Ancestors by Gertrude Atherton

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PART I

1904

I

Miss Thangue, who had never seen her friend's hand tremble among the
teacups before, felt an edge on her mental appetite, stimulating after
two monotonous years abroad. It was several minutes, however, before she
made any effort to relieve her curiosity, for of all her patron-friends
Victoria Gwynne required the most delicate touch. Flora had learned to
be audacious without taking a liberty, which, indeed, was one secret of
her success; but although she prided herself upon her reading of this
enigma, whom even the ancestral dames of Capheaton looked down upon
inspectively, she was never quite sure of her ground. She particularly
wished to avoid mistakes upon the renewal of an intimacy kept alive by a
fitful correspondence during her sojourn on the Continent. Quite apart
from self-interest, she liked no one as well, and her curiosity was
tempered by a warm sympathy and a genuine interest. It was this capacity
for friendship, and her unlimited good-nature, that had saved her,
penniless as she was, from the ignominious footing of the social
parasite. The daughter of a clergyman in a Yorkshire village, and the
playmate in childhood of the little girls of the castle near by, she had
realized early in life that although pretty and well-bred, she was not
yet sufficiently dowered by either nature or fortune to hope for a
brilliant marriage; and she detested poverty. Upon her father's death
she must earn her bread, and, reasoning that self-support was merely the
marketing of one's essential commodity, and as her plump and indolent
body was disinclined to privations of any sort, she elected the role of
useful friend to fashionable and luxurious women. It was not an exalted
niche to fill in life, but at least she had learned to fill it to
perfection, and her ambitions were modest. Moreover, a certain integrity
of character and girlish enthusiasm had saved her from the more
corrosive properties of her anomalous position, and she was not only
clever enough to be frankly useful without servility, but she had become
so indispensable to certain of her friends, that although still blooming
in her early forties, she would no more have deserted them for a mere
husband than she would have renounced her comfortable and varied
existence for the no less varied uncertainties of matrimony.

It was not often that a kindly fate had overlooked her for so long a
period as two years, and when she had accepted the invitation of one of
the old castle playmates to visit her in Florence, it had been with a
lively anticipation that made dismay the more poignant in the face of
hypochondria. Nevertheless, realizing her debt to this first of her
patrons, and with much of her old affection revived, she wandered from
one capital and specialist to the next, until death gave her liberty.
She was not unrewarded, but the legacy inspired her with no desire for
an establishment beyond her room at the Club in Dover Street, the
companionship of friends not too exacting, the agreeable sense of
indispensableness, and a certain splendor of environment which gave a
warmth and color to life; and which she could not have commanded had she
set up in middle years as an independent spinster of limited income. She
had received many impatient letters while abroad, to which she had
replied with fluent affection and picturesque gossip, never losing touch
for a moment. When release came she had hastened home to book herself
for the house-parties, and with Victoria Gwynne, although one of the
least opulent of her friends, first on the list. She had had several
correspondents as ardent as herself, and there was little gossip of the
more intimate sort that had not reached her sooner or later, but she
found subtle changes in Victoria for which she could not as yet account.
She had now been at Capheaton and alone with her friend for three days,
but there had been a stress of duties for both, and the hostess had
never been more silent. To-day, as she seemed even less inclined to
conversation, although manifestly nervous, Miss Thangue merely drank her
tea with an air of being too comfortable and happy in England and
Capheaton for intellectual effort, and patiently waited for a cue or an
inspiration. But although she too kept silence, memory and imagination
held rendezvous in her circumspect brain, and she stole more than one
furtive glance at her companion.

Lady Victoria Gwynne, one of the tallest women of her time and still one
of the handsomest, had been extolled all her life for that fusion of the
romantic and the aristocratic ideals that so rarely find each other in
the same shell; and loved by a few. Her round slender figure, supple
with exercise and ignorant of disease, her black hair and eyes, the
utter absence of color in her smooth Orientally white skin, the mouth,
full at the middle and curving sharply upward at the corners, and the
irregular yet delicate nose that seemed presented as an afterthought to
save that brilliant and subtle face from classic severity, made her
look--for the most part--as if fashioned for the picture-gallery or the
poem, rather than for the commonplaces of life. Always one of those
Englishwomen that let their energy be felt rather than expressed, for
she made no effort in conversation whatever, her once mobile face had of
late years, without aging, composed itself into a sort of illuminated
mask. As far as possible removed from that other ideal, the British
Matron, and still suggesting an untamed something in the complex centres
of her character, she yet looked so aloof, so monumental, that she had
recently been painted by a great artist for a world exhibition, as an
illustration of what centuries of breeding and selection had done for
the noblewomen of England.

Some years before, a subtle Frenchman had expressed her in such a
fashion that while many vowed he had given to the world an epitome of
romantic youth, others remarked cynically that his handsome subject
looked as if about to seat herself on the corner of the table and smoke
a cigarette. The American artist, although habitually cruel to his
patrons, had, after triumphantly transferring the type to the canvas,
drawn to the surface only so much of the soul of the woman as all that
ran might admire. If there was a hint of bitterness in the lower part of
the face, from the eyes there looked an indomitable courage and much
sweetness. Only in the carnage of the head, the tilt of the chin, was
the insolence expressed that had made her many enemies. Some of the
wildest stories of the past thirty years had been current about her, and
rejected or believed according to the mental habit or personal bias of
those that tinker with reputations. The late Queen, it was well known,
had detested her, and made no secret of her resentment that through the
short-sighted loyalty of one of the first members of her Household, the
dangerous creature had been named after her. But whatever her secrets,
open scandal Lady Victoria had avoided: imperturbably, without even an
additional shade of insolence, never apologizing nor explaining;
wherein, no doubt, lay one secret of her strength. And then her
eminently respectable husband, Arthur Gwynne, second son of the Marquess
of Strathland and Zeal, had always fondly alluded to her as "The
Missus," and lauded her as a repository of all the unfashionable
virtues. To-day, presiding at the tea-table in her son's country-house,
an eager light in her eyes, she looked like neither of her portraits:
more nearly approached, perhaps, poor Arthur Gwynne's ideal of her; not
in the least the frozen stoic of the past three days. When she finally
made an uncontrollable movement that half-overturned the cream-jug,
Flora Thangue's curiosity overcame her, and she murmured, tentatively:

"If I had ever seen you nervous before, Vicky--"

"I am not nervous, but allowances are to be made for maternal anxiety."

"Oh!" Miss Thangue drew a deep breath. She continued, vaguely, "Oh, the
maternal role--"

"Have I ever failed as a mother?" asked Lady Victoria, dispassionately.

"No, but you are so many other things, too. Somehow, when I am away from
you I see you in almost every other capacity."

"Jack is thirty and I am forty-nine."

"_You_ look thirty," replied Flora, with equal candor.

"I am thankful that my age is in Lodge; I can never be tempted to enroll
myself with the millions that were married when just sixteen."

"Oh, you never could make a fool of yourself," murmured her friend.
Then, as Victoria showed signs of relapsing into silence, she plunged in
recklessly; "Jack is bound to be elected. When has he ever failed to get
what he wanted? But you, Vicky dear--is there anything wrong? You had a
bulky letter from California the day I arrived. I do hope that tiresome
property is not giving you trouble. What a pity it is such a long way
off."

"The San Francisco lease runs out shortly. Half of that, and the
southern ranch, are my only independent sources of income. The northern
ranch belongs to Jack. All three are getting less and less easy to let
in their entirety, my agents write me, and I feel half a pauper
already."

"This is not so bad," murmured Flora.

"Strathland would bundle me out in ten minutes if anything happened to
Jack."

"It would be a pity; it suits you." She was not referring to the hall,
which was somewhat too light and small for the heroic mould of its
chatelaine, but to the noble proportions of the old house itself, and
the treasures that had accumulated since the first foundations were laid
in the reign of Henry VI. There were rooms hung with ugly brocades and
velvets never duplicated, state bed-chambers and boudoirs sacred to the
memory of personages whose dust lay half-forgotten in their marbles; but
above all, Capheaton was famous for its pictures. Not only was there an
unusually large number of portraits by masters scattered about the
twenty rooms that lay behind and on either side of the hall, but many
hundreds of those portraits and landscapes from the brushes of artists
fashionable in their day, unknown in the annals of art, but seeming to
emit a faint scent of lavender and rose leaves from the walls of
England's old manor-houses and castles. In the dining-room there was a
full-length portrait of Mary Tudor, black but for the yellow face and
hands and ruff; and another, the scarlet coat and robust complexion
still fresh, of the fourth George, handsome, gay, devil-may-care; both
painted to commemorate visits to Capheaton, historically hospitable in
the past. But Lord Strathland, besides having been presented with six
daughters and an heir as extravagant as tradition demanded, was poor as
peers go, and had more than once succumbed to the titillating delights
of speculation, less cheering in the retrospect. Having a still larger
estate to keep up, he had been glad to lend Capheaton to his second son,
who, being an excellent manager and assisted by his wife's income, had
lived very comfortably upon its yield. Upon his death Elton Gwynne had
assumed possession as a matter of course; and a handsome allowance from
his doting grandfather supplementing his inheritance, the mind of the
haughty and promising young gentleman was free of sordid anxieties.

Lady Victoria's satirical gaze swept the simpering portraits of her
son's great-aunts and grandmothers, with which the hall was
promiscuously hung.

"Of course I am as English as if the strain had never been crossed, if
you mean that. But I'd rather like to get away for a while. I really
ought to visit my California estates, and I have always wanted to see
that part of America. I started for it once, but never even reached the
western boundaries of New York. One of us should spend a year there, at
least; and of course it is out of the question for Jack to leave England
again."

"You would not spend six months out of Curzon Street. You are the most
confirmed Londoner I know."

"Do you think so?"

Miss Thangue replied, impulsively, "I have often wondered if you
numbered satiety among your complexities!"

This was as far as she had ever adventured into the mysterious
backwaters of Victoria's soul, and she dropped her eyelids lest a
deprecating glance meet the contempt it deserved; both with a due regard
for the limit imposed by good taste, despised the faint heart.

"I hate the sight of London!" Her tone had changed so suddenly that
Flora winked. "If it were not for Jack I would leave--get out. I am sick
of the whole game."

"Oh, be on your guard," cried her friend, sharply. "That sort of thing
means the end of youth."

"Youth after fifty depends upon your doctor, your masseuse, and your
dressmaker. I do not say that my present state of mind is sown with
evergreens and immortelles, but the fact remains that for the present I
have come to the end of myself and am interested in no one on earth but
Jack."

Miss Thangue stared into her teacup, recalling the gossip of a year ago,
although she had given it little heed at the time: Victoria had been
transiently interested so often! But all the world knew that when Arthur
Gwynne was killed Sir Cadge Vanneck had been off his head about
Victoria; and that when obvious restrictions vanished into the family
vault he had left abruptly for Rhodesia to develop his mines, and had
not found time to return since. Sir Cadge was about the same age as the
famous beauty, and rose quite two inches above her lofty head. People
had grown accustomed to the fine appearance they made when
together--"Artie" was ruddy and stout--and although Victoria reinforced
her enemies, for Vanneck was one of the most agreeable and accomplished
men in London, the artistic sense of that lenient world was tickled at
their congruities and took their future mating for granted; Arthur
Gwynne was sure to meet his death on the hunting-field, for he was far
too heavy for a horse and rode vilely. When he fulfilled his destiny and
Vanneck fled, the world was as much annoyed as amused. But they were
amused, and Flora Thangue knew that this gall must have bitten deeper
than the loss of Vanneck, who may or may not have made an impression on
this woman too proud and too spoiled to accept homage in public
otherwise than passively, whatever may have been the unwritten tale of
her secret hours. The excuses hazarded by Vanneck's friends were neither
humorous nor sentimental, but no one denied that they were eminently
sensible: his first wife had died childless, his estates were large, his
title was one of the oldest in England. But although no one pitied
Victoria Gwynne, many were annoyed at having their mental attitude
disarranged, and this no doubt had kept the gossip alive and been a
constant source of irritation to a woman whose sense of humor was as
deep as her pride.

Flora replied at random. "Jack couldn't very well get on without you."

His mother's eyes flashed. "I flatter myself he could not--at present.
If Julia Kaye would only marry him!"

"She won't," cried Flora, relieved at the change of tone. "And
why do you wish it? She is two years older, of quite dreadful
origin--and--well--I don't like her; perhaps my opinion is a little
biased."

"She is immensely rich, one of the ablest political women in London, and
Jack is desperately in love with her."

"I cannot picture Jack in extremities about any one, although I don't
deny that he has his sentimental seizures. He even made love to me when
he was cutting his teeth. But he doesn't need a lot of money, you rank
higher than she among the political women, and--well, I believe her to
be bad-tempered, and more selfish than any woman I have ever known."

"He loves her. He wants her. He would dominate any woman he married. He
is such a dear that no woman who lived with him could help loving him.
Moreover, she is inordinately ambitious, and Jack's career is the most
promising in England."

"Jack is far too good for her, and I am glad that he will not get her. I
happen to know that she has made up her mind to marry Lord Brathland."

"Bratty is a donkey."

"She would be the last to deny it, but he is certain to be a duke if he
lives, and she would marry a man that had to be led round with a string
for the sake of being called 'your grace' by the servants. She'll never
be anything but a third-rate duchess, and people that tolerate her now
will snub her the moment she gives herself airs. But I suppose she
thinks a duchess is a duchess."

"Money goes pretty far with us," said Lady Victoria, dryly.

"Doesn't it? Nevertheless--you know it as well as I do--among the people
that really count other things go further, and duchesses have been put
in their place before this--you have done it yourself. Julia Kaye has
kept her head so far because she has been hunting for strawberry leaves,
and there is no denying she's clever; but once she is in the upper
air--well, I have seen her as rude as she dares be, and if she became a
duchess she would cultivate rudeness as part of the role."

"We can be rude enough."

"Yes, and know how to be. A parvenu never does."

"She is astonishingly clever."

"Duchesses are born--even the American ones. Julia Kaye has never
succeeded in being quite natural; she has always the effect of
rehearsing the part of the great lady for amateur theatricals. Poor
Gussy Kaye might have coached her better. The moment she mounts she'll
become wholly artificial, she'll patronize, she'll give herself no end
of ridiculous airs; she won't move without sending a paragraph to the
_Morning Post_. The back of her head will be quite in line with her
charming little bust, and I for one shall walk round and laugh in her
face. She is the only person that could inspire me to such a vicious
speech, but I am human, and as she so ingenuously snubs me as a person
of no consequence, my undazzled eyes see her as she is."

Lady Victoria, instead of responding with the faint, absent, somewhat
irritating smile which she commonly vouchsafed those that sought to
amuse her, lit another cigarette and leaned back among the cushions of
the sofa behind the tea-table. She drew her eyelids together, a rare
sign of perturbation. The only stigma of time on her face was a certain
sharpness of outline and leanness of throat. But the throat was always
covered, and her wardrobe reflected the most fleeting of the fashions,
assuring her position as a contemporary, if driving her dressmaker to
the verge of bankruptcy. When her bright, black, often laughing eyes
were in play she passed with the casual public, and abroad, as a woman
of thirty, but with her lids down the sharpness of the lower part of the
face arrested the lover of detail.

"Are you sure of that?" she asked, in a moment.

"Quite."

"I am sorry. It will be a great blow to Jack. I hoped she would come
round in time."

"She will marry Brathland. I saw Cecilia Spence in town. She was at
Maundrell Abbey with them both last week. You may expect the
announcement any day--she'll write it herself for the _Morning Post_.
How on earth can Jack find time to think about women with the immense
amount of work he gets through?--and his really immodest ambitions!
By-the-way--isn't this polling-day? I wonder if he has won his seat? But
as I said just now I do not associate Jack with defeat. His trifling
set-backs have merely served to throw his manifest destiny into higher
relief."

"The telegram should have come an hour ago. I have few doubts--and yet
he has so many enemies. I wonder if we shall be born into a world, after
we have been sufficiently chastened here, where one can get one's head
above the multitude without rousing some of the most hideous qualities
in human nature? It is a great responsibility! But there has been no
such speaker, nor fighter, for a quarter of a century." Her eyes glowed
again. "And heaven knows I have worked for him."

"What a pity he is not a Tory! He could have a dozen boroughs for the
asking. I wish he were. The whole Liberal party makes me sick. And it is
against every tradition of his family--"

"As if that mattered. Besides, he is a born fighter. He'd hate anything
he could have for the asking. And he's far too modern, too progressive,
for the Conservative party--even if there were anything but blue-mould
left in it."

"Well, you know I am not original, and my poor old dad brought us up on
the soundest Tory principles; he never would even compromise on the word
Conservative. But considering that Jack is as Liberal as if the taint
were in the marrow of his bones, what a blessing that poor Artie did not
happen to be the oldest son. Cecilia says they were all talking of it at
Maundrell Abbey, where of course it is a peculiarly interesting topic.
That ornamental and conscientious peer, Lord Barnstable, has never
ceased to regret his father's death, for reasons far removed from
sentimental. He told Cecilia that Lord Strathland almost confessed to
him that he would give his right eye to hand over his old shoes to Jack,
not only because he detests Zeal, but because it would take the backbone
out of his Liberalism--"

"And ruin _his_ career. Thank heaven Zeal is engaged at last. They will
marry in the spring, and then the only cloud on Jack's horizon will
vanish."

"What if there were no children?"

"There are so much more often than not--that is the least of my worries.
He had five girls by his first wife; there is no reason why this
splendid cow I have picked out should not produce a dozen boys. I never
worked so hard over one of Jack's elections--not only to overcome Zeal's
misogyny, which he calls scruples, but I had to fight Strathland every
inch of the way. When I think of Jack's desperation if he were
pitchforked up into the Peers--you do not know him as I do."

"Well, he is safe for a time, I fancy. There has been consumption in the
family before, and always the slowest sort--"

A footman entered with a yellow envelope on a tray.

Lady Victoria opened it without haste or change of color.

"Jack is returned," she said.

"How jolly," replied the other, with equal indifference.

II

"You look tired--I will take you up to your room. Vicky has so many on
her hands."

The American rose slowly, but with a flash of gratitude in her eyes.

"I am tired, and I don't know a soul here. I almost wish Lady Victoria
had not asked me down, although I have wanted all my life to visit one
of the ancestral homes of England."

"Oh, you'll get over that, and used to us," said Miss Thangue, smiling.
"Your staircase is behind this door, and we can slip out without
attracting attention. They are all gabbling over Jack's election."

She opened a door in a corner of the hall where the newly arrived guests
were gathered about Lady Victoria's tea-table, and led the way up a wide
dark and slippery stair. After the first landing the light was stronger,
and the walls were, to an inch, covered with portraits and landscapes,
the effect almost as careless as if the big open space were a
lumber-room.

"Are they _all_ old masters?" asked Miss Isabel Otis, politely, her eyes
roving over the dark canvases.

"Oh no; the masters are down-stairs. I'll show them to you to-morrow.
These are not bad, though."

"What a lot of ancestors to have!"

"Oh, you'll find them all over the house. These are not Gwynnes. This
house came to Lord Strathland through the female line. It will be Jack's
eventually--one way or another; and Jack must be more like the Eltons
than the Gwynnes--unless, indeed, he is like his American ancestors."
She turned her soft non-committal eyes on the stranger. "You are his
thirty-first cousin, are you not?"

"Not quite so remote. But why do you call him Jack? He is known to fame
as Elton Gwynne."

"His name is John Elton Cecil Gwynne. We are given to the nickname these
days--to the abbreviation in general."

They were walking down a corridor, and Miss Thangue was peering through
her lorgnette at the cards on the doors.

"I know you are on this side. I wrote your name myself. But exactly
where--ah, here it is."

She opened the door of a square room with large roses on the white
wall-paper, and fine old mahogany furniture. The sofa and chairs and
windows were covered with a chintz in harmony with the walls. "It is
cheerful, don't you think so?" asked Miss Thangue, drawing one of the
straight curtains aside. "Vicky had all the rooms done over, and I chose
the designs. She is quite intolerantly modern, and holds that when
wall-paper and chintz can save an old house from looking like a
sarcophagus, why not have them? That bell-cord connects with your maid's
room--"

"I have no maid. I am not well off at all. I wonder Lady Victoria
thought it worth while to ask me down."

"Dear me, how odd! May I sit with you a little while? I never before saw
a poor American girl."

"I'll be only too grateful if you will stay with me as long as you can.
I am not exactly poor. I have a ranch near Rosewater, some property and
an old house in San Francisco. All that makes me comfortable, but no
more; and there are so many terribly rich American girls!"

"There are, indeed!" Miss Thangue sat forward with the frank curiosity
of the Englishwoman when inspecting a foreign specimen. But her
curiosity was kindly, for she was still a girl at heart, interested in
other girls. Miss Otis, looking at her blond, virginal face, took for
granted that she was under thirty, and owed her weight to a fondness for
sweets and sauces.

"How can you travel in Europe if you are not rich?" demanded Flora. "I
never dare venture over except as the guest of some more fortunate
friend."

"Are _you_ poor?" asked Miss Otis, her eye arrested by the smart little
afternoon frock of lace and chiffon and crepe-de-chine.

"Oh, horribly. But then we all are, over here. If it were not for the
Jews and the Americans we'd have to make our own clothes. The
dressmakers never could afford to give us credit."

"They all looked very wealthy down-stairs."

"Smart, rather. This happens to be a set that knows how to dress. Many
don't. You know something of it yourself," she added, with a frank
survey of the girl's well-cut travelling-frock and small hat. "Lots of
Americans don't, if you don't mind my saying so--for all their
reputation. I went to a dinner at an American Legation once and two of
your countrywomen came with their hats on. They had brought letters to
the Minister, and he hadn't taken the precaution of looking them over.
He was terribly mortified, poor thing."

She related the anecdote with philanthropic intention, but Miss Otis put
her half-rejected doubts to flight by remarking, lightly:

"We don't do that even in Rosewater."

"Where _is_ Rosewater? What a jolly name!"

"It is in northern California, not far from Lady Victoria's ranch and
what is left of ours. I have spent most of my life in or near it--my
father was a lawyer."

"Do tell me about yourself!" Like most amiable spinsters, she was as
interested in the suggestive stranger as in a new novel. She sank with a
sigh of comfort into the depths of the chair. "May I smoke? Are you
shocked?"

Then she  apprehensively, fearing that her doubt might be
construed as an insult to Rosewater.

But Miss Otis met it with her first smile. "Oh no," she replied. "Will
you give me one? Mine are in my trunk and they haven't brought it up."
She took a cigarette from the gayly tendered case and smoked for a few
moments in silence.

"I don't know why you should be interested in my history," she said at
last in her slow cold voice, so strikingly devoid of the national
animation. "It has been far too uneventful. I have an adopted sister,
six years older than myself, who married twelve years ago. Her husband
is an artist in San Francisco, rather a genius, so they are always poor.
My mother died when I was little. After my sister married I took care of
my father until I was twenty-one, when he died--four years ago. There
are very good schools in Rosewater, particularly the High School. My
father also taught me languages. He had a very fine library. But I do
not believe this interests you. Doubtless you want to know something of
the life with which Lady Victoria is so remotely connected."

"I am far more interested in you. Tell me whichever you like first. How
_are_ you related, by-the-way?"

"Father used to draw our family tree whenever he had bronchitis in
winter. One of the most famous of the Spanish Californians was Don Jose
Argueello. We are descended from one of his sons, who had a ranch of a
hundred thousand acres in the south. When the Americans came, long
after, they robbed the Californians shamefully, but fortunately the son
of the Argueello that owned the ranch at the time married an American
girl whose father bought up the mortgages. He left the property to his
only grandchild, a girl, who married my great-grandfather, James Otis--a
northern rancher, born in Boston, and descended from old Sam Adams. He
had two children, a boy and a girl, who inherited the northern and
southern ranches in equal shares. The girl came over to England to visit
an aunt who lived here, was presented at court, and straightway married
a lord."

"Then you are second cousin to Vicky and third to Jack. I had no idea
the relationship was so close."

"It has seemed very remote to me ever since I laid eyes on Lady Victoria
down-stairs. Father made me promise, just before he died, that if ever I
visited Europe I would look her up. Somehow I hadn't thought of her
except as Elton Gwynne's mother, so I wrote to her without a qualm. But
I see that she is an individual."

"Rather! How self-contained our great London is, after all! Vicky has
been a beauty for over thirty years--to be sure her fame was at its
height before you were old enough to be interested in such things. But I
should have thought your father--"

"He must have known all about her. It comes back to me that he was very
proud of the connection for more than family reasons, but it made no
impression on me at the time."

"Proud?"

"Yes, he was rather a snob. He was very clever, but he fell out of
things, and being able to dwell on his English and Spanish connections
meant a good deal to him. I can recite the family history backwards."

"But if he was clever, why on earth did he live in Rosewater? Surely he
could have practised in San Francisco?"

"He drank. When a man drinks he doesn't care much where he lives. My
father had fads but no ambition."

"Great heaven!" exclaimed Miss Thangue, aghast at this toneless
frankness. "You must have been glad to be rid of him!"

"I was fond of him, but his death was a great relief. He was a hard
steady secret drinker. I nursed him through several attacks of delirium
tremens, and was always in fear that he would get out and disgrace us.
Sometimes he did, although when I saw the worst coming I generally
managed to get him over to the ranch. Of course it tied me down. I
rarely even visited my sister. My father hated San Francisco. He had
practised there in his youth, promised great things, had plenty of
money. The time came--" She shrugged her shoulders, although without the
slightest change of expression. "I never lived my own life until he
died, but I have lived it ever since."

"And the first thing you did with your liberty was to come to Europe,"
said Miss Thangue, with a sympathetic smile.

"Of course. My father and uncle had got rid of most of their property
long before they died; there isn't an acre left of our share in the
southern estate. But my uncle died six years ago and willed me all that
remained of the northern, as well as some land in the poorer quarter of
San Francisco. I could not touch the principal during the lifetime of my
father, but we lived on the ranch and I managed it and was entitled, by
the terms of the will, to what I could make it yield. When I was finally
mistress of my fortunes I left it in charge of an old servant, sold
enough to pay off the mortgage on a property in San Francisco I
inherited from my mother, and came to Europe with a personally conducted
tour."

Miss Thangue shuddered. The phrase unrolled a vista of commonness and
attrition. Miss Otis continued, calmly: "That is the way I should feel
now. But it was my only chance then; or rather I had seen enough of
business to avoid making mistakes when I could. In that way I learned
the ropes. After we had been rushed about for six weeks and I could not
have told you whether the Pitti Palace was in Italy or France, and the
celebrated frescos were one vast pink smudge, the party returned and I
wandered on by myself. I spent a winter in Paris, and months in
Brittany, Austria, Italy, Spain--Munich." It was here that her even
tones left their register for a second. "I studied the languages, the
literatures, the peoples, music, pictures. In Munich"--this time Flora's
alert ear detected no vibration--"and also in Rome, I saw something of
society. It was a life full of freedom, and I shall never cease to be
grateful for it, but I must go home soon and look after my affairs. I
left England to the last, like the best things of the banquet. I hope
Lady Victoria--I shall never be able to call her Cousin Victoria, as I
remember father did--will be nice to me. I have seen a good deal of
life, but have never had a real _girl's_ time, and I should love it.
Besides, I have a lot of new frocks."

"I am sure Vicky will be nice to you. If she isn't, I'll find some one
that will be. You might marry Jack if you had money enough. We are dying
to get him married--and a California cousin--it would be too romantic.
And you would hold your own anywhere!"

But Miss Otis expanded a fine nostril. "I have no desire to marry. I
feel as if I had had enough of men to last until I am forty--what with
those I have buried, and others I have known at home and in Europe--to
say nothing of the executors of my uncle's will, who did not approve of
my coming abroad alone and delayed the settlement of the estate as long
as possible. And now I have had too much liberty! Besides, I have seen
'Jack's' picture--two years ago, in a magazine. I will confess I had
some romantic notions about him: imagined him very dashing, bold,
handsome; insolent, if you like--the traditional young aristocrat,
glorified by genius. He looks like Uncle Hiram."

"Is that who Jack looks like? We never could make out. No, Jack is not
much to look at, except when he wakes up--I have seen him quite
transfigured on the platform. But he is as insolent as you could wish,
and has a superb confidence in himself that his enemies call by the most
offensive names. But he is a dear, in spite of all, and I quite adore
him."

"Perhaps; but life, myself, so many mysteries and problems, upon which
I have barely turned a dark lantern as yet, interest me far more than
any man could, unless he were superlative. I have had my disillusions."

She lit another cigarette, and for a few moments looked silently out of
the window at the darkening woods beyond the lawn. Flora Thangue
regarded her with a swelling interest. It was a type of which she had no
knowledge, evidently not a common type even in the hypothetical land of
the free; she had visited New York and Newport and known many Americans.
True, she had never met the provincial type before, but she doubted if
Rosewater had produced a crop of Isabel Otises. What was at the source
of that cold-blooded frankness, so different from the English fashion of
alternately speaking out and knowing nothing? Was she merely an
egoist--it ran in the family--or did it conceal much that she had no
intention of revealing? Her very beauty was of a type rarely seen in the
America of to-day, prevalent as it may have been a hundred years ago:
she looked like a feminine edition of the first group of American
statesmen--although black Spanish hair was pulled carelessly over the
high forehead, a heavy coil encircling the head in a long upward sweep,
and the half-dreaming, half-penetrating regard of the light-blue eyes
was softened by a heavy growth of lash. The eyebrows were low and thick,
the upper lip was sensitive, quivering sometimes as she talked, but the
lower was firm and full. It was the brow, the profile, the strength of
character expressed, the general seriousness of the fine face and head,
that made her look like a reversion to the type that gave birth to a
nation. But Miss Thangue had seen too much of the world to judge any one
by his inherited shell. She had observed many Americans with fine heads
and bulging brows concealing practically nothing, insignificant German
heads whose intellects had terrified her, the romantic Spanish eyes of
the most unromantic people in Europe, English pride and an icy mask of
breeding guarding from the casual eye the most lawless and ribald
instincts. Therefore had she no intention of taking this new specimen on
trust, much as she liked her, and she speculated upon her possibilities
in the friendly silence that had fallen between them. Life is composed
of individuals and their choruses, and Flora, humorously admitting the
fact, was far more interested in others than in herself.

Only in the dense silky masses of her black hair and the almost stolid
absence of gesture did the American betray her Spanish ancestry; but how
much of the Spaniard, subtle, patient, vengeful, treacherous, mighty in
passive resistance and cunning, lay behind those deep fearless blue eyes
of her New England ancestors? Or was she not Spanish at all, but merely
a higher type of American--or wholly herself? Would Jack, susceptible
and passionate, a worshipper of beauty down among the roots of his
abnormal cleverness and egoism, fall in love with her? And what then?
The girl, with her strong stern profile against the shadows, her low
brooding brows, might wield a power far more dangerous than that of the
average fascinating woman, if her will marshalled the rest of her
faculties and drove them in a straight line; although the luminous skin
as polished as ivory, the low full curves and slow graceful movements of
her figure added a potency that Flora, always an amused observer of men,
would have been the last to ignore. Victoria, high-bred, fastidious,
mocking, yet unmistakably passionate and possibly insurgent, was of
that mint of woman about whom men had gone mad since the world began.
But this girl, who might be as cold as the moon, or not, looked, in any
case, capable of clasping a man's throat with her strong little hand,
and gently turning his head from east to west. At this point Miss
Thangue rose impatiently and rang a bell. Jack's career was almost at
the flood. No woman could submerge his intellect and stupendous
interests for more than a moment.

"Order lights and have your trunks brought up," she said. "I will send
one of the housemaids to help you dress. My room is over on the other
side of the house--go through that door opposite, and down a corridor
until you come to another long hall and staircase like the one on this
side. You will find my name on the door. Knock at about a quarter-past
eight and I will go down with you. Vicky may be in an angelic humor and
she may not. It depends mainly upon whether Jack condescends to turn up.
I suppose you know all about him; it would hardly do for you to face him
and his mother if you didn't. He has travelled quite exhaustively in the
colonies and given us some of the most informing literature on that
subject that we have. He was out in Africa when the Boer War broke out,
and once before in India, when there was fighting, volunteered both
times and did brilliant service. He has no end of medals with clasps.
Then he suddenly went in for politics and announced himself an
uncompromising Liberal. It nearly killed his grandfather--Lord
Strathland--for Jack is the one person on earth that he loves as much as
himself; and it has alienated many of his relatives on both sides--which
gave him one more chance to win against terrific odds; he enjoys that
sort of thing. He had been in but two years when there was a general
election, and he has only just got back--he contested three divisions
before he won his seat this time, and he had almost as hard a fight
before. Vicky, who hates the Gwynnes, with the exception of Lord Zeal,
the heir, besides believing in Jack as you would in Solomon, has
steadily upheld him; and she is a powerful ally--not only one of the
most distinguished of the political women, but still turns heads when
she chooses, and her game is generally in the cabinet preserves, when it
is not in the diplomatic. I must run. Put on your most fetching gown.
Julia Kaye, a detestable little parvenu, is here. Jack is in love with
her and she has chosen another. It will be a cousinly duty to console
him. Then you can turn him over to some one else. Ta, ta!" Her last
words floated back from the depths of the corridor; a clock was striking
and she had pattered off hastily.

III

The "Jack," whose more distinguished patronymic was so gayly caracolling
down the road to posterity, had arrived, and after dressing hastily,
sought his mother. Her hair was done, her gown laced; she dismissed her
maid at once, and while her eyes melted, in the fashion of mothers, she
embraced her son with something more than maternal warmth: a curious
suggestion of relief, of stepping out of her own personality and leaving
it like a heap of clothes on the floor. This attitude had occasionally
puzzled her idol, but he was too masculine to analyze. She was his best
friend and a delightful person to have for a mother; her soul might be
her own possession undisturbed. He admired her almost as much as he did
himself, and to-night he kissed her fondly and told her gallantly that
she was looking even more beautiful than usual.

"It is all this white after the dead black," said Lady Victoria, smiling
appreciatively. "I am thankful that prolonged mourning is out of date;
it made a fright of me and was getting on my nerves." She wore no jewels
save a high diamond dog-collar and a few sparkling combs in her hair,
but she made a superb appearance with the long white sweep of shoulders
and bust, her brilliant eyes and smart tailed gown of black chiffon and
Irish lace. Her arms, no longer rounded as when artists had fought to
paint her, were but half-revealed under floating sleeves, and her fair
tapering hands were even younger than her face.

She opened a large black fan and moved it slowly while looking intently
at her son's bent profile. "Something has gone wrong," she said. "Have
you seen Julia Kaye again?"

"No, I was invited to Maundrell Abbey last week, but couldn't manage it,
of course. And I knew she was to be here. Nothing has gone wrong--but I
had rather a shock this morning. I met Zeal at the club. He looks like a
death's head. He vowed he was taking even better care of himself than
usual, but his chest is bad again. He talked about going to Davos--the
very word makes me sick! In the next breath he said he might go out to
Africa. Can't you hurry on his marriage?--persuade Carry that it is her
duty to go with him?"

"I should have no difficulty persuading Carry. The rub is with him.
Compulsory asceticism has bred misogyny, and misogyny scruples. He says
that he has sins enough to his account without laying up a reckoning
with posterity. If it were not for you I should agree with him. I feel
like a conspirator--"

"There is no reason why his children should be consumptive. Carry's
physique is Wagnerian, and she is just the woman to look after her
children herself. Zeal's health was thrown to the dogs by a weak
indulgent frivolous mother, and what she left him he disposed of later
when he made as great an ass of himself as might have been expected. He
is a hypochondriac now and would keep a close watch on his heir's health
and habits; you may be sure of that. He ought not to be in London
now--it is stifling--went up for some business meeting or other--seemed
to wish to avoid details. I hope to heaven he has not been relieving the
monotony of his life by some rotten speculation. I begged him to come
down here, but he wouldn't--says that his hand is no longer steady
enough to hold a gun--it's awful!--worse because I'm not merely fond of
him and regretting the possible loss of a good friend--I have felt like
a beast all day. But I can't help it. For God's sake write and persuade
him to go to Davos at once--and picture the delights of a pretty and
devoted nurse. I feel as if I had ashes in my mouth--and yesterday I was
so happy!" he burst out, with the petulance of a child.

"I will write to-night," she said, soothingly. "He has a very slow form
of consumption; I have the assurance of his doctors. And at least he has
committed himself with Carry, and announced his intention to marry as
soon as a sojourn somewhere has made him feel fit again. You know how
much better he always is when he comes back. Put it out of your mind
to-night. I want you to be as happy as I am. Everybody is talking of the
brilliance of your campaign--"

"Much good brilliance will do me if I am to rot in the Upper House!"

"Put it out of your mind; don't let apprehension control you for a
moment. Believe me, will-power counts in life for more than everything
else combined, and if it isn't watched it weakens."

"All right, mummy. You are never so original as when you preach. So
Julia Kaye came down this afternoon? Talk about will. Mine should be of
pure steel; I have ordered her out of my consciousness these last weeks
at the point of the bayonet. She has written me exactly three times.
However--those letters were charming," he added, with the sudden smile
that transfigured his face, routing the overbearing and contemptuous
expression that had won him so many enemies; friends and flatterers and
the happy circumstances of his life had combined thoroughly to spoil
him. "Do you maintain that will can win a woman?" he added, sharply.

She was the woman to laugh outright at such a suggestion. "No, nor that
it can uproot love, although it can give it a good shaking and lock it
in the dark room. I doubt if you love Julia Kaye, but you will find that
out for yourself. You might bring her to terms by flirting a little with
your American cousin--"

"My what?" He opened his eyes as widely as he had ever done when a
school-boy.

"Of course--I forgot you know nothing of her. She wrote me from
Ambleside--I infer she has been 'doing' England; and as her credentials
were unimpeachable I asked her down. She has inherited a part of the
northern estate and was brought up in the neighboring town of
Rosewater--the American names are too silly. She seems quite _comme il
faut_ and is remarkably handsome. I detest Americans, as you know, but
there certainly is something in blood. I liked her at once. She looks
clever, and is quite off the type--none of the usual fluff. If she
doesn't bore me I shall keep her here for a while."

"I wish you would adopt her," he said, fondly. "I shouldn't be jealous,
for I hate to think of you so much alone." He rose and kissed her
lightly on the forehead, experience teaching him to avoid a stray hair
from the carefully built coiffure. "I'll see if I can waylay Julia on
the stairs; she is always late. Keep from eleven to twelve for me
to-morrow morning. I want to tell you about the campaign. It was a
glorious fight!" His eyes sparkled at the memory of it. "I felt as if
every bit of me had never been alive at once before. My opponent was a
splendid chap. It meant something to beat him. The other side was in a
rage!--more than once yelled for half an hour after I took the platform.
When I finished they yelled again for half an hour--to a different
tune." His slight, thin, rather graceless figure seemed suddenly to
expand, even to grow taller. Some hidden magnetism burst from him like
an aura, and his cold pasty face and light gray eyes flamed into
positive beauty. "It was glorious! Glorious! I was intoxicated--I could
have reeled, little as they suspected it. I wouldn't part for a second
with the certainty that I am the biggest figure in young England to-day.
I hate to sleep and forget it. If I cultivated modesty I should renounce
one of the exquisite pleasures of life. Humility is a superstition. The
man who doesn't weed it out is an ass. To be young, well-born, with
money enough, a brain instead of a mere intelligence, an essential
leader of men--Good God! Good God!" Then he subsided and blushed, jerked
up his shoulders and laughed. "Well--I never let myself go to any one
but you," he said. "And I won't inflict _you_ any longer."

IV

"I wish the old homes of England had electric lights," thought Miss
Otis, with a sigh.

There were four candles on the dressing-table, two on the mantel-shelf;
beyond the radius of their light the room was barely visible. She
carried one of the candles over to the cheval-glass and held it above
her head, close to her face, low on either side.

"I feel as if I had been put together by some unpleasant mechanical
process. It is well I am not inordinately vain, but when one puts on a
new dress for the first time--" She shrugged her shoulders hopelessly,
replaced the candle, and walked up and down the room swinging the
train--her first--of the charming gown of pale blue satin; patting the
hair coiled softly about the entire head in a line eminently becoming to
the profile, and prolonged by several little curls escaping to the neck.

She felt happy and excited, her fine almost severe face far more
girlishly alive than when she had told her story, provocatively dry, to
Flora Thangue. She directed an approving glance at the high heels of her
slippers, which, with her lofty carriage, produced the effect of
non-existing inches. She was barely five feet five, but she ranked with
tall women, her height as unchallenged as the chiselling of her profile.

"What frauds we all are!" she thought, with a humor of which she had
not vouchsafed Miss Thangue a hint. "But what is a cunningly made
slipper on a foot not so small, at the end of a body not quite long
enough, but an encouraging example of the triumph of art over nature?
Not the superiority, perhaps, but they are the best of working
partners."

She sat down and recalled the conversation with her new friend, giving
an amused little shudder. She had heard much of, and in her travels come
into contact with, the cold-blooded frankness of the English elect; with
whom it was either an instinct or a pose to manifest their careless
sense of impregnability. When pressed to give an account of herself the
dramatic possibilities of the method suddenly appealed to her,
accompanied by a mischievous desire to outdo them at their own game and
observe the effect. She had found herself as absorbed as an actress in a
new and congenial role.

"After all," she thought, "clever women make themselves over in great
part, uprooting here, adopting there, and as we have so little chance to
_be_ anything, there is a good deal to be got out of it. If one cannot
be a genius one can at least be an artist. I have never had much cause
to be as direct as stage lightning, but as I enjoyed it I suppose I may
infer that even brutal frankness is not foreign to my nature. Perhaps,
like father, I am a snob at heart and liked the sensation of a sort of
artistic alliance with the British aristocracy. Well, if I develop
snobbery I can root out that weed--or persuade myself that some other
motive is at the base of a disposition to adopt any of the
characteristics of this people: a woman can persuade herself of any
sophistry she chooses. Not for anything would I be a man. Absolutely to
accept the facts of life, even the ugly unvarnished fact itself, and at
the same time to invent one's own soul-tunes--that is to be a woman and
free!"

A printed square of card-board on her writing-table had informed her
that the dinner-hour was half-past eight. She looked at her watch. It
was five minutes to the time. Once more she peered into the glass, shook
out her skirts, then sought a door in a far and dusky corner. It opened
upon a long dimly lit corridor which led into another at right angles,
and Isabel presently found herself at the head of a staircase similar to
the one on her side of the house. Here, too, the walls were hung with
portraits and landscapes, and as far down as the eye could follow; but
after glancing over them for a moment with the recurring weariness of
one who has seen too many pictures in the hard ways of European travel,
her eyes lit and lingered on the figure of a young man who stood on the
landing, his back to her, examining, with a certain tensity, a canvas on
a level with his eyes.

"Uncle Hiram--John Elton Cecil Gwynne! What a likeness and what a
difference!"

The young Englishman's hair, pale in color and very smooth, was worn
longer than the fashion, the ends lilting. As he turned slowly at the
rustle of descending skirts, this eccentricity and his colorless skin
made him look the pale student rather than the gallant soldier, the best
fighter on the hustings that England had seen for five-and-twenty years.
As Isabel walked carefully down the slippery stair she veiled her eyes
to hide the wonder in them. She had expected personality, magnetism, as
a compensation for nature's external economies. His apparent lack of
both made him almost repellent, awakened in Isabel a sensation of
antagonism; and the cool speculation in his light gray eyes merely
accentuated his general dearth of charm. True he had height--although
his carriage was unimposing--his head was large and well-proportioned,
his nose and chin salient, but the straight heavy mouth was as
contemptuous as a Prussian officer's, and in spite of his grooming he
looked old-fashioned, absurdly like the Uncle Hiram who had been a
country lawyer and farmer, and had always worn broadcloth in the hottest
weather--except, to be sure, when he wore a linen "duster," or sat on
the veranda in his shirt-sleeves, his feet on the railing.

However, she smiled, and he smiled politely in return, advancing a few
steps to meet her. "I hope you have heard of me," she said. "Your mother
is so busy--English people are so indifferent to details--I am your
cousin, Isabel Otis--"

"Of course my mother has spoken of you. I am very glad to see you in my
house," he added, hospitably. "Shall I show you the way?"

He made no further remark as they descended the darker section of the
stair, and she could think of nothing to say to him. Nor did she
particularly care to think of anything, the American in her resenting
his lack of effort. But as they reached the door she paused abruptly.

"I forgot! Miss Thangue asked me to knock at her door--"

"You take us too seriously," he said, with a slight sneer. "Flora has
evidently forgotten you; she came down a quarter of an hour ago."

Isabel lifted her head still higher, annoyed at the angry blood that
leaped to her face. "I am afraid I am rather literal," she said, with
more hauteur than the occasion demanded. "But perhaps you will tell me
where to go. There seems to be a bewildering number of rooms. After
three years of lodgings in Europe, to say nothing of the modest
architecture of Rosewater, I feel as if astray in a maze."

"You got that off as if you were a masquerading princess," he said, with
a flicker of humor in his eyes. "Americans generally bluff the other
way." He opened the door. "We meet here in the hall. There is my mother.
You are not obliged to speak to her, you know. We are less formal in
life than in novels." With this parting shot he left her abruptly and
joined a small dark woman with a plebeian face, a sensual mouth, and
magnificent black eyes.

"The rude beast!--Julia Kaye, of course." But Isabel forgot them both in
the novelty of the scene. The square white hall was lit with wax-candles
and shaded lamps, and filled with the murmur of voices--beautiful
gowns--the sparkle of jewels. Isabel dismissed the memory of early
trials, the long years she had lived in the last three, her philosophic
resignation to the disillusions and disappointments with which her
liberty had been pitted; it was her first appearance in the world of
fashion--which she entered, after all, by a sort of divine right.
Trepidation was undeveloped in her, and when she had stood for a moment,
quite aware that her proud and singular beauty had won her instant
recognition, she walked over to her hostess.

No fresh demand was made on her courage. Lady Victoria's earlier mood of
colossal indifference had been dissipated by her son's return. She
greeted Isabel with a dazzling smile and a winning gesture.

"Isn't Jack a darling? Isn't he a dear?" she commanded. "I have put you
on his left, that you may be sure not to be bored. What hair! That is
_your_ legacy from Spain. I have the eyes, but I never had a foot of
hair. I hope you are comfortable. I expect you to remain a week. I am so
glad that Jack will be here. The place is intolerably dull without him."

Isabel, warming to such maternal ardor in a beauty whose years were
prematurely emphasized by a son as conspicuous as Elton Gwynne, summoned
a few vague words of enthusiasm. She was reproached politely for
wandering about England for two months before discovering herself to her
relatives; then, Lady Victoria's interest waning, she turned to a young
man, handsome and Saxon and orthodox, and said, casually, "Jimmy, you
will take in Miss Otis."

Dinner had already been announced. The twain, in complete ignorance of
each other's identity, walked through a long line of rooms, almost
unfurnished but for the scowling or smiling dead crowding the walls.
Isabel decided that she would be as effortless as the English and see
what came of it. The practised instinct of the American girl, added to
the excessive hospitality of the Californian, would have led her to put
her companion immediately at ease, but not only was she fond of
experimenting with racial characteristics upon her own hidden
possibilities, but she was intensely proud, and the English attitude had
stung her more than once.

"Why should I please them?" she thought, contemptuously. "Let them
please me."

Her companion betrayed no eagerness to please her; and during the first
ten minutes at table he talked to Gwynne about the late elections.
Evidently, he too had emerged from the political fray triumphant. Isabel
sat like a stately picture by Reynolds, and after her slow gaze had
travelled over the dark full-length portraits of the kings and queens
that had honored Capheaton, it dropped to the more animated faces in the
foreground. The men were good-looking, with hardly an exception; judging
by their carriage they might all have been army men, but as every word
that floated to the head of the table was political, they possibly had
followed their successful host's example and adopted an equally
intermittent career. One or two of the women were almost as handsome as
Lady Victoria, with their superb figures, their complexions of claret
and snow, that blending of high breeding and warm palpitating humanity
one never sees outside of England. But others within Isabel's range were
too haggard for beauty, although one had a Burne-Jones face and her eyes
gazed beyond the company with an expression that made her seem pure
spirit; but she too looked tired, delicate, curiously overworked.

Opposite Isabel was a tall buxom young woman of the purest Saxon type,
who was talking amiably with the man on her right, and occasionally
shaking with deep and silent laughter; her intimate casual manner, her
slight movements, her accentuation, manifestly bred in the bone.
Suddenly it was borne in upon Isabel's always sensitive consciousness
that she was the only haughty and reserved person present, and she felt
provincial and laughed frankly at herself. The lady across the table
claiming the attention of the host, she turned to her own partner. Her
black eyelashes were long, and under their protecting shadow she swept a
glance at the card above the young man's plate. It was inscribed, "Lord
Hexam." She saw her opportunity and asked, ingenuously:

"How can you be a member of the House of Commons?"

He looked up from his fish and replied, somewhat cuttingly, "By
contesting a borough and getting elected."

"But I thought a peer could not be in the House of Commons."

"He can't."

"Then how can you be?"

"I am not a peer." He looked very much annoyed.

"But you are Lord Hexam."

He answered, sulkily: "I happen to be the son of a peer."

"Are you irritated because I know nothing about you?" asked Isabel,
cruelly. "Do you suppose I have wasted my time in England reading
Burke?"

"No, there are too many sights," he replied, more cruelly still.

"They are far more interesting than most of the people I have met." Then
she changed her tactics and smiled upon him; and when she smiled she
showed a dimple hardly larger than a pin's head at one corner of her
flexible mouth. For the first time he looked under her eyelashes into
the odd blue eyes, with their dilated pupils and black rim edging the
light iris. He suddenly realized that she was beautiful, in spite of the
three little black moles on her face--he detested moles--and smiled in
return.

"I am afraid I was rude. But I am really shy, and you quite took it out
of me. I am more afraid of the American girl than of anything on earth."

"How did you know I was an American?"

"By your accent." He laughed good-naturedly. "Now I am even with you."

"Well, you are. Californians pride themselves upon having no accent."

"Oh, it is not nearly so bad as some. But it is there all the same. Not
a twang nor a drawl, but--well--every country has its unmistakable
stamp."

"Well, I have no desire to be taken for anything but an American," she
said, defiantly. "A Californian, that is. After all, we are quite
different. But we do have an appalling variety of accents in the United
States. I have lived abroad long enough to discover that. When I am an
old maid I am going to mount the platform and preach the training of the
voice in childhood. I have taken a violent dislike to more than one
clever American man merely because he trailed his voice through his
nose. I don't mind our vices being criticised as much as our crudities."

"I never before heard an American girl make a remark that indicated the
least interest in her country--even when--pardon me--they brag. They
generally give the impression that they don't even know who happens to
be the President of the moment. Somehow, you look as if you might."

"I was brought up by a man, and my uncle was a great politician in a
small way. That is to say he was identified with country politics only,
but he and my father were everlastingly discussing the national issues.
Of course you have only met girls from the great cities, where the men
are too busy making money to take any interest in public affairs. The
women rarely hear them mentioned, practically forget there are such
affairs--except on the Fourth of July, which they resent as a personal
grievance. I have met scores of them in Europe. To know anything of
politics they regard as the height of bad form."

"Sometimes I wish that our women would let them alone for a while. That
is my sister over there," indicating the lady with the Burne-Jones face.
"She has worn herself to a shadow working for her husband, who is in the
House, and she is heart and soul in politics--which she regards as a
sort of divine mission. She is on several committees, is far more useful
to her husband than his secretary, for she has the gift of style--and no
one would accuse Rex of that--and during an election she never rests.
Besides which, of course she has her little family, the usual number of
establishments to look after, and great social pressure. I always
maintain that our women are of immense service to us, but many of them
are physically unfit. I expect to see my sister go to pieces any day,
and as she is little short of an angel it worries me."

"She does look angelic," said Isabel, sympathetically. "Is that what is
the matter with the rest of them?--the thin ones, I mean?"

"Generally speaking. The thinnest is my cousin. I went in for a cup of
tea a week or two before the end of last session. There were several of
us about the tea-table when a footman entered and muttered something to
her, and with a vague word of apology she left the room and did not
return for half an hour. I thought the baby must be dying, and was about
to ring, when she reappeared and remarked that she had been sitting at
the telephone listening to a paper her husband had just finished on one
of the questions before the House. Some of them stand it better." He
indicated a fair beautiful creature with a determined profile and deep
womanly figure. "There is Mrs. Sefton, for instance. She presides at
committee meetings--she is great on colonial politics--for three or four
hours at a time, and always sails out as fresh as a rose; but she has
buried her husband and entertains when and whom she chooses. Lady
Cecilia opposite understands politics as well as any woman in England,
but does not go in for them--Spence isn't in the House; that may account
for it!"

"Your fashionable women do not in the least resemble ours," said Isabel,
meditatively. "They are far more like the women of our small towns."

"What!"

"It sounds paradoxical, but it is more than half true. Say two-thirds;
the other third is all in favor of your women, for obvious reasons. But
those I speak of, the best women of every small town, are constantly
active in civic affairs. Most of the sanitary improvements and the
educational, all schemes for parks and better streets, come from them.
There is no village too small to have its 'Woman's Improvement Club.'
And it is the women that have saved all the historical buildings in the
country from destruction."

"I thought they went in for Browning Societies."

"Doubtless you would scorn really to know anything of American humor.
Perhaps our comic papers have never heard of the Improvement Clubs, or
find nothing in them that is humorous. Not that I would decry the
Browning Clubs, nor any literary clubs, however crude. It is all in the
line of progress. 'Culture' is a tempting morsel for the jokemaker, but
as an alternative for dull domesticity and the vulgar inanities of
gossip it is not to be despised."

"By Jove, you are right," said Hexam, not without warmth.

"Is my fair cousin converting you to something?" asked the host. His
voice had been little heard, and he looked sulky.

"Cousin?"

"Yes, he is my cousin," said Isabel, with the accent of resignation.
Hexam laughed. Gwynne looked as if the grace of humor had been left out
of him. Isabel, innocent and impassive, turned her eyelashes upon her
partner. "I was quite wild to meet my cousin," she went on, in the
toneless voice that contrasted so effectively with her occasional
extravagance of speech; "and now I find him the precise image of my
uncle Hiram, who never spoke to me except to say: 'Little girls should
be seen and not heard,' or 'Run off to bed now, little one.'"

Without repitching her voice she yet infused it with a patronizing
masculinity that once more startled Hexam into laughter, and caused a
silent convulsion in the massive frame of Lady Cecilia Spence.

"She knows that was a bit of vengeance," thought Isabel. "But of course,
manlike, he'll never suspect it." She turned her deep thoughtful gaze
full upon her cousin. His eyes were glittering under their heavy lids.
He replied, suavely:

"I hope you will find us more polite--if less picturesque. I cannot
flatter myself that my likeness to your uncle Hiram extends that far.
'Precise image'--is not that perhaps a bit of national exaggeration?"

"Well, I take that back," said Isabel, sweetly. "But you really might be
his son instead of his second cousin."

"Perhaps that accounts for a good many things," said Lady Cecilia. "You
know, Jack, I have always said there was something exotic about you. You
are much too energetic and progressive for this settled old country. If
you had been born in America I suppose you would have been president at
the earliest moment the constitution permitted."

He hesitated a moment, then delivered himself of a bombshell. "I was
born in America," he said.

His eyes moved slowly from one stupefied face to another. "As I left at
the age of five weeks I can hardly claim that the incident left an
indelible impress. But the fact remains that I should be eligible for
the presidency if I chose to become an American citizen."

Isabel looked at her relative with an accession of interest; he had
suddenly ceased to be an alien, become in a measure a personal
possession. "Come over and try it," she said, impulsively. "_There_ is a
career worth while! A young country as full of promise as of faults!
Think of the variousness of achievement! England's history is made. If
you are all they claim, you might really make history in the United
States. If I only had a brother--" Her eyes were flashing for the first
time. "However--they say you love the fight. It is far more difficult to
become a president of the United States than a prime-minister of
England, for with us family influence counts for nothing."

"I am afraid I have not the qualities that do count. To be as frank as
yourself--I don't think I could stand your politics."

"But think of the excitement of really sounding your capacities!"
Impersonality was an achievement with Isabel and she could always
command it. "You can never do that here, no matter how brilliant your
success. There must always be the question of how far you would have
gone without your family, and friends of equal power. The ugliest lesson
of life is its snobbishness. Even when the herd can expect no return, a
blind instinct--doubtless an inheritance from the days when there were
but two classes--drives it to beat the drums for the socially elect. We
have enough of that in America, heaven knows, but the best thing that
can be said of American politics is that they are free of it. Besides,
if our politics are bad, so much the better for you. You might do for
the United States what your English great-grandfather helped to do for
this country in 1832. You might be another 'Great Revolutioner,' like
your still more illustrious ancestor, Sam Adams. You'll never, never
have such an opportunity to become a great historical figure over here,
for English dissatisfaction hardly counts, and in the United States
there are increasing millions that demand reform, a closer approach to
the ideal republic promised by their ancestors, and the man for the
hour."

The angry glitter had left his eyes and he was looking at her with
interest and curiosity. He respected her courage and obvious power to
rise above the personal attitude of her sex.

"I dislike intensely many things in your country," he said, slowly; "but
I will confess that it interests me greatly. If it has failed in some of
its original ideals it has at least continued to be a republic for more
than a century; and when one considers its enormous size and conflicting
elements--for I suppose you will not claim that you are a homogeneous
race--that is very inspiring! It makes one believe that fundamentally
the country must be sound--that unswerving fidelity to an ideal. It is a
great thing! a stupendous thing! I wish I knew that I should live to
see England, all Europe, a republic. There is no other state fit for
self-respecting men--that voice in the selection of their own rulers."

"By Jove, Jack!" cried Lord Hexam. "I never heard you go as far as that
before."

"Possibly you never will again. I have no desire to rank with those
brilliant failures that are born before their time, and no intention of
wasting my energies on the unattainable. Moreover, radicals and
socialists per se are merely a nuisance. The Liberal party is the only
choice in England to-day, and when I get it at my back, I can, at least,
after I have led it to a stronger position, fight for the soundest of
the extremist dogmas, as well as for the reorganization of the House of
Peers. Hereditary legislation in the twentieth century and the most
civilized country in the world! Why not an hereditary army and navy?
Russia has few greater anachronisms. And when one thinks of the careers
it has ruined! Look at Barnstaple."

The two men plunged into discussion, and Isabel, her eyes expressing a
polite interest, studied the face of her cousin. She appreciated for the
first time something of its power. A brief illumination of his eyes had
betrayed the soul of the idealist; a passion that in a less sound mind
might result in fanaticism. He was talking with none of the fiery
enthusiasm that made him so irresistible a public speaker, but his
negative suggestion of vitality, of mature thought, his very lack of
every-day magnetism, fascinated her; not the woman, but the acute,
receptive, and antagonistic intelligence. As he sat there talking, with
hardly a change of expression in his voice or on his cold face, faintly
sneering, he seemed to be holding his powers in solution; to have
resolved them for the time being into their elements, that they might
rest and recuperate. While no doubt in first-rate physical condition, he
looked as if he had not a red corpuscle in his body, and this very
contrast to the warm full-blooded people surrounding him gave him a
distinction of his own, the distinction of pure brain independent of
those auxiliaries that few public men have been able to dispense with.
It was obvious that he was too self-centred, too haughtily indifferent,
or too spoilt, to make any effort in private life to charm or bewilder;
when he vanquished from the platform it was by the awakened rush of the
forces within him; and this very indifference, this contemptuous
knowledge of his mighty reserves, this serene faith in his star,
invested his personal unattractiveness with a formidable significance.
Isabel's imagination dilated him into a disembodied intellect surrounded
by mere statues of human flesh. As she left the dining-room the illusion
vanished. She liked him less than ever, nevertheless wished that he were
her brother and the rising star in American politics.

V

As the women entered a large room on the opposite side of the central
hall, where coffee was to be served, Flora Thangue laid her hand
deprecatingly on Isabel's arm. "I was so sorry not to be able to wait
for you," she said. "But I had a distracted note from Vicky at eight
asking me to dress as quickly as I could and see if the cards on the
table were all right: the new butler is rather a muff, and such a
martinet the footmen dare not interfere. I was delighted to see that
Jack had taken charge of you. What do you think of our infant prodigy?"

"I have had little chance to think anything," said Isabel, evasively.
"Is he the typical Englishman--I mean apart from his peculiar gifts?"

"Only in certain qualities. You see he has Celtic blood in him: of
course the Gwynnes had their origin in Wales; and then he is one-fourth
American, isn't he? I can't say how far that inheritance has influenced
his character, but there is no doubt about the Celtic. Outwardly he is
even more impassive than the usual Oxford product, and if he had been
born a generation earlier he would have had all sorts of affectations.
But affectation, thank heaven, is out of date. We wouldn't tolerate a
Grandcourt five minutes. Whom should you like to talk to? You will have
enough of me."

"I am sure there is no one I shall like half so well," said Isabel,
truthfully; and Flora loved her for not being gracious. "I think I
should like to know Mrs. Kaye."

"If you ever do, please give me the benefit of your investigations.
There are as many opinions of her as there are of cats. Vicky believes
in her and I don't. Jack is in love with her--with certain of his Celtic
instincts gone wrong."

She led Isabel over to Mrs. Kaye, who sat alone on a small sofa, sipping
her coffee and absently puffing at a cigarette. She was exquisitely
dressed and jewelled, and her little figure was round and symmetrical;
but nothing could obscure the ignoble modelling of her face. She might
have been misunderstood for a housemaid masquerading had it not been for
an air of assured power, a repose as monumental as that of a Chinese
joss.

She had cultivated a still radiance of expression which, when she
thought it worth her while, broke into a tender or brilliant smile;
although even then her large, ripe mouth retained a hint of the
austerity her strong will had imposed upon it--to the more complete
undoing of the masculine host. She smiled graciously as Miss Thangue
murmured the introduction and moved away, but did not offer the other
half of the sofa, and Isabel fetched a chair.

"You are the American cousin, of course," she said, with a slight lisp.
"We were all talking about you down at our end of the table, but I could
not see you until just now. I long to go to America, your novels
interest me so much. But one is always so busy--one never gets time for
the Atlantic. Lady Victoria says you come from that wonderful country,
California, but of course you know New York and Newport still better.
All Americans do."

"I have never seen Newport, and passed exactly a week in New York before
sailing."

Mrs. Kaye's expressive eyes, which had dwelt on Isabel with flattering
attention, fell to the tip of her cigarette. "No? I thought that all
smart Americans came from that sacred precinct."

"I am not in the least smart. I don't really _know_ half a dozen people
in America outside of the county in which I have spent the greater part
of my life--not even in San Francisco, where I was born." Isabel held
her cigarette poised in one slender hand, letting her eyes fall
deliberately on the broad back and flat nails of the exquisitely kept
section on Mrs. Kaye's lap. "So far, in my small social ventures I have
felt the necessity of little beyond good manners and a small independent
income. This is my first excursion into the great world, and of course
my cousin is too secure in her position to care whether I am smart or
not. Miss Thangue, the only other woman I have talked with, is far too
amiable and well-bred. Am I to understand that I shall be tried by New
York measurements and found wanting?"

"Oh no!" Mrs. Kaye's bright color had darkened. "On the contrary, the
English are always rather amused at American distinctions. It only
happens that all my friends are New-Yorkers."

She was a very clever woman, for snobbery had blunted and demoralized
only one small chamber of her brain, and she had as comprehensive a
knowledge of the world as any woman in it. Nevertheless, as her powerful
magnetic eyes met the ingenuous orbs opposite, she was unable to
determine whether the barbed words, quivering in a sore spot, had been
uttered in innocence or intent. "Of course one doesn't meet so many
Americans, after all. Naturally, the New-Yorkers bring the best
letters." She paused a moment as if ruminating, then delivered herself
of an epigram: "New York is the great American invention for separating
the wheat from the tares."

"Indeed!" Isabel was too surprised to strike back.

"It is well known that it is one of the most exclusive social bodies in
the world. You have far less difficulty over here."

"That may be merely owing to the fear that affects all new social
bodies. I have the honor to know the leader of society in St. Peter--a
town of ten thousand inhabitants near my own--and she is frightfully
exclusive. She is so afraid of knowing the wrong sort of people that she
is barely on nodding terms with the several thousand new-comers that
have added to the wealth and importance of the town during the last ten
years. Consequently, her circle is as dull as an Anglo-Saxon Sunday. I
fancy the same may be said of New York, for its fashionable set is not
large and its interests are far from various. From all I have heard,
London society alone is perennially interesting, and the reason is,
that, absolutely secure, it keeps itself from staleness by constantly
refreshing its veins with new blood, exclusive only against
offensiveness. Of course you are a daughter of a duke or something," she
added, wickedly. "Everybody here seems to be. Don't you feel that your
ancestors have given you the right to know whom you please?--instead of
eternally plugging the holes in the dike."

In spite of her sharpened wits, Mrs. Kaye smiled radiantly into Isabel's
guileless eyes. "I am not the daughter of a duke; I wish I were!" she
exclaimed, with a fair assumption of aristocratic frankness. "But your
point is quite correct." Again she appeared to ruminate; then added:
"The British aristocracy is to society what God is to the
world--all-sufficient, all-merciful, all-powerful."

"And she would sacrifice Him and all his archangels to an epigram,"
thought Isabel, who was somewhat shocked. "How fearfully clever you
are!" she murmured. "Do you think in epigrams?"

"Epigrams? Have I made one? I wish I could. They are immensely the
fashion."

"I should think you might have set it--"

She did not finish her sentence, for the ear to which it was addressed
suddenly closed. Lady Cecilia Spence had sauntered up, and Mrs. Kaye
hastily made room for her on the sofa, turning a shoulder upon Isabel. A
faint change, as by the agitation of depths on the far surface of
waters, rippled her features, and Isabel, summoning the impersonal
attitude, watched her curiously. It was her first experience of the snob
in a grandiose setting, but it was the type that had aroused her most
impassioned inward protest all her life: the smallest circles have their
snobs, and, like all the unchosen of mammon, she had had her corroding
experiences. But her high spirit resented the power of the baser
influences, and, with her intellect, commanded her to accept the world
with philosophy and the unsheathed weapon of self-respect. In the
present stage of the world's development it was to be expected that the
pettier characteristics of human nature would predominate; and perhaps
the intellectually exclusive would not have it otherwise.

Mrs. Kaye, polite tolerance giving place to the accent of intimacy,
began: "Oh, Lady Cecilia, have you heard--" and plunged into a piece of
gossip, no doubt of absorbing interest to those that knew the
contributory circumstances and the surnames of the actors, but to the
uninitiated as puzzling as success. Lady Cecilia's eyes twinkled
appreciatively, and her wells of laughter bubbled close to the surface.
Isabel, completely ignored, waited until the story was finished, and
then made a deliberate move.

"How interesting!" she exclaimed. "Won't you tell me the names of the
people?"

Mrs. Kaye, without turning her head, murmured something indistinctly,
and lit another cigarette. "Won't you have a light, Lady Cecilia?" she
asked.

"Please give me one," said Isabel, sweetly. She reached out and took the
cigarette from Mrs. Kaye's faintly resisting hand. "Thank you. I am lazy
about looking for matches. Do you smoke a lot?"

But Mrs. Kaye, irritated, or having reached the conclusion that the
newcomer was not in the very least worth while, said with soft fervor to
her who was: "How delightful that dear Jack was returned! Of course you
are as interested in his career as the rest of us."

"I should be a good deal more so if his mother had turned him across her
knee a little oftener--or if I could shake him myself occasionally."

Isabel, satisfied, more amazed than ever at the infantile ingenuousness
of the snob, rose, and was about to turn away when she met Lady
Cecilia's eyes. They were full of amusement, and there was no mistaking
its purport. In a flash Isabel had responded with a challenge of appeal,
which that accomplished dame was quick to understand.

"Please don't go," she said. "I came over here to talk to you. We are
all so interested in the idea that Vicky is half an American--we had
quite forgotten it. Did you ever see any one look less as if she had
American cousins than Vicky? She might easily have a whole tribe of
Spanish ones."

"Well, she has, in a way." And in response to many questions Isabel
found herself relating the story of Rezanov and Concha Argueello, while
Mrs. Kaye, whatever may have been her sensations, rose with an absent
smile and composedly transferred herself to an equally distinguished
neighborhood.

"I wonder if she has ever tried to condense rudeness into an epigram,"
said Isabel viciously, pausing in her narrative.

Lady Cecilia shook expressively. "At least she has not made an art of
it," she said. "They never do."

VI

The next morning, Isabel, after little sleep, rose early and went out
for a walk. She had sat up until eleven, listening to the puzzling jets
of conversation, or watching the Bridge-players, and when she had
finally reached her room, tired and excited, Flora Thangue had come in
for a last cigarette and half an hour of chat. Her first evening in the
new world had had its clouded moments, for it was impossible not to feel
the alien, and the kindness of English people, no matter how deep, is
casual in expression. But on the whole she had felt more girlishly happy
and ebullient than since her sister had gone her own way and left a
heavy burden for young shoulders behind her. In the freedom of a girl in
Europe, no matter how prized, there is much of loneliness in idleness, a
constant attitude of defence, moments of bitter wonder and disgust, and,
to the analytical mind, an encroaching dread of a more normal future
with a chronic canker of discontent.

Isabel had by no means passed her European years in the procession that
winds from the Tiber to the Seine, prostrating itself at each successive
station of architecture or canvas; nor even devoted the major portion of
her time to the investigation of the native, deeply as the varying types
had interested her. Her intellectual ambition, as is often the case with
the American provincial girl, had been even stronger than her desire for
liberty and pleasure, and she had spent several months with the
archaeological society of Rome, read deeply in Italian history and art,
attended lectures at the Sorbonne, and spent nearly a year in Berlin,
Dresden, Munich, and Vienna, studying that modern stronghold of dramatic
literature, the German Theatre.

It had been the living dream of long winter evenings, when she had not
dared to join in the festivities of the other young folk lest her father
should stray beyond her control; he would, when the demon was quiescent,
sit at home if she read to him, and she had learned to read and dream at
the same time. It was only at the beginning of her third year of
liberty, when, in spite of shifting scenes, the entire absence of daily
cares and of heavy responsibilities involving another had given her
longer hours for thought and introspection, that the poisonous doubt of
the use of it all had begun to work in a mind that had lost something of
the ardor of novelty. The eternal interrogations had obtruded themselves
in her unfortunate girlhood, and she had questioned the voiceless
infinite, but angrily, with youth's blind rebellion against the
injustice of life. The anger and rebellion had been comatose in these
years of freedom, but the maturer brain was the more uneasy, at times
appalled. For what was she developing, perfecting herself? She had no
talent, with its constant promises, its occasional triumphs, its
stimulating rivalries, to give zest to life; and there were times when
she envied the student girls in Munich with their absurd "reform dress,"
their cigarettes and beer in cheap restaurants and theatres, their more
than doubtful standards. Although she had her own private faith and
never hesitated to pray for anything she wanted, she was not of those
that can make a career of religion; her mind and temperament were both
too complex, and she was unable to interest herself in creeds and
theologies--and congregations.

Now and again she had considered seriously the study of medicine,
architecture, law, of perfecting herself for criticism of some sort, for
she had spoken with a measure of truth when she had assured Flora that
she had no wish to marry. In her depths she was--had been--romantic and
given to dreaming, but the manifold weaknesses of her father--who had
been one of the most brilliant and accomplished of men, a graduate of
Harvard, and the possessor of many books--and the selfish and tyrannous
exactions which had tempered his enthusiasm for all things feminine, the
caustic tongue and overbearing masculinity of her uncle, who had been as
weak in his way as her father, for he had lost the greater part of his
patrimony on the stock-market, and the charming inconsequence of her
brother-in-law, who loved his family extravagantly and treated them like
poor relations, had not prepared her to idealize the young men she had
met in Rosewater and Europe. She had been sought and attracted more than
once during her years of liberty, but her prejudices and the deep cold
surface of temperament peculiar to American girls of the best class,
lent a fatal clarity of vision; and although she had studied men as
deeply as she dared, the result had but intensified the sombre threat of
the future. It was quite true that she had half-consciously believed
that hope would live again and justify itself in Elton Gwynne, and the
disappointment, at the first glimpse of his portrait, was so crushing
that she had buried her sex under an avalanche of scorn.

But scorn is far more volcanic than glacial and a poor barrier between
sex and judgment. It needed more than that, and more than disillusions
of the second class, no matter how inordinate, to give a girl the cool
reality of poise that had stimulated the curiosity of Miss Thangue; and
this Isabel had encountered, during the most critical period of her
inner life, in the beautiful city by the Isar. The experience had been
so brief and tremendous, the incidents so crowding and tense, the climax
so hideous, that she had been stunned for a time, then emerged into her
present state of tranquil and not unpleasant philosophy--when the
present moment, if it contained distraction, was something to be
grateful for; otherwise, to be borne with until the sure compensation
arrived. The future had neither terror for her nor any surpassing
concern, although all her old impersonal interest in life had revived,
and she was still too young not to be very much like other girls when
circumstances were propitious. And at last she had conceived--or
evolved--a definite purpose.

This morning she was living as eagerly as ever during her first deep
months in Europe. The excitement of the evening still possessed her; she
had held her own, received homage, lived a little chapter in an English
novel; above all, she was young, she was free, she was no longer
unhappy; and she loved the early morning and swift walking.

It was Sunday; the shooting would not begin until the morrow; everybody
except herself, apparently, still slept; the breakfast-hour was
half-past nine. She walked down a long lane behind the lawns and entered
the first of the coverts. There was a drowsy whir of wings--once--that
was all. There was a glint of dancing water in the heavier shades, a
rosy light beyond the farthest of the trees in the little wood where the
delicate pendent leaves hung asleep in the sweet peace. There was not an
expiring echo of her own wild forests here; nor any likeness to the
splendid royal preserves of Germany and Austria, with their ancient
trees, their miles of garnished floor, the sudden glimpse of chamois or
stag standing on a rocky ledge against the sky as if drilled for his
part. These woods had a quality all their own: of Nature in her last
little strongholds, but smiling, serenely triumphant, of tempered heat
without chill, above all, of perfect peace.

Nothing in England had impressed Isabel like this atmosphere of peace
that broods over its fields and lanes, its woods and fells, in the
evening and early morning hours; the atmosphere that makes it seem to be
set to the tune of Wordsworth's verses, and to keep it everlastingly
old-fashioned and out of all relation to its towns. As she left the wood
she saw a big hay-stack, as firm and shapely of outline as a house, not
a loose wisp anywhere. A girl, bareheaded, was driving a cow across a
field. A narrow river moved as slowly as if the world had never
awakened. The road turned to her right and led to an old stone village
with a winding broken street and several oak-trees, a pump, and a long
green bench. It might have been the Deserted Village, for the English
rise far later than the Southern races that have fallen so far behind
them in importance and wealth. Beyond the village, on a rise of ground,
was the church, its square gray tower crumbling down upon its ancient
graves. In the distance were farms, coverts, another village, a gray
spire against the blossoming red of the sky; and over all--peace--peace.
Had anything ever really disturbed it? Would there ever be any change?
England had been devastated to the roots, would be again, no doubt, but
unless it became one vast London, it would brood on into eternity with
the slight defiant smile of a beautiful woman in an enchanted sleep.

"Are you, too, an early bird?"

Isabel flew out of her reverie. Lady Victoria was approaching from a
forking road. She wore a short skirt, leggings, and heavy boots; and she
was bright, fresh, almost rosy from swift walking. "I have gone five
miles already," she said, smiling. "But I believe you were sauntering."

"Only just now--to absorb it all. I, too, can do my five miles an hour,
although Californians are the laziest people in the world about
walking."

"Then if you are up to a sharp trot we'll go to that farthest village.
My land steward has been telling me a painful tale about one of my young
women, and I intend to ask her some embarrassing questions while she is
still too stupid with sleep to lie."

"Your young women? Is all this your estate?"

"It belongs to Strathland, but I have lived here since I married, and
now the place is virtually Jack's. These people have been my particular
charge for thirty years and will continue to be until my son marries.
There are only about a hundred families on the estate altogether, but
they keep one busy."

"I can't imagine you in the working role of the Lady Bountiful. Last
night, at least, if I had written to my friend, Anabel Colton, I should
have devoted pages to your more famous attributes, but I should never
have thought of this."

"Indeed? If one could languish through life in the shell of a mere
beauty that life would be a good deal simpler proposition than it is.
Unfortunately there are complications, and, agreeable or not, one
accepts them as one does enemies, husbands, stupid servants, and all
other mortal thorns. But I am not uninterested in my people here, not by
any means, and they bore me less than going to court and visiting my
father-in-law. I watch them from birth, see that they are properly
clothed and fed, that they go to school as soon as they are old enough,
later that they find a situation here or elsewhere--those that have no
work to do at home. My son gives the young men and women a complete
wardrobe when they start out to win their way in life, and the details
fall on me. It means correspondence, mothers' meetings, and all that
sort of thing. Even during the London season I come down once a month.
Of course it is a bore, but on the whole tradition is rather kind than
otherwise in making life more or less of a routine."

"Wouldn't you miss it if your son married?" Isabel wondered if this
woman had really given her the impression of tragic secrets, unlimited
capacities for both license and arrogance. In this early morning
freshness there was hardly a suggestion of the woman of the world,
barely of the great lady; and in the rich tones of her voice there was a
genuine note of interest in her poor.

"Oh, I should always keep an eye on them; young wives have so many
distractions. If I had to give them up--yes, of course it would mean a
vacancy in my collection of habits; one side of me clings strongly to
traditions and duty. The other--well, I'd like to be a free-lance in the
world for a while--although," she added, with a sharp intonation, "I
don't suppose I should stay away from Jack very long. It is a great
relief to have a vital interest in life outside one's self. You, of
course, are not old enough to have discovered that; and, indeed, I am
not always so sure that it is possible."

Isabel did not ask her if she would not be jealous of the wife who must,
if he loved her, take the greater part of all that her "Jack" had to
give; she divined in this many-sided woman a quality in her attitude
towards her son with which ordinary maternal affection had little in
common. Her fine eyes flashed with pride at the mention of his name, and
it was more than evident that he was her deep and abiding interest; but
this keen and curious young student of life had never seen any one less
maternal. Lady Victoria's attitude, indeed, might as reasonably be that
of a proud sister or wife. When he was beside her she looked almost
commonplace in her content. The moment he passed out of her sight some
phase of individuality promptly lit its torch. Last night Isabel had
seen her stand for half an hour as motionless as some ivory female
Colossus, only her eyes burning down with slow voluptuous fire upon an
adoring little Frenchman. She had looked like a Messalina petrified with
the complications and commonness of the modern world; possibly with the
burden of years, Isabel had added, in girlish intolerance of the wiles
of which youth is independent. She had been far from falling under her
spell, although not wholly repelled by the glimpse of this worst side of
a woman far too complex to be judged off-hand. This morning she liked
her suddenly and warmly, and, with the lightning of instinct, divined
why she worshipped her son and still was willing to have him marry and
swing aside into an orbit of his own. All she needed was a certain
amount of his society, opportunities to work for him, the assurance of
his success and happiness. He was a refuge from herself; in his
imperious demands her memory slept, her depths were stagnant. But Isabel
was still too young, in spite of her own experience, more than dimly to
apprehend the older woman's attitude, and the innumerable and various
acts and sufferings, disenchantments and contacts that had led up to it.
Victoria seemed to her the most rounded mortal she had met, and yet with
an insistent terror in the depths of her riven and courageous soul, the
terror of the complete, the final disillusion. Between that moment and
her too exhaustive knowledge of life stood the magnetic figure of her
son, safeguarding, almost hypnotizing her. She was as incapable of
jealousy as of aching vanity in the fact of a son whom the world was
never permitted to forget. She had done with little things, and Isabel,
with young curiosity, wondered in what convulsion the last of them had
gone down.

Lady Victoria, unconscious of the analytical mind groping to conclusions
beside her, was revolving the midnight comments of Flora Thangue, and
her own impressions of this American relative whose sudden advent, taken
in connection with her eighteenth century beauty and undecipherable
quality, wrought the impression of a symbolic figure swimming out of
space. Lady Victoria was far too indifferent to analyze the problems of
any woman's soul, but she was keenly alive to the vital suggestion of
power in the girl, and of the strong will and intellect, the command
over every faculty, evidenced in the strong line of the jaw, the stern
noble profile, the calm searching gaze so difficult to sustain. None
knew better than Victoria the value and rarity of a free and courageous
soul. Such a woman must, when more fully developed, throw the whole
weight of her character into the scales balancing for the few whom she
recognized as equals and accepted as friends. If she had had "some
smashing love affair," as the more romantic Flora suggested, so much
the better.

She said, with a perfectly simulated impulsiveness:

"Of course you understand that I meant what I said last evening. And not
merely a week; you must pay us a long visit, if it won't bore you. But
the house will rarely be empty now that the shooting has begun, and
there is always something going on in the neighborhood. Later comes the
hunting, and I am sure you ride."

"Oh yes, I ride! I have spent about half my life on a horse. I want to
stay more than I can tell you, but before long I must go home. The same
safe old bank that has charge of your ranches looks after my small
affairs, and I have a man on the farm that has been in the family for
forty years; otherwise I should never have dared to leave my precious
chickens; but Mr. Colton writes me that Mac is failing, and before the
rainy season commences I must look into things myself."

"Chickens?" said Lady Victoria, much amused. "Do you raise chickens?"

"Rather; and not in the back yard, neither. I have about a thousand of
the most beautiful snow-white Leghorns with blood-red combs you ever
saw; and I have incubators, runs, colony-houses, and all the rest of it.
They are raised on the strictest scientific principles and yield me the
greater part of my income. That is the reason I feel obliged to
return--if Mac is no longer able--or willing--to get up at night. One
must not neglect the chicks--the little ones. I doubt if real babies are
more trouble. I don't mind telling you that I have resolved to make a
fortune out of chickens, if only that I may be able to live as I should
in San Francisco. But I must go back and do the greater part of the work
myself."

"Make a fortune--out of chickens! How odd that sounds! Not in the least
romantic, but rather the more interesting for that. But why don't you
let your ranch for dairy and grazing purposes, as we do? They bring us
in a very good income--have done, so far."

"There are about nineteen thousand acres in Lumalitas, and some forty
thousand in the southern ranch. I possess exactly three hundred and
thirty-two, forty-five of which are marsh. You have now nearly the whole
of the original grants, for as my father and uncle sold or mortgaged
portions--and could not pay--your agents bought in. You may remember."

"There is seldom any correspondence. Mr. Colton has always had a free
hand--yes--I do recall--vaguely. So I am profiting at your expense. I am
afraid that must seem unjust to you."

"Not in the least. I did not choose my paternal relatives, but I long
since accepted them with philosophy. I am thankful to have anything. Why
don't you go to California and look at your property?--live on it for a
few years? You could make far more out of it if you ran it yourself. The
lease of Lumalitas must expire very soon. I do wish you would come and
pay me a visit, and--Mr.--what on earth am I to call him?"

"Jack, of course," said Lady Victoria, warmly, although she would have
been swift to resent the liberty had the new relative been so
indiscreet.

"I never could manage Jack--never! I can't feel, see him, as Jack. I
think Cousin Elton will do."

"Quite so. I shouldn't wonder at all if we went. Jack is rather keen on
American politics, knows his Bryce--I suppose it is in the blood. He
even takes in an American Review. I have always rather wanted to visit
California, and started for it once upon a time--on my wedding journey.
But we were entertained so delightfully in New York and Washington that
before we realized what an American summer meant it was too hot to cross
the continent, and we accepted an invitation to the Adirondacks,
intending to return to England in the course of a month. But Arthur
broke his leg, and by the time he was well again it was not safe for me
to travel. So we rented a place in Virginia, where there was good sport,
and there Jack was born. Here we are. Rest under that tree while I
interview the erring maiden."

VII

Isabel sat on the bench under an ancient oak for half an hour or more,
but took no note of the time. In rural America one always seems to hear
the whir of distant machinery and responds to its tensity in the depths
of some nerve centre; but in England's open the tendency is to dream
away the hours, the nerves as blunt as in the tropics; unless, indeed,
one happens to be so astir within that one rebels in responding, and
conceives of ultimate hatred for this incompassionate arrogant peace of
England.

Isabel had been roused from her mood of unreasoning content by her
contact with the older woman, but for a few moments her thoughts waved
to and fro in that large tranquillity like pendent moss in a gentle
breeze. There was a stir of life in the little village; a window was
thrown open; a man came out to the pump and filled a bucket with water;
a child cried for its breakfast; the birds were singing in the trees.
But they barely rippled the calm. Isabel's eyes dwelt absently upon a
white line along a distant hill-top, made, no doubt, by Caesar's troops;
for she had heard that the mosaic floors of Roman houses had been
discovered under one of the fields in the neighborhood. This
information, imparted by Lord Hexam's cousin, Mrs. Throfton, a lady
interested in neither Bridge nor gossip, had not excited her as it might
have done before her archaeological experience at headquarters, but she
was glad to recall it now, for that white road, sharply insistent in the
surrounding green, was one of the perceptible vincula of history.

It was all old--old--old; an illimitable backward vista. And she was as
new, as out of tune with it as the motorcar flashing like a lost and
distracted comet along that hill-top in a cloud of historied dust: she
with her problems, her egoisms, the fateful independence of the modern
girl. In a fashion she was one of the chosen of earth, but she doubted
if the women who had toiled in these villages, or in centuries past had
lived their lives in the mansions of their indubious lords, had not had
greater compensations than she. Unbroken monotony and a saving sense of
the inevitable must in time create for the soul something of the
illimitable horizon of the vast level spaces of the earth.

And she? At twenty-five she had lost her old habit of staring with
veiled eyes into some sweet ambiguous future, her girlish intensity of
emotion. But her theories, in general, were sound, and she had ticketed
even her minor experiences. She knew that character was the most
significant of all individual forces, and that if developed in strict
adjustment to the highest demands of society, dragging strength out of
the powers of the universe, were it not inborn, the book of one's
objective future at least need never be closed prematurely by those
inexorable social forces, which, whatever the weak spots on the surface
of life, invariably place a man in the end according to his deserts. She
had seen her father, with all his advantages of birth and talents, and
early importance in the community, gradually shunned, shelved, dismissed
from the daily life of steadier if less gifted men, almost unknown to
the young generation. He had clung to certain strict notions of honor
through it all, however, and at his death the county had experienced a
spasm of remorse and attended his funeral; the sermon had been eloquent
with masterly omissions, and even the newspaper that had vilified him in
his days of political influence came out with an obituary, which, when
included in some future county history, would give to posterity quite as
good an impression of him as he deserved.

And James Otis had had his virtues. One of his claims to redemption
survived in his daughter. He had reared her in the strict principles and
precepts of his New England ancestors, many of which are generally more
useful in the life of a man. This early instillation, taken in
connection with himself as a commanding illustration in subcontraries,
had given Isabel a directness of vision invaluable to a girl in no haste
to place her life in stronger hands. Whatever her dissatisfactions and
disillusions, her road lay along the upper reaches; the second rate, the
failures from birth, the criminal classes, far below. Her start in life
was indefectible, and she knew that did the necessity arise to-morrow
she could support herself and ask no quarter.

Perhaps, she mused, she would be happier in the necessity, for the
problem of roof and bread is an abiding substitute for the problem of
what to do with one's life. But she had never known an anxious moment
regarding the bare necessities, and although there was something
pleasantly stimulating in the prospect of making a fortune and being
able to live as she wished in the city of her birth--the only object for
which she retained any passion in her affections--she smiled somewhat
cynically at the modest outlook.

Environments like the present were uplifting, almost deindividualizing,
and there had been a time when she had known seconds in the face of
nature's surprises that were distinct spiritual experiences. She
believed they would return when she was in her own land once more, and
Europe a book of fading memories. Her love of beauty at least was as
keen as ever, and now that Europe was off her mind, leaving the proper
sense of surfeit behind it, no doubt she would have a sense of actually
beginning life when the time came to take an active part in it, and she
assumed a position of some importance in her own community. She was far
too sensible for ingratitude, and fully appreciated the gifts that life
had so liberally dealt her. And she fully believed in work as the
universal panacea. The mere thought of a busy future brought a glow to
her heart. She rose with a smile as Lady Victoria emerged from the
cottage at the upper end of the village.

Lady Victoria was not smiling. Her brows were drawn, and she looked
angry and contemptuous.

"The little idiot!" she exclaimed, as they started briskly for home.
"This is the first failure I have had in ten years. That is one of my
boasts. And I took particular pains with that girl. Now Jack will have
the agreeable task of coercing the man into marrying her, for it appears
that his ardor has cooled."

Her brow cleared in a few moments, but she seemed to have had enough of
conversation, and it was evident that words for words' sake, or as a
flimsy chain between signposts of genuine interest, had no place in her
social rubric. Isabel, who was equally indifferent, strode along beside
her without so much as a comment, and so confirmed the good impression
she had made on her mettlesome relative. As they approached the house,
Lady Victoria turned to her with a smile that brought sweetness to her
eyes rather than any one of her more dazzling qualities.

"I am generally in my boudoir at five," she said. "Come in this
afternoon for a chat before tea, if you have nothing better to do. Now
run and get ready for breakfast."

VIII

Whether or not Mr. Gwynne had made up his mind to follow his mother's
advice and employ a new weapon in his siege of Mrs. Kaye, or whether,
like common mortals, he was subject to the natural impulses of youth,
the most novel of the guests of Capheaton found herself on his right in
the informality of breakfast, and the object of his solicitude. He
fetched her bacon and toast from the sideboard, and when he discovered
that she did not like cream in her tea, carried her cup back to his
mother and waited for the more pungent substitute. And then he actually
made an effort to entertain her. There was a flicker of surprised
amusement in the neighborhood, but Isabel accepted his attentions as a
matter of course, assuming that the young gentleman felt refreshed after
a night's rest in his own bed, or had awakened to a sense of her
importance as a member of his family. It was not until she caught Mrs.
Kaye's eye and read a contemptuous power to retaliate, that she
experienced a certain zest in the situation. With the magnetism of
intelligent interest in her own eyes, she turned to Gwynne with a
question that betrayed a flattering acquaintance with one of his less
popular books, then hung upon the monologue of which he promptly
delivered himself. It was characteristic that he either contributed
little to the conversation or monopolized it; and he reflected, as he
talked of the personal experience which led up to the episode of her
interest, that he had never before gazed into eyes at once so lovely and
so fine. He disliked American girls, partly because they had shown no
disposition to join the ranks of those that lived to spoil him, partly
because he believed them to be shallow and cold. Some of the married
women had attracted him, but not before they had lived long enough to
develop the stronger qualities of the older races; he had his ideals and
was not easily satisfied. He was deeply in love with Mrs. Kaye, for her
brilliant subtle mind and powerful appeal to his passions had blinded
him to her defects, and he was convinced that his heart had travelled to
its predestined goal. Nevertheless, he decided that his new cousin, if
as cold as the rest of her youthful compatriots, was worth cultivating
for her intelligence and obvious talent for good-comradeship.

But in a moment a subject was started that entirely diverted his mind
and upset the lively tenor of the breakfast-table.

"Where is Lorcutt?" asked some one, abruptly, referring to a brother of
Lord Brathland, who had lost heavily and cheerfully at Bridge the night
before.

Isabel's eyes happened to have wandered to the face of the man opposite.
To her surprise it became livid. He turned instantly to Gwynne, however,
and said: "I should have told you--I quite forgot--he asked me to make
his excuses. He got a telegram--bad news--Bratty is dead."

Involuntarily Isabel glanced at Mrs. Kaye; Flora had hinted to her of
the lady's designs. That face for once was ghastly and unmasked, but the
eyes were not glittering with grief.

"Impossible!" she cried, sharply. "Lord Brathland? Why--I saw him only
two days ago, in London. He was as well as possible."

The others barely noticed her. Their astonished eyes were fixed on the
first speaker, Captain Ormond, who was sitting very erect, as if to
receive the questions fired at him as a brave man faces the hiss of lead
on the field.

"I know little," he replied; "except that Brathland was suddenly
attacked by appendicitis two nights ago and that an operation was
immediately performed--"

"Friday night!" cried Mrs. Kaye. "Why he spent an hour with me that
afternoon, and was to dine with Lord Zeal and Lord Raglin and half a
dozen other men that night--they all came up to London to talk over one
of Sir Cadge Vanneck's mines. Why--I remember you were to be there.
Surely Lord Brathland was well then?"

"He was looking very seedy when he came in. I happened to sit next to
him--told him he ought to go home. Finally he got so bad he decided
that he would, and as he left the table he fainted. Several of us saw
him to bed. He said he didn't want his family fidgeting him, and the
surgeon said he would be all right in a few days. I thought he was out
of danger when I came down last night, so said nothing about it to
Harold."

"Was he taken home?" asked Gwynne, whose eyes had never left Ormond's
face.

"No--to Raglin's room up-stairs. The dinner was at the Club."

"I cannot understand why his family was not summoned at the last!"
exclaimed Lady Victoria.

"Well, there's only the old duke and Harold, you see. Dick is out in
Africa. I suppose they didn't want to agitate the duke until the last
moment and couldn't find Harold until this morning. Besides, Raglin was
with him, and he is a relative, at least. It is awfully sudden. I have
been upset ever since Harold woke me up this morning and told me; and
hated to speak of it."

"Who was the surgeon?" asked Gwynne.

"Ballast."

"Ballast? Who is he? Why not one of the big men, in heaven's name?"
cried Mrs. Kaye.

"Well--they were all out of town--naturally enough at this time of year.
We had to take what we could get. No doubt Lester or Masten was
telegraphed for later. I--all of us--left the affair in Raglin's hands."

The company broke into general comment, and under cover of the confusion
Isabel distinctly heard Gwynne demand:

"What's up your sleeve, Ormond?"

And the response: "For God's sake, old chap, don't ask!"

IX

Gwynne had never recognized the contingency of a serious rival in the
affections of the woman he had elected to mate, and had he heard of the
late Lord Brathland's attentions it would not have occurred to him that
Mrs. Kaye could weigh a prospective dukedom against the reflected
glories of his own career. He intended to be prime-minister before he
was forty, and older and soberer heads shared his confidence. It was
true that Mrs. Kaye was an emphatic Conservative--scorning even the
compromise of Liberal-Unionism--and that so far he had been unable to
convert her; but he did not take any woman's political convictions very
seriously, knowing that they commonly owed their inspiration to social
ambition, a desire for a career, or to marital comradeship. The latter
he made no doubt would operate in his own case as soon as the lady gave
him the opportunity to demand it as his right; and his sharp political
discussions with her were among the spiciest of his experiences. She
rarely expressed herself in every-day language; and although it had
crossed his mind that epigrammatic matrimony might grow oppressive, he
had reminded himself that her speech was but a part of a too cultivated
individuality and would be unable to endure the strain of daily
intercourse. Although he had in his composition little of the femininity
that gives a certain type of man a sympathetic comprehension of women,
his Celtic blood imparted a subtle understanding of their foibles of
which he was but half aware. More than once this subconscious
penetration had induced a speedy recovery from misplaced affections; but
the toils of Julia Kaye, who piqued, allured, repelled, dazzled, now and
again snubbed every one else for his sake, bound him helpless. He was
grateful for his mother's abetment, although it somewhat surprised him;
but his mother was the woman of whom he had the least comprehension.

So far Mrs. Kaye had ignored his several proposals, but of this he
thought nothing. He would have cared little for a woman to be had for
the asking; and he rather welcomed any treatment that stirred the
somewhat sluggish surfaces of his nature.

He had determined, however, to force a definite answer from her during
this visit, and although he was far too courteous a host to embarrass a
guest, he knew that were Mrs. Kaye deliberately to grant him a private
interview he should be at liberty to press his suit.

Immediately after the hour in the smoking-room that followed breakfast,
he started in search of her; but although many of the women were
scattered throughout the lower rooms, reading, writing, gossiping, he
saw nothing of his inamorata. Flora Thangue happened to be standing
alone, and he went up to her impulsively.

"Do you know if Julia has gone to church?" he asked, without
circumlocution.

"She went to her room directly after breakfast. I fancy she is rather
cut up over Lord Brathland's death," replied the astute Miss Thangue.

"Of course; we all are--poor Bratty! He was rather a bounder, but it is
natural to recall his virtues. Flora, go and tell her I want her to come
for a walk. I can't go to her room myself, and I don't care to send a
servant."

Miss Thangue reflected. Probably this was the most favorable moment for
a repulse that he could have chosen. She was sincerely fond of him and
distrusted Mrs. Kaye as much as she disliked her.

"Very well," she said. "I will see what I can do."

Mrs. Kaye admitted her promptly and presented an unstained front,
although her color was lower than usual. She was a woman of too much
natural and acquired poise to remain askew under any shock. But she had
experienced an hour of mixed emotions in which a confused and wondering
sense of defeat was paramount. It had left her a little aghast, for
although she had met with the inevitable snubs in her upward course, she
rarely permitted them to agitate her memory in these days when she had
grown to believe herself one of the spoiled favorites of destiny; and
her fibres were by no means sensitive. But this sudden blow was a
reminder that fate had been capricious to spoiled darlings before. She
had stood almost motionless before the window from the moment she had
entered her room until Miss Thangue knocked at the door, and by that
time she had repoised herself and set her heavy mouth in a hard line as
she reflected upon her own will as a factor in any game with life.

"Jack wants you to go for a walk," announced Miss Thangue, who saw no
occasion for subtlety.

"That means he intends to propose again," said Mrs. Kaye, in her
carefully modulated voice. "I don't know that I care about it. I have
letters to write."

"Why not get it over? You could compel him to believe, if you chose,
that you have no intention of marrying him, and it would be rather a
kindness; he has so much else to think about, and he certainly should
have a free mind before the opening of Parliament. If you really did
Jack any harm," she added, deliberately, "Vicky would never forgive
you--nor a good many others."

"I wouldn't do him any harm for the world," said Mrs. Kaye, casting down
her eyes and looking very young and innocent. "But I should hate to give
him up. After all, there is no one half so interesting. Well, I'll go
down and have it over."

A few moments later she joined Gwynne at the foot of the staircase, and
they went out to the woods. She looked her best in a smart walking-frock
of white tweed, and a red toque; for the tailor costume modifies where
the elaborate accentuates.

Her brilliant eyes melted as Brathland's name was mentioned; naturally
at once.

"What a dreadful--shocking thing!" she cried. "I do not realize it at
all. Poor dear, we were such friends--and I saw him only a few hours
before. Have you heard anything more?"

"Ormond ran off to town directly after breakfast--as if he were afraid
of being asked too many questions. I have an idea that he kept the cat
in the bag. I saw my cousin Zeal yesterday, and thought he looked as if
he had something besides his health on his mind."

"Why?" asked Mrs. Kaye, startled. "What else could it be?"

"Well, Bratty was rather a flasher," said Gwynne, innocently. "The
dinner may not have been at the Club at all, and there is a little
chorus-girl that engaged the fickle Bratty's affections for a time, and
proclaimed her desire for vengeance from the house-tops when he
transferred himself to a rival at the Adelphi. She is a Neapolitan, and
that sort may carry a stiletto even in prosaic old London. Or perhaps
poor Bratty was despatched with the carving-knife. No wonder he didn't
want his family. But whatever it was, he has paid the penalty himself,
poor chap, and no doubt the matter will be hushed up."

"How disgusting! I don't want to think of human slums on this heavenly
Sunday morning."

"Nor to be proposed to, I suppose?"

"I don't mind, Jack dear."

She looked girlish and very piquant. Jack took her hand. She did not
withdraw it, and they walked silently in the shadowed quiet of the wood.
His heart beat almost audibly. Never before had she given him such
definite encouragement. He could think of nothing to say that would not
sound banal to this woman of the ready tongue. But agitation unlocks
wayward fancies and sends them scurrying inopportunely across the very
foreground of the mind. The vagrant hope that she would not accept him
in an epigram restored his balance, and he turned to her with his
habitual air of confidence, albeit his eyes and mouth were restless.

"I want an answer to-day," he said, boldly. "And there is only one
answer I will take. I have let you play with me, as that seemed to be
your caprice, and I love caprice in a woman. But there is an end to
everything and I want to marry before Parliament meets."

"And you never thought I would not marry you?" she asked, in some
wonder.

"I have never faced the possibility of failure in my life. And you are
as much to me as my career. I cannot imagine life without either."

He suddenly put his hand under her chin and lifted her face; she was of
tiny stature and this disadvantage in the presence of man was not the
least subtle of her charms. "Say yes quickly," he cried, and the
strength of his will and passion vibrated to her through the medium he
had established. But she pouted and drew back.

"Perhaps I want a career of my own. You would swallow me whole."

"You could become the most powerful woman in the Liberal party--have a
salon and all the rest of it."

"I happen to be a Conservative."

"What has that to do with it? Or politics with love, for that matter?
Tell me that you love me. That is all I care about."

"It is only during the engagement that love is all. Marriage is the
great public school of life; the passions fall meekly into their proper
place--beside the prosaic appetites, the objective demands; somewhat
below the faculties that distinguish the higher kingdom."

"Indeed? Well, I am sanguine enough to believe that we would prove the
exception. I hardly dare think of it!" he burst out. "For God's sake
keep your epigrams for other people and be a woman pure and simple."

She looked both as she permitted her full red mouth to tremble and his
arms to take sudden possession of her.

X

In the large liberty of an English country-house Isabel might have found
the long morning tedious had she been of a more sociable habit. Lady
Victoria, Mrs. Throfton, and Lady Cecilia Spence went to church; all
three, as great ladies, having a dutiful eye to the edification of
humbler folk. Flora Thangue spent the greater part of the morning
writing letters for her hostess, the men fled to the golf-links, and the
rest of the women not engaged in vehement political discussion, or
Bridge, were striding across country. Isabel, tempted by the charmingly
fitted writing-table in her room, although an indolent correspondent,
wrote a long and amply descriptive letter to her sister, which her
brother-in-law, being more than usually hard up at the moment of its
arrival, transposed into fiction and illustrated delightfully for a
local newspaper. Then she roamed about looking at the pictures, testing
her European education by discovering for herself the Lelys and Mores,
the Hoppners, Ketels, Holbeins, Knellers, Dahls, and Romneys. She had a
quick instinct for the best in all things, but cared less for pictures
than for other treasures of the past: marbles, the architecture in old
streets, hard brown schlosses on their lonely heights, the Gothic spaces
of cathedrals, the high and fervent imaginations, immortal yet nameless,
in the carvings on stone; the jewelled facades of Orvieto and Siena,
the romantic grandeur of the Alhambra.

She opened a door at the back of the central hall and found herself in a
pillared corridor with a door at either end. Both rooms were open, and
as a blue cloud hung about the entrance to the left, she turned to what
proved to be the library of Capheaton. It was a square light apartment,
with the orthodox number of books, but with so many desks and
writing-tables that it looked more like the business corner of the
mansion. Here, indeed, as Isabel was to learn, Lady Victoria held daily
conference with her housekeeper and stewards, interviewed the women of
the tenantry, and those active and philanthropic ladies of every
district that aspire to carry the burdens of others. Here Gwynne kept
his Blue Books and thought out his speeches, but it was not a favorite
room with the guests.

Isabel had found many books scattered about the house, solid and
flippant, old and new, but nothing by her host. She rightly assumed that
his works would be disposed for posterity in the family library, and
found them on a shelf above one of the large orderly tables. As a matter
of fact she had read but two of his books, and she selected another at
random and carried it to a comfortable chair by the window. The work was
an exposition of conditions in one of the South African colonies,
containing much criticism that had been defined by the Conservative
press as youthful impertinence, but surprisingly sound to the
unprejudiced. What had impressed Isabel in his other books and claimed
her admiration anew was his maturity of thought and style; she saw that
this volume had been published when he was twenty-four, written,
doubtless, when he was a year or two younger. She felt a vague pity for
a man that seemed to have had no youth. Since his graduation from
Balliol in a blaze of glory he had worked unceasingly, for he appeared
to have found little of ordinary recreation in travel. She wondered if
he would take his youth in his bald-headed season, like the self-made
American millionaire.

His style, pure, lucid, virile, distinguished, might have been the
outcome of midnight travail, or, like his eloquence on the platform, a
direct flight from the quickened brain. It certainly bore no resemblance
to his amputated table talk. But in a moment she dismissed her
speculations, for she had discovered a quality, overlooked before, but
arresting in the recent light of his cold arrogance and haughty
self-confidence. Behind his strict regard for facts and the keen insight
and large grasp of his subject, which, without his evident care for the
graces, would have distinguished his work from the dry report of equally
conscientious but less gifted men, was the lonely play of a really lofty
imagination, and a noble human sympathy. As she read on, this warm
full-blooded quality, tempered always by reason, grew more and more
visible to her alert sense; and when the fires in his mind blazed forth
into a revelation of a passionate love of beauty, both in nature and in
human character, Isabel realized what such a man's power over his
audience must be; when this second self, so effectually concealed,
suddenly burst into being.

"It is too bad a woman would have to live with the other!" she thought,
as she raised her eyes and saw Gwynne emerge from the woods with Mrs.
Kaye. "I cannot say that I envy her."

"By Jove, they have an engaged look!"

Isabel turned with a start, but greeted Lord Hexam with a smile. He was
as yet her one satisfactory experience of the young English nobleman,
whom, like most American girls, she had unconsciously foreshadowed in
doublet and hose. Hexam was quite six feet, with a fine military
carriage; he had been in the Guards and had not left the army until
after two years of active service; his blue eyes were both honest and
intelligent, and he was generally clean cut and highly bred.

He drew up a chair beside Isabel and reflected that she was even
handsomer than he had thought, with the sunlight warming the ivory
whiteness of her skin, although it contracted the mobile pupils of her
eyes; and that little black moles when rightly placed were more
attractive than he had thought possible. They gave a sort of daring
unconscious eighteenth-century coquetry to what was otherwise a somewhat
severe style of beauty. But he was a man for whom a woman's hair had a
peculiar fascination, and while they were uttering commonplaces at
random his eyes wandered to the soft yet massive coils encircling
Isabel's shapely head, and lingered there.

"Pardon me!" he said, boyishly. "But I always thought--don't you
know?--that hair like that was only in novels and poems and that sort of
thing. Is it all your own?" he asked, with sudden suspicion.

"You would think so if you had to carry it for a day. I should have had
it cut off long ago if it had happened to be coarse hair. It is an
inherited evil of which I am too vain to rid myself. The early Spanish
women of my family all had hair that touched the ground when they stood
up. I have an old sketch of a back view of three of them taken side by
side; you see nothing but billows of fine silky hair. But I have put it
out of sight, as it looks rather like an advertisement for a famous hair
restorer."

"I'd give a lot to see yours down. It's wonderful--wonderful!"

"Well, I have promised a private view to some of the women. If Lady
Victoria thinks it quite proper perhaps I'll admit you."

"I'll ask her for a card directly she comes home. Let it be this
afternoon just after tea."

"I wonder if they really are engaged," said Isabel, who had been told
that Englishmen never paid compliments, and was growing embarrassed
under the round-eyed scrutiny. Gwynne and Mrs. Kaye had paused by a
sundial.

"Who? Oh yes, I should think so, although there was some talk that poor
Bratty--but no doubt that was mere rumor, or Mrs. Kaye wouldn't be on
with Jack like that. By Jove, he is engaged. I never saw him look
so--so--well, I hardly know what."

"Do you approve of the match?"

"If my consent is asked I shall give them my blessing. He is the salt of
the earth, although a bit lumpy now and then; and she is such a jolly
little thing, full of genuine affection--just the wife for Jack."

"You believe in her, then?" Isabel wondered, as many another has done,
at the miasma that seems to rise and dim a man's perceptive faculties
when he is called upon to estimate the worth of a fascinating woman.

"Rather! Don't you?"

"She struck me as being one of the few people without a redeeming
virtue. To be sure that has a distinction of its own."

"Oh!" He wondered if so handsome a girl shared the common rancor of her
age and sex against charming young widows.

"And the worst mannered," continued Isabel, who knew exactly what he
thought. "And plebeian in her marrow. I wish my cousin had chosen Miss
Thangue or any one else."

"But he couldn't marry Flora," said the literal young nobleman. "She
hasn't a penny, and is the friend of all our mothers. But I'm sorry
you've such a bad opinion of Mrs. Kaye. She's tremendously popular with
us. I'm not one of her circle--retinue would be more like it; but I've
always thought her the brightest little thing going, and I'm sure she
wouldn't harm a fly."

"I'm sure she would do nothing so little worth her while. Well, there is
no need for your eyes to be opened; but I wish that my cousin's might
be. I suppose that you have the same faith in him that so many
others--himself included--seem to have."

"Rather!--You are a most critical person. Haven't you?"

"I think I have. In fact I am sure of it. That is the reason I have been
wishing he were an American."

He laughed boyishly. "That is a good one! But we need him over here. You
haven't the slightest idea how much. We get into a blue funk every time
Zeal takes a cold on his chest. To quote Mrs. Kaye, 'A Liberal peer is
as useful as a fifth wheel to a coach, and as ornamental as whitewash.'
Clever, ain't it?"

"I think people are touchingly easy to satisfy! I have been treated to
several of Mrs. Kaye's epigrams and heard as many more quoted. It seems
to me that nothing could be easier than the manufacture of that popular
superfluity."

"Perhaps--with time to think them out beforehand. Anyhow, it's rather
jolly to hear things you can remember."

"I should be the last to deny her cleverness," said Isabel, dryly. But
being by no means desirous that he should find her too acid, she dropped
her eyes for a moment, then raised two dazzling wells of innocence. "I
am tired of the subject of my cousin and Mrs. Kaye," she murmured. "Are
you as ambitious as Jack?"

"No use." He stared helplessly down into the blue flood. "There is no
escape from the 'Peers' for me, although my father, I am happy to say,
is as healthy as I am. But after the brain cells become brittle--one
never knows. I too am a Liberal, and am getting in all the good work of
which I am capable while there is yet time. I don't go as far as
Jack--don't want to see the 'Peers' chucked. I have a strong reverence
for traditions, and no taste whatever for democracy--that would be too
long a step. And I think a man should be content to be useful, do the
best he can, in his own class; and be loyal to that class whatever
happens. Of course I understand Jack's point of view, because I
understand him so well, and know that he would be the most maimed and
wretched man on earth in the Upper House; but personally, I think one
should be prepared to accept inherited responsibilities."

And then, as they were both young, and mutually attracted, they found
many subjects of common interest to keep them in the library until the
gong summoned them to luncheon.

XI

Flora Thangue, after luncheon, took Isabel out in a pony cart, and
although too loyal to gossip intimately about her patrons, incidentally
directed a search-light into certain of their recesses; a light that was
to prove useful to Isabel in her future intercourse with them, although
it did not in the least prepare her for an experience that awaited her
later in the day. Miss Thangue's mind was occupied at first with the
obvious engagement of Gwynne and Mrs. Kaye.

"That woman was born to upset calculations!" she exclaimed. "Yonder is
the castle of the dukes of Arcot. We are going over to a party to-morrow
night. It really looks like a castle with all those gray battlements and
towers, doesn't it? We don't call every tuppeny-hapenny villa inhabited
by a nobleman a 'castle' as they do in Germany and Austria. Well--that
clever little panther! I'd like to pack her into one of her own epigrams
and bury her alive. I _know_ she was as good as engaged to Brathland.
Now, having decided that, all things considered, Jack is the best match
going--for everybody believes Lord Zeal to be worse than he is--well!
there is something appalling in a woman who can adjust herself as
quickly as that; whose caprices, sentiments, passions, all natural
impulses, are completely controlled by her reason. I wish Vicky saw
through her; she has so much influence over Jack, and such deadly
powers of ridicule. But Vicky, like all spoiled women of the world, is
as much the victim of the subtle flatterer as any man, and Julia Kaye
has managed her beautifully. She considered Jack for a bit before she
was sure of Brathland. Vicky's real reason for indorsing Julia
Kaye--between us--is because she believes her to be one of that small
and select band that can hold a man on all his various sides, and she
wants to avoid the probability of an absorbing and possibly tragic
liaison--like Parnell's, for instance--which might interfere with,
perhaps ruin, Jack's career. That is all very well, as far as it goes,
but I believe Julia Kaye to be so entirely selfish that when Jack finds
her out he will sicken of life. I have had the best of opportunities to
study women, and I have brought Jack up--I had the honor to be the
highly idealized heroine of his calf-love, and have been more or less in
his confidence ever since. In certain ways I understand him better than
his mother does, for she has seen too much of the worst side of men, and
is at heart too _blasee_ to have much respect for or knowledge of their
spiritual side; and if I have ever had any maternal spasms in my
virtuous spinsterhood they have been over Jack. Can't you help us out?"
she asked, turning suddenly to the stranger, to whom she was powerfully
attracted. "Are you as indifferent as you look?"

"I have no idea! But although I should not in the least object to be
cast for a part in this domestic drama, I don't care for it at the price
of too much 'Jack.' To attempt to cut out Mrs. Kaye I should need a
little genuine enthusiasm; and frankly, your beloved prodigy does not
inspire it. I like Lord Hexam far better."

"Oh, Jimmy! He's a fine fellow, but only a type."

"He hasn't a rampant ego, if that is what you mean. And for every-day
purposes--" She shrugged her shoulders. "I could endure and even be
deeply interested in Elton Gwynne if he happened to be my brother and I
could hook my finger in his destiny; but in any other capacity--no,
thank you!"

"Are you going to marry Jimmy?"

"I did not even know he was not already married. Do you see nothing in a
man but a husband over here? If I ever do marry it will not be before I
am forty."

"That is rather long--if you see much of the world meanwhile! And Jimmy,
although there is not much money in the family--about twenty thousand a
year--would be a very good match. He will be Earl of Hembolt--a fine old
title."

"You assume that such a plum may be pulled by the first comer."

"Rather not! But you Americans have such a way with you! What is more to
the point, I never saw him so bowled over."

"Well," said Isabel, imperturbably, "I will think of it. This English
country and these wonderful old houses, with their inimitable
atmosphere, appeal to me very strongly. I have more the feeling of being
at home here than I had even in Spain, where I have roots. And socially
and picturesquely, there is nothing to compare with the position of an
English noblewoman."

Flora turned her eyes frankly to the classic profile beside her. Isabel
had removed her hat, and, framed in the heavy coils of her hair, her
features impressed the anxious observer as even more Roman than early
American; although had she but reflected she would have remembered that
the type of the Caesars had its last stronghold in the United States of
the eighteenth century. Isabel looked like a very young Roman matron,
but her resemblance to the stately effigies in the galleries of Florence
and Rome, strong in virtue or vice, was so striking that once more Flora
longed for her support. A woman with such capabilities would be wasted
in the role of a mere countess--but as the wife of an aspiring Liberal
statesman! She devoutly wished that the American had arrived six months
earlier, or that Brathland still lived.

But she was a very tactful person and was about to drop the subject,
when Isabel slowly turned her eyes. They looked so much like steel that
for the moment they seemed to have lost their blue.

"I have made up my mind to do something to prevent this marriage," she
announced. "I do not know what, as yet. I shall be guided by events."

And Flora devoutly kissed her, then gossipped pleasantly about the other
guests and the people in the neighborhood. Isabel was curious to know
something of the duchess she was to meet on the morrow.

"Does she really look like a duchess?" she asked, so innocently that
Flora laughed and forgot the Roman-American profile, and the fateful
eyes that had given her an uncomfortable sensation a moment before.

"Well--yes--she does--rather. It is the fashion in these days not to--to
be smart above all things, excessively democratic, animated, unaffected,
clever. But our duchess here is rather old-fashioned, very lofty of head
and expression. She has a look of floating from peak to peak, and
although passee is still a beauty. To be honest, she is hideously dull,
but as good a creature as ever lived, and all that the ideal duchess
should be--so high-minded that she has never suspected the larkiest of
her friends."

"Well, I am glad she looks the role. I have artistic cravings."

They drove for an hour through the beautiful quiet green country, past
many old stone villages that might have been the direct sequence of the
cave era. An automobile skimmed past and the pony sat down on its
haunches. Isabel had a glimpse of a delicate high-bred face set like a
panel in a parted curtain.

"That is the duchess," said Miss Thangue. "She wouldn't wear goggles for
the world, and only gets into an automobile occasionally to please the
duke. There is nothing old-fashioned about him."

"She looks as if her name ought to be Lucy," said Isabel, to whom the
pure empty face had appeared like a vision from some former dull
existence, and left behind it an echo of insupportable ennui.

XII

Isabel had looked forward all day to the promised talk with the somewhat
formidable relative for whom, however, she had conceived one of those
enthusiasms peculiar to her age and sex. Her wardrobe was barren of the
costly afternoon gowns smart women affect, but she put on an organdie,
billowy with many ruffles, that consorted with the season, at least.
Blue cornflowers were scattered over the white transparent surface, and
she possessed no more becoming frock. Had she been on her way to a tryst
with Lord Hexam she would have thrust a rose in her hair, accentuated
the smallness of her waist with a blue ribbon, the whiteness of her
throat with a line of black velvet; but she had the instinct of dress,
which teaches, among many things, that self-consciousness in external
adornment provokes amusement in other women.

She had not the least idea where to find Lady Victoria's boudoir,
although a casual reference by Flora Thangue suggested that it was on
the bedroom floor. She lost herself in the interminable corridors and
finally ran into Elton Gwynne.

"Your mother expects me--where is her boudoir?" she asked.

He was at peace with the world, and answered, good-naturedly: "I'll
pilot you. Her rooms are over on the other side."

"You look as if you should be congratulated about something," she said,
demurely. "There are all sorts of rumors flying about."

She had half-expected to be snubbed, but he was not in the humor to snub
anybody. "You can congratulate me!" he said, emphatically. "The most
wonderful woman in the world has promised to marry me."

"I hope you will be happy," said Isabel, conventionally. She resented
his sudden drop from his pedestal, for he looked sentimental and
somewhat sheepish. Still, her youth warmed to his in spite of herself,
and again he noticed with a passing surprise that her eyes were both
lovely and intellectual. He was hardly aware that coincidentally his
Julia's eyes met his mental vision with a glance somewhat too hard and
brilliant, but he caught Isabel's hand and gave it a little shake.

"Thank you!" he exclaimed. "That was said as if you jolly well meant it.
There are my mother's rooms."

He went off whistling, and Isabel raised her hand and looked at it
meditatively; his own had been unexpectedly warm and magnetic. She had
imagined that his grasp would be cold and loose.

He had indicated a private corridor, and she entered it and approached a
door ajar. There was no response to her knock, but as she was expected,
and Lady Victoria no doubt was still dressing, she pushed open the door
and entered. The room was empty, but Isabel was instantly impressed with
its reflection of an individuality, although of a side that had
attracted her least. Here was none of the old-time stiffness of
Capheaton, and there was a conspicuous absence of dead masters and their
pupils. It was not a large room. The walls were covered with a Japanese
gold paper to within four feet of the floor where it was met by a
tapestry of Indian cashmeres, and from it was separated by a narrow
shelf set thick with photographs in silver frames, and with odd and
exquisite bibelots. On the walls were artists' sketches, and two or
three canvases of the Impressionist and Secessionist schools, expressive
of the ardent temperaments of their creators. In the place of honor was
a painting of Salambo in the folds of her python.

There were several deep chairs and a mighty divan covered with
gold- cushions and a tiger-skin, whose mate was on the floor. The
gloom of the afternoon was excluded by heavy gold- curtains, and
the only, but quite sufficient light, filtered through an opalescent
globe upheld by a twisted bronze female of the modern Munich school,
that looked like nothing so much as Alice elongating in Wonderland.

Isabel suddenly felt herself and her organdie absurdly out of place in
this room with its enchantress atmosphere. She wished that Lady Victoria
had made the appointment for the library, which was equally in tune with
another side of her.

She was even meditating a retreat, inexplicably embarrassed, when an
inner door opened and Lady Victoria entered. She wore a tea-gown of a
sort, black and yellow, open over the soft lace of a chemisette,
although a dog-collar of tiny golden sequins clasped her throat. In her
hair a golden butterfly trembled, and in that light she would have
looked little older than her guest had it not been for the expression of
her face. It was this expression that arrested Isabel even more than the
toilette, as she moved towards the divan without a word of greeting. It
looked as if it had been put on with the costume, both intended to
express a mood of the wearer: which might have been that of a tigress
whose ferocity was slowly awakening with the approach of the victim. The
black eyes were heavy with the lust of conquest, the points of the mouth
turned up more sharply than usual; there was an insatiable vanity in the
commanding poise of her head. She was as little like the woman of the
morning as the sun is like the midnight, and Isabel experienced a
positive terror of her.

Feeling sixteen and very foolish, she sank to the edge of a chair and
muttered something about the charm of the room. Then, as Lady Victoria,
who had arranged herself among the shining pillows, continued to stare
at her with absolutely no change of expression, it dawned upon her that
she had not been expected but that some one else was. With too little
presence of mind left to retire gracefully and too much pride to appear
to have ventured into the cave of Venus unasked, she managed to
articulate her gratitude for the invitation of the morning.

"Oh!" Lady Victoria's eyebrows expressed a flicker of intelligence. "I
hope you have managed not to bore yourself."

Isabel plunged into an account of her drive, to which Lady Victoria, who
had lit a long Russian cigarette, paid no attention whatever. Her
expression was still petrified, except that she might have had the scent
of blood in her slightly dilating nostrils.

Suddenly the slow flame in her eyes burned upward, and Isabel, her head
fairly jerking about, saw that a man had entered and was advancing
rapidly across the room, his heavy eyes wide with admiration. It was the
Frenchman whom Lady Victoria had honored with so much of her attention
the evening before.

He raised to his lips the pointed fingers negligently extended, and
murmured something to which Lady Victoria replied in French as pure and
fluent as his own; and in a low rich voice, with not an echo in it of
her habitual abruptness or haughty languor.

The Frenchman accepted a cigarette and a low chair opposite the divan,
whose golden cushions seemed subtly to embrace the yielding flexible
figure against them. Neither took the slightest notice of the third
person beyond a muttered introduction and acknowledgment, and as the man
embarked on a soft torrent of speech, bearing the burden of his
beatitude in at last meeting the only Englishwoman whose fame in Paris
was as great as among her native fogs, Isabel rose and retreated with
what dignity she could summon. Then Lady Victoria, seeing that she was
rid of her, and courteous under all her idiosyncrasies, rose with a long
motion of repressed energy and accompanied her to the door, her hand
resting lightly against the crisp organdie belt.

"Will you pour out the tea for me?" she asked, sweetly. "I doubt if I go
down."

No small part of her dangerous fascination lay in her sincerity. She
really liked Isabel, although it was characteristic of her that she did
not in the least care at what conclusions that puzzled young woman might
arrive in a more solitary meditation.

When Isabel found herself in the long cool corridor, set thick with
gentle landscapes, and hunting squires, and dames haughty and humble,
she drew a long breath of relief, as if she had escaped from a jungle.
But she felt oddly wounded in her self-love, young and silly. She had
thought herself old in the last three years, tremendously modern. What
did she know? The easy morals of students in France and Germany had
repelled her at first, but she had ended by accepting them as a matter
of course, and had rather plumed herself upon her accumulating grains
and blends of human nature. She felt a rush of contempt for their
crudity. What children they were with their simple unmorality of
artists, as ignorant of the real world as babes in a wood!

When she reached her own room she astonished herself by bursting into a
passion of tears. It was some time before she understood what had
induced it. It was not that the illusions of youth had received a hard
blow, for many of them had disappeared long since in Paris, when she had
supported an American girl of decent family but too much liberty through
the most desperate experience that a young woman, alone and friendless
in a foreign city, well could have. The girl had died cursing all men
and the folly of women, and after Isabel had buried her and the leading
cause of her repentance, she returned to her lonely flat in a state of
disillusion and disgust which seemed to encase her by no means
susceptible heart in a triple panoply. This state of mind had lasted for
at least three months. And there was little of which she had not
abstract knowledge, nor had she lived a quarter of a century to learn
for the first time of the license which the world permits to women so
highly placed that they have come to believe themselves above all laws.

But all her experience and abstract knowledge counted for nothing, and
she had for the first time a sudden and complete appreciation of the
evil of the world and of its odd association with even the higher
virtues; of the fact that in the upper walks of life the balance was
more nearly even than on planes where there existed scantier
opportunities for development. There was no question that Victoria
Gwynne was made on a magnificent plan, as capable of heroism, no doubt,
as any of the salient women of history. She was an ornament in her
world, useful, sympathetic, the author of much good, a devoted and
inspiring mother. And yet there was no more question that this Frenchman
was the last of a long line of favored adorers than that Victoria, for
all her individualities, was but a type of her kind: a kind that was
sufficiently distinct from the hundreds of wholly estimable women that
were proud to know her, or accepted her as a matter of course.

And even these good women? Had they not the same passions, the same
inclinations in the secrecies of their souls? What was the determining
cause of their indisputable virtue? A happy marriage? Too many children?
Timidity? Absence of temptation? Or were they merely orthodox through a
more uneven balancing of their qualities, the animal in abeyance? For
this very reason were they not frequently narrow, unsympathetic,
unuseful--unless, indeed, they were of the few who, with the mighty
temptations of the Victoria Gwynnes, were mightier still in their
fidelity to some inner and cherished ideal. This lofty ideal of
womanhood Isabel had unconsciously set up in her soul, and the sudden
conviction of its imperfection was, after all, the reason of her sudden
despair. For the soul with its immemorial and often incommunicable
knowledge may have its moments of terror while the mind wonders.

And she was disheartened at the sense of insignificance and
mortification inspired by this contact with a side of life, as real and
consequent as motherhood or government, instead of feeling merely
repelled, infinitely superior in her unstained maidenhood. She had no
wish to emulate, but neither did she relish feeling provincial, a chit,
an outsider. Her youthful vanity had its way in a mind too speculative,
intelligent, observant, merely to be shocked. Her memory reverted to
experiences that had made her feel as much older than the ordinary girl
as she now felt at sea. What was she, Isabel Otis, after all? She felt a
mere assortment of fluids, which might or might not crystallize into
some such being as she had dimly apprehended, or into something quite
commonplace; realized with a shock that her own deep personal experience
had left her less definitely moulded than she had imagined.

She rose impatiently and bathed her eyes before ringing for the maid to
lace her for dinner--it was long past tea-time. "Perhaps I had better
marry Lord Hexam and have ten children," she thought. "That sort of
existence has kept more women up to the correct standard than anything
else except poverty."

XIII

"And is this really your first big party?" asked Hexam, wonderingly.

"The first! The first! And I am twenty-five! Just think of it! Of course
I have been to students' balls, and little parties in Rosewater. But a
function--never before."

"This is hardly a function--parties even in the big political
country-houses are more or less informal."

"Informal! The jewels fairly blind my provincial eyes. And this is a
real castle!"

"Oh yes, it is a castle," he said, laughing outright. "I suppose you
have read up its record?" he added, teasingly. "You industrious and
curious Americans know a lot more about us than we know about
ourselves."

"Of course I know the history of this castle. I haven't the least doubt
you know every word of it yourself. I have already learned that the
English are not nearly so vacant-minded as, in their curious pride, they
would have one believe."

She threw back her head, half-closing her eyes in the ecstasy of her new
experience. The dancing was in the picture-gallery, an immense room, in
which there were many dark paintings of the old Italian and Spanish
schools, besides the presentments of innumerable Arcots by the usual
popular masters of the Dutch and English. The ceiling was of stone and
vaulted, but set thick with electric lights, blazing down from their
great height like the crystal stars of the tropics. It had seemed to
Isabel that after entering the castle she had walked for ten minutes
before reaching this room, where as brilliant a company was disporting
itself as she was likely to look upon in England. The Duke of Arcot was
an energetic Conservative and a member of the present cabinet, but his
social attentions were ever directed to the prominent and interesting of
whatever party or creed. As he found a particular zest in being
surrounded by smart, bright and pretty women, the parties at the castle,
and at Arcot House in London, were seldom surpassed in either brilliancy
or interest. And as his rent-roll was abnormal, there was no sign of
dilapidation within the gray walls and towers of the ancient castle, but
much comfort and luxury against a background of countless treasures
accumulated throughout the centuries. He had taken an immediate fancy to
Isabel and promised to show her the lower rooms as soon as she tired of
dancing.

Hexam watched her with an amused indulgence that in no wise tempered his
mounting admiration. She was radiant. Her blue eyes were shining and
almost black, her cheeks flooded with a delicate pink. She wore a gown
of white tulle upon whose floating surface were a few dark-blue lilies.
The masses of her black hair were piled on her head in the fashion of
her Californian grandmothers, and confined by a high Spanish comb of
gold and tortoise-shell. Her only other jewel was a long string of Baja
California pearls that had glistened on warm white necks in many an old
California ballroom before ever an American had crossed the threshold of
Arcot Castle. They had been given by Concha Argueello, when she assumed
the gray habit of the Third Order of the Franciscan nuns, to the wife of
her brother Santiago and so had come down to Isabel.

And to-night this descendant of that powerful clan, unimaginable in her
modern complexities to their simple minds, was receiving homage in the
ballroom of one of the greatest houses in Europe. For there was no
question, even in the minds of the young married women, who carry all
before them in English society, that the American girl had created a
furore among the men. Isabel had confided to the duke, who had lunched
that day at Capheaton, and to Hexam, her haunting fear of being a
wall-flower, and both had vowed that she should have no lack of partners
at her first English ball. But to Hexam's disgust, at least, their
solicitude came to an untimely end, and he was able to secure but two
waltzes and a square dance. The duke had spoken for the cotillon, which
he had no intention of dancing. He was a most estimable person, but he
never ignored an opportunity to talk with a new and interesting woman.

Isabel could hardly have failed to be a belle that night, for her spirit
was pitched to a height of joy and triumph that charged her whole being
with a powerful magnetism. Possibly with a presentiment that it was to
be an isolated experience, she abandoned herself recklessly to the mere
delight of living, her will imperious for the fulness of one of the
dearest of girlhood's ideals. She was one of those women, cast, as she
well knew, for tragic and dramatic contacts with life, but Nature in
compensation had granted her a certain wildness of spirit that sprang
spontaneously to meet the pleasure, trifling or great, of the mere
present; no matter for how long a period, or how hard, its wings had
been smitten.

So she danced, and talked far more than was her wont, surpassing herself
in every way, and no more interested in poor Hexam than in twenty
others. He took her in to supper, however, and after three hours of
dancing she was glad to rest and be sheltered by his determined bulk,
planted squarely before her corner. She knew that she had a coronet very
close to her footstool, and that this brilliant night might be but the
prologue to a lifetime of the only society in the world worth while, but
she was not conscious of any desire beyond the brimming cup of the
moment. Moreover, she had never so thoroughly enjoyed being a girl, and
love-making would have bored her grievously.

The duke claimed her, and after a desultory tour of the great
reception-rooms and an infinite number of little cabinets, containing
some of the most valuable of the Japanese and Indian treasures, he led
her to the library, a luxurious room conducive to rapid friendship.

With that amiable desire, peculiar to the kindly Englishman, to gratify
the ingenuous curiosity of the American, he produced a huge leather
volume containing the various patents of nobility that marked the upward
evolution of his house from a barony in some remote period of the
world's history to the present dukedom, and the royal letters that had
accompanied them. It was something he never would have dreamed of doing
for a stranger of his own country, or of any state in Europe, but the
English humor Americans that please them much as they would engaging
children; and Isabel's eyes sparkled with so lively an intelligence that
the duke fancied she had literary intentions and might one day find
such information useful. He even showed her his complicated
coat-of-arms, which included a bend sinister, for he had royal blood in
his veins; and this slanting rod interested Isabel as deeply as the moat
under the window. She was even more interested in the duke's attitude;
it was evident that he felt no more vanity in his royal descent than
deprecation of its irregular cause and enduring emblem. It was, and that
was the end of it; but he had quite enough imagination to appreciate the
effect of so picturesque an incident in family history upon the mind of
the young republican.

"The best we can do is to descend irrelevantly from Washington,
Hamilton, or Jefferson," said Isabel. "Only we have not yet reached the
stage where we dare to acknowledge it on our coat-of-arms. The illusions
of the American youth must be preserved. Even the fact that one of our
Presidents was a son of Aaron Burr is still to be read only in the great
volume of unwritten history. My father was a sort of walking edition of
that work."

"That is new to me!" The duke was quite famous as a student of history,
and took a personal interest in America, having been over twice in
search of big game. He asked her many questions; but his interest in the
general subject was as nothing to the enthusiasm she aroused by a chance
allusion to the chicken-ranch. The duke was agricultural above all
things; he had a model estate bristling with scientific improvement. He
was enchanted at Isabel's picture of her wire-enclosed "runs" and yards
containing industrious chickens of all ages, engaged, however
innocently, in the pursuit of wealth. Isabel, when she chose, could
invest any subject with glamour, and her account, delivered in tones
notably accelerated, of the snow-white, red-crowned flocks, their
aristocratic little white mansions, the luxurious nurseries for the
"chicks," and the astonishing and costly banquets with which they were
daily regaled, was so lively that the duke vowed he would raise Leghorns
forthwith. He asked her so many practical questions, taking copious
notes, and inevitably embracing California ranch life in its entirety,
in his thirst for knowledge, that Isabel had no more dancing that night;
but she made an enduring impression upon the eminently practical mind of
her host.

It was quite two hours after supper, and Isabel was beginning to reflect
with some humor upon the brevity of all illusions, when Hexam and Miss
Thangue appeared simultaneously and announced that the Capheaton guests
were leaving. Hexam looked sulky and suspicious. Flora was smiling.

"For the first time--" she murmured.

Isabel and the duke laughed outright, and then shook hands warmly.

"When I go home we can correspond," she said to him, "and I will tell
you all the new kinks. We are always improving."

"The duke looked positively rejuvenated," said Hexam, spitefully, as
they walked down the corridor. "Have you discovered the elixir of life
in California, and promised him the prescription."

"No," said Isabel, demurely. "I have merely been initiating him into the
mysteries of raising Leghorns."

Hexam looked stupefied, but Miss Thangue burst into a merry peal of
laughter.

"Isabel!" she exclaimed. "I begin to suspect you are a minx!"

And Isabel laughed, too, in sheer excess of animal spirits and gratified
vanity. She had excellent cause to remember the ebullition, for it was
some time before she laughed again.

The duchess, with her light sweet smile, her old-fashioned
Book-of-Beauty style, a certain affectation of shabbiness in her
black-and-silver gown, looked a more indispensable part of the picture
than any of her guests, as she stood in the middle of the great
drawing-room with a group of her more intimate friends. Among them was
Lady Victoria, more normal of mood this evening, sufficiently gracious,
superbly indifferent, although she had held her court as usual.

She tapped Isabel lightly on the cheek with her fan. "You were quite the
rage," she said. "I never should have forgiven you if you had not been."
And Isabel had not the slightest doubt of her sincerity.

The duchess, in the immensity of her castle, did not pretend to keep an
eye on any one, and would have been the last to suspect that Miss Otis
had inspired her husband with a sudden passion for chickens. She shook
hands approvingly with the young American and asked her to come over
informally to luncheon on the morrow.

"Is your head turning?" asked Miss Thangue, as they drove home. "You
must reap the results of your success; it would be a pity not to. After
a few weeks here with Vicky you must go on a round of visits and then
have a season in London."

"It would be glorious!" exclaimed Isabel, in whom problems were
moribund. "I certainly believe I shall."

She was in the second of the carriages to reach Capheaton, and Gwynne,
who was still standing on the steps, helped her down, and asked her
pleasantly if she had enjoyed herself.

"I had such a good time I know I sha'n't sleep a wink for twenty-four
hours. I believe I'll go to the library and get a book of yours I began
on Sunday--only--" She hesitated. A talk with this enigmatical cousin
would be a proper climax to the triumphs of the night. She raised her
eyes, full of flattering appeal. "There are one or two points I did not
quite understand--I have hesitated to go on--"

He too was wakeful, and rose to the bait promptly. "Suppose you give me
an hour by the empty hearth. Will you? Well, go on ahead and I'll follow
in a moment--after I see that the men have all they want in the
smoking-room."

In the depths of the most independent woman's soul is a lingering taint
of servility to the lordly male, and in Isabel it warmed into subtle
life under the flattering response of this illustrious specimen. She
fairly sailed towards the library, wondering if any of the famous
old-time California belles, Concha Argueello, Chonita Iturbe y Moncada,
with their caballeros flinging gold and silver at their feet, Nina
Randolph and Chonita Hathaway and Helena Belmont, with their pugnacious
"courts," had ever felt as exultant as she. That last moment, as she
stepped lightly over the threshold of the library, was a sort of climax
to the intoxication of youth.

And then she stopped short, stifling a cry of terror. The library,
except for the wandering moonshine, was unlit, but a ray fell directly
across a shadowy figure in the depths of a chair, half-way down the
room. It was a relaxed figure, the head fallen on the chest; the arms
were hanging limply over the sides of the chair, the hands ghastly in
the moonlight. At the rustle of skirts the figure slowly raised its
head, and the eyes of a man, haunted rather than haunting, looked out of
a drawn and livid face. But the movement was not followed by speech, and
Isabel stood, stiff with horror, convinced that she was in the presence
of the Capheaton ghost. Of course, like all old manor-houses, it had
one, and she was too imaginative not to accept with her nerves if not
with her intelligence this ugly proof of a restless domain beyond the
grave. But her petrifaction was mercifully brief. There was a quick step
behind her, and then an exclamation of horror as Gwynne shot past and
caught the lugubrious visitant by the shoulder.

"Good God, Zeal!" he cried, and his voice shook. "What is it, old man?
You look--you look--"

The man in the chair rose slowly and drew a long breath, which seemed to
infuse him with life again.

"I probably look much as I feel," he said, grimly. "I'm about to go on a
journey, and if you can give me a few minutes--"

He paused and looked with cold politeness at Isabel. She waited for no
further formalities, but shaken with the sure foreboding of calamity,
turned and fled the room.

XIV

That night had also been one of triumph for Elton Gwynne. He had dined
at the castle, and--his Julia having flitted to another
country-house--spent the greater part of the evening in the smoking-room
with half a score of the most eminent men in political England; and
others whose recognition was not to be despised.

As there were many guests at the castle the dinner took place in the
banquet-hall, but at six or eight round tables, and Gwynne had found
himself distinguished above all the other young men present by being
seated at that of the duchess. The prime-minister, the chancellor of the
exchequer, two other members of the cabinet, and an ambassador were his
companions. All the women were of exalted station, but for this fact
Gwynne cared nothing, being entirely free of that snobbery which so
often agitates even the best-born of the world; indeed, would have been
resentful of the ripe age of the ladies--accumulated with their
political values--had it not been for the tremendous compliment paid to
his personal achievement.

He could not sit beside her grace in that nest of titles, but at the
suggestion of the duke he had been placed as nearly opposite her as the
round table permitted, and he soon forgot the broken circle of
immemorial bosoms in the manifest disapproval of the Conservative
premier towards himself, and in the attitude of the other men, which,
whether hostile or friendly, evinced a recognition of the rising star
and a tolerance of his ideas.

There is always a glamour about a very young man who has given
cumulative evidence of genius and compelled the attention of the world,
always distrustful of youth. His enemies had long since--and he was but
thirty--admitted his gift for letters, fiercely as they might scoff at
his conclusions; and his rewards for bravery in the field had aroused no
adverse comment. But while his most persistent critics had never
discovered him truthless and corruptible, his political sincerity had
been called into question even by his colleagues, and almost unanimously
by the opposition. His principles were by no means so rigidly outlined
as those of the great Whig families, nor of the men who belonged to the
Liberal party as a natural result of their more modest station and
protesting spirit. He was strong on the fundamental principles of the
party, and far more energetic in his advocacy of the rights and needs of
the working-man than any Liberal of his own class, but he rarely, if
ever, alluded to the question of Home Rule; a question somnolent but by
no means dead; and the omission savored of Unionism, in spite of his
avowed scorn of all compromises.

These facts, taken in connection with the pride and arrogance of the
young scion of the house of Strathland and Zeal, generated the suspicion
that he had allied himself with the Liberal party for two reasons only:
its weakness in first-class men, and his passion for self-advertising.
No one disputed his pre-eminence in this branch of industrial art, for
although he never descended to commonplace methods, and the interviewer,
far from being sought, rather dreaded him than otherwise, there was no
man in England who was such a mine for "copy," nor of a perennially
greener growth in the select front lawn of "news." When he attacked the
government he was eminently quotable, and this endeared him to both
reporters and editors. When he was interviewed, fearsome in manner as he
was, he sent the worm away packed with ideas and phrases. But although
he was almost continuously on the tongue, and the object of more
acrimonious discussion than any young man in England, distrust of him
had grown to such proportions that he had been dropped after one brief
sojourn in the House; and to regain his seat had taken two years of the
hardest and most brilliant fighting Great Britain had seen since the
Conservative majority of 1874 permitted Disraeli to rest on his prickly
laurels. But this memorable battle of one young man against a mighty
phalanx of enemies and doubting friends had battered down the prejudices
of his own party, and won a meed of applause from even those of stout
old Tory principles. The humbler class, upon whom the election largely
depended, were captivated by his eloquence, his insidious manipulation
of the best in their natures, filling them with a judicious mixture of
ideals and self-approval; while the phenomenon he invariably presented
on the platform of the gradual awakening into life of a warm-blooded
generous magnetic and earnest inner man, so effectually concealed at
other times within a repellent exterior, never failed to induce in them
the belief that something responsive in their own personalities awakened
that rare spirit from its stifled sleep. That the glamour of his birth
and condescension to their plane had aught to do with the dazzling
quality of his charm, they might have admitted had their minds been
driven by the enemy into the regions of self-analysis, but in any case
he was the theme of two-thirds of the "pubs" and reading-rooms in
England. He had achieved a sweeping victory that loomed portentously as
a forerunner of greater triumphs in the future; for the personal
popularity he had achieved, the gift for leadership he had demonstrated,
the self-control he showed at all times, and the fatally adhesive
quality of his biting wit, had strengthened the Liberal party and caused
the Conservative to wish that he had never been born.

And flushed with self-love and the conquest of the woman of his desire,
he had never talked better than on that night at Arcot; nor less
offensively, for his arrogance and assertiveness were tempered by the
warm high tide of his emotions. It was a magnificent room, the
banquet-hall at Arcot, as large as that of many royal palaces, hung with
old Gobelins and frescoed by a pupil of Giotto. It was a fit setting for
the triumphant hour of the "most remarkable young man since the younger
Pitt," a phrase which, if not notably suave, at least possessed an
astonishing vigor, and was almost as familiar in American and
continental newspapers as in his own proud nation; a nation always so
keen to possess the first in all departments of excellence--creating
them out of second-class material when the first is lacking--that the
wonder was she had been so long accepting Elton Gwynne. Nothing,
perhaps, but a noble desire for a really great man restrained her.

Opposite Gwynne, the duchess, sweet and tactful, if little more than an
ornamental husk in which the juices of her race possibly recuperated to
invigorate the future generations, was as fair and stately as her castle
demanded; and if her gown was shabby her jewels were not. On either
side of her table, which occupied the central position in the great
room, were some of the most beautiful women in England, the smartest,
the most politically important; all, without exception, of an inherited
status that brought them once a year as a matter of course within the
sternly guarded portals of Arcot. Gwynne did not know that Mrs. Kaye had
knocked at these sacred portals in vain; for such gossip, if by chance
he heard it, made no impression upon him whatever. But he was by no
means insensible to the salient fact that he was one among the chosen of
Earth to-night, and that it was good to be the hero of such an assembly.

For that he was the hero there was no manner of doubt, and when the
dinner was over he spent but half an hour in the drawing-room,
preferring the conversation of the heads of state, who so seldom
gratified the vanity of a man of his years, but whom he had the power to
interest whether they approved of him or not. He had many friends among
women, some conquered by the magic of notoriety, others, like Flora
Thangue, sensible of his finer side, or tolerant of him through
life-long intimacy; and there were times when he was as alive to the
pleasures of their society as any young sprig about town; but to-night
their admiration was too illogical to administer to the self-love which
in the last few days had palpitated with so exquisite a sense of
fruition. Moreover, it gave him the keenest satisfaction to read in the
manner of these older and long-tried men the grudging belief in his own
sincerity.

In reality his motives for joining a party at war with every tradition
of his house had been, primarily, as mixed as are all motives that bring
about great voluntary changes in a man's life. It was quite true that
he was inordinately ambitious, that he had a distinct preference for the
sensational method, as productive of speedier results; for he had no
intention of waiting until middle-age for the activities and honors he
craved in his insatiable youth; and it was also true that he was even
more of an aristocrat than many of his class, with whom a simpler
attitude had become the fashion, even if it were not marrow-deep. But
the ruling motive had been his passionate love of battle, a trait
inherited perhaps from his pioneer ancestors, whose roots were in the
soil. This desire to prove his mettle and fill his life with the only
excitement worthy of his gifts, would alone have made him turn from the
broad ancestral paths, but, like a lawyer fascinated by his brief, he
had long since been heart and soul with the party he had chosen, and,
with the exercise of his faculties, become possessed of a mounting
desire not only to be of genuine use to his country, but to lift the
family name from the comparative obscurity where it had rested during
the half of a century.

The present head of the family had been an invalid in his early life,
and Italy had withered whatever ambitions may have pricked him in his
youth. When he finally found himself able to live the year round in
England he saw no fault in a nation so superior to any of his exile, and
he had settled down to the life of a country squire, devoted to sport,
and supremely satisfied with himself. His eldest son, an estimable young
man, who had worked at Christ Church as if he had been qualifying for a
statesman or a don, died of typhoid-fever before the birth of his boy.
The present heir, brilliant, weak, cynical, absolutely selfish, had
rioted to such an extent that he had fatally injured his health and
incurred the detestation of his grandfather; Lord Strathland was not
only a virtuous old gentleman but was also inclined to be miserly. The
subjects upon which they did not quarrel bitterly every time they met
were those relating to Elton Gwynne, whom both loved, in so far as they
loved any one but themselves. Deeply as they disapproved of his
politics, they respected his independence and were inordinately proud of
him. Zeal's daughters, who bored him inexpressibly, were parcelled out
among relatives, and he led a roving life in search of beneficent air
for his weary lungs. All women had become hateful to him since he had
been forced to sit in the ashes of repentance, but he had consented to
enter upon a second marriage through the most disinterested sentiment of
his life, his love of his cousin, whose haunting fear of being shelved
in his youth had been poured into his ears many times. That he also
enraged his grandfather, who wanted nothing so much as the assurance
that his favorite should inherit the territorial honors of his house,
may have given zest to his act of renunciation. Not that he had the
least intention of giving his cousin a solid basis for despair for many
years to come, for no mother ever nursed her babe more tenderly than he
his weak but by no means exhausted chest. During his last interview with
Elton in London he had assured his anxious relative that he was taking
the best of care of himself, and that, in spite of blood-shot eyes and
haggard cheeks, his disease was quiescent; although he had decided to
start for Davos or some other popular climate before the advent of harsh
weather. Davos is a word of hideous portent in English ears, but Gwynne
had expelled it with all other cares from his mind, and on this night
when he returned from Arcot feeling a far greater man than any of his
house had ever dreamed of being, and with a song in his heart, the
awful face of his cousin, whom in the shock of the moment he thought
stricken with death, gave him the first stab of terror and doubt that he
had experienced in his triumphant life.

XV

"Come up-stairs," said Zeal. "We are liable to interruption here."

"Have they put you up decently?" asked Gwynne, with his mind's surface.
"The house is rather full."

"I shall leave by the seven-o'clock train, and it must be three now. I
have no intention of going to bed."

"Is that wise? You look pretty seedy, old man. You haven't had a
hemorrhage?" He almost choked as he brought the word out, and yet he was
not in the least surprised when Zeal replied, tonelessly, "I had
forgotten I ever had a chest;" for his mind was vibrating with a
telepathic message which his wits attacked fiercely and without avail.

As they entered his room he pushed his cousin into an easy-chair and
turned up the lamp on the writing-table. Then he planted his feet on the
hearth-rug with a blind instinct to die standing.

"Fire away, for God's sake," he said. "Something has happened. You know
you can count on me, whatever it is."

Zeal, who was sitting stiffly forward, his hands gripping the arms of
his chair, laughed dryly. "You will be the chief sufferer. The others
don't count."

"Has my grandfather speculated once too often? Are we gone completely
smash?" Gwynne was rapidly assuring himself that he was now prepared for
the worst, that nothing should knock the props from under him again,
that it was the sight of Zeal's face that had upset him; he was not one
to collapse before the stiff blows of life.

"It is likely. Anyhow, if he lives long enough he'll make a mess of what
is left." He raised his head slowly, and once more Gwynne, as he met
those terrible haunted eyes, felt as Adam may have felt when he was
being bundled towards the exit of Eden. He braced himself unconsciously,
and after Zeal's next words did not relax his body, although his lips
turned white and stiff.

"I am going to kill myself some time to-day," said Zeal, in a voice so
emotionless that Gwynne wondered idly if all his capacity for expression
had gone to his eyes. "I should have done it several hours earlier, but
I felt that I owed you an explanation. You can pass it on to my
grandfather when the time comes."

He paused a moment, and then he too seemed to brace himself.

"I killed Brathland," he said.

Gwynne moistened his lips. "Poor old Zeal," he muttered. "It must be a
horrid sensation--"

"To be a murderer? I can assure you it is."

Gwynne's mind seemed to darken until only one luminous point confronted
it, the visible tormented soul of his kinsman. He walked over to the
table and mixed two tumblers of whiskey-and-soda, wondering why he had
not thought of it before. They drank without haste, and then Gwynne took
the chair opposite Zeal's.

"Tell me all about it," he said.

"Brathland and I had not been friends for some years. He was a bounder,
and an ass in the bargain. I never, even when we were on speaking
terms, made any particular effort to hide what I thought of him--it
wasn't worth while. Of course, with every mother firing her girls at his
head, and the flatterers and toadies from whom a prospective duke cannot
escape if he would, he had an opinion of himself that would have made me
the object of his particular rancor, even if I hadn't cut him out with
three different women that couldn't marry either of us. When I got the
verdict that I must pull up or go under, he chose that particular moment
to take up with Stella Starr, the only woman I ever cared a pin for.
Somehow, he got wind of my condition, and knowing that I would prefer to
retire as gracefully as possible, it struck him as the refinement of
vengeance to make a laughing-stock of me when I was no longer in a
condition to play the game out; to advertise me as a worn-out rake for
whom the world of Stella Starrs had no further use. We never spoke again
until Friday night."

He paused, then mixed and drank another whiskey-and-soda, lit a
cigarette, and resumed.

"I had objected to his being let into the mine, which Vanneck's agent
and private letters had persuaded the rest of us would make our
fortunes; but I was helpless, for he was not only Vanneck's cousin, but
his brother is out in Africa and also interested in the mine. I
therefore consented to attend the dinner at which the whole business was
to be discussed, fully intending to treat him as I should any stranger
to whom I had just been introduced.

"At first all went well enough. We had the private dining-room and
smoking-room on the second floor at the Club, the dinner was excellent,
and Brathland, although nearly opposite me, behaved as decently as he
always did when sober. It was champagne that let loose the bounder in
him, and that was one reason I always so thoroughly despised him: the
man that is not a gentleman when he is drunk has no right to be alive at
all.

"We were not long discussing the mine threadbare, for we did not know
enough about it to enlarge into any picturesque details, and the agent,
who had seen each of us separately, was not present. Raglin read a
personal letter from Vanneck, and Brathland another from Dick. Then, the
subject being exhausted long before we reached the end of dinner, we
drifted off to other topics; and went into the smoking-room with the
coffee.

"It was at least six years since I had tasted anything stronger than
whiskey-and-water, and what devil entered into me that night to drink a
quart of champagne, and liqueurs, and pour port and brandy on top, the
devil himself only knows. Perhaps the old familiar sight of a lot of
good fellows; most likely the vanity of forcing Brathland to believe
that he beheld a rival as vigorous and dangerous as of old--I had gained
ten pounds and was looking and feeling particularly fit. At all events
the mess affected me as alcohol never had done in even my salet days,
and although my thoughts seemed to be moving in a crystal procession, I
became slowly obsessed with the desire to kill Brathland; whose face,
chalky white, as it always was when he was drunk--and he always got
drunk on less than any one else--filled me with a fury of disgust and
hatred. My mind kept assuring this thing that straddled it that I had
not the least intention of making an ass of myself; and that procession
of thought, in order to support its confidence, entered into an argument
with my conscience, which was in a corner and looked like a codfish
standing on its tail and grinning impotently. A jig of words escaped
from the mouth of the codfish: copy-book maxims, Bible admonitions, the
commandments, legal statutes; all in one hideous mess that annoyed me so
I slipped out, went up to my room, and pocketed a pistol. That logical
procession of thought in my mind assured me that this unusual move at a
friendly business dinner was merely in the way of self-protection, for
Brathland had once been heard to say that he wished we were both
cow-boys on an American ranch so that he could put a bullet into me
without taking the consequences--he never had a brain above shilling
shockers. My thoughts, as they visibly combined and recombined in the
crystal vault of my skull, asserted confidently that he had been reading
such stuff lately, and that, ten to one, he had a pistol in his pocket.

"When I returned Brathland was standing by the hearth, supporting
himself by the chimney-piece. The rest were lying about in long chairs,
smoking, and drinking whiskey-and-sodas. They were all sober enough, and
Brathland looked the more of a beast by contrast.

"I took a chair opposite him and ordered my thoughts to arrange
themselves in phrases that should pierce his mental hide and wither the
very roots of his self-esteem--his vanity was the one big thing about
him. But he took his doom into his own hands and built it up like a
house of cards.

"'How does it feel to be drunk once more?' he asked, with his damnable
sneer. 'It makes you look less of a hypochondriac, anyhow. "Granny
Zeal"--that's what the girls call you.'

"'If they do I've no doubt you taught them,' I replied, in tones as low
as his own. Several men were seated not far off, but neither of us hung
out a storm signal.

"'I did,' he said. 'Not but that I had had revenge enough. I had made
you ridiculous--you with your damned superior airs--like that infant
phenomenon cousin of yours who is making the family ass of himself over
Julia Kaye--'

"Those were his last words. I pulled the pistol and fired straight into
his abdomen--knew I couldn't miss him there.

"God! what a commotion there was. He doubled up with a yell--just like
him. The men fairly bounded out of their chairs. There were two waiters
in the room--just come in with Apollinaris. Raglin slammed the doors to,
and, while Ormond and Hethrington laid Brathland out on a sofa, asked
the servants if they would hold their tongues until it was known whether
he would die or not. They assented readily enough, knowing how damned
well worth their while it was. Then he went off for a surgeon--didn't
dare telephone--went straight for a young fellow named Ballast he
happened to know, and asked him if he would probe for a bullet and call
it appendicitis, for a thousand pounds. Apparently there was no time
wasted in argument, for he returned in half an hour with his man. The
surgeon probed for the bullet, but without success. Then he bandaged
Brathland, had him carried up to Raglin's room, and sent for a nurse
that he could trust.

"We all regathered in the smoking-room, shut the waiters in the
dining-room, and talked the matter over. By this time I was more
hideously sober than I ever had been in my life. What they thought of me
I neither knew nor cared, and it is doubtful if they knew themselves;
their one thought was to keep the matter from getting out and dragging
the Club into a scandal; and of course Raglin was equally keen on
sheltering the family, whether Brathland lived or died. Anyhow, I fancy
they would have stood by me, for if we have no other virtue we do stand
by each other.

"Practically the only question was the amount to be paid in blackmail,
for every trace of the affair had been removed; even the smell of
antiseptics and ether had gone. We finally called the waiters in and
offered them four hundred each for their silence, or in the case of
Brathland's death--the surgeon held out hopes--a thousand. They coolly
replied they would take a thousand apiece before noon on the following
day, and ten thousand each in case of death. We--or rather Raglin and
one or two others--jawed for an hour; but the wretches never yielded an
inch. They had us on the hip and were not likely to be put off by any
amount of eloquence. Of course we caved in and God knows what amount of
future blackmail the Club is in for. Then there was the thousand for the
surgeon, and the nurse would expect a thousand more. Of course I made
myself responsible for the entire amount. Raglin insisted for a time
upon going halves--blood may be blood, but he had despised Bratty as
much as I ever did--but of course I would not hear of it.

"The next afternoon the surgeon probed again, and Brathland died under
the ether. The wound after probing looked sufficiently like an ordinary
incision to deceive any one. Raglin and Harold Lorcutt--who, of course,
was told the truth--naturally had the body sealed up in lead before
taking it north. The old duke and the women of the family are in a fair
way to know nothing."

He paused abruptly and lifted his eyes once more to Gwynne's, bursting
into a laugh that sounded like the crackling of fire under dry leaves.

"Lovely story, ain't it?"

But Gwynne made no reply. His mind, released, was working abnormally,
and his face was as livid as his cousin's had been.

Zeal rose. The narrative had excited him out of his apathy and physical
exhaustion, the confession shaken the rigidity from his mind. He planted
himself on the hearth-rug with an air that approached nonchalance. His
thin clever face had a burning spot on either cheek, his sunken eyes
were no longer haunted, but brilliant and staring; his thin high nose
and fine hands twitched slightly, as if his nerves were enjoying a too
sudden release.

"Heavenly sensation--to be a murderer. What beastly names things have
and how we are obsessed by them! The word rings in my brain night and
day--I haven't slept three hours since it happened, and I never had the
remotest hope that he would live. It's the second time in my life I've
been up against a cold ugly fact that stands by itself in a region where
rhetoric doesn't enter. I believe I could tolerate the situation if I'd
done it in cold blood, if I'd thought it out, determined to gratify my
hatred of the man; if, in short, the deed had been the offspring of my
intelligence, for which I have always had a considerable respect. But to
have been under the control of a Thing, like any navvy, to be a criminal
without the consent of my will--

"I don't know that that fact alone would make life insupportable. But
there are other and sufficient reasons. I shall never get the hideous
sight of Brathland as he doubled up, and his horrid gurgling shriek, out
of my mind this side of the grave. And I am practically cleaned out. You
know how much I have left of my mother's property! It barely covers
what I paid out to-day. There isn't a penny for the girls. They will be
dependent on Strathland--as I should be if I lived; a position for which
I have as little relish as for that of a murderer on the loose. And
should I ever be really safe? If this stinking quartet takes it into its
head to levy annual blackmail, where is the money coming from? I won't
have the others let in while I'm alive. If it did come to that--and of
course it would--I'd get out anyhow, so I may as well go now and save
myself further horrors. Besides, with all our precautions, we may have
overlooked some significant detail, there may have been an eavesdropper,
the undertakers may have had their suspicions--for all I know I may be
arrested to-morrow--well, Jack, what would you do in my place?"

Gwynne shook himself and stood up. "I don't know. I have been feeling as
if I had killed Bratty myself. But I cannot imagine myself committing
suicide--talk about ugly words! In the first place I don't think that
one crime is any reason for committing another, and in the second--"

"It is cowardly! You don't suppose that old standby slipped my mind, do
you? Well, I am a coward. There you have my dispassionate opinion of
myself. I don't see myself in the prisoner's dock, in the graceful act
of dangling from the end of a rope; or, if the judge was inclined to
have pity on the family, of dying in a prison hospital. Even if I
trumped up the necessary fortitude I should be a blacker villain than I
am to bring disgrace upon my five poor girls and the woman that has
promised to marry me, to say nothing of Vicky and yourself. Nor, on the
other hand, do I see myself skulking in some hole abroad with the hue
and cry after me. I have just as little appetite for the role of the
haunted man in comparative security. Well, what would you do yourself?"

Gwynne shuddered. His own eyes were hunted. "How, in God's name, can any
man tell what he would do until he is in the same hole? I should like to
think that I would speak out and take the consequences. There is little
danger of your swinging, and as for imprisonment--one way or another
you've got to answer for your crime, and it seems to me that the honest
thing is to accept the penalty of the law you live under."

"Well, it doesn't to me," said Zeal, coolly, and lighting another
cigarette. "I asked the question merely out of curiosity, as the
workings of your mind always interest me. But I have quite made up my
own mind. The only reason I hesitated a moment--to be exact, it was half
a day--was on your account. Of course I know what my death will mean to
you."

"It was for that reason I was almost coward enough not to remonstrate."
Gwynne scratched a match several times before he succeeded in getting a
light. "Nevertheless, I meant it."

"Don't doubt it. And I am sorry--it is about the only regret I shall
take with me, that and some remorse on account of the girls. I suppose
Strathland will throw them a bone each--"

"I will look out for them. But you are not bent on this horror!" he
burst out. Wild plans of drugging his cousin, of locking him up, chased
through his mind, and at the same time he was sick with the certainty of
his own impotence. He knew his cousin, and he had the sensation that an
illuminated scroll of fate dangled before his eyes.

Zeal nodded. His excitement, his fears, had left him. He felt something
of the swagger in calm peculiar to the condemned in their final hour,
that last great rally of the nerves to feed the fires of courage. He
finished his cigarette and flung himself on the sofa.

"Wake me at twenty to seven, will you?" he asked. "I have ordered the
trap."

XVI

The young Marquess of Strathland and Zeal sat alone in the smoking-room
at Capheaton--the guests, with the exception of Flora Thangue and Isabel
Otis had departed six days ago--sunk in a melancholy so profound that
his brain was mercifully inactive: if the history of the past week was
dully insistent the future was not.

He had witnessed the descent of his grandfather and cousin into the
vault of the chapel at Strathland Abbey two days before, and after the
necessary interviews with stewards and family solicitors had returned
this afternoon to Capheaton with his mother. Lady Victoria, even her
dauntless soul sick with grief and horrors, had gone to bed at once, and
after a funereal dinner, where he had made no response whatever to the
feeble efforts of the girls to illuminate the darkness in which he
moved, had gone to the smoking-room alone, wishing to think and plan,
yet grateful that he could not.

He had known nothing of the weakness of his grandfather's heart, and the
old gentleman, as ruddy and debonair as ever, had just come in from the
coverts when he arrived at the Abbey a few hours after Zeal's departure
from Capheaton. Always vain of his health and appearance since his
complete recovery, now many years ago, Lord Strathland had turned a
haughty back upon the one physician that had dared to warn him; not even
his valet was permitted to suspect that he had been forced to pay to
Time any debt beyond bleaching hair and an occasional twinge of gout.
The care he had taken of himself in his delicate youth had given him a
finer constitution than he would have been likely to enjoy had he been
able to go the wild way of many of his family; and it was his familiar
boast that he intended to live until ninety.

Elton's visit roused no curiosity in his complacent breast, for the
favorite seldom announced his coming, and it was quite in order that he
should run down for congratulations, and delight his affectionate if
disapproving relative with personal details of the great fight. He had
come with the intention of being the one to break the news of his
cousin's death to his grandfather, should it be necessary; but he
permitted himself to hope that Zeal would rise above his type. He had
driven him to the station himself, dispensing with the groom as well,
and pleaded with him to wait at least a month; to consider the matter
more coolly and carefully than had hitherto been possible; begged him to
return to Capheaton; offered to travel with him if he preferred to leave
England. Whatever might threaten in the future there could be no
immediate danger of arrest, for if the shot had carried beyond the
private rooms of the Club there would have been evidence of the fact at
once, and if the undertakers had suspected the truth and delayed giving
information, their purpose was blackmail and could be dealt with.

And while he argued and pleaded he wondered, as he had during the hours
he watched beside his cousin sleeping, if, in spite of certain
principles which he had believed to be immutable, he could have found
any other solution himself. Honor has many arbitrary inflections, and
Zeal's act, being wholly abominable, there must seem, in his code, to be
no place for him among men. To walk among them unscathed, punished only
by a conscience that time would inevitably dull, and the loss of a small
fortune that his promised wife would more than replace, while some
passionate creature without powerful friends or money for blackmail went
to the noose, was an outrage abroad in the secret regions of the spirit
even if it made no assault upon public standards. He deserved
extinction, one way or another, and it would be almost as great an
outrage were he to cover his family with his own disgrace. Certain men
might, after such a lesson, live on to devote their lives to repentance
and beneficent works, but not Zeal; and Gwynne had no great respect for
a character made over after some terrifying explosion among its baser
parts. And the question would always remain if the highest honor would
not have commanded confession.

He made a deliberate effort to put himself in Zeal's place, and after
several failures accomplished the feat. He was willing to believe that
his first impulse would have been to destroy himself, not so much
through fear as through a blind sense of atonement, for when he
endeavored to argue that the crime belonged to the law and the public,
he swore at himself for a prig. Either way was suicide, and if the more
deliberate might damn a man's soul, no doubt he deserved nothing less,
and at least he had done his duty by his family and his class. Gwynne
had in the base of his character a puritanical stratum by no means mined
as yet, but with too many outcroppings to have been overlooked. But the
very strength it gave him served to confuse the simplicity of the
religious instinct; and duty, like the code of honor, endures many
interpretations in complex minds. He was quite sure that ultimately he
would have decided with his cold intelligence; and he was equally sure
that if he had doggedly determined to conquer life and be conquered by
nothing, that the best part of his mental existence would have gone into
the grave with his ideals.

Although there was still some confusion in his mind, he kept it out of
his words, and as he drove home from the station he was sanguine enough
to hope that he had at least dissuaded Zeal from precipitancy; for his
cousin, flippant, cynical, appeared to be quite his usual self, and as
he nodded from the window of the train bore little resemblance to the
demoralized wretch of the night.

Nevertheless, he hastened to his grandfather, for he knew how little the
mood of the moment may presage that of an hour hence; although he was
reasonably sure that if Zeal lived until the following morning it would
be some time before he brought himself to the sticking-point again. He
announced to his mother and his guests that it was his duty to spend
twenty-four hours with his grandfather, promising to return in time for
two hours' shooting on the morrow.

He took for granted that Zeal had gone to London. What then was his
foreboding horror when Lord Strathland, as they sat alone at
luncheon--the unmarried aunts were visiting--remarked with acerbity:

"Zeal arrived on the train before yours--went straight to his room,
giving orders he was not to be called until dinner--has not honored me
with so much as an intimation that he was in the house--Where are you
going?"

Gwynne had half risen. He sat down hastily.

"I was afraid he might be ill," he replied, coolly. "But doubtless he
merely had a bad night and wants sleep."

In a flash he had understood. It was like Zeal's cynicism to die as
close to the family vault as possible.

No meal had ever seemed as long as that last luncheon with his
grandfather, who promptly dismissed the subject of his detested heir and
asked a hundred questions about the campaign. A fierce sense of
protecting the two men he loved best enabled Gwynne to answer as
collectedly as if he had not been possessed with the sickening idea that
the very bones had gone out of him. When luncheon was over he
accompanied his grandfather to the library, then after smoking a third
of a cigar, left him to his nap, frankly stating that he thought he had
better look up Zeal, who had been rather seedy of late; he would risk
being unwelcome.

He walked slowly up the stair and along the corridor to his cousin's
suite; he was in no hurry to reach it, but neither could he wait for the
possible discovery of the servants at the dinner-hour.

He knocked at the door of the sitting-room. There was no answer. He
turned the handle. The door was locked. Then he pounded and called. He
was about to fling himself against the door when he heard a quick step
in the corridor, and before he could retreat Lord Strathland was beside
him. There was no defect in the old gentleman's eyesight nor in his
perceptions. Zeal's abrupt arrival without servant or luggage, and his
more than usual rudeness, had charged him with vague suspicions as well
as annoyance. When Gwynne, in spite of his self-control, had turned
livid upon hearing that Zeal was in the Abbey, and had risen as if to
fly to his rescue, a dark if undefined foreboding had entered his
grandfather's mind. But Lord Strathland respected the reserve of his
guests, no matter how nearly related, and, dismissing the subject, had
forgotten his apprehension until Gwynne revived it by his untimely
pilgrimage. Then Lord Strathland thought the time had come to hear the
truth.

"Well?" he demanded, sharply. "What is it? What's up? Why doesn't Zeal
open? I saw him in Piccadilly on Saturday and he stared at me as if he
had never seen me before. I thought at the moment it was some of his
damned impertinence, but concluded that he had something on his mind. He
looked more dead than alive."

Gwynne's back was to the light, and he controlled his voice, although
his heart was thumping. "Well, he has been, poor chap--awfully seedy--I
am really worried. He may have anticipated a final hemorrhage, and
crawled home to die." He cherished the hope that Zeal had been at pains
to procure an untraceable drug.

"Ah! Well--I hope that is it if the poor fellow is dead. He looked as if
he had more than ill-health on his mind. I thought he had pulled up, but
no doubt he went to pieces over some wretched woman again. Come, let us
get in. I don't want the servants to know anything of this at present."

They threw themselves against the door. The old gentleman was heavy and
Gwynne sound and wiry in spite of his delicate appearance. The door was
stout but its hinges were old, and after several attempts they drove it
in. Lord Strathland's face was pale and he was panting, but he led the
way rapidly through the sitting-room into the bedroom.

Zeal had undressed, extended himself on the bed, and covered his body
with an eider-down quilt. Lord Strathland jerked it off, and both saw
what they had expected to see, for a faint odor of burnt powder lingered
in the rooms.

Lord Strathland's face was ghastly, almost blue. He had anticipated
death, not with the imagination of the young, but dully, through the
atrophied faculties of his age, and the shock could hardly have been
greater had he found his grandson without warning.

"What does this mean?" he demanded, thickly. "You know and I will know."

Gwynne took him firmly by the arm and turned him about. "Not here," he
said. "Come to the library. I will tell you, but I am no more fit to
talk just now than you are to listen."

His grandfather submitted, and Gwynne dropped his arm and rearranged the
quilt over his cousin's body. At the same moment Lord Strathland's eyes
lit on a sealed letter addressed to himself. Before Gwynne could
interfere he had broken the seal. It ran:

     MY LORD,--I murdered Brathland. In cold blood--saving the fact
     that I was drunk. My entire private fortune has gone for purposes
     of blackmail. Even that might not have saved me eventually from the
     hangman, we have grown so damned democratic. All things considered,
     I am sure you will agree that it is quite proper I should make the
     exit of a gentleman while there is yet time. Jack will give you
     further particulars, should you care to listen to them. ZEAL."

He too had known nothing of the condition of his grandfather's heart,
and it had amused him to plan a last shock to the perennial optimism
and complacency of the person he disliked most on earth. The smile was
still on his frozen lips that expressed the amused anticipation of his
brain. Death, to do him justice, he had met with none of the cowardice
he had vaunted, and consistently with his arid cynical soul.

"Don't read it! Don't!" Gwynne had exclaimed, in agony, and forgetting
the awful figure on the bed in his alarm at the sight of his
grandfather's face. "If you must know the truth let me tell it in my own
way."

But Lord Strathland read, and fell at his feet like a bundle of old
clothes.

XVII

Gwynne wondered if he should ever shake off the pall-like memories of
the past week: the testimony before the coroner, in which every word had
to be weighed as carefully as if life instead of the honor of the
worthless dead were at stake, the reporters from the less dignified of
the British newspapers, and the American correspondents, two of whom
dodged the vigilance of the servants, entered the Abbey by a window, and
took snap shots of the lower rooms and of the coffins in the
death-chamber; the painful scenes with the women of the family, who had
descended in a body; the wearisome interview with the family solicitor,
in the course of which he had learned that he was heir to little more
than the entailed properties; which must be let in order to insure an
income for his three unmarried aunts, Zeal's five girls, and himself;
the hideous reiteration of "your lordship" by the obsequious servants,
that reproduced in his mind the slow deep notes of the passing bell,
tolled in the village for his grandfather and cousin.

A letter from Julia Kaye had fluttered in like a dove of promise, but he
had never been able to recall anything in the six pages of graceful
sympathy but her allusions to the dead as "the marquess" and "the earl."
He told himself angrily that his brain must have weakened to notice a
solecism at such a time, but it is in moments of abnormal mental strain
that trifles have their innings; and during the beautiful service in the
chapel he caught himself wondering if any woman of his own class could
have made such a slip. Always deaf to gossip, he had no suspicion that
his Julia had been laughed at more than once for her inability to grasp
all the unwritten laws of a world which she had entered too late. With
an ear in which a title lingered like a full voluptuous note of music,
she was blunt to certain of the democratic canons of modern society.
Although it gave her the keenest pleasure to address the highest
bulwarks of the peerage off-handedly as "duke" and "duchess," there had
been moments of confusion when she had lapsed naturally into "your
grace." And it would have seemed like a lost opportunity to have alluded
to a titled foreigner without his "von" or "de," even where there was a
more positive title to use as often as she pleased. It was the one weak
spot in a singularly acute and accomplished mind.

But of all this Gwynne knew nothing, and he was dully wondering if a
great love could be affected by trifles, and if his brain and character
were of less immutable material than he had believed, his mental vision
still straying through the insupportable gloom of the past week, when he
heard a light foot-fall beyond the door. He sprang to his feet, cursing
his nerves, and was by no means reassured upon seeing the long figure of
a woman, dressed entirely in white, a candle in her hand, approaching
him down the dark corridor. He had never given a moment's thought in his
active life to psychic phenomena, but he was in a state of mind where
nothing would have surprised him, and he had turned cold to his
finger-tips when a familiar voice reassured him.

"I am not Lady Macbeth," said Isabel, with a tremor in her own voice, as
she entered and blew out the candle. "But I felt like her as I braved
the terrors of all those dark corridors and that staircase in my wild
desire to talk to a living person. I had arrived at that stage where all
your ancestors gibbered at the foot of my bed. Flora has been sleeping
with me, but your mother wanted her to-night, and I am deserted."

"What a lot of babies you are!" Gwynne was delighted to wreak his
self-contempt on some one else, but glad of the interruption, and
unexpectedly mellowed by the sight of a pretty woman after the red noses
and sable plumage of the past week. It was true that he had seen Isabel
at dinner, but like Flora she had worn a black gown out of respect to
the family woe, and he hated the sight of black.

Now she wore a gown of soft white wool fastened at the throat and waist
with a blue ribbon; and even her profile, whose severity he had
disapproved, having a masculine weakness for pugs, was softened by the
absence of the coils or braids that commonly framed it: her hair hung in
one tremendous plait to the heels of her slippers.

"I see that you have no more sleep in you than I have," he said. "Let us
make a night of it."

It had rained all day and he was suddenly alive to a sense of physical
discomfort. He rang and ordered a servant to make a fire and bring the
tea-service.

"How did you know I was here?" he asked Isabel, when they were alone
again.

"I felt that you were, but I went first to your room and tapped. I was
quite capable of waking you up. Thank heaven I summoned the courage to
come down. This is delightful."

The fire was crackling in the grate, the water boiling in the big silver
kettle. Isabel made his tea almost black, but diluted her own, lest she
should be left alone before she too was ready for sleep.

"You have had a beastly time these last days," he said, for he was
genuinely hospitable. "I am sorry you did not happen to come a month
earlier. Have you seen anything of Hexam? He was going on to Arcot."

"He rode over, or walked over, every day. We should have fallen a prey
to melancholy without him, although you may believe me when I assure you
that we thought more of you than we did of ourselves. I am your own
blood-relation, so I have a right to feel dreadfully sympathetic--may I
have a cigarette?"

"What a brick you are to smoke! I don't mind being sympathized with for
a change. I have had to do so much sympathizing with others in the last
week that I have not had time to pity myself. Even my mother went to
pieces, for she was fond of Zeal, poor old chap, and her conscience
scorched her because she was always rather nasty to my grandfather--she
likes and dislikes tremendously, you know; although to most people she
is merely indifferent. But when she dislikes--" He blew the ashes from
the tip of his cigarette with a slight whistling sound.

Flora Thangue had extracted all the particulars of the death and suicide
from Lady Victoria--who knew nothing, however, of the tragic cause of
both--and imparted them to Isabel, whose mind, in consequence, was free
of morbid curiosity. She had also read the newspapers. The speculations
and veiled hints of the sensational sheets had not interested her, but
she had pondered deeply over leaders in the more dignified organs, which
had abounded in comment upon the changed conditions in the meteoric
career of the young man who was no longer Elton Gwynne, but a peer of
the realm.

"Do you mind it so awfully much?" she asked, after a short silence
during which they had both smoked absently and gazed at the fire.

"What?" Gwynne turned the cold surprise of his eyes upon her. "Losing
two of the four people I cared most for on earth?"

"Of course not. Being suddenly made a peer and having to begin all over.
You never will be called Elton Gwynne again, and you will have as much
trouble educating the public up to your new name as if you were emerging
from obscurity for the first time."

The words, brutally direct, rolled away the last clouds of his lethargy.
He vividly realized that he had been skulking before the closed shutters
of his understanding, accepting the new conditions with but the dulled
surface of his brain.

Now his naked soul stared at her out of his white face and tortured
eyes, and she looked away. She had not believed that he could be racked
with feeling of any sort, and it was as if she heard him cry: "Oh, God!
Oh, God!" although his lips were silent.

But she did not change the subject.

"I suppose you haven't seen the newspapers," she said. "I cut out all
the editorials and paragraphs I thought would interest you. One of the
big dailies, I forget which, said that the interruption of your career
was a greater political tragedy than Parnell's or Lord Randolph
Churchill's."

"Do they say that?" asked Gwynne, eagerly. "Well, God knows, it is a
tragedy for me."

"Don't you like being a peer the least little bit? I am too feminine,
possibly too American, not to see a certain picturesqueness in a title,
especially in such a pretty one as yours; and there is no doubt that you
are a more imposing figure in the eyes of the world to-day than you were
a week ago. Are you really indifferent to that side of it?"

"Am I? One does such a lot of self-posing and self-imposition. There are
few things in this world that gratify a man's vanity more than being a
peer of Great Britain, and, no doubt, had I happened to be born without
what you might call a fighting ambition, and certain abilities, I
should--barring natural grief--feel that I was one of the favorites of
destiny--that is to say if I had a commensurate income. The fact that I
must let the Abbey and Capheaton, and after portioning off all the
unmarried women of the family, shall have barely enough left to keep up
my flat in Charles Street, may have something to do with my absence of
enthusiasm. But--yes--I _am_ sure of myself!" he burst out. "I am the
most miserable man on earth to-night, and the reason is not that I have
lost two good friends, but because my career is ruined, broken off in
the middle."

"You could become a militant Liberal peer."

"Paradoxes don't happen to appeal to me. And the only chance for a
genuine fighter is the House of Commons. Besides, it is impossible for a
man to be a peer and remain a true Liberal. Power, and inherited
influence, and exalted social position have a deadly insinuation. I
don't believe any man is strong enough to withstand them. There is never
an hour that a peer is not reminded of his difference from the mass of
humanity; and human nature is too weak to resist complacency in the
end--long before the end. And complacency is the premature old age of
the brain and character. If this tragedy had not occurred, even if my
grandfather had lived on for fifteen years more, as there was every
reason to believe he would, I might have gone on that much longer before
discovering weak points in my character. Now God knows what I shall
develop."

"Have you made any plans?"

"Plans? I hadn't faced the situation until you spoke."

"You have weak spots like other people, of course. You would be a horrid
prig if you hadn't. But you surely must know if your Liberalism is
sincere, ingrained. There is no question that you are a hopeless
aristocrat in essentials. But so have been certain of America's greatest
patriots--Washington and Hamilton, for instance. I do not see that it
matters. One can hold to what seems to me the first principles of
advanced civilization--that hereditary monarchy is an insult to
self-respecting and enlightened men--without wishing to associate with
those that offend grammar and good taste. Education, intellect,
breeding, would create an aristocracy among anarchists on a desert
island--supposing any possessed them; and in time it would become as
intolerant of liberties as if it harked back to the battle of Hastings.
There is no plant that grows so rapidly in the human garden as
self-superiority, and it is ridiculous only when watered by nothing more
excusable than the arbitrary social conditions that exist in the United
States. I don't see that the qualities you have inherited should
interfere with your ability to see the justice and rationality of
self-government."

"They do not!" She seemed to beat his thoughts into their old coherent
and logical forms. "Whatever may have been the various motives that
impelled me into the Liberal party in the beginning, there is no
question that I have become even more extreme and single-minded than I
have let the world know. Perhaps it is my American blood, although I
never thought of that before. At all events, had the time been ripe I
should have devoted all the gift for leadership I now possess, and all
the power I could build up, to overturning monarchy in this country and
establishing a republic. There! I never confessed as much to a living
soul, but I think you have bewitched me, for I never have been less--or
more--myself!"

"With yourself as President?"

"Sooner or later--the sooner the better. But I waste no time in dreams,
my fair cousin--although I have something of a tendency that way. It was
enough that I had a great and useful career before me and might have
gone into history as the prime factor of the great change."

"Well, that is over," said Isabel, conclusively. "There is only one
thing left you and that is to come over and be an American."

"What?" He stared, and then laughed. "Ah!"

"You will have all the fighting you want over there. You will have to
work twenty times harder than you ever did here, for your accent, your
personality, the thirty years you have lived out of the country you were
born in, all will be against you. You will have to be naturalized in
spite of your birth--I happen to know of a similar case in my father's
practice--and that will take five years. In those five years you will
encounter all the difficulties that strew the way of the foreigner who
would gain the confidence of the shrewd American people--they are most
characteristic in the small towns and farming districts. You will win
because you were born to win, but you will learn for the first time what
it is to stand and fight absolutely alone--for if they learn of your
exalted birth they will but distrust you the more; and you will taste
the sweets of real success for the first time in your life. In spite of
your youth and enthusiasm, there is in you a vein of inevitable
cynicism, for you have had far too much experience of the flatterer and
the toady. You are too honest not to confess that if you had been born
John Smith there would have been no editorial comments of any sort upon
the tragic end of your relatives, and the great world would have taken
as little notice of your abilities until you had compelled its unwilling
attention by many more years of hard work. America will take you for
exactly what you are and no more. But you will have to become more
American than the Americans; although you may continue to say 'ain't it'
and 'it's me' and drop your final gs, because those are all the
hall-marks of the half-educated in the United States, and will rather
help you than otherwise. Of course you will assume charge of your own
ranch, for that will not only give you plenty to do, but it will be the
quickest way of becoming one of the people; and after you have been out
in all weathers for a year or two, turned a dark brown down to your
chest, ridden a loping horse on a Mexican saddle, talked politics on
street corners and in saloons, left your muddy or dusty wagon once a
week at the Rosewater hitching-rail while you transact business in a
linen duster, or yellow oil-skin overalls and rubber boots, you will
feel so American--Californian, to be exact--that the mere memory of this
formal cut-and-dried Old World will fill you with ennui."

There was a glint of laughter in Gwynne's eyes, but they were widely
open and very bright.

"I see! You are determined to make a convert of me. You began the night
of your arrival. I suspect you of having come over on a crusade."

"That was the moment of inspiration--that first night. I won't deny that
I have thought a great deal about it since--of little else since I read
those editorials."

He leaned back and regarded the sole of his shoe as if it were a
familiar. "That is a large order," he said, in a moment. "Colossal!
There might be worse solutions. And the life of a cow-boy, for a while
at least--"

"Don't delude yourself. You would not be the least bit of a cow-boy.
You wouldn't even look picturesque--if you did you might be sorry.
You would just be a plain northern California rancher. Of course
you would have all the riding you wanted, but there are no round-ups
worth speaking of on a ranch the size of Lumalitas. And probably you
would continue to let sections of it to men that wanted to raise cattle
or horses on a small scale. You had better devote yourself to the dairy
and to raising hay and grain, and turn about five hundred acres into a
chicken-ranch--nothing pays like that."

He threw back his head and laughed as heartily as if death and disaster
had never been.

"From the English hustings and the greatest parliamentary body the world
has ever known to chickens and butter in California! From Capheaton to
Rosewater, oil-skin overalls and a linen 'Duster!' Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!
But give me a comprehensive idea of the place, in your own inimitable
unvarnished diction. That will keep the ghosts off, at all events."

XVIII

Julia Kaye was one of those women designed by nature for the role of a
Valerie Marneffe, or of that astute Parisian's bourgeoise and more
romantic daughter, Emma Bovary; but tossed, in the gamble of the fates,
into a setting of respectable opulence, where her instincts for prey
were trimmed of their crudities, and the vehemence of her passions
subdued by the opportunity to gratify all other whims and desires.

Her father, born in the sooty alley of a manufacturing town in the north
of England, had run away to sea in his boyhood, deserted in the port of
New York, starved, stolen, peddled, washed dishes in cheap restaurants,
shovelled snow, tramped to Chicago, starved and peddled and shovelled
again, finally found a position with a firm of wholesale druggists. He
attended a night school, proved himself a lad of uncommon sharpness, and
in less than a year was first packing and then dispensing drugs. Five
years later he was drawing a large salary, and at the age of thirty he
had opened a retail drug store of his own.

It was during his earlier period of comparative leisure and peace of
mind that he began to test the inventive faculty that had pricked him in
small but significant ways during his boyhood. His first inventions were
of a minor importance, although they increased his income and were
permanently remunerative; but when he turned the torch of his genius
upon the fatal antipathies of vermin, his success was so deservedly
rewarded that he was a millionaire in less than three years. He returned
to England, and, avoiding the alley of inglorious memory, courted and
won the daughter of a manufacturer, his ambition driving him to compel
social recognition in his native city. It soared no higher, but his
wife, now no longer one of a large family, but with the income of a
generous millionaire at her disposal, was open to higher promptings; and
he to conversion. They moved to London and laid their plans with some
skill.

But although London can stand a good deal in the cause of resupply and
novelty, the violence of Mrs. Tippett's accent, and the terrible
solecisms of a gentleman whose education had begun in a Lancashire alley
and finished in the business purlieus of Chicago, who had acquired the
American vice of brag in its acutest form, and who, when in his cups,
shouted and spat and swore, were more than the most enterprising among
them had been called upon to endure. The social ambitions of the
Tippetts were so definitely quenched that the indignant millionaire
threatened to return to Chicago. But Mrs. Tippett moved him firmly to
Brighton, where, in the course of time, she toned him down. They made
their way slowly into society of a sort, and attracted the attention of
the public. There was no law to prevent them from dining at the
fashionable hotels, where Paris gowns could not pass unobserved; and
their turnouts were irreproachable.

Mrs. Tippet, an astute woman, by this time had realized that hers was
not the destiny of the social star, and she concentrated her hopes and
ambitions upon her one child, an uncommonly clever little girl. This
child grew up in a luxury that would have stifled even her precocious
mind had it not been for the rigid laws of the school-room. Her
governesses and tutors were selected with a sharp eye to the number of
titles in their reference-books, but dismissed promptly if they were
unworthy of their hire. Later, the little Julia was sent to a
distinguished school near Paris, where, with an eye to her future
well-being, remarkable in one so young, she divided her affectionate
affluence among the few whose exalted station made them worth the while
of a maiden with an indefinite future.

These friends did not prove as useful as she had hoped. At home there
were her parents to terrify theirs, and although she visited at several
chateaux, and more than one title was laid at her gilded feet, she made
up her mind to read her name in Burke.

She took her parents for a tour round the world with a view to polishing
off their lingering idiosyncrasies, and her chance came in India, where
she buried them both. They succumbed to cholera, and the kindly wife of
the viceroy, to whom she had had the forethought to secure a letter,
sent for her to come to Simla and remain as her guest until she found
courage and a chaperon for the return to England. Here she met Captain,
the Honorable Augustus Kaye, heir to an ancient barony, chivalrous,
impressionable, and hard-up. They were married with the blessings of old
friends and new, and, to do her full justice, she made him a good wife
according to her lights. She was quite insanely in love with him at
first, for he looked like one of Ouida's guardsmen, and his pedigree was
so long, and so varied with romantic historic episode, that she was
fully a week committing it to memory.

When he left the army and they had returned to England--via Paris--she
had the wardrobe and establishment of a princess, the right to dine at
the Queen's table, and not a relative in London. She was immoderately
happy, and during the five years of her wedded life she exhausted the
first strength of her affections, buried her feminine caprice, and
whatever of impulse youth may have clung to as its right. When Gussy
Kaye died, the predominant feeling in her bosom was rage at his
inconsiderateness in leaving the world before his father, and nothing
behind him but a courtesy prefix which she could not even use on her
cards.

She opened her soul to searching, and decided that five years of love
were quite enough for any woman, and that her attentions hereafter
should be directed towards the highest worldly success obtainable with
brains, talents, and wealth. To be merely a rich woman in the right set
did not come within measurable distance of her ambition's apex, and she
determined to gratify her passionate self-love by becoming a
personality.

She had long since simulated the repose of the high-born Englishwoman,
until, like all imitators, she far surpassed her models, and her manners
were marked not so much by the caste of Vere de Vere as by an almost
negative stolidity. This at least provided her with an unruffled front
for trying occasions--others besides the Arcots were insensible of her
offerings--which in the United States of America would have been
admiringly characterized as "nerve." This manner became solidified after
her popular husband's death, and if it was generally referred to as
"aplomb" or "poise," allowances must be made for the poverty of the
average vocabulary.

It is not difficult for a clever, handsome, correct, and wealthy woman
to reach and hold a distinctive position even in London, that world's
headquarters of individualities. In addition to a judiciously lavish
hospitality, it is only necessary to personalize intelligently, and this
Mrs. Kaye did with an industry that would have carried her to greatness
had she been granted a spark of the divine fire. She cultivated the
great and the fashionable in art, letters, and the drama, mixed them
tactfully with her titles, attended the banquets of the ruling class in
Bohemia attired flatteringly in her best, and founded a society for the
study of Leonardo da Vinci. She became intimate with several royal
ladies, who were charmed with her endless power to amuse them and her
magnificent patronage of their charities; and she formed close relations
with other dames but a degree less exalted, and generally more
discriminating. She cultivated a witty habit of speech, the society of
cabinet ministers, and her _chef_ was a celebrity. Her gowns would have
been notable in New York, and she was wise enough to avoid eccentricity
and openly to regard all forms of sensationalism with a haughty disdain.

Her attitude to men was equally well-advised. Detrimentals and
ineligibles never so much as came up for inspection; she had a
far-reaching sense of selection and a proper notion of the value of
time. Therefore, the many that had the run of her luxurious mansion
contributed personally to her prestige, and she flattered herself that
her particular band was little less distinguished than the Royal
Household. And they invariably found her witty, entertaining, or, like
Madame Recamier, ready to listen "avec seduction." Her knowledge of
politics was practically unbounded.

In such moments as she happened to be alone with any of her swains, she
became distractingly personal, inviting, gently repelling, afforded
dazzling glimpses of possibilities awaiting time and the man: so
accomplishing the double purpose of agreeably titillating her own depths
and wearing the halo of a well-behaved Circe. Altogether her success was
what it always must be when brains and ambition, money and a cold heart
are allied; but it was small wonder if the head of the daughter of the
House of Tippett was a trifle turned and certain of her perceptions were
blunted.

Although ofttimes large with complacency, she by no means lost sight of
her original purpose to wed a coronet, and if she endured four years of
widowhood it was merely because she knew that she could afford to wait
for transcendence. This she had finally run to earth in Lord Brathland,
imminent heir to a dukedom, and personally more agreeable to her than
any man in London. That he was notoriously inconstant but added zest to
the chase, and it was, perhaps, the illusion she at times achieved of a
certain resemblance to the ladies of his preference that finally
overcame his intense aversion from respectability. He had offered
himself to her on the day of his undoing.

This was the woman with whom Elton Gwynne was infatuated at the most
critical moment of his career. Of her profound aybsses he suspected
nothing. She reigned in his imagination as the unique woman in whom
intellect and passion, tenderness and all the social graces united in an
exquisite harmony. There had been a time when, dazzled by the brilliancy
of his ascending star, and Brathland being but a name to her, she had
considered marriage with a man who assuredly would be the next leader of
a Liberal House, and was no less certain of being prime-minister. She
was under no delusion that she could one day induce him to accept a
peerage, but she was reasonably sure that Zeal would not marry again,
and there were times when the heir looked so ill that she tightened her
bonds about the heir-presumptive, while assuring him that she was too
much in love with liberty to think of marriage. Even when Zeal came back
from Norway or Sorrento looking almost well, she never permitted Gwynne
to escape, to see so much as a corner of her ego that might disturb the
image of herself she had created in his mind; and when she met Brathland
and her senses swam with the subtle scent of strawberry leaves, she saw
no reason for losing the stimulating society and flattering attentions
of the brightest star in the political firmament. Therefore, when he was
ready to hand, in the crushing hour of her riven ambitions, and his own
of serenest effulgence, she promptly reflected that the distance between
a marquisate and a dukedom was quickly traversed by a powerful
statesman. Meanwhile, although Elton Gwynne would no doubt be a hideous
trial as a husband, his wife's position, supported by a million in the
funds and another in Chicago, would be one of the most brilliant in
England. And she too had seen Lord Zeal in Piccadilly on Saturday.

XIX

The sudden elevation of her Jack to a marquisate, beside whose roots,
gripping the foundations of Britain's aristocracy, and ramifying the
length and breadth of its society, the lost dukedom was a mere mushroom,
created for a favorite of the last George, and notorious for its
_mesalliances_, did not cost Mrs. Kaye a moment's loss of poise. She
merely wondered that she had ever questioned her star. People that
disliked her found a subtle suggestion of arrogance in her manner, and
the slight significant smile on her large firm lips was a trifle more
stereotyped. Those that she favored with the abundance of her offerings
remembered afterwards that she had never been so brilliant as during the
month that followed the announcement of her bethrothal, and attributed
the fact to the electrified springs of affection.

Gwynne and she had been invited to the same houses for the rest of the
autumn, but he cancelled his engagements while begging her to fulfil
hers, as he should be too busy to entertain her were she so sweet as to
insist upon coming to Capheaton. This she had not the least intention of
doing, for she not only yearned for the additional tribute due to her,
but she always avoided long sojourns in Lady Victoria's vicinity,
knowing her as a woman of caprice, who often dropped people as abruptly
as she took them up. Susceptible to the charm of novelty, so far Mrs.
Kaye had wholly pleased her; but the clever Julia gauged the depths of
her future mother-in-law's credulity and kept her distance. With all her
reason for self-gratulation, in the depths of her cynical soul she was
quite aware of her natural inferiority to the women she emulated in all
but their license. That prerogative, with the wisdom that had marked her
upward course, she had flagrantly avoided, knowing that the world is
complacent only to those that fire its snobbishness, never to those that
fan the flame; and while she bitterly envied these women, she never
forgot the market value of her own unimpeachable virtue. She could not
in any case have been the slave of her passions, but her serenity was
sometimes ruffled as she reflected that, in spite of eminence achieved,
her caution in this and in other respects branded her in her secret soul
as second rate.

But if she tactfully did not insist upon flying to Capheaton, she wrote
such charming letters, happily free of solecisms, that Gwynne wondered
at his failure to sound the depths of her charm. But he refrained from
meeting her, and the reason was that he was slowly working towards a
momentous decision, and wished to arm himself at all points before
braving her possible disapproval. When he was his cool normal collected
self again, he gave way to his impatience to see the woman he had every
reason to believe was deeply in love with him. He telegraphed her a
peremptory appeal to go up to her house in London, and she was too wise
to refuse. It was now October and London quite bearable. She telegraphed
to her servants to strip her house of its summer shroud, and returned
early on the day of his choice.

It is hardly necessary to state that Mrs. Kaye lived in Park Lane. She
had cultivated half-tones with a notable success, but to symbolize her
new estate was a temptation it had not occurred to her to resist.
Shortly after her return from India she had bought a large house in the
facade of London, and furnished it with a luxury that satisfied one of
the deepest cravings of her being, while her admirable sense of balance
saved her from the peculiar extravagances of the cocotte.

She had seen Lady Victoria's expressive boudoir at Capheaton, and its
mate in Curzon Street, and relieved the envy they inspired in a caustic
epigram that happily did not reach the insolent beauty's ear. "These old
coquettes," she had lisped, with an amused uplift of one eyebrow. "They
surround themselves with the atmosphere of the demi-monde and forget
that a wrinkle is as fatal as a chaperon."

The pictures in her own house were as correct as they were costly, and
she had no boudoir. She invariably received her guests in the
drawing-room, an immense and unique apartment, with a frieze of dusky
copies of old masters, all of a size, and all framed in gilt as dim with
time. From them depended a tapestry of crimson silk brocade of
uncheckered surface. By a cunning arrangement of furniture the great
room was broken up into a semblance of smaller ones, each with its group
of comfortable chairs, its tea-table, or book case, or cabinet of
bibelots, or open hearth. And all exhaled the inviting atmosphere of
occupation.

Mrs. Kaye, rested, and more self-possessed than if the hastening lover
had been the late Lord Brathland, but agreeably stirred nevertheless,
awaited the new peer in a charming corner before a screen of dull gold,
the last reviews on a table beside her, the afternoon sun shining in on
her healthy unworn face. When he entered and advanced impetuously across
the room she decided that he certainly was a dear, even if he lacked the
fascination of Brathland and his kind. And his halo was almost visible.
She therefore yielded enchantingly when he enveloped her, smothered her,
stormed her lips, and even pulled her hair. She finally got him over to
the little sofa--she had advanced to meet him--but remained in his arm,
the very picture of tender voluptuous young womanhood. Indeed, she was
well pleased, and found her Jack, with that light blazing in his eyes,
quite handsome, and fascinating in his own boyish imperious
self-confident way.

It was half an hour before she rang for tea, and then she looked so
pretty and domestic on the other side of the little table, with its
delicate and costly service, that Gwynne was obliged to pause and summon
all his resolution before proceeding to another subject that possessed
him as fully as herself; but he succeeded, for not even passion could
turn him from his course; and she gave him his opening.

"Poor Lord Strathland!" she exclaimed, with a tear in her throat. "He
was always so jolly and amusing, quite the most cheerful person I ever
met. And before your cousin became--lost his health--we were great
friends. Indeed he never quite forgot me. But it was for you I was so
horribly cut up. I cried for two nights."

"Did you? But I was positive you did not make those tears in your first
letter with your hair-brush." He laughed like a happy school-boy, while
she protested with a roughish expression that made her look like a very
young girl.

"It need not prevent our immediate marriage," he said. "What do you say
to the last of this month?"

"I could get ready. Only girls, who never have any clothes, poor things,
get trousseaux in these days. I had set my heart upon spending the
honeymoon at the Abbey, but it would be rather indecent yet awhile;
don't you think so?"

He had not an atom of tact and rushed upon his doom. "We shall have to
cut the Abbey," he said, firmly. "I start for California three weeks
from to-day."

"Indeed?" she said, stiffly. "I should have thought you would have
consulted me. Not but that I shall be enchanted to visit California,
but--well, you _are_ rather lordly, you know."

"My dear girl, I have been too harassed to consider the amenities. And
when a man is rearranging his whole life he must isolate himself or run
the risk of clouds in his judgment."

He paused. She disguised her mortification and answered, kindly: "I can
understand that in this sudden demand for readjustment you have had many
bad moments. It was far too soon for you to go up to the Peers'. But
with your marvellous energies, your genius--there is no other word for
it--you can soon astonish the world anew with a patent for
defossilization. At all events the Peers' will enter upon a new life as
a sort of mastodon cave swept out and illuminated by the most energetic
and aspiring of knights-errant."

Gwynne laughed dryly. "The role does not appeal to me; nor any other in
the same setting. I have done a month of the hardest thinking of my
life. Everything that went before looks like child's play. I have
arrived at the definite conclusion that my career in England has come
to a full stop, and I have made up my mind to create another--out of
whole cloth--in the United States."

She stared at him, her face not yet unset, but her eyes expanding with
incredulous apprehension. "You mean to desert England?" she asked,
quietly.

"Forever. Absolutely. It is all or nothing. I cannot become an American
citizen until five years after entering the country, and I do not wish
to lose any valuable time. Having made up my mind, I have ceased to
wonder if I shall like it. That is now beside the question. I shall drop
my title as a matter of course, and hope that I shall pass undiscovered
as John Gwynne. In short, I shall begin life all over again--as if I
were a criminal in disguise instead of the sport of circumstances. I
have ceased to regret the inevitable and begun to be stimulated by the
thought of a struggle to which all that I have had here was a mere game,
and I am sure that you, with your brains and energy, will enjoy the
fight as much as I. I am not going into the wilderness. We shall be only
two hours from San Francisco, which I am told is the only city in
America that in the least suggests Europe; it should be very attractive.
On the ranch you shall have every comfort and luxury. You must be sick
of London, anyhow. You have conquered everything here."

He paused and regarded her in some trepidation. In spite of his
self-confidence he had had his moments of doubt. And although he had
anticipated tears and remonstrance, he was unprepared for the more
subtle weapon of amusement, flickering through absolute calm. He
suddenly wished that she were younger. He had never given a thought to
her age before, but he remembered that she had lived for two years
longer than himself, and it made him feel even less than thirty.

"My dear boy," she said, wonderingly, "I never heard anything so
romantic and impossible. Of course it is the American cousin with whom
you have been shut up all these weeks that has been putting such
preposterous ideas into your head. I always said that nature just missed
making you a poet. But if you wish to work out your manifest destiny--to
be immortalized in history--you will remind yourself that England is the
one place on earth where an Anglo-Saxon can cut a really great figure.
Not only because he has the proper background of traditions, but because
he has an audience trained to recognize a man's greatness during his
lifetime. If you go in for those unspeakable American politics you will
never be given credit for anything higher than your medium; in other
words, should you develop into a statesman on American lines you would
never be recognized for anything but a successful politician. Even if
you survived in their hurly-burly of history, you would be judged by
contemporary standards--infused with a certain contempt because you were
not American-born."

"I have thought it all out. The obstacles to greatness, even more than
to success, have whetted my appetite for the struggle. I must fight!
fight! fight! I must exercise my powers of usefulness to some good end,
and now, now, when I am young and ardent. I should go mad sitting round
doing nothing. I have no temper for attacking the passive resistance of
inertia. I want to fight out in the open. If I fail I will take my
beating like a man. But I have not the least intention of failing. I am
acutely aware of the powers within me, and I can use them anywhere."

"Then why not in the Upper House?" she asked, quickly.

"For the reasons I have given you, and because I should fear the results
on my character. You know what it means to be a peer of Great Britain.
Flattery without accomplishment is demoralizing--would be to me, at all
events. It is wine to me when I am achieving, but it would drug me in
idleness. Are you so wedded to London?"

"London is the _raison d'etre_ of life. Has it occurred to you," she
asked, gently, "that I might refuse to go to America?"

"I was afraid the idea would be something of a shock, but I was sure you
would see the matter in my light."

"It is not wanting in power! But it seems that I am. I have never
aspired to the role of Amelia Sedley. I have, in fact, rather a
pronounced individuality; and yet you have taken upon yourself to
dispose of my future as if I were a slip of eighteen--delighted at the
prospect of a husband."

"Indeed you are wrong!" he cried, distressed to have bruised so beloved
an ego. "But, I repeat, it was a question I was forced to decide alone.
Nor would it have been fair to ask you to assume any part of so great a
responsibility. Do you suppose I did not think of that? Do you suppose I
have ever lost sight of your happiness? Let me think for both and you
shall not regret it."

She could have smiled outright at this evidence of the ingenuousness of
man, but her breast was raging with a fury of disappointment and
consternation. She kept her eyes down lest they should betray her. But
suddenly she had an inspiration. She controlled herself with a masterly
effort, flooded her eyes with tenderness, raised them, and said,
softly:

"I do love London, love it with what I called a passion before I--before
we met. And I cannot believe that this extraordinary resolution of yours
has had time to mature. Promise me at least that you will not apply for
letters of citizenship for at least a year after your arrival--"

"I shall apply the day after I arrive in Rosewater." He steeled himself,
for he had had his experience of woman's wiles; and his faith in
masculine supremacy as a habit did not waver. "I only regret that the
time of probation must be so long. I am on fire to throw myself into the
arena--however, there will be opportunities to make myself known and
felt. I have decided to study law meanwhile--and the law, it seems, is a
career in itself in America."

And then he watched her eyes, fascinated. They slowly hardened, until,
with the sun slanting into them, they looked like bronze. She was too
intent upon studying his own to hide them, and upon arriving at a final
conclusion. She reached it in a moment, for to her habit of rapid
thought and her understanding of the workings of the masculine mind she
owed no little of her supremacy among the clever women of London.

"I see that your decision is irrevocable," she said. "You are yourself;
no one could make or unmake you, and God forbid that I should try.
But--and I forbear to lead up to it artistically--I dissever myself from
your chariot wheels. I am not afraid of being crushed, for no doubt you
would always remember to be polite, if not considerate. I am not sure
that you would even permit me to become unrecognizable with dust. But I
am no longer plastic. I am thirty-two, and I am as much I as you are
you. I shall watch you from afar with great interest, and I sincerely
hope, for both your sakes, that Miss Otis will succeed in marrying you.
I cannot fancy anything more suitable."

He had turned white, but he looked at her steadily. He felt as if the
round globe were slipping from under him; and vaguely wondered if she
had gone about alluding to him as "the marquess." Then he sprang to his
feet, lifted her forcibly from her chair, deposited her on the sofa, and
taking her in his arms defied her to dismiss him, to live without him.
As the body, so yielding before, declined even to become rigid in
resistance, he poured out such a flood of pleading that, believing
passion had conquered reason, she flung her arms about his neck and
offered to marry him on the morrow if he would promise to remain in
England. But there was a crystal quality in Gwynne's intellect that no
passion could obscure. He merely renewed his pleadings; and then she
slipped out of his embrace and rose to her feet.

"We are wasting time," she said. "I always drive before dinner, and I
cannot go out in a tea-gown." She paused a moment to summon from her
resources the words that would humiliate him most and slake the desire
for vengeance that shrieked within her. She had never hated any one so
bitterly before, not even in her youth, when snubs were frequent. For
the third time she watched a coronet slip through her strong determined
impotent fingers. She could forgive her husband and Brathland their
untimely deaths, but for this young man, passionately in love with her,
who tossed the dazzling prize aside as an actor might a "property
crown," she felt such a rage of hatred that for almost a moment she
thought of giving her inherited self the exquisite satisfaction of
scratching his eyes out. But it was too late in her day to be wholly
natural, and, indeed, she preferred the weapons the world and her
ambitions had given her. As he rose and stared at her doubtingly, she
said, without a high or a sharp note, in her clear lisping voice:

"I think it wise to put an end to all this by telling you that I was
engaged to Lord Brathland when he died. I was more in love with him than
I ever shall be with any one again. You caught me in the violence of the
rebound, for I was confused with grief, and distraction was welcome: you
are always sufficiently amusing. I have not the least idea it would ever
have come off, for, to tell you the truth, my friend, you are too
hopelessly the _enfant gate_ for a woman who is neither young enough nor
old enough to crave youth on any terms. As a husband, I fear, not to put
too fine a point on it, you would be a bore. At the risk of being
thought a snob--to which I am quite indifferent--I will add that as
plain John Gwynne you seem to have so shrunk in size as to have become
as insignificant as most men are, no doubt, when you catch a glimpse of
their unmanufactured side. However"--with the air of a great lady
dismissing an object of patronage--"I wish you good-fortune, and
sincerely hope that we shall one day read of John Gwynne, senator, and
recall for a moment the brilliant Elton Gwynne so long forgotten in this
busy London of ours."

During quite half of her discourse Gwynne had felt his soul writhe under
a rain of hot metal, gibber towards some abyss where it could hide its
humiliation and its scars for ever. His brain seemed vacant and his very
nostrils turned white. But like many clever people goaded to words by a
furious sense of failure, she overshot her mark, and before she
finished his pride had made a terrified rebound and taken complete
possession of him. He still felt stripped, lashed, a presumptuous youth
before a scornful woman in the ripeness of her maturity, but it was
imperative for his future self-respect that he should reassert his
manhood and retire in good order. He let her finish, and then, as she
stood with a still impatience, he lifted his eyes and drew himself up.
His face was devoid of expression. His eyes did not even glitter; he
might have been listening with voluntary politeness to the speech of
majesty laying a corner-stone.

"You are quite right," he said. "You have given me the drubbing I
deserve, and I am grateful to you. It was the only thing I needed to
snap my last tie with England and brace me for the struggle in America.
It emboldens me to ask another favor--that you will regard what I have
told you of my plans as confidential. I shall give out that I am going
to travel for a time. As I believe I mentioned, I do not wish to be
recognized in the United States; and that by the time I have made my new
name my old one will be forgotten, is one of the sure points upon which
I have reckoned. Have I your promise?"

"My oath!" she said, flippantly; and although she was not generous
enough to admire, and still felt as if the world itself were a corpse,
every inherited instinct in her united in a visible respect for a poise
that was a gift of the centuries, not a deftly manufactured mask.

She rang the bell and extended her hand. Gwynne shook it politely; and a
moment later was walking down Park Lane in that singular state of
elation that in mercurial natures succeeds one of the brutal blows of
life, when all the forces of the spirit have leaped to the rescue.

PART II

1905

I

For Isabel Otis the _genius loci_ had a more powerful and enduring
magnetism than any man or woman she had ever known. She had felt the
consolation of it, although without analysis, in her lonely girlhood by
the great Rosewater Marsh; definitely in Tyrol, Perugia, Toledo, in
Munich where she had lingered too long, in a hundred tiny high-perched
and low-set villages of Austria and Italy of which the tourist had never
heard, at Konigsee and Pragserwildsee; and deeply in England. But no
place had ever called her, disturbed her, excited her into furious
criticism, mockingly maintained its hold upon the very roots of her
being, like the city of her birth. Her childhood's memories of it
clustered about the old house on Russian Hill where the most cordial
neighbors were goats; the beach by the Cliff House on a stormy day; long
rides up and down the almost perpendicular hills of the city in the
swift cable cars; and certain candy stores on Polk and Kearney streets.
At long intervals there was a children's party at one of the fine houses
on the ledge below her home; or out in the Western Addition, where an
always migratory people were rivalling the splendors of Nob Hill--as
that craggy height had long since humbled South Park and Rincon Hill
into their abundant dust. She also cherished many charming memories of
her mother, with dinner or ball-gown so prudently looped under her
rain-coat that it gave her slender figure the proportions of the
old-fashioned hoop-skirt; always laughing as she kissed the little girls
good-night before braving the two flights of steps to the carriage at
the foot of the cliff. Two years before her death Mrs. Otis was glad to
bury her mortification and misery in Rosewater. After that Isabel had
never so much as a glimpse of San Francisco until she was sixteen, when
her father was induced to visit his adopted daughter and take his
youngest martyr with him. Isabel had planned for this visit throughout
six long months, and arrived in the city of her heart radiant in a frock
every breadth of which was new--heretofore her wardrobe had risen like
an apologetic ph[oe]nix from the moth-eaten remnants of her mother's old
finery--and such uncompromising trust in the benevolence of fate as a
girl rarely knows twice in a lifetime. There were three days of
enchanted prowling about the old house on Russian Hill, where, as the
tenant, in the rocking-chair by the bedroom window, did not invite her
to enter, she consoled herself with the views and the memories; and of
an even more normal delight in the shopping streets and gay restaurants
of a real city. After that the visit existed in her mind with the
confused outlines of a nightmare.

Her adopted sister's peevish complaints at being obliged to remain in
the foggy windy city all summer, the crying baby, the whirlwinds of dust
and shivering nights, she might have dismissed as unworthy the spirit of
sixteen, and dreamed herself happy. But Mr. Otis, who had been sober for
seven months, selected this occasion for a fall which resounded from
Market Street to Telegraph Hill, and rejuvenated the long line of
saloons that had graced Montgomery Street since the days when "Jim" Otis
had been one of the wildest spirits in the wildest city on earth. That
was "back in the Sixties," when his lapses were as far apart as they
were unrivalled in consumption, span, and pyrotechny. By the late
Eighties he had disappeared into the north, and the careless city knew
him no more.

During the Seventies and early Eighties there had been a period of
reform, incident upon his marriage with a pretty and high-spirited girl,
and one of the city's estimable attempts to clean out its political
stables. His brilliant and desperate encounter with Boss Buckley was
historic, but its failure, and the indifference of the gay contented
majority to the city's underworld, soured him and struck a fatal blow at
the never vital roots of personal ambition. When he began to water the
roots at his old haunts, the finish of his career and of his splendid
inheritance passed into the region of problems that Time solves so
easily. When she solved his problem he was glad to subside into one of
his cottages in Rosewater. Here he reformed and collapsed, reformed and
collapsed; but, with fewer temptations, and a remnant of his legal
brilliancy, he supported his family after a fashion; and fed his pride
to the day of his death with the fact that his wife, unlike the
forgotten half of many another comet, had never been obliged to do her
own work.

During that last visit to San Francisco, Isabel, guided by her amused
brother-in-law, routed him out of no less than fourteen saloons, and
spent night after night walking the streets with him to conquer the
restlessness that otherwise would find a prolonged surcease beyond her
influence. When she finally steered him back to Rosewater he fell into
an exuberant fit of repentance, during which he was so charming and so
legal that Isabel forgave him, laid by her bitterness and
mortification, and hoped. But although no repentance could maintain a
grip upon that slippery flabby substance which he still called his
character, at least he never went to San Francisco again. Occasionally
he permitted Isabel to spend a week with her sister, while he pledged
himself to good behavior during her absence; and kept his word. He
always kept his word; and he took care to withhold it except when he was
sure of himself. Isabel decided that as everything was relative it was
better to have a dipsomaniac as her life portion than a drinking-machine
of more steady and industrious habits.

Finally his patient clients left him, he sold the cottage in
Rosewater--all that remained of his inheritance--to pay its mortgages,
and moved with Isabel out to the ranch-house, preserved with a few
hundred acres by the more canny and less thirsty Hiram. When the elder
brother died James would have returned forthwith to the sources of
supply, but by this time Isabel had the upper hand, and although he
disappeared for days at a time, he was always forced to return to the
ranch when the small monthly sum allowed him by the terms of his
brother's will was exhausted; no one in Rosewater would give him credit.
As he invariably left a note behind him promising to "be quiet about
it," Isabel ceased to haunt his footsteps. His appetite was far beyond
his control or hers, and as he kept his word and spent his time in the
back parlor of a saloon, and had no longer the digestive capacity to
achieve his former distinction, she merely sat at home and waited.
Fortunately he did not live long enough after his brother hopelessly to
embitter his daughter's youth. Liberty came to her when she had ceased
to hate with young intolerance and begun to pity; and before too much
longing for freedom, and its insidious suggestions, had poisoned her
nature. Indeed, when she had seen her father buried with much pomp in
the cemetery behind Rosewater, and returned to the permanent peace of
her home, she missed her cares and responsibilities, so long and
systematically borne, and mourned, not as a child for its parent, but as
an adoptive mother suddenly bereft. Nevertheless, she was bent upon
enjoying her freedom to the utmost and rebelled against the obduracy of
her uncle's executors, who disapproved of her pilgrimage to Europe
unattended by a matron of Rosewater. Hiram Otis, who trusted no man, had
appointed four executors; and had not Judge Leslie been one of them the
other three might have delayed the settling of the estate beyond the
legal term. But at the end of a year Isabel was absolute mistress of her
property and herself.

One of the happiest moments of her life was when she sat before her
lawyer's table in San Francisco and watched the pen strokes that
cancelled the mortgage of the house on Russian Hill. The house and its
acre, encumbered by the inevitable mortgage, had been all that remained
of Mrs. Otis's personal inheritance when she left San Francisco for
ever. James Otis had promised his dying wife that he would never sell
the place, which she bequeathed to Isabel; and when his last client left
him and he could no longer pay the interest, Hiram, who was morosely
devoted to his niece, met the yearly obligation: he would not redeem the
mortgage unless he were permitted to buy the property. But to this James
Otis, clinging to his solitary virtue, would not consent; and Hiram,
although he intended to leave all he possessed to Isabel, could not
bring himself to part with any sum in four figures.

Before leaving for Europe Isabel had leased the house to a young
newspaper man whose wife had an income of her own, and not only an
artistic appreciation of the view, but a more practical esteem for a
site so far removed from the "all-night life" below. Immediately after
Isabel's return Mrs. Glait had asked permission to sublet the house,
remarking cynically that time had inured her to the desultory phenomena
of journalism, but never to the stable prospect of her husband's death
struggle with foot-pads, or her children falling down the cliff of this
wild bit of nature in the heart of a city.

Isabel took back her old home with another spasm of delight, and vowed
that not until she was a pauper would she part with it again. Five or
six days of every week must be spent on the chicken-ranch, which had
grown to such proportions that she was now one of the persons that
counted in her flourishing community. But in time she would live more
and more in her lofty home, become a notable figure in San Francisco,
drawing with both hands from its varied best; and meanwhile, once a
week, she could sit for hours and look down upon the city, which, even
in rainy weather, was a wild and beautiful sight from her eyrie.

Mrs. Otis had been a niece of the Mrs. Montgomery who had reigned on
Rincon Hill twenty years ago, and a cousin of the Helena Belmont who had
been the greatest belle the city had seen since that earlier time when
Nina Randolph, Guadalupe Hathaway, Mrs. Hunt McLane, and "The Three
Macs" had made history for themselves in spite of the momentous era of
which they were so unheeding a part. Mary Belmont would have been no
mean heiress herself had not her father been too adventurous a spirit
on the stock-market during the Belcher Bonanza excitement of 1872. For a
time it looked as if Gordon Belmont would be a far richer man than his
famous brother, Colonel Jack, always contented with a modest million;
but in ten mad days there was a decline of sixty million dollars in the
aggregate value of stocks on the San Francisco market; and six months
later, when he died of sheer exhaustion, he had nothing to leave his
only child but the house on Russian Hill, and a small income generously
supplemented by her uncle and guardian until her marriage. She was
thirteen at her father's death, and as her mother had preceded him, she
spent the following five years in a New York boarding-school. Then she
returned home, and, after a year's gayety, married James Otis. Colonel
Belmont surrendered her small property. Skilfully "turned over" it would
have multiplied indefinitely. But James Otis and his wife knew far more
about spending money than making it, and to-day nothing was left to
commemorate the meteoric and eminently typical career of Gordon Belmont
but the ancient structure whose nucleus he had taken over just after his
marriage as a "bad debt." His wife, too, had insisted upon living in it,
for reasons subsequently understood by her daughter and Mrs. Glait, and
complacently enlarged it with all the hideous improvements of the day.

That part of Russian Hill conspicuous from the city is little more than
a great cliff rising abruptly from the extreme north end of the graded
ledge on the summit of Nob Hill, which, in its turn, almost overhangs
the steep and populous ascent from the valley. In "early days" none but
the goat could cling to those rough hills that all but stood on end, and
the brush was so thick and the titles so uncertain that their future
distinction was undreamed of. Then came a determined period of grading
which embraced the heights in due course, titles were settled, and many
that foresaw the ultimate possession of that great valley now known as
"South of Market Street"--but which in its haughty youth embraced South
Park and Rincon Hill--by the tenacious sons of Erin and Germania, moved
to the uplands while lots could still be bought for a song. The Jack
Belmonts, the Yorbas, the Polks, and others of the first aristocracy to
follow the Spanish, made Nob Hill fashionable before a new class of
millionaires sprang up in a night, and indulged its fresh young fancy
with monstrous wooden structures holding a large portion of converted
capital. Mrs. Yorba, who led society in the Eighties, when it was as
exclusive as a small German principality, was disposed to snub all
parvenus. But the young people made their way. When Mary Belmont
returned from school, and, chaperoned by a widowed relative, gave at
least a dance a month until she married, and many a one after, the heirs
of all grades thought nothing of leaving their carriages at the foot of
the cliff to climb the precarious stair; groping blindly more often than
not through the rains of winter or the fogs of summer. To-day Isabel's
neighbors wisely made no such demands upon the pampered, but in that
incomparably older time the young people would have climbed to the stars
for the sake of the lavish hospitality of the gay indulgent young
hostess; and if some of the youths rolled down the hill when the lights
went out, that was hardly a matter to excite indignant comment in a city
where drink was so admittedly the curse that it was philosophically
accepted with such other standing evils as fogs, trade-winds,
small-pox, mud-holes, dust-storms, and unmentionable politics.

When Mary Belmont became the wife of James Otis, one of the greatest
ranchers in California--in which State, unlike other fervent patriots of
that era, he had been born--and a brilliant figure in one of the most
notable legal groups of any time, she long held her position as a social
favorite. But children came and died too quickly for her health and
fragile beauty, and the storms of life beset her. She continued to live
in her inconvenient eyrie, not only in the waning hope of ultimately
separating her husband from the convivial beings on the lower plain, but
because she felt an intense pride in owning a home two generations old
in that young community. She was determined that it should remain in the
family and be occupied by at least one of her children. So the ugly
brown wooden structure with its bay-windows, its central tower, its
Mansard-roof--added for the servants--had, contrary to all tradition,
actually joined three generations of San Franciscans in one unbroken
chain. It owed its proud position, no doubt, to the fact that when the
Otis fortunes collapsed there was but one child left to inherit it and
to be supported meanwhile.

Isabel intended in time to give the house a new facade, and had gloated
over such of the Burnham plans as had been reproduced by the city press.
These lovely plans were designed to make the city as classic and
imposing as Nature had dreamed of when she piled up that rugged
amphitheatre out of chaos; and Isabel had long since resolved that, if
she could not be the first to plant a bit of ancient Athens upon a brown
and ragged bluff, the high tide of her fortunes should coincide with the
awakening of the city to the sense of its architectural guilt. She
banished much of the tasteless furniture of the old time, and refitted
with a stately comfort that expressed one side of her nature. She too
clung to traditions--and to the long mirrors in their tarnished gilt
frames, with the little shelf below; the multitude of family portraits
engraved on wood, and surrounded by a wide white margin and tiny gilt
frame. That they might strike no discordant note, she made use of a
lesson learned in London, where she had spent a month with Lady
Victoria, and had the walls and wood of the living-room painted white,
covered the windows and furniture with a plain stuff of a dark but
neutral blue. In the dining-room were a few paintings of her New England
and Spanish ancestors, and she disturbed them only to replace the
wall-paper with leather; at the same time sending the black walnut
furniture to the auction-room.

Being the one practical member of her family, and the product of an
earthquake country, she repaired the uncertain foundations of her house
before removing the walls that had cut up the lower floor into the
conventional number of rooms and hallways. The house, of no great depth,
was so close to the hill-side, still rising above it, that more than one
enterprising cook had made use of the natural ledges before the windows.
Besides the kitchen department and pantries, there were now but three
rooms on the lower floor: the dining-room, a small reception-room in the
tower, and an immense living-room, broken by the white pillars that
supported the storys above.

Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Otis, in the time-honored American fashion, had
made a day nest of their bedroom, but Isabel was far too modern for that
lingering provincialism, and lived luxuriously in the big room
down-stairs when she was not in the porch. She had reserved her mother's
old alcoved bedroom with its mahogany four-poster for her own use, but
the rest of the second-story rooms she had fitted for her English
cousins, that they too might have headquarters in town.

Neither appeared to be in any haste to visit the city of their
ancestors. Gwynne had left England in October, now nearly a year ago,
but, having discovered from his solicitor that he could apply for
letters of citizenship as late as the end of the third year after
landing, had announced to Isabel his intention to travel slowly about
the country "before settling down in its remotest part, which, from all
accounts, was sufficiently unlike the rest to provincialize his point of
view unless he saw something first of the East, South, and Middle West."
He had written to her several times, but only on business. She had
returned in January, after a round of visits in England, and had put his
house in order at once. The lease had expired, and Mr. Colton had
engaged a temporary superintendent, but Gwynne sent Isabel his power of
attorney and she was temporarily in possession. She wrote to him from
time to time that all was well, or to send him an account of her
expenditures; but felt no promptings towards a friendly correspondence
with one who showed as little disposition to encourage it.

From Victoria she had not heard directly since she bade her good-bye in
Curzon Street, but Flora Thangue had written that her ladyship's superb
health had (to her ill-concealed fury) given way, following an attack of
influenza, and she would not be able to leave her doctor for an
indefinite time. A few months later she wrote that "dear Vicky" was
outwardly herself again, but in reality very nervous, the result, no
doubt, of her illness, and of the prolonged stress of business. However,
she had finally succeeded in letting the Abbey and Capheaton to
advantage, and it was on the cards that she would reach California
before the end of the year. Isabel hoped that, unfed by her son's
exacting presence the maternal fires burned low; she had a clearly
defined intention to be a factor in the new career of

Question: Summarize the above passage in exactly 500 words and give a brief outlook on it.