The Visionary Gleam

ANNE O'HAGAN ORRINGFORD'S mind groped slowly upward out of an abyss of fog. Finally it emerged into the clear medium in which it could interpret the information of his senses and his memory. He found himself stretched out in bed in the room he had been occupying for a week at the Adirondack Club. One of the servants, with an exaggerated air of silent caution, was piling logs upon the hearth fire. A man whose broad back suggested, to the vague recollections of his recently renewed acquaintance, the outlines of Dr. Annesley, stood at the door issuing an informal bulletin. Ward's thin face peered in across the doctor's shoulder.

"A simple concussion of the brain," Torringford heard the subject lightly dismissed. "No complications—he'll be about again in a week or ten days. It's lucky there was no longer exposure. The little chap doesn't seem to have much stamina."

Even as he winced at this offhand judgment of the burly physician, Torringford pieced the situation together. He had left the club in the forenoon with no other guide than the compass in his pocket. It had been foolhardy, of course, but his fondness for solitude amounted sometimes to a need, and he had wanted to explore a little the edge of his new twenty-thousand-acre acquisition, on one corner of which the club abutted. What he had met, after an hour or two of carefully blazed wandering through the light-diffusing glory of the autumn woods, was a long mountaineer with a tale of wrongs. It was a grimly humorous circumstance, Torringford reflected, that he, who was almost morbidly conscientious about his relations with those over whom his wealth gave him advantage, should have been felled to the earth by a totally unexpected blow from this unkempt son of toil whose rights in some stream his recent purchase had affected. How, he wondered, had he come again to the club? He recalled alternate waves of returning and receding consciousness and the pungent odor of leaf mold in his nostrils. But his final recollection was of drifting out into the void.

The doctor, the servant, and the man at the door, all swung toward the bed at his faint "Hello, you fellows." Congratulations and inquiries buzzed about his ears. It seemed that this was not the twilight of Tuesday, after all, but of Wednesday; he had been found in the woods at the base of a miniature precipice that afternoon by two of the club members out gunning with their guides. The severe exposure, following the fall, had exhausted him.

"You missed your footing at the top of that declivity, I suppose, Torringford?" suggested the doctor.

"I suppose so," agreed Torringford. He felt sorry for that ragged fellow who had apparently fled in panic from his first desperate attempt to equalize social inequalities. "Who did you say picked me up?"

"Ray and a friend of his from Montreal, a man named Connaughton. Ray had a telegram calling him to Albany when they got in. and they're off. He left all sorts of civil messages for you, Torringford."

"The civil messages should be from me, I think. What Ray is it?"

"Arthur P. Something in railroads, isn't he, Ward? Or is it mines? "

"Anything," said Ward. "He's a promoter."

"Oh!" Torringford's voice was flat—scarcely surprised, scarcely disappointed, but not at all the voice of a man hailing his deliverer's name.

"Know him?" asked Ward.

Torringford shook his head while the doctor made answer for him. "No. He said he had never met you before, though he'd heard a great deal of you. Well, Torry, I hope this reintroduction to your native land won't send you off again to some of those countries where all the roots are neatly covered and all the forests graded. You haven't been back long, have you?"

"Four months. But I'm home to stay."

Then followed directions about rest and medicine, and the threat of a trained nurse, withdrawn at Torringford's plea and his encomiums on the accomplishments of his man. Finally he was left alone to ponder at his leisure the knowledge that Evangeline's husband had saved his life.

His first feeling inclined toward an apprehensive chagrin. When Evangeline, with a charm that robbed the process of all coquetry, and indeed established her more firmly than ever in his thoughts as the incomparably exquisite among women, had broken their engagement that she might marry Arthur Ray, Torringford had taken the blow standing. Somewhere in his nature, with its modern anxieties about his ethical title to the wealth he had inherited, its fondness for speculation upon his duty to his fellow-man, its personal modesty, its simple, unconscious pride of race, there was a strain of mediæval chivalry. In his code, a woman's decisions were not to be questioned by the man who loved her. He had kissed Evangeline's lovely hand and had uncomplainingly left her. He had been hurt to the very heart, but he had gloried in her truthfulness; the grave plans he had made for his life—for their life—had suddenly become as so much thistle silk adrift upon the wind; but he honored Evangeline, surrendering the solidly brilliant prospects of an alliance with him for her love's sake. It was women of such fiber, he had told himself, that should continue the Torringford race; that he, personally, had failed to hold such a one was his great misfortune.

Nevertheless his whole-souled acceptance of the situation had not involved an acceptance of commonplaces—serving as usher at her wedding, becoming a casual dinner guest at her home, being "Uncle Dane" to her children, staling, in short, the fine flavor of his devotion and his loss, by familiar intercourse on a new footing. That Evangeline had shown a momentary tendency thus to misinterpret his unwhimpering acquiescence in his dismissal, he had translated into an evidence of her adorable kindness. But he had not fallen victim to it. Instead, he had gone abroad without even meeting the young Westerner who had supplanted him. And his European exile had gradually, undeliberately eaten away ten years before he came back, back to his own country.

The fact that he owed his life to Evangeline's husband, a fact almost coincident with his permanent home-coming, presaged acquaintance. From that Torringford shrank almost as nervously as ever. If he had outgrown the poignancy of the young man's humiliation and loneliness, if he had outlived the ardor which would have made it intolerable for him to see much of Evangeline ten years before, at least the place in his heart and imagination which she had filled had known no other occupant. The instinctive fastidiousness which ran so incongruously side by side with his conscientious democracy had never again been satisfied in any woman.

"I wish," he frowned in his bed, "that some poor devil whom a check would make rich had picked me up. Oh, well! America's a big country—I dare say I needn't rub elbows with the Rays too constantly even if I do have to see them once or twice."

Watching the firelight play fantastically through the dusk on the big, plain furniture, which achieved, at some expense, a rustic simplicity, he wondered a little about Ray. The husband whom Evangeline had chosen—he must be a wonderfully fine fellow. There was in her, Torringford knew, an unswerving surety of taste—to put the matter on no higher plane. Ah, there was in her the fine, divining quality of limpid, lovely womanhood! Ray must be a remarkable man, of stalwart virtues, of signal charm. Torringford's own personality as he knew it, with its anxious, negative merits, its spiritual diffidences and awkwardnesses, shrank to despicable proportions as he pictured his rival.

A servant interrupted his musings, bearing mail and the information that Dr. Annesley would permit for dinner such and such delicacies. Torringford nodded indifferently at the suggested menu and ran over the superscriptions of his letters, opening none until he came to the characteristic rough gray of Martha Endicott's envelope. He had written to her about the new working women's hotel they wanted him to finance. He knew that her reply would be a clever gibe, but he knew, too, that it would contain the facts he desired. For a woman whose mouth was permanently tilted in a smile at least half mocking, and whose eyes proclaimed a sad, ineradicable belief in the futility of most things, Martha was amazingly and most inconsistently bound up in schemes of social amelioration. He liked Martha, though she was very far from his enshrined ideal. She was at once too skeptical and too tolerant. She was apt to shrug her shoulders over the shortcomings of the race and to say: "What does it matter? Poor things!" She had not the clear-burning, flame-like beliefs that Evangeline had had. She had not Evangeline's ethereal delicacy, Evangeline's transparency of beauty. He tore open her letter to the thought of contrasts.

It was ten days before Annesley would allow that he had sufficiently recovered from his simple concussion to come downstairs. His appearance in the billiard room a little before dinner one evening was the signal for no very ostentatious congratulation. Two or three men looked up without recognition, and one or two said they were glad to see him about again—the woods were a nasty place in which to lose one's self. He stood with his back to the fireplace watching a match in progress at the table, feeling a little out of it all, both by reason of long absence and of a native reserve which made it difficult for him to fraternize with the chance-met of his kind. Suddenly the door opposite him flung open and two men, with the violet chill of twilight clinging to them, burst noisily in. "Back again, Ray? How are you, Connaughton?" Indifferently cordial greetings met them. Torringford stared.

Connaughton, burly, middle-aged, flabby, and fishy-eyed, detained his glance the merest second. Then it dwelt upon Ray. Instant repulsion seized him. Ray's good looks were of the flamboyant sort, which Torringford immediately found himself regarding as an affront to his taste. Everything was overemphasized, overcontrasted. The eyebrows were too black upon a brow too white; the cheeks were overruddy signals of health; the mouth showed too red, too full, beneath a mustache too black. The figure called attention to itself with its height, its breadth of shoulders, its depth of chest. Ray's hair, even, Torringford thought, passing a hand across his own thin, drabbish locks, looked more like an advertisement for a "hirsute restorer" than the decent covering of a gentleman's skull. With a lapse into ill nature, so swift that it surprised him, he found himself reflecting upon the gentle agitation which Ray would cause among the hearts behind a counter were he fulfilling his manifest destiny as an "aisle man." But Evangeline

He pulled himself abruptly out of the pit of criticism and advanced from the fireplace toward his recent deliverer. Ray was pressing a button with continuous finger. Torringford's nerves were as rasped as though he had been in the bar where the long clangor of the bell was sounding.

"Mr. Ray?" he said. His outstretched hand saved the button.

"Mr. Torringford? I'm uncommonly glad to see you yourself again."

"It's you whom I must thank for being myself again." Torringford's smile illumined his thin, lined, brownish face. "I'm without words when I think of what I owe you. And you, too, Mr. Connaughton—" He turned to include the other man.

"Oh, it wasn't anything," declared Mr. Connaughton. "There you lay and there we came. That's all there was to it. You looked like a dead un, but your heart was going. So Blockett and Riggs—bully good guides, those fellows—made a stretcher of saplings; we got a little brandy between your teeth, laid you on the stretcher over our coats, and brought you home. Ten days later and you're as good as new. Nothing much in it"

"That," said Torringford, smiling again, "is a matter of opinion. Since my life was involved, you'll understand my thinking there was a great deal in it."

"What'll you take, Torringford?" interrupted Ray, to whom the slave of the button had arrived. "Martini—Scotch—what? Usual thing for you, Con? Well, Torringford, I'm mighty glad we happened along when we did. We're not to thank, but your lucky stars. We did nothing much, as Connaughton says, but I guess you were fortunate that somebody came along."

"As I said before," answered Torringford gravely, "I feel that I owe my life to you."

"Well, if that's so, maybe you'll forgive me at last for doing you out of your wife. A life for a wife, that cancels the debt, eh?" His laugh rang out boisterously. Even the billiard players looked toward Torringford to see how the little man bore the thrust.

If his spirit flinched before the brutality, his bearing gave no sign of it.

"Hardly," he said, smiling, "when the wife is such a one as yours, Mr. Ray, and the life a comparatively worthless affair like mine. "It sounded like the easiest and perhaps the least sincere of retorts courteous, but Torringford at the moment was scarcely aware of its value as a parry. He looked squarely into the face of Mr. Arthur Ray and wondered, beneath his smile, if it were possible that the man—the gross fool—did not appreciate the fact that his wife was the marvel, the fair-flushed evening star, among women.

"By the way," he went on, while Ray made his drink serve as a cover for his lack of speech. "How is Mrs. Ray?"

"I guess she's all right. I haven't seen her for a couple of weeks; she's in Lenox, with the youngsters. I've a place there now—next to Rhoades of the Standard Oil. Know him? No? Well, he has a pretty swell establishment up there; mine's nothing much, but the missus likes it, and the kids. We've four; I suppose you know."

"No, I hadn't happened to hear."

"Four pretty, healthy little brutes. You must know them, now that you're home again, Torringford. I wrote Eve of our encounter and she sent you all sorts of messages. She'll be glad to hear that you're on your feet again. You haven't seen her in a long time, have you? "

"It's about ten years."

"So long? Well, you won't find her much changed. She's handsomer than ever, I think. Don't you, Connaughton? Don't you think that Eve's getting prettier all the time?"

Torringford repressed a shudder. Evangeline "handsome"! Evangeline "pretty"! Did the fool call the miracle of dawn "pretty"? Did he regard the majestic sweep of the planets as he did the involutions of a peasant chorus in a Broadway show? But Ray, serenely unaware of criticism, went on:

"Oh, when you see her, Torringford, you'll admit I have treated her well."

His full, boastful voice and laugh preceded Torringford into the dining room. The meal was bombarded with his vauntings. Every nerve in Torringford's body tingled with disgust. But his morbidly questioning mind would not let him yield complete belief to the testimony of his distaste. After all, he faced a successful rival; and what masquerade of offended sensibility might not mere jealousy put on?

A day or two more of familiar intercourse, however, convinced him that it was not the light of a rekindled envy which showed Ray so unattractive a figure. He had been prepared to find the man who had outweighed him with Evangeline finer, more compelling, more satisfying to exquisiteness, than himself. And here was a loud-mouthed braggart, of dull though noisy wit, a man whose own successes, commercial, social, even amorous, were his constant themes, a man frankly indifferent to the large aspects of life and duty.

"It may be all right for you, Torringford," he proclaimed on one occasion when Torringford had inadvertently criticised some lobbying in which Ray proved interested, "it may be all right for you to go in for all this civic righteousness. Your father, or your grandfather, or some other good old duck, who didn't give a tinker's dam for the public weal, made your living for you and you can afford to be as squeamish as you please. But we fellows that had to get out and hustle for our butter and jam and all the extras, we simply can't afford it. You say that what I'm doing for the D. C. & C. up there in Albany is an attempt to sell out the public to a corrupt corporation by means of a corrupt assembly. All right—say it. But if I don't buy out the Legislature, some other fellow will. The blessed public will be exactly in the same position—granting, I mean, for the sake of the argument, that you're right in your premises. As a matter of fact you are a long way off. The franchise that the road wants will be a clear public benefit. Just let me explain to you—" and his voice boomed endlessly on.

Listening, Torringford remembered the rapt shining of Evangeline's eyes when he had been used, in the happy days of his engagement, to disclose to her all the plans of his young idealism. The eloquent smile, the silent appreciation—so much better than other women's voluble intelligence—how inspiring they had been! And for ten years now her fineness had been outraged, her intellect insulted, by these cheap arguments for dishonesty, for indifference as ignoble as dishonesty! How the man must have lacerated her, what a crucifixion life with him must have been! A hot wave of pity engulfed him; a love stronger than that of the young man threatened him. That had been youth's desire to possess itself of beauty, to win sympathy for its aspirations, sweet companionship for its loneliness in the great loneliness of the new-found universe. This was manhood's protecting pity, manhood's rage at the thought of the defilement of a sanctuary. That Ray's cynical, vulgar materialism was no worse than that of half a million men did not make Torringford more tolerant. The other half million, at any rate, had not been guilty of the blasphemy of leading their gross lives in Evangeline's presence.

He fell to picturing her as she would be after the years that had turned her from lovely girlhood into womanhood. The wonderful oval of her face that had seemed as much a message of truth, a hymn of praise, as any poem, would be marred by suffering; the fluctuating color that had so often spoken for her when youth's shyness sealed her lips to her fair thoughts would have ebbed into a permanent pallor; the starry, wide-set, innocent, glad eyes—what acquaintance with sorrow, what knowledge of outraged nobility, must lie in their translucent depths; how the sensitive, proud mouth must be set in the line of restraint!

He could not bear to see her, to mark the ravages of ignoble association upon her. Yet the desire to save her, to draw her again into her own region of eternal grace, to set her again in her own shrine, beat in him with a fervor beyond the love of his earlier years.

It was after a conversation with Martha Endicott that he finally accepted one of the invitations from the Rays which had begun to assail him upon his return to the city. Martha, to be sure, had advised against it, advised with an inexplicable entreaty in her manner. They had been talking of the working women's hotel again; both of them found themselves on its executive committee, though Martha persisted in declaring that there ought to be no such institution.

"There should be no working women," she maintained with cheerful, inconsequent medievalism. "But if there are, what they need is more wages. However, since you will have flaxseed poultices when the situation demands a surgeon's knife, I suppose I can help concoct them."

Torringford was less reserved with Martha than with most women. He could remember when her uncomfortable cleverness at the younger dancing class had made her almost as dreaded a partner as his seriousness and awkwardness had made him. He could remember even further back to the days when she, a very tiny, straight figure upon her horse at her father's country place, and he, a scarcely more imposing one upon his, had ridden under the eye of one groom. As far as ease with his fellow-beings was possible to him, he was at ease with Martha.

"Do you know Ray?" he asked abruptly on this occasion, rolling up the eleventh set of architect's plans and dismissing the housing of working women from his mind. Martha made a faint grimace as she rang for tea.

"For my sins, I sat next him at three dinners last season. I haven't yet decided whether I'm losing or he's achieving importance—which sounds beastly now I've said it."

"What do you think of him?"

"God made him and therefore let him pass for a man," she quoted. "Why do you want to talk about him, Dane? He's a perfectly impossible person, don't you think? I suppose he's trying to work you into some of his schemes—they aren't always pretty ones." Then a clear color mounted her humorous, tired face. She suddenly recalled who Arthur Ray was. For a second she rattled the tea-cups. Then she raised her honest eyes.

"I beg your pardon, Dane," she said. "I forgot for the instant that he was the man Evangeline Whiting married."

"He's also the man who picked me up in the woods last month. They've been asking me to come to Lenox ever since. And now they're in town and they have begun to invite me to dinner."

"Are you going?" Martha awaited his answer a little with the air of a woman bracing herself to receive courageously a blow. Torringford did not notice her manner.

"That's the point," he answered. "I haven't seen Evangeline since the breaking of our engagement. You know that performance—revising relations, converting love into friendship—has always seemed to me unnecessary and even unwise. But now I owe him any courtesy he may ask. He wants me for business purposes chiefly, I think."

Martha sipped her tea slowly.

"It's a long time," she said. "Would it really be so hard to—revise your feelings? Are you still afraid of opening an old wound by seeing her?"

"It isn't exactly that," answered Torringford, painstakingly accurate. "The old feeling was pretty well starved out, I think, before I came back. But I'm afraid of a new one. The man—he is a coarse brute, isn't he? And when I think of her, subjected to his vulgarities all these years, hurt every hour by his stupidities, jarred by his ill-breeding, disgusted by his lack of common honor—when I think of what she has been through, Martha, I am afraid to see her. I am afraid of pitying her too much."

"She married him quite of her own volition," stabbed Martha. But the thrust glanced away from his unselfishness.

"You mean she has only herself to blame for whatever has resulted from her own choice? That isn't your usual judgment, is it, Martha? Though I confess I don't understand it—her throwing me over for him. He could never have seemed a gentleman to even the most primitive intelligence, and to her, with her standards, her intuitions—But look around you. See the contemptible tricks Nature is forever playing upon men and women in the matter of love and choice. It's the wildest gambling, all of it, and when congeniality and happiness do result, it's blind bull luck and nothing more."

"Well," Martha spoke impatiently as he paused; "granted that all the impulses of youth show nothing true of the tastes and characters of those who feel them, grant that, for the sake of some bitter jest of her own, Nature is everlastingly deluding Titania with Bottom—what has all this to do with your going to the Rays' to dinner?"

"She must have awakened long ago." He struggled to clarify his thought by speech. "It might hurt her to see me—to be reminded—oh, I'm not able to express it. I don't want to hurt her. I can't bear to see her mortified in my presence; I don't want her to guess that her husband is willing to play upon my respect for my own love—is willing to use me, her old lover, for his own cheap purposes. In short, Martha, I don't think I could bear the sight of her humiliation. God knows, I'm not much of a man to enchain a woman's fancy, but I know how to cherish and to reverence her—and he doesn't. She could not but feel the difference between the devotion I could have given her, drab and uninteresting as it looked to her once, and his—his ineffable coarseness. I don't want to hurt her."

"Dane," Martha leaned forward in her low chair and touched his hand, "you are a very good man, a very simple-hearted, good man, my dear. There is no one like you—no one." He pressed her fingers gratefully, absent-mindedly. "Don't go," she went on earnestly. "Don't go. Don't see her. No matter how much they urge you—don't! "

That very evening, walking through the glittering, noisy dusk toward his rooms, indefinably touched by the recollection of the affectionate anxiety of his old friend's voice, he was overtaken by Arthur Ray. Eagerly the man who had been the means of saving his life congratulated himself upon the chance meeting; he was just thinking of Torringford; had Torringford any engagement that evening? Torringford, unresourceful in those emergencies where the only resource is a lie, confessed that he had no engagement Ah! Neither had the Rays. Torringford must come up to dinner—must. It would be the pleasantest of reunions, quiet, intimate, informal. Evangeline was beginning to feel hurt at Torringford's refusal to see her again; and he, Ray himself, had been longing for just such an opportunity to lay before Torringford, at leisure, that matter of the directorate of the new mining company. To decline the profusely proffered hospitality longer became impossible, even to churlishness. Torringford went to his home pledged to appear at the Rays' at the dinner hour.

Waiting in a drawing-room of merely conventional opulence, scanning it with unconscious wistfulness for the sure touch of grace that should mark it Evangeline's, he reminded himself of many things. She would be thirty-one now, not twenty-one, a mother, not a maiden, a wife habituated to the hourly repression of her finest thought, her most flowerlike fancy. He must be prepared.

He heard the faint rustle of her silks. The curtains parted and she came in, Ray at her shoulder. Torringford had a moment's confused impression of delicate quince blossoms faintly aglow beneath a blue limpidity of sky, of something bright as sunlight and more rare, more wonderful. As he took her soft, warm hand into his own icy one, the vision resolved itself into Evangeline and her rosy, diaphanous draperies against the portière, Evangeline with wide-set, innocent, glad eyes, Evangeline, the oval of whose cheek, the fluctuating color of whose bloom, the dewy tenderness of whose smile, the dear expectancy of whose lifted glance had known no ravage, no change, in all the years.

"Well, Torringford, have I taken pretty good care of her, or haven't I?" demanded Ray jocosely, as they shook hands. Evangeline pouted fleetingly.

"You mustn't fish for me, Arthur," she admonished him. "Don't try to make Dane compliment me on first sight."

"But indeed the years have stood still with you," said Torringford. He could not withdraw his eyes from her beauty. It illuminated the room. He saw it deepen with joy in his admiration, like a gem palpitating in a concentrated light.

"You've grown a flatterer," she said, shaking her head reprovingly. "I'm an old woman—and I'm growing atrociously fat."

"You should see her gym bills, Torringford," said Ray, laughing. "She gets weighed once a week and takes her waist measure—how often, Eve? Oh, the madam isn't going to develop any embonpoint, not if she knows herself." Evangeline's half-chiding, half-amused laugh chimed silverly with her husband's appreciation of his own wit.

The dinner, elaborately epicurean, wore itself to a close to an accompaniment of trivialities and personalities. Evangeline, who had once had the great gift of silence, had learned the use of tinsel speech. Finally they sat in the library over their coffee, intimately at ease. A message, prearranged Torringford knew, summoned Ray to his study, and the two old lovers were alone together.

"I had hoped," she said at last, sounding the inevitable personal note that had so repelled him during the dinner, "that you would have married long ago, Dane. I never thought"—from less lovely lips the words would have come simperingly—"I never thought that you would take it so badly—my—" Torringford arrested her speech by a little gesture. "But, perhaps," she went on, sentimental challenge in her voice, "I flatter myself. Perhaps it is not on my account you are still a bachelor?"

"You must not reproach yourself with my bachelorhood," he answered, stiff in spite of himself.

"But I cannot help it," she persisted plaintively. "I should so like to see you happy, happy as Arthur and I are. If you knew how happy we are, I think you could forgive me."

"Dear Mrs. Ray"—Torringford could not force to his lips the familiar name that had meant so long the clear flame of beauty and of aspiration—"please do not talk like this. Surely I never gave your kindness cause for self-reproach. And now, of course, the sight of your happiness can only—" He paused. He looked at her with her rapt, waiting eyes, her faintly parted lips. He could have died, he thought, not to have known how little they meant "Surely," he finished, "that can only make me glad that you followed your heart."

"You were always so noble," she murmured, "so magnanimous." Then she drifted on. He heard the soft cadences of her voice. He wished that Ray would return—he wanted to get away. If only she looked less like an alabaster lamp of loveliness through which the divine light of a wonderful soul shone! And finally he was conscious that she was "hoping" he would serve on the directorate of the new mining company Arthur was forming. It was in the desire to escape before the strangulation of his last memory, his last cherished vision of her, that he made a promise to see Arthur about it in the morning, and fled.

"Martha," he said abruptly next day, "I have seen Evangeline. I came in to tell you."

"Oh!" Martha's exclamation was a commonplace subterfuge to gain a second's time.

"She is as beautiful as ever," he went on relentlessly. "More beautiful."

"Certainly she is wonderfully lovely and in a very rare way," agreed Martha evenly.

"When you advised me so strongly not to see her, was it because you feared my being enthralled again by her loveliness? Of course you knew what I had never guessed—that it was always her beauty, never the woman herself. Did you fear I could not resist it again?" He made no apology for his cross-questioning.

"No," replied Martha indifferently.

"What was it then?"

"My dear Dane"—her direct, kind, unhappy eyes met his squarely—"I will tell you the truth. I never, for a moment, feared your being bound to her again. I only wanted to spare your disillusionment. You and I are old friends—good friends," she hurried a little. "I would always be glad to spare you pain. I hated to have the dream you were so faithful to all these years—that dream of the ideal woman—Oh, I don't know. And it's always an æsthetic pleasure to see a man capable of illusions."

"And you knew all the time that she was only an exquisite shell, reflecting whatever lights were nearest, not a fine-flaming spirit shining through gloriously fashioned clay?"

Martha stared at him a moment The new note in his voice was one of power. Would emancipation from even a chivalrous, high-minded slavery bring him into fuller manhood? The question wavered in her eyes. Then she relapsed into her customary mood of tolerance.

"And if she is—are you going to blame her? You know it is not her own selection that makes her lack—what did you so eloquently call it?—the fine-flaming spirit."

"I find I am not thinking so much about her," he answered, "poor Evangeline! I'm thinking of another woman I've known for—thirty years, is it, Martha?—and never knew until this hour."