeway!” she exclaimed. “Let’s speak to him!”

Durand’s face grew black. She laughed out loud. But just the same she did insist on going over to the tea-tables, where Durand, glumly absorbed in thought, sat while Mrs. Montgomery laughed and chatted with the chatty attendants and sipped a cup of tea.

207

The course of true love doesn’t traditionally run smooth. But it may at least be said that, compared with the course of untrue love, it is the merest mill-pond.

The following week Janeway spent an evening with Bishop Marion. “I’ve felt some responsibility in unloading this arbitration work on an overburdened man,” remarked the visitor blandly. “I’ve come to ask how you’re getting on.”

There was no complaint on the Bishop’s part. His talk drifted from his difficulties with Simms and the obstacles Simms continually put in the way of the committee’s investigations, to the strike itself.

Janeway brought up the letter of the American bishops on the duties and rights of labor and capital. “I was surprised,” he remarked, “to find it so closely in touch, on a very vital subject, with modern thought. Democracy, to-day, is as badly abused a word as liberty used to be. And we’ve heard so much hollow prating about making the world safe for democracy, that it’s refreshing to find something suggesting a real democracy instead of a sham autocracy to parade ourselves in. Your bishops seem to have caught the idea.”

“There is really but one perfect democracy,” said Bishop Marion, “the democracy of sacrifice. Its effective expression is a collective expression—just as the word itself is collective. And the most nearly 209perfect example of it is in the religious communities of the Church. It is rather odd that none of our dazzling lights of communistic thought has ever noticed that practically the only permanently successful communistic venture is a religious community. I always hesitate,” continued the Bishop, “when I hear that phrase—‘modern thought.’”

Janeway manifested impatience. “And yet,” he interrupted, “why intelligent men—and you represent intelligent men—should shrink from modern thought is one of the repellent things about your Church.”

Bishop Marion spoke on. “It’s not precisely that we shrink from the thing itself—we shrink rather from mere unquestioning approval of it—an approval that seems to connote commendation of a specified line of thought because it is modern—which is obviously foolish. All lines of thought, good or bad, were once unimpeachably modern. The principles you approve, set forth by the bishops, are as old as the first necessity that ever arose for formulating them. If the thought you refer to as ‘modern’ agrees with these, so much the better for it; if it doesn’t, so much the worse for modern thought.

“The appeal that men unwittingly make to ‘modern’ thought always reminds me that the Church is the very fortress and citadel of thought, if by thought be meant clear thinking. It is seemingly the only institution that preserves in this dark age of loose thinking the art of reasoning. When one nowadays appeals to reason, he appeals inevitably to Catholic 210thought; all other schools have apparently become too lazy to think seriously or well.

“I’ve heard you say, Mr. Janeway, that the reason lawyers fail is because they don’t work hard enough to get up their cases. If you ever got up the case against ‘modern’ thought, you’d scourge it out of court. The very essence of your own success is your devotion to tireless thinking and close, hard reasoning—yet modern thought abhors logic, the basis of all reasoning; it is patient neither of history nor of fact; yet history and fact are the very shield and armor of the good lawyer.”

Janeway brushed the ashes from his cigar. “That may be the reason why good lawyers are afraid to quarrel with you,” he suggested.

“I remember my father’s telling me,” continued the Bishop, “of some negro sailors, mutineers, shipwrecked on our shores, who were apprehended, tried, and convicted of murder on the high seas. The case was appealed. John Quincy Adams appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States to defend the rights of the friendless negroes. You may imagine it was not a million-dollar case——”

“Don’t take a shot at me, Bishop.”

“My father heard Adams make his argument. It was an occasion. Adams must have been a very old man then; his eyes bothered him greatly and he wiped them continually with a handkerchief. Aside from the technicalities of the case, his plea was on the rights growing out of the duties of hospitality to the miserable men cast, thus, starving upon a foreign 211shore. It was a plea so masterly, as I heard it described, that it might well have served for all time as a classic on the obligations of hospitality. Adams had ransacked history for his precedents, and so marshalled them that he carried the court with him; his shipwrecked clients were freed. But how many men, as eminent to-day as Adams was in those days, and in old age, would undertake to get up a case for naked mariners as Adams got up his case, and to win it on an appeal to the obligations of hospitality?

“You spoke of the bishops’ letter. The encyclical of Leo XIII on labor, written a generation ago, is the classical presentation of the enlightened Christian view on that subject; this letter is based on his encyclical.”

“Whichever way you put it,” observed Janeway lazily, “I wish your view-point on other problems were as much in harmony with the modern view-point—less reactionary, Bishop.”

Both men were smoking peacefully. The discussion was academic. “It’s odd we should be called reactionary,” replied the Bishop. “It isn’t the rock that’s reactionary—only the waves that dash against it—the tides that rise and fall at its feet.”

“Put it as you will,” persisted Janeway, “men and women of to-day—as of many another day—are enmeshed in the conventions of a current civilization—it is a condition, Bishop, not a theory, that confronts men and women”—Janeway was gathering steam—“and if your Church stands apart from such conventions, shipwreck ensues.”

212

“Civilization,” commented the Bishop, “is properly only the leisure moment of Christianity. When the world holds up a mirror to Christianity, civilization is the image it reflects. If Christianity be fresh, vigorous, and beautiful, the image will be such. If it be weak and weary, corrupt in high places, or if, as to-day, its voice is despised, the image will reflect the evil results.”

“Bishop Marion, are you proud of civilization as we see it in the world to-day?”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“No. But the root of the trouble is that civilization to-day won’t listen to Christianity; baptism as a social prophylactic has fallen to a plane of importance far below that of vaccination. Yet Christianity offers to a world, distracted as ours is, a trained and world-wide army of soldiers strengthened by the victories and defeats of twenty centuries. Its forces have never been possessed of more élan than to-day—a great trained engine at the command of human nature against its besetting weaknesses. And all it asks of its recruits is that which real intelligence always suggests—humility.

“Yet, curiously enough,” continued the Bishop, “we, ourselves, are blamed for the ills of the day—the war and all else! Few, indeed, understand us; few fail to condemn us. The modern wits—grasshopper philosophers like Wells, who jump, with the confidence of a locust, from ‘It may have been’ to ‘It was’; our own apostates, like Moore and 213Ibañez, mere calumniators—these men lie about us and defame us with the sangfroid of the Roman wits of eighteen hundred years ago. Calumny, I suppose, like flattery, should be well laid on. Among the enemies of God, there’s no such word as honor.”

“It’s the stubbornness of your position,” objected Janeway, “that excites the opposition. I feel it at times strongly myself,” he said with emphasis.

“There is inevitably a fundamental difference in your view-point and mine,” returned Bishop Marion. “You, like most Americans, think in decades; the Church thinks in centuries.

“Naturally,” he continued, “I hold no brief for any mutilated form of Christian faith. I defend only that which, being whole, is equal to meeting every menace that threatens society. Religion is humanity in account with God. The accounting must be clear and simple. The religion that can direct this accounting must speak with a definite authority and be possessed of a delegated power to enforce its mandates. Christianity, as I know it, and as the world despises it, has lost none of its early characteristics. It is as vital, as aggressive, as uncompromising to-day as it was then. It still excites the contempt and hatred it has always excited—the scorn of the dilettante, the rage of the brutal, the resentment of the refined. It is sanely intolerant, profoundly indifferent, supernaturally patient.

“Yet men may find in it to-day all that St. Augustine found in it fifteen hundred years ago. Nor does ‘modern’ thought offer to-day to thinking men any 214more than Augustine tasted and cast from him in the husks of the Manicheans.”

Janeway was silent for a moment. “I came to you to-night, in reality,” he said at length, “on anything but an academic errand.” He lighted his small bomb under the Bishop with perfect poise. “You know enough of me, I think, to realize that in laying a case with difficult aspects before you, I should not be anything less than perfectly frank. And in the solution of its difficulties lies, perhaps, the future happiness of a woman, and, of a certainty, my own future happiness. I speak of Louise Durand and myself: and I shall tell you the whole story.

“I came back to Fond du Lac a few years ago, you remember, as counsellor for the Durand Steel Corporation. Durand often invited me to his house; I became acquainted with his wife. Almost the first time I met her I saw the unhappiness of her position, and I realized as quickly the fine simplicity of her nature. I saw her aversion to the license of her husband—the fight, practically hopeless, that she made as he tried to drag her down to the level of his own circle of disreputable men and women. And watching her intolerable situation, first with curiosity, then with respect for the way in which she bore the indignities Durand heaped on her before his low companions, my admiration deepened into something more. There was nothing to keep me from telling her all this except—herself. And when I was resolved—come what would—to free my mind, 215he had driven her abroad to clear the way for marrying this Montgomery woman. Can you understand it all?”

“I know something of it,” replied the Bishop.

“She came back. I told her everything. And when I had wrung from her the admission that under happier circumstances she might have listened, I fancied the last obstacle to a new life for both of us was removed. Imagine my consternation when she told me she had become a Catholic, and that for her remarriage was impossible. I refused to believe it. She begged me to wait, in any event, before we should even discuss remarriage. When I had reduced her objections to the last—her religion—I asked her, if it stood between us, to give it up—you see, I am keeping nothing back.”

“Did she consent to this?”

“She refused.”

Bishop Marion drew a breath. “How well you served Satan,” he murmured, “when you put that temptation before her!”

“Do you blame me for doing what any man with red blood would do to win the woman he loves?” demanded Janeway, with indignant emphasis. “You call me a fighter. If a man will fight for money, power, justice, won’t he fight for his life and what is dearer than life? Shouldn’t you do it?”

Both men spoke under perfect control; both were practised duellists. It could only be said that underlying their measured exchanges there was an element of mutual forbearance, especially on the part 216of the Bishop—and a mutual respect. But there was likewise, on the one hand, the keenness of resolve, and on the other a firmness of principle that rendered the discussion grave.

Bishop Marion paused an instant before answering Janeway’s importunate question. “I should not, in any event,” he said carefully, “dwell on ‘red’ blood. Leave that for men like Durand. The red-blood appeal has been used to justify everything man has ever done to break a woman’s heart. You and I must meet without surrendering our convictions.”

“We do so meet at this moment,” interposed Janeway firmly. “The civil decree is about to free her. I must know where she and I stand before your Church. And I need your help.”

“All the help I can give you I will give.”

“You mean,” commented Janeway, instinctively alert, “there is no relief for us?”

“I mean,” returned the Bishop, “that I myself do not know until I learn fully the circumstances surrounding her marriage to Mr. Durand.”

Janeway felt his way forward with care. “That marriage,” he began, “took place wholly, of course, outside the jurisdiction of your Church. Neither of the parties were of your communion—never had been. In those circumstances, Bishop Marion,” he asked slowly, “what would be the presumption of your Church as to the validity of such a marriage?”

“Marriage,” observed the Bishop, with equal care, “is a natural contract. In the circumstances you relate the presumption of the Church would be that the marriage is valid.”

217

Janeway’s crushing disappointment was well concealed. “Does that mean,” he asked, engaged with his thoughts, “that the remarriage of the wife during the life of her former husband would not be recognized by the Church?”

“Not quite that. You asked what the presumption would be. But nullifying impediments, diriment impediments, as we call them, that might invalidate the first marriage, may exist, and such must be reckoned with. Presumption, I need hardly say, is not proof. You merely presume a man innocent until proved guilty; our presumption is the same concerning a natural contract. But bring Mrs. Durand to me; let me examine into her case and weigh the circumstances.”

“If she comes she will probably come alone,” continued Janeway, relaxing, but not less serious. “And her sensitiveness is very great. I am only sorry, so far as the presenting of her cause goes, that it is not hers alone—I mean, that I had no personal interest in it. No man can plead his case as well as another can plead it for him. And my concern in this matter is so vital that it really becomes my own case when I plead it. But I bespeak, Bishop, for Louise Durand, every consideration it is in your power to give her.

“You spoke a few moments ago of an American, once a President of the United States and the son of a President of the United States, a diplomat of distinction, among the first of our statesmen, and, in addition to all this, an eminent jurist. You told me 218of a moving incident in that man’s extraordinary career; how he thought it no derogation of his dignity, not too great a tax on his years, to appear before our most august tribunal to plead the cause of a crew of friendless, shipwrecked negroes, accused of mutiny on the high seas, and to urge in their abandoned behalf the hospitality of our shores.

“If this woman, who is very dear to me, comes before you as a judge, she will come friendless and unknown among those of your great communion; she will come, not as a criminal, but as a victim, shipwrecked on the shores of a detestable and corrupt society. I ask you to remember that she is very new in your Faith. And to weigh in her behalf the responsibility that hospitality may rightly impose on you and your Church toward an innocent woman who appeals in misfortune to its mercy; I ask you to remember John Quincy Adams and his negroes.”

Janeway was taking his leave.

“I shall try,” said the Bishop simply, “to measure up to my responsibilities. Let Mrs. Durand come, either with you or alone, as she prefers—and the sooner the better.”

“She is at Turtle Island with Mrs. Harrison just now,” said Janeway.

“When she returns, of course. We shall all,” added Bishop Marion gravely, but with sympathetic kindliness, “experience anxieties until we know just where we stand.”

Turtle Island in midsummer combined, so Judge Harrison, who had long owned it, maintained, the coolness of the lake with the seclusion of the wilderness, and possessed for its owner yet another prime attraction—it afforded for him, he said, with a complete change of air and thought, a unique “access- and inaccess-ibility.” A few hours’ run in the launch—and the Judge’s launch was not considered, by his younger relatives, fast—was more than enough to cover the distance from the Fond du Lac pier.

The island, too, was just large enough for a nine-hole golf-course, and this added, for the Judge, the crowning attraction of the little speck of green in the wide expanse of blue waters. The golf-course was never, in Janeway’s estimation, in playable condition, but for the Judge, who talked golf more than he played, this was not a vital defect. His summer guests were too courteous to complain of the greens, and these reached in the end a condition in which, as Kennedy said, there were none to complain of. But Judge Harrison’s clubs were faithfully carried to and from Fond du Lac in the launch, and if by any chance they were forgotten, the boat was peremptorily turned back. This made the family alert to be sure they were aboard.

220

Under the dozen Norway pines—and they were good ones—at the north end of the island stood the Harrison cabin—just a roomy, comfortable affair of cedar logs, with a living-room running through the middle. At one end of this room was a rough stone fireplace, and opening on either side of the living-room were bedrooms. The dining-room was entered through archways on both sides of the fireplace, and facing south, overlooked the lake, the beach pleasingly visible not far away.

Mrs. Harrison had taken Louise, of whom she was fond, over to the island when she went with the servants to open the house for the summer. Little as Louise could bear to talk to any one of her marriage experience with Mrs. Harrison’s nephew, the two women came to confidences before very long, and Mrs. Harrison made it very clear that she understood and sympathized.

“Sometimes, Auntie, I think the crudest part of it all is that it has robbed me of faith in all other men,” said Louise one evening, before the fire. “I have to keep saying to myself: ‘They’re all alike—all alike!’”

“My dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Harrison, “if you are forcing yourself to say that, it only shows you haven’t lost faith in men. They are all alike in this, my child—men are creatures of the flesh; we may as well resign ourselves to that fact. Don’t expect to find a normal man without that primal taint in his nature. But they are not all alike; pray that you may find one with consideration enough to think of 221you first; if such a man loves you, you may be sure of happiness with him. The other kind—the kind that think of their impulse only—you’ve had experience with, poor girl!”

“But sometimes men are the victims of women, Auntie; what kind are they?”

“Both kinds. Their impulses make them the easier victims. But the distinction holds; the one kind deserve our sympathy; the other kind get what they deserve at some vile creature’s hands.”

They talked late—the younger woman beset by difficulties and perplexities—the other experienced in the illusions and grounded in the realities of life; and Louise went to sleep steadied and strengthened in some respects, if still facing the future blindly in others.

On the afternoon following the evening with Bishop Marion, Janeway left Chicago on the three-o’clock train, joined Judge Harrison at Fond du Lac, and Oliver, the Judge’s chauffeur, headed the launch for the island. Mrs. Harrison and Louise were at the little landing pier to greet the arrivals. If there had been any doubt in the minds of the Harrisons as to Janeway’s interest in Louise—and her more carefully measured return of it—there was none after twenty-four hours with their two guests at the island.

For a lover every situation is an opportunity. A mere elevator man on duty in a twenty-story building can make love with complete happiness provided the object of his affections will ride up and down 222with him—and she will. It is absolutely necessary, however, that the interested pair should, in any situation, have some moments apart from other people. Janeway, after dinner, tried skilfully to draw Louise from the fire before which Judge Harrison, with his slow-burning cigar, had planted himself. But she resisted every appealing hint. Janeway was forced to cease repining and to resign himself to cards indoors, with only the consolation of eying Louise, next to him, somewhat unscrupulously—to her occasional embarrassment—and saying for her benefit whatever the situation might inspire.

In the morning, on his way up from the plunge, he was singing before breakfast. Over the eggs and bacon Mrs. Harrison cautioned him. “I pay no attention to that wretched saying,” he remarked, frankly contemptuous of it. “I learned long ago the wisdom of singing before breakfast. Often it’s the only time of day a man gets a chance to sing. Weep if you have to; sing when you can.” And with hardly a break he suggested, addressing Louise: “Let’s go fishing.”

While Louise parried, Judge Harrison, with contempt for fishermen’s ignorance, growled: “Nothing but perch out there, Janeway.”

Janeway was not disturbed. He disputed the Judge’s dictum, and set up as an authority on island fishing himself.

With Louise, after a decent resistance won over, Janeway disappeared, and when in a sport skirt and under a summer hat she appeared on the porch, 223Janeway was in the garden with a tin can and a spading fork, digging angleworms.

Louise laughed. “Do you really want to go fishing?” she asked, as she joined him.

“No, do you?”

“No.”

“Then come on!” He struck the fork vigorously into the ground, to desert it then and there. Louise pointed to the tin can. “Those poor worms!” Janeway, drawing his handkerchief from his pocket to dust his fingers, kicked the can over, and with Louise took the path through the woods.

He told her of his talk with the Bishop. Louise, not temperamentally optimistic, got less encouragement than Janeway got out of it. He was conscious of her anxiety. “We shan’t get on without a fight—I don’t expect to,” he declared bluntly. “I never got anything worth while yet without a fight, so I could hardly hope for all of this world and part of the next without one.” He looked hard at her, but Louise was looking, or trying to look, ahead. “Nobody ever handed me anything on a platter,” he went on grimly. “All the bright boys in my town were picked up at one time or another and made protégés of by some big man; no one ever picked me up for a winner; nobody ever seemed to need brains when mine were for sale. I was just a puny, sallow-faced kid. I couldn’t do anything that made other boys famous. I hadn’t even good looks—which are a material asset, even when not backed by brains.”

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“But think,” exclaimed Louise, not repressing, for the instant, her feelings, “what you’ve done in your profession! My! If I were you, I should be swollen with pride.”

“No—you’d be thinking of the many things you should have done better. I’ve too often cut down with an axe when I should have thrust with a rapier. And,” he went on, with unabated interest in his failures, “I never could swim across the river. I never could make the ‘first nine’ in baseball. Even in the ‘Turner School,’ the best I ever could do was the ‘Knieweller.’”

“What on earth is the ‘Knieweller’?”

“It would be hard to explain without a turning pole; but it was the easiest of many other ‘wellers’—not nearly so hard as you are.”

“Ah!” She caught her breath with the little exclamation. “Why did you look to a woman so hard to clear the way to?”

Janeway looked at her. “Think of what’s at the end of the way.”

“Have they agreed on a money settlement yet?”

“It’s all over but the quarrelling. You remember Simms decided, under proper pressure, to withdraw his original complaint and immediately substitute an amended complaint, with the objectionable features left out. After a conference last week it was agreed between your attorneys and Durand’s that Judge Bellows—the case is before him—should sit in chambers as an arbitrator to arrive at a final agreement 225on the property settlement, the deeds and other securities involved in this to be placed in escrow and delivered out at the time of signing the final decree; and that a stipulation of settlement be filed in the divorce proceedings and the final decree come down. This may sound a little confusing to you——”

Louise sighed. “It does.”

“But things are arranged with sinister clarity. Just give me a judge that understands—that’s all I ask.” Janeway paused at a thought. “Whenever Judge Harrison used to hear me say that he would always take the chance to grumble: ‘And a jury that doesn’t understand’—which wasn’t true, but he liked to say so. Anyway, Judge Bellows does understand.”

“How I shrink,” murmured Louise, “from all this divorce disgrace!”

“The disgrace fixes solely on him.”

“And the settlement of all this money on me worries me.”

“The sole reason I’ve insisted on it is because you won’t give me an answer. Say you’ll be my wife and I’ll drop this settlement matter instanter.”

“But independently of any answer to you, I am well able to take care of myself.”

Janeway stopped in the path before her. They had reached the edge of the woods, and were facing the lake and the beach. “Louise,” he asked, “am I your legal adviser or am I not?”

She glanced up with just enough of mischief in her eyes to set his pulses going. “You’re not permanently 226retained yet. But I haven’t any other,” she added.

“Then this settlement must go through. It’s the merest recompense—inadequate compensation.” They walked along the beach till they found a driftwood log. “I’m finally getting it clear in my mind, Louise,” Janeway continued, as they sat down, “why that fellow pursued you so. Putting two and two together—what I’ve heard of his business affairs from his Uncle Sid and what you’ve told me—he was cold-bloodedly after your money!”

Louise, looking down, was running the hem of her handkerchief between her thumb and finger. Without moving her head, she lifted her eyes to his. “Don’t I get any personal credit?” she asked, in a demure effort to abate his angry intensity.

He was not to be turned from his resentful indictment. “He needed it to tide him over the ‘psychological depression’ that culminated in 1913. He was close to the rocks that year, his uncle says; your money saved him.” Janeway twisted his shoulders in protest. “What a price,” he exclaimed slowly and savagely, “for a girl to pay for the crime of inheriting wealth! What a tragedy—my Louise!

“Durand is ingratiating,” Janeway went on, less tensely. “I remember how genuinely surprised I was the first time he lied to me. One of the treasured watchwords of my corrupted youth was that no man who was a liar could succeed in life. A slavish adherence to that maxim nearly wrecked my early career. First and last, I’ve had to scrap a 227great deal of copy-book maxim as far as it refers to success in life—or to what men agree to call success. Not a few of the great exemplars of big business that I know are likewise, if occasion demands, extremely able-bodied liars—Durand’s no worse than the others. His crowning villainy was that he broke your heart!”

“No!” interposed Louise, disclaiming instantly. “He could humiliate me, he could torture my feelings—but he couldn’t break my heart. It never belonged to him. You—be careful of it—will you?”

He looked at her so suddenly it almost took her breath. Then she laughed at his gravity. “When I do break it—” he said grimly——

“When you do break it,” she echoed, cutting off his words, imitating his frown and mockingly solemn.

“—let me drink the poison from your hand.”

The moment seemed to bring a care-free happiness. “I can’t promise that,” she objected. “I might need it myself.” She pointed to the clump of willow shoots at her hand. “Cut me a switch.”

When he handed it to her she began stripping the leaves from it. “Whatever possessed you,” she demanded, turning on him a Lilliputian frown of her own, “to follow a luckless creature like me down that day to that swamp? What were you thinking of?”

“I wanted to save you from the fate to which you were headlong rushing.”

“Fate?”

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“That of marrying a rebuilt hero of France. I didn’t want to see you tied to a damaged poilu.”

“My heavens, would you wish me on a poor poilu? Couldn’t you do better than that for a slightly respectable client? But you shan’t make fun of the poor poilus; they’re too sacred.”

“Well, then, to one of those cigarette-waisted barons that drain our country of its wealth. Only the other day I had to draw a marriage-settlement contract for an innocent old candy maker who had amassed too many millions in Chicago real estate. A third of his fortune had to go to a puttering Frenchman for marrying his silly daughter.”

“And she may have been dear at the price!”

“But in your case I was resolved not to see your respected father’s estate—if you could ever get your hands on it again—go to feed the flower of a foreign aristocracy—especially”—he coughed slightly to point his remark—“if there was a chance to salvage any part of it for a poor but dishonest American.”

He talked to her of himself, as if to put himself as honestly as he could before her. Something in his confidences, and especially in his odd voice, always drew her to him; some intonation, some note, some manner of his saying even little things, broke each time like a rude wave against the barriers of her scepticism. In spite of herself, she believed; sincerity seemed to echo from his words—though she knew how perfectly able he was to conceal his thoughts. “It’s not that I deceive people,” he had said once 229to her, in defense, “I only allow them to deceive themselves; when they wake it’s too late—I’m gone!”

And when he spoke her name as he had only now—from the depths of an emotion she had never realized could be in a man’s heart—she felt helpless—almost marvelled at his restraint when alone with her, for she dreaded how an unguarded moment might have overwhelmed her own. “Can you wonder,” she managed to say, with an attempt at coldness, as she spoke again of her husband, “that I have no faith in men?”

“But you still can have faith in a man. Point your finger at me and say: ‘You are the man!’”

“I’d rather not take a dollar from Robert Durand,” she said. “I’ve suffered so much at his hands, I hate even to think of him. At first he was so fussy about me, so considerate—and then gradually—think of having to live through it! The protestations—and the neglect!

“And then”—her voice tightened—“there came a moment when I knew—really knew—I was no longer first with him. What a moment! Another woman! And I no longer preferred—just cast off, like a discarded glove. How I struggled that night with shame and rage! How little I understood, that night; how little I realized what a foundation of sand my house of pride had been built on”—she stopped.

“Sometimes,” said Janeway in hard tones, “we are compelled, or think we are, to cast pearls before swine. It is, of course, trying business. But occasionally, when all else has failed and the pearls are 230definitely discredited, the swine may still be moved by a certificate from some one whom they are used to regarding as an authority, attesting the market value of the gems. When Durand finds out I’ve won you, he’ll burst with rage.”

“But you can’t know,” she exclaimed, as if the brand were still hot on her heart, “the abasement of that first moment when a woman realizes it all—you who always, everywhere, come first!”

He checked her with explosive energy. “Don’t say that!”

“It’s true—you always succeed.”

“Don’t say that, Louise!” he exclaimed in protest. “I couldn’t count my failures.”

“How can you honestly say that?”

“What you count successes have been wrung from men that hated me. They had no choice but to concede them. They needed me to put through their schemes. But, Louise—you didn’t need me to make money for you—you didn’t have to like me—it all just came out of your heart! I can’t understand yet how you could listen to me! I’ve always thought the finest instinct a woman has is her love for her offspring—the flesh of her flesh, the bone of her bone. How in the name of God she can love a man is a little too deep yet for me—no doubt He understands it.”

“You would understand it,” said Louise, “if you understood our vanity and weakness. We’re very common clay. Perhaps that’s why you love us.”

“Do you know,” he asked suddenly, “what I 231count my one success in life—my only success in life?”

She turned away, unwilling or unable either to respond or to bear his look—for his answer to his question was already foreshadowed in his tone and manner—just whipping her foot lightly with the willow. “My one success,” he repeated, not alone with a lover’s ardor but with a deeper conviction, “is that I come first with you! Nothing else—I count nothing else! Oh!” he exclaimed, “if I could have met you ten years ago—if you could have loved me ten years ago!”

She laughed softly. “Barely sixteen!”

“Yes,” he declared energetically, unabashed. “When you were barely sixteen! What I could have saved you!”

“I don’t know whether I could have loved anybody then—I was such a fool! But now I can at least make my way in the world. I can earn my own living.”

He was gently tolerant. “What a picture you’d make, earning your own living—you’re so big and strong!”

She held her ground. “I could do it.”

“How, for instance?”

“I could do lots of things—teach.”

Janeway was laughing at her. “Do you think you could possibly find any one to teach that knows less than you do?”

Louise blazed. “Why, the idea!”

“I mean, less of the world.”

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“I could sew.”

“Kimonos? Shirts? Pajamas? Louise!”

“Oh, you needn’t laugh. I could do lots of things.”

He was thinking, as his eyes rested on her, of a remark Harrison, in speaking of Durand, had once made to him; it was the first time he had ever heard of Louise. “Bob has a very bright wife,” the Judge had said, “a California girl. Elizabeth says she’s too thin to be beautiful. But she makes a hit with me. She’s got more brains than Bob,” the Judge had, in his staccato fashion, blurted out in conclusion.

As she sat before Janeway now in the morning sun, the thinness Harrison had criticised had gone, and the interval had given her the color—sometimes high—denied by earlier years.

“I’ll tell you what you could do,” suggested Janeway. “Write beauty hints to women for yellow newspapers. If you could only tell women how to charm merely by doing nothing—the way you do! But you couldn’t do even that. Charm is incommunicable.

“No; while I live, outside of any question of settlement from Durand, and whether you marry me or not, you shall never have to earn your own living. At the least, I can and will be responsible for your subsistence. There’s no law, human or divine, against my providing for you.”

“I couldn’t take money from you if I didn’t marry you.”

He closed his hands as he looked at her. “Louise, I’ll get money to you if I have to break into your 233room at night like a thief, and slip it into your purse by stealth. And I’ll bend above you as you sleep, to steal the fragrance of your breath!”

“Henry!”

“I’ll originate a new burglary; I’ll become an unheard-of criminal for you. Unlooked-for returns shall come to you, strange dividends reach you unawares; I’ll be behind every man you turn to for a position; mysterious salaries shall arise on every hand. But every man you speak to will fall in love with you——”

“They haven’t yet!”

“—then I’ll strangle each one in turn the way I’d have strangled Durand one day when he mentioned your name—if Simms hadn’t pushed him out of the room.

“You earn your living! The only way you could ever work hard enough to earn it would be in keeping me from providing it.”

“Do you know you’ll break my heart with kindness?”

“If you call that kindness, what’s to come would, as Jim Kennedy might say, reduce your pulsing muscle to the merest fragment, believe me. Louise, do you ever think of it—the mark of this world to-day, whichever way you turn, is unhappiness? Everywhere it’s unhappiness. Frankly, I want to escape it. I don’t feel I’m responsible for the present infernal state of things. But I do feel, with a horrible conviction, that you’re my only way out.”

She was gazing out on the lake. “Don’t forget,” 234she said, “that any one capable of great happiness cannot hope to escape great suffering—they go together. Oh, you’re very patient with my wretched difficulties. I know I ought to give you an answer.”

“Not till you give me the right one. But, Louise,” he added, “remember—there is a time for all things. Remember, the time for all things passes. Perhaps I’ve waited too long for my happiness. But when I think of you, I say to myself: ‘No. God meant I should wait for her.’ Only—don’t let the cup slip from our lips!”

“How can I ever marry you with this stone wall of divorce between us?”

“We must smash through any wall that parts us. I could make you outface this cringing, contemptible world; I could force it to your feet. It’s only your religion—this strange, uncompromising, incomprehensible, human and unhuman high court of Christianity that keeps you from me. Louise! Will you sacrifice me for an ideal?”

“It is not an ideal—it’s a faith. If you take it from me—if I lose it—I lose myself; I am lost.”

“Why did you ever put such a mountain as this Catholic Church between us? Why?”

“I turned to its hope to escape this world. I knew I was raising an impassable barrier against remarrying. What had marriage brought me but humiliation, wretchedness, sorrow, shame!”

“Damn men, anyway!” he exclaimed. “What were they made for?”

“How could I but detest it?” she asked. “How 235could I foresee such a moment as this? Forget me! Give me up!”

“Louise, I can’t give you up! You can give up what stands between us. Join some other church—turn Mohammedan, Hindu, Mormon—I don’t care a hang what you are. Only, for God’s sake don’t throw me over!”

“And what manner of creature should I be, if I now denied the Truth? I could never be the woman you hope for—the woman to make you happy, as you deserve to be. Had I never known this faith, it would be different. If I abandon it now, I lose, with its hope, even my self-respect. I am a grovelling apostate—worse than this low pagan I have put out of my life!”

“Stop, Louise!”

“Give me up. It is hopeless!”

Janeway rose to his feet. “You call it hopeless; be it so. For me it is not hopeless—nothing is hopeless. I will grapple with this to the death. I will study your faith till I know it better than you know it. I will besiege your priests till they run from the sight of me. I’ll wrestle with them till they gasp for breath! I will grope for every clew, clutch at every straw; hope, while I live, against hope. I will never give you up. After you see Marion, I will talk to him till one of us drops dead. I will go to Rome itself!”

Louise rose in turn. She could not conceal her emotion as she regarded him. “Surely, if they could hear you now they would find a way.”

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“I mean it. I will hear, if I must, from the lips of the Pope himself what you dread to ask. He himself shall tell me that because you’ve become a Christian you’ve condemned yourself to death in life, a woman neither married nor unmarried, a wife and no wife, a victim of the brutality of man, and a sacrifice on the altar of an all-merciful Christianity! I’m going to fight single-handed for my right to live, to breathe, to have my being in the woman I believe God created for me—as I believe He created me for her. Louise, wish me luck——”

She threw away her switch as she looked straight at him and rose to go. “I’d wish you, if I could, into heaven!”

That night Louise dreamed—not of the hours of the day she and Janeway had spent wandering over the island—not of the fragrance of the pine woods or the odor of reedy margins in their deep recesses—not of those early moments in which a woman realizes for the first time in her life that she is deeply, passionately loved by an honest man, and allows the yearnings of her heart to open it a little to the devotion of a lover—not of any of these pledges of a happy day after a dreadful night did she dream, but of trying amid agonizing confusion to catch a train that every one was hurrying to reach, and for which she seemed just too late. Janeway, clasping one hand, was urging her with energy up the platform; but Durand, refusing to release her other hand, was stubbornly holding her back.

“Did you finally make it?” asked Janeway, when she told him next morning. Both, by an unspoken but mutual conspiracy, were ready for breakfast ahead of their hosts.

“Oh, I woke up,” said Louise, “so I don’t know.”

“Well, my name isn’t Joseph,” he said, bending confidentially toward her over his coffee-cup, and giving an excellent imitation of Judge Harrison’s softest nasal tone, “but no seer is needed to interpret 238that dream—it’s taking candy from the baby. The train you were trying to catch was Happiness. The pulling and hauling on my part and Durand’s explains itself. But I suspect a contributing cause to your painful vision was a poor mattress; there was an awful hole in mine. Change rooms and beds with me to-night, and you’ll find yourself falling over a terrible precipice, or headed for the bottom of the sea, with me trying to bail the boat, and Durand furtively opening the sea-cocks and making faces at Neptune.

“There’s a bit more, though, to your dream about trying to catch the Happiness train that everybody was running after. It’s this: You’ve made certain reservations aboard that train, and in a particular car. I shouldn’t have been so particular myself, but that’s aside. If any car would do you, the last would be as good as the first; however, you’ve put it up to me to get you aboard one particular car—where accommodations are somewhat limited. And that’s my job.

“Fortunately,” continued Janeway gravely, “the conductor in charge is well disposed. Naturally he has asked to see your ticket, and we must show it to him before we can know what our chances are for a compartment. So—will you see the Bishop alone, or shall I go with you?”

They saw him together. In the afternoon Oliver took them over to Fond du Lac. Janeway made an appointment through Father Smyth, the Bishop’s 239secretary, for that evening, and at eight o’clock he called for Louise. They drove together to the Bishop’s residence.

Bishop Marion lived in a roomy, old-fashioned brick house that stood in a grimy street not far from the rolling-mills, and in the block occupied by the procathedral. In an early day the house had been the home of a well-to-do Fond du Lac family. Deserted by them as the town grew to the north, the property had been bought for church purposes, and gradually the whole block had been acquired. The old church used as a procathedral stood at one end of the block and the Bishop’s house at the other. Both were now greatly overshadowed by a huge parochial school which rose between the two, and which, with the exception of a large hospital that he had sponsored, comprised in its scope and expense most of the building operations that Bishop Marion had thus far achieved. When Janeway had reproached him for worshipping in a shabby church and spending his money on a big school building, the Bishop had asked him what he should think of a husbandman-farmer who, if forced to choose, should build a big house in preference to a big barn. “Moreover,” he had added, “I must set an example for my priests.”

Louise had been in the house but once before; that was some years earlier, with Gertrude, to arrange for a hospital benefit. She remembered only its dull, smoky interior and its very bare reception-room.

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Twilight softened the steep, shabby roof angles of the house as their car stopped before it. The reception-room seemed to Louise’s quick, nervous glance absolutely unchanged. The woodwork seemingly bore its original paint—not positively black but sombrely dark. Large folding doors, now closed, communicated with the chapel on one side, and a door opened on a rear room, but the height and width and gloom of these doors added to the depressing effect of the dreadfully ornate black-marble mantelpiece that stared at Louise as she sat opposite it.

The pictures were hardly less formal than the few pieces of carved walnut furniture in the room. On one side of the mantel hung a tolerable oil portrait of Benedict XV, and on the other an excellent copy on stone of the Richmond portrait of Cardinal Newman. His sweet dignity seemed, in the shabby gaslight, reassuring even to Louise’s uneasy eyes. She called Janeway’s attention to this picture, for she remembered it on her first visit as the most sympathetic feature of the room.

“I’ve been trying, from the looks of this room, Bishop, to decide whether you’re a very rich man or a very poor one; you might be either,” observed Janeway, after the Bishop had entered from the hall.

Bishop Marion laughed. “If debts would make a man rich, I should have nothing to complain of. Come this way, Mrs. Durand.”

The Bishop led his callers across the hall and ushered them through a large room fitted as a business office into a smaller room opening into it from 241the rear. This was, in effect, a private office. Louise and Janeway were comfortably seated, and the Bishop, taking the chair at his table, addressed himself without further prelude to Louise.

“Mr. Janeway has outlined to me something of the difficult situation in which you find yourselves, Mrs. Durand. And I assume you understand all he has told me of his wish to marry you?” Louise, not speaking, inclined her head in assent. “And,” added the Bishop, “that he speaks for you both?” She nodded again. Bishop Marion perceived the strain under which she was laboring. “You have become a Catholic,” he continued. “You have professed, no doubt despite great difficulties, the Christian faith of the many centuries. I have had no favorable opportunity to offer you my felicitations on the privilege of having embraced this faith; and my hope that you will persevere in it. Converts do not always realize what happens. It is not so much the neophyte who chooses as it is God who first offers the grace of faith. Once receiving this gift, we may accept it or reject it; but before we can choose, God first must give.

“He has chosen you, my child, into His fold, and your will has corresponded to His great gift. This is why I felicitate you. In all of the divine economy, nothing to our eyes moves more mysteriously than grace; and to you, not to another, it has been given.

“And now, I beg you to remember, you are in your Father’s house; and in the difficulties in which you find yourself because you are there, be not dismayed; 242for all that a Father can give you He will give. It is not always possible for even the most devoted parent to gratify every wish of his child; but the will and the wish for her greatest good is always in that parent’s heart—how much more so in the heart of God for the child of His creation!

“Now I must ask all about your marriage with Mr. Durand. Did you enter into your marriage with him of your own free will?”

It was still difficult for Louise to speak. She answered simply: “I did.”

Janeway started. “No!” he interposed quietly, but instantly. “Your mother—you told me, it was she who made you marry Durand.”

Louise looked at him. “Unhappily,” she said clearly, “I consented.”

The Bishop listened carefully. “Unless you were under duress,” he said, “no chance lies for us there. You married him in good faith?”

“I did.”

“Had Mr. Durand ever been married before—had he, by any chance, a wife living at the time of your marriage to him?”

“No, Bishop Marion.” Janeway, his eyes on Louise, sat in a brown study. “I have never heard a previous marriage mentioned in the family.” But Janeway held his peace, for on this point he could offer nothing. Bishop Marion was reflecting. “That gate, too,” he said, “is closed.”

“You never heard even a hint of such a thing?” asked Janeway of Louise.

243

“I am quite sure,” she returned, “that he was never married before.”

“Tell me,” continued the Bishop, “where were you married to Mr. Durand, and by whom?”

“Our wedding was at the Church of the Messiah, in San Francisco; we were married by Doctor Frale.”

“May his bond,” said Janeway between his teeth, “prove as flimsy as his name!”

“You, of course,” said Bishop Marion, still addressing Louise, “never had been married before?”

“No, Bishop Marion.”

“Do you know, Mrs. Durand,” continued the Bishop, “whether Mr. Durand had ever been baptized?”

“He never had been, Bishop Marion.”

“He never had been?” The Bishop leaned forward a little as he echoed her words. “Are you sure of that?” he asked, scrutinizing her closely.

“His mother told me he never had been.”

“How did she happen to tell you that?”

“In this way: His mother was reared a Catholic. She had given up her religion when very young. In her last illness, she told me and told Gertrude, among other things, that Robert and Gertrude had never been baptized, and she regretted it. That’s why Gertrude calls herself a ‘pagan,’” smiled Louise, looking at Janeway as she spoke.

But Bishop Marion did not join in the smile. “Had you, Mrs. Durand,” he asked, “ever been baptized?”

“Not until I was baptized in Geneva last year.”

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“Are you very sure of that?” he asked searchingly and almost suddenly. “Never before?”

“Quite sure. I was asked particularly then. My mother was an invalid after my birth. I was taken care of from infancy by my Aunt Maynie—she engaged my nurses and chose my governesses. She was living last year in Vevey, and wrote me about it at the time of my baptism, so I am quite sure. I have her letter. She is now at home in St. Louis.”

Bishop Marion regarded her with serious eyes. “You feel very sure then,” he said, measuring his words, “that you can lay before me satisfactory evidence that neither you nor Mr. Durand had been baptized at the time you married him?”

Louise replied without hesitation. “Oh, I think so, Bishop Marion. There should be no serious difficulty about that, I am sure.”

“And I,” interposed Janeway mildly, “ought to be of some assistance in assembling what you require concerning the facts.”

The Bishop sat a moment wrapped in thought. Janeway only watched him closely. Conscious of the oppressive hush of the moment, Louise looked down at the flimsy handkerchief in her gloved hand, clasped it more tightly, and waited for what should follow.

She could not know precisely what a moment in her life had just been reached; how delicately the chances for her present happiness were now being weighed in the scales of twenty centuries by the 245tired man before her; she was only conscious of a feeling that she loved Janeway deeply, a hope that she might yet be the means of his happiness. Only a woman is capable of such a hope.

“You lay a peculiar complication before me; not a new one—a very old one,” said the Bishop, still thoughtful. “You wish to know, my child, whether you are free to marry again. And you ask this as a Christian woman—one that has embraced the Catholic faith with intent to follow its teachings?”

“Yes, Bishop Marion.”

“Are you prepared to abide by what it shall decide?”

Louise moved in her chair. “How can I do otherwise?”

“Mr. Janeway has pleaded with you to give up that faith if it should raise a barrier between you; and you have refused to do so?”

His bluntness frightened her, yet something in his voice gave reassurance. She looked gravely at Janeway. “He understands,” was all she said.

“And you, Mr. Janeway, ask whether this woman is free in her faith to marry you?”

“Just that,” said Janeway coldly.

“Are you a Christian?”

“I am not.”

“You told me once,” observed the Bishop, surprised, “that you had been baptized?”

“Quite true, Bishop, I have been; but I make no pretensions.”

“And are you willing, Mr. Janeway, in your turn, 246to abide by what my findings in Mrs. Durand’s case may be?”

“I am not!”

The instant smoothness of Janeway’s refusal disconcerted for a moment even the Bishop. But he was quickly equal to a rejoinder. “Does that mean,” he asked, turning his collected faculties on Janeway, “that if I find no relief for her, you will continue to press upon her your suit; continue to urge her to deny her faith to grant it? Surely, this is not fair. You are an eminent lawyer. You have a perfect comprehension of what law means. Yet you appeal to a court, and in the same breath say frankly you will not abide by its decision—even when you must know,” he added, in reproach, “that the court is only too anxious to find for you, if it can be found, the relief you seek.”

Janeway met the statement with entire poise. “Bishop Marion,” he said gravely, “you have no need to ask in what esteem I hold you, but this is a question that bites into my very life. Your faith you would maintain with your last breath, defend at your life’s cost. Know, then, what this question means that you have put so lightly to me. This woman is my faith; she is my religion. I remember nothing of how she came into my life; I only know that at the price of it I would cheerfully seek her happiness.”

“Would you seek her happiness,” asked the Bishop in like tone, “before your own?”

Janeway showed emphasis. “My happiness could only be hers!” he exclaimed. “But somehow, somewhere,” 247he added intensely, “there is relief for us. And if you decide against us I will go for our relief to Rome itself.”

A faint smile on the Bishop’s face seemed sympathetic, but he pressed his visitor without relenting. “And beyond Rome?” he asked.

Janeway responded without hesitation. “It would rest with God—and Louise!”

As Janeway spoke Louise’s name, Bishop Marion turned his grave eyes on her. “In the circumstances you lay before me,” he said, “we can move only a step at a time. And the first step will seem harsh.” He appeared to speak as if in warning and in appeal to both. “But it is the great step,” he added, “and with it taken, the path, I hope, will be much clearer.” He turned to Louise. “My child, this step is yours to take.”

“What is it to be?”

“You must ask Mr. Durand whether he will consent to live again with you as his wife, in peace, and will promise in good faith not to interfere with you in any way in the practice of your religion.” Janeway started violently. Louise regarded the Bishop with open amazement. Indeed, she could hardly collect herself to echo the Bishop’s words. “Ask him,” she exclaimed, “whether he will consent to live again with me, as his wife! Why, we are divorced!”

“True,” returned the Bishop, “but that should, in point of fact, make the trial even safer than if you were not.”

Her horror at the proposal was reflected in her 248expression. “That,” she said, almost choking, “I could never, never do!”

“I warned you,” repeated the Bishop calmly, “that it would seem harsh.”

Louise appeared desperate. “I could give up my life before I could do that!”

“Such a proposal is intolerable, Bishop Marion,” interposed Janeway energetically. “Intolerable even to think of.”

“Let us all keep our heads,” remarked the Bishop admonishingly.

Louise looked hopeless. “I could not live,” she exclaimed, “for another hour under the same roof with that man!”

Bishop Marion held firm, but appealed for coolness.

“We tread on very thin ice, my children,” he said gently. “Let us weigh carefully our words.”

He saw how Louise was cut to the heart. “Our words!” she exclaimed. “Yes! But their meaning! Who but I can weigh that? You two, the kindest of men, are yet men. I, God help me, am a woman—I alone can weigh their meaning!”

“I am not asking you to live with Mr. Durand,” said the Bishop guardedly. “I bid you only to ask him whether, under certain rigorous conditions to be imposed, he will consent to live with you.”

It was a moment before the tortured woman could speak. When she did speak, it was under better control of her feelings, but with no less horror of the Bishop’s request.

249

“I need no discrimination,” she said more collectedly, “to make me realize what such a step means. Ask me anything, Bishop Marion, but that; ask me to drag myself on my knees in shame before him; ask me to forget that I have a heart; ask me never again to look into the face of any man. Don’t force me to go again to him!”

“Calm yourself, dear Mrs. Durand,” said the Bishop. “No one—I least of all—will force you to do anything.”

Janeway thundered his feeling into words. “No one,” he exclaimed, “shall force you, Louise.”

“Then let us think of it no more,” she said instantly.

“My dear child,” interposed the Bishop, “this interpellation must be made. It is not optional; it is necessary. I have no authority to dispense you from it. And without it, you leave me powerless in any way to help you.”

“Then I say,” declared Janeway and speaking to Louise, “if you can’t bear that message to him, I can. I,” he said ominously, “will talk to Durand.”

Louise grasped eagerly at the straw. She appealed to the Bishop. “Could he act for me?”

The older man, thinking, looked at Janeway. “The bearer of that message,” he said in measured tones, “will have need of very great self-control. The least rashness might lead to the death of the very hopes you seek by the step to kindle.”

“What do you mean, Bishop?” asked Louise.

“You know how acutely revengeful Mr. Durand 250is. He feels more bitterly toward you,” the Bishop looked at Janeway, “than toward any man living—unless,” he added with a faint smile, “it be toward me. Suppose Mr. Durand should gain, through Mr. Janeway’s coming from you,” he went on, speaking to Louise, “an inkling of your mutual hopes—and—from a motive of revenge—agree to all that is demanded by you?”

“We should be ruined!” exclaimed Louise, looking toward Janeway.

“But such a motive,” burst out Janeway, indignantly, “would invalidate his consent!”

“Yet how can we catch and label any man’s motive? We should be left in doubt. I myself would interpellate him for you; but anything I might say would arouse feelings quite as violent on his part toward all of us. I should, in all likelihood, be accused of conniving—and, to act, I must have his unclouded decision. May I tell you how I feel?” The Bishop, looking first at Louise, then at Janeway, addressed himself to both. “I feel that if we can secure an honest expression from Mr. Durand, you, Mrs. Durand, have nothing whatever to fear from interpellating him. I see what suffering the idea has caused you,” he said in kindly manner, to Louise, “but I really believe you are torturing yourself unnecessarily. Mr. Durand’s characteristics are such, his habits of life are so flagrantly open and notorious, that a Christian wife—any decent wife—would be an incubus on him.”

“Then,” demanded Janeway impatiently, “why, 251if these facts are patent to the public, to the court itself, require this hard interpellation to be made? Why not dispense with it and grant this injured woman relief out of hand?” he asked with vehemence.

“I should have more trouble in explaining to another than to an experienced legal mind that this step has long since been found by the Church necessary to protect the rights of all the parties at interest—the pagan spouse, the Christian spouse, and the third party who would enter into marriage with the latter. I need hardly tell you that when, for reasons founded on an experience in human affairs extending over many centuries, a law has been enacted precisely to avoid misunderstandings and deceits, its provisions are not lightly to be waived. This is not to say they may not be waived; if such an interpellation, for example, were impossible, an Apostolic dispensation from it could be obtained. All I want you to realize is that my power is a delegated, not a plenary one; that we must move first to establish, then to protect the rights of this innocent woman, and that this must be done under the seasoned laws of the Church to which she has appealed. I will leave nothing undone to shelter her within its mercies—the Church will never reject the child that has sought its sanctuary.

“Not,” he added clearly, “that it can always give to every one that pleads all he may plead for; but that it will give, to the uttermost farthing, all it may lawfully bestow on those who seek, as this 252injured woman has sought, its protection. Yet that certain forms of law must, in every code, be gone through with, I need hardly remind you, Mr. Janeway. The form that confronts us is one: Mrs. Durand must make this interpellation I have described; or we—you, I should say—must go to Rome and submit to the inevitable delays that follow an appeal to a supreme tribunal. Is it wise? Is it necessary? Is it not better, for your mutual relief, to comply with this requirement of the only law that I myself can administer?”

Seriously as the Bishop had spoken, Janeway had followed and had already digested every word of the speaker’s thought; when the Bishop finished he made only a further suggestion: “How about Gertrude?” he asked tentatively of Louise. “She might put these questions to Durand.”

Louise reflected. It was evident that she, too, had considered and was weighing every phase of the situation. “Gertrude’s relations with her brother are already strained to the snapping point over me,” she replied at length. “I can’t ask it of her. No,” she said hesitatingly, but as if reaching a hard decision, “there is no one to do this terrible thing for me. I alone—I, myself—must act. But when—where to see and speak to him?”

“If ’twere done, ’twere well ’twere done quickly,” observed Janeway, with immediate grimness. “The suspense is deadly. If she must interpellate this man as the first step toward freedom, let it be done at the earliest possible moment. All I ask is, not 253that I be present at their interview, but that I be in whatever place it is arranged.”

“He is in New York now,” said Louise, looking from one to the other of the two men. Bishop Marion and Janeway went into discussion concerning time and place. It was the Bishop’s suggestion that was finally adopted.

“I think,” said he, “that all can be conveniently and appropriately arranged here, in this house. Mr. Simms knows that the Arbitration Committee meets here next Monday evening to receive the signatures of the company and the men to the new agreement. Mr. Durand must be here in person to sign for the company. The men demand it, and Judge Harrison and Simms have agreed he shall be here. The house is large; you can have ample privacy. Isn’t that the best? Indeed, I urge it for reasons of my own—reasons I cannot explain now, but which you would approve could I discuss them, and which, I hope, you will one day fully understand. Shall we say, then, next Monday night, here; and that you both come to my private entrance door in Lake Street at seven-thirty o’clock?”

Even Janeway was taken a little aback at the businesslike promptness with which the Bishop wished the ordeal and the crisis—which meant so much in the two lives before him—faced. He looked toward Louise as if to ask whether she felt equal to what was being arranged. The expression of her face, as she looked down at the hand-bag she was toying with in her lap, reflected her distress. “Louise?” 254Janeway called her name tenderly. “I’m afraid,” he added, as she looked at him, “you can’t do it.”

All the reserve of courage in her being was manifest in her expression and in her words. “I must do it.” She rose as she spoke. Janeway and the Bishop rose with her. “I will go down into this valley. I will go alone before this—Moloch!” Her eyes, as they moved from one to the other of the men before her, were in themselves a moving appeal. “Only, pray for me, both of you,” she said steadily, “that I do not go in vain.”

“I’ve been practising in a new court,” said Janeway to Judge Harrison on the following afternoon. The Harrisons had returned from the island, and the two men were sitting on the Judge’s terrace.

Harrison looked sceptically at his companion. “What court is new to you?”

“An ecclesiastical court.” The Judge’s face showed he was still in the dark. “I suppose you know,” continued Janeway, without the slightest prelude, “or suspect, anyway—that I am in love with Louise Durand.” As a matter of conventional courtesy, Janeway waited for any comment the Judge might make on a subject that must always be considered a delicate confidence. It was not that Janeway expected a comment. He did not; his surmise that none would be forthcoming was correct—Judge Harrison’s face was non-committal. Janeway, however, knew that mask perfectly well; and knew pretty well most of the time what was going on behind it. He accordingly continued his disclosure without hesitation or embarrassment. “You know she has become a Catholic,” he went on, “and that makes the present question of her remarriage an extremely difficult one. I have appealed—or we have—to Bishop Marion, and as I represent the plaintiff, 256and am the plaintiff, in the case, I am considerably exercised over the outcome. You don’t seem in a hurry to wish me happiness.”

Judge Harrison roused himself. “Nevertheless, I do wish you happiness, Janeway. You deserve it. It’s the elusiveness of the thing I am thinking of. What company, for instance, would undertake to insure happiness in this life? Yet we are everywhere confronted with the spectacle of those about us attempting individually that which transcends even corporate recklessness. So—so,” he mused, in the German fashion. “You and Louise, eh? Well, it wasn’t very hard to see that over at the island the other day. Elizabeth seems to approve, so it would do no good for me to withhold my consent. You know what I think of Louise; she’s fine; as fine as they make ’em. In the Catholic end of it you’re up against a pretty stiff proposition.”

“Fairly stiff.”

“Can you make the grade?”

Janeway drew himself back, after his manner when facing a problem. “I wish I knew,” he said. “Always before I have had enough detachment, even in the greatest difficulties, to keep from worrying; not so, this time.”

“My advice to people that worry is not to worry,” said Harrison magisterially. “My advice to people that don’t worry is to worry. At Catalina once I met a man on a glass-bottom boat-trip, a stationmaster for the Erie Road at 23d Street. He was a Jew—the first I ever ran across working for a railroad—they 257know better—though I’ve met more than one that owned a railroad. He was a veteran in the service and knew Harriman, Mrs. Harriman, Roosevelt—everybody prominent in New York. He was worrying for fear he should lose his job. I told him he ought to be in no danger, and advised him not to worry. He looked at me with all the worldly wisdom of his race in his anxious eyes. ‘Mister,’ he said impetuously, ‘that’s all right; you mean well. But, let me tell you—in New York the men that don’t worry are sitting in the park.’

“After that I saw the wisdom of advising men that don’t worry, to worry. It’s not possible, I suppose, I can help you—briefing, or anything?” suggested Judge Harrison in softly nasal irony.

“You can help a little,” returned Janeway, somewhat to the other man’s surprise. “I’m anxious,” he continued, “to have Durand at Bishop Marion’s house promptly next Monday night at eight o’clock. He’s to be there, you know, to sign the new wage agreement; for another reason, which I need not go into, I hope to see him there on time. You can help by impressing on him the importance of closing with the men at the Bishop’s house next Monday evening, without fail.” Janeway threw emphasis into his words.

“Conspiracy,” muttered the Judge, chewing calmly his unlighted cigar.

“A new rôle,” retorted Janeway, “for you.”

“I’ll undertake to have Robert there,” acquiesced Harrison, quite matter-of-factly, “only stipulating 258that personal violence on the part of the ecclesiastical court be barred. What are you trying to do—write a new chapter in the canonical jurisprudence of the Roman Catholic Church?”

“I don’t know,” replied Janeway vaguely, “precisely what I’m trying to do—beyond getting Durand at Bishop Marion’s residence next Monday evening at eight o’clock.”

“I’ll begin wiring to-night,” said Harrison. “I think by Monday we can produce him.”

“Meantime,” remarked Janeway precatorily, “keep the confidence, please; not even Elizabeth, Judge.”

“Not even Elizabeth. And you,” admonished the Judge, “don’t torture yourself anticipating the worst. I’ve spent my life in jumping at conclusions, and most of them have been wrong.”

“You have never failed me in a crisis,” said Janeway simply. “Your friendship and mine is an unclouded one of long standing. I prize it the more because experience has forced me to the conclusion—as it did Shakespeare—that most friendship is feigning.”

“Friendship,” observed the Judge meditatively, “is a community of interests.”

“Or,” suggested Janeway, “a community of tastes?”

“Whatever it is,” responded Harrison, “it ought to be a community of principles. Well”—he spoke philosophically—“some one has said, pray as if everything depended on God; act as if everything 259depended on yourself. Go into the thing to win, Janeway. If the wind gets too high, make for shore in good season. I went out once with an old fisherman in Nantucket. Elizabeth was along. The Sound began to ruffle up. The fisherman wanted to head for home. Elizabeth didn’t want to go in, but he was set very seriously on getting ashore. She urged him to stick it out; quoted a line from the old song, ‘Is not God upon the water, just the same as on the land?’

“‘He is, ma’am, He is,’ responded the old salt, with one eye on Elizabeth and the other on his telltale. ‘I’m free to admit He is. But with the wind settin’ in that particular quarter, ma’am, ’tain’t so much with me a question of where He is as where I am.’”

The Judge continued in gently nasal tones to give Janeway the benefit of his reflections. “I don’t know much about Catholics myself. Elizabeth considers them—taken by and large,” explained the Judge apologetically, “somewhat smelly. But I tell her that will all be remedied when they ‘Gather with the saints at the ri-ver—That flows by the throne of God.’”

Janeway seemed too absorbed to respond. “The only thing I have against them,” Judge Harrison continued calmly, “is that their priests are mostly a—a—queer-looking lot. What?”

This suggestion drew from Janeway the desired rise. He responded in judicial appraisement of the Judge’s observation.

260

“I used to think so myself! I thought precisely the same thing,” he concurred, with emphasis, “and they are—a good many of them—a homely lot. But,” he asked flatly, “what can you do? Did Christ hunt up Apollos when he was looking for apostles? Fishermen are not usually handsome men. Peter wouldn’t get very far in a beauty show. And certainly Paul wasn’t drafted by the Lord because of his manly beauty.

“No,” he went on, with gathering conviction. “I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a bad sign for any religion when its favorite leaders, its clergymen and preachers, are handsome men—men notable for fine, strong features, good physique, and rich, persuasive voices. Such a state of affairs is a result, not a cause. It is due to the fact that a sect has nothing stronger than the personality of attractive men to kindle the interest of its adherents. The cynics grin when a handsome preacher makes a hit; and in this instance the grin has a basis of justification. Compare the picture of the dilettante, delicate-handed, snowy-banded priest held up to scorn by Tennyson, with the common, imperfect, knock-about, rough-and-ready men of the wide-spread Catholic priesthood—dressed in shabby wear; queer-looking, if you like—fat, squatty, angular, thin, just as they come; always comprehensible, usually dependable, no frills, nothing esoteric, just plain, every-day, cold-in-the-head servants of the Most High God. God help the religion whose heroes need to be handsome men!”

261

Janeway did not see Louise until Thursday. She was in Chicago that morning with Gertrude. Gertrude called Janeway up from Field’s to lunch with them. He found he could not, but clung to the telephone conversation, and at length, by agreeing to send Kennedy as a substitute, got Louise on the wire, and, under the plea of having something important to say, got her to promise, if Gertrude would accompany her, to come over a moment to his office. The two women took a car down-stairs and drove to Adams and Clark. They were received by Kennedy’s secretary and ushered into Janeway’s office. Kennedy was in conference with Janeway.

The conference ceased. “You’re going to lunch with us, Jim,” said Gertrude.

“Second choice, eh?”

“Not with me, silly. I hope you wouldn’t expect to be first with everybody?”

“If I hadn’t found a mistake of a hundred dollars in my favor in my bank-account this morning, I couldn’t do it, anyway.”

“That won’t help much, Jim; we’ve decided to lunch in Michigan Avenue.”

“What are you two fussing about?” asked Louise, turning from her talk with Janeway to get away from his eyes.

Kennedy looked at her. “When you write my epitaph, Mrs. Durand,” he said gravely, “let it be brief: ‘Always short.’ One o’clock, I suppose?”

“What was it important you had to tell me?” asked Louise of Janeway.

262

“Come over here by the window,” suggested Janeway, leading the way.

“I don’t believe you have a thing,” declared Louise, following him doubtfully. “You don’t act as if you had.”

“It’s something quite important, though not important at this moment. I saw Bishop Marion last night. He asked me to have you bring him that last letter from your aunt regarding your never having been baptized. And I have supplied him with all the other affidavits he has requested concerning the non-baptisms. He seems to attach great importance to that point. I don’t quite see myself what difference it makes; but I’ve won some desperate cases on seemingly inconsequential points.”

Janeway’s secretary appeared at the office door. “Mr. King, Mr. Janeway.”

“I’ll see him in a moment,” said Janeway, as Kennedy and Gertrude passed out into Kennedy’s office.

“Who,” murmured Louise, as the secretary retired, “is Mr. King?”

“Will King is President of the Standard Oil Company. An important thing,” continued Janeway, pursuing his topic, “for every moment from now till next Monday night, is not to worry over the situation. I feel,” he added, with a confidence real or assumed, “that everything will come out right.”

Louise looked at him incredulously. “You don’t really?”

“I do.”

263

She drew a breath of relief. “You certainly know how to inspire confidence.”

“That’s the way I earn my living. And my confidence expands enormously whenever you come in sight. You’re so—so trim, so pretty; you appeal to all the senses at once. First, you charm the eye; then there’s a faint, indefinable fragrance in your presence——”

Louise rose. “The President of the Standard Oil Company is waiting.”

“Let him wait,” retorted Janeway. “I hadn’t finished. To continue——”

“But you’re not going to continue,” declared Louise firmly. “You’ve said too much already. Next it will be my hat, and then my hair—that takes a long time—and then my hands and my feet—and my suit—all ‘impinging,’ as you say, on the valuable time of the President of the Standard Oil Company.”

Janeway looked closely at her, and pointed his words with a finger pantomime. “Louise,” he said earnestly, “I want to ask you just one question.”

“What is it?”

“If Will King were in here talking to you and I were out there waiting to get in—how long do you suppose he’d keep me cooling my heels before he rang?”

“Suppose we ask him?” suggested Louise, retreating toward the door of Kennedy’s office. She raised her arm and with a fast-waving hand said good-by. “Which of these doors is the right one?” she asked. “I don’t want to collide with poor Mr. King.”

264

“You never were more tantalizing in your life,” protested Janeway. “I’ll let you go if you’ll do something. It’s too nice a day to lose. Get through with your shopping in time for the three-o’clock train; I’ll make it, too. We’ll get off at Cedar Point and motor home—it’s only thirty miles.”

“How many times in thirty miles will you want to stop and talk to the waves?”

He made a grimace of impatience. “Will you? That’s a good girl. I’ll ’phone Adolph to meet us at the Point with the roadster.”

Janeway at Cedar Point took the wheel from Adolph, who boarded the train, and with Louise beside him had driven half-way to Fond du Lac, when a turn in the road brought them to the edge of the lake. Janeway stopped the car, and, giving way, Louise walked with him out to the beach. The sun was well down and a tonic north wind filled their nostrils as they reached the edge of the waves, curling in long, even swells up the sands.

Louise laughed. “A beach always makes me think of the first story I ever heard about you; it gave me an idea of your terrible temper.”

“What could that have been?” demanded Janeway calmly.

“You took a big touring car down to Florida one winter. It was very heavy. You had trouble with it all the time. Finally, one day you were driving with friends along the beach, and the car stuck in the sand. Nobody could budge it. In great wrath 265you despatched your chauffeur for another car, put your party into it, drove off and left your big car there for good.”

“I hope it’s there yet,” remarked Janeway, facing her unabashed.

“What an absurd thing for a great lawyer to do!”

“Don’t make fun of me. You know what a humbug I am, anyway, don’t you?”

They sat down on a ledge where the waves had undermined the turf. “No, I don’t know,” protested Louise promptly. “You must be a great lawyer. I’ve been hearing about it ever since I knew you. ‘Remarkably subtle mind; extraordinary grasp on constitutional questions; exceptional as a trial lawyer’!”

“What nonsense you know it all to be!”

“No, I don’t!” she insisted. “Haven’t I heard these judges that go fishing with Uncle Sidney talk? And somehow”—she was poking the point of her sunshade into the wet sand—“my ears are so wide open when your name comes up. And I say to myself, I don’t care how subtle his mind is—or how much he knows about the Constitution—or how much he sways a jury——”

“Make me out as silly as you can.”

“That’s all.”

“No, you hadn’t finished. Go on.”

Louise was in no hurry to proceed. “If you have such a remarkably subtle mind,” she said complacently, “you can guess the rest.”

“How much is there to it?”

266

With her sunshade she was drawing dancing dolls in the sand. “Just four words,” she said finally.

He could get no more from her, but she promised to tell him some time. When he called up late that evening, she thought the telephone was not the proper medium for at least one of the words.

“I hope it’s not a swear word,” he said reprovingly.

Her reply followed a slight pause. “I’m afraid it is, in a way. At least, many people swear by it.”

Before train time, in the morning, a note addressed in a hand he recognized by instinct was brought to his apartment. It bore a “Personal” caution above his name. He slit open the envelope, and found an unsigned correspondence card. On it was written in a small, fast-flowing hand:

“I’m awfully sorry I made that promise last night. You wheedled it out of me with that jury-fixing way of yours. Now, it makes me feel very silly indeed. But, since I promised: when I hear all these nonsensical things about you, I say to myself: I don’t care; he loves me, anyway.”

He neglected his morning paper, and having no prospect of seeing Louise that day, he called up, as the next best thing, her brother George, and asked him to take lunch at the Lawyers’ Club. At the table he reproached George for neglecting to run up to see his sister oftener, and having done so, told him the story of his hopes.

George listened with interest. He was pleased. 267But he made little of the difficulties that Janeway confessed confronted him. “If you want her, take her!” he exclaimed. “No institution should step in between a man and a woman that want to live together. And a man and a woman should live together only till they’re tired of each other—no longer.”

“But suppose one tires and the other doesn’t?”

“That minute,” declared George emphatically, “they should quit.”

“So,” commented Janeway, “when a man sees a woman he likes better than the first one he has picked on, he should desert Number One for Number Two—Number Two for Number Three—and so on down the line.”

“Just that!” exclaimed Louise’s brother. “And for a woman, exactly the same privilege. An ironclad marriage contract is a curse to human nature. If you want people to be happy, leave men and women as free as birds of the air to mate when and where and with whom they choose, and as often as they choose.”

“But, George,” said Janeway composedly, “would you give me such a privilege as that with your own sister? Would you condemn a woman like Louise to the filth of that kind of a sex barnyard?”

“Let the woman that wants to keep out of it, keep out.”

“That’s not the way your soviet heroes talk in Russia. They’re drafting women in Russia, George. When a man wants a woman, they profess to ‘need’ 268her, for the ‘service of the state’ in their soviet barnyard.”

Fargo shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not responsible for what’s done in Russia. I want men and women to be free.”

“Durand ought to be a good recruit for your ideas,” suggested Janeway, meditating, “and the bigger you make your barnyard the more popular it will be with the Simmses and Durands of your commonwealth. Well, here’s to your sex barnyard, George! May it flourish in your servile state!”

“But I think I can safely say that at least one Fargo of your family and one Janeway of mine will never avail themselves of its freedom!”

It was only after he returned to the office that he learned from Kennedy that the Durand Steel Company had passed its dividend. This was not reassuring, in view of the large cash settlement asked for Louise, to which he was holding Durand. But more disquieting was the further news that Kennedy had had the night before from Gertrude Durand. Bob, she told him, had quarrelled and, she thought, broken with Maymie Montgomery. And as an anticlimax came news under a scare-head in the evening papers that Mrs. Simms had brought suit for divorce, with the revolting particular that she had named, among others in her bill, her Wheaton relative.

Reaching Fond du Lac late, hot, quite tired, and grown serious with the day’s developments, a telegram, as he stepped from the train, was put in Janeway’s hands.

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He tore it open on the platform; it was from Kennedy.

“Final decree in the Durand-Durand case came down late this afternoon. Property settlement gives Mrs. Durand practically everything asked for. Copy ready for you in the morning. Either party may remarry at any time. Congratulations!”

From his apartment Janeway despatched a messenger, enclosing the message to Louise.

On Saturday night Janeway had a political meeting to address in Chicago. Uneasy over the developments in his own particular concerns, the task of speaking seemed an especially onerous one. But the meeting was meant to launch the Harding campaign in the Middle West, and demanded his best possible effort; its success was deemed vital.

The night proved insufferably warm, but the auditorium was packed. Despite the weather handicap and his own mental anxieties, Janeway, whose sympathies were enlisted in the signal defeat of the incumbent administration, rose to the occasion. Never a strong partisan, his detachment on ordinary issues lent force to his present appeal, and in the eight years of Mr. Wilson’s record in the White House he found ample material for his purpose. His facts, chosen strictly with a view to their cumulative force, concealed his bitterness skilfully, and with his energy carefully in hand, Janeway, in speaking, seemed the frankest and most disinterested man in the huge gathering.

Simms had come down with Judge Harrison to see how the thing went off. His first expression of opinion was given in reply to a prod from Harrison 271as the two left the platform. “The mildest-mannered man,” quoted Simms vindictively, “that ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.”

Harrison’s comment was dry: “All throats should be cut and all ships scuttled in that fashion; it’s the most effective. He certainly bored into your craft to-night.”

“Jury talk—jury talk, Janeway,” sputtered Simms impatiently, as the three men sat down to supper.

“If every case I’ve had to lay before a jury had as much merit as that, my juries wouldn’t have to leave the box,” remarked Janeway.

“Why can’t you come out square in the open and fight clean and aboveboard?” demanded Simms, with indignation.

“There are several answers to that,” returned Janeway lazily. “The first is, it’s too hot.”

“You appeared to have ’em with you to-night, Henry,” observed Harrison, biting his cigar.

“A man that couldn’t talk on that subject,” exclaimed Janeway, “would have to be born in darkest America. I’m no patriot; but any man, after he’s been robbed, and bludgeoned, into the bargain, will talk.”

Janeway had intended to stay at the club, but Harrison persuaded him the heat was such that he could not sleep in the city, anyway. He finally accepted Harrison’s suggestion that he ride to Fond du Lac with Simms and himself in Harrison’s car. Still warm from his work, Janeway took the seat with 272the chauffeur, and, lapsing into silence, gave little heed to the talk in the tonneau. He had enough to think about. And the stars were good company. The travellers had looked for a deserted roadstead, but the highway was packed with cars the whole way home. They reached Fond du Lac drowsy but cooled, just as the east was brightening with the new day.

Janeway, still keyed up from his effort, slept uneasily and for only a few hours. At breakfast a sudden resolve seized him—to go to church. And next to go to the procathedral, because there he might see Louise. He was to be at Gertrude’s in the evening for dinner, but the intervening hours bulked before him like an age.

When he reached the church, High Mass was under way. The usher he met in the vestibule proved a local acquaintance whom Janeway knew but could not place, and who, with a quick smile, beckoned the chance visitor to come with him. Janeway would have sought an inconspicuous place, but it was impossible, without running, to catch up with his guide to ask for one. To his great annoyance the young man, treating him as an exhibit, led him on and on down the crowded centre aisle, till Janeway, red in the face, found himself seated within a few pews of the altar-rail. Unluckily, too, the pewholder whose hospitality had been invoked in his behalf knew Janeway, and the efforts on his part to make the unexpected guest feel at home made him feel the less so. From the choir-loft came the martial 273strains of the Gloria. But by giving his attention with ostentatious correctness to what Harrison would have termed “the proceedings” at the high altar, Janeway gradually cooled, and, as he did so, recovered his poise.

By that time the pulpit had been rolled to the front, and a young clergyman was reading the announcements. Janeway listened to the opening of the sermon, mentally following and changing at times the words and phrases of the youthful orator, but sympathetic to the simplicity of his presentation. Then his mind wandered, and he recalled the last time—some years earlier—that he had been in that church. It was at the funeral of an elderly man, a client. Janeway had drawn his will, and the family asked Janeway to be a pall-bearer, because of the friendship the dead man had felt for him.

The incident had fixed itself in Janeway’s mind because of an unusual circumstance. The dead man had failed in Fond du Lac in business. It had been a bad failure and a compromise with the creditors. The man had been, through Janeway’s efforts, legally freed from his debts. Years afterward a strange thing—at least in Janeway’s experience—had happened. The man, succeeding then very well, had come and told him he wished to make further payments to his old creditors, until they should receive, when and as he was able, a hundred cents on the dollar for their claims. Janeway had notified the creditors, widely scattered, and a large initial payment 274had been made, when death had knocked at the heart of his client, and, dying, he had told everything to his lawyer, because it then became a necessity.

In his old failure the man, now long dead, had concealed an item in his assets. It had never been found out—never would be, Janeway had told him—but the client was bent on making complete restitution, and now committed the unfinished amend to his two grown sons. Janeway was made solemnly to promise that, so far as in him lay, he would see that the dead man’s sons carried out their father’s dying injunction—though they were never to know the real reason for it; Janeway had urged that they should not.

The two sons, strong men, had faithfully co-operated in the discharge of the debt. It left Janeway now only to recall the strictness of the dying man’s code, and how a sort of death agony of humiliation had beaded his brow in the moment he found himself forced to confess to his attorney a shameful delinquency.

The sermon was ended—though it happened it was the dead man who had preached to Janeway’s somewhat cynical views, formed among men of large affairs, on conscientious scruples. And Janeway now recollected it was the younger of his friend’s two sons who had ushered him to an honorable seat before the altar, and the older who had welcomed him to the family pew.

The Mass had been resumed when Janeway’s mind 275returned to the scene before him. He wondered whether Louise might be in the church, but the perfervid usher had placed him where he could see but few of the congregation. The music of the Credo reached his ears; then the dignity of the function at the altar, as the officiating priest reached the Canon of the Mass, held his interest. With the coming of the Sanctus he heard the strident warning of an altar-bell. The solemn moment of the celebration was at hand, and the hush that spread over the crowded nave reacted on Janeway.

He shared, without knowing why, in the suspense of the waiting multitude of which he had made himself one. He watched, without understanding, the priest bow low, in the words of the consecration, and suddenly kneel, while the acolyte struck the bell again. He saw the heads bowed about him as the Host was elevated. It was as if he had for a moment participated in some strange new sensation, some mystery never before touched on. He fell musing on what his new feeling might be, surrendered an instant to its restfulness, and only the music of the Agnus Dei, storming heaven with its plea, brought him uncertainly back to his surroundings.

Abandoned to his dreaming mood, seeing and hearing what his eyes and ears filmed before his senses, yet with his mind wandering to the battlefields of France, back to the altar and then to Louise, he sat, half in trance, until the priest, turning toward him, held the Host aloft and repeated the words of the Domine, non sum dignus, while an acolyte, walking 276down to the rail, threw over it the communion cloth.

A burst of music fell upon Janeway’s ears. With the unison of many voices rising higher and still higher in the pleading of the Agnus Dei, the thunders of the organ rolled down the long nave. He heard, breaking in on this, the harsh clang of the sanctuary bell. Then he was conscious of a hush among the people, and his ear caught a quick feminine step in the aisle—a slender figure, that of a youthful woman, her veil half raised, passed him rapidly and knelt at the foot of the sanctuary steps. It was Louise.

Janeway’s shock, the thrill of watching her walk up alone before the silent congregation in an act of humility and faith, blended into the solemnity of the scene. The hush of the watching multitude under the prayer of the swelling music, the priest coming slowly down from the altar, bearing the ciborium and the Host, held him motionless. He saw Louise rise, ascend the steps, and kneel at the sanctuary rail to receive the Holy Eucharist.

He had seen this woman who had so entered his life, in many aspects of loveliness—to him; under many circumstances moving—to him; in many moods that ministered to every wish of his heart, that stilled with hope every desire of his being; yet in none of these had she seemed quite as she now seemed, kneeling alone before him at the altar; it was as if a curtain never before raised had been lifted; as if, himself unseen, he had for an instant looked into her soul.

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He passed out as the congregation passed out, saw Louise kneeling, with head bowed, in a seat well down the aisle, and waited outside in the sunshine. When she appeared she half tripped down the cathedral steps, laughing at seeing him. She bore in on his stiff seriousness, as she always did when care free, with bantering questions. She seemed to bring out something pleasant but only rudimentary in his nature. Her light-heartedness, her buoyancy of spirit, knocked at something dormant, something neglected, but something that could be awakened, in his own nature, and, whatever it was, pleasant to feel. In a few moments she could change his mood, put new thoughts into his head, lift his spirits, naturally sober, to her own.

“You must have covered yourself with glory last night,” she said, as they started to walk home.

“I covered myself with perspiration. It was fearfully close. I hope the election won’t be like it.”

“The morning papers featured you.”

“Not for any love of me; they want Harding elected.”

“It was a dreadful photograph of you. But”—she lifted her eyes to his for just an instant—“I was awfully proud. Gertrude and I were sorry we hadn’t gone down.”

“If you’d been there I should have forgotten my speech.”

“It was so warm I lay awake nearly all night, anyway. Then I overslept this morning and missed the early Masses.”

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“That was for my particular benefit.” He turned to her as they walked. “It amazes me, how little I think of outside you. When I leave you, it’s only to wonder when I shall see you again.”

“Heavens!” she exclaimed. She was looking straight ahead to break the gathering force of his words, and saw an unwelcome sight. “There comes Mr. Simms.”

Janeway, too, was annoyed, but turned it off. “If he carries any tales I’ll kill him,” he said evenly.

Simms greeted them effusively. He stopped a moment to abuse Janeway for his talk at the auditorium and moved on. Janeway hung on till he reached Gertrude’s. Louise could not do otherwise than ask him in. Indeed, she was little loath to cling to his company. Gertrude had not come down-stairs, and Janeway sat in the dining-room while Louise took her rolls and coffee.

“Sure you won’t have a cup—just a little one?” she asked, more than once—partly for hospitality and largely in an effort to divert his mind from an all-pervading interest in everything she was doing. He declined refreshment, but walked with her out into the garden. They sat down in the shade of the pergola.

“Will Simms do us any harm?” Louise asked. She was sitting close beside him, in the lee, as it were, of his arm; he had thrown it along the back of the bench and sat half facing her. She, in the sheerest of white, tried not to be self-conscious, but Janeway, however quiet, made the effort an unremitting 279one. When she asked her question, his eyes happened to be bent on her hands, folded very simply in her lap. And when he made no answer, she repeated her question. “Will Simms, do you think, do us any harm?”

“All he can,” he returned contemptuously. “How nice and cool you look,” he added.

“I am cool. Your suit is too heavy for to-day, isn’t it?”

“I always forget to change. Where did you get such hands?”

“Isn’t it terrible to want to make trouble for others?”

Janeway half laughed. “I’m going to play golf with him this afternoon. And I’m going to hand him a poser myself.”

“What kind of a poser?”

He regarded her with quizzical benevolence. “Gertrude has invited me for dinner. I’ll tell you to-night.”

At dinner Kennedy joined them. Gertrude and he sat down with Louise and Janeway. Afterward Kennedy and Gertrude went for a drive. Louise and Janeway walked in the summer night up the lake front, and, returning, sought the coolness of the garden. Only twenty-four hours lay between them and the crisis of their lives, and its impending weighed, despite the efforts of each to conceal from the other the strain both felt. “It’s no use, I guess,” said Janeway at last. “We’re trying to talk and 280think about everything but what we actually are thinking of, if not talking about; I would to-morrow night were past!”

“You were going to tell me what you said to Simms.”

“Then first I must tell you why I said it. A new complication arose yesterday. I said nothing about it for fear it should worry you; don’t let it—any more than you can help, anyway. Durand has quarrelled with Mrs. Montgomery, I hear. That makes our situation somewhat more delicate—if anything can,” he added with gentle irony. “So I injected another factor into the case to-day. I said to Simms: ‘Simms, I’m beginning to feel Bob Durand and I both made a mistake in quarrelling. I’m going to tell him so at the first opportunity. Is there any good reason why we shouldn’t resume our old relations?’

“Simms was struck dumb. You can imagine how that set on him. His head will whirl like a merry-go-round till he can get Durand’s ear and warn him I’ve got something dangerous up my sleeve. In point of fact, I have, but not of the sort he supposes.

“With that astonishing overture planted, their minds will be in confusion for a day, at least; in it we may escape; I wish to God I knew!”

Louise drew herself up a little and took a breath as if of resolve. She looked at him with something of the affection she usually guarded so closely.

“Whatever comes, Henry,” she said quietly, “I can never be grateful enough for your patient restraint. 281If nothing else had touched my heart, that would. From the very first you’ve been, every moment, considerate! Don’t imagine I don’t realize it; don’t imagine—” Afraid to go too far, she checked herself as quickly as she had begun. “It’s out of fashion nowadays in love-making, you know,” she said, with a hard laugh.

“Yes, I do know,” he answered simply. “I realize how foolish I should seem, tried by present-day standards. ‘If you want her,’ says even as wise a man as Judge Harrison, ‘tear her silly religious scruples away from her—they’re out of date—carry her off!’ ‘Yes,’ I said to him, ‘I’ve thought of that, too. I’m not an expert at love-making. And it may be that if another type of woman were in question, I might forcibly abduct her. But I’m not interested in a mere abduction. I want to live my whole life with the woman I love. I want her to be happy—otherwise I can’t be. To separate her with violence from her matured convictions in the most vital of concerns, after what she has already been through, might work for a while. But should I really have the same woman I loved? Or altogether another sort of woman?’

“When I was young in the law I used to tie men up for my clients in contracts so tight they couldn’t breathe; I never do that any more. Men will sign; but if the agreements are too violently one-sided they won’t stick.

“I think,” he went on, “a man would be a poor manager—he’d be a mighty poor judge of human 282nature, and that means a poor lawyer—if, on catching a humming-bird and a hawk, he were to treat them both alike. You might starve the hawk, common style, into tameness; but the humming-bird would die. I don’t see what I have to gain by doing violence to mine; I want her exactly what she is—not turned into a hawk. She might, some time, sink her claws into me!”

Wrapped in thought, Janeway, while Louise made comment, looked out across the garden. In a moment he laughed. “What is it?” she asked.

“I was just thinking,” returned Janeway, “when I get to heaven——”

“Oh!” exclaimed Louise, “you expect to get there, then?”

“Well, for my trial, at least; I understand every man is to have his ‘last day’ in court. I want to ask God just one question. I want to turn my eyes back for once on the ruck of men and women that incumber this earth, and say: ‘How did You stand them?’”

Louise laughed. “I shouldn’t dare ask Him that.”

“Why not?”

“He might ask: ‘How did I stand you?’”

She saw, despite his raillery, how his anxiety was centred on what confronted them in the interpellation. “You’ve borne it all so well,” she said, “and you’ve done nothing to deserve all this. I feel like a wretch to inflict it on you.”

His hand covered hers. “My only fear once was that you might refuse to ‘inflict’ your difficulties on 283me. Even now I suffer more suspense for you, if possible, than for myself—though I can’t think of us any more as two; I think of us only as one. If I am anxious, if I am sometimes worried——”

“I know more than you think how it has weighed on you.”

“If it has, it’s because it’s all so strange, so unaccustomed in my life; it’s because it stirs depths that I never knew were within me till I loved you. Then, when I think coolly of it, and of my chances, Louise—” He checked himself. “Why should I say this to you?”

She resented his forbearance. “I want to hear everything.”

“Sometimes I feel like a gambler—a gambler who, staking all on the fickle turn of a card, has played the game year after year and won; a gambler who looks back now, awed, at the wrecks on every side, that sat at the same table with him, laid the same stake, success, on the same card—and lost!

“And now”—his fingers closed over hers—“I grope forward again bringing in my hand—not as steady as it used to be—my old stake, success! And this time I bring with it my only chance for happiness—my life—and I bring it to the table to take the last chance on the last card that can ever turn for me in this world——”

“Don’t say that!”

“But I do say it! And I say to myself: Is it even possible I can win again?”

Twenty-four hours later Bishop Marion’s residence was well lighted. Its evening appearance indicated something like a reception. But it was not to be, in the conventional sense of the word, a reception, although, as Judge Harrison, accompanying the two solemn arbitrators, remarked in nasal undertones to his cigar, “matters of great pith and moment” were to go forward that night within those walls.

Harrison, in fact, with the representatives of the men and of the company, was the first that evening to ring the Bishop’s bell and to be received into the public office. While the Arbitration Board, made complete by the Bishop, were examining their findings for the final signatures, the door-bell rang the second time. The man-servant answering the summons received Simms, as Durand’s attorney, and Durand himself.

They were shown into the reception-room and told that the Bishop would join them in a moment. The man, retiring, closed the door behind him.

Durand was neither in an amiable frame of mind nor in a waiting mood. The issue of the wage controversy had gone somewhat against him, and had added to his personal and corporate annoyance. 285Ignoring the parting invitation of the passive servant to be seated, he strode almost truculently from one to another of the pictures on the walls, inspecting them with rapid and impatient disdain, and glancing with querulous eyes in one direction after another as he heard the sound of footsteps outside the closed doors of the room—for the Bishop’s house was large and his visitors, on occasion, numerous; arrangements for the receiving of different parties without intruding one on the other had long been studied and pretty well perfected.

But on this evening an exception had been made to the careful arrangements for front-door entries. One of his expected guests the Bishop had thought entitled to even more protection from possible contretemps. The young woman, on whose shoulders he had laid, in the discharge of his office, the heavy duty of interpellating a gross and revengeful husband, he considered entitled to his own household entrance by the inconspicuous door of the side street.

There, Louise, accompanied by Gertrude, whom she had begged to come with her, and by Janeway, was received by Father Smyth, the Bishop’s secretary, and shown into a small anteroom to await Bishop Marion, when he should be ready to summon her for her ordeal. This anteroom communicated with the reception-room in which Durand was then waiting; it might easily have been the sound of his wife’s or Janeway’s footsteps that Durand at one moment impatiently heard. But the house was old and honestly built, and its walls and doors gave no 286echo to voices. The Bishop’s sister appeared in a moment. When she left the room she took Gertrude with her.

Durand, finding nothing to please him in his surroundings, turned on Simms. “Well, where is this meeting here to-night?” he snapped.

“In the Bishop’s office, I suppose.”

“Why don’t we go in there? What’s all this red tape for? I thought you said they’d be waiting for us!”

Each question came sharper than the last. Simms knew there was nothing to do, but felt called on to get up out of the comfortable chair he had settled in and pace the floor a little himself. “I guess they are waiting for us,” he said defensively, “but we’ll have to wait here till the Bishop takes us in.”

“Takes us in!” retorted Durand. “I’ll say so! Five hundred thousand dollars a year added to our pay-roll. Then this divorce settlement gouge! And you thought you’d get rid of her for nothing!”

His words made Simms sulky. “You’re lucky she didn’t cost you an even million. If Janeway’d had his way, you’d not have got off so light.”

Durand’s lips tightened. “I’ll get back at that fellow some time.”

“Watch him till you do. He made a mighty queer crack at me yesterday. It made me think he’s got some kind of home-brew fixing for both of us. He’s sticking mighty close to your wife. I saw ’em out yesterday together.”

“Sticking close to a fifty-per-cent fee,” said Durand. 287“I saw him out myself yesterday morning with a classy dame.”

“Where?”

“In Lake Street.”

“What time?”

“About eleven o’clock; I was driving down Fifth.”

“That was your wife with Janeway.”

“What?”

Durand’s exclamation expressed his incredulity. “Great Scott, man,” demanded Simms peevishly, “don’t you know your own wife when you see her?”

“Was that Louise? Well!” Durand half laughed. “Queening up, ain’t she?”

“She always was a queen. I never could see what you wanted to throw her over for,” observed Simms, willing to return to Durand something of his own daily portion of ill-humor at his employer’s hands.

Durand only made a mouth. “She’s caught the style.”

“If you’d held on to a wife like that, your lady friends wouldn’t all be hounding you to marry ’em.”

“Oh, hell!” Whatever Durand meant to add to an inelegant expletive was cut short. Bishop Marion opened the hall door.

“Well, Bishop,” said Simms, in his naturally pompous manner, and after the rather stiff greetings, “we’re—er—ready to meet the Board and—er—clean this thing up. Sooner the better, eh?”

“You will find the Board members and Judge Harrison in my office. Come this way, please.”

The meeting in the Bishop’s office, requiring the 288signatures of the parties at interest, was formal and not prolonged, but to Louise and her companion the moments dragged with leaden feet. Janeway used the tactics he had so often employed with a client when waiting for a verdict, that is, he kept going a series of remarks neither frivolous nor serious, choosing subjects to divert, if possible, her mind and his own.

“It’s a curious fact,” he said, musing, when other topics had failed, and staring in an absent-minded way at the high, bare walls of the little room in which the two were cooped, with two small chairs and a very small table. “I never come into this old house without feeling better when I go away from it. And somehow I feel that’s just what’s going to happen to-night.”

Louise smiled. It was a smile of sympathy for him, such sympathy as a woman is capable of expressing for a man she has learned to love, even at a moment when she herself is the greater sufferer; such as a woman is capable of feeling for one loved, even at a moment that she immolates herself on the altar of their mutual affection. Women can do these things; if men ever can, it is because they have learned how from women.

“I wish I had your courage,” she said, in simple reply.

Janeway reached across the table. “Your hands are cold.”

“I shouldn’t mind that if my knees would keep still.”

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“I wish I could put mine under you,” exclaimed Janeway, “though they might carry you too far or too fast for your work to-night. But simply be composed, Louise, in what you say. And say only what the Bishop requires you to say. Don’t say too much; many a man has come to grief through that. Do you remember the Bishop’s exact words?”

“I think so.”

“Be everlastingly sure so.”

“But if I am in good faith, I must be natural?”

Janeway threw up his hands. “If you’re natural you’ll ruin us! Be cattish, cold, ominous—but not natural. While you talk, I’ll go into the office and sit with Judge Harrison.”

“And remember,” he continued, always in raillery, but with a shrewd admixture of prudence, “these are the vital words. I will repeat them: ‘It is my duty, under certain conditions, to live with you as your wife.’ Come out strong with ‘conditions.’ Don’t, for the love of God, Louise, let too much of the sweetness of your mouth breathe into your words. And these are the conditions: ‘That you will not, in any way, interfere in the practice of my religion.’ Use those very words, ‘in any way’—they will irritate him.”

“Henry!”

“And don’t talk too long. If you do, I’ll break into the room myself.” He regarded her critically, as a master might study a prized pupil, his glance roving from feature to feature, as if calculating the danger each might contribute to the impending situation. 290His eyes rested at length on her hat, a close-fitting affair, with just crown enough to add artfully to her height and frame the slender outline of her face. “Darling!” he exclaimed, with a despairing gesture. “Why did you wear your prettiest hat? Why didn’t you put on an old one? You should have dressed dowdily for the part—why didn’t we think of it? I’m always,” he said angrily, “forgetting something vitally important.”

“But this hat is an old one,” cried Louise under her breath, in self-defense. “I brought it from Paris.”

“I wish you’d brought one from Oshkosh!”

“I might take it off.”

“That would be worse. When I began practice,” he went on, “I never let a feminine client appear before a jury till she had passed my inspection. If it were a widow suing a heartless corporation, she was drenched in grief and trappings of woe when she entered the court-room—no gay-widow business there; and even then I’d have to tell her that if her new fiancé put his head so much as inside the court-room door, I’d drop the case. And if it were breach of promise—well! My client was sent straight from my office to a beauty parlor—the very first shot out of the box—and dolled up, every morning the trial was on, within an inch of her life. I’ve had some queer-looking dames come back from those places.”

There was a slight knock. The door of the reception-room opened. Bishop Marion stood before 291them. “Your husband,” he said quietly to Louise, “is here.”

She rose with a start and looked from one to the other of the two men. “How shall I ever face him?” she murmured.

“Don’t be frightened,” said the Bishop calmly. “He is in the office with Mr. Simms and the arbitrators. They have signed. I’ve told him you are here and wish to speak to him a moment in the reception-room. You ask how you shall ever face him. You will face him, my child, by committing your cause to God, who will not fail you. And to the Mother of God, who was a woman, and knew suffering even as you have known it. Neither God nor His blessed Mother will for one moment desert you or see you tried beyond your strength. That is how you will face him—with the right on your side, and leaving the issue in God’s hands. We two will retire now. Come in this way. I will ask Father Smyth to send your husband in.”

Bishop Marion pointed the way to the reception-room. Janeway spoke.

“Give me just a moment, Bishop,” he said. “I will follow you.” The Bishop walked from the antechamber. Janeway took Louise’s hand. The two looked into each other’s eyes. Janeway drew her hand close and for the first time slipped his arm behind her. “Courage, my darling,” he said, tenderly. “This is the last battle you will ever fight alone; the last moment, I hope, that will ever separate us. And if it separate us forever—let it leave us, at least, the memory of a kiss!”

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He drew her to him. Her hands caught the lapels of his coat. Their lips met. Releasing herself, she whispered, still looking into his eyes: “You must go!”

She stood behind the centre table in the reception-room, fingering, with rather a pathetic effort to appear at ease, the leaves of an open pamphlet that lay near the call-bell on the table before her. Under the electric light of the old-fashioned chandelier above, her hat partly shading her face bent down, and with her gloves in one hand, Louise’s eyes saw nothing of what they looked at. She could not have named one word of the printed pages passing slowly under her sensitive fingers; she could not even call to mind the words she was soon to speak, so intently were her ears keyed to listening for the familiar stride of her husband’s feet; it was a sound that had too often brought her unhappiness to be at any time lightly awaited. When at last she heard it, she suffered acutely, nor would she look up even when she knew he had halted in the open doorway, for she was determined he should speak first.

Durand entered the room, carrying his overcoat on his arm and with his hat in his hand; the hat he laid, with something of an air, on the table as he reached it, and faced Louise. And he was too preoccupied to notice that the servant who conducted him to the reception-room had closed the door as he withdrew.

294

“I understand you want to see me?” he said, speaking as if to a stranger on business.

The grating quality of his voice seemed not particularly harsh in the words, but Louise so dreaded and detested all of its qualities that any words would have served as a challenge.

She stiffened defensively, apprehension took wings, her mind cleared. “I have a question to ask, Robert,” she said, looking up at him from across the table.

“What’s your question?” he inquired coolly.

“Since I saw you last I have become a Catholic. Will you accept baptism, that you may live with me again?”

“What!” His exclamation, weighted with contempt, sufficiently rejected the thought, but he added a definite, emphatic word: “No!”

“I won’t try to tell you how it happened—” she continued.

“Don’t!”

“—nor why. And what I have further to say will seem very strange to you.”

He stood with one hand on the back of a chair that faced her. “A good many of your ideas have seemed strange to me,” he retorted harshly.

“My religion,” she continued, not heeding his contemptuous tone, “imposes a duty on me; it has become necessary for me to offer, under certain conditions, to live with you again as your wife.”

Of all the possibilities he had anticipated, none were within the slightest range of what he now heard. 295“Well!” he exclaimed, sparring for breath. “This is a go!” He eyed her intently—as if, with her will or against it, to read her mind. But for the first time, looking into her face, he realized he could not do that which he had once done. Something new in her eyes, some impalpable barrier, seemed now to screen her thoughts. “What do you mean by ‘certain conditions’?” he finished by asking suspiciously.

She was ready. “That I be free,” she answered quietly, “at all times to practise my religion without hindrance of any kind; and that you do not compel me to do anything against my conscience.”

Durand threw out a little smoke-mask of his own. His eyes, dwelling instinctively on her erect figure, and noting the rounded cheeks, flushed under her lifted veil, had impressed her comeliness anew on his senses. She looked very pretty. Maymie, he had complained to Simms, though still sprightly, was already close to fat; and when once he had told her she was eating too much, swore at him—being of a sensitive temperament—and slapped his face.

“Look here, Louise,” he said, coming back patronizingly to the present situation, “you’ve always suffered from enlargement of the conscience. That’s what used to be the matter with you.”

She made an involuntary gesture of disdain. Unhappily, it served only to attract him. Durand, in his dealings both with men and women, loved about the same degree of active protest from them that a cat enjoys in the struggles of a mouse.

296

“I suppose you know we’ve been divorced lately,” he continued. “Catholics don’t believe in divorce, do they?”

“Certainly,” returned Louise collectedly, “not in divorce as you understand it.”

“After they’re divorced they can’t marry anybody else, can they?”

She met each thrust evenly. “Not,” she answered, “if they have been validly married.”

The suspicion of a grin crossed Durand’s face. “So you’d like your wicked husband back.”

“It is my duty,” she repeated in a frosty monotone, though with rising uneasiness, “to offer to live again with you as your wife, under the conditions I have named. But only under those conditions.”

It seemed as if her very aloofness added to her present danger. Durand stepped closer to the table in front of her. “Look here, Louise,” he repeated—and she almost shuddered at the thawing in his tone—“this is the first time I’ve talked business with you since we quarrelled that night in your room; maybe we’ve both learned something since. You got me hot; I guess I talked pretty rough. But I never really had anything against you. You were foolish to fuss about my little riots. A red-blooded man has got to be free to live his life. If you’d be a sport once in a while yourself you wouldn’t mind my fun. You’ve got the sparkle in you for a good time, if you’d warm up a little. That’s all that ever made trouble between us—you’re too frosty. You could 297outdance and outsing, and, for that matter, outdrink any chicken in the coop—if you’d do it.”

All her latent hatred of the man before her glowed at his words. Indeed, she had never detested him so much, because fear was not now uppermost as it had long been in her submerged years. So intense was her feeling that restraint became difficult. If she controlled herself it was only by thinking of another man, one waiting, and for whom she was making her desperate fight for liberty. She looked at Durand steadily. “Never expect me to dance as you want drunken women to dance. Never expect me to sing, half drunk, the songs your friends sing; never expect me to drink as they drink. I hate it!” She threw her aversion into her tones. Durand, looking at her with increasing interest, laughed. This sort of a spirit was new in Louise.

“Well,” he asked lazily, “you could drink with me once in a while all by your lonesome, couldn’t you, kitten?” He laughed again. “Remember the night you wouldn’t drink whiskey straight, and I put the gin in it when you asked for water? You had the Follies put to sleep that night!”

Her face flushed painfully. She reddened to her neck, and for an instant stared past him, in humiliation. Then she fixed her eyes steadily on his. “I didn’t know, that night,” she said quietly, “what whiskey was.”

“That wasn’t my fault. I was full of it when I married you.”

“I didn’t know that.”

298

“Well,” he persisted, “didn’t I always do everything I could for you? Did I ever refuse you money?”

“Yes.”

“Not often,” he exclaimed, not quite pleased. “Maybe sometimes when you wanted to give it away. Louise, if you’d brace up—just be a good pal once in a while and meet my friends like friends, you and I could waddle along like two ducks. This is a gay old world; but if you want to be happy, you’ve got to give it a chance to make you happy.”

She instinctively drew back her head. “I can’t dance through life with friends without homes, women without names, men without decency. I tried to make a home for you; I loved it—you loved every place else. I loved children—you abominated them.”

“We want to live while we live, don’t we? Not mould in a nursery. Come! Meet me half-way. I’ll be reasonable; you’ve been badly advised. That man Janeway, not content with playing traitor to me and secretly fanning my trouble with my men, has stung me for a big settlement on you in this divorce suit—cripples me, with the worst time ahead in the steel business since 1893.”

She almost started with the fear of what Janeway’s persistence in the settlement might now do.

“Together,” he went on, speaking fast now, “we can make a go of the thing, much better than if we split our resources. You’re a good business woman—as Gertrude never gets tired of reminding me. 299I’m not stuck on marrying Montgomery; it’s she that’s keen for that. What do you want in a reconciliation?”

It was the cruelest of all the moments. She felt the ground slipping from under her feet. While he spoke, she was praying desperately for help to know what to say. All she could think of she mechanically uttered. “I will do my duty toward you as a wife. But”—and then came the inspiration she had asked for—“do not expect me ever again to merge my means with yours. As long as we live, my estate must always be separate. Nor will I ever again live with you such a life as you have lived, Robert.”

She, who knew its lines so well, could perceive in his face the blow her decision to retain control of her estate had been. A sneering changed his expression. “There you go again,” he said with a snap. “More conscience—you’ve always had that after the first cocktail.”

“I can’t be the chum of the companions who came between us before,” she said composedly, though both knew they were not talking of the real blow to his pretensions.

“Look here, Louise,” he began, with his favorite opening; but there was a harder note in his voice, “this thing looks a little queer to me. I’ll ask you a question: Do you come to me of your own free will?”

She paused slightly. “Yes,” she said at length.

“No one told you to, eh? Why don’t you answer? Are Christians supposed to tell the truth?”

300

“Yes.”

“And to answer questions?”

“If one has the right to ask them.”

“Am I your husband, or not?”

“I suppose you are, in one sense.”

“Then if a husband has the right to ask the truth of his wife”—he was enjoying his high rôle—“I ask you, who told you to come to me in this way?”

She welcomed the question. “Bishop Marion,” she answered, quite unafraid.

He flew into a rage. “He thinks if I take you back, he’ll get all my money some day, eh?”

“Bishop Marion told me it was my duty to ask you what I have asked to-night.”

“So that’s the wrinkle! This meddlesome Bishop tries to run you back on me!”

“Do you wish time, Robert, to think over what I have asked you?”

He raised his head defiantly. “No! Not on your life!”

“Then,” she exclaimed swiftly, “we have debated enough. You do not wish to accept my proposal.”

“And have this rascally Bishop running to my house to see you?” She was restfully silent. “And have his sneaking priests,” stormed Durand, “spying around among my men?”

She turned her face half away. “Don’t conjure up foolish things,” she said, lifting her shoulders.

“See here,” flamed Durand—a new and angry thought crossed his mind—“has Henry Janeway had a hand in this scheme?”

301

“What do you mean?” she asked, quite sure now of her ground.

“Did he help put you up to this?” demanded Durand.

“Mr. Janeway advised me strongly not to do what I have just done.”

“Of course not,” retorted Durand. “A bird to pluck in hand is worth a dozen in the bush. Janeway wants his fifty-per-cent fee right now out of the money you’re getting from me!”

Her attitude, her involuntary shrinking with cold impatience, expressed her indifference to his temper and threats. She looked at him without an effort. “What have I to do with all this?” she asked coldly. “You will not take me under the conditions I have named.”

“Conditions be damned! Will you live with me and play the dutiful chicken as you never would play it before?”

“No!”

“No!”

Turning, with a quick breath, from his presence, Louise waited for nothing more. As if to escape the air, she hastened to the door of the antechamber from which she had come. With her hand on the knob, and with the door ajar, she turned toward him for the last time. “Good night!” she murmured swiftly and, passing out, closed the door behind her.

Confused by the surprising proposal of his wife, uncertain as to his wisdom in bluntly rejecting it, and more than ever under the sway of his violent temper, Durand, upset by the abrupt ending of the interview and by the unexplained light that shone in Louise’s eyes as she left him, caught up his hat and started for the hall door. He flung it rudely open, only to find himself confronted by Janeway.

It was an awkward encounter. Janeway was never in worse mood. The strain of his suspense showed in his flushed face, and he spoke the hardest of greetings. “Good evening, Durand.”

With the words he continued to advance, and in effect backed Durand into the room. Stepping aside to make way for the intrusion, Durand answered sharply: “You can have the room to yourself!”

He tried to pass out. Janeway obstructed him. “It’s large enough for two,” he said.

The words and manner of the lawyer were too charged with aggressiveness to mistake. “What’s your game?” demanded Durand in a loud voice.

“Mrs. Durand,” said Janeway, and he seemed to regain in part his habitual restraint, “has had some questions to put to you to-night——”

303

“Questions,” retorted Durand, “that mean another capitalistic fee for her high-minded legal adviser!”

“It won’t make any difference to me in fees whether you do what she asked or not. But before I see her, I want to know what answer you gave her. Will you tell me?”

“No.”

The violent refusal did not stir Janeway. As the storm gathered, he gained better control of himself. “There are good reasons, Durand,” he continued carefully, “for my asking you this before I see her.”

“No reasons that are of the slightest consequence to me,” blustered Durand.

“One of them is of consequence to you,” persisted Janeway, still confronting the angry steel master. “If you attempt to take that woman back and sink her into the licentious hell you train in, I’ll kill you. Make no mistake, Durand, for I mean it.”

So intense was the instant that neither of the two men noticed a third person in the hall behind them.

“Curse your impudence!” cried Durand. “It’s time for you and me to adjust our differences!”

Bishop Marion, on the threshold of the open door, halted, amazed. “Mr. Janeway!” he exclaimed, in stinging reproach, “have you completely forgotten yourself? What possible controversy can you have with this man now? Surely you will withdraw your words.”

“I meant exactly what I said,” declared Janeway, unmoved. “He’s warned.”

304

“Are you two,” demanded the Bishop, “to stand here in my presence with murder in your hearts?”

“My words were conditional.” Janeway made a characteristically wrathful gesture as he spoke. “Let him be guided,” he added, not lowering his tone on the final words.

“No more words, I beg of you—nor threats,” interposed Bishop Marion.

“Don’t imagine your threats or withdrawals are of any interest to me. And I’ll thank you, Mr. Bishop, to give less attention in the future to my personal concerns.”

Bishop Marion regarded Durand steadily. “I hope I shall have need in future to give very much less. Do I hear correctly that you have just declined to receive back your wife?”

“You do!” Durand pushed the declaration almost to a shout.

If Janeway started, it was imperceptibly; he stood a transfixed listener to the rapid exchanges.

“Then my interest in your domestic affairs,” returned Bishop Marion, “ceases from this instant forever.”

“And if you’ve no further threats to offer,” added Durand, looking savagely at Janeway, “I’ll bid you both good evening.”

Janeway suppressed a laugh. “Good evening, Mr. Durand,” he said, making way as Durand strode from the room; then he turned keenly on the Bishop. “He has refused?”

“He has.”

305

“Then where do we stand?”

The Bishop regarded him gravely. “We have crossed a great gulf.”

“Where is Mrs. Durand?”

“With my sister and Miss Durand. I will find her and bring her in.” And, speaking, Bishop Marion passed at once into the anteroom.

Stalking to the Bishop’s office for Simms and Judge Harrison, Durand ran into Simms, looking for him. Simms, much excited, took him by the arm. “Stay there half a minute in the office with Harrison, Bob,” he whispered hurriedly. “I’ve uncovered something. I must move quick.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Durand, with an epithet of disgust.

“Never mind what I mean. Do as I tell you!”

“What’s up?”

Simms was not tractable. “You’ll know soon enough, if I don’t get action. Do as I tell you.” He pushed Durand into the office and hastened toward the reception-room. In it he encountered Janeway.

“Look here!” exclaimed Simms. “What’s this story I hear from Harrison about you and Louise Durand?”

“What do you hear?” asked Janeway.

“Why, that you’re going to marry her! Man, isn’t there bad blood enough already between you and Bob Durand?”

“There never was less.”

“She’s a Catholic. She won’t marry you.”

306

“How do you know?”

“Know? Why, damn it, man, I’m a Catholic myself.”

“You a Catholic?” Contempt could convey nothing more than the even words carried. “Well”—Janeway paused in his studied scorn—“somebody’s got to be persecuted; I suppose it might as well be the Catholics as anybody else.”

“That’s all right,” flared Simms, “but I’ll tell you there’s a few things you can put over a jury that you can’t put over the outfit that runs this house.”

“I haven’t taken a degree yet in the Canon Law of the Church,” remarked Janeway composedly. “But I think I can qualify pretty soon.”

“Bob Durand,” declared Simms, “will fight to the death your marrying Louise.”

Janeway only continued to bait the exasperated attorney. “You wouldn’t help him make trouble for me, would you, Simms?”

Simms puffed out. “I’m his lawyer, Henry,” he said warningly. “I’ll stand by him, remember that.”

“Do,” counselled Janeway, as Simms again started into the hall. “I’ve beaten you both before. I may do it again.”

It was only a moment before Louise stood in the anteroom door with Bishop Marion. Janeway clasped her hands. They were icy.

“Was that Simms here with you just now?” asked Louise anxiously. “What was he saying?”

Janeway laughed with the spirit of a boy. “He said Durand would never let you marry me.”

307

“What did you say?”

“That I shouldn’t ask his permission.” He turned to the Bishop. “Now we are here with you together, tell us: Where do we stand?”

Bishop Marion, cognizant of the excitement of the two before him, yet lost nothing of his seriousness. “Mr. Janeway,” he said, “the problem you laid before me with this child is a very old one—and as long as humanity endures and men and women turn to the Church of God, that problem will call for merciful answer. St. Paul”—he spoke now to Louise—“found himself confronted by cases precisely like yours. And for those difficult cases he laid down a great law—the Magna Charta in favor of the Christian faith—the law that I apply to you to-night. It is this:

“Where one party to a pagan marriage becomes a Christian, she is bound by natural justice to live with her pagan partner as his wife, provided that partner permits the untrammelled practice of her religion, and does not compel her or tempt her to lead a sinful life. But St. Paul required that on these points the Christian spouse, before breaking the bond between them, should interpellate her husband. This you have done.”

“If that’s St. Paul’s law, it’s good law and good common sense,” interposed Janeway with emphasis.

“Your husband,” continued the Bishop, addressing Louise, “has refused the assurance you had the right to demand. I say to you, therefore, Louise, 308that in the sight of the Catholic Church you are no longer bound in your marriage to Robert Durand.”

“Then,” exclaimed Janeway tensely, “that dread barrier falls! Louise! I renew my suit!”

Gertrude hastened into the room from the antechamber, almost dragging Judge Harrison after her. The Judge looked as close to bewildered as he could ever be caught, and, glancing uncertainly from one to another of the three in the room, clung to the dead cigar in his fingers; it seemed, in the confusing circumstances, as if it might prove his best friend. Gertrude was at no loss for greetings. “Oh, this is where you are!” she exclaimed. Louise ran to her. “Gertrude!” she cried in a low voice, “I’m free!”

Harrison walked toward Janeway and the Bishop, and looked from one to the other. “If I’ve no business here,” he suggested calmly, “I shall hope somebody will tell me so.”

“But you have!” exclaimed Janeway. “I want you here. Louise is free!”

Harrison regarded the men before him benevolently.

“Well,” he observed, in leisurely fashion, “I shan’t ask just now how it’s been done; I hope to hear some time in the future. I had it fixed in my own mind that Janeway would come to grief this time,” he said to the Bishop. “I couldn’t see any other way out. But I never let on to Simms. I told him a few minutes ago I didn’t know the rules of this particular game; but whatever they were, I considered it a bet to play Janeway to win.”

309

“No, no!” interrupted Janeway hastily. “Not Janeway to win. But St. Paul to hand down a great law—and a just judge to administer it,” he said, laying a hand on the sleeve of the Bishop. “Now,” he added, turning to Gertrude, “set our wedding-day!”

Gertrude took the remark seriously. “Oh, let it be set quick! Give no chance for hatred or revenge to defeat your happiness!”

Louise spoke to Bishop Marion, as if again to hear that the gyves had fallen from her wrists. “And my marriage bond to my former husband—is it now absolutely broken?” she asked, looking for confirmation to her protector.

The Bishop alone had remained calm. He turned kindly eyes on his eager questioner. “I have said you are free,” he replied slowly. “But to say, at this moment, that your marriage bond to your former husband is absolutely broken would be to say too much.”

Janeway started. He looked, in effect, apoplectic. “What!” he burst out. “After all this sacrifice, all this humiliation—her marriage bond is not absolutely broken! What, in God’s name, Bishop Marion, do you mean?”

“I mean,” answered the Bishop, choosing his words, “there is but one way—only one—completely to sever that bond.”

A question rose like a flash to Janeway’s lips. “What’s that way?”

“Your marriage bond to Robert Durand”—Bishop Marion addressed Louise—“becomes forever 310severed the moment you become the wife of another man.”

Janeway whirled toward her. “Then, Louise!” he exclaimed, “for the love of heaven, become my wife now, here, this minute!”

Louise looked from Gertrude to Janeway, and back at Bishop Marion, to grasp the meaning of his astonishing words.

The Bishop refused to become excited. “That privilege, my child,” he added, looking at Louise, “is yours, if you wish it. You are absolutely free to act.”

The sound of voices, raised in argument, floated in from the hall. “Mr. Simms,” said Gertrude, alarmed, “was in the office when I called Uncle Sidney out, talking awfully loud to a white-haired priest—about who could get married and who couldn’t.”

Bishop Marion smiled. “It must be dear old Father Breton—who is as deaf as a post.”

Janeway caught Louise’s hands. “Can you ask more than what Bishop Marion tells you?” he said earnestly. “We can protect ourselves now from every peril of the revengeful duplicity of another. She looked at him bewildered. Louise!” he pleaded. “God of Heaven, don’t you understand?”

His words shook her from her thoughts. “Henry,” she cried, low and affectionately, “I understand. But I can’t be married this minute! I’ve made no preparations, no, no—nothing of any kind.” She turned in confusion to Gertrude. “I didn’t expect to get married to-night!”

311

Janeway saw her dismay. He held her hands before him and spoke reassuringly. “Louise! I ask it only for our happiness. Don’t you wish to make that safe?”

She looked at him with the simplest faith. “I wish to reward all your patience,” she said, “to repay all your kindness. Above all, I do want—if you really wish it—to make you happy, if I can.” She hesitated. “But I can’t get married without any notice, Henry!”

Janeway drew her a little apart. “Dearest, I understand perfectly your delicacy of feeling. Go home with Gertrude; but be married now. Receive me as your husband in your own good time—when you like.”

She opened her eyes wide. “Oh, but I shouldn’t like that at all!” she said. “I want you to be my husband when I marry you. But I haven’t had one minute’s notice!”

The voice of Simms, struggling with Father Breton, strengthened Janeway’s last appeal. “They are at our heels, Louise! I implore you, consent!”

She turned to the Bishop. “What must we do, Bishop Marion, to get married now?”

“Are you sure you wish it—now?” he asked.

“Henry says so,” faltered Louise. “Yes, I’m sure—if Henry is!” And she joined uneasily in the laughter started by her words.

“Then to the chapel,” said Bishop Marion. “Father Smyth is there. You, Judge Harrison, and you, Miss Durand, as witnesses.”

312

Judge Harrison looked nonplussed. He laid down his cigar and addressed himself gravely to Gertrude and Louise. “You will have to stand by me,” he said aside. “Elizabeth is missing all this; when she hears it, she’ll never believe I was no more than an innocent bystander. I look to you to protect me, girls.”

Bishop Marion threw open the chapel doors.

“You’re coming in with us, Bishop?” Janeway turned with the question to Bishop Marion, who stood in the reception-room, waiting to close the doors behind the wedding party as it passed into the chapel.

The Bishop thought not. “My guests are not all gone yet. It may be better that I remain here a few moments.” Closing the door of the chapel, he crossed the room and opened the door into the hall, where Durand’s voice was plainly to be heard berating Simms.

“I don’t believe they’re here at all,” he was saying testily. “You’ve made a fine mess! First you tell me he can’t marry her; then you tell me he’ll marry her to-night! I’ll block that if I have to eat my words every day for ten years. You’re a bungler, Simms.”

“I?” exclaimed Simms. “Don’t talk to me, Durand. You’ve queered everything I’ve done from the start to keep you out of the hole!”

Bishop Marion walked forward to the bay window, raised the front shade and looked out into the street.

“Janeway’s beaten you at every turn,” retorted 314Durand, with bitterness, as the two men came down the hall. “Now he’s got half my surplus and my wife besides. You’re a great big windbag, Simms.”

“Look here! While you’re ranting, you’re getting beaten worse and worse. I tell you they’re here in this house, and if you don’t see her and fix it up with her, you’re beat forever!” With Durand sullenly following, Simms walked brusquely into the reception-room and pounded the call-bell on the table furiously. “Where are the infernal servants here?”

Bishop Marion spoke from the window, where he had stood until now unnoticed. “Whom,” he asked calmly, “do you wish to see, Mr. Simms?”

Simms whirled on him; known to the belligerent lawyer only as a man of peace, the Bishop seemed a safe outlet for his smarting ill-temper. “We want to see you,” he announced stridently. “Robert Durand wants to see his wife at once. Your servant started off to find her and never came back.”

The Bishop looked undisturbed at Durand. “Mr. Durand,” he said, in the same unmoved tone, “has seen his wife to-night.”

Durand cut off anything Simms could say. “I knew nothing then about this last conspiracy you’re a party to—to make her Janeway’s wife! This is your trick, is it?” demanded Durand furiously, facing the Bishop. “Posing with your long fingers and oily tongue as an apostle of matrimonial purity, and attempting to marry a divorced woman to a crooked lawyer!”

315

Simms felt that he, too, should register, in the interest of high thinking and right living, his emphatic protest. “It’s an outrage, Bishop Marion!” he thundered. “A scandal to religion for a man holding an—er—honored office, a position of—er—er—hierarchical trust—to lend himself to such a damnable proceeding! I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard it! You make me ashamed of the Church I was baptized in!”

The Bishop did not seem deeply stirred. He looked at one and the other of the two men who faced him, as each spoke. But though his demeanor was restrained, the expression of his eyes, as Simms continued to hurl condemnation at him, changed.

“And have you the audacity, Simms,” he said deliberately, “to stand before me and talk of scandal to religion, in the face of the life you live and the example you set in this community? You,” repeated the Bishop, with gathering indignation, “born and reared in the Catholic faith, yet whose face is never seen inside a Catholic church! You, public profligate and reprobate that you are—a reproach to your baptism—have you the effrontery to accuse me of giving scandal? I say to you, Simms”—the voice of the gray-haired prelate shook with the castigation. He pointed his finger at the astounded attorney. “I say to you, this blinded pagan at your side”—the finger fixed on Durand—“sunken in vice as he is, is less guilty, in the eyes of God, than you! He has never fallen, as you have, from decency and restraint! Wretched man! Scandal of your faith! 316When Sodom and Gomorrah are weighed—how—God help you—shall you be judged?

“And you, Durand! This is the creature you have enlisted to help you persecute an unoffending woman! How are you to be named when men speak of men?”

Durand was able to recover himself first. “You’re a hypocrite!” he shouted. “You’ve exploited my domestic troubles to line your own pockets. I tell you, my wife offered to-night to come back and live with me. I want no abuse at your hands, no threats from you; I’ll hold you personally responsible for detaining her!”

“Then I say to you here and now, Durand,” and the Bishop, with flashing eyes, laid his words like whip-lashes on the husband’s shoulders, “that your pagan marriage, with its iniquities you have wallowed in, and into which you tried to drag your innocent wife, is dissolved! I say to you that before the State and before God you have no wife! I invoke to-night for Louise Durand what your own intolerable conduct has given her—THE PAULINE PRIVILEGE! And the last remnant of any bond binding her to you breaks this night when she becomes the true wife of Henry Janeway!”

“And I say to you!” cried Durand, his confidence shaken but his effrontery unabated, “in the presence of this witness, that I’ll make the promises you and she require. I’ll take my wife back and leave her free and untrammelled in the practice of her religion. And I demand her at your hands!”

317

The folding doors of the chapel were thrown open by Father Smyth. Louise walked out at Janeway’s side. The glow suffusing her face told the Bishop all he needed to know. “Your professions are too late,” he said sternly to Durand. “Neither God nor man gives you claim on this woman now; she is Henry Janeway’s wife.”

“It’s conspiracy!” blustered Simms. “Plain conspiracy! We’ll see what the courts have to say about this! Come, Mr. Durand.” The two were starting from the room when Janeway spoke. “Hold on, Simms. You said you had a copy of that settlement document with you. Give it to me.”

Simms drew the agreement from his pocket. Durand interposed sharply. “Do nothing of the kind, Simms. Give that paper to me!”

Between the two fires Simms hesitated. He looked from one to the other of the men, afraid of offending Durand, but knowing they could not bluff Janeway. He turned on the steel master placatingly. “Mr. Durand, this is in accordance with the court record,” he said, trying to explain. “It merely itemizes the sums and securities stipulated in the settlement. It would do no good to withhold it. The court has entered the decree.”

“Curse the decree!” exclaimed Durand, losing what little temper he had left. “I’ll have it annulled. This is fraud. I’ll claim my wife!” Janeway only laughed gently. “Give me that paper!” persisted Durand in wrath.

“Bob, I tell you it’s no possible use,” objected 318Simms tartly. “The court will enforce it, anyway!”

“Simms,” said Janeway, holding out his hand, with a tone of finality, “deliver that paper.” Simms reluctantly handed it to him. Janeway turned to his wife. “Louise,” he said, “this is yours.” She took the agreement, looking at him inquiringly. “When I exacted it,” he went on, “I believed, or feared, you might face the world without an income, without the training to earn a living, without a protector to do it for you; my hopes, not my fears, have been realized. It is now my privilege to lay my earnings in your hands for your comfort and protection. I am your income.” He pointed to the paper in her hand. “This shield from the hardships of the world, rightfully yours, is no longer a necessity. What will you do with it?”

She looked at her husband. “It was your solicitude, Henry, that provided this.” She held the paper in her open hand. “I never insisted on it,” she added.

“Simple justice entitled you to it,” said Janeway. “It restores to you what is left of your father’s estate. And exacts, in addition, a substantial sum for the humiliations and injustices you have suffered. But as money you no longer need it. What will you now do with it?”

Without hesitation she put the paper in her husband’s hand. “You,” she replied, “will know best what to do with it.”

319

Janeway, pausing as he looked at the paper, regarded her with seriousness. “Do you give me this, Louise,” he asked, “to do with exactly as I please?”

“To do with exactly as you please, Henry.”

“Then I will say to Mr. Simms and Mr. Durand,” continued Janeway, “and to this little world of Fond du Lac, that my wife will not participate in the surplus of the twelve-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week Durand Corporation. I hope personally to provide for the necessities, and, if possible, the luxuries of Mrs. Henry Janeway. The property representing in this document your father’s estate is properly restored to you. As to the added securities pledged herein by Robert Durand, they would make, it seems plain to me, a fitting foundation for a children’s hospital. Persuade, if you can, Bishop Marion and Judge Harrison to act as your trustees in such an undertaking, Louise. If they can be made to accept, the community will know that your trust is to be faithfully carried out. And I feel sure now that Bishop Marion will excuse Mr. Simms and Mr. Durand from further participation in the happiness of this evening.”

Without attempting further retort, Durand turned brusquely on his heel, and, followed by Simms—Janeway still eying them—left the room and the house.

Bishop Marion took one of Louise’s and one of Janeway’s hands. “And our little ‘conspiracy,’” he said, “is dissolved.”

320

“No,” responded Janeway, clasping the Bishop’s hand in both his own, and unleashing for the moment the intensity of his feelings. “It’s not dissolved yet; I hope it never will be dissolved. I hope I may always retain the loyal friendship that has brought me my wife”—he looked at her—“and the happiness that is ours now. You have guided us patiently through seas uncharted to me, into a haven of safety. You have established a new home——”

Bishop Marion’s self-consciousness would stand no more. “You are too grateful,” he protested, “for the little I have done.” He looked at Louise. “It was only your right, my dear child, that I have given you; and what I have done for you, I would have done—indeed, have done—for the simplest of my flock. I rejoice with you both, honestly, in your new-found happiness. And, I repeat, our ‘conspiracy’——”

“Do not repeat, Bishop,” interrupted Janeway, “that our ‘conspiracy,’ as Mr. Durand terms it, is dissolved. My best friend”—he indicated Judge Harrison, who, with an unlighted cigar between his fingers, tried to appear somewhat at ease—“is here witness that I have entered into a new and solemn engagement, with the oldest living member of the natural-contract family—matrimony. I am going to try to make one woman happy, trusting to find in her happiness my own. It is you”—he addressed Bishop Marion—“who have surrendered her into my 321keeping—to you I must in some measure be responsible. Give us, at least, your blessing, that in what I undertake I may not fail!”

THE END