When David reached home he found the Mayor had just brought over Rogers's lunch and Kate, with the help of Tom, was arranging it on the table. He threw his happiness among them in a score of words.
The Mayor stepped forward, his face ruddied with a smile. "Friend, put 'er there!" invited his gruff diaphragm, and David put his hand to bed in the big, mattress-soft palm. "Well, sir, I'm certainly happy—that's me! On the level, when I first heard you were tryin' to write a book, said I to myself, private-like, 'he'd better be makin' tidies.' But you're the goods, friend! Every man and woman on the Avenue has got to buy one o' your books, you bet!"
"Say, pard, you're certainly it!" cried Tom, who had seized him from the other side. "Dat puts you on top—way up where you belongs. An' no more worryin' about de coin!"
"I'm glad too,—you know that, Aldrich!" said Rogers, grasping David's hand. Rogers's face was drawn; David's success had freshened, emphasised, his own failure. "I wish both of us could have pulled out. But if only one of us could, it's best that that one is you. I'm glad, Aldrich!"
David felt the pain behind Rogers's words, felt their pathos, and he suddenly was ashamed of his success. "It's because I was doing something where the world did not have to trust me," he said apologetically.
"It's because you are the exceptional man, doing the exceptional thing. They have a chance. The others have not."
Kate had not moved since David had announced his good fortune. She stood with her hands on the table and leaning slightly against it, her white, strained face fastened on David. "I'm glad, too," she now said, in a voice that had a trace of tremolo; and, turning abruptly, she went into the office.
In there, alone, she sat at her desk with her cheeks in her hands. Soon, with a little burst of despair, she cried out: "Why did this have to happen!" And she added, with a moan: "Oh, David, this puts you such a long ways off!"
That afternoon and evening David could settle to nothing; and that night he slept not a minute for sweeping joy, for flashing ideas for stories, for swift, vivid visions of the future.
The next morning he had a note from Helen asking him to call in the afternoon. "You remember my speaking to you about the check for twenty thousand dollars my father gave me," she said, when he had come. Her face was pale and she spoke with an effort. "I've decided what to do with it. I want you to help me."
"If I can," he said.
"I've been thinking a great deal about Mr. Rogers." She paused, then went on, her voice more strained. "He should not have lost that money. I have cashed the check. I want to give the money to Mr. Rogers—not as a gift, but as property that belongs to him."
He looked wonderingly into her pained eyes. "You're in earnest?" he said slowly.
"I am—I must do it. And I want you to take the money to him, from"—she obeyed a sudden instinct of blood-loyalty—"from my father."
His anger against her father suddenly flamed up. "From your father? I know how much your father knows of this plan!"
She went on as if she had not heard him, though she had quivered at his words. "I want you to take the money to Mr. Rogers. You will know what to say."
The full significance of what she had said was just dawning upon him. He gazed at her, wondering what must have been passing in her mind these last few days.
"Mr. Rogers is very proud," he said. "He'll not take the money—at least not from me."
"You're certain?"
"From me—never."
"Then I must take it to him myself." She rose. "I'll be ready in a few minutes. You must go with me."
He rose also. Her white face, that met his so squarely, told him how deeply she felt, how strong her determination was.
"Yes, I'll go with you," he said.
When she re-entered the library she was dressed in the suit of autumn brown and the brown hat with its single rose, which she had worn the day they had met at St. Christopher's. He knew she felt the matter of her errand too keenly to speak of it, and too absorbingly to speak of anything else; and so, in silence, they went out into the street.
Half an hour later they entered Rogers's office. "Just wait a minute, while I tell him you're here," whispered David, and went into the living room where Rogers was. Presently he brought her in, introduced her to Rogers, and withdrew.
Helen had never seen Rogers. Her picture of him was purely of the imagination, and imagination had put in its vague portrait the hard lines, the hang-dog look, the surly bearing that might well remain with a reformed criminal. So she was totally unprepared for the slight figure with the wasted, intellectual face that rose from an easy-chair by the air-shaft window, and for the easy gesture and even voice with which he asked her to be seated. She recognised instantly that to make him accept the money would prove a harder task than she had counted.
"Thank you," she said, and sitting down she studied Rogers's face for the moment she was adjusting her faculties to the new difficulty. "Did Mr. Aldrich tell you why I wished to see you?"
"No." He would be courteous to her for the sake of the request David had made to him, but his hatred of her father allowed him only a monosyllabic reply.
To speak words that would show warm sympathy for him and no disloyalty to her father, this was her problem. "Mr. Aldrich has told me of your land enterprise and how—it failed," she said with a great effort, feeling that her words were cold and ineffective. "He told me how you lost a large sum that you had practically gained. He told me that it was—my father—who made you lose it."
Her first effort would carry her no further. He nodded.
She clutched the arms of her chair, breathed deeply, and drove herself on. "You should not have lost it. I have come to bring you—to ask you to let me return to you"—a brown-gloved hand drew a roll of bills from the bag in her lap "this money that belongs to you."
She held the elastic-bound roll out to him. His interlocked hands did not move from his lap.
"I don't just understand," he said slowly. "You mean that this money is the equivalent of what I should have made in the land deal?"
"Yes."
His face tinged faintly with red, his bright eyes (he had discarded glasses, now that a disguise no longer served him) darted quick flames, and he leaned toward her.
"Do you think I can take as a gift that which I honestly earned?" he demanded in a low, fierce voice.
"But it is not offered as a gift. It is restitution."
"Restitution! So you want to make restitution? Can you restore the strength despair has taken from me? My good name was built on deception, but I had worked hard for it and it was dear to me. Can you restore my good name? I've lost everything! Can you restore everything?"
The ringing bitterness of his voice, the wasted face working with the passion of despair, the utter hopelessness of the future which her quick vision showed her—all these stirred a great emotion which swept her father from her mind. Before, she had sympathised with Rogers abstractly; now her sympathy was for a hopeless soul, bare and agonising beneath her eyes.
Her words rushed from her, in them the throb of her heart. "No! No! I can't give them back—no one can. Oh, what a wrong it was!"
He stared at her. The wrath and bitterness on his face slowly gave place to surprise.
"Oh, but it was a shame!" she cried, her face aflame, her voice aquiver. And then a sense of the irretrievableness of this wreck laid hold upon her and a quick sob broke forth. She felt a sympathetic agony for Rogers, and an agony that she, through her blood, was the cause of his wrecked life.
"Oh, it was terrible, terrible! You are right! Restitution cannot be made—only the pitiful restitution of money. But you must let me make that—you must!"
He felt that he was speaking to a friend, and it was as to a friend that he said quietly: "I can't."
"But youmust!" She was now thinking of but one thing, how to force him to take the bills. "I'm not doing you a favour. I'm asking a favour from you. I come to you in humility, contrition. The money I bring is not my money—it is your money. My father entered your house and took it; I bring it back to you. You merely accept your own. You see that, don't you? Surely you see that!"
Rogers did not answer at once. He was so dazed by the rush of her words—words that sprang from complete sympathy and understanding, words that might have come from his own heart—that he could not.
She had risen and now stood above him. "You understand, don't you?" she went on imploringly. "My father has done wrong; I feel it just as though I had done it. I must repair the wrong as far as I can. You must take this money for my sake, don't you see?"
He rose and started to speak, but she cut him off. "I know what is in your heart; your pride wants you to refuse. If you refuse, you do only one thing: you deny me the relief of partially correcting a wrong. That is all. Is it right for you to deny me that? Will you yourself not be doing a wrong?"
He was trembling; she had taken the only road to his consent. But he made no motion toward the money in her outstretched hand.
"For my sake—I beg you—I implore you." She spoke tremulously, simply.
He held out a thin hand, and she laid the money in it. "For your sake," he breathed.
"Thank you," she said.
Helen felt herself growing weak and dizzy. The reaction was setting in. "I must go. I can't ask you to forgive me—but won't you let me, as one that would like to be regarded as a friend, wish that there may be brightness ahead which you don't see."
She held out her hand, timidly. He grasped it. He could not speak.
"Thank you," she whispered, and slowly turned away. At the door she paused, and looked back. "My best wishes are with you," she said, and went out.
That night David and Rogers had a long talk. In consequence, correspondence was re-opened with the sanitarium at Colorado Springs, and David began to spend part of his time in helping equip Rogers for the distant struggle against death.
During the two weeks since his exposure Rogers had not railed; he had borne his defeat in grim, quiet despair. His bitterness did not now depart; he had not forgotten his defeat, and he had not forgiven the world. But his life now had an object, and the hope, which the really brave always save from even the worst wreck, began to stir within him.
The next two weeks David worked with his pen as he had never worked before. He was in that rare mood when things flow from one. Before the end of the two weeks he turned in to Mr. Osborne two short stories which Mr. Osborne, with the despatch a publisher gives a new author he is desirous of holding, immediately examined, accepted and paid for at a very respectable rate. Mr. Osborne suggested a series of articles for his magazine, spoke of more stories, assured David he would have no difficulty in marketing his writing elsewhere; and when David left the publisher's office it was with the exultant sense that financially his future was secure.
Mr. Osborne assured him his book was going to turn much serious thought to our treatment of the criminal and other wasted people, and that his shorter writings were going to help to the same end. His publisher asked him to speak before a club interested in reform measures, and his talk, straight from the heart and out of his own experience, made a profound impression. The success of this speech suggested to him another means of helping—the spoken word. He felt that at last his life was really beginning to count.
But he realised he was still only at the beginning. Before him was that giant's task, conquering the respect of the world—with the repayment of St. Christopher's as the first step. The task would require all his mind and strength and courage and patience, for years and years and years—with success at the end no more than doubtful.
The more David pondered upon the ills he saw about him, the less faith did he have in superficial reforms, the deeper did he find himself going for the real cure. And gradually he reached the conclusion that the idea behind the present organization of society was wrong. That idea, stripped to its fundamentals, was selfishness—and even a mistaken selfishness: for self to gain for self all that could be gained. Under this organization they that have the greatest chance are they that are strong and cunning and unscrupulous, and he that is all three in greatest measure can take most for himself. So long as the world and its people are at the mercy of such an organization, so long as self-interest is the dominant ideal—just so long will the great mass of the people be in poverty, just so long will crime and vice remain unchecked.
He began to think of a new organization of society, where individual selfishness would be replaced as the fundamental idea by the interest of the whole people—where "all men are born free and equal" would not be merely a handsome bit of rhetoric, but where there would be true equality of chance—where the development of the individual in the truest, highest sense would be possible—where that major portion of vice and crime which spring from poverty and its ills would be wiped out, and there would remain only the vice and crime that spring from the instincts of a gradually improving human nature. And so, without losing interest in immediate changes that might alleviate criminal-making conditions, David set his eyes definitely upon the great goal of a fundamental change.
Since Rogers would soon be gone, David began to look for new quarters. His pride shrunk from a boarding-house, where he knew he would be liable to snubs and insults. As money matters troubled him no longer, he leased a small flat with a bright southern exposure, in an apartment house just outside the poorer quarter. If he and Tom prepared most of their own meals they could live here more cheaply than in a boarding-house, and he could save more to quiet Lillian Drew and to pay off the debt to St. Christopher's.
One afternoon, while David was at the Pan-American talking to the Mayor, and Kate was at her desk type-writing a manuscript, the office door opened and closed, and a low, satiric voice rasped across the room:
"Hello, little girl!"
Kate looked about, then quickly rose. Her cheeks sprang aflame. At the door stood Lillian Drew, smiling mockingly, her face flushed with spirits.
"Hello, little girl!" she repeated.
Kate's instinctive hatred of this woman, founded partly on what Lillian Drew obviously was, but more on the certainty that she had some close and secret connection with David's life, made Kate tremble. A year before the wrathful words that besought to pass her lips would have burst forth unchecked. But she controlled herself.
"What do you want?" she demanded.
To pain a person who stirred her antagonism, this twenty uncurbed years had made one of Lillian Drew's first instincts. She had observed before that Kate disliked her and stung under her "little girl;" consequently to inflict her presence and the phrase on Kate was to gratify instinct.
She walked with a slight unsteadiness to David's chair, sat down and smiled baitingly up into Kate's face. "I've just come around to have a visit with you, little girl. Sit down."
Kate grew rigid. "If you want Mr. Aldrich, he's not here."
"Oh, yes, he is. But I don't want him just yet. I want to have a visit with you." She looked Kate up and down. "Well, now, for such a little girl, you're not so bad."
Kate's eyes blazed. "I tell you he's not here. There's no use of your waiting."
"I'm in no hurry at all. But you're too thin. You've got to put on ten or fifteen pounds if you expect to catch his eye."
Kate pointed to the door. "Get out of here!—with that breath of yours!"
The vindictive fire gathered in Lillian Drew's eyes; the return blow of her victim had roused her pain-giving desire into wrath.
"Oh, you want to catch him, all right!" she laughed, malignantly. "I saw that in a second the other day from the way you looked at him. But d'you think he'll care for a girl like you? I came the other day and found no one around but that nice father of yours. I had a little talk with him, and—well, I've got you sized up just about right. And you think you're the girl for him!"
Kate took one step forward and drew back her open hand. But the hand paused in mid-blow. "You drunken she-devil!" she blazed forth, "get out of here!—or I'll have the police put you out!"
Lillian Drew sprang up, as livid as if the hand had indeed cracked upon her cheek, and glared at the flame of hatred and wrath that was Kate Morgan. Rage, abetted by liquor, had taken away every thought, every desire, save to strike this girl down. Her hands clenched; but blows make only a passing hurt. All her life she had used words; words, if you have the right sort, are a better weapon—their wound is deep, permanent.
"You little skinny alley-cat!" she burst out furiously. "You think you're going to marry him, don't you. You marry him! Oh, Lord!"
Kate shivered with her passion. "Get out!"
Lillian Drew gave a sharp, crunching, gloating laugh. "That's it!—you think you're going to marry him. You think he's a thief, don't you. You think you're in his class. Well—let me tell you something."
She drew close to Kate and her eyes burned upon Kate with wild vindictive triumph. "He's not a thief—he never was one!"
"It's a lie!" cried Kate.
"Oh, he says he is, but he's not. He never took that five thousand dollars from St. Christopher's. He pretends he did, but he didn't. You hear that, little girl?—he didn't. Phil Morton took it. I know, because I got it.—D'you understand now?—that he's not a thief?—that he's ten thousand miles above you? And yet you, you skinny little nothing, you've got the nerve to think you're going to catch him! Oh, Lord!"
"You're drunker than I thought!" sneered Kate.
"If it wasn't true, d'you suppose he'd be paying me to keep still about it?"
"Pay you to keep still about his not being a thief! And you want me to believe that too?" Kate laughed with contempt. Then she inquired solicitously: "Would you like a bucket of water over you to sober you a bit?"
At this moment the hall door opened and David entered the room. He paused in astonishment. "What's the matter?" he asked sharply.
The two had turned at his entrance, and, their faces ablaze with anger, were now glaring at him. Kate was the first to speak, and her words tingled with her wrath.
"Nothing. Only this charming lady friend of yours—don't come too near her breath!—has been telling me that you didn't take the money from the Mission—that Mr. Morton did—that she got it—that you're paying her not to tell that you're innocent."
The colour slowly faded from David's face. He held his eyes a moment on Kate's infuriate figure, and then he gazed at Lillian Drew. She gazed back at him defiantly, but the thought that her betrayal of the secret might cut off her supplies began to cool her anger. David thought only of the one great fact that the truth had at last come out; and finally he exclaimed, almost stupidly, more in astoundment than wrath:
"So this's how you've kept it secret!"
Kate paled. Her eyes widened and her lips fell apart. She caught herself against her desk and stared at him.
"So—it's the truth!" she whispered with dry lips.
But David did not hear her. His attention was all pointed at Lillian Drew. "This is the way you've kept it, is it!" he said.
"She's the only one I've told," she returned uneasily.
Her effrontery began to flow back upon her. "She's only one more you've got to square things with. Come, give me a little coin and I'll get out, and give you a chance to settle with her."
"You've had your last cent!" he said harshly.
"Oh, no, I haven't. I don't leave till you come up with the dough!" She sat down, and looked defiantly at him.
Kate moved slowly, tensely, across to David, gripped his arms and turned her white, strained face upon his.
"So—you never took that Mission money!" Her voice was an awed, despairing whisper.
Her tone, her fierce grip, her white face, sent through him a sickening shiver of partial understanding. "I'm sorry—but you know the truth."
She gazed wide-eyed at him; then her voice, still hardly more than a whisper, broke out wildly: "Yes—yes—you took it, David! Say that you took it!"
He was silent for a moment. "If I said so—would you believe me?" he asked.
Her head slowly sank, and her hands fell from his arms. "Oh, David!" she gasped—a wild, choked moan of despair. She took her hat and jacket from their hooks, and not stopping to put them on, not hearing the triumphant "Good-bye, little girl" of Lillian Drew, she walked out of the office.
She moved through the acid-sharp November air, a white-faced automaton. She felt a vague, numb infinity of pain. She perceived neither the causes of the blow nor its probable results; she merely felt its impact, and that impact had made her whole being inarticulate.
But presently her senses began to rouse. She began to see the outlines of her disaster, its consequences; her great vague pain separated into distinct pangs, each agonisingly acute. She felt an impulse to cry out in the street, but her instinctive pride closed her throat. She turned back and hurried to her room, locked herself in, and flung her hat upon the floor and herself upon the bed.
But even here she could not cry. All her life she had been strong, aggressive, self-defending; she had cried so rarely that she knew not how. So she lay, dry-eyed, her whole body clenched, retched with sobs that would not come up.
Lillian Drew's words, "He's ten thousand miles above you," sat upon her pillow and cried into her ear. She had seen David's superior quality and his superior training; but she and he had both been thieves—they were both struggling to rise clear of thievery. This commonness of experience and of present effort had made him seem very near to her—very attainable. It was a bond between them, a bond that limited them to one another. And she had steadfastly seen a closer union a little farther ahead.
But now he was not a thief. The bond was snapped—he was ten thousand miles above her! Her despair magnified him, diminished herself; and when she contrasted the two she shrunk to look upon the figure of her insignificance. He must see her as such a pigmy—how could he ever care for such paltriness? He never could. He was lost to her—utterly lost!
All that afternoon she was tortured by her hopelessness. In the evening she became possessed by an undeniable craving to see David, and she went to David's house and asked him to walk with her. For the first minute after they were in the street the silence of constraint was between them. David could but know, in a vague way, of Kate's suffering; he was pained, shamed, that he was its cause.
In the presence of her suffering, to him, with his feeling of guilt, all else seemed trivial. But there was one matter that had to be spoken of. "You've not told a soul, have you, what you learned this afternoon?" he asked.
"No," she returned, in a muffled voice.
"I was sure you hadn't. I was afraid this afternoon that Rogers had overheard, but he didn't; either you talked in low voices, or he was asleep. No one must ever know the truth—no one—and especially Rogers."
"Why him especially?" she asked mechanically.
David hesitated. "Well, you see one thing that makes him feel close to me is that he believes we have both been in the same situation. In a way that has made us brothers. If he knew otherwise, it might make a difference to him."
"I understand!" said Kate's muffled voice.
She asked him details of the story Lillian Drew had revealed, and since she already knew so much, he told her—though he felt her interest was not in what he told her.
At length—he had yielded himself to her guidance—they came out upon the dock where they had talked a month before. She had wanted to be with him alone, and she had thought of no better place. Despite the wind's being filled with needles, they took their stand at the dock's end.
They looked out at the river that writhed and leaped under the wind's pricking—black, save beneath the arc lamps of the Williamsburg bridge, where the rearing little wave-crests gleamed, sunk, and gleamed again. For several minutes they were silent. Then the choked words burst from her:
"I'm not fit to be your friend!"
"You mustn't let this afternoon make a difference, Kate," he besought. "It doesn't to me. Fit to be my friend! You are—a thousand times over! I admire you—I honour you—I'm proud to have you for a friend!"
She quickly looked up at him. The light from the bridge lamps, a giant string of glowing beads, lay upon her face. In it there gleamed the sudden embers of hope.
"But can you love me—some time?" she whispered.
It was agony to him to shake his head.
"I knew it!" she breathed dully.
When he saw the gray, dead despair in her face, he cried out, in his agony and abasement:
"Don't take it so, Kate! I'm not worthy to be the cause of so much pain."
She looked back at the river; the wind had set her shivering, but she did not know she was cold. He saw that she was thinking, so he did not speak. After several minutes she asked in a low voice:
"Do you still love Miss Chambers?"
He remained silent.
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"As much as I love you?"
"Yes."
There was a pause. When she next spoke she was looking him tensely in the face.
"Would she love you if she knew the truth?"
"I shall never tell her."
"But would she love you?" she repeated, fiercely. She clutched his arms and her eyes blazed. "She'd better not!—I'd kill her!"
The face he looked down into was that of a wild animal. He gazed at it with fear and fascination.
The vindictive fire began slowly to burn lower, then, at a puff, it was out. "No!—No!" she cried, convulsively, gripping his arms tighter. "I wouldn't! You know I wouldn't!"
The face, so rageful a minute before, was now twitching, and the tears, that came so hard, were trembling on her lashes. Her eyes embraced his face for several moments.
"Ah, David!" she cried, and her words were borne upward on the sobs that now shook her, "even if you don't love me, David—I want you to be happy!"
Mr. Allen put down his teacup and gazed across the table at Helen. Since Mrs. Bosworth had left the drawing-room, ten minutes before, they had been arguing the old, old point, and both held their old positions.
"Then you will never, never give your ideas up?" he sighed, with mock-seriousness that was wholly serious.
"Then you will never, never give your ideas up?" she repeated in the same tone.
"Never, never."
"Never, never."
They looked at each other steadily for a moment, then their make-believe lightness fell from them.
"We certainly do disagree to perfection!" he exclaimed.
"Yes. So perfectly that the more I think of what you've asked for, the more inadvisable does it seem."
"But you'll change yet. A score of drawn battles do not discourage me of ultimate victory."
"Nor me," she returned quietly.
Their skirmish was interrupted by the entrance of a footman. Helen took the card from the tray and glanced at it.
"Show her into the library and tell her I'll join her soon." She turned back to Mr. Allen. "Perhaps you remember her—she was a maid at your house a little while—a Miss Morgan."
"I remember her, yes," he said indifferently.
His face clouded; he made an effort at lightness, but his words were sharp. "Where, oh where, are you going to stop, Helen! You are at St. Christopher's twice a week, not counting frequent extra visits. Two days ago, so you've just told me, that Mr. Aldrich was here. To-day, it's this girl. And the week's not yet over! Don't you think there might at least be a little moderation?"
"You mean," she returned quietly, "that, if we were married, you would not want these friends of mine to come to your house?"
"I should not! And I wish I knew of some way to snap off all that side of your life!"
She regarded him meditatively. "Since there's so much about me you don't approve of, I've often wondered why you want to marry me. Love is not a reason, for you don't love me."
The answers ran through his head: He admired her; she had beauty, brains, social standing, social tact, and, last of all but still of importance, she had money—the qualities he most desired in his wife. But to make a pretence of love, whatever the heart may be, is a convention of marriage—like the bride's bouquet, or her train. So he said:
"But I do love you."
"Oh, no you don't—no more than I love you."
"Then why would you marry me?—if you do."
"Because I like you; because I admire your qualities; because I believe my life would be richer and fuller and more efficient; and because I should hope to alter certain of your opinions."
"Well, I don't care what the reasons are—just so they're strong enough," he said lightly. He rose and held out his hand; his face grew serious; his voice lowered. "I must be going. Four more days, remember—then your answer."
After he had gone she sat for several minutes thinking of life with him, toward which reason and circumstances pressed her, and from which, since the day he had declared himself, she had shrunk. This marriage was so different from the marriage of her dreams—a marriage of love, of common ideals; yet in it, her judgment told her, lay the best use of her life.
She dismissed her troubling thoughts with a sigh and walked back to the library. As she entered Kate rose from a high-backed chair behind the great square library-table, whose polished top shone with the light from the chandelier. Kate's face was white, the mouth was a taut line, the eyes gleamed feverishly amid the purpled rings of wakeful nights.
Helen came smiling across the noiseless rug, her hand held out.
"I'm very happy to see you, Miss Morgan."
Kate did not move. She allowed Helen to stand a moment, hand still outheld, while her dark eyes blazed into Helen's face. Then she abruptly laid her hand into the other, and as abruptly withdrew it.
"I want to speak to you," she said.
"Certainly. Won't you sit down?"
Kate jerked a hand toward the wide, curtained doorway through which Helen had entered.
"Close the door."
"Why?" asked Helen, surprised.
"Close the door," she repeated in the same low, short tone. "Nobody must hear."
The forced voice, and the repressed agitation of Kate's bearing, startled Helen. She drew together the easy-running doors, and returned to the table.
Kate jerked her hand toward the open plate-glass door that led into the conservatory.
"And that door."
"There's no one in there." But Helen closed the heavy pane of glass.
"Won't you sit down," she said, when this was done, taking one of the richly carved chairs herself.
"No."
Kate's eyes blazed down upon Helen's face; her breath came and went rapidly, with a wheezing sound; her hands, on the luminous table-top, were clenched. Her whole body was so rigid that it trembled.
The colour began to leave Helen's face. "I'm waiting—go on."
Kate's lips suddenly quivered back from her teeth. She had to strike, even if she struck unjustly.
"People like you"—her voice was harsh, tremulous with hate—"you always believe the worst of a man. You throw him aside—crush him down—walk on him. You never think perhaps you've made a mistake, perhaps he's all right. Oh, no—you never think good of a man if you can think bad." She leaned over the corner of the table. "I hate your kind of people! I hate you!"
"Is this the thing you wanted no one to hear?" Helen asked quietly.
Kate slowly straightened up. After two days and two nights—a long, fierce, despairing battle between selfish and unselfish love—she had decided she must come here; but now her rehearsed sentences all left her. For a moment she stood choking; then the bald words dropped out:
"He's not a thief—never was one."
"Who?"
"David Aldrich."
Helen came slowly to her feet. Her face was white, her eyes were wide. For a moment she did not speak—just stared.
"What do you mean?"
"He did not take the money from the Mission."
Helen moved from the corner of the table, her wide eyes never leaving Kate's gleaming ones, and a hand clutched Kate's arm and tightened there.
"Tell me all."
"You hurt me."
Helen removed her hand.
Kate crept closer and stared up into her face.
"Does it make any difference to you?" she breathed, tensely.
"Tell me all!"
Kate drew back a pace, and leaned upon her clenched hands. "You knew Mr. Morton," she said, in a quick strained monotone. "When he was young, he lived with a woman. He wrote her a lot of letters—love letters. She turned up again a few months before he died, and threatened to show the letters if he didn't pay her. He had no money; he took money from the Mission and paid her. Then he died. His guilt was about to be found out. But David Aldrich said he took the money and went to prison. He did it because he thought if Mr. Morton's guilt was found out, the Mission would be destroyed and the people would go back to the devil. You know the rest. That's all."
Helen continued motionless—silent.
"It's all so," Kate went on. "The woman herself told me. She knew the truth. She'd been making David pay her to keep from telling that he was innocent. She told me before him. He had to admit it."
Kate leaned further across the corner of the table. "He made me promise never to tell." For a moment of dead quiet she gazed up into Helen's fixed face. "And why do you think I've broken my promise?" she asked in a low voice, between barely parted lips.
Helen rested one hand on the back of a chair and the other on the table. She trembled slightly, but she did not reply.
"Because"—there was a little quaver in Kate's voice—"I thought it might sometime make him happy."
There was another dead silence, during which Kate gazed piercingly into Helen's face.
"Do you love him?" she asked sharply.
Helen's arms tightened. After a moment her lips moved.
"You love him yourself."
"Me?—it's a lie. I don't!"
Kate moved round the corner of the table and laid a fierce hand on Helen's arm.
"Do you love him?" she demanded.
Silence. "Thank you—for telling me."
Kate laughed a low, harsh laugh, and flung Helen's arm from her.
"You!—you think you're way above him, don't you! Well—you're not! You're not fit for him!" Her eyes leaped with flame. "I hate you!"
Again a moment of silence. A tremor ran through Helen. She moved forward, and her hands reached out and fell upon Kate's shoulders.
"I love you," she whispered.
Kate shrunk sharply away. Her eyes never leaving Helen's face, she backed slowly toward the doors. She pushed them apart, and gazed at Helen's statued figure. Kate's face had become ashen, drawn. After a moment she slipped through the doors and drew them to.
As the doors clicked, Helen swayed into a chair beside the table, and her head fell forward into her arms.
At half-past eight o'clock that evening David walked up the broad steps of the Chambers's house and rang the bell. The footman left him in the great hall, rich with carved oak and old tapestries, and went off with his card. As he waited, he continued to wonder at the telegram he had received half an hour before from Helen, which had merely said, "Can you not call this evening?" Why could she so suddenly desire to see him? He had no faintest guess.
In a few minutes the footman returned, led him up the stairway and directed him into the library. A wood fire was burning in the broad fire-place, and on a divan before it she was sitting, all in white.
She rose. "Will you draw the doors, please," her voice came to him.
He did so, and went toward her eagerly. But his steps slowed. Two or three paces from her he came to a stop. She stood, one hand on the divan's arm, gazing at him with parted lips, and wide, marvelling eyes. The look put a spell upon him; he returned it silently, with a growing bewilderment.
For several moments her whole being was brought to a focus in the awed wonder of her face. Then her breast began to rise and fall, her face to twitch, her eyes to flood with tears. The tears glinted down her cheeks and fell upon her swelling breast. She gave them no heed, but continued to hold her quivering face full upon him.
"What is it?" he whispered.
She stretched out her hands and slowly moved toward him, her eyes never leaving his face. He automatically took her hands. They were warm and tight, and through them he felt her whole body trembling. He thrilled under their pressure and under her look—under her glorious, brimming eyes.
As she gazed upon him his last five years ran through her mind—his trial, his prison life, his struggle for a foothold, his dishonoured name. A sob broke from her, and upon it came her low, vibrant voice—quavering, awed:
"It was God-like!"
He could barely ask, "What?"
"What you did."
He could not find a word, he was so bewildered, so thrilled by her gaze, by her clinging hands.
Her tears continued to drop from her eyes to her heart. There was a momentary silence, then the awed, quavering voice, said slowly:
"You never took the money!—the Mission money!"
For a space he was utterly dazed. The room swam; he held to her hands for support. Slowly the bewilderment of ignorance passed into the greater bewilderment of knowledge. She knew the truth! The secret of his life that he had hidden from her, thought always to hide from her, she had found out!
He realised this, but no more. It did not occur to him even to wonder how she had learned—and her words, "Miss Morgan told me," lodged an explanation in his mind that would waken after a while, but did not now stir a single thought regarding Kate. That she knew, had burst upon him so suddenly as to set everything whirling within him—to overwhelm, outcrowd all else. He sank to the couch, and she sank to a place beside him, their hands and eyes still clasped.
"Oh, you never took it!"
The voice dripped with tears, vibrated with a rising note of triumph.
"To think what you've gone through!" she marvelled on, quaveringly. "Your struggles—such struggles!—and everybody believing you dishonoured. And all the time, you being this splendid thing that you are!" A great sob surged up.
He was still whirling and still saw her face hazily. But his faculties were coming back. "What I did was not active—it was merely passive," he said.
"To achieve by suffering, and be repaid by dishonour—what can be higher?"
She gazed at him, and gazed at him. "And to think that I believed you—you!—guilty! To think that I never sent you even a single word while you were in prison! How I drew away from you when I found you sick in that poor room! How since then I have tried to help you reform! Ah, the irony of that now! And the irony of my proposing to you to pay back the money you never took!"
The words, the voice, had reached the ears of his heart; it was going madly. He gazed into her glorious face, quivering, tear-splashed, into her glorious, swimming eyes. Even in his daringest fancy he had never pictured his innocence affecting her so! He felt himself suddenly a wild, exultant flame. The insuperables were swept out of the world. He was the lover he had tried seven years to stifle.
He had thought the words would never be spoken. But they came out boldly—with a rush.
"I love you!"
She paled slightly. For a moment she looked wonderingly into his eyes. Her head slowly shook.
"Ah—how can you!" she whispered. "After I've had no faith!—after I've treated you so!"
She tried to draw away. But he caught her hands, held them tight.
"I love you!"
Again her head shook. "I'm ... not worthy."
"But you're glad—I did not take it?"
There was silence. Her eyes held steadfastly to his.
"It's another world!" she whispered.
Her glorious self looked at him, leaned toward him, from her divine eyes. His soul reeled; awe descended upon him. One hand loosed itself from hers, and weak, tingling, fearful, crept slowly about her, drew her toward him. She came at his touch. He bent down breathless. He felt her tremble in his arm. Her face was white, but it did not waver; her eyes glowed into his. As their lips touched, her free arm slipped about his neck and she shook with sobs.
"Yes ... another world!" she breathed.
When he had finished the long story of his acceptance of Morton's guilt and of what had followed, she sat gazing at him with her look of awe.
"I shall never stop being amazed that a man could do a thing like that," she said. "It was wonderful!"
He shook his head. "No," he said slowly, "the real wonder is that you could learn to love a man whom you believed to be a criminal." For a moment he looked silently into her eyes; this great thing that had come to pass still seemed hardly true. "That's the wonder—Helen."
It was the first time he had used her name, and he spoke it with a fervent hesitancy. He repeated it softly, "Helen!"
She flushed. "I loved you long before I thought you were guilty," she said. "It seems that I have always loved you."
"Always!" he repeated, amazed. "Always?—just as I've always loved you?"
"Yes."
For a space he was lost in his astonishment. "It doesn't seem possible. What was there in me to make you love me?"
"I loved you because of your idealism, because there was an indefinable something in you that was good and great. I loved you—Oh, I don't know why I loved you. I just loved you. And how I felt when I thought you had taken the money! Oh, David, it was——"
"Say it again!" he broke in.
"What?"
"David."
She smiled. "David."
Her face became serious. "It was weeks before I could sleep. I tried to forget you. As the years passed I sometimes thought I had; but when I tried to listen to other men talk of love, I knew I hadn't. I never forgot you. I was on trial with you. I was in prison with you. Though I kept away from you, I suffered with you when you were sick in that poor little room. I have searched for work with you. I have struggled with you to regain place in the world. Haven't you ever felt me beside you?"
"I have always thought of you as far away from me. Of you here"—his eyes swept the library—"in this life."
The glance about the room was an abrupt transition. For an hour or more he had been oblivious to all things save herself and himself. Now the library's material richness recalled to him the circumstances his rapture had for the time annihilated—her wealth, her social position, his poverty, his disgrace. Slowly these forced upon him one relentless fact. His face became grave, then pale.
"Why, what's the matter?" she cried.
"After all, we are as inexorably separated as ever," he said. "We can be merely friends."
"Why?"
"I'm poor—without position in life—covered with dishonour."
"It's your soul that I love," she said. "It's rich, and full of honour."
Her look, the ring in her voice, made him catch his breath.
"What!—you don't mean you'd marry me—as I am!"
"Yes."
Wild joy sprang up within him. But he choked it down.
"No—No! You couldn't. You haven't thought. You couldn't give up all the richness of your life, all your friends, for my poverty, my friendlessness. And this isn't all—nor the worst. There's my disgrace." He paused a moment before the great fact that must always be a barrier between them. "Do you realise, Helen," he went on, "that I can never clear myself. To do that would be to destroy the people of St. Christopher's. I can never do that. I never will."
She was thoughtful for several moments. "No, you never can," she said slowly. Then a glow came into her face, and she added suddenly in a tone that vibrated through him:
"But I shall marry you anyhow!"
He caught her hands. "God bless you!" he said huskily.
He shook his head slowly, with pale resolution. "But no. I love you too much, honour you too much, to drag you from your place—to let you marry a criminal!"
After David had gone Helen sat gazing into the rich romance of the glowing logs, reproached by the remembrance of her treatment of David, awed by his long sacrifice, thrilled with love and the knowledge of his innocence. Her imagination showed her scenes of David's trial, of his prison life, of his struggles to regain place in the world, and she cried softly as she looked upon him amid these travails. That she had not believed in him despite appearance and his own declaration, she regarded as evidence of her weakness, and she told herself that her five years of suffering were too light a punishment for her lack of faith. She should have learned his innocence—and lost him!
Presently her mind, rehearsing the evening, came to David's statement that, for St. Christopher's sake, he must always remain a guilty man. She paused before the declaration. Yes, he was right. As she admitted this a calm fell upon her, and she saw, as she had not seen before, the distance that lay between them. He could not come to her; he was bound where he was. If they came together, she must go to him.
Could she go? She loved the ease and beauty which surrounded her; and this love now pointed out that going to him meant resigning all the comforts of her father's house, all things that thus far had comprised her life. And not alone resigning them, but substituting for them the cramped, mean surroundings of a poor man. Was the love of a poor man sufficient to balance, and balance for the rest of life, the good things that would be given up?
She had said to David with ringing joy, "I shall marry you anyhow!"—and now, with the same glow of the soul, she swept her present life out of consideration. Yes, she could give it up! But following immediately upon the impulse of renunciation came the realisation that David was not only a poor man—he was, and must be always, to the rest of the world a criminal. Was her love strong enough, and was she strong enough, to share a criminal's dishonour and struggles—even though she knew him to be guiltless?
While this question was asking itself her father entered, and with him her Aunt Caroline—in an ermine-lined opera cloak and a rustling cream-lace gown, about her plump throat a collar of pearls and in her gray hair a constellation of diamonds.
"Why, Helen, sitting here all alone, and at one o'clock!" her aunt cried. "Well, at any rate it means you're feeling better." Helen had had her dinner brought to her sitting-room, and had excused herself from the opera on the plea of indisposition.
Helen returned the kiss with which her aunt, bending over, lightly touched her cheek. She would have preferred to say nothing of David's visit, but she knew her aunt, who had charge of the servants, would doubtless learn of it on the morrow from the housekeeper.
"But I haven't been alone the whole evening," she returned quietly. "Mr. Aldrich called."
Mrs. Bosworth hopelessly lifted her shoulders, whose fulness her fifty-odd years had not impaired. "What'll your help-the-poor ideas make you do next!" she cried. "Think of giving up Melba to be bored a whole evening by an East Side protégé! And such a lot of your friends came to our box, too. Mr. Allen was very disappointed."
"It seems to me, too, Helen," said her father who stood with his back to the fire, "that you're carrying your philanthropy a little too far in having your brands-snatched-from-the-burning so much at the house."
Helen did not answer.
"Well, I suppose you must find some satisfaction in it or you wouldn't do it," Mrs. Bosworth sighed. "Good night, dear."
They kissed again, perfunctorily. Helen liked her aunt in that moderate way in which we all like good-natured, fate-made intimates whose interests touch our own at few points. And Mrs. Bosworth's complacent good-nature there was no denying—even if her interest did pause, way-worn, after it had journeyed out as far as those remote people who had only twenty-five thousand a year.
"Don't sit too long," said her father, bending down. During the last four weeks she had tried to wear before her father an unchanged manner. So she now met his lips with her own. "Only a few minutes longer; good night," she said.
When they had gone her gaze returned to the fire, and her mind gathered about her father. Since she had learned he was a great highwayman whose plunderings were so large as to be respectable, her days and nights had been filled with thoughts of him, and of her relation to him and his fortune. She realised that if he were seen by the world as he actually was, and if the world had the same courage to condemn large thefts that it had to condemn small thefts, he would be dishonoured far below David. She realised that his great fortune was founded on theft, that the food she ate, the dresses she wore, the house she lived in, were paid for with money that was rightly others!
What should she do?—for almost a month that question had hardly left her: Should she beg her father to change his business ways, and to restore his money to whom he had defrauded? She knew the power was not in her, nor any other, to change him. Since he was going to continue gathering in other people's money with his own, should she keep silent and remain by him, and see that the money was spent in service of the people? Or should she, refusing to live on dishonest income, withdraw from his house and shape her own life?
She came out of her thoughts with a start to find herself shivering, the bronze clock on the mantel pointing at two, and the glowing romance in the fire-place cooled to gray ashes. When she reached her sitting-room she remembered a yellow photograph of David that on the day he had confessed his guilt she had tried to burn, and which she had since tried to forget, but which she had often taken from its hiding-place and gazed at in pained wonderment. She took this out of the drawer of her writing desk, went into her bedroom and set it upon the reading-table beside her bed. After preparing herself for sleep she lit the candles on the table, turned out the gas, and lying with her head high up on the pillows she looked with glowing eyes on the open boyish face. After a time she reached a white arm for the picture, pressed a kiss upon its yellowed lips, then snuffed the candle and held the picture against her heart; and, lying so, she presently drifted softly away into sleep.
Paradise walked home with David that night. He did not think of the barrier that stood between Helen and him—that must always keep them apart despite her declaration that she would marry him. He thought only of her love. This fact was so supremely large that it had filled his present. At times he thrilled with awe, as though God had descended and were walking at his side. Again he could barely hold down the eruptive cries of his exultation; he clenched his hands, and tensed his arms, and flung his face up at the far, white stars.
He strode through the night, too excited to think of anything but Helen and himself. He and she—they were the world. But presently, after hours of walking, his thoughts went to people without the walls of his paradise. He thought of Rogers—and the misery of Rogers was an accusation against his joy. He had gained everything—Rogers had lost everything. He was ashamed of himself, and he tried to subdue his happiness by thinking of Rogers's failure and hopelessness.
And the thought of Kate shot through him a great jagged pain. He realised how fierce must have been the struggle that had preceded her call on Helen; he realised that he owed his paradise to the apotheosis of her love; and he realised, too, how utterly beyond his power it was to make her any repayment.
When, toward three o'clock, he reached his house, he was surprised to see that a light burned in Roger's office. The office door was unlocked, and he entered. Beside her desk stood Kate, suddenly risen, and on the desk's arm lay a few note-books, a dictionary and a pair of sateen sleeve-protectors.
"I've come for my things—I've got a new job," she said after a moment, in a dry unnatural voice.
David saw instantly through her pitiful craft—knew instantly how long she had been waiting there. He filled tinglingly with a quick rush of pity and pain and tenderness. He wanted to thank her, but he felt the emptiness of words, and dared not. So, confusedly, awkwardly, he stood looking at the white face.
Her eyes holding to his like a magnetic needle, she moved across the room, paused a pace away, and stared, hardly breathing, up at him. Her burning, questioning eyes, ringed with their purple misery, forced from him a low cry of pain.
"Oh, Kate!—Kate!"
She trembled slightly at his voice. "You've seen her!" she whispered.
"Yes."
He felt tears scalding his eyes. Suddenly he caught her hands and broken words leaped from his lips.
"What a wonderful soul you are!—I can't speak my thanks, but in my heart—"
She jerked her hands away and drew back. "Don't!" she gasped. "Don't!"
He hated himself for the suffering he was causing her—for his helplessness to thank her, to say the thing in his heart.
She continued to stare up at him with the same quivering tensity. After a moment she asked in a dry whisper:
"And she loves you?"
"Yes."
A sharp moan escaped her. She put an unsteady hand out and caught her desk, and the edge of David's vision saw how the fingers clenched the wood.
"I knew it—from the way she acted," she said mechanically.
For several moments more she looked up at him, her face as pale as death. Then she turned and, thoughtless of her belongings, walked toward the door, a thin, unsteady figure. As she reached for the knob he sprang across the room with a cry and caught her outstretched hand.
"Oh, Kate—forgive me!—I hate myself!—Forgive me!"
Her hand tightened spasmodically on his, her body swayed, her eyes flamed up into his. "Oh, David!" burst from her in a low moan of infinite pain and loss. For a moment she was all a-tremble. Then she clenched herself in an effort at self-control, answered him with a slow nod, and dropping her head turned and went through the door.
When David, after leaving Helen at the end of the next afternoon, sat down to his early dinner in the almost empty Pan-American, the Mayor came swaying toward him. During the last two weeks the Mayor had been daily seeking David for sympathy over his marriage, or advice upon his wedding clothes and upon arrangements for the ceremony that was to make his life a joyless waste. He took an opposite chair, sighed heavily and regarded David in steady gloom.
"D'you, realise, friend," he burst out, "that it's only one day more? Twenty-four hours from to-night at nine o'clock! Only one day more o' life! If God had to make me, why didn't he put a little sense into me—that's what I'd like to know!"
He shook his head despairingly. But after a few moments his face began to lighten and he leaned across the table. "But anyhow, friend, don't you think my weddin' clothes is just about proper!"
David agreed they were, and in the discussion of the marriage garments the Mayor forgot the marriage and became quite happy. From garments he passed on to a description of the preparation for the wedding festivities, which were to be held in the Liberty Assembly Hall.
He leaned proudly back and glowed on David. "It's goin' to be the swellest ever," he said, with a magnificent wave of his right hand. "It's goin' to have every weddin' that was ever pulled off in this part o' town, simply skinned to death—yes, sir, simply faded to nothin'."
He flamed upward into the very incandescence of pride. But on the morrow his pride was ashes. Never did another bridegroom have so severe an attack of the bridegroom's disease as did the Mayor. All the afternoon he kept David beside him, and once when David tried to leave for a few minutes the Mayor frantically caught his arm and would not let him go. The Mayor was too agitated to sit still, too nerveless to move about, too panic-stricken to talk or to listen to David; and when, after dinner, it came to putting on his wedding raiment, he was in such a funk that David had to dress him. He had but one coherent idea, and that he often expressed, his glassy, fearful eyes appealingly on David, with a long-drawn moan: "Friend, ain't it hell!"
When it came time to leave, the Mayor collapsed into a chair and glared defiantly at David. "I ain't goin' to go!" he announced in a tremulous roar. But David, by the use of force and dire pictures, finally got him into the dressing-room of the Liberty Assembly Hall where he was to meet Miss Becker. She was already there, and she came toward him with a blushing smile. He stood motionless, his tongue wet his lips, a hand felt his throat. He gazed at the white gown and at the veil as a condemned man at the noose. He put a limp, fumbling hand into hers. "Howdy do, Carrie," he said huskily.
Some men are cowards till the battle starts, then are heroes. When the Mayor and his triumphant bride, radiant on his arm, paused a moment outside the hall door for the march to begin, he was still the agitated craven. But when he saw within the hall the scores of gorgeous guests, and realised that he was the chief figure in this pageant, his spirit andsavoir-faireflowed back into him; and when Professor Bachmann's orchestra struck into the wedding-march he stepped magnificently forward, throwing to right and left ruddy, benign smiles. He bore himself grandly through the ceremony; he started the dancing by leading the grand march with Mrs. Hoffman in his most magnificent manner; and at the wedding supper, which was served in an adjoining room, he beamingly responded to the calls for a speech with phrases and flourishes that even he had never before equalled.
At the end of the supper the party resumed dancing, and the Mayor had a chance to pause a moment beside David. He swept a huge, white-gloved hand gracefully about the room, and demanded in an exultant whisper:
"Didn't I tell you, friend, that this was goin' to be the swellest weddin' that ever happened? Well, ain't it?"
"It certainly is," agreed David.
The Mayor tapped David's shirt-front with his forefinger. "It certainly is the real thing, friend. Nothin' cheap-skate about this, let me tell you. Everything is just so. Why, did you notice even the waiters wore white gloves? Yes, sir—when I get married, it's done right!"
He leaned to within a few confidential inches of David's ear. "And say—have you sized up Carrie? Ain't she simplyIt! Huh, she makes every other woman in this bunch look like a has-been!"
A little later, during a lull in the dancing, the Mayor and his bride, who had quietly withdrawn, suddenly appeared in the doorway of the hall, hatted and wrapped.
"Good-bye!" boomed the Mayor's mighty voice. "Same luck to you all!"
Mrs. Hoffman's finger-tips flung a kiss from her blushing lips to the guests, and the Mayor's hand gathered a kiss from amid his own glowing face and bestowed it likewise. The guests rushed forward, but the couple went down the stairs in a flurry, into a waiting carriage, and were gone.
The dancing continued till early workmen began to clatter through the streets—for in the supper-room was enough cold meats and cake and punch and ices to gorge the guests for a week, and Professor Bachmann has been paid to keep his musicians going so long as a dancer remained on the floor. But David slipped away soon after the bride and groom.
When he got home he found Kate Morgan sitting by Rogers's side. He looked at her in constraint, and she at him—and it was a very uncomfortable moment till Rogers announced:
"She's going with me."
David turned to his friend. There was an excited glow in Rogers's dark eyes.
"What?" David asked.
"She's going with me—to Colorado."
David stared at him, and then at Kate, who nodded. "Oh, I see!" he said.
Kate's features tightened, and she looked at him defiantly. "It isn't what you think. I offered to marry him, but he wouldn't let me."
"What, let a woman marry a wreck like me!" exclaimed Rogers. "No, she's going as a nurse. I've begged her not to go, but she insists."
"Why shouldn't I?" Kate asked, still with her straight, defiant look full on David. "My father's now in an asylum. Mr. Rogers needs me: he'll be lonely—he ought to have someone to take care of him. I know something about nursing. Why shouldn't I?"
David looked at her slight, rigidly erect figure, standing with one hand on the back of Rogers's chair, and tried to find words for the feelings that rushed up from his heart. But before he could speak she said abruptly, "Good night," and, very pale, marched past David and out of the room.
The following afternoon, as David was helping Rogers with the last of the packing for the western trip, which was to be begun that night, a messenger brought him a letter. He looked at the "St. John's Hospital" printed in one corner of the envelope in some surprise before he opened the letter. It read:
"Dear Sir:—"There has just been brought here, fatally injured from being run down by an express wagon, a woman whose name seems to be Lillian Drew, judging from a packet of old letters found on her person. As your address was the only one about her, I am sending you this notice on the possibility that you may be an interested party."
"Dear Sir:—
"There has just been brought here, fatally injured from being run down by an express wagon, a woman whose name seems to be Lillian Drew, judging from a packet of old letters found on her person. As your address was the only one about her, I am sending you this notice on the possibility that you may be an interested party."
The note was signed "James Barnes, House Surgeon." David's first thought was, Morton's letters have been read and the secret has begun to come out! For a space he did not know whether this was a hope or a fear. On the way to the hospital it was of the glory that would follow this disclosure, and not of the disaster, that he thought. He saw his name cleared, himself winning his way unhampered into honour, free to marry Helen—he saw a long stretch of happiness in work and in love.
On reaching the hospital he was led to a small room adjoining the operating-room. Here he found Dr. Barnes, a young fellow of twenty-five, shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows, aproned in a rubber sheet, head swathed in gauze. He was beginning to wash his hands at an iron sink.
"Are you a near friend or relative?" Dr. Barnes asked after David had introduced himself.
"An acquaintance," David answered.
"Then I can break the news point-blank. She died a few minutes ago."
David hardly knew what the young surgeon was saying—his mind was all on the letters.
"It's the old, old story," added the surgeon, with a shrug. "Intoxicated—got in the way of a truck—a cracked skull. I've been trying to do what I could for her"—he nodded toward the open door of the operating-room,—"but she died under the operation."
"In your note," David said as steadily as he could, "you mentioned some letters."
"Oh, yes. I wanted to find the address of friends, so I read a few of them." He smiled at David as he rubbed a cake of yellow soap about in his hands.
David leaned heavily against a window-sill. His mind was reeling.
"They were from relatives?" he forced from his lips.
The surgeon gave a short laugh. "Hardly! They were love letters—and warm ones, too! All about twenty years old. Queer, wasn't it."
He rinsed the soap from his arms and began to rub them with a white powder. "But I got nothing out of them. They were merely signed 'Phil.'"
David's control returned to him, and he was conscious of a tremendous relief. "I suppose," he said, "there's no objection to my claiming and taking the letters."
"We usually turn anything found on a body over to the relatives or friends. But pardon me—I don't know that you're the proper person."
"There's no one else to claim them. I'm perfectly willing to give you security for them."
"Oh, I guess it'll be all right. They're merely a package of old letters."
He walked over to where several coats were hanging, and pointed a scoured hand at one. "I've just washed up for another operation, so I can't take them out for you. You'll find them in the inside pocket."
David transferred the yellow packet to the inside pocket of his own coat. He had thanked the surgeon and said good-bye, when the fear seized him that perhaps the dead woman might after all not be Lillian Drew. He turned back and asked if he might see the body. The surgeon led him into the operating-room where two attendants were starting to push out a wheeled operating-table, burdened with a sheeted figure. The surgeon stopped them, and at his order a nurse drew back the sheet from the head. David gave a single glance at the face. His fear left him.