The reading of the bit of stale news impressed him curiously. Why had Miss Margery interested herself in the details of the New Orleans bank robbery? Why—with no apparent special reason—should she have remembered it at all? or remembering it, have known where to look for the two newspaper references?
Raymer left the library speculating vaguely on the unaccountable tangents at which the feminine mind could now and then fly off from the well-defined circle of the conventionally usual. On rare occasions his mother or Gertrude did it, and he had long since learned the folly of trying to reduce the small problem to terms of known quantities masculine.
"Just the same, I'd like to know why, this time," he said to himself, as he crossed the street to the Manufacturers' Club. "Miss Grierson isn't at all the person to do things without an object."
After a few more days in the Morris chair; days during which he was idly contented when Margery was with him, and vaguely dissatisfied when she was not; Griswold was permitted to go below stairs, where he met, for the first time since the Grierson roof had given him shelter, the master of Mereside.
The little visit to Jasper Grierson's library was not prolonged beyond the invalid's strength; but notwithstanding its brevity there were inert currents of antagonism evolved which Margery, present and endeavoring to serve as a lightning-arrester, could neither ground nor turn aside.
For Griswold there was an immediate recrudescence of the unfavorable first impression gained at the Hotel Chouteau supper-table. He recalled his own descriptive formula struck out as a tag for the hard-faced, heavy-browed man at the end of the café table—"crudely strong, elementally shrewd, with a touch, or more than a touch, of the savage: the gray-wolf type"—and he found no present reason for changing the record.
Thus the convalescent debtor to the Grierson hospitality. And as for the Wahaskan money lord, itis to be presumed that he saw nothing more than a hollow-eyed, impractical story-writer (he had been told of the manuscript found in Griswold's hand-baggage), who chanced to be Margery's latest and least accountable fad.
Griswold took away from the rather constrained ice-breaking in the banker's library a renewed resolve to cut his obligation to Jasper Grierson as short as possible. How he should begin again the mordant struggle for existence was still an unsolved problem. Of the one-thousand-dollar spending fund there remained something less than half: for a few weeks or months he could live and pay his way; but after that.... Curiously enough, the alternative of another attack upon the plutocratic dragon did not suggest itself. That, he told himself, was an experiment tried and found wanting. But in any event, he must not outstay his welcome at Mereside; and with this thought in mind he crept down-stairs daily after the library episode, and would give Margery no peace because she would not let him go abroad in the town.
"Not to-day, but to-morrow," she said, finally, when there was no longer any good reason for denying him. "Wait until to-morrow, and if it's a fine day, I'll drive you in the trap."
"But why not to-day?" he complained.
"'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless'—what shall I say; patient, or guest, or—friend?" she laughed, garbling the quotation to fit the occasion.
"Shakespeare said 'child,'" he suggested mildly.
"And so shall I," she gibed—but the gibe itself was almost a caress. "Sometimes you remind me of an impatient boy who has been promised a peach and can't wait until it ripens. But if you must have a reason why I won't drive you this afternoon, you may. We are going to have a tiny little social function at Mereside this evening, and I want you to be fresh and rested for it."
"Oh, my dear Miss Margery!" protested the convalescent, reluctant to his finger-tips; "not to meet your friends! I am only your poor charity patient, and——"
"That will do," she declared, tyrannizing over him with a fine affectation of austere hostess-ship. "Isay you are to come down-stairs this evening to meet a few of our friends. And you will come."
"Certainly, I shall come, if you wish it," he assented, remembering afresh his immense obligation; and when the time was ripe he made himself presentable and felt his way down the dimly lighted library stair, being minded to slip into the social pool by the route which promised the smallest splash and the fewest ripples.
It was a stirring of the Philistine in him that led him to prefigure weariness and banality in the prospect. Without in the least suspecting it, Griswold was a Brahmin of the severest sect on his social side; easily disposed to hold aloof and to criticise, and, as a man Eastern-bred, serenely assured that nothing truly acceptable in the socialsense could come out of the Nazareth of the West.
For this cause he was properly humiliated when he entered the spacious double drawing-rooms and found them so comfortably crowded by a throng of conventionally clothed and conventionally behaved guests that he was immediately able to lose himself—and any lingering trace of self-consciousness—in a company which, if appearances were to be trusted, was Western only by reason of Wahaska's location on the map. Indeed, the sudden and necessary rearrangement of the pieces on the prefigured chess-board was almost embarrassing; and Margery's greeting and welcome brought a grateful sense of relief and a certain recovery of self-possession for which, a few minutes earlier, he had thought there could be no possible Wahaskan demand.
"Thank you so much for coming down, and for resolving heroically not to be bored," she began brightly. "And now that you've made your little concession, I'll make mine. I sha'n't ask anything at all of you"—piling the cushions in the corner of a wide window-seat and making him sit down; "you are just to be an invalid this evening, you know, and you needn't meet any more people than you want to."
When she had patted the pillows into place and was gone to welcome still later comers, Griswold had a chance to look around him. The readjusting mechanism was still at work. Beyond question it was all very different, strikingly different, from his forecastings. A young woman was at the piano,with a young man whose clothes fitted him and who was in nowise conscious of them, turning the music for her. There was a pleasant hum of conversation; the lights were not glaring; the furnishings were not in bad taste—on the contrary, they were in exceedingly good taste. Griswold smiled when he remembered that he had been looking forward to something suggesting a cross between a neighborhood tea-drinking and a church social. He was agreeably disappointed to find that the keynote was distinctly well-mannered, passably urban, undeniably conventional.
And the charming young hostess.... From his corner of the window-seat Griswold had a comprehensive view of the two great rooms, and beyond them through a pillared opening to the candle-lighted dining-room where the refreshments were served. Though the rooms were well filled, there was but a single personality pervading them for the eager student of types. Admitting that there were other women more beautiful, Griswold, groping always for the fitting figure and the apt phrase, told himself that Miss Grierson's crowning gift was an acute sense of the eternal harmonies; she was always "in character."
Hitherto he had known her only as his benefactress and the thoughtful caretaker for his comfort. But now, at this first sight of her in the broader social field, she shone upon and dazzled him. Admitting that the later charm might be subtly sensuous—he refused to analyze it too closely—it was undeniablethat it warmed him to a newer and a stronger life; that he could bask in its generous glow like some hibernating thing of the wild answering to the first thrilling of the spring-tide. True, Miss Grierson bore little resemblance to any ideal of his past imaginings. She might even be theAspasiato Charlotte Farnham'sSaint Cecilia. But even so, was not the daughter of Axiochus well beloved of men and of heroes?
It was some little time afterward, and Jasper Grierson, stalking like a grim and rather unwilling master of ceremonies among his guests, had gruffly introduced three or four of the men, when Griswold gladly made room in the window-seat for his transformed and glorified mistress of the fitnesses. As had happened more than once before, her nearness intoxicated him; and while he made sure now that the charm was at least partly physical, its appeal was none the less irresistible.
"Are you dreadfully tired?" she asked; adding quickly: "You mustn't let us make a martyr of you. It's your privilege to disappear whenever you feel like it."
"Indeed, I'm not at all tired," he protested. "It is all very comforting and homelike; so vastly—" he hesitated, seeking thoughtfully for the word which should convey his meaning without laying him open to the charge of patronizing superciliousness, and she supplied it promptly.
"So different from what you were expecting; I know. You have been thinking of us as barbarians—outerbarbarians, perhaps—and you find that we are only harmless provincials. But really, you know, we are improving. I wish you could have known Wahaska as it used to be."
"Before you took it in hand?" he suggested. "I can imagine it."
"Can you? I don't have to imagine it—I can remember: how we used to sit around the edges of the room behaving ourselves just as hard as ever we could, and boring one another to extinction. I'm afraid some of them do it yet, sometimes; but I won't let them do it here."
Once more Griswold let his gaze go at large through the stately rooms. He understood now. His prefigurings had not been so wide of the mark, after all. He had merely reckoned without his hostess.
"It is a miracle," he said, giving her full credit. "I'd like to ask how you wrought it, only I mustn't keep you from your duties."
She laughed joyously, with a little toss of the shapely head which was far more expressive than many words.
"I haven't any duties; I have taught them to amuse themselves. And they are doing it very creditably, don't you think?"
"They are getting along," he admitted. "But tell me: how did you go about it?"
"It was simple enough. When we came here we found a lot of good people who had fallen into the bad habit of boring one another, and a few who hadn't; but the few held themselves aloof. Weopened our house to the many, and tried to show them that a church sewing-circle isn't precisely the acme of social enjoyment. That is all."
Griswold saw in his mind's eye a sharply etched picture of the rise and progress of a village magnate cleanly struck out in the two terse sentences, and his respect for his companion in the wide window-seat increased in just proportion. Verily, Miss Margery had imagination.
"It is all very grateful and delightful to me," he confessed, at length. "I have been out of the social running for a long time, but I may as well admit that I am shamelessly Epicurean by nature, and an ascetic only when the necessities drive."
"I know," she assented, with quick appreciation. "An author has to be both, hasn't he?—keen to enjoy, and well hardened to endure."
He turned upon her squarely.
"Where did you ever learn how to say such things as that?" he demanded.
It was an opening for mockery and good-natured raillery, but she did not make use of it. Instead, she let him look as deeply as he pleased into the velvety eyes when she said: "It is given to some of us to see and to understand where others have to learn slowly, letter by letter. Surely, your own gift has told you that, Mr. Griswold?"
"It has," he acknowledged. "But I have found few who really do understand."
"Which is to say that you haven't yet found your other self, isn't it? Perhaps that will come, too,if you'll only be patient—and not expect too many other gifts of the gods along with the one priceless gift of perfect sympathy."
"When I find the one priceless gift, I shall confidently expect to find everything else," he asserted, still held a willing prisoner by the bewitching eyes.
She laughed softly. "You'll be disappointed. The gift you demand will preclude some of the others; as the others would certainly preclude it. How can you be an author and not understand that?"
"I am not an author, I am sorry to say," he objected. "I have written but the one book, and I have never been able to find a publisher for it."
"But you are not going to give up?"
"No; I am going to rewrite the book and try again—and yet again, if needful. It is my message to mankind, and I mean to deliver it."
"Bravo!" she applauded, clapping her hands in a little burst of enthusiasm which, if it were not real, was at least an excellent simulation. "It is only the weak ones who say, 'I hope.' For the truly strong hearts there is only the one battle-cry, 'I will!' When you get blue and discouraged you must come to me and let me cheer you. Cheering people ismymission, if I have any."
Griswold's pale face flushed and the blood sang liltingly in his veins. He wondered if she had been tempted to read the manuscript of the book while he was fighting his way back to consciousness and life. If they had been alone together, he wouldhave asked her. The bare possibility set all the springs of the author's vanity upbubbling within him. There and then he promised himself that she should hear the rewriting of the book, chapter by chapter. But what he said was out of a deeper, and worthier, underthought.
"You have many missions, Miss Margery: some of them you choose, and some are chosen for you."
"No," she denied; "nobody has ever chosen for me."
"That may be true, without making me a false prophet. Sometimes when we think we are choosing for ourselves, chance chooses for us; oftener than not, I believe."
She turned on him quickly, and for a single swiftly passing instant the velvety eyes were deep wells of soberness with an indefinable underdepth of sorrow in them. Griswold had a sudden conviction that for the first time in his knowing of her he was looking into the soul of the real Margery Grierson.
"What you call 'chance' may possibly have a bigger and better name," she said, gravely. "Had you ever thought of that?"
"Give it any name you please, so long as you admit that it is something beyond our control," he conceded.
As had happened more than once before, she seemed to be able to read his inmost thought.
"You are thinking of the chain of incidents that brought you here? It is only the details that have'happened.' You meant to come to Wahaska; you were carrying out a definite purpose of your own that night in St. Louis when you took your ticket. And coming here, sooner or later you would have found your way to this house—to a seat on these cushions. I could tell you more, but my prophetic soul warns me that Agatha Severance is protesting to Mr. Wamble that she can'tpossiblyplay the particular song he is asking for without the music. I'm going to convince her that she can."
Some little time after this, Raymer, who had been one of the men introduced by Jasper Grierson, turned up again in the invalid's corner.
"Sit down, won't you?" said Griswold, making a move to share the cushions with the young ironmaster; and it was thus that the door to a friendship was opened. Farther on, when they had gotten safely beyond the commonplaces, Raymer suggested the smoking-room and a cigar, and Griswold went willingly.
"I was wondering if you were like me in that, Mr. Raymer," he said. "I never feel properly acquainted with a man until I have smoked with him."
"Or with a woman until she has made a cup of tea for you?" laughed the native. "That is Miss Margery's try-out. She has taught us the potentialities that lie in a cup of tea well brewed and skilfully sweetened."
From that on, the path to better acquaintance was the easiest of short-cuts, even as the mild cigar which Raymer found in his pocket-case paved theway for a return of the smoker's zest in the convalescent. Without calling himself a reformer, the young ironmaster proved to be a practical sociologist. Wherefore, when Griswold presently mounted his own sociological hobby, he was promptly invited to visit the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, to the end that he might have some of his theories of the universal oppression of wage-earners charitably modified.
"Of course, I don't deny that we're a long way from the Millennium, yet," was Raymer's summing up of the conditions in his own plant. "But I do claim that we are on a present-day, living footing. So far as the men understand loyalty, they are loyal; partly to my father's memory; partly, I hope, to me. We have never had a strike or an approach to one, or a disagreement that could not be adjusted amicably. Whether these conditions can be maintained after we double our capacity and get in a lot of new blood, I can't say. But I hope they can."
"You are enlarging?" said Griswold.
Raymer waited until the only other man in the smoking-den had gone back to the drawing-rooms before he said: "Yes; I caught the fever along with the rest of them a few weeks ago, and I'm already beginning to wish that I hadn't."
"You are afraid of the market?"
"N-no; times are good, and the market—our market, at least—is daily growing stronger. It is rather a matter of finances. I am an engineer, asmy father was before me. When it comes to wrestling with the money devil, I'm outclassed from the start."
"There are a good many more of us in the same boat," said Griswold, leaving an opening for further confidences if Raymer chose to make them. But the young ironmaster was looking at his watch, and the confidences were postponed.
"I'm keeping you up, when I daresay you ought to be in bed," he protested; but Griswold held him long enough to ask for a suggestion in a small matter of his own.
Now that he was able to be about, he was most anxious to relieve Miss Grierson and her father of the charge and care of one whose obligation to them was already more than mountain-high: did Raymer happen to know of some quiet household where the obligated one could find lodging and a simple table?
Raymer, taking time to think of it, did know. Mrs. Holcomb, the widow of his father's bookkeeper, owned her own house in Shawnee Street. It was not a boarding-house. The widow rented rooms to two of Mr. Grierson's bank clerks, and she was looking for another desirable lodger. Quite possibly she would be willing to board the extra lodger. Raymer, himself, would go and see her about it.
"It is an exceedingly kind-hearted community this home town of yours, Mr. Raymer," was the convalescent's leave-taking, when he shook handswith the ironmaster at the foot of the stairs; and that was the thought which he took to bed with him after Raymer had gone to make his adieux to the small person who, in Griswold's reckoning, owned the kindest of the kind hearts.
Having Clerk Maurice's telegram to time the overtaking approach, Broffin found theBelle Juliebacking and filling for her berth at the Vicksburg landing when, after a hasty Vicksburg breakfast, he had himself driven to the river front.
Going aboard as soon as the swing stage was lowered, he found Maurice, with whom he had something more than a speaking acquaintance, just turning out of his bunk in the texas.
"I took it for granted you'd be along," was Maurice's greeting. "What bank robber are we running away with now?"
Broffin grinned.
"I'm still after the one you took on in the place of John Gavitt."
"Humph!" said the clerk, sleepily; "I thought that onewasJohn Gavitt."
"No; he merely took Gavitt's place and name. Tell me all you know about him."
"I don't know anything about him, except that he was fool enough to pull Buck M'Grath out of the river just after M'Grath had tried to bump him over the bows."
This was a new little side-light on the characteristics of the man who was wanted. Broffin pulled gently at the thread of narrative until he had all the particulars of the humane mutiny and the near-tragedy in which it had terminated.
"Stuck to him and kept him from drowning till you could pick 'em up, did he—what?" was his commentary on the story. "Then what happened?"
"Oh, nothing much—or nothing very different. Of course, Mac favored the fellow all he could, after that; gave him the light end of it when there was any light end. But he didn't get his chance to even up right until we got to St. Louis."
Here, apparently, was another overlooked item in the list of things to be considered, and Broffin grappled for it.
"How was that?" he asked.
"I don't know for a certainty. But I put it up that the fellow took Mac into his confidence—a little—and told him he wanted to make a run for it as soon as we hit the levee at St. Louis. He hadn't got his pay; we always hold the 'rousties'' money back till we're unloaded, if we can; so Mac advanced it, or claimed that he did."
It was Broffin's business to put two and two together, and at this conjuncture the process was sufficiently simple. With a hundred thousand dollars in his possession, the make-believe deck-hand would not be foolish enough to run even a hypothetical risk for the sake of saving the bit of wage-money. Broffin's next query seemed wholly irrelevant.
"Do you carry any nippers or handcuffs on theBelle Julie, Maurice?" he asked.
"Yes; I believe Mac has an odd pair or so in his dunnage; in fact, I know he has. I've seen him use 'em on an obstreperous nigger."
From the handcuffs Broffin went off at another tangent.
"Of course, so far as you know, nobody on the boat suspected that the fellow who called himself Gavitt was anything but the 'roustie' he was passing himself off for? You didn't know of his having any talk with any of the upper-deck people?"
"Only once," said the day-clerk, promptly.
"When was that?"
"It was one day just after the 'man-overboard' incident, a little while after dusk in the evening. I was up here in the texas, getting ready to go to supper. Gavitt—we may as well keep on calling him that till you've found another name for him—Gavitt had been cubbing for the pilot. I saw him go across the hurricane-deck and down the companion to the saloon-deck guards; and a minute later I heard him talking to somebody—a woman—on the guards below."
"You didn't hear what was said?"
"I didn't pay any attention. Passengers, women passengers especially, often do that—pull up a 'roustie' and pry into him to see what sort of wheels he has. But I noticed that they talked for quite a little while; because, when I finished dressing and went below, he was just leaving her."
Broffin rose up from the bunk on which he had been sitting and laid a heavy hand on Maurice's shoulder. "You ain't going to tell me that you didn't find out who the woman was, Clarence—what?" he said anxiously.
"That's just what I've got to tell you, Matt," returned the clerk reluctantly. "I was due at the second table, and I didn't go as far forward as the stanchion she was holding on to. All I can tell you is that she was one of the half-dozen or so younger women we had on board; I could guess at that much."
Broffin's oath was not of anger; it was a mere upbubbling of disappointment.
"Maurice, I've got to find that young woman if I have to chase her half-way round the globe, and it's tough luck to figure out that if you hadn't been in such a blazing hell of a hurry to get your supper that night, I might be able to catch up with her in the next forty-eight hours or so. But what's done is done, and can't be helped. Chase out and get your passenger list for that trip. We'll take the women as they come, and when you've helped me cull out the names of the ones you're sure it wasn't, I'll screw my nut and quit buzzing at you."
The clerk went below and returned almost immediately with the list. Together they went over it carefully, and by dint of much memory-wringing Maurice was able to give the detective leave to cancel ten of the seventeen names in the women's list, the remaining seven including all themight-have-beens who could possibly be fitted into the clerk's recollection of the woman he had seen clinging to the saloon-deck stanchion after her interview with the deck-hand.
To these seven names were appended the addresses given in the steamer's registry record, though as to these Maurice admitted that the patrons of the boats were not always careful to comply with the regulation which required the giving of the home address.
"About as often as not they write down the name of the last place they stopped at," he asserted; and Broffin swore again.
"Which means that I may have to pound my ear eight or ten thousand miles on the varnished cars for nothing," he growled. "Well, there ain't any rest for the wicked, I reckon. Now tell me where I can find this man Buck M'Grath, and I'll fade away."
M'Grath was on duty, superintending the loading and unloading of the Vicksburg freight quotas; but when Broffin tapped him on the shoulder and showed his badge, the second mate was called in and M'Grath stood aside with his unwelcome interrupter.
There were difficulties from the outset. A man-driver himself, the chief mate shared with the sheerest outcast in his crew a hearty hatred for the man-catchers all and singular; and in the present instance his sympathies were with the fugitive from justice, on general principles first, and for good andsufficient personal reasons afterward. Then, too, Broffin was hardly at his best. At the thought of what this man M'Grath could tell him, and was gruffly refusing to tell him, he lost his temper.
"You're edgin' up pretty close to the law, yourself, by what you're keeping back," he told the mate finally. "Sooner or later, I'm going to run this gentleman-roustie of yours down, anyhow, and it'll be healthier for you to help than to hinder. Do you know what he's wanted for?"
M'Grath did not know, and his enlargement upon the simple negative was explosively profane.
"Then I'll tell you. He was the 'strong-arm' man that held up the president of the Bayou State Security and made his get-away with a hundred thousand. Now will you come across?"
"No!" rasped the Irishman—and again there were embellishments.
"All right. When I catch up with him, you'll fall in for your share in the proceeds as an accessory after the fact. My men nabbed him on the levee at St. Louis, and when he euchred them he carried away a pair of handcuffs that somebody had to help him get shut of. He came back to the boat, and you are the man who took the handcuffs off!"
"'Tis a scrimshankin' lie, and ye can't prove ut!" said M'Grath.
"Maybe not; but there's one thing I can prove. This side-partner of yours didn't get his pay before he went ashore with the spring-line;but you drew it for him afterwards!"
M'Grath was cruelly cornered, but he still had the courage of his gratitude.
"Well, then, I did be taking the bracelets off av 'm. Now make the most av ut, and be damned to you! Did I know what he'd been doing? I did not. Do I know where he wint? I do not. Have I seen the naygur that skipped with him, from that day to this? I have not; nor would I be knowing 'm if I did see 'm. Anything else yez'd like to know? If there is, ye'll be taking ut on the tip av my fisht!" And he went back to his work, oozing profanity at every pore.
Thrown back upon the one remaining expedient, Broffin went ashore and became a student of railroad time-tables. Passing the incidents of the stubborn chase in review after many days, he wondered that it had not occurred to him to question Captain Mayfield. But that the captain would know anything at all about any particular bit of human driftwood in the ever-changing deck crew seemed easily incredible; and there was no good angel of clairvoyance to tell him that the captain had once been made the half-confidant of a distressed young woman who was anxious to be both just and merciful.
It was while he was waiting for the departure of the first northbound train that he planned the search for the young woman, arranging the names of the seven might-have-beens in the order of accessibility as indicated by the addresses given in theBelle Julie'sregister. In this arrangement MissCharlotte Farnham's name stood as Number Three; the two names outranking hers being assigned respectively to Terre Haute, Indiana, and Baldwin, Kansas.
In his after-rememberings, Broffin swore softly under the drooping mustaches when he recalled how, in that morning waiting at Vicksburg, he had hesitated and changed his mind many times before deciding upon the first three zigzags of the search. Terre Haute, Baldwin, and Wahaska lay roughly at the three extremities of a great triangle whose sides, measured in hours of railroad travel, were nearly equal. Failing at Terre Haute, the nearest point, he could reach either of the two remaining vertices of the triangle with fairly equal facility; and it was surely an ironical fate that led him to decide finally upon the Kansas town as the second choice.
Some twenty-odd hours after leaving Vicksburg, Broffin the tireless found himself in Terre Haute. Here failure had at least the comfort of finality. The Miss Heffelfinger of his list, whom he found and interviewed within an hour of his arrival, was a teacher of German whose difficulties with the English language immediately eliminated her from the diminishing equation. Broffin got away from the voluble little Berliner as expeditiously as possible and hastened back to the railway station. Kansas came next in his itinerary, and a westbound train was due to leave in a few minutes.
It was here again that fate mocked him. Arriving at the station, he found that the westboundtrain was an hour late; also, that within the hour there would be a fast train to the north, with good connections for Wahaska. Once more he stumbled and fell into the valley of indecision. A dozen times during the forty-five minutes of grace he was on the point of changing his route; nay, more; at the last minute, when the caller had announced the northern train, he took a gambler's chance and spun a coin—heads for the north and tails for the west. The twirling half-dollar slipped from his fingers and rolled under one of the stationary seats in the waiting-room. Broffin got down on his hands and knees to grope for it, and while he was groping the chance to take the northbound "Limited" was lost. Moreover, when he finally found the coin it was standing upright in a crack in the floor.
Having now no alternative to distract him, he held to his original plan and was soon speeding westward toward the Kansan experiment-station. For two full days of twenty-four hours each he fought as only a determined man and a good traveller could fight to cover a distance which should have been traversed in something less than half of the time. Washouts, blocked tracks, missed connections, all these got in the way; and it was not until late in the afternoon of the third day out from Terre Haute that he was set down at the small station which serves the needs of the Kansas university town.
Having had himself conveyed quickly to the university, which was given as the address of the MissSanborn whose name stood second in his list, he learned how shrewd a blow his implacable ill-luck had dealt him in making him the victim of so many delays. Miss Sanborn, it appeared, had been fitting herself at the denominational school to go out as a missionary. And some twelve hours before his arrival she had started on her long journey to the antipodes, going by way of San Francisco and the Pacific Mail.
Another man might have taken the more easily reached addresses in the list, leaving the appalling world-tour for the last. But the doggedness which had hitherto been Broffin's best bid for genius in his profession asserted itself as a ruling passion. Twenty minutes after having been given his body-blow by the dean of the theological school he had examined some specimens of Miss Sanborn's handwriting, had compared them with the unsigned letter, and was back at the little railroad station burning the wires to Kansas City in an attempt to find out the exact sailing date of the missionary's steamer from San Francisco.
When the answer came he found that his margin of time was something of the narrowest, but it was still a margin. By taking the first overland train which could be reached and boarded, he might, barring more of the ill-luck, arrive at San Francisco in time to overtake the young woman whose handwriting was so like, and yet in some respects quite strikingly unlike, that of the writer of the letter to Mr. Galbraith.
Under such conditions the long journey to the Pacific Coast was begun, continued, and, in due course of time, ended. As if it had exhausted itself in the middle passage, ill-luck held aloof, and Broffin's overland train was promptly on time when it rolled into its terminal at Oakland. An hour later he had crossed the bay and was in communication with the steamship people. Though it was within a few hours of the China steamer's sailing date, Miss Sanborn had not yet made her appearance, and once more, though the subject this time was wholly innocent, Broffin swore fluently.
Notwithstanding, after all these intermediate buffetings, it was only the ultimate disappointment which was reserved for the man who had come two thousand miles out of his way for a five-minute talk with a young woman. Almost at the last moment he found her, and in the same moment was made to realize that the similarity in handwriting was only a similarity. Miss Sanborn had been a passenger on theBelle Julie, boarding the steamboat at New Orleans and debarking at St. Louis. But she had known nothing of the Bayou State Security robbery until she had read of it in the newspapers; and one glance into the steadfast blue eyes that met his without flinching convinced Broffin that once more he had fired and missed.
Number Two in the list of seven being thus laboriously eliminated, Broffin, to be utterly consistent, should have boarded the first train for Minnesota. But inasmuch as three of the remainingfive addresses were west of the Missouri River, he sacrificed consistency to common-sense, halting at a little town in the Colorado mountains, again at Pueblo, and a third time at Hastings, Nebraska only to find at each stopping-place that the ultimate disappointment had preceded and was waiting for him.
With his list cancelled down to two names, he resumed the eastward flight from the Nebraska town and was again beset by the devil of indecision. The two place-names remaining were Wahaska and a small coal-mining town in southern Iowa. Measuring again by railroad hours, he found that the Iowa town was the nearer; but, on the other hand, there were good connections from Omaha to Wahaska, and a rather poor one to the coal mines. Once more Broffin took the gambler's chance, spinning the coin in his hat, heads for Iowa and tails for Minnesota. It came heads; and the following day recorded the sixth in the string of failures.
Leaving What Cheer in the caboose of a coal train, with only the train's crew for company, and a hard bench for a bed, the man-hunter was already thrilling to the exultant view-halloo in the chase. By the light of the flickering caboose lamp he drew his pencil through the Iowa failure. The one uncancelled name was now something more than a chance; it was a certainty.
"I've got you for fair, girlie, this time!" he triumphed, and since he did it audibly, the coal-train conductor laughed and wanted to be told the color of her eyes and hair.
"Got 'em pretty bad, ain't you, pardner?" he commented, when Broffin, loose-tongued in his elation, confessed that he was chasing a woman whom he had never seen. "I know how it goes: seen a picture of one once on a bill-board, and I'd 'a' gone plum to Californy after her if I hadn't been too danged busy to take a lay-off."
Landing in Wahaska the next evening, Broffin's first request at the hotel counter was for the directory. Running an eager finger down the "F's" he came to the name. It was the only Farnham in the list, and after it he read: "Dr. Herbert C., office 8 to 10, 2 to 4, 201 Main St., res. 16 Lake Boulevard."
Broffin had a traveller's appetite, and the café doors were invitingly open. Yet he denied himself until the clerk, busy at the moment with other guests, should be at liberty.
"I see there's a Doctor Farnham here," he said, when his time came. "I was wondering if he was the man I met up with down in New Orleans last winter."
The clerk shook his head.
"I guess not. Doctor Bertie hasn't taken a vacation since the oldest inhabitant can remember."
"H'm; that's funny," mused the detective, as one nonplussed. "The name's just as familiar as an old song. Is your Doctor Farnham a sort of oldish man?"
"He's elderly, yes; old enough to have a grown daughter." Then the clerk laughed. "Perhapsyou've got things tangled. Perhaps you 'met up' with Miss Charlotte. She was down on the Gulf Coast last winter."
"Not me," said Broffin, matching the ice-breaking laugh. And then he registered for a room and passed on into the café, deferring to the appetite which, for the first time in nearly four tedious weeks, he felt justified in indulging to the untroubled limit.
Having, by the slow but sure process of elimination, finally reduced his equation to its lowest terms, Broffin put the past four weeks and their failures behind him, and prepared to draw the net which he hoped would entangle the lost identity of the bank robber. After a good night's sleep in a real bed, he awoke refreshed and alert, breakfasted with an open mind, and presently went about the net-drawing methodically and with every contingency carefully provided for.
The first step was to assure himself beyond question that Miss Farnham was the writer of the unsigned letter. This step he was able, by a piece of great good fortune, to take almost immediately. A bit of morning gossip with the obliging clerk of the Winnebago House developed the fact that Dr. Farnham's daughter had once taught in the free kindergarten which was one of the charitable out-reachings of the Wahaska Public Library. Two blocks east and one south: Broffin walked them promptly, made himself known to the librarian as a visitor interested in kindergarten work, and wascheerfully shown the records. When he turned to the pages signed "Charlotte Farnham" the last doubt vanished and assurance was made sure. The anonymous letter writer was found.
It was just here that Matthew Broffin fell under the limitations of his trade. Though the detective in real life is as little as may be like the Inspector Buckets and the Javerts of fiction, certain characteristics persist. Broffin thought he knew the worth of boldness; where it was a mere matter of snapping the handcuffs upon some desperate criminal, the boldness was not wanting. But now, when he found himself face to face with the straightforward expedient, the craft limitations bound him. Instantly he thought of a dozen good reasons why he should make haste slowly; and he recognized in none of them the craftsman's slant toward indirection—the tradition of the trade which discounts the straightforward attack and puts a premium upon the methods of the deer-stalker.
Sooner or later, of course, the attack must be made. But only an apprentice, he told himself, would be foolish enough to make it without mapping out all the hazards of the ground over which it must be made. In a word, he must "place" Miss Farnham precisely; make a careful study of the young woman and her environment, to the end that every thread of advantage should be in his hands when he should finally force her to a confession. For by now the assumption that she knew the mysterious bank robber was no longer hypothetical inBroffin's mind: it had grown to the dimensions of a conviction.
Wahaska was not difficult of approach on its gossiping side. Though it owned a charter and called itself a city, it was still in the country-town stage which favors a wide distribution of news with the personal note emphasized. Broffin, conveying the impression that he was a Louisiana lumberman on a vacation, approved himself as a good listener, and little more was needed. In a week he had traced the social outlines of the town as one finds the accent of a painting; in a fortnight he had grouped the Griersons, the Raymers, the Oswalds, the Barrs, and the Farnhams in their various interrelations, business and otherwise.
With the patient curiosity of his tribe he suffered no detail, however trivial, to escape its jotting down. To familiarize himself with the goings and comings of one young woman, he made the acquaintance of an entire town. He knew Jasper Grierson's ambition, and its fruitage in the practical ownership of Wahaska. He knew that Edward Raymer had borrowed money from Grierson's bank—and was likely to be unable to pay it when his notes fell due. He had heard it whispered that there had once been a love affair between young Raymer and Miss Farnham, and that it had been broken off by Raymer's infatuation for Margery Grierson. Also, last and least important of all the gossiping details, as it seemed at the time, he learned that the bewitching Miss Grierson was a creature of fads; that withinthe past month or two she had returned from a Florida trip, bringing with her a sick man, a total stranger, who had been picked up on the train, taken to the great house on the lake shore and nursed back to life as Miss Grierson's latest defiance of the conventions.
It should have been a memorable day for Matthew Broffin when he had this sick man pointed out to him as Miss Grierson's companion in the high trap—which was also one of Miss Margery's bids for criticism in a town where the family carryall was still a feature. But Broffin was sufficiently human to see only a very beautiful young woman sitting correctly erect on the slanting driving-seat and holding the reins over a high-stepping horse which, he was told, had cost Jasper Grierson every cent of a thousand dollars. To be sure, he saw the man, as one sees a vanishing figure in a kaleidoscope. But there was nothing in the clean-shaven face of the gaunt, and as yet rather haggard, convalescent to evoke the faintest thrill of interest—or of memory.
A week and a day after the opening of new vistas at Miss Grierson's "evening," Griswold—Raymer's intercession with the Widow Holcomb having paved the way—took a favorable opportunity of announcing his intention of leaving Mereside. It figured as a grateful disappointment to him—one of the many she was constantly giving him—that Margery placed no obstacles in the way of the intention. On the contrary, she approved the plan.
"I know how you feel," she said, nodding complete comprehension. "You want to have a place that you can call your own; a place where you can go and come as you please and settle down to work. Youaregoing to work, aren't you?—on the book, I mean?"
Griswold replaced in its proper niche the volume he had been reading. It was Adam Smith'sWealth of Nations, and he had been wondering by what ironical chance it had found a place in the banker's library.
"Yes; that is what I mean to do," he returned. "But it will have to be done in such scraps and parings of time as I can save from some bread-and-butter occupation. One must eat to live, you know."
She was sitting on the arm of one of the big library lounging-chairs and looking up at him with a smile that was suspiciously innocent and childlike.
"You mean that you will have to work for your living?" she asked.
"Exactly."
"What were you thinking of doing?"
"I don't know," he confessed. "I have been hoping that Raymer might help me to find a place; possibly in the machine works as an under bookkeeper, or something of that sort. Not that I know very much about any really useful occupation, when it comes to that; but I suppose I can learn."
Again he surprised the lurking smile in the velvety eyes, but this time it was half-mischievous.
"We have a college here in Wahaska, and you might get a place on the faculty," she suggested; adding: "As an instructor in philosophy, for example."
"Philosophy? that is the one thing in the world that I know least about."
"In theory, perhaps," she conceded, laughing openly at him now. "But in practice you are perfect, Mr. Griswold. Hasn't anybody ever told you that before?"
"No; and you don't mean it. You are merely taking a base advantage of a sick man and making fun of me. I don't mind: I'm in a heavenly temper this afternoon."
"Oh, but I do mean it, honestly," she averred. "You are a philosopher, really and truly, and I canprove it. Do you feel equal to another little drive down-town?"
"Being a philosopher, I ought to be equal to anything," he postulated; and he went up-stairs to get a street coat and his hat.
She had disappeared when he came down again, and he went out to sit on the sun-warmed veranda while he waited. He had already forgotten what she had said about the object of the drive—the proving of the philosophic charge against him—and was looking forward with keenly pleasurable anticipations to another outing with her, the second for that day. It had come to this, now; to admitting frankly the charm which he was still calling sensuous, and which, in the moments of insight recurring, as often as they can be borne, to the imaginative, and vouchsafed now and then even to the wayfaring, he was still disposed to characterize as an appeal to that which was least worthy in him.
Latterly, however, he had begun to question himself more acutely as to the exact justice of this attitude; and while he was sunning himself on the veranda and listening for the hoof-beats of the big trap horse on the stable approach, he was doing it again. In those graver analytical moments he had called Margery a preternaturally clever little barbarian, setting his own immense obligation to her aside in deference to what he assumed to be the immutable realities. In the sun-warming excursion came another of those precious moments of insight; a moment in which he was given a sobering glimpseof the deathless Philistine within. Who was he to be setting his machine-made ideals above the living, breathing, human fact whose very limitations and shortcomings might figure as angelic virtues when weighed in any balance save that of the Philistinic ego?
To admit the query was to admit a doubtful distrust of all the charted anchorages; those sure holding-grounds which he had once believed to be the very bottoming of facts assured and incontestible. From his lounging seat the trees on the lawn framed a noble vista of lakescape and crescent-curved beach drive, the latter with its water-facing row of modest mansions, the homes of Wahaska's well-to-do elect. At the end of the crescent he could see the chimneys of the Raymer house rising above a groving of young maples; and nearer at hand the substantial, two-storied frame house which Miss Grierson had pointed out to him as the home of the kindly Doctor Bertie. When he found himself drifting, his thoughts reverted automatically to Charlotte Farnham. There, if anywhere, lay the touchstone of truth and the verities; there, he told himself, was at least one life into which the doubtful distrust of the anchorages had never come.
Passing easily from Miss Farnham the ideal to Miss Farnham the flesh-and-blood reality, he was moved to wonder mildly why the fate which had brought him twice into critically intimate relations with her was now denying him even a chance meeting. For a week or more he had been going outdaily; sometimes with Miss Grierson in the trap, but oftener afoot and alone. The walking excursions had led him most frequently up and down the lakeside drive, but the doctor's house stood well back in its enclosure, and there was much shrubbery. Once he had heard her voice: she was reading aloud to some one on the vine-screened porch. And once again in passing, he had caught a glimpse of a shapely arm with the loose sleeve falling away from it as it was thrust upward through the porch greenery to pluck a bud from the crimson rambler adding its graceful mass to the clambering vines. It was rather disappointing, but he was not impatient. In the fulness of time the destiny which had twice intervened would intervene again. He was as certain of it as he was of the day-to-day renewal of his strength and vitality; and he could afford to wait. For, whatever else might happen in a mutable world, neither an ideal nor its embodiment may suffer change.
As if to add the touch of definitiveness to the presumptive conclusion, a voice broke in upon his revery; the voice of the young woman whose most alluring charm was her many-sided changefulness.
"What? no trap yet? Thorsen is outliving his usefulness; he is getting slower and pokier every added day he lives!" the voice was saying, with a faintly acid quality in it that Griswold had seldom heard. Then, as if she had marked his preoccupied gaze and divined its object: "You must have a little more patience, Mr. Griswold. All things cometo him who waits. When you have left Mereside finally, Doctor Bertie will some time take you home to dinner with him."
For his own peace of mind, Griswold hastily assured himself that it was only the wildest of chance shots. Since the day when he had admitted that he knew Miss Farnham's name without knowing Miss Farnham in person, the doctor's daughter had never been mentioned between them.
"How did you happen to guess that I was thinking of the good doctor?" he asked, curiously.
"You were not thinking of Doctor Bertie; you were thinking of Doctor Bertie's 'only'," was the laughing contradiction; and Griswold was glad that the coming of the man with the trap saved him from the necessity of falling any farther into what might easily prove to be a dangerous pitfall. Later on, while he was mechanically lifting his hat in recognition of the many salutations acknowledged by his companion in their triumphal progress down Main Street, he was still thankful and still puzzling over the almost uncanny coincidence. It was not the first time that Miss Grierson had seemed able to read his inmost thoughts.
The short afternoon drive paused at the curb in front of Jasper Grierson's bank, and, as on former occasions, Margery lightly scorned the convalescent's up-stretched arms and sprang unhelped to the pavement. But now her mood was sweetly indulgent and she softened the refusal. "By and by, after you are quite well and strong again," she said; and whena horse-holding boy had been found, she led the way into the bank.
It was Griswold's first visit to the Farmers' and Merchants', and while his companion was speaking to the cashier he was absently contrasting its rather showy interior with the severe plainness of the Bayou State Security; contrasting, and congratulating himself upon the gift of the artistic memory which enabled him to recall with vivid accuracy all the little details of the New Orleans banking house—this notwithstanding the good excuse the observing eye might have had for wandering.
A moment later he found himself bringing up the rear of a procession of three, led by a young woman with a bunch of keys at her girdle. The procession halted for the opening of a massive gate in the steel grille at the rear of the public lobby; after which, with the gate latching itself automatically behind him, Griswold found himself in the grated corridor facing the safety deposit vaults.
"Number three-forty-five-A, please," his companion was saying to the young woman custodian, and he stood aside and admired the workmanship of the complicated time-locks while the two entered the electric-lighted vault and jointly opened one of the multitude of small safes. When Miss Grierson came out, she was carrying a small, japanned document box under her arm, and her eyes were shining with a soft light that was new to the man who was waiting in the corridor. "Come with me to one of the coupon-rooms," she said; and then to the custodian:"You needn't stay; I'll ring when we want to be let out."
Griswold followed in mild bewilderment when she turned aside to one of the little mahogany-lined cells set apart for the use of the safe-holders, saw her press the button which switched the lights on, and mechanically obeyed her signal to close the door. When their complete privacy was assured, she put the japanned box on the tiny table and motioned him to one of the two chairs.
"Do you know why I have brought you here?" she asked, when he was sitting within arm's-reach of the small black box.
"How should I?" he said. "You take me where you please, and when you please, and I ask no questions. I am too well contented to be with you to care very much about the whys and wherefores."
"Oh, how nicely you say it!" she commended, with the frank little laugh which he had come to know and to seek to provoke. She was standing against the opposite cell wall with her shoulders squared and her hands behind her: the pose, whether intentional or natural, was dramatically perfect and altogether bewitching. "I was born to be your fairy godmother, I think," she went on joyously. "Tell me; when you bought your ticket to Wahaska that night in St. Louis, were you meaning to come here to find work?—the bread-and-butter work?"
"No," he admitted; "I had money, then."
"What became of it?"
"I don't know. I suppose it was stolen from meon the train. It was in a package in one of my suit-cases; and Doctor Farnham said——"
"I know; he told you that we had searched your suit-cases when you were at your worst—thinking we owed it to you and your friends, if you had any."
"Yes; that is what he told me."
"Also, he told you that we didn't find any money?"
"Yes; he told me that, too. We agreed that somebody must have gone through the grips on the train."
"And you let it go at that? Why didn't you tell me, so that we might at least try to find the thief?"
He had quite lost sight of the black box on the table by this time, and was consumed with curiosity to know why she had brought him to such a place to reproach him for his lack of confidence.
"How often are we able to tell the exact 'why' of anything?" he answered evasively. "Perhaps I didn't wish to trouble you—you who had already troubled yourself so generously in behalf of an unknown castaway."
"So you just let the money go?"
"So I just let it go."
She was laughing again and the bedazzling eyes were dancing with delight.
"I told you I was going to prove that you are a philosopher!" she exulted. "Sour old Diogenes himself couldn't have been more superbly indifferent to the goods the gods provide. Open that box on the table, please."
He did it half-absently: at the first sight of the brown-paper packet within, the electric bulb suspendedover the table seemed to grow black and the mahogany walls of the tiny room to spin dizzily. Then, with a click that he fancied he could hear, the buzzing mental machinery stopped and reversed itself. A cold sweat, clammy and sickening, started out on him when he realized that the reversal had made him once again the crafty, cornered criminal, ready to fight or fly—or to slay, if a life stood in the way of escape. Without knowing what he did, he closed the box and got upon his feet, eying her with a growing ferocity that he could neither banish nor control.
"I see: you were a little beforehand with the doctor," he said, and he strove to say it naturally; to keep the malignant devil that was whispering in his ear from dictating the tone as well as the words.
"I was, indeed; several days beforehand," she boasted, still joyously exultant.
"You—you opened the package?" he went on, once more pushing the importunate devil aside.
"Naturally. How else would I have known that it was worth locking up?"
Her coolness astounded him. If she knew the whole truth—and the demon at his ear was assuring him that she must know it—she must also know that she was confronting a great peril; the peril of one who voluntarily shuts himself into a trap with the fear-maddened wild thing for which the trap was baited and set. He was steadying himself with a hand on the table when he said: "Well, you opened the package; what did you find out?"
"What did I find out?" He heard her half-hesitant repetition of his query, and for one flitting instant he made sure that he saw the fear of death in the wide-open eyes that were lifted to his. But the next instant the eyes were laughing at him, and she was going on confidently. "Of course, as soon as I untied the string I saw it was money—a lot of money; and you can imagine that I tied it up again, quickly, and didn't lose any more time than I could help in putting it away in the safest place I could think of. Every day since you began to get well, I've been expecting you to say something about it; but as long as you wouldn't, I wouldn't."
Slowly the blood came back into the saner channels, and the whispering demon at his ear grew less articulate. Was she telling the truth? Could it be possible that she had not opened the packet far enough to see and read the damning evidence of the printed bank-slips which, in a very bravado of carelessness, as he now remembered, he had neglected to remove and destroy? He was searching the dark eyes for the naked soul behind them when he ventured again.
"You—you and your father—must have thought it very singular that a sick man should be knocking about the country with so much money carried carelessly in a suit-case?"
"My father knows nothing about it; nor does any one else. And it wasn't my place to gossip or to wonder. I found it, and I took care of it for you. Are you glad, or sorry?"
He took the necessary forward step and stood before her. And his answer was no answer at all.
"Miss Grierson—Margery—are you telling me the truth?—all of it?" he demanded, seeking once again to pinion the soul which lay beyond the deepest depth of the limpid eyes.
Her laugh was as cheerful as a bird song.
"Telling you the truth? How could you suspect me of such a thing! No, my good friend; no woman ever tells a man the whole truth when she can help it. I didn't find your money, and I didn't lock it up in poppa's vault: I am merely playing a part in a deep and diabolical plot to——"
Griswold forgot that he was her poor beneficiary; forgot that she had taken him in as her guest; forgot, in the mad joy of the reactionary moment, everything that he should have remembered—saw nothing, thought of nothing save the flushed face with its glorious eyes and tempting lips: the eyes and lips of the daughter of men.
She broke away from him hotly after he had taken the flushed face between his hands and kissed her; broke away to drop into the chair at the other side of the table, hiding the flashing eyes and the burning cheeks and the quivering lips in the crook of a round arm which made room for itself on the narrow table by pushing the japanned money-box off the opposite edge.
It was the normal Griswold who picked up the box and put it in the other chair, gravely andmethodically. Then he stood before her again with his back to the wall, waiting for what every gentle drop of blood in his veins was telling him he richly deserved. His punishment was long in coming; so long that when he made sure she was crying, he began to invite it.
"Say it," he suggested gently, "you needn't spare me at all. The only excuse I could offer would only make the offence still greater."
She looked up quickly and the dark eyes were swimming. But whether the tears were of anger or only of outraged generosity, he could not tell.
"Then there was an excuse?" she flashed up at him.
"No," he denied, as one who finds the second thought the worthier; "there was no excuse."
She had found a filmy bit of lace-bordered linen at her belt and was furtively wiping her lips with it.
"I thought perhaps you might be able to—to invent one of some sort," she said, and her tone was as colorless as the gray skies of an autumn nightfall. And then, with a childlike appeal in the wonderful eyes: "I think you will have to help me a little—out of your broader experience, you know. What ought I to do?"
His reply came hot from the refining-fire of self-abasement.
"You should write me down as one who wasn't worthy of your loving-kindness and compassion, Miss Grierson. Then you should call the custodian and turn me out."
"But afterward," she persisted pathetically. "There must be an afterward?"
"I am leaving Mereside this evening," he reminded her. "It will be for you to say whether its doors shall ever open to me again."
She took the thin safety-deposit key from her glove and laid it on the table.
"You have made me wish there hadn't been any money," she lamented, with a sorrowful little catch in her voice that stabbed him like a knife. "I haven't so many friends that I can afford to lose them recklessly, Mr. Griswold."
"Damn the money!" he exploded; and the malediction came out of a full heart.
"If you would only say you are sorry," she went on sadly, groping only half-purposefully for the bell-push which would summon the custodian. "You are sorry, aren't you?"
Unconsciously he had taken her former pose, with his back to the wall and his hands behind him.
"I ought to be decent enough to lie to you and say that I am," he returned, hardily. "I know you can't understand; you are too good and innocent to understand. I'm ashamed; that is, the civilized part of me is ashamed; but that is all. Knowing that he ought to be in the dust at your feet, the brutal other-man is unrepentant and riotously jubilant because, for a brief second or two, he was able to break away and——"
Her fingers had found the bell-push and were pressingit. When the custodian opened the door, Miss Grierson was her poiseful self again.
"Number three-forty-five-A is Mr. Kenneth Griswold's box, now," she announced briefly. "Please register it in his name, and then help him to put it away and lock it up."
Griswold went through the motions with the key-bearing young woman half-absently. By this time he was fathoms deep in the reactionary undertow. Must the recovered treasure always transform itself into a millstone to drag him down into some new and untried depth of degradation? Thrice he had given it up for lost, and in each instance its reappearance had been the signal for a relapse into primitive barbarism, for a plunge into the moral under-depths out of which he had each time emerged distinctively and definitely the loser. Was it to be always thus? Could it be even remotely possible that in a candidly material world there could still be standing-room for the myths and portents and superstitious traditions?
He was trying to persuade himself that there could not be standing-room when he rejoined Margery—herself the best imaginable refutation of the old-wives' tales—at the gate in the great steel grille. Man-like, he was ready to be forgiven and comforted; and there was at least oblivion in her charming little shudder as the custodian shot the bolts of the gate to let them out.
"Br-r-r!" she shivered, "I can never stand here and look at the free people out there without fancyingmyself in a prison. It must be a dreadful thing to be shut away behind bolts and bars, forgotten by everybody, and yet yourself unable to forget. Do you ever have such foolish thoughts, Mr. Griswold?"
For one poignant second fear leaped alive again and he called himself no better than a lost man. But the eyes that were lifted to his were the eyes of a questioning child, so guilelessly innocent that he immediately suffered another relapse into the pit of self-despisings.
"You have made me your poor prisoner, Miss Grierson," he said, speaking to his own thought rather than to her question. And when they reached the sidewalk and the trap: "May I bid you good-by here and go to my own place?"
"Of course not!" she protested. "Mr. Raymer is coming to dinner to-night and he will drive you over to Mrs. Holcomb's afterward, if you really think you must go."
And for the first time in their comings and goings she let him lift her to the high driving-seat.