XII.

At breakfast, where the guests were reasonably punctual, they were all able to observe, in the rapid succession in which they descended from their rooms, that it had stopped snowing and the sun was shining brilliantly.

“There isn’t enough for sleighing,” Mrs. Westangle proclaimed from the head of the table in her high twitter, “and there isn’t any coasting here in this flat country for miles.”

“Then what are we going to do with it?” one of the young ladies humorously pouted.

“That’s what I was going to suggest,” Mrs. Westangle replied. She pronounced it ‘sujjest’, but no one felt that it mattered. “And, of course,” she continued, “you needn’t any of you do it if you don’t like.”

“We’ll all do it, Mrs. Westangle,” Bushwick said. “We are unanimous in that.”

“Perhaps you’ll think it rather funny—odd,” she said.

“The odder the better, I think,” Verrian ventured, and another man declared that nothing Mrs. Westangle would do was odd, though everything was original.

“Well, there is such a thing as being too original,” she returned. Then she turned her head aside and looked down at something beside her plate and said, without lifting her eyes, “You know that in the Middle Ages there used to be flower-fights among the young nobility in Italy. The women held a tower, and the men attacked it with roses and flowers generally.”

“Why, is this a speech?” Miss Macroyd interrupted.

“A speech from the throne, yes,” Bushwick solemnly corrected her. “And she’s got it written down, like a queen—haven’t you, Mrs. Westangle?”

“Yes, I thought it would be more respectful.”

“She coming out,” Bushwick said to Verrian across the table.

“And if I got mixed up I could go back and straighten it,” the hostess declared, with a good—humored candor that took the general fancy, “and you could understand without so much explaining. We haven’t got flowers enough at this season,” she went on, looking down again at the paper beside her plate, “but we happen to have plenty of snowballs, and the notion is to have the women occupy a snow tower and the men attack them with snowballs.”

“Why,” Bushwick said, “this is the snow-fort business of our boyhood! Let’s go out and fortify the ladies at once.” He appealed to Verrian and made a feint of pushing his chair back. “May we use water-soaked snowballs, or must they all be soft and harmless?” he asked of Mrs. Westangle, who was now the centre of a storm of applause and question from the whole table.

She kept her head and referred again to her paper. “The missiles of the assailants are to be very soft snowballs, hardly more than mere clots, so that nobody can be hurt in the assault, but the defenders may repel the assailants with harder snowballs.”

“Oh,” Miss Macroyd protested, “this is consulting the weakness of our sex.”

“In the fury of the onset we’ll forget it,” Verrian reassured her.

“Do you think you really will, Mr. Verrian?” she asked. “What is all our athletic training to go for if you do?”

Mrs. Westangle read on:

“The terms of capitulation can be arranged on the ground, whether the castle is carried or the assailing party are made prisoners by its defenders.”

“Hopeless captivity in either case!” Bushwick lamented.

“Isn’t it rather academic?” Miss Macroyd asked of Verrian, in a low voice.

“I’m afraid, rather,” he owned.

“But why are you so serious?” she pursued.

“Am I serious?” he retorted, with a trace of exasperation; and she laughed.

Their parley was quite lost in the clamor which raged up and down the table till Mrs. Westangle ended it by saying, “There’s no obligation on any one to take part in the hostilities. There won’t be any conscription; it’s a free fight that will be open to everybody.” She folded the paper she had been reading from and put it in her lap, in default of a pocket. She went on impromptu:

“You needn’t trouble about building the fort, Mr. Bushwick. I’ve had the farmer and his men working at the castle since daybreak, and the ladies will find it all ready for them, when they’re ready to defend it, down in the meadow beyond the edge of the birch-lot. The battle won’t begin till eleven o’clock.”

She rose, and the clamor rose again with her, and her guests crushed about her, demanding to be allowed at least to go and look at the castle immediately.

One of the men’s voices asked, “May I be one of the defenders, Mrs. Westangle? I want to be on the winning side, sure.”

“Oh, is this going to be a circus chariot-race?” another lamented.

“No, indeed,” a girl cried, “it’s to be the real thing.”

It fell to Verrian, in the assortment of couples in which Mrs. Westangle’s guests sallied out to view the proposed scene of action, to find himself, not too willingly, at Miss Macroyd’s side. In his heart and in his mind he was defending the amusement which he instantly divined as no invention of Mrs. Westangle’s, and both his heart and his mind misgave him about this first essay of Miss Shirley in her new enterprise. It was, as Miss Macroyd had suggested, academic, and at the same time it had a danger in it of being tomboyish. Golf, tennis, riding, boating, swimming—all the vigorous sports in which women now excel—were boldly athletic, and yet you could not feel quite that they were tomboyish. Was it because the bent of Miss Shirley was so academic that she was periling upon tomboyishness without knowing it in this primal inspiration of hers? Inwardly he resented the word academic, although outwardly he had assented to it when Miss Macroyd proposed it. To be academic would be even more fatal to Miss Shirley’s ambition than to be tomboyish, and he thought with pathos of that touch about the Italian nobility in the Middle Ages, and how little it could have moved the tough fancies of that crowd of well-groomed young people at the breakfast-table when Mrs. Westangle brought it out with her ignorant acceptance of it as a social force. After all, Miss Macroyd was about the only one who could have felt it in the way it was meant, and she had chosen to smile at it. He wondered if possibly she could feel the secondary pathos of it as he did. But to make talk with her he merely asked:

“Do you intend to take part in the fray?”

“Not unless I can be one of the reserve corps that won’t need to be brought up till it’s all over. I’ve no idea of getting my hair down.”

“Ah,” he sighed, “you think it’s going to be rude:”

“That is one of the chances. But you seem to be suffering about it, Mr. Verrian!” she said, and, of course, she laughed.

“Who? I?” he returned, in the temptation to deny it. But he resisted. “I always suffer when there’s anything silly happening, as if I were doing it myself. Don’t you?”

“No, thank you, I believe not. But perhaps you are doing this? One can’t suppose Mrs. Westangle imagined it.”

“No, I can’t plead guilty. But why isn’t it predicable of Mrs. Westangle?”

“You mustn’t ask too much of me, Mr. Verrian. Somehow, I won’t say how, it’s been imagined for her. She’s heard of its being done somewhere. It can’t be supposed she’s read of it, anywhere.”

“No, I dare say not.”

Miss Macroyd came out with her laugh. “I should like to know what she makes of you, Mr. Verrian, when she is alone with herself. She must have looked you up and authenticated you in her own way, but it would be as far from your way as—well, say—the Milky Way.”

“You don’t think she asked me because she met me at your house?”

“No, that wouldn’t be enough, from her point of view. She means to go much further than we’ve ever got.”

“Then a year from now she wouldn’t ask me?”

“It depends upon who asks you in the mean time.”

“You might get to be a fad, and then she would feel that she would have to have you.”

“You’re not flattering me?”

“Do you find it flattering?”

“It isn’t exactly my idea of the reward I’ve been working for. What shall I do to be a fad?”

“Well, rather degrading stunts, if you mean in the smart set. Jump about on all fours and pick up a woman’s umbrella with your teeth, and bark. Anything else would be easier for you among chic people, where your brilliancy would count.”

“Brilliancy? Oh, thank you! Go on.”

“Now, a girl—if you were a girl—”

“Oh yes, if I were a girl! That will be so much more interesting.”

“A girl,” Miss Macroyd continued, “might do it by posing effectively for amateur photography. Or doing something original in dramatics or pantomimics or recitation—but very original, because chic people are critical. Or if she had a gift for getting up things that would show other girls off; or suggesting amusements; but that would be rather in the line of swell people, who are not good at getting up things and are glad of help.”

“I see, I see!” Verrian said, eagerly. But he walked along looking down at the snow, and not meeting the laughing glance that Miss Macroyd cast at his face. “Well?”

“I believe that’s all,” she said, sharply. She added, less sharply: “She couldn’t afford to fail, though, at any point. The fad that fails is extinguished forever. Will these simple facts do for fiction? Or is it for somebody in real life you’re asking, Mr. Verrian?”

“Oh, for fiction. And thank you very much. Oh, that’s rather pretty!”

They had come into the meadow where the snow battle was to be, and on its slope, against the dark weft of the young birch-trees, there was a mimic castle outlined in the masonry of white blocks quarried from the drifts and built up in courses like rough blocks of marble. A decoration of green from the pines that mixed with the birches had been suggested rather than executed, and was perhaps the more effective for its sketchiness.

“Yes, it’s really beautiful,” Miss Macroyd owned, and though she did not join her cries to those of the other girls, who stood scattered about admiring it, and laughing and chattering with the men whose applause, of course, took the jocose form, there was no doubt but she admired it. “What I can’t understand is how Mrs. Westangle got the notion of this. There’s the soprano note in it, and some woman must have given it to her.”

“Not contralto, possibly?” Verrian asked.

“I insist upon the soprano,” she said.

But he did not notice what she said. His eyes were following a figure which seemed to be escaping up through the birches behind the snow castle and ploughing its way through the drifts; in front of the structure they had been levelled to make an easier battle-field. He knew that it was Miss Shirley, and he inferred that she had been in the castle directing the farm—hands building it, and now, being caught by the premature arrival of the contesting forces, had fled before them and left her subordinates to finish the work. He felt, with a throe of helpless sympathy, that she was undertaking too much. It was hazardous enough to attempt the practice of her novel profession under the best of circumstances, but to keep herself in abeyance so far as not to be known at all in it, and, at the same time, to give way to her interest in it to the extent of coming out, with her infirmly established health, into that wintry weather, and superintending the preparations for the first folly she had planned, was a risk altogether too great for her.

“Who in the world,” Miss Macroyd suddenly demanded, “is the person floundering about in the birch woods?”

“Perhaps the soprano,” Verrian returned, hardily.

Bushwick detached himself from a group of girls near by and intercepted any response from Miss Macroyd to Verrian by calling to her before he came up, “Are you going to be one of the enemy, Miss Macroyd?”

“No, I think I will be neutral.” She added, “Is there going to be any such thing as an umpire?”

“We hadn’t thought of that. There could be. The office could be created; but, you know, it’s the post of danger.”

Verrian joined the group that Bushwick has left. He found a great scepticism as to the combat, mixed with some admiration for the castle, and he set himself to contest the prevalent feeling. What was the matter with a snow-fight? he demanded. It would be great fun. Decidedly he was going in for it. He revived the drooping sentiment in its favor, and then, flown with his success, he went from group to group and couple to couple, and animated all with his zeal, which came, he hardly knew whence; what he pretended to the others was that they were rather bound not to let Mrs. Westangle’s scheme fall through. Their doubts vanished before him, and the terms of the battle were quickly arranged. He said he had read of one of those mediaeval flower-fights, and he could tell them how that was done. Where it would not fit into the snow-fight, they could trust to inspiration; every real battle was the effect of inspiration.

He came out, and some of the young women and most of the young men, who had dimly known of him as a sort of celebrity, and suspected him of being a prig, were reconciled, and accepted him for a nice fellow, and became of his opinion as to the details of the amusement before them.

It was not very Homeric, when it came off, or very mediaeval, but it was really lots of fun, or far more fun than one would have thought. The storming of the castle was very sincere, and the fortress was honestly defended. Miss Macroyd was made umpire, as she wished, and provided with a large snowball to sit on at a safe distance; as she was chosen by the men, the girls wanted to have an umpire of their own, who would be really fair, and they voted Verrian into the office. But he refused, partly because he did not care about being paired off with Miss Macroyd so conspicuously, and partly because he wished to help the fight along.

Attacks were made and repelled, and there were feats of individual and collective daring on the side of the defenders which were none the less daring because the assailants stopped to cheer them, and to disable themselves by laughing at the fury of the foe. A detachment of the young men at last stormed the castle and so weakened its walls that they toppled inward; then the defenders, to save themselves from being buried under the avalanche, swarmed out into the open and made the entire force of the enemy prisoners.

The men pretended that this was what might have been expected from the beginning, but by this time the Berserker madness had possessed Miss Macroyd, too; she left her throne of snow and came forward shouting that it had been perfectly fair, and that the men had been really beaten, and they had no right to pretend that they had given themselves up purposely. The sex-partisanship, which is such a droll fact in women when there is any question of their general opposition to men, possessed them all, and they stood as, one girl for the reality of their triumph. This did not prevent them from declaring that the men had behaved with outrageous unfairness, and that the only one who fought with absolute sincerity from first to last was Mr. Verrian.

Neither their unity of conviction concerning the general fact nor the surprising deduction from it in Verrian’s case operated to make them refuse the help of their captives in getting home. When they had bound up their tumbled hair, in some cases, and repaired the ravages of war among their feathers and furs and draperies, in other cases, they accepted the hands of the late enemy at difficult points of the path. But they ran forward when they neared the house, and they were prompt to scream upon Mrs. Westangle that there never had been such a success or such fun, and that they were almost dead, and soon as they had something to eat they were going to bed and never going to get up again.

In the details which they were able to give at luncheon, they did justice to Verrian’s noble part in the whole affair, which had saved the day, not only in keeping them up to the work when they had got thinking it couldn’t be carried through, but in giving the combat a validity which it would not have had without him. They had to thank him, next to Mrs. Westangle herself, whom they praised beyond any articulate expression, for thinking up such a delightful thing. They wondered how she could ever have thought of it—such a simple thing too; and they were sure that when people heard of it they would all be wanting to have snow battles.

Mrs. Westangle took her praises as passively, if not as modestly, as Verrian received his. She made no show of disclaiming them, but she had the art, invaluable in a woman who meant to go far in the line she had chosen, of not seeming to have done anything, or of not caring whether people liked it or not. Verrian asked himself, as he watched her twittering back at those girls, and shedding equally their thanks and praises from her impermeable plumage, how she would have behaved if Miss Shirley’s attempt had been an entire failure. He decided that she would have ignored the failure with the same impersonality as that with which she now ignored the success. It appeared that in one point he did her injustice, for when he went up to dress for dinner after the long stroll he took towards night he found a note under his door, by which he must infer that Mrs. Westangle had not kept the real facts of her triumph from the mistress of the revels.

“DEAR MR. VERRIAN, I am not likely to see you, but I mustthank you.“M. SHIRLEY.“P. S. Don’t try to answer, please.”

Verrian liked, the note, he even liked the impulse which had dictated it, and he understood the impulse; but he did not like getting the note. If Miss Shirley meant business in taking up the line of life she had professed to have entered upon seriously, she had better, in the case of a young man whose acquaintance she had chanced to make, let her gratitude wait. But when did a woman ever mean business, except in the one great business?

To have got that sillily superfluous note to Verrian without any one’s knowing besides, Miss Shirley must have stolen to his door herself and slipped it under. In order to do this unsuspected and unseen, she must have found out in some sort that would not give her away which his room was, and then watched her chance. It all argued a pervasiveness in her, after such a brief sojourn in the house, and a mastery of finesse that he did not like, though, he reflected, he was not authorized to like or dislike anything about her. He was thirty-seven years old, and he had not lived through that time, with his mother at his elbow to suggest inferences from facts, without being versed in wiles which, even when they were honest, were always wiles, and in lures which, when they were of the most gossamer tenuity, were yet of texture close enough to make the man who blundered through them aware that they had been thrown across his path. He understood, of course, that they were sometimes helplessly thrown across it, and were mere expressions of abstract woman with relation to abstract man, but that did not change their nature. He did not abhor them, but he believed he knew them, and he believed now that he detected one of them in Miss Shirley’s note. Of course, one could take another view of it. One could say to one’s self that she was really so fervently grateful that she could not trust some accident to bring them together in a place where she was merely a part of the catering, as she said, and he was a guest, and that she was excusable, or at least mercifully explicable, in her wish to have him know that she appreciated his goodness. Verrian had been very good, he knew that; he had saved the day for the poor thing when it was in danger of the dreariest kind of slump. She was a poor thing, as any woman was who had to make her own way, and she had been sick and was charming. Besides, she had found out his name and had probably recognized a quality of celebrity in it, unknown to the other young people with whom he found himself so strangely assorted under Mrs. Westangle’s roof.

In the end, and upon the whole, Verrian would rather have liked, if the thing could have been made to happen, meeting Miss Shirley long enough to disclaim meriting her thanks, and to ascribe to the intrinsic value of her scheme the brilliant success it had achieved. This would not have been true, but it would have been encouraging to her; and in the revery which followed upon his conditional desire he had a long imaginary conversation with her, and discussed all her other plans for the revels of the week. These had not the trouble of defining themselves very distinctly in the conversation in order to win his applause, and their consideration did not carry him with Miss Shirley beyond the strictly professional ground on which they met.

She had apparently invented nothing for that evening, and the house party was left to its own resources in dancing and sitting out dances, which apparently fully sufficed it. They were all tired, and broke up early. The women took their candles and went off to bed, and the men went to the billiard-room to smoke. On the way down from his room, where he had gone to put on his smoking-jacket, Verrian met Miss Macroyd coming up, candle in hand, and received from her a tacit intimation that he might stop her for a joking good-night.

“I hope you’ll sleep well on your laurels as umpire,” he said.

“Oh, thank you,” she returned, “and I hope your laurels won’t keep you awake. It must seem to you as if it was blowing a perfect gale in them.”

“What do you mean? I did nothing.”

“Oh, I don’t mean your promotion of the snow battle. But haven’t you heard?” He stared. “You’ve been found out!”

“Found out?” Verrian’s soul was filled with the joy of literary fame.

“Yes. You can’t conceal yourself now. You’re Verrian the actor.”

“The actor?” Verrian frowned blackly in his disgust, so blackly that Miss Macroyd laughed aloud.

“Yes, the coming matinee idol. One of the girls recognized you as soon as you came into the house, and the name settled it, though, of course, you’re supposed to be here incognito.”

The mention of that name which he enjoyed in common with the actor made Verrian furious, for when the actor first appeared with it in New York Verrian had been at the pains to find out that it was not his real name, and that he had merely taken it because of the weak quality of romance in it, which Verrian himself had always disliked. But, of course, he could not vent his fury on Miss Macroyd. All he could do was to ask, “Then they have got my photograph on their dressing-tables, with candles burning before it?”

“No, I don’t believe I can give you that comfort. The fact is, your acting is not much admired among the girls here, but they think you are unexpectedly nice as a private person.”

“That’s something. And does Mrs. Westangle think I’m the actor, too?”

“How should Mrs. Westangle know what she thinks? And if she doesn’t, how should I?”

“That’s true. And are you going to give me away?”

“I haven’t done it yet. But isn’t it best to be honest?”

“It mightn’t be a success.”

“The honesty?”

“My literary celebrity.”

“There’s that,” Miss Macroyd rejoiced. “Well, so far I’ve merely said I was sure you were not Verrian the actor. I’ll think the other part over.” She went on up-stairs, with the sound of her laugh following her, and Verrian went gloomily back to the billiard-room, where he found most of the smokers conspicuously yawning. He lighted a fresh cigar, and while he smoked they dropped away one by one till only Bushwick was left.

“Some of the fellows are going Thursday,” he said. “Are you going to stick it out to the bitter end?”

Till then it had not occurred to Verrian that he was not going to stay through the week, but now he said, “I don’t know but I may go Thursday. Shall you?”

“I might as well stay on. I don’t find much doing in real estate at Christmas. Do you?”

This was fishing, but it was better than openly taking him for that actor, and Verrian answered, unresentfully, “I don’t know. I’m not in that line exactly.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” Bushwick said. “I thought I had seen your name with that of a West Side concern.”

“No, I have a sort of outside connection with the publishing business.”

“Oh,” Bushwick returned, politely, and it would have been reassuringly if Verrian had wished not to be known as an author. The secret in which he lived in that regard was apparently safe from that young, amiable, good-looking real-estate broker. He inferred, from the absence of any allusion to the superstition of the women as to his profession, that it had not spread to Bushwick at least, and this inclined him the more to like him. They sat up talking pleasantly together about impersonal affairs till Bushwick finished his cigar. Then he started for bed, saying, “Well, good-night. I hope Mrs. Westangle won’t have anything so active on the tapis for tomorrow.”

“Try and sleep it off. Good-night.”

Verrian remained to finish his cigar, but at the end he was not yet sleepy, and he thought he would get a book from the library, if that part of the house were still lighted, and he looked out to see. Apparently it was as brilliantly illuminated as when the company had separated there for the night, and he pushed across the foyer hall that separated the billiard-room from the drawing-zoom and library. He entered the drawing-room, and in the depths of the library, relieved against the rows of books in their glass cases, he startled Miss Shirley from a pose which she seemed to be taking there alone.

At the instant of their mutual recognition she gave a little muted shriek, and then gasped out, “I beg your pardon,” while he was saying, too, “I beg your pardon.”

After a tacit exchange of forgiveness, he said, “I am afraid I startled you. I was just coming for a book to read myself asleep with. I—”

{0087}

“Not at all,” she returned. “I was just—” Then she did not say what, and he asked:

“Making some studies?”

“Yes,” she owned, with reluctant promptness.

“I mustn’t ask what,” he suggested, and he made an effort to smile away what seemed a painful perturbation in her as he went forward to look at the book-shelves, from which, till then, she had not slipped aside.

“I’m in your way,” she said, and he answered, “Not at all.” He added to the other sentence he had spoken, “If it’s going to be as good as what you gave us today—”

“You are very kind.” She hesitated, and then she said, abruptly: “What I did to-day owed everything to you, Mr. Verrian,” and while he desisted from searching the book-shelves, she stood looking anxiously at him, with the pulse in her neck visibly throbbing. Her agitation was really painful, but Verrian did not attribute it to her finding herself there alone with him at midnight; for though the other guests had all gone to bed, the house was awake in some of the servants, and an elderly woman came in presently bringing a breadth of silvery gauze, which she held up, asking if it was that.

“Not exactly, but it will do nicely, Mrs. Stager. Would you mind getting me the very pale-blue piece that electric blue?”

“I’m looking for something good and dull,” Verrian said, when the woman was gone.

“Travels are good, or narratives, for sleeping on,” she said, with a breathless effort for calm. “I found,” she panted, “in my own insomnia, that merely the broken-up look of a page of dialogue in a novel racked my nerves so that I couldn’t sleep. But narratives were beautifully soothing.”

“Thank you,” he responded; “that’s a good idea.” And stooping, with his hands on his knees, he ranged back and forth along the shelves. “But Mrs. Westangle’s library doesn’t seem to be very rich in narrative.”

He had not his mind on the search perhaps, and perhaps she knew it. She presently said, “I wish I dared ask you a favor—I mean your advice, Mr. Verrian.”

He lifted himself from his stooping posture and looked at her, smiling. “Would that take much courage?” His smile was a little mocking; he was thinking that a girl who would hurry that note to him, and would personally see that it did not fail to reach him, would have the courage for much more.

She did not reply directly. “I should have to explain, but I know you won’t tell. This is going to be my piece de resistance, my grand stunt. I’m going to bring it off the last night.” She stopped long enough for Verrian to revise his resolution of going away with the fellows who were leaving the middle of the week, and to decide on staying to the end. “I am going to call it Seeing Ghosts.”

“That’s good,” Verrian said, provisionally.

“Yes, I might say I was surprised at my thinking it up.”

“That would be one form of modesty.”

“Yes,” she said, with a wan smile she had, “and then again it mightn’t be another.” She went on, abruptly, “As many as like can take part in the performance. It’s to be given out, and distinctly understood beforehand, that the ghost isn’t a veridical phantom, but just an honest, made-up, every-day spook. It may change its pose from time to time, or its drapery, but the setting is to be always the same, and the people who take their turns in seeing it are to be explicitly reassured, one after another, that there’s nothing in it, you know. The fun will be in seeing how each one takes it, after they know what it really is.”

“Then you’re going to give us a study of temperaments.”

“Yes,” she assented. And after a moment, given to letting the notion get quite home with her, she asked, vividly, “Would you let me use it?”

“The phrase? Why, certainly. But wouldn’t it be rather too psychological? I think just Seeing Ghosts would be better.”

“Better than Seeing Ghosts: A Study of Temperaments? Perhaps it would. It would be simpler.”

“And in this house you need all the simplicity you can get,” he suggested.

She smiled, intelligently but reticently. “My idea is that every one somehow really believes in ghosts—I know I do—and so fully expects to see one that any sort of make-up will affect them for the moment just as if they did see one. I thought—that perhaps—I don’t know how to say it without seeming to make use of you—”

“Oh, do make use of me, Miss Shirley!”

“That you could give me some hints about the setting, with your knowledge of the stage—” She stopped, having rushed forward to that point, while he continued to look steadily at her without answering her. She faced him courageously, but not convincingly.

“Did you think that I was an actor?” he asked, finally.

“Mrs. Westangle seemed to think you were.”

“But did you?”

“I’m sure I didn’t mean—I beg your pardon—”

“It’s all right. If I were an actor I shouldn’t be ashamed of it. But I was merely curious to know whether you shared the prevalent superstition. I’m afraid I can’t help you from a knowledge of the stage, but if I can be of use, from a sort of amateur interest in psychology, with an affair like this I shall be only too glad.”

“Thank you,” she said, somewhat faintly, with an effect of dismay disproportionate to the occasion.

She sank into a chair before which she had been standing, and she looked as if she were going to swoon.

He started towards her with an alarmed “Miss Shirley.”

She put out a hand weakly to stay him. “Don’t!” she entreated. “I’m a little—I shall be all right in a moment.”

“Can’t I get you something—call some one?”

“Not for the world!” she commanded, and she pulled herself together and stood up. “But I think I’ll stop for to-night. I’m glad my idea strikes you favorably. It’s merely—Oh, you found it, Mrs. Stager!” She broke off to address the woman who had now come back and was holding up the trailing breadths of the electric-blue gauze. “Isn’t it lovely?” She gave herself time to adore the drapery, with its changes of meteoric lucence, before she rose and took it. She went with it to the background in the library, where, against the glass door of the cases, she involved herself in it and stood shimmering. A thrill pierced to Verrian’s heart; she was indeed wraithlike, so that he hated to have her call, “How will that do?”

Mrs. Stager modestly referred the question to him by her silence. “I will answer for its doing, if it does for the others as it’s done for me.”

She laughed. “And you doubly knew what it was. Yes, I think it will go.” She took another pose, and then another. “What do you think of it, Mrs. Stager?” she called to the woman standing respectfully abeyant at one side.

“It’s awful. I don’t know but I’ll be afraid to go to my room.”

“Sit down, and I’ll go to your room with you when I’m through. I won’t be long, now.”

She tried different gauzes, which she had lying on one of the chairs, and crowned herself with triumph in the applauses of her two spectators, rejoicing with a glee that Verrian found childlike and winning. “If they’re all like you, it will be the greatest success!”

“They’ll all be like me, and more,” he said, “I’m really very severe.”

“Are you a severe person?” she asked, coming forward to him. “Ought people to be afraid of you?”

“Yes, people with bad consciences. I’m rattier afraid of myself for that reason.”

“Have you got a bad conscience?” she asked, letting her eyes rest on his.

“Yes. I can’t make my conduct square with my ideal of conduct.”

“I know what that is!” she sighed. “Do you expect to be punished for it?”

“I expect to be got even with.”

“Yes, one is. I’ve noticed that myself. But I didn’t suppose that actors—Oh, I forgot! I beg your pardon again, Mr. Verrian. Oh—Goodnight!” She faced him evanescently in going out, with the woman after her, but, whether she did so more in fear or more in defiance, she left him standing motionless in his doubt, and she did nothing to solve his doubt when she came quickly back alone, before he was aware of having moved, to say, “Mr. Verrian, I want to—I have to—tell you that—I didn’t think you were the actor.” Then she was finally gone, and Verrian had nothing for it but to go up to his room with the book he found he had in his hand and must have had there all the time.

If he had read it, the book would not have eased him off to sleep, but he did not even try, to read it. He had no wish to sleep. The waking dream in which he lost himself was more interesting than any vision of slumber could have been, and he had no desire to end it. In that he could still be talking with the girl whose mystery appealed to him so pleasingly. It was none the less pleasing because, at what might be called her first blushes, she did not strike him as altogether ingenuous, but only able to discipline herself into a final sincerity from a consciousness which had been taught wisdom by experience.

She was still a scarcely recovered invalid, and it was pathetic that she should be commencing the struggle of life with strength so little proportioned to the demand upon it; and the calling she had taken up was of a fantasticality in some aspects which was equally pathetic. But all the undertakings of women, he mused, were piteous, not only because women were unequal to the struggle at the best, but because they were hampered always with themselves, with their sex, their femininity, and the necessity of getting it out of the way before they could really begin to fight. Whatever they attempted it must be in relation to the man’s world in which livings were made; but the immemorial conditions were almost wholly unchanged. A woman approached this world as a woman, with the inborn instinct of tempting it as a woman, to win it to love her and make her a wife and mother; and although she might stoically overcome the temptation at last, it might recur at any moment and overcome her. This was perpetually weakening and imperilling her, and she must feel it at the encounter with each man she met. She must feel the tacit and even unconscious irony of his attitude towards her in her enterprise, and the finer her make the crueller and the more humiliating and disheartening this must be.

Of course, this Miss Shirley felt Verrian’s irony, which he had guarded from any expression with genuine compassion for her. She must feel that to his knowledge of life she and her experiment had an absurdity which would not pass, whatever their success might be. If she meant business, and business only, they ought to have met as two men would have met, but he knew that they had not done so, and she must have known it. All that was plain sailing enough, but beyond this lay a sea of conjecture in which he found himself without helm or compass. Why, should she have acted a fib about his being an actor, and why, after the end, should she have added an end, in which she returned to own that she had been fibbing? For that was what it came to; and though Verrian tasted a delicious pleasure in the womanish feat by which she overcame her womanishness, he could not puzzle out her motive. He was not sure that he wished to puzzle it out. To remain with illimitable guesses at his choice was more agreeable, for the present at least, and he was not aware of having lapsed from them when he woke so late as to be one of the breakfasters whose plates were kept for them after the others were gone.

It was the first time that Verrian had come down late, and it was his novel experience to find himself in charge of Mrs. Stager at breakfast, instead of the butler and the butler’s man, who had hitherto served him at the earlier hour. There were others, somewhat remote from him, at table, who were ending when he was beginning, and when they had joked themselves out of the room and away from Mrs. Stager’s ministrations he was left alone to her. He had instantly appreciated a quality of motherliness in her attitude towards him, and now he was sensible of a kindly intimacy to which he rather helplessly addressed himself.

“Well, Mrs. Stager, did you see a ghost on your way to bed?”

“I don’t know as I really expected to,” she said. “Won’t you have a few more of the buckwheats?”

“Do you think I’d better? I believe I won’t. They’re very tempting. Miss Shirley makes a very good ghost,” he suggested.

Mrs. Stager would not at first commit herself further than to say in bringing him the butter, “She’s just up from a long fit of sickness.” She impulsively added, “She ain’t hardly strong enough to be doing what she is, I tell her.”

“I understood she had been ill,” Verrian said. “We drove over from the station together, the other day.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Stager admitted. “Kind of a nervous breakdown, I believe. But she’s got an awful spirit. Mrs. Westangle don’t want her to do all she is doing.”

Verrian looked at her in surprise. He had not expected that of the India-rubber nature he had attributed to Mrs. Westangle. In view of Mrs. Stager’s privity to the unimagined kindliness of his hostess, he relaxed himself in a further interest in Miss Shirley, as if it would now be safe. “She’s done splendidly, so far,” he said, meaning the girl. “I’m glad Mrs. Westangle appreciates her work.”

“I guess,” Mrs. Stager said, “that if it hadn’t been for you at the snow-fight—She got back from getting ready for it, that morning, almost down sick, she was afraid so it was going to fail.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Verrian said, putting the praise from him.

Mrs. Stager lowered her voice in an octave of deeper confidentiability. “You got the note? I put it under, and I didn’t know.”

“Oh yes, I got it,” Verrian said, sensible of a relief, which he would not assign to any definite reason, in knowing that Miss Shirley had not herself put it under his door. But he now had to take up another burden in the question whether Miss Shirley were of an origin so much above that of her confidant that she could have a patrician fearlessness in making use of her, or were so near Mrs. Stager’s level of life that she would naturally turn to her for counsel and help. Miss Shirley had the accent, the manners, and the frank courage of a lady; but those things could be learned; they were got up for the stage every day.

Verrian was roused from the muse he found he had fallen into by hearing Mrs. Stager ask, “Won’t you have some more coffee?”

“No, thank you,” he said. And now he rose from the table, on which he dreamily dropped his napkin, and got his hat and coat and went out for a walk. He had not studied the art of fiction so long, in the many private failures that had preceded his one public success, without being made to observe that life sometimes dealt in the accidents and coincidences which his criticism condemned as too habitually the resource of the novelist. Hitherto he had disdained them for this reason; but since his serial story was off his hands, and he was beginning to look about him for fresh material, he had doubted more than once whether his severity was not the effect of an unjustifiable prejudice.

It struck him now, in turning the corner of the woodlot above the meadow where the snow-battle had taken place, and suddenly finding himself face to face with Miss Shirley, that nature was in one of her uninventive moods and was helping herself out from the old stock-in-trade of fiction. All the same, he felt a glow of pleasure, which was also a glow of pity; for while Miss Shirley looked, as always, interesting, she look tired, too, with a sort of desperate air which did not otherwise account for itself. She had given, at sight of him, a little start, and a little “Oh!” dropped from her lips, as if it had been jostled from them. She made haste to go on, with something like the voluntary hardiness of the courage that plucks itself from the primary emotion of fear, “You are going down to try the skating?”

“Do I look it, without skates?”

“You may be going to try the sliding,” she returned. “I’m afraid there won’t be much of either for long. This soft air is going to make havoc of my plans for to-morrow.”

“That’s too bad of it. Why not hope for a hard freeze to-night? You might as well. The weather has been known to change its mind. You might even change your plans.”

“No, I can’t do that. I can’t think of anything else. It’s to bridge over the day that’s left before Seeing Ghosts. If it does freeze, you’ll come to Mrs. Westangle’s afternoon tea on the pond?”

“I certainly shall. How is it to be worked?”

“She’s to have her table on a platform, with runners, in a bower of evergreen boughs, and be pushed about, and the people are to skate up for the tea. There are to be tea and chocolate, and two girls to pour, just as in real life. It isn’t a very dazzling idea, but I thought it might do; and Mrs. Westangle is so good-natured. Now, if the thermometer will do its part!”

“I am sure it will,” Verrian said, but a glance at the gray sky did not confirm him in his prophetic venture. The snow was sodden under foot; a breath from the south stirred the pines to an Aeolian response and moved the stiff, dry leaves of the scrub-oaks. A sapsucker was marking an accurate circle of dots round the throat of a tall young maple, and enjoying his work in a low, guttural soliloquy, seemingly, yet, dismayingly, suggestive of spring.

“It’s lovely, anyway,” she said, following his glance with an upward turn of her face.

“Yes, it’s beautiful. I think this sort of winter day is about the best the whole year can do. But I will sacrifice the chance of another like it to your skating-tea, Miss Shirley.”

He did not know why he should have made this speech to her, but apparently she did, and she said, “You’re always coming to my help, Mr. Verrian.”

“Don’t mention it!”

“I won’t, then,” she said, with a smile that showed her thin face at its thinnest and left her lip caught on her teeth till she brought it down voluntarily. It was a small but full lip and pretty, and this trick of it had a fascination. She added, gravely, “I don’t believe you will like my ice-tea.”

“I haven’t any active hostility to it. You can’t always be striking twelve—twelve midnight—as you will be in Seeing Ghosts. But your ice-tea will do very well for striking five. I’m rather elaborate!”

“Not too elaborate to hide your real opinion. I wonder what you do think of my own elaboration—I mean of my scheme.”

“Yes?”

They had moved on, at his turning to walk with her, so as not to keep her standing in the snow, and now she said, looking over her shoulder at him, “I’ve decided that it won’t do to let the ghost have all the glory. I don’t think it will be fair to let the people merely be scared, even when they’ve been warned that they’re to see a ghost and told it isn’t real.”

She seemed to refer the point to him, and he said, provisionally, “I don’t know what more they can ask.”

“They can ask questions. I’m going to let each person speak to the ghost, if not scared dumb, and ask it just what they please; and I’m going to answer their questions if I can.”

“Won’t it be something of an intellectual strain?”

“Yes, it will. But it will be fun, too, a little, and it will help the thing to go off. What do you think?”

“I think it’s fine. Are you going to give it out, so that they can be studying up their questions?”

“No, their questions have got to be impromptu. Or, at least, the first one has. Of course, after the scheme has once been given away, the ghost-seers will be more or less prepared, and the ghost will have to stand it.”

“I think it’s great. Are you going to let me have a chance with a question?”

“Are you going to see a ghost?”

“To be sure I am. May I really ask it what I please?”

“If you’re honest.”

“Oh, I shall be honest—”

He stopped breathlessly, but she did not seem called upon to supply any meaning for his abruptness. “I’m awfully glad you like the idea,” she said, “I have had to think the whole thing out for myself, and I haven’t been quite certain that the question-asking wasn’t rather silly, or, at least, sillier than the rest. Thank you so much, Mr. Verrian.”

“I’ve thought of my question,” he began again, as abruptly as he had stopped before. “May I ask it now?”

Cries of laughter came up from the meadow below, and the voices seemed coming nearer.

“Oh, I mustn’t be seen!” Miss Shirley lamented. “Oh, dear! If I’m seen the whole thing is given away. What shall I do?” She whirled about and ran down the road towards a path that entered the wood.

He ran after her. “My question is, May I come to see you when you get back to town?”

“Yes, certainly. But don’t come now! You mustn’t be seen with me! I’m not supposed to be in the house at all.”

If Verrian’s present mood had been more analytic, it might have occurred to him that the element of mystery which Miss Shirley seemed to cherish in regard to herself personally was something that she could dramatically apply with peculiar advantage to the phantasmal part she was to take in her projected entertainment. But he was reduced from the exercise of his analytic powers to a passivity in which he was chiefly conscious of her pathetic fascination. This seemed to emanate from her frail prettiness no less than from the sort of fearful daring with which she was pushing her whole enterprise through; it came as much from her undecided blondness—from her dust-colored hair, for instance—as from the entreating look of her pinched eyes, only just lighting their convalescent fires, and from the weakness that showed, with the grace, in her run through the wintry woods, where he watched her till the underbrush thickened behind her and hid her from him. Altogether his impression was very complex, but he did not get so far even as the realization of this, in his mental turmoil, as he turned with a deep sigh and walked meditatively homeward through the incipient thaw.

It did not rain at night, as it seemed so likely to do, and by morning the cloudiness of the sky had so far thinned that the sun looked mildly through it without more than softening the frozen surface of the pond, so that Mrs. Westangle’s ice-tea (as everybody called it, by a common inspiration, or by whatever circuitous adoption of Verrian’s phrase) came off with great success. People from other houses were there, and they all said that they wondered how she came to have such a brilliant idea, and they kept her there till nearly dark. Then the retarded rain began, in a fine drizzle, and her house guests were forced homeward, but not too soon to get a good, long rest before dressing for dinner. She was praised for her understanding with the weather, and for her meteorological forecast as much as for her invention in imagining such a delightful and original thing as an ice-tea, which no one else had ever thought of. Some of the women appealed to Verrian to say if he had ever heard of anything like it; and they felt that Mrs. Westangle was certainly arriving, and by no beaten track.

None of the others put it in these terms, of course; it was merely a consensus of feeling with them, and what was more articulate was dropped among the ironies with which Miss Macroyd more confidentially celebrated the event. Out of hearing of the others, in slowly following them with Verrian, she recurred to their talk. “Yes, it’s only a question of money enough for Newport, after this. She’s chic now, and after a season there she will be smart. But oh, dear! How came she to be chic? Can you imagine?”

Verrian did not feel bound to a categorical answer, and in his private reflections he dealt with another question. This was how far Miss Shirley was culpable in the fraud she was letting Mrs. Westangle practise on her innocent guests. It was a distasteful question, and he did not find it much more agreeable when it subdivided itself into the question of necessity on her part, and of a not very clearly realized situation on Mrs. Westangle’s. The girl had a right to sell her ideas, and perhaps the woman thought they were her own when she had paid for them. There could be that view of it all. The furtive nature of Miss Shirley’s presence in the house might very well be a condition of that grand event she was preparing. It was all very mysterious.

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