'TWAS WONDROUS PITIFUL.Othello; i—3.
Helen's first conscious sensation next morning was a feeling of loss, which resolved itself into a deep sadness when she was fairly awake and realized that Arthur had gone. She had not Considered how much his companionship and friendliness had been to her until now, when she felt them lost. A woman so lonely yet so affectionate as Helen could not spare from her life a friend so dear as Fenton had been without being much moved. So strong had been her attachment, and so intimate had been the acquaintance between herself and Arthur, that Dr. Ashton had believed his wife to love the artist; but Helen, closely questioning her heart, was able to assure herself that warm as had been her regard for Fenton, he had never awakened in her bosom a single thrill of love. She was sad this morning with the sorrow of a broken friendship, not of a blighted passion.
She sighed deeply, the sigh of one but too well accustomed to life's disappointments, and arose the determination to lose herself in her work, and to shake off if possible the sadness which seemed to paralyze her energies and enervate her whole being.
The gown which she had worn upon the previous evening lay over a chair, giving out, as she lifted it, an odor of tobacco smoke. Some remark made by Grant Herman about the fumes which had filled the little parlor came into her mind, giving a new current to her thoughts. She unconsciously fell to thinking of the sculptor, and, by a natural connection of ideas, of Ninitta, who was still nominally posing for her.
Partly from interest in the girl herself and partly from the perception that it pleased her master to have the Italian remain with her, she had retained Ninitta, although the bas-relief was so far advanced that the model was hardly needed. She had even set herself, by those unobtrusive ways at the command of gracious women, to win the girl's confidence, not so much for the sake of hearing her story as to give the waif so strangely cast in her path the feeling that the friendship she so sorely needed was within her reach. It had resulted, however, in her hearing Ninitta's history. Many women have no idea of returning kindness save by unreserved confidence, and although Ninitta was perhaps scarcely to be reckoned among these extremists, she yet found so much comfort in pouring out her sorrows to one who could both sympathize and appreciate, that little by little the whole pathetic tale was told.
"I did not understand," Ninitta said once in her broken English, "when he left Rome. It was as if somebody had taken my life away somehow. I couldn't make it seem that I was really alive all the same, though I knew it could not be his fault. He would not have done it if he had known. You do not believe he would have left me if he had known the truth?"
"No," Helen answered. "He could not have left you if he had known. It was because he was hurt so much, and that could only be because he loved you so much."
"He loved me so much," poor Ninitta repeated murmuringly, "he loved me so much."
And all that day she followed Helen with wistful eyes, as if she longed to hear her say again those precious words.
"I cannot tell you what it was like in Paris," she said at another time. "In Rome they all knew me. They knew I was betrothed, and no one ever troubled me. But in Paris it was different. Oh, I hate Paris! And it was so cruel that he was not there. It was so dreadful that he should be on the other side of that horrible sea!"
The girl was so self-forgetful in these revelations, she spoke always with such an unshaken faith in Herman and was so free from any thought of blaming him, that Helen could not but be touched. She soothed poor Ninitta as well as she was able, having power to promise nothing, seeing no way out of the entanglement, yet at least showing to the lonely Italian that her woman's heart bled for her sorrow if she might not alleviate it. Sometimes she felt like going to the sculptor and entreating him to take pity upon the girl who so adoringly loved him. Once when the model had told her how just as she had saved by long, painful economy, nearly money enough to pay the passage to America it was stolen and she was forced to begin the slow process over again, Helen impulsively left her studio and found herself on the very threshold of Herman's door before she realized what she had been about to do. By what authority was she to interfere in a matter like this? If Ninitta loved the sculptor who had long ago ceased to return her affection, could matters be helped by an unloving marriage? It was not for her, moreover, to give unasked her advice to such a man as she knew Grant Herman to be. If he consulted her, she reflected, she might present the pathetic, touching story which Ninitta had told her, but she had plainly no pretext for forcing her feelings upon her master unsought.
She turned and went slowly up the stairs toward her little room; but suddenly she paused. She had all at once become conscious that she desired eagerly to know the nature of the sculptor's feelings toward his old love. Why, she asked herself, was she so interested in what after all did not personally concern her. A quick emotion, almost too vague to be called a thought, made her cheek flame.
"No, no," she said half aloud. "It is only that I am touched byNinitta's sadness. It is nothing more."
But her breath came more quickly, and it was with difficulty that upon re-entering her studio she assumed a quiet mien, lest her model should guess at her unfulfilled errand.
On the morning following the meeting of the Pagans at her rooms, Helen was alone in her studio. She had told Ninitta she should be late and the latter was therefore tardy in arriving. Mrs. Greyson uncovered her bas-relief, now rapidly nearing completion, and stood before it, examining critically its merits and defects. A familiar step in the passage, a tap at the door, and Grant Herman joined her.
"You look as fresh as ever this morning," he said. "I feared that the entertaining of such a company of Bohemians would have tired you out."
"No, indeed," she returned. "I am of far too much endurance to be worn out by any thing of that sort. I have a drop of Bohemian blood in my veins myself, I think, and I like to meet men as men—when they are simply good fellows together, I mean. A woman usually sees men in an attitude of either deference or defense, and there is something inspiriting to her in being occasionally received as a comrade."
"There are few women who can be received so," returned Herman. "I suppose it requires both an especial temperament and especial experiences to render a woman capable of being a comrade to men."
The talk drifted away to general and indifferent subjects, broken hereand there by allusions and criticisms relating to the Flight of theMonths, and not infrequently dropping into brief silences. One of theseHerman broke by saying abruptly:
"You do not know how your song has haunted me all night. I have been saying over and over to myself
'I strew these opiate flowersOn thy restless pillow.'
And, indeed, I longed for some such soporific myself before morning. Your coffee or your song, or—yourself,"—he hesitated over the last word—kept me very effectually awake."
"It must have been the coffee; there was little potency in either of the other causes."
"There is much," he returned resolutely, advancing a step nearer. "Mrs. Greyson, I have not wasted the night. I have thought out a great many things; the first and chief being in regard to yourself."
His tone, the piercing glow of his eyes, warned Helen what was coming.She thought of Ninitta, and retreated a step.
"It is true," the sculptor continued, as if answering the doubt implied by her movement, "that I—"
The door opened softly and Ninitta came in.
His outstretched hand dropped; the words died upon his lips. He turned from one woman to the other an appealing look of hopeless sadness and left the studio in silence.
It was characteristic of Helen's generosity that her first thought should be of the pain which Ninitta must feel. One glance at the model was sufficient to show that the Italian had comprehended enough of the interrupted scene to be made wretched; but it did not then occur to Mrs. Greyson that to Ninitta's jealous soul, unsuspicious of Herman, the only explanation of a fondness between the sculptor and his pupil lay in an effort on the part of the latter to win from the model her rightful and long betrothed lover.
CRUEL PROOF OF THIS MAN'S STRENGTH.As You Like It; i.—2.
Grant Herman sat in his studio in the gathering twilight thinking gloomily. However little Mrs. Greyson suspected the tumult which would be aroused in Ninitta's breast by the misadventure of the morning, the sculptor was too well aware of the Italian's passionate nature not to dread the consequences of the jealousy she was sure to feel. He knew, moreover, that Ninitta's rage would vent itself not upon him but upon Helen, and he wondered how best to avert the danger that threatened.
He debated with himself, too, how much he owed to the girl who gave her life up so unreservedly to him. His old love—"call it rather mere boyish passion," he-thought scornfully—was long since dead beyond hope; yet the devotion which it had awakened in Ninitta burned on as steadily as ever. Had he now a right to repulse the love he had himself called into being; to throw aside the fondness he had himself fostered and which he had once prized above measure.
"No," he thought, "a thousand times no. A man must be a villain who would not marry a girl under such circumstances. I am hers; the fact that I have changed is my misfortune, not her fault. If I have any manliness about me, I won't let things go on in this way any longer. I'll marry Ninitta. It is the smallest reparation I can make for the long years of pain I have caused her. There is no other course for me.
"But I do not love her, and a woman, they say, always instinctively feels it when a man's heart is not hers. Nonsense! That is only a cowardly excuse. At least Ninitta would never be troubled. She has not known so much love that she can draw very sharp comparisons. No; she will be satisfied; and I—well, if a man is such a devilish fool as I have been, it remains for him to pay the penalty. Oh, if youth only knew!"
He sighed deeply and began to walk up and down the studio, in which the dusk was gathering thickly. A last faint gleam from a window high in the riverward wall fell upon one of the mutilated goddesses in the gallery. Herman looked up, contemplating the phantom-like head gloomily. Something in its pose, or perhaps more truly something in his own mind, suggested a faint likeness to Helen, as if it were her ghost looking down from some far height upon the conflict of his soul.
"Ah!" he cried hotly to himself. "And she? How can I give up the hope of winning her? What was a boy's foolish fancy to the passion of a man—and for such a woman! She is half goddess. No, no; I cannot do it. I cannot marry this Italian peasant, this model that has who knows what history! I will not; I owe something to myself, to my art. What is the simple happiness of Ninitta to my art? I should be a fool to ignore how much more to the world my own well-being is worth than is hers; and what could I not do with the inspiration of the other! Oh, my God!"
The darkness grew. The phantom faded imperceptibly away. He was left alone in the darkness to fight out his battle. He marched with great strides, avoiding obstacles by a certain sixth sense born of constant familiarity with the place. He fought manfully, persuading himself that his scruples were as idle as air, remnants of the long since outgrown superstitions of his childhood. He defiantly claimed the right to be true to his powers, to his genius, rather than to an empirical standard erected by narrow moralists. He should be thankful that he had escaped entangling his life by that absurd marriage in Rome seven years ago, and that he was now free to win a wife worthy Of himself and of his art.
Yet he cut through all the meshes of logic he had himself been weaving, by striking his strong hands together there in the dark, and crying aloud, his voice startling him in the stillness:
"My God! What a poltroon I have become! Shall I cast on others the burden of my own mistakes?"
And seizing hat and cloak he left the studio, taking his way towards the narrow street where Ninitta lodged, hastening to ask her to marry him before his resolution faltered.
THIS "WOULD" CHANGES.Hamlet; iv.—7.
Herman found Ninitta alone in the attic which served her for a home in this bleak northern city, so far and so different from her own sunny Capri.
Bare and half furnished as was the room, the girl had contrived to impart to it a certain air which removed it from the common-place. A bit of flimsy drapery, begged from some studio, hung over one of the windows; a rude print of the Madonna was pinned to the wall, and under it, on the wooden table, was a bunch of withered flowers. They were roses which Helen had given Ninitta, and the Italian, returning home that day, had in her jealous rage thrown them to the floor and trampled upon them. Then remembering that they had been offered to the Madonna, she had been seized with a superstitious fear, and carefully restoring the battered flowers, had eagerly vowed a fresh bunch to the Holy Mother if she might be forgiven this sacrilege.
But the most beautiful article in the room was a cast of a woman's shoulder. It had been modeled by Herman in the earliest days of his acquaintance with Ninitta, when she had been still only his model and not his betrothed. He was touched as he looked at it now. Yellow with time and soiled by its various journeyings, it still preserved unmarred its lovely shape, exquisite curve melting into exquisite curve as softly and sweetly as in those glowing days when he had molded it under the sky of Italy.
He looked from the cast to Ninitta. He had only seen her at the studio, and he experienced a faint feeling of surprise at detecting a subtle difference in her here at home. It was nothing so tangible that he could have told by what means he received the impression, yet it was sufficiently definite to make him lose something of the freedom with which he had always addressed her. She was no longer simply the model, she was an Italian woman in her own home.
The years during which they had been separated had formed and strengthened Ninitta's character. If Herman had not before noted the alteration, it was due in part to his pre-occupation and in part to the force of old habit which made her manner toward him much the same as formerly. To-night he began to appreciate the change in her, and he felt the awkwardness which always results from the discovery that we must adapt ourselves to a modified condition in a friend.
On her side Ninitta was naturally surprised at seeing the sculptor. She had come to regard as hopeless all speculations upon his intentions, and she had waited patiently until he should choose to show her favor, tacitly acknowledging his right to do whatever should be his good pleasure. Had he come at any time and said, "Ninitta, I am here to marry you," she would gladly but quietly have made ready to follow where he chose to lead, even to the world's end. Equally, had he said, "Ninitta, I have come to say good-by; you will never see me again," she would have acquiesced without a murmur, and then, perhaps, have taken her own life. As long as it was his simple wish, uninfluenced by the will of another, she would never have questioned.
Now, however, all passive acquiescence was at an end. Since the scene in Helen's studio, Ninitta had an object upon which to expend all her energies, and she even almost forgot to love Herman in the intensity of her sudden jealous hatred of Mrs. Greyson. Yesterday Grant Herman would have found a woman not unlike the Ninitta of old times, tender, loving, pathetically submissive; today he was confronted by a fury, only restrained by the respect for his presence born of long habit.
"Good evening!" he said gently, as he entered, his mood softened by the struggle through which he had passed in his studio.
"Good evening!" she answered defiantly, in Italian. "So you are not with her!"
"What!" he exclaimed.
He had been wholly unprepared for this outburst, and for the instant was too surprised to at all understand it.
A sudden rage seemed to seize Ninitta, which swept away all barriers of restraint.
"Si,si,si," she cried, "I am not blind! What if you are my betrothed, when this woman comes to entrap you, to bewitch you with an evil eye, to steal your soul! Yes, yes; you are not with her to-night as you were last night. Did I not see you myself come out of her house?"
"Stop!" he said in his most commanding tone, but without anger.
The calmness and decision of the manner arrested her. She sank back into a chair, regarding him with defiant eyes.
"So you have followed me," continued Herman, speaking with painful slowness, so that every word seemed to poor Ninitta to fall upon her like a curse; "so you have played the spy upon me. Ah!"
As he looked at her she began to cower. She shrank back in her seat, putting up her hands to shield her face from his gaze.
"Yet I meant to marry you," he said, half to himself, although still addressing her. "I came to-night to say, 'Come, Ninitta, let us take up the broken romance that a cruel mistake interrupted there in Rome.' I had long ago outgrown my old fancy, but I meant to be true to my promise to you. I meant to give up even my ambition for your sake; to make your life happy and secure. And this is your trust in me! If you really loved me, to track me like a thief would have been impossible to you. And where have you learned this trick of playing the spy?" he went on with growing wrath, becoming more and more cruel with every word. "It is a relic of your Paris life, I fancy. It is hardly a resource to which a good girl would be driven. I at least believed you when you told me you had been true to me."
He spoke rapidly, aggressively. The fact that he was outraging his own instincts in beating with bitter words the girl who bowed before him with drooping head and disheveled hair made him but the more harsh. To fall from the height of self-sacrifice into a pool of vulgar intrigue! Bah! His disgust at himself for ever having known this woman seemed too great to be borne.
Yet under all his passionate protest and repulsion he was conscious that he doubted what he was himself saying with so much vehemence; that he secretly believed Ninitta to be true and pure, and that to her Italian blood, to her peasant nurture, was due the espionage in which she had been self-betrayed. The sting of conscience, too, in the knowledge that the model's jealousy of Helen was well founded, the humiliation of finding his feelings and motives discovered, increased his irritation. He felt a base desire to stab and humiliate Ninitta, but for whom he might be free to win the one woman he had ever loved; and the more his denunciations recoiled to hurt himself, the more eagerly he poured them out, as in some moods of mental anguish one finds relief in the pain of self-inflicted physical hurts.
"Yes," he said, more and more completely abandoning control of himself; "yes, this tells sufficiently what you have learned in Paris."
"Oh, no, no, no!" she cried, flinging herself at his feet and groveling there. "No, no! For the love of the Virgin, signor, not that! I have been good. Oh, for the love of God, signor! For the love of God!"
She was shaken by the storm of sobs in which her words ended. She got hold of his feet and refused to rise when he attempted to lift her. Her long hair, escaped from its stilletto, fell about her face. Even in this agitated moment the sculptor in Grant Herman noted with a sharp, aesthetic pleasure the beautiful curves of her neck and shoulders.
"Pity," she went on between her agonized sobs. "Oh, forgive me! I will do any thing you wish. I will go away and leave you."
He stooped and raised her by main force, yet tenderly.
"There, there, Ninitta," he said, "I was wrong. I do believe you are a good girl; but you should not have played the spy."
He soothed her as well as he was able, her violence spending itself in passionate tears. She drew herself away from him, and sat down again in the chair she had been occupying. She put up her hands to her head, twisting the loose tresses into a great coil. The sleeve of her dress, unfastened in her agitation, fell back from her rounded arm. The superb lines of her figure were displayed by her attitude. Her face, flushed with weeping and lighted by the still tear-wet eyes, if not beautiful, was appealing and pitiful. Some fiber touched of old vibrated anew in his being. He made a step forward.
"Ninitta," he said, "I came to-night to ask you to marry me at once; to fulfill the promise I made you so long ago."
The words and the tone both were tender, but he had said those same words in anger just before.
"But you do not love me," she responded, her arms dropping pathetically into her lap. "You have said it."
"But I was angry," answered Herman, for the moment almost believing that his old love was re-awakened. "I did not mean you to believe it."
"If you do love me," she said, a new look coming into her eyes, "you will promise me never to see her again."
He started back as if from a blow. His frail dream of passion was shattered like a bubble at her words. A wave of bitter self-contempt that its existence had been possible swept over him. The blood surged into his cheeks. Ninitta saw the flush and her eye kindled.
"Promise me," she repeated. "It is little for love to ask. It is my right."
With instinctive feminine guile she leaned towards him in an attitude so beautiful, so appealing that even now he was moved. But with this emotion came, too, a subtle if now fainter sense of degradation that he was susceptible to this dangerous fascination, with a painful consciousness of how wide a moral gulf had opened between them by the anger and vulgar jealousy which Ninitta displayed. It is not impossible, too, that his instinctive clinging to Helen was a stronger power than he knew; while still through all his mingled emotions ran the resolve he had made to give himself up to his old betrothed.
"No," he said; yet as he moved slowly towards the door he had the air of a man who still deliberates.
She threw herself back in her seat with a touching gesture of despair, but also with a gleam of malice in her eyes, which he, turning with his hand upon the latch, caught and understood.
"No," he repeated with final decision. "No, no!"
BEDECKING ORNAMENTS OF PRAISE.Love's Labor's Lost; ii.—I.
Fenton had returned to Boston with his bride, but as yet Helen had not seen him. One morning late in March, however, he came to call.
"I could not come before," he said after the first greeting, "'I have married a wife,' and the amount of arrangement and adjustment implied in that statement is simply astounding."
"I am glad to see you at last," she returned. "And your wife, is she well?"
"My wife," replied he, with a little hesitancy over the unfamiliar term, "is well. Cannot you come to see us before that dreadful reception through which I am to be dragged? I'd like you to know Edith in a different way from the crowd."
Helen crossed the room and sat down in her favorite chair by the window.
"He ought to understand," was her thought. "Why cannot he see that it is impossible for his wife and me to harmonize. We have no common ground."
"I shall be glad to," she said aloud, inwardly shrinking at the need of speaking disingenuously to one with whom she had so long been upon terms of frankness. "I will come very soon; to-day or to-morrow. To-day, though, I must go and see my bas-relief. It is all ready to be cut for the furnace; I only want to take a last look at it, to be sure that every thing is right. If it will not bore you," she added, a little hesitatingly, "you might come too; it is your last chance to find fault to any advantage, for any changes must be made at once."
"I'd like to go," answered her friend, looking at his watch, "if I can get back to luncheon. Yes, there's plenty of time."
"Benedick, the married man," laughed Helen. "That I should ever live to see this air of domesticity!"
They crossed the Common, chatting idly, and both conscious that the frankness of their old intercourse was somehow lacking; that it was necessary to begin a new adjustment upon a basis different from the former one. They talked upon indifferent subjects, of what had occurred during the three weeks of Arthur's absence, playing the part of amiability without pleasure, endeavoring to simulate the old relations which no longer had real existence.
"Oh, Arthur," Helen laughed, suddenly, "let's not go on in this way! Let us quarrel, or something. Say a wicked epigram; do any thing, only don't be so eminently amiable!"
"My head is as empty of ideas," he returned laughing, in his turn, "as is a modern title-page of punctuation points. Besides, Edith has forbidden wicked epigrams."
"Does she therefore suppose she can suppress them?"
"Oh, I don't know," responded Fenton, good-humoredly. "I am not in as epigrammatic a frame of mind as I was."
"'Tis a good sign."
"Yes; a sign I am growing inane and respectable."
"I can imagine you one about as easily as the other."
"That is bitter-sweet; a compliment and a flout."
"If I had said that," Helen observed, smiling, "you would have retorted, with a look of gloomy solemnity, that most things in life are bitter-sweet; unless, indeed, you felt called upon to phrase it that it had the advantage of most earthly matters by not being wholly bitter."
"Was I ever guilty of such commonplace attempts at epigrams as that?" returned Arthur. "If so it is certainly a good thing that I have given up repartee for matrimony."
"Oh, that is brilliant beside many of your attempts, I assure you. And as for your giving them up—I reserve my decision."
"You shall see, skeptic," he said lightly. "I expect to change the face of the whole world if necessary."
"It is a common error of ardent temperaments," she returned pleasantly, but with evident sincerity, "to assume that a state of feeling can change the world."
"But I must, I will," he began eagerly. Then the light died out of his face and he ended with a shrug.
Helen put up her hand with an impulsive gesture, as if about to speak.
Then letting her arms fall by her side, she turned to unlock the studio door, which by this time they had reached.
The bas-relief was still shrouded in its damp envelopes, which Helen carefully removed, keeping Fenton away, that he might first see the work as a whole, and not lose its legitimate effect by catching fragmentary glimpses as it was uncovered. When at last it was fully disclosed, she called him to her as she stood before it.
"By Jove! That's stunning!" he exclaimed, after an instant's pause, which gave him time to see it fairly. "Helen, you have outdone yourself! That figure is simply superb. I hadn't an idea you would come out so well. I'm wonderfully proud of you."
"You are more amiable than ever," she responded; but her flushed cheek showed that she was touched by his earnest praise. "For that figure I have to thank Ninitta's posing. She is an inspiration."
"But Ninitta did not inspire that splendid head," observed Arthur, pointing with his cane at the December, "and you evidently did thatcon amore. By Jove! It's Grant Herman, as I live!"
As he spoke he turned and saw Ninitta on the threshold.
"Shall you want me to-day?" the latter asked of Helen.
"What made that girl look so savage?" Fenton questioned as the door closed behind the model.
"She perhaps chooses to be jealous of me," Helen replied composedly.
"Elle a peutêtre raison."
"Perhaps."
"You say that too calmly by half," was his gay response. "Yet as every work a woman does has a man for its end—I learned that from the classics; Penelope, you know, and even washwoman Nausicaä—I suppose it is fair to assume this had. Only who is the man?"
Helen flushed slightly. She recalled the ambition with which she had begun this work, to make the man beside her praise its completion; and she was conscious that before she finished it was the praise of Herman for which she strove.
"It is filthy lucre that inspires me," she replied steadily. "I need no other incentive."
They walked about the studio, talking of the bas-relief as seen from different points; of how it was to be cut for firing; and on the safe ground of art they forgot all personal constraints, until the striking of a clock aroused Fenton to a sense of the flight of time.
"I must go," he said. "I am no end glad I came. The truth is I am not very well acquainted with this married man, and it is comfortable to slip back occasionally into a familiar bachelor mood. However," he continued with his brightest smile, "I like the Benedick far better than I should ever have dreamed possible; and his wife is charming. And I want to say, too," he added, "that I have a thousand times thanked you for taking that vial before I went to be married. I'm in a spasm of virtuousness just now, and it is pleasant to remember that I did not have it that day."
They went down stairs and out into the soft, spring-like day, sauntering homeward in a happy and accordant mood. Arthur urged Helen's going home to lunch with himself and Edith, but to Helen the morning was far too precious to be ended in a possibly inharmonious meeting with Mrs. Fenton.
And that afternoon Herman sent for Mrs. Greyson in all haste. Ninitta had vented her jealous rage upon the bas-relief, destroying the head of December which she heard Fenton say must have been donecon amore, and the beautiful May for which she herself had posed.
NOW HE IS FOR THE NUMBERS.Romeo and Juliet; ii.—4.
Mrs. Fenton's wedding reception was largely attended. However strongly the artist might savor of Bohemianism, his wife was connected with certain prominent Philistines, and he had exhibited a most remarkable readiness to have them present in force.
"Into the camp of Philistia itself," muttered Rangely to Bently, as they elbowed their way through the crowd. "By the great horn spoon, if there isn't Peter Calvin! Arthur calls him the Great Boston Art Greek. That ever I should live to see the humbug under Fenton's roof-tree!"
"Pshaw!" returned Bently with an oath. "What a set of rubbishy old fobs and dowagers there is here anyway. Is this the kind of people Fenton means to know?"
"Means to know," echoed Rangely. "He's got to go down on his marrow bones to get them to consent to know him. They patronize art, and that means that they snub artists."
"Humph!" exclaimed Bently. "Is he sycophant enough to do that?"
"That's as you look at it. His wife probably decides the matter for him. She very naturally likes to know what she would call 'nice people.' How those women chatter! I wonder what they find to talk about."
"Not necessarily any thing. They always talk all the same whether they've any thing to say or not."
"How much of life is wasted in enduring people for whom one does not care," philosophized Rangely, looking over the throng which filled to overflowing the Fentons' somewhat limited rooms. "Ah! There is Dr. Ashton. How do you do, Doctor?"
"As well as could be expected," the Doctor answered, "in this antiquated assembly."
"Oh, Boston is only an antiquarian society," laughed Rangely, "and these old tabbies are all honorary members. By Jove, though, there are some awfully pretty girls here."
"I've observed that Boston girls are apt to be pretty when they give their minds to it," remarked Bently. "Not when they wander round with Homer under one arm and Virgil under the other and dyspepsia in the stomach, but when they are deliberately frivolous."
The throng separated them at this moment, and Dr. Ashton went in search of host and hostess. Arthur caught sight of his tall figure, and made a sign at once of recognition and summons. Struggling between a young Episcopal clergyman and a corpulent old lady, Dr. Ashton made his way with difficulty to the spot where his friend was standing.
"You are the most married man I know, Arthur," was his greeting. "Brigham Young wasn't a circumstance. I have been half an hour crossing the room."
"Dr. Ashton, Edith; my wife, Will," was the only reply Fenton made, unless one could interpret the quizzical glance he bestowed upon his friend.
"I feel already acquainted with you," was Mrs. Fenton's remark, "I have heard of you so often. My husband has spoken to me so much of his friends that it is hard for me to realize that I do not know them myself."
"You have been very little in Boston, I believe," Dr. Ashton said, looking at her in a sudden surprise at remembering that he had seen her face before.
"Very little," replied she, "I have been abroad a great part of my life and—"
New claims upon her attention ended the conversation with that charming abruptness characteristic of such an occasion, and the Doctor was left to elbow his way out of the crush, with the sense of having done all that would be required of him. He found a corner where he could watch the hostess and fell to wondering whether Mrs. Fenton in her turn remembered their previous meeting.
Edith Fenton was a slender, nun-like woman, too pale, with a smile of wonderful attractiveness. "A woman to wear lilies," was the way Grant Herman put it afterward; a remark which conveyed well the purity of her face. Her ease of manner showed familiarity with the conventionalities of life, yet in some vague way she seemed removed from the people by whom she was to-day surrounded.
"She has been brought up in the old narrow ways," Dr. Ashton reflected, "but there are great possibilities about her. She'll either be the making of Fenton or send him to the dogs. She will scarcely find much room in her house for many of his former friends, I fancy."
He stood watching the people and amusing himself with cynical speculations until he saw Grant Herman's great figure among the guests. He knew him but slightly and looked at him with an indifference which a couple of hours later he regretted. Herman cared little for the formalities of the occasion, and very likely might have gone away without even being presented to the hostess had not Fred Rangely taken him in charge and brought him safely through that ceremony. Now the sculptor was looking for Mrs. Greyson, of whom he soon caught sight, when he began making his way towards her. She however perceived him, and with the feeling that she could not bear to meet him in public just at this time, she evaded him by slipping into the window where her husband was ensconced.
"Take me out of this, please," she said, "I am tired."
He gave her his arm without speaking, and together they made their way from the room.
"I want to talk to you," he remarked easily. "Mayn't I walk home with you?"
When she was ready they went together out into the starlit streets. Neither spoke at first, each carrying on a train of thought to which the other could have no adequate clew.
"Who is Arthur's wife?" Dr. Ashton asked at length. "I know she was a Miss Caldwell, that she came from Providence, and that she has been an orphan so short a time that they had a perfectly quiet wedding; but that is the extent of my knowledge. Is she an artist?"
"An amateur," answered Helen. "She studied in Paris. He met her there. She is a relative, I forget just how far or near, of Peter Calvin. She seems to me an icicle. Think of Arthur's marrying areligieuse!"
"What is his game, I wonder," said her companion thoughtfully. "Do you know when she was in Paris? Was it when we were there."
"Let me see," Helen responded, with a mental calculation. "Yes; she must have been there the last year we were. Why? Did you ever meet her?"
"Perhaps," was the careless reply.
They reached Helen's door as he spoke.
"Come in," she said. "Fortunately I can make you a salad. It is a long time since we had apetit soupertogether. I have, too, something to say to you."
He followed her to the pretty parlor, and sat idly chatting while she made her preparations for the supper.
THE WORLD IS STILL DECEIVED.Merchant of Venice; iii.—2.
It was a dainty little table to which Helen invited her husband when every thing was ready. The china was of odd bits picked up here and there abroad, and it was now disposed with an artist's eye for color and grouping. A tall bottle of Rhine wine had come from some mysterious nook, and beside it were a pair of fine old German glasses, frail as bubbles.
"I have always to offer my guests Rhine wine," Helen said, "for I've no glasses for any thing else. Arthur is ungracious enough to object. He does not like white wine as you do."
"I do like it," her guest answered, drawing the cork, "and so does Arthur, only he does not know it. He has somewhere stumbled upon the whim of pretending not to, and he can deceive himself more completely than any other man I ever saw. Rhine wine is the most poetic of beverages. It should go down like oil and only leave a fragrance like a poet's dream behind it."
"That is quite a rhapsody for you, Will; only your cool tone gives it a certain cynical flavor."
"I mean all I say, I assure you. Champagne is vulgar. It is the drink of self-made snobs and cads who wish to pass for men of the world; but Rhine wine is the drink for poets and artists."
"I am delighted to hear you defend it; it is very good of you, when I happen to know you are not fond of it. It is a graceful return for my inhospitality in not giving you your favorite Burgundy, but I haven't a drop."
"Oh, don't mind the wine! I came to see you," Dr. Ashton said, with his delightful smile. "How droll it was to see Arthur to-day. Do you think he has really persuaded himself he is in love with his wife?"
"Arthur has great adaptability," Helen returned. "I think he believes he is in love. I'm sure I hope you'll not feel it your duty to tell him he isn't."
"I'm not Mephistopheles," answered Dr. Ashton, smiling, and watching appreciatively as she made the salad.
Mrs. Greyson had dressed carefully for the reception from which she had just come, and her cream-colored cashmere, with soft old thread lace, and a bunch of amber-hued roses at the throat, became her as only a dress chosen by an artist could. It fell away from her exquisite arms, and from among the lace rose her beautiful neck, the stuff of her gown setting off the lovely texture of her skin to perfection.
"I must not ruin my best attire," she said lightly, gathering it up."Now Ninitta has spoiled my bas-relief, it may be long before I getmore. I owe you a good deal, Will, for letting me study modeling inParis."
"It was pure selfishness," he returned good-humoredly. "I wanted to keep you busy so that I might go my own way. But what about your bas-relief? Who spoiled it? Who is Ninitta, and what has she against you?"
"That is what I wanted to tell you."
She did not speak again for a moment, seemingly intent upon the exact measurement of the ingredients of her salad. In reality she was considering how best to present what she had to say. She mentally ran over the points she wished to make, becoming thereby conscious that she had herself come to no definite conclusions upon the topic she was about to discuss. She looked furtively at her husband, noting his attitude, his expression, and whatever her past experience enabled her to construe into indications of his mood. As well and as long as she had known this man, she was still ignorant of the key to his nature—that feeling or motive which, touched in an ultimate appeal, would always insure a response. Conscience is the fruit of the tree of experience, and, taken in this sense, every man must be possessed of a conscience, which by its inner voice re-enforces any pleading which coincides with its dictates. What was the nature of her husband's inward monitor Helen had never been able to discover and at this moment she realized keenly her ignorance.
"Will," she said earnestly, laying down her salad-fork and spoon, "I think it is wrong for us to live as we do."
He shrugged his shoulders, looking at her curiously.
"I cannot flatter myself that you care to return to the old uncomfortableness."
She flushed warmly, with a keen pang of mingled pain and indignation.
"No," she replied. "No; never that. It is not for ourselves, but for others."
"Others! Fenton?"
She flushed more deeply still.
"I have told you already that you are mistaken about my regard forArthur. It was not he I meant."
She served her guest, and sat playing nervously with her fork as he ate and praised the salad.
"Mr. Herman sent for me the other afternoon," she began again, forcing herself to speak calmly. "My model Ninitta is very fond of him, and chose to be jealous of his praise of my work. It might have all gone over without an outburst, I suppose, if she had not had her attention called to the fact that I had modeled his head for December. Why she had never happened to notice it I don't know; she was in the studio constantly."
"Not when he was there?" queried Dr. Ashton, holding up his graceful, antique wine-glass and admiring it.
"No, not when he was there," repeated his wife. "She had pounded off the head when he sent for me with a mallet she had picked up in his studio. I never saw him in such a rage. She was gone when I got there. She didn't make any attempt to conceal it. She came stalking melodramatically into his studio with the mallet and laid it down. 'There,' said she, 'now kill me. I have broken her work.' It was like a fashion magazine story. He thought at first she had gone mad."
"So she had. Women are always insane when they are jealous. I wish I had Arthur's knack at epigram, and I'd make that sound original."
"He says he was very harsh," Helen continued, "though I fancy he could not be quite that in any circumstances. It was very hard," she added with a sigh. "It was like looking at a dead child to see my best work ruined. It was really a part of myself."
"But can't it be repaired? It was in the clay, wasn't it?"
"Yes, but I fear for my exhausted enthusiasm. I can never do it as it was before. My poor, unlucky December."
She toyed with her glass absently, apparently for the moment forgetting her companion, who continued his supper with no less relish than before. He watched her keenly, however, fully aware that there was more to be told. He was a man too accustomed to follow any desire or indulge any whim not to notice appreciatively, as he had noticed many times before, how beautiful were the curves of his wife's arms and throat, and with what grace her head was poised. He had once defined a liberal man as one who could appreciate his own wife, and he would have been far more insensible than he was, if, with this beautiful woman before him he had not been, judged by his own standard, extremely liberal.
"And this has what to do with the question of our relations being known?" he asked.
She started from her reverie, the red again showing faintly in her cheek.
"It is hardly fair," she answered in a tone softer and lower than that in which she had been speaking, "to tell you all that Mr. Herman said. He wishes to marry me."
"And you wish you were free to have it so?"
There was once more a pause. Helen busied herself in an elaborate arrangement of the torn lettuce leaves upon her plate, seemingly concentrating all her thoughts upon forming them into an intricate figure.
"Will," she said, suddenly, lifting her eyes and leaning towards him, "I do not know how to make you understand. I haven't succeeded so well in my attempts thus far in life as to be very sanguine of doing it now. You do not know how ashamed and contemptible I felt for being party to the deception that made it possible for him to speak so to me. He was so honest, so earnest; he was so unconscious of the barriers between us. I felt that I had done him such an irreparable wrong by concealing the truth. He had a right to know that I am a married woman."
"Did you tell him?"
"No; but I must. I want to be free from the promise we made to each other."
"It all comes," returned her husband without any show of irritation, "from my telling Fenton."
"I cannot see what that has to do with it. I like the absence from questioning, the avoidance of gossip, as much as you can; but it makes me feel as if I were a living lie to have Mr. Herman bringing his honest love to me to be met only by deception. It is cruel and it is wrong."
"That depends entirely upon how you define wrong," retorted Dr. Ashton coolly. "I do not see why it is wrong for me to decline to sacrifice my convenience to Mr. Herman's sentiment. But without going into the question of metaphysics, let us look at the matter reasonably. Do you love Mr. Herman?"
Notwithstanding the studied nonchalance of his tone, a glance into his eyes might have shown Helen how much importance he attached to her answer. A woman is peculiarly dangerous when she is telling one man that another loves her. The masculine greed of possession is aroused by the mere thought of a possible rival, and Dr. Ashton was conscious at this moment of a kindling desire himself to win Helen's love, which he knew perfectly well had never been his.
"That is not at all relevant," was her reply, her eyes downcast. "The question of honesty is enough now. At least I respect Mr. Herman, and I must treat him squarely, as you would say. You have always told me to be 'a square fellow,' you know," she added, raising her glance with a faint smile.
"But if you tell him," said her husband, with a subtle tinge of impatience in his tone, "others must know. You can't go on letting one after another into the secret without its soon becoming public property."
"Why not then?" she responded. "I wonder we have been able to keep it so long. It is sure to be known now you have come home. I do not mean to proclaim it upon the housetops; but to let it work out if it will. What harm can it do?"
"It will harm me. My life is not so secluded as yours is, Helen, It will make things confoundedly awkward. I shall have to go about giving endless explanations. Besides, here is Arthur's wife. I particularly don't want her to know."
"Why not? It is precisely that I was coming to. She seems to feel far more kindly to me than I should have supposed possible. I can't lie to her, Will. She has already asked me questions about my past life hard to answer. I want to tell her, so that we may have an honest basis for our friendship. I don't want to lose my hold on her."
"Nor on Arthur," acquiesced he gravely. "It is for that reason that I say you had better not tell her. I usually know what I am saying, do I not? I tell you it is for your own sake that I warn you to be quiet. Arthur isn't going to be held in the leash very long by that piece of china-ware piety, and it is to you he will naturally turn for sympathy. Don't spoil your chance of his friendship by breaking with her yet."
"Will," his wife said, with a glitter in her eyes he knew of old, "sometimes you talk like a very fiend incarnate."
"That," he replied rising, "is precisely what I am. There are a few rare, but fairly well authenticated cases on record, Helen, where a man under stress of circumstances, has been able to keep his own counsel; women without a confidant go mad. For your own sake you'd better trust me, now that Arthur isn't available; so I'll come and see you again. I am obliged to you for this jolly little supper. Your salads always were perfection. I'd like to stay and have you make me some coffee, but I have an engagement at twelve. Good-night."
HIS PURE HEART'S TRUTH.Two Gentlemen of Verona; iv.—2.
When Grant Herman attempted to speak with Mrs. Greyson at the Fenton's reception, he had more in view than simply the desire of being near the woman he loved. He was full of trouble and bewilderment, and instinctively turned toward her for aid and sympathy.
The scene between himself and Helen, to which the latter had alluded in her conversation with Dr. Ashton, was of far deeper import than her words might have seemed to imply. In the first shock of discovering that her work was broken she had been so overcome, that although she struggled bravely to conceal her feelings, she had excited the sculptor's keenest pity; and it not unnaturally followed that in attempting to express his sympathy he found himself telling his love before he was aware. He had determined to be silent upon this subject. Uncertain what were Helen's feelings towards him and restrained by a sense of loyalty to the bond which united him to Ninitta, he had resolved to bury his love in his own breast, at least until time gave him opportunity of honorably declaring it. Now circumstances betrayed him into an avowal of his passion; and he was not without the indignant feeling that Ninitta's act had freed him from all obligations to her. It might have required an ingenious casuist to arrive logically at the conclusion that an injury which the Italian had done to another released him from his plighted word, but the person injured was the woman he loved, and he blindly felt that Ninitta had struck at himself through his most sensitive feelings. He renounced all the fealty to which he had been held by a sense of honor, and he now poured out to Helen the full tide of his passionate love.
The sculptor was not a man to be lightly moved, but it is these calm, grave natures that once aroused are most irresistible. His passionate outburst took Helen unaware; she scarcely knew what she did, and she became suddenly aware of a truth so overwhelming that every thing else faded into insignificance beside it.
"I love you!" he cried out; and at the word she first knew, with a poignant pang of mingled bliss and anguish, that she too loved him.
It seemed to her that some power above her own volition ruled her, as in moments of high excitement the body sometimes appears to declare its independence of the will, and to act wholly by its own decisions. She was aware that she raised her eyes to his, although she would have given much to avoid his glance; and she knew that it was from what he read there that he took courage to fold her in his embrace.
Yet with his arms about her and his piercing kisses upon her face, Helen felt as if sinking helplessly into a mighty ocean; as if all struggles must be unavailing, and she could only yield to the resistless love which engulfed her.
From this first feeling of powerlessness, however, her strong nature sprang with a sharp recoil. She was too noble to surrender without a struggle. She would not even think whether she loved this man; that might be considered upon some safe vantage ground; now all energy must be concentrated upon escaping from the deadly peril in which she found herself.
Helen had freed herself as far as she was able from the marriage bond which had so galled her, and she was glad to forget that such a tie had ever existed, but she yet remembered that she was still a wife, and the kiss of a man not her husband overwhelmed her with shuddering humiliation and fear. She struggled from her lover's embrace with such an expression of terror upon her face, that he started back amazed and grieved.
He began to stammer confused words of contrition, of sorrow, of love, and of supplication.
"How could you!" she gasped. "Oh, leave me!"
There came into her excited mind a way of escape, upon which, even though it brought with it a sense of baseness, she seized in despair.
"Ninitta," she said. "Ninitta!"
He gave her a look of pain which went to her very heart. He did not move or answer, but his whole soul seemed to look through his dark eyes in pitiful appeal.
"Go," she continued, but in a hurried voice which betrayed her agitation. "Leave me now. Oh, I cannot bear it!"
And crushed with pain and shame, she buried her face in her hands and burst into tears.
Herman made a step towards her, but instantly she recovered herself, looking up with swimming eyes and lips that quivered despite her utmost effort.
"No," she said, "do not touch me. You must go. I cannot bear another word. Forgive me," she went on rapidly, as he hesitated, still with those appealing eyes fixed upon her. "Oh, forgive me, but go."
He turned slowly and moved towards the door. The broken bas-relief, with its beautiful mutilated figure caught his eye, and seemed again to remind him that he had at last a right to speak to Helen, unhampered by the thought of Ninitta. He looked back as if he would even now disobey her and plead his love anew. But her eyes refused his prayer before it could be uttered. He lingered still an instant.
"I cannot go," he broke out suddenly. "I love you! I must stay! I must at least have an answer. Do you think a man could kiss you once and then leave you like this?"
She shivered as if she felt anew his passionate embrace and shrank from it. She threw her glance about as to discover some means of escape. The gesture, the look, overwhelmed him with sudden remorse. He trusted himself not for a single backward look now, but rushed out of the studio, leaving her sitting there like the princess of the fairy tale who overcame the genii only by recourse to immortal fire which consumed her also.
Alone in his studio the sculptor strode up and down, struggling with the emotion which mastered him. He debated with himself whether Helen loved him or not; yet the more carefully he recalled his interview with her, the more impossible he found it to determine. But hope plucked courage out of this very uncertainty, and clung to the belief that had not Helen in her heart some affection for him, she could not have been so touched.
But what of Ninitta? He threw back his head and walked down the studio, his steps sounding sharply upon the hard cement floor. What of Ninitta? He had absurdly dallied with his supposed obligations to her long enough. Now, at least, after this outrage, he repeated to himself, he was free. He was at liberty now—if indeed he had not always been—to consider what he owed to himself; what to the woman he loved.
He recalled the hot words he had spoken to the model earlier in the afternoon when the anger of discovery was fresh upon him, and he felt a pang of self-reproach. He could not but know how poignant to Ninitta must be the grief of giving him up, although he assured himself that in the long years of separation she must have become accustomed to live without him, and that her grief would be rather fancied than real. Yet he was too tender-hearted to be wholly at ease after all his reasoning. He at last started out to find Ninitta, perhaps to comfort her, perhaps to cast her off forever. At least to come to some definite conclusion of their doubtful relations.
But Ninitta was not to be found. She was not in her attic; nor did she return that night, nor the next day, nor yet the following; and it was to tell of the model's disappearance, and to ask aid in tracing her, that Herman had wished to speak to Helen at the Fenton's reception.
UPON A CHURCH BENCH.Much Ado about Nothing; iii.—3.
Herman did not see Helen for several days after the reception, but she came down to the studio Sunday afternoon to begin the repairing of her mutilated bas-relief. The sculptor heard her step pass his door, and felt a thrill at the sound for which he had longingly waited every waking hour since he had heard Helen go out upon the night of Ninitta's disappearance.
He waited what seemed to him a long time, forcing himself to perform certain trifling things needful in the studio, yet Mrs. Greyson had only been able to get fairly to work before she heard his footstep, and then his tap upon her door.
He entered the studio almost hesitatingly, and after the usual greetings stood looking gravely at the disfigured clay.
"I began to think you were never coming to restore it," he remarked, breaking at last the silence.
"I could not bear to touch it," she returned, not caring to confess that she had also wished to avoid him until time should have restored his usual self-control. "But I determined yesterday to begin this morning, only strangely enough I went to church for the first time since I came from Europe."
"Ah!" returned Herman smiling. "I often go to church when I am not too busy."
"I hardly supposed that a Pagan was guilty of going to any church where he could not worship Pasht."
"One can worship whatever deity he pleases in whatever temple, I suppose," was his rejoinder. "I'm catholic in my tastes. I do not so much mind what people worship, if they are only sincere about it."
"It must be a great comfort to believe every thing, if one only could."
"There is often danger," he observed, "that we assume it to be a weakness to believe any thing."
"It is, I'm afraid," replied she, turning her face from him and seemingly intent upon her modeling.
"At least we believe in work," Herman answered, "else we are not artists. You certainly find joy and support in your art."
"Yes," Helen said with a sigh; "but I fancy the joy of creation, great as it is, can never be so satisfying to a woman as to a man. It is humiliating to confess—or it is presumptuous to boast, I am not sure which—but a woman is never so fully an artist as a man. He is in great moments all artist; but a woman is never able to lay herself aside even in her most imaginative moods."
"I cannot think you wholly right," her master returned smiling; "but to go back a little, at least faith is woman's peculiar province and prerogative. We seem nowadays to pride ourselves upon being superior to belief in any thing; but it is really a poor enough hypocrisy. If we really believed nothing, should we ever give up a single selfish desire or combat any impulse that seizes us. For my part, I am glad to find men better than their professions. But this," he added with his genial smile, "is more of a sermon, very likely, than you heard at church."
"I at least agree with it better than the one I heard at church this morning. The preacher patronized the Deity so that he shocked me."
"That troubles me at church," Herman assented; "preachers are so irreverent."
Helen stepped back to observe the effects of the work she was doing.
"Do you think," she ventured, "that it would be possible for me to induce Ninitta to pose again for the May? If I told her that I am not angry, that I understand, and that——"
"But Ninitta is gone!" exclaimed the sculptor, suddenly recalled to present difficulties. "I have not been able to find her since the day she did this."
"Gone!" echoed Helen in dismay; "and you cannot find her?"
Herman related in detail the steps he had taken to trace Ninitta, all of which had thus far proved unavailing. He had endeavored to avoid publicity, but he already began to fear that it would be necessary to call detectives to his aid.
"Not yet," Helen said. "Let me try first. Have you seen Mr. Fenton?"
"No; why? I have been very cautious. I have told nobody but FredRangely."
Helen reflected a moment. Her woman's instinct told her that it was not likely Ninitta would put any great distance between herself and the sculptor. The model could have but few acquaintances in the city, and as she would need support it seemed probable she might try posing for some of the artists. As this thought crossed her mind, Helen remembered that Ninitta had promised to pose for Fenton when no longer wanted for the has-relief. It was therefore possible that Fenton might know something of the whereabouts of the missing girl; and in any case Helen had been so used to consulting the artist in any perplexity, that it was but natural for her thoughts to turn to him now.
"Let me try," she repeated. "It will be less likely to excite talk if I look for her; she was my model. Trust the search to me for a day or two."
He was only too glad to do so; glad to be released from the burden of anxiety, as by virtue of some subtle faith in Mrs. Greyson he was; glad of any thing in which he might obey her; glad above all of any bond of common interest which might draw them nearer to each other, even if it were search for the woman who stood between them.
On her way homeward Helen went into Studio Building, but before she had climbed half way to Fenton's room, she encountered Dr. Ashton.
"It is of no use," was his greeting. "He isn't in. His wife has probably taken him to church."
"He was at church this morning," Helen answered, putting her hand into the one Dr. Ashton extended. "I saw him."
"Did you go to church? What a lark."
"It was rather a lark," she assented; "only I got wretchedly blue before the service was done."
"What church was it? Mrs. Fenton looks as if she'd poise dizzily on high church altitudes like the angel on St. Angelo."
"So she does; she goes to the Nativity."
"How did Arthur look?"
"Amused at first; then bored; then cross; and finally, when the sermon was well under way, indignant."
"And his wife?"
"His wife, Will," Helen said with a sudden enthusiasm, "looked like a saint. She really believes all these fables. I wish I did."
"It will be some fun to watch Arthur's conversion and backsliding," Dr. Ashton observed, "if he really gets far enough along to be able to backslide. Where are you going?"
"To see Arthur. I have an errand."
"Do you object to my walking with you?" he asked with a deference rare enough to attract her notice.
The sun was setting, and the trees on the Common, as yet showing but faintest signs of coming buds, stood out against the saffron sky. The long shadows stretched softly over the dull ground, while every slight prominence was gilded and transfigured by the golden glow which flooded from the west. The atmosphere had that peculiar brilliancy characteristic of the season, while the cool and bracing air was full of that champagne-like exhilaration in which lies at once the fascination and the fatality of the New England climate.
It was some time before either broke the silence.
"How I wish," at length began Helen wistfully.
"That shows," spoke her husband, as she left the sentence unfinished, "that you are still under forty. When you have quadrupled your decades you'll thank your stars for deliverances and ask for nothing more."
"When I get to that stage, then," she returned, "I'll take poison."
"Is that a hint?"
"Life is bad enough now," she continued without heeding the interruption, "but better a bitter savor than none at all."
"You should devote yourself to cultivating the approval of conscience as I do. I only do what I think to be right, you know."
"But think right whatever you do."
"Not quite that," returned the Doctor with a laugh, "but the approval of my conscience—or of my reason, which stands in its place—is necessary to my happiness, so I change my principles whenever my acts don't accord with them."
"So do a great many persons," she responded; "perhaps most of us, for that matter, only we are seldom honest enough to own it."
"By the way," queried her companion, as they approached her destination, "how came Mrs. Fenton so quickly domesticated at the Church of the Nativity?"
"There is a young man there—a deacon or a monk; I never know these high church terms; they are usually faded out pieces of Romanism—that once wrote an article which enjoyed the honor of being interred in the Princeton Review when her uncle was one of its editors."
They reached the doorsteps and Dr. Ashton said good-by. Then he turned back.
"By the by," he said. "I walked up with you to make you invite me to supper again. I enjoyed the last time very much."
"Did you?" returned his wife, rather carelessly. "Come to-morrow—no, not until Thursday night."