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 Therefore, God shall send them the operation of error, to believe a lie."

If we examine these very remarkable words of the Apostle, we shall see that his object was to instruct his Thessalonian disciples that the day of our Lord's second coming was not so near at hand, as some, who had misinterpreted our Lord's words (St. Luke xxii. 82), "Amen I say unto you, this generation shall not pass away, till all things be fulfilled," had supposed.

He tells them, therefore, that many things are to happen in the world before that day arrives: that it will not come "until there has been a revolt first." Now this word, which our English Catholic version thus renders, is in the original Greek termed "," and in the Anglican version it is translated a falling away, which comes nearer the expression of the Latin Vulgate, which words it "discessio," than either the original Greek or the English Catholic version, although the latter professes to follow the Vulgate. But the English word "apostasy" would certainly come nearer to the Greek than any other, and we must not forget it was in the Greek that the Apostle wrote. The Apostle then foretells, that before the day of the Lord, that is the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, shall arrive, there will be "the apostasy," that is, "a


text: The Battle of the Books; with selections from the literature of the Phalaris controversy/Letter of Geo. Gibson

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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320 "One Army" in Action).

$23$ Forest K. Kleinman, "Front and Center: The Changing Army." Army 12 (Feb 1962): 16; Department of Defense Annual Report, FY 1962, pp. 100, 110, 113; Public Affairs Division, Big Lift 1963 (U.S. Army, Europe, 1963).

$24$ Kleinman, "Front and Center," pp. 17–18; Ltr, TAG to CGs, Third and Sixth Armies, and Chief of Engineers, 28 Nov 61, sub: Reorganization of Units, AGAO-O (M) 322 (6 Nov 61) DCSPER, Lir, TAG to CG, Third U.S. Amy, 27 Feb 62, sub: Reorganization of the 82d Airborne Division, AGAO (M) 322 (16 Feb 62) DCSPER, Ltr, TAG to CinC, USARPAC, 14 Jun 61, sub: Change in Status of Units, AGAO-O (M) 322 (2 Jun 61) DCSPER, Ltr, TAG to CinC, USARPAC, 27 Mar 62, sub: Change in Status of Units, AGAO-O (M) 322 (14 Mar 62) DCSPER, and Ltr, TAG to CG, Sixth U.S. Army, L5 Feb 62, sub: Reorganization of the 4th Infantry Division, AGAO-O (M) 322 (15 Feb 62) DCSPER, all AG Reference files, Historical Data Cards, Divisions, DAMH-HSO.

$25$ Coakley et al. "Army Expansion, 1961–62," pp. 124–57 passim; Memo, Deputy Sec of Defense to Sec of Defense, sub: Plan for Activation of Two Additional Active Army Divisions, 18 Jan 62, Division General file, and Ltr, TAG to CGs, CONARC, and other addresses: 22 Jan 62, sub: Change in Status of Units, 22 Jan 62, AGAO-O (M) 322 (22 Jan 62) DCSPER, and Ltr, TAG to CGs, CONARC, and other addresses, 26 Jan 62, same subject, AGAO-O (M) 322 (26 Jan 62) DCSPER, both AG Reference files, all DAMH-HSO,

$26$ Ltr, CofS, U.S. Army Infantry Center, to CGs, CONARC and Third U.S. Army, 12 Mar 62. sub: Reorganization of 1st Brigade under ROAD, AGICT (Adjutant General, Infantry Center), Ltr, CONARC to CG, U.S. Army Infantry Center, same subject, 13 Jun 62; ATUR-P&O (Unit Training and Readiness-Plans and Operation Branch, DF, DCofS/Unit Training and Readiness), CONARC, to DCG and CofS, CONARC, same subject, 23 May 62, and Ltr, TAG to CG, Third U.S. Army, 20 Sep 62. sub: Change in Status of 1st and 197th Infantry Brigade, AGAO-O (M) 322 (5 Sep 62) DCSPER, all 1st Brigade. 1st Inf Div, DAMH-HSO.

$27$ John W. Wike, "173d Airborne Brigade,”" Fact Sheet for DOD Hearings, 30 Apr 63, 173d Airborne Brigade file, DAMH-HSO; Ltr, TAG to CG, Third U.S. Army, 20 Sep 62, sub: Change in Status of 1st and 197th Infantry Brigade.

$28$ Ltr, TAG to CG, Third U.S, Army, 20 Sep 62, sub: Change in Status of 1st and 197th Infantry Brigade,

$29$ Matloff, American Military History. pp. 594–95; Memo, CofS for SA, 15 Aug 62, sub: Schedule for Conversion of Army Divisions to ROAD, 320 (15 Aug 62), Division General file, DAMH-HSO; Ltr, OTAG to TAG, 27 Aug 62, sub: Change in Status of Unit, AGAO-O (M) 322 (15 Aug 62), GO 69, U.S, Army Caribbean, 1962. and Ltr, TAG to CG, U.S, Army Caribbean, 11 Feb 63, sub: Change in Status of Units, all 193d Inf Bde file, DAMH-HSO.

$30$
Department of Defense Annual Report, FY 1963, p. 109; Army News Service, Release No. 46, 19 Jul 62, SA Sends Message to Army National Guardsmen and Reservists, Berlin Crisis 1961–1962, Reference Paper files, DAMH-HSO; "One Army" in Action.

$31$
Department of Defense Annual Report, FY 1963, pp. 111–14; Joseph R. Wisnack "Old Tronsides' Response to the Cuban Crisis," Army 13 (Apr 1963): 26–30; Ltr, 1st Armored Division to CG, III Corps, 20 Apr 63, Incl, sub: Historical Narrative of the 1st Armored Division in the Cuban Crisis, 1962, AKDFA-CG, 1st Armd Div file, DAMH-HSO.

$32$
Memo, CofS to SA, 15 Aug 62, sub: Schedule for Conversion of Army Divisions to ROAD.

$33$
Ibid.

$34$
Ibid.

$35$
Ibid.; Fact Sheet on Reorganization of Army Division (ROAD), 10 Jan 63. Division General file, DAMH-HSO.

$36$
Ltr, TAG to CG, Fourth U.S. Army. and other addresses, 3] May 63, sub; Reorganization of the 2d Armored Division Under ROAD, AGAO-O (M) (10 May 63) DCSPER, Ltr, TAG to CinC, USAREUR, 21 Jun 63, sub: Reorganization of 3d Armored Division Under ROAD TOE, AGAO-O (M) (22 May 63) DCSPER, Ltr. TAG to CinC, USAREUR, 19 Jun 63, sub; Reorganization of the 4th Armored Division Under ROAD TOE, AGAO-O (M) (22 May 63) DCSPER, Ltr, TAG to CinC,


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 A NEW DIRECTION—FLEXIBLE RESPONSE authorized an additional 1,000 troops. The troop increase permitted the complete mechanization of the divisions with additional armored personnel carriers. The readiness of the Strategic Army Force was increased in the United States and the training base was expanded, eliminating the basic training mission in combat divisions.

In the summer of 1961 Congress also authorized the Defense Department to order 250,000 reservists (individuals as well as those in units) to active duty for twelve months. The subsequent closing of the Berlin border on 13 August 1961 sparked another series of mobilization measures. In October the Army Reserve's 100th Division (Training) was ordered to active military duty to open the training center at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. That same month the Kennedy administration approved the deployment of two additional combat divisions to the European command. Two National Guard divisions were federalized in October to replace the divisions programmed to be deployed from the strategic force, bringing the total number of divisions on active duty to sixteen. The 32d Infantry Division (Wisconsin) was sent to Fort Polk, Louisiana, and the 49th Armored Division (Texas) reported to Fort Hood, Texas. In all, 113,254 officers and enlisted men of the Army National Guard and Army Reserve were ordered into active military service.

During the crisis no division deployed to Germany, but during the next few months the Army took other steps to strengthen its forces in Europe. Measures included equipping the troops with new M14 rifles and M60 machine guns and accelerating production of M60 main battle tanks and M113 armored personnel carriers, actions that permitted the Army to field those systems earlier than planned. To shorten the time required to move units to Europe, the Army positioned sufficient materiel in Germany to equip one armored division, one infantry division, and several nondivisional battalions. To maintain the equipment, personnel from the 2d Armored and 4th Infantry Divisions moved to Germany, but eventually permanent caretaker units replaced these men, Shortly after the equipment was placed in Germany, the Army launched Operation with units from the United States traveling to Europe and conducting exercises with the stockpiled equipment, a precursor of similar exercises that were soon to become a regular fixture in the Army.

The Army also increased combat readiness in other commands. It replaced the cumbersome Honest Johns with Little Johns in the 82d and 101st Airborne Divisions and 4th and 25th Infantry Divisions, a step directed toward improving the ability to move these units by air. The 25th Infantry Division was brought to full strength in Hawaii, and the reinforced airborne battle group that had been sent to Okinawa in June 1960 was relieved from assignment to the division but remained in Okinawa. In Korea the strength of two divisions was also increased.

Following the call-up of the reserves for the Berlin crisis, Congress authorized a modest permanent increase in the strength of the Regular Army, and in January 1962 Secretary McNamara approved the activation of the first two


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306 ROAD divisions, which were eventually to replace the two National Guard units in the strategic force. On 3 February the Fourth U.S, Army reorganized the 1st Armored Division, using its Combat Command A as its nucleus, at Fort Hood. The division became a mechanized infantry unit having four armor and six mechanized infantry battalions. Sixteen days later the Fifth U.S. Army reactivated the 5th Infantry Division (less its 2d Brigade and a tank battalion) at Fort Carson, Colorado, by absorbing the personnel of the training center there. The 2d Brigade, 5th Infantry Division, was activated at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, using the resources of the 2d Infantry Brigade, which was inactivated. The brigade continued to support reserve training in the First U.S. Army area, while one of the 5th Division's tank battalions stationed at Fort Irwin, California, supported the Combat Developments Command's test and evaluation programs. Stretched from coast to coast, the 5th Infantry Division had three infantry battalions at Fort Devens, one armor and six infantry battalions at Fort Carson, and one tank battalion at Fort Irwin.

When McNamara approved the activation of the two Regular Army divisions in early 1962, he decided to delay reorganization of the remainder of the Army until fiscal year 1964 because of the Berlin crisis. But events soon overtook that decision. For example, during the spring of 1962 Powell directed that all instruction at the Infantry School after 1 July reflect ROAD doctrine. Therefore, the Infantry School asked for permission to reorganize the 1st Infantry Brigade under a ROAD structure. Instead, the Army Staff decided to inactivate the pentomic-structured brigade and replace it with a new ROAD unit, the 197th Infantry Brigade, which resolved a unit designation issue.

The ROAD reorganization once again brought up the matter of unit designations. Divisional brigades had not appeared in the Army force structure since the demise of the old square division. Army leaders decided that two out of the three new brigade headquarters in each infantry division would inherit disbanded or inactivated infantry brigade headquarters associated with the former square divisions, With the designation 1st Infantry Brigade slated to return to the 1st Infantry Division when it converted to ROAD, the existing unit at Fort Benning required a new name. For it and other separate brigades, the staff selected infantry brigade numbers that had been associated with Organized Reserve divisions that were no longer in the force, For the new ROAD brigade at Fort Benning, Georgia, for example, the adjutant general on 1 August 1962 restored elements of the 99th Reconnaissance Troop, which thirty years earlier had been organized by consolidating infantry brigade headquarters and headquarters companies of the 99th Infantry Division, as Headquarters and Headquarters Companies, 197th and 198th Infantry Brigades. The following month the 197th Infantry Brigade was activated at Fort Benning. For the third brigade in each infantry division, the staff redesignated the division headquarters company, which had been disbanded during the pentomic reorganization, as a brigade headquarters. For example, the 3d Brigade, 5th Infantry Division,


text: Talk:Heidi/Chapter 3

title: Talk:Heidi/Chapter 3


text: The Battle of the Books; with selections from the literature of the Phalaris controversy/Bibliography


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managed to work part way around the enemy left flank, east of the road. During the next week they continued this envelopment, and the Cannon and Antitank Companies joined them. On 30 November, I Company under Capt. John D. Shirley and the Antitank Company under Capt. Meredith M. Huggins pressed on until they were astride the Soputa road in the rear of the enemy forward position, which was at the junction with the first branch trail to Cape Killerton.

At this point the American units established a road block to prevent use of the road to supply the enemy front. Operations of the next 3 weeks on the Sanananda front consisted essentially of the maintenance of this road block against desperate counterattacks from all sides. Sometimes enemy soldiers came so close to our trenches that our 66


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 men could grab them by the ankles and pull them in, but they never broke through the block. Though K Company and the Cannon Company remained on the east flank through most of the period in order to maintain the supply line to the road block, it was often impossible to push supplies and ammunition through. Communications also were frequently interrupted. Day after day the dwindling survivors holding the road block had to spend all their daylight hours crouched in fox holes. Capt. Shirley was killed on 2 December. Capt. Huggins was wounded on the 5th but could not be evacuated until the 8th, when Lt. Peter L. Dal Ponte took command.

Against these odds, I Company and the Antitank Company held on until 22 December, when they were relieved by the Australian 3oth Infantry Battalion (30th Brigade). They then joined other elements of the 126th Infantry on the main Sanananda front, south of the road block. Exhausted by the long period under constant fire, these units of the 126th Infantry were finally withdrawn on 9 January and rejoined the remainder of the regiment at Buna.

While the 126th Infantry had been holding the road block, the Australian 21st Infantry Brigade had come by air to Popondetta and reinforced the 25th Brigade on 28 November for a drive on Gona. They smashed through the desperate defense and captured Gona on 9 December. The Australians found that the last survivors of the enemy had fought with the dead bodies of their comrades decomposing about them. They buried 638 Japanese dead.

Fresh American troops also were arriving from Port Moresby. The 163d Infantry of the U. S. 41st Division under Col. (later Brig. Gen.) Jens A. Doe began to move by air to Popondetta and Dobodura on 30 December. The regiment was attached to the Australian 7th Division and assigned to the road-block positions. The 1st Battalion marched via Soputa to take over the positions of the Australian 39th Infantry Battalion from 2–4 January.

Moreover, operations at Buna were drawing to a close, permitting a shift of Allied strength. The 127th Infantry, operating on the 67


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 western flank of the Buna front, had established an outpost in Tarakena Village, but on 4 January a Japanese attack drove it out. Next day the 1st and 2d Battalions counterattacked from Siwori Village. E Company, in the lead, advanced along a sandspit which lay just off the shore and directed enfilading canister fire from a 37-mm gun against the enemy on the mainland, who were slowly pushed westward through dense jungle by C and G Companies. These companies recaptured Tarakena on the 8th, and on the following day reached the bank of the rain-swollen Konombi Creek.

68


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title: Page:NBS Circular 553.djvu/54


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 Meanwhile, X Squadron, Australian 2/6 Armored Regiment, and the 18th Brigade were moving from Buna to the Sanananda front via Ango Corner. The 18th Brigade relieved the 30th Brigade and the units of the 126th Infantry on g January in the front line on the Soputa road. The Japanese at Sanananda could feel the net closing around them.

With additional forces on hand, we could at last hope to break the long stalemate and sweep the enemy out of the Buna-Sanananda area. The Japanese position "P" at the junction of the trail to Cape Killerton with the Soputa–Sanananda Road had thus far held up our advance, but our maintenance of a road block to the north forced the enemy to rely on the roundabout and difficult Killerton trail for supply of his front. The whole situation along the road was quite extraordinary. Our original road block, about half a mile north of the enemy advanced position, was organized for all-around defense and called Perimeter "Huggins," after Capt. Meredith M. Huggins of I Company, 126th Infantry. Immediately north of Huggins was a second Japanese defensive position, and just beyond this a second Allied road block later called "Fisk," after Lt. Harold R. Fisk of the 163d. Less than a quarter mile farther north was a third group of enemy defenses. Our supply line to the road blocks ran through dense jungle east of the road and had to be patrolled constantly. At three points along it we maintained small defensive positions.

Perimeter Huggins was on relatively dry, jungle-covered ground, some 4 feet above the swamps on either side. An outer ring of rifle and automatic weapon positions extended about 250 yards from north to south and 150 from east to west. Each position was about 15 yards from its neighbors and consisted of fox holes for a squad. The fox holes were arranged in square or circular patterns. Between this and the inner or support perimeter were small supply dumps, kitchens, and lower headquarters. The inner perimeter, similar in plan to the outer, contained higher headquarters, switchboard, 81-mm mortars, ammunition dump, and aid station. Slit trenches were everywhere and the whole area was often densely crowded, especially when troops were in transit to other points. 69


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 Our other road blocks were, like Huggins, perimeters organized for all-around defense. When the 163d took over Perimeter Huggins from the Australian 39th and 49th Infantry Battalions and the Australian 2/7 Cavalry, Japanese tree snipers were very troublesome but were soon thinned out and forced back by harassing mortar fire, by special antisniper patrols, and by our own tree snipers. At night our men were not permitted to move from their slit trenches and those in the front line used hand grenades against suspicious noises. Huggins was our main position and headquarters of the regiment. Fisk consisted of two smaller perimeters, one on each side of the road. The enemy used no artillery or planes and his defenses were in such dense jungle that fear of casualties among his own men from tree bursts prevented effective use of his 4o-mm mortars. Consequently, we had to deal only with small-arms fire and grenades.

The Japanese defenses consisted of groups of bunkers arranged about 5 yards apart in circular or oval patterns on both sides of the road. Automatic weapons were sited to fire 6 to 8 inches above the ground and along fire lanes so carefully cleared that little disturbance of the jungle was apparent. Around the perimeters were trip wires and vines attached to warning rattles. Enemy patrols and snipers were active on all sides. During the 7 weeks of stalemate preceding the arrival of the 163d Regiment, American and Australian patrols had discovered that there were several Japanese defensive positions along the Soputa–Sanananda Road, but no clear understanding of their nature or extent had been gained.

Between 4 and 7 January, patrols found that just north of Huggins there were two enemy perimeters: "Q" on the west and "R" on the east of the road. At noon on the 8th, after a 15-minute preparation by artillery, mortars, and machine guns, B and C Companies attacked Perimeter "R." C Company attacked southward from the supply trail leading to Fisk but was stopped in front of "R" by a swamp which was more than waist deep as the result of heavy rain during the preceding night. B Company advanced northward from Huggins but had made only some 20 yards when it came under heavy cross fire. Here it dug in, about half way between Huggins and "R."

70


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71


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 Personally I didn't care to get into a lifeboat. I was perfectly willing to take my chance in the water, but as I returned to the for'ard part of the deck I saw a sight that simply demanded action on my part.

I found myself opposite the stern of a boat, into which had climbed about thirty-five people, principally women and children. The for'ard davit was about a foot from the bow, and at the rate the Lusitania was going down it meant but a few moments before the bow of the boat would be caught by the davit, and this whole boatload would be taken down, or at least thrown violently into the water.

I judge that this particular boat in the first rush had been lowered many feet to the water and as the steamer sank she floated, and so the distance between the lifeboat and the davits gradually shortened. The slack of the ropes had to fall somewhere and


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 as the ropes fouled on themselves in the bow and the stern of the boat, it convinces me that there was no way on the steamer.

Certainly one ought to make the attempt to clear this boat and not let those women and children be drowned without an effort to save them. Someone was working on the bow ropes, so I climbed into the stern and threw clear my end, but before I had time to cast off the block it was done for me by a seaman who had stepped into the boat apparently at the same moment that I had. My next thought was of the for'ard ropes. I looked and saw someone struggling to clear them. As I have written, I think he was a steward, cutting at them with a knife. I yelled to him to take the axe. He looked around a moment and said there was none. I looked in my end and found none. Then I stepped up on the seat, planning to go for'ard to see if I could help. As I straight-


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 ened up to get my balance, my back came in contact with the davit hanging over the after end. The blow knocked me down into the bottom of the boat. Then I tried again, looking out for the davit and stepping from one seat to the next. I couldn't avoid the oars, of which there seemed an infinite number. I stepped on one which rolled over. Again I slipped to the bottom of the boat. When I got up and looked for'ard I saw it was too late to make a further attempt, for the end of the davit had gripped the bow of the boat and had just begun to press it under.

I turned to the people and told them to jump. It was their only chance. I begged them to! One or two men did, and finally two women who had on life jackets. When I saw them go I felt that I could be of use to them, so I stepped over and pushed them ahead of me as I swam. A short distance


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 out I found a third woman. They all three kept calm, and I was able to get them to put their hands on each others' shoulders, two hi front and one behind.

I stopped swimming for a moment, telling them to wait, for I wished to turn around and see how near the steamer was to her final plunge. I felt that there would be considerable suction, and I wanted to try and keep the three women out of it.

The steamer had an acute list to starboard, so as I looked back I could clearly see the people on deck B, clinging to the rail that ran along the side of the house. It was impossible to stand on the deck unless one had hold of some stationary object. People were clinging to one another, so that it seemed as if they were standing three or four abreast by the rail. As the steamer sank by the head and the water rose higher up the deck, those in front were obliged to release their hold.


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 It was a terrifying sight for the people back of them, but there were no hysterical shrieks. The men, women, and children on that steamer met their end like heroes, every one of them.

It was at this point that the aërial caught me and took me down. I couldn't imagine what was landing on me out of the sky. I wouldn't have been as much surprised if the submarine had risen and I had found myself on her, but to get a bolt from the blue did surprise me. I shook this off my head and so got a glimpse of what it was that struck me. I saw it was one of the aërials, but fortunately it was the outside one, so I knew the other was between me and the steamer. As the three women were out beyond me they were safe from both aërials. This wire took me rapidly under, but I rose before the steamer sank.

As she went under the sea I was not conscious of hearing cries; rather it was a long,


text: The Battle of the Books; with selections from the literature of the Phalaris controversy/Introduction


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 lingering moan that rose, and which lasted for many moments after she disappeared. They who were lost seemed to be calling from the very depths.

I kept my eyes on the steamer until she went out of sight. Then the deluge of wreckage was upon us. That separated me from the women, and I am not confident that I got them afterwards into my boat, but I am quite sure that they must have been saved. They had every chance.

Just before the steamer sank she seemed to right herself and go down on quite an even keel. She settled by the stern, and that is another reason that convinces me that if her portholes had been closed she might have stayed afloat after her bow struck bottom.

Much to my surprise there was only slight suction. There were explosions out of the funnels as the cold water mixed with the


text: One Way of Love (Lee)

title: One Way of Love (Lee)


text:
Talk:One Way of Love (Lee)

Review

 * The Graphic 24 Feb 1906:

 * The Journalist in Fiction.

 * Current fiction reflects the estimate that a nation places upon its leaders in thought and action, and fiction today is beginning to recognize the splendid material in the person of the many-sided journalist. For some time past both American and British writers have produced interesting short stories in which the newspaper-man figures prominently, and occasionally this new type of hero has been selected as the central figure for novels, as in Comfort's “The Fortress.”

 * But newspaper hustle is the side of a journalist's life usually selected for exploitation by fiction-writers in general. Now comes Jennette Lee with an effective reverse picture in her novelette “One Way of Love," which appears in February Lippincott's. Here is a portrayal of that phase of the newspaper man's character the tender human part-which only his dear ones know when he is off duty. The picture is drawn with a sure hand and does honor to a class of men who possess in a markedly typical sense the sincerest qualities of American manhood.

 * The recognition of this intimate side of the newspaper 1nan's character harmonizes with the well known fact that a large number of our successful American authors received their training in the journalistic school—from which many have not been content to graduate, but have gone back to its fascinations again and again, until, bowed by years, as famous authors they have actually died in the editorial harness.

 * Mrs. Lee has added a psychological element to her tale “One Way of Love” which greatly accents the artistic form, and which will be greatly appreciated by all who know or are in sympathy with the life of the journalist whose search for news leads through strange byways. When “the man” in the novel meets with a disappointment at the outset of his career, the scales, weighted by his grief, dip so far that it seems as if he must go under. But an older man's experience and advice save him. As the title indicates, “One Way of Love” is at last found to assure his soul's peace.

 * The lucid directness of Mrs. Lee's story fits well its sincere characterization of New England people whose inheritance is that of brains, not money. The author—the wife of Gerald Stanley Lee—is herself a New England woman and a Smith College girl. After receiving her diploma she taught at both Smith and Vassar, and is now living at Northampton, Mass., where she absorbs the atmosphere which breathes through her lives of New England characters. The real action of the story, however, is planed in Chicago, where the hero adopts newspaper work and finds the woman who becomes his inspiration.

title: Talk:One Way of Love (Lee)


text:
The Boy-Man

MONG other things, Lady Harden knew when to be silent; and now, having made her speech, she sat watching Cleeve as, aghast, he dropped his rod until its flexible tip lay on the darkening water, and stared off towards the house.

She had said it, and its effect on him was much what she had expected it to be.

He was so young that his strength, she knew, was largely potential: only she, as far as she knew, had ever observed its potentiality; to others he was a handsome, merry young animal, “keen on girls,” as he himself called it, and as innocent of any comprehension of the deeper meanings of life as a pleasant poodle pup.

She, being of those who have eyes to see, had, during the three days she had known him, watched him closely, with the result that he interested her.

And now, she had said to him this thing that so utterly disconcerted him. Partly out of kindness she had said it, and partly because it was the quickest way to fix his genial but roving attention where she wished it to be—on herself.

He was so young that her five years of seniority and the existence of her eleven-year-old son had, to his mind, separated her from him by something like a generation. He had found her a ripper as to looks, awfully jolly to talk to, and no end of a musician. But he had never thought of her as belonging to his own class in years, and she knew this.

And as she watched him first shrink and then straighten himself under the blow she had given him, she knew that her first move was a success.

For over a minute he did not speak. Then he looked up. “How in the devil did you find that out?” he asked abruptly.

“I saw it. Do you mind my warning you?”

“Good gracious, no. It's—most awfully kind of you. I—I really never thought of such a thing. You see, she was always a great pal of Dudley's—my eldest brother.”

Lady Harden laughed. “So she seemed too old for—that sort of thing? I see. In fact, I saw from the first, and that is why I ventured ... We have drifted nearly to the willows, by the way.”

He laid his neglected rod in the bottom of the boat, and rowed in silence until his companion resumed, lighting a cigarette, and speaking with easy deliberation between puffs: “She is thirty-four, and—that is not old nowadays. The Duke of Bodmin is crazy to marry her, by the way.”

“Bodmin!”

“Bodmin. And—there are others. My dear Teddy—may I, a contemporary of Miss—Methusaleh—call you Teddy? Are you really so naif as not to have known?”

It was almost dark, but she could still see the flush that burnt his face at the question.

“I hadn't the slightest idea,” he tested, indignantly jerking the boat the boathouse.

“But why have you been making love to her so—outrageously?” She rose, and stood balancing herself gracefully while she lit a fresh cigarette. Her figure was remarkably good.

“Making love to her? I? Nonsense!” he returned rudely: “she's the best dancer in the house, and the best sort all round: those Warrington girls are frights, and the little Parham thing is—poisonous.”

“But—at breakfast, who fetched her eggs and bacon? Who made her tea? Who” She held out her hand as she spoke, and leaned on him as she got out of the boat.

“Who got your eggs and bacon, then?” he retorted.

It was the first sounding of the Personal tone, and behind the cigarette her lips quivered for a fraction of a second. Then looking up at him, “Colonel Darrant,—a contemporary of my own, as is right and proper.”

“A contemporary!—why, the man's old enough to be your father!”

“No.” They had left the dusky darkness of the trees, and struck off across the lawn. “He could hardly be my father, as he's forty-five, and I—thirty!”

Then silence fell, and she knew that he was somewhat tumultuously readjusting his thoughts. If Mrs. Fraser, who was thirty-four, was in love with him,—then this woman with the sleepy, far-seeing eyes, who was only thirty.... what an ass he had been! Just because he had known Bess Fraser ever since he was a kid, and because Lady Harden was a great swell, and wore diamond crowns and things, and had a son at Harrow....!

And Lady Harden, apparently dreaming, enjoying the exquisite evening, read his thoughts with the greatest ease, and smiled to herself—the vague smile that consisted more of a slight, dimpled lift of her upper lip than of a widening of her mouth.

That evening, by some caprice, she wore no diamonds, and the simplest of her rather sumptuous gowns.

Colonel Durrant, who had fallen deeply in love with her ten years before, and never fallen out, whispered to her that she looked twenty. And as she smiled in answer, her eyes met Teddy Cleeve's.

Mrs. Fraser, quite unconsciously, gave the great Lady Harden all the information she wanted.

And Lady Harden (her greatness, in several ways, was an undoubted fact, and the proof of this is that only two people in the world suspected it!) was insatiable in the matter of information. Like a boa-constrictor, her tremendous curiosity would sleep for months, and then, on awakening, it hungered with a most mighty and devastating hunger. And her concentrative force was such that while one person interested her she lived in a small world, half of which was in blackest shadow, half in brightest light, and in the shadow she stood, watching the only other person who, for the time being, existed.

Bess Fraser, after dinner, told her, quite without knowing it, the whole story of her own rather absurd love for the boy.

She had once been engaged to Dudley Cleeve; she had known Teddy as a little fellow in long sailor trousers and white blouses; he had had the dearest curls,—had Lady Harden noticed that the close-cropped hair turned up at the ends even now?

He had been an obstinate child, always good-tempered, but always bent on his own way. He was his mother's pet, and was by her always plentifully supplied with money, so that the world was for him a smiling place.

He had insisted on going into the Navy; or rather, he had not insisted—he had simply taken for granted that he was to go, and he had gone.

He had always been in love, but never with one girl for long. “Of course, he's a perfect child,” Mrs. Fraser added, with elaborate carelessness.

She herself had been a widow for five years. She was a magnificently beautiful woman, much handsomer than Lady Harden, but she did not know her own points, and wore the wrong colours.

Lady Harden, watching her while she talked, knew how ashamed she was of her love for Teddy Cleeve; and, constitutionally kind and comforting, the younger woman tried to put her at her ease by chiming in with her tone of detached, middle-aged friendliness towards the beautiful youth.

“He is a dear boy,” she agreed. “I do like to see him dance! He's so big and strong. Billy, my boy, is going to be big too, and I only hope he'll turn out like this Teddy!”

And Teddy, attracted while rather frightened by the idea of Mrs. Fraser's caring for him, made love to her spasmodically just to convince himself, and then, convinced by something in her voice, fled to Lady Harden for protection, and was scolded by her.

“You are a wretch!” she said, looking up at him. (She was a small woman, and in this day of giantesses, this has its charm.)

“A wretch?”

“Yes. You are a flirt.”

Of course, he was delighted by this accusation, and smiled down, his teeth gleaming; under his young yellow moustache.

“I am a saint,” he declared with conviction. “A young, innocent—anchorite.”

“Young—yes. You are very young, Mr. Cleeve.”

“You called me Teddy this afternoon.”

“Then I was a very abandoned person.”

“Please be abandoned again. By the way, the Colonel expiated many times at dinner, didn't he?”

She stared. “How?”

“By sitting where he did. Not even opposite side of the table! My luck, even, was better.”

“Your luck? How?”

“Because—I could at last see you!”

Lady Harden was an adept in the gentle art of snubbing. “My dear child,” she said, very gently, pulling off her gloves, “don't be absurd. I can't bear being made love to by boys!”

“I haven't the slightest intention” he began, fiercely; but she had turned, and opening her violin case, took out what she always called her fiddle.

She was not a musical artist—so few people are!—but she had worked hard, and knew the things she played. If there was no Heaven-shaking inspiration about her, there was no flattening and no slipping from note to note. She played simple, little-known things, plaintive for the most part, and played them well. She also looked her best with the fiddle in her arms, a rapt, far-off expression in her half-closed eyes.

Teddy Cleeve, watching her, hated her for the moment. And, while he had in a youthful way loved several women, this was the first one he had hated. He was, however, too young to see the signification of this fact, and as soon as she had ceased playing, escaped to the smoking-room with a Major of Hussars who declared that fiddling was the one thing he couldn't stand.

“Lovely creature, Lady Harden,” the unmusical Major began, as he lit his cigar.

“Too thin,” returned Teddy the crafty.

The Major stared. “Are you drunk?” he asked, severely. “Her figger's the best in England! And amusin', Tells the best stories of any woman I know. Only thing I don't like about her is that infernal fiddlin'.”

But the fiddling continued, and Teddy, who loved it, felt his hatred melt. After a bit he went back to the drawing-room, only to see the violin being returned to its case. Lady Harden smiled absently at him, and soon afterwards was settled at a bridge-table, opposite. Colonel Durrant.

The next morning Lady Harden went for a ride with a man who had just arrived—a fellow named Broughton. Cleeve watched them go. Then, finding Bess Fraser at his elbow, he asked her to play Fives with him.

Bess had become non-interesting since Lady Harden's revelation. Poor old Bess—he wondered whether she really... And to think of Bodmin's wanting to marry her! She really was a splendid creature. Much better-looking than Lady Harden. Lady Harden was too pale by daylight.

“I say, Bess, what is Lady Harden's first name?”

“Dagny. Her mother's mother was a Norwegian, you know.”

“Dagny,” repeated Cleeve slowly. “I never heard the name before: I like it; it suits her somehow.”

Alas for poor Mrs. Fraser, she was not clever. Pausing in the game, she looked up. “Mind you don't fall in love with her, Teddy,” she said sharply.

“What rot!” he answered, smashing the ball into a pocket. “Why should I fall in love with her?”

“Well,—a good many men do. And she's frightfully attractive, and you're so—young.”

He frowned. “I'm twenty-five, and—a fellow sees a lot by that time, if he's ever going to see anything. Play!”

When Lady Harden came in from her ride, she found Teddy waiting for her.

“I've been warned against you,” he said abruptly, his blue eyes dancing.

“Against me?”

“Yes. Against falling in love with you.” The personal note was strong now.

Lady Harden sank into a chair with a laugh.

“How perfect! Who warned you? Dear old Lady Carey? Did you tell her a man may not fall in love with his—great-aunt?”

“I'm even not sure that yesterday I was not in love with—some one who is five years older than you!”

Her charming face, flushed with exercise, grew suddenly serious. “Oh, but that was—different!”

“I don't see why.”

“Why, because she is married.”

Cleeve burst out laughing. “I may be an infant,” he said, “but I'm not such an infant as to think that 'married or not married' has anything to do with the question!”

She laughed too. “You are a charming infant, at all events. Perhaps if you were a little older”

“Well?”

“I might allow you to—do what you were warned against.”

“Allow me?”

She rose, and went slowly to the foot of the stairs. Then she gathered up her habit, and turned. “Yes, Allow you to.”

“You grant a great deal by that remark. How about the old 'I had no idea of such a thing'?” he retorted.

She looked at him meditatively. 'You know more than I had thought. How old are you?”

“Nearly twenty-six,” he answered, stretching a point. “Why?”

“Because my boy is only eleven. I am so curious as to how he will turn out. He is blond, too. Well, au 'voir. I must go and dress.”

If any one had asked Dagny Harden at that period just what she wanted of young Cleeve she would not have known what to answer. She was a great flirt, but at the same time she was a very kind woman, and never wilfully gave pain to any one.

A careful study of the science of flirting and its masters and mistresses would probably prove that the greatest (in the sense of artistic skill) flirts are those people who have excitable brains and little temperament.

Dagny Harden had been fond of her husband in a mild, domestic, sincere way that satisfied both him and herself, and that had never faltered.

She had, however, a really remarkable dramatic talent, and this needing outlet, she interested herself with a series of gracefully conducted, scandal-avoiding flirtations, in which she appeared to each man as a very good woman found by him personally to be more charming than she intended. These men, some of them, suffered intensely during their term, but they had no bitterness for her. And she, liking them all (for she was discriminating, and never let herself in for an affair with a dull man), had really no appreciation of their suffering. When she had turned a victim's mind and heart wrong-side out; when she had watched the wheels go round; when all had been said that could be said without her nice scales of judgment being weighed down on the side of either too great severity or too great indulgence—it was good-bye.

She was exquisitely ruthless, brutally enchanting, admirably cruel. And she never talked of her victims to each other, or to other women. She was, in a way, great.

“I wish,” said Teddy Cleeve, folding his arms as he sat on the low stone wall, and looking at her, “that I was clever.”

“Aren't you clever?”

“No.”

“And if you were?”

“If I were, I'd know what you are thinking about.”

This, too, is a milestone on the Dover Road.

“What I am thinking about? Well, at that moment I was thinking about you.”

“Honour bright?”

“Honour bright. I was wondering what you will be like in fifteen years.”

“Why fifteen?”

She smiled, and prodded with her stick at a bit of moss in a crack in the wall. Somewhere below them there was a view, but it was far away.

“Well—because if you were forty, you would be—just my age.”

“You are thirty.”

“Voilà! 'That's exactly what I said. A woman of thirty is as old as a man of forty. As it is, you are a child, and I a middle-aged person.”

Cleeve watched her for a moment. Then he said slowly, “I'd give up those intervening years to be forty to-day.”

“Then you'd be an awful idiot!”

“I'd not be an idiot at all. You treat me like a child.”

“You are one—to me.”

“I'm not a child.”

“Very well—you are old. You are a padded veteran of sixty—like Mr. Blake. Do you like that better?”

He was silent, and after a pause they started slowly down the hill.

Two days had passed since she had told him that Mrs. Fraser was in love with him. They had been much together, but never alone until now, and she knew that he was furious with himself for letting the minutes slip unmarked by.

Suddenly he burst out: “Will you wear that grey frock you wore the first night to-night, and the low diamond thing in your hair?”

“Why?”

“Because—I want to see you again as I saw you then. I—I have lost my bearings. I can't remember how you looked, and I—want”

“I looked like a well-preserved middle-aged lady. Please don't begin to think me young, Teddy.”

Under her broad hat-brim her eyes gleamed maliciously.

“You are young! I was an idiotic”

She raised her 'head. “Oh, don't! Don't fall in love with me; it would bore us both to death: be my nice adopted son.”

“Dear Lady Harden,” he returned, flushing, “I assure you that I have not the slightest idea of falling in love with you.”

“Thank Heaven! I adore boys, but a boy in love is really too appalling!”

He caught her hand, and looked down at her, something suddenly dominating in his eyes. “That is nonsense,” he said, shortly. “I am young, but I am not a child; and if I fell in love with you”

“Well?”

“It would not be as a child loves. That is all.”

He released her hand, and they walked on in silence.

The extraordinary delight that most charming women take in playing with fire had ever been Dagny Harden's, for the reason that she had never in all her experiences been in the slightest danger of burning her delicate fingers. Purely cerebral flirt that she was, her unawakened heart dozed placidly in the shadow of her husband's strong affection for her.

Once or twice, when the suffering she inflicted was plainly written on the face of her victim, her mind shrank fastidiously away from closer examination of pain she had caused, and the disappearance of the man was a relief to her.

As she descended the stairs that evening, in the grey frock and the diamond circlet, she smiled the little smile that meant pleased anticipation.

Teddy was a dear boy, and he had grown older in the last day or two. After dinner she would play on her fiddle and—watch the dear boy. Then there would be a rather picturesque good-bye, for he was leaving at dawn, and—that would be all.

Fate, grinning in his monk's sleeve, had settled things otherwise.

There was no music, and at half-past ten Lady Harden found herself in a little boat on the lake, one of several parties, alone with Teddy Cleeve.

In the shadow of some willows he pulled in his oars. His face was very white, his mouth fixed. “Why—have you done this?” he asked, abruptly.

She hesitated, and then, the obvious banality refusing to be uttered, answered slowly: “It isn't really done, Teddy; you only think it is.”

“That is—a damned lie.”

The woman never lived who did not enjoy being sworn at by the right man in the right way.

“Teddy!”

“Oh yes, 'Teddy.' It is a lie. Why tell it?”

“I mean that if it hadn't been me it would have been—some one else. Your time had come,” she returned, nervously.

From across the lake came singing—some “coon song” anglicised into quaint incomprehensibility. Cleeve folded his arms.

“Don't—look like that, Teddy.”

“I look as I feel. I am not—you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you looked at me at dinner as if”

“Hush! Don't say horrid things.”

“You looked at me as though you loved me. And if truth is better than lying, it was worse to look—like that—without feeling it, than it would have been to really feel it.”

“You are talking nonsense. I am very near-sighted, and”

He laughed harshly. “Can't you play the game even for five minutes? I understand that it amused you to make a fool of me, but it didn't end with that. You have made me really love you. Really love you—do you understand?”

As he spoke, they heard peals of distant laughter, and saw six or seven of the people who had been boating, scampering across the moonlit lawn towards the nearest park gates,

“They must be going over to the Westerleighs',—we must go too,” said Lady Harden. “Will you row in?”

Cleeve did not answer; he did not appear to have heard her remark.

After a pause he said slowly: “You have made me really love you. I don't know why you did it, for I surely had not hurt you in any way. However, you did it, and you must have had some reason. You found me a boy; you have made me a man. Well,—you must love me too.”

The boat had begun to drift, and was alone on the burnished water.

Lady Harden clasped her hands nervously.

“I must love you—what rot! Come, row to the landing, please. I am going back to the house, and you must go on to the Westerleighs'.”

“Dagny,—I say, you must love me too.”

“You are crazy.”

“I am not.”

“Well,—I do not love you, and I never shall. Now let us end this melodrama.”

Cleeve took up the oars and rowed rapidly to the landing-place. Then, as she stepped on to the platform he took her into his arms. “You must,” he said, looking down at her. “It's all your own fault. You did it wilfully. Now you must love me.”

His dogged persistency puzzled her, and routed all her usual array of graceful phrases. “Am I being invited to—elope with you?” she asked, laughing a little shrilly.

He flushed. “No. I—love you. But—you must feel something of this that is hurting me. Hurting? Why, it's Hell!”

“Hell! I am sorry,—indeed I am!”

“Oh, that does no good. Words can't help. You have got to suffer too,” he returned, still holding her round the shoulders.

It was, in spite of the thrill of the unusual that she distinctly felt, absurd. It ought to be laughed at. So she laughed. “How can you make me suffer, you baby?” she asked.

“Well, I can. Women have their weapons, and men have theirs. You've made a man of me. I know a lot of things I didn't know last week. Among others, I know that you couldn't have been as you have been, unless I had attracted you pretty strongly. You are,” he went on, with a coolness that sat oddly on his tense young face, “pretty near to loving me at this moment.”

“That is not true.”

“Oh yes, it is, Lady Harden. It's because I am young, and big, and—good-looking. These things count for you as well as for us. And you are thirty. I read a book the other day about a woman of thirty. Thirty is young enough, but thirty-five isn't, and—thirty-five is coming.”

Her eyes closed for an instant. “You are brutal.”

“Yes, I am very brutal. You were brutal too. You see, I remembered that novel while I was dressing for dinner, and it taught me a lot. You and it have made me rather wise between you. Well—I love you,” he went on, suddenly fierce, “and you must love me. Dagny!”

Bending, he kissed her.

She had killed his boyish shyness, his youthful hesitation, all the boy's natural fear of repulsion. He was the man, she the woman. He dominated, she submitted; he was strong, she was weak; he was big, she was small.

“Oh, why?” she stammered, as he released her.

Because,—it is the only way. You could always have beaten me at talking.”

“You had no right to kiss me.”

“I think I had. If a woman has a right to torment a man as you tormented me, he surely has a right to take whatever means he can of—getting even. Women are so brutal.”

He had found, she felt, the solution to the Eternal riddle. Her heart was beating furiously, but her voice, as she went on, was cool enough.

“Look here, Teddy, I will tell you the truth about all this. Will you believe me?”

After a second's hesitation he answered curtly, “Yes.”

“Well,—you are right: I mean your—method is right. It never occurred to me before that—well, that turn-about is fair play. Women are brutes—particularly, perhaps, the good ones who flirt.”

Cleeve laughed. “'The good ones who flirt.' Go on!”

“And I suppose you were, in a way, entitled to use against me the only weapons you had. You see, I am quite frank. Only—you used them too soon. I don't love you. Probably, if we had been together a week longer, I should have; but I do not love you at this minute.”

“Wait till I'm gone,” he observed, with his horrible young wisdom.

She frowned. “That has nothing to do with it. You leave here to-morrow morning, and on Friday you sail. And I do not love you. I am sorry for having hurt you. Believe this.”

“I don't believe it. I'm not sorry, and I don't believe you are. Listen,—the others are coming. Run back to the house, and I'll go and meet them. And first—if there is no danger for you, let me kiss you again.”

The voices, still afar, seemed discordant in the white stillness.

Cleeve opened his arms. “Come. Then I shall believe you.”

Lady Harden took a step forward, and held her face bravely to his. Then, just as he bent his head, she turned and hid her face on his arm. “I cannot,” she whispered.

The Boy-Man's lips were set hard, his brows drawn down. “Ah! Dagny, dearest,” he whispered, “and I must go to-morrow.”

She looked up. “You have won; I have lost: thank God you go to-morrow!” she answered.

A moment later she was speeding through the shadows towards the house, Cleeve, lighting a cigarette, lounged down to the drive towards the laughing groups of returning frolickers.

title: The Boy-Man


text:
Wrostella's Weird (Ludgate Monthly serial)/Part 2

DOOR at the end of the corridor opened suddenly, and the face of Tim, pale, menacing, and strange, appeared in the aperture.

He was looking at his mistress as she descended the stairs to breakfast, her French heels tapping smartly on the boards; her French morning gown, a miracle of freshness and frivolity, trailing behind her; her little sleek head dressed with consummate skill, and the first roses in her cheeks that her hand had ever planted there.

As if all these outward and visible signs of health and prosperity were not sufficient, she was humming an air—and quite loud enough, too, to display the quality of a most charming voice—which seemed, however, to have no charm for Tim, who shook his fist frowningly at her vanishing back.

Breakfast was laid for two in the dining room, a French déjeuner à la fourchette, probably the daintiest, most delicious meal to which a human being can sit down, and when served by a cordon bleu, not to be matched by the finest dinner or supper ever invented by a culinary genius. M. Laurent was already there, and two menservants were busying themselves about the table, and in a quick whisper Noémie said to herself,

“Three.”

“You slept well, monsieur?” she said, calmly, when they were seated at table with the delicious fragrance of Alphonse's coffee diffusing itself in the air.

“Oh yes, madam,” he replied in French. “And you?”

He was helping himself from a silver dish as he spoke, preoccupied for the moment with the supreme happiness of a gourmet, who enjoys at once the pleasures of hope, and the certainty of their immediate gratification.

“Well enough,” she replied; then, with the same curiously intent eyes, looked at the serving-men, who blundered about as usual, and remained perfectly vacuous under her scrutiny.

“I must somehow manage to see every man who slept in this house last night,” she said to herself, as she pretended to eat; and it did not seem strange to her that yesterday she had been an unthinking child, and to-day she was a resolute woman, who, having committed a crime in a moment of madness, was able to calculate every risk, and hold herself ready to meet all emergencies.

“M. Fitzgerald returns to-day?” said M. Laurent, presently, whose epicurean enjoyment of his breakfast had been touched with but just one note of regret, that the charming figure opposite him was not to make the permanent adornment of his own morning meal through life.

“M. Fitzgerald is detained,” said Noémie gravely; “he is grieved to appear inhospitable towards you.”

M. Laurent shot a quick glance at her. She was looking down, playing with a teaspoon; and her young mouth was curved in proud, firm lines. He saw at once the nameless change that had swept over her since yesterday, and his pulses throbbed, for was she not even more lovely and desirable to him now than then?

Never had she seemed so truly adorable to him as this morning, and the àplomb, with which all through she had accepted an embarrassing situation, enchanted him still more—not that it embarrassed him at all, indeed, it was a perfectly natural thing—and so French—that a married couple should quarrel and part, and accept consolation elsewhere.

Nearly all women made mistakes in their husbands (M. Laurent shrewdly opined that his own wife, when he got her, would make as big a mistake as any), and they all got over it, and were polite and cold and friendly to each other afterwards, that is to say, if they had any breeding about them.

And there was plenty of breeding, and pluck too, about this young wife who bore her husband's absence with such nonchalant grace, but had yet grown so pale under neglect, that pride had called to her aid a little rouge—which vastly became her.

But when their eyes met, he saw how very far from her thoughts he was, nay, to what pin-point insignificance he had dwindled in her mind, and his colour rose as he said,

“I am desolated, madam, to leave you; but I must intrude on your charming hospitality no longer, and will return to Londonderry to-day.”

“But why should you go?” she said, the enormous spiritual stride she had made in the past few hours seeming to have altered the very shape of her eyes, and the sound of her voice, so that she seemed miles away from him, and no longer a woman but a sphinx. Clearly, he thought, the change in her was not attributable to him.

“Because I am trespassing on your kindness,” he said in a flat voice.

“On the contrary,” she said, as the men arranged the fruit on the table, and prepared to leave, “I want you most particularly this morning”

She broke off suddenly to tell one of the servants that Tim was to be sent to her at once.

“Tim,” she said, as the door closed, “is my husband's henchman, his body slave—who has been with him all his life, and thinks that, like the king, he can do no wrong; except, perhaps, in marrying me,” she went on with a laugh that had little mirth in it. “On that point, I am convinced he thinks his master made a great mistake.”

A violent rap on the door came at this juncture, followed by the abrupt entry of a typical young Irishman, tall and well-grown, and of that turn of feature which is positively agreeable on some occasions and downright ferocious on others.

He stood just inside the door, looking scowlingly at the little charming and cosey interior, at the dainty table, and the two handsome young people sitting opposite each other, and his expression was positively malignant as he said,

“You sent for me, ma'am?”

Noémie had looked at him with the same curious intentness that had distinguished her glance at every man she had seen that morning; still, it was not the strangeness of his face that fixed her attention, but something on his white blouse that drew her away from the breakfast table and close up to him, when she pointed her hand at his breast and said:—

“That is blood.”

Her voice was so strange, that M. Laurent started up and came to look, and there, surely enough, making a wide stain on the white blouse the man wore, was the mark of blood.

“You have had an accident?” she said.

The man nodded.

“It is nothing,” he said, “an accident when I was cleaning firearms in the gallery; but no harm was done.”

“Then why didn't you change your blouse before coming in here to frighten madam?” said M. Laurent angrily, in his halting English.

“I was told to come at once. And I don't think Madam is easily frightened.”

But Noémie at that moment belied his character of her, for she staggered and fell into the arms of M. Laurent, whereupon Tim, with a malevolent look at the pair, promptly opened the door, and disappeared, leaving Noémie, for the first time in her life, unconscious. The night's events had changed her to a criminal—just one moment of mad panic, of unreasoning, cowardly fear, and the transformation was complete—and her first impulse had been to cover up her deed, until she could confess it to her husband, or until she was denounced by the man who had stolen in like a thief in the night, and got a thief's welcome.

She had pictured him dead or dying; and the revulsion of feeling with which she realised that it was Tim she had shot, without, apparently, his being much the worse for it, altogether overcame her; and her senses fairly forsook her, and did not seem in any hurry to return.

Suzette was summoned, and went through many graceful exercises in recovering her mistress, using her wits smartly all the while, and marvelling what hand M. Laurent had in the business, and thinking that life was certainly getting livelier at Wrostella. And glancing at the handsome Frenchman, so assiduous in his attentions, she thought Noémie must have been mad to jilt him for a poor Irishman, who neglected her, leaving her in a dungeon while he went off to amuse himself elsewhere.

The three French figures, the luxurious table, and a bit of the wainscoted wall beyond, formed one of those pictures that a clear hand would have converted into a masterpiece of genre painting; and M. Laurent, being a man of taste, felt the picturesqueness of the situation, and enjoyed it.

“She has long ago ceased to find me ridiculous,” he muttered, when she showed some signs of recovery; and when Suzette's eyes met his expressively, he smiled and withdrew.

LAURENT had appeared at a moment when Noémie was smarting severely under the affront her husband had put upon her, and when, like many another spoiled child, she longed with all her heart to give back slap for slap, and scorn for scorn, to the bitter end.

She entirely forgot the great provocation she had given him, and was only intensely alive to the humiliating position in which he had placed her; and when M. Laurent dropped apparently from the clouds, the devil whispered that here indeed was an instrument for the punishment of her lord, that she would be a fool indeed not to use skilfully.

But how to keep him here till Terry returned? One night perforce he must remain, and all aghast as he was at the cage which held Noémie, and perplexed at finding the master of the house absent, in spite moreover of the serious illness already creeping over him, M. Laurent spent a delightful evening in the young wife's company, and retired to bed deploring his loss of her more than ever.

M. Alphonse, overjoyed at having a well-known gourmet for whom to provide, exhausted the resources of his skill in sending up a dinner worthy of the occasion, and afterwards confided to Suzette that when gentlemen left their young Wives in a huff it was just as well that young wives should amuse themselves, instead of sitting down to cry.

And Noémie was amused, and if her gaiety were a little wild, it passed unnoticed, even by Tim, who assisted to wait on them, and whose glowering looks ought to have spoilt the flavour of every dish that passed through his hands.

It was life to Noémie to be in touch once more with her beloved Paris, to hear of her father, of the theatres, of fashions and bibélots, of the frivollings of her friends, and the little faux pas of her enemies; and as he talked to her, she seemed to breathe the very atmosphere of the city, to smell its flowers, the intangible aroma of its streets, and her heart throbbed with longing for the time when she would once more be in the midst of it all.

“She is sick of him already, and beginning to wish she had married me,” said M. Laurent, as he went to bed that night. “Heavens! to drive her to such a place as this, and to leave her alone here, with that eternal dirge, as for universal death, wailing on the shore!”

He shivered at the sound, but soon began to shiver in real earnest, and by morning was so seriously ill, that the extremely difficult task of getting a doctor had to be undertaken, Tim volunteering for the purpose, as he wished at the same time to execute a little commission for himself that he had no mind to entrust to anybody else.

The doctor came. He had been summoned once before to Wrostella, but on a different errand, and he glanced curiously at the shooting gallery, as he passed it, remembering what had lain there when last he had crossed its threshold.

“Does he walk still?” he said curiously to Tim, who was conducting him.

“Who says so, sir?” enquired the young Irishman quickly.

“Oh! then it doesn't,” said the doctor drily, and said no more.

He did his best for M. Laurent, wondering not a little at his presence there, and at the absence of the husband of the most lovely little creature he had ever beheld even in a country famous for its fair women, and went away at last with an odd feeling that he had stepped out of his own prosaic life into a bit of romance, in which all the figures were French and uncommon.

For Suzette and Alphonse between them nursed the sick man devotedly, the latter preparing all sorts of delicacies that the invalid could not touch; and Noémie, left alone, had ample leisure in which to reflect on Terry's misdemeanours, now more deeply aggravated by the fact that he had not written a line to her since his departure, so that she knew neither where he was, nor when to expect his return.

True, she had behaved outrageously at his departure, but his hot Irish temper had flamed out just as violently as hers, and he had treated her discourteously; and pride arose, forbidding her heart to ache tor the loss of his love, and actually suggesting the impossible feat of henceforth living her life without it.

Some women might do so, indeed many do—but Noémie was not one of them. As the days went by, a feeling of almost physical cold and wretchedness oppressed her, for it was a new and extraordinary sensation to her to be treated like a naughty child, and, as it were, put in a corner, and left to mind and care for herself, not knowing how. Her heart went out then to her father—the father whose life-long devotion she had slighted for this charming stranger, who had ceased so quickly to be charming, and who had seized the very first opportunity to leave her.

But all these phases of feelings, and many others, passed, and the girl, thrown at last entirely on her own resources, found them much greater than she had supposed. She was full of character, if capable of folly; and the sharp experience through which she was passing had a bracing instead of a depressing effect upon her, while the presence of M. Laurent at Wrostella gave a strong spice of excitement to the whole situation.

Mischief danced in her eyes at the thought of Terry's face, when he returned; and she rehearsed with much diablerie the scene when, as hostess to the convalescent, and right under Terry's nose, she should lavish upon him those attentions that his condition made perfectly excusable. For, of course, her husband might be back at any moment, and in her heart—which was of gold—Noémie knew that she would be very glad to see him, and was equally sure that he would be rejoiced to see her.

All the same, she meant to lead him a dance; but as the days passed, and M. Laurent was sufficiently recovered to lie on the sofa in the drawing room, and sit at table with her, she grew impatient; and the play bored her, now that the central figure was left out.

It had been in such a mood that she had retired to rest on the night when one moment of mad, unreasoning panic had caused her rash act—an act that in less than twelve hours she had reason to believe was attended with no fatal results, and under the joy of which discovery her senses had forsaken her, as has been already told. A feeling of intense joy succeeded the moment of coming to herself; then she seized Suzette's arm, and cried,

“Fetch him—bring him back—this moment!”

“M. Laurent, madam?” said Suzette.

“No; Tim. Be quick!”

Suzette looked with amazement at her mistress, but departed to do her bidding.

Tim entered, clean and with a fresh blouse, but with his expression as sullen as before.

“Shut the door,” she said, “and come here.”

He did so; then, as their eyes met, something in his eyes—she could not at the moment tell what—frightened her, and she trembled.

“Tim,” she said, bravely, “you came into my room last night, and I shot you. I thought you were a thief. I was terrified and did not stop to think.”

He answered not a word, and her courage rose.

“You hear me,” she said, “answer.”

“I know nothing at all about it,” he answered gruffly.

“How did you get into the room?” she said, looking at him with eyes that glowed like fires in her small, pale face, “What business had you there?”

“I don't know what you are talking about,” said Tim, his obstinate upper lips looking longer than ever.

“But there is the wound,” she cried, “you can't deny that!”

“I did it myself, ma'am. It was just a graze—no more, You've been dreaming, and didn't shoot anybody.”

She shook her head.

“I could show you the revolver,” she said, “and there were—other things. Tim, do you walk in your sleep?”

Tim meditated,

“I may,” he said cautiously, “but don't you always lock your door, ma'am?”

“Yes. But there is some secret way into my room—I'm sure of it”

Tim's eyes flickered.

“And you know it,” went on the girl, rapidly. “Why won't you tell the truth?”

“You just dreamed it all, ma'am,” he said stubbornly.

“Does one dream blood?” she demanded.

“Blood?” exclaimed Tim, as if in astonishment

Noémie lost patience.

“When your master comes home, he shall get the truth out of you,” she said angrily, “and, after all, you only had your deserts. Now go!”

But Tim lingered.

“If you'll take my advice, ma'am,” he said very earnestly, “you won't say a word to master about it—not one word. It'll breed mischief. He's got trouble enough just now”

“What trouble?” said Noémie swiftly.

Tim kept his eyes down so that she could not see the baleful light in them.

“Tim,” she said, with a proud dignity that sat well on her young face, “you have been many years with Mr. Fitzgerald, indeed all his life, and I have only known him a very few months. He—he did not want to worry me, and so he did not tell me why he went away in such a hurry. Was—was his errand a dangerous one?”

Tim's sharp wits seemed to be taking a long journey, and Noémie had to repeat her question.

“What I know, ma'am,” he said at last, “is more guesswork than anything else. But I think,”—he paused as if again seeking for spiritual direction—“I think he went to fight a duel.”

Noémie turned white as snow, and all the light in her beautiful eyes went out suddenly.

“About a woman?”

The question rushed out without her own volition.

“Yes, ma'am.”

Noémie turned her back on the man, that he might not see the furious scarlet that rushed up over brow and cheek, stinging her with a sense of shame. She threw out her hand with a gesture of dismissal, she could not have asked him another question to save her soul alive.

The door closed behind her. She had forgotten the catastrophe of the night before in the knowledge that her husband had loved some woman—loved her still sufficiently to fight a duel for her.

LAURENT left on the following morning, profoundly puzzled and irritated by Noémie's sudden change from a delightful châtelaine, eager to please and be pleased, and by no means insensible to his many charms, to a mere dummy, who spoke, answered, and ate mechanically, moreover, without appearing to include him in her range of vision as a man at all.

“We shall meet in Paris,” he had said at parting, and she had looked at him vacantly and without response.

He said to himself as he jolted away, that she would even lose her beauty if she stayed much longer in this God-forsaken place, watching always for a churl who never came; and he wondered how much or how little he should tell M. Richepin when he saw him. And then the Frenchman smiled to himself courtly, triumphantly, for he knew women well, and the prospects of the future pleased him.

Immediately following his departure, indeed as if it had waited for it, with a politeness that is not common with ghosts, “Wrostella's Weird,” for so, with a fine mingling of a man, his house, and his fate, the ghost had been designated who was supposed to haunt the castle, walked in a way that was “painful and free,” frightening Suzette into fits, and greatly strengthening Alphonse's desire to return to his beloved Paris.

Only two persons in the castle seemed unaffected by the apparitions, and these were Noémie and Tim; the first because her whole attention just then was concentrated on herself, and Tim because as he averred “he was used to 'em,” and thought no more of a ghost's little ways than he did of a cook's tantrums.

The shooting gallery was the place most affected by the ghostly visitant, and as Tim had no duties to speak of during his master's absence, and spent a good deal of his time there cleaning and arranging the various arms it contained, it might reasonably be supposed that he would be able to give the servants “jim-jams” in the servants' hall, with accounts of what he saw there; but he related nothing, and, indeed, laughed to scorn the idea that the suicide's ghost was anywhere about.

And Noémie walked too—abroad among the peasants' miserable shanties, and for miles and miles along the sea-coast, until the people got used to seeing her come and go, and marking the change in her, how she had altered from a mere frivolous French fashion-plate into a woman who suffered in spirit even as they did in body, came to look at her with pity, and even say a word of greeting to her as she passed.

And she answered them at first timidly, then with pleasure, for the mere human kindness of their voices; and when she came to know them better, she saw how outrageous and wicked had been her fears of them; and the semi-famine in which they lived and which was now revealed to her, filled the girl with shame when she thought of Alphonse and his prodigal waste.

Very soon the meals were curtailed at the castle, but food and money found its way into the hovels on the shore; and in the joy of ministering to others—the greatest, the purest, surely, in the whole world—Noémie in part was freed from the anguish of apprehension, jealousy and anger, that Terry's continued absence caused her. Well, she had been a spoiled child, selfish and too happy, and wanted a good rousing lesson; and now she had got it—a lesson that would last all her life, aye, and perhaps ennoble it, did she but know it.

She envied these poor toilers who had no sins upon their consciences, who had not been, like herself, within an ace of taking a human life, and even Terry's faults grew pale beside the that she had done; and so, between suffering and jealous pain, she dwindled day by day, and alarmed Suzette to the point of making her write secretly to M. Richepin with alarming reports of her mistress's health.

Alphonse wrote by the same post to say that he was désolé to make such a communication, but he found no scope whatever at Wrostella for his talents, and would M. Richepin graciously recall him? His cooking lately had been mainly confined to baking bread for the peasants, and the kitchenmaid was even better able to do such work than he.

M. Richepin read Alphonse's communication first, sighed, and shrugged his shoulders. If the cook could not do anything for these young people, then no one else could—he, himself, least of all.

But when he had read Suzette's letter, he was greatly disturbed, and would have started for Wrostella at once, had not prudence mercilessly pointed out that if these two persons could not settle things happily by themselves, the interference of a third person was not likely to have the effect if bringing them together.

But he wrote at once to Noémie, asking for news of her, and saying with what pleasure he was looking forward to her approaching return to Paris. And he mentioned Terry as usual, though his heart was hot with rage within him, and he meant that there should be a heavy day of reckoning between them.

And it was as well that M. Richepin sent a letter instead of conveying himself thither, for on the very day it arrived, Terry himself walked into Wrostella.

HERE is your mistress?” he enquired of the man who stood in the doorway, staring at his master as at some perfectly unfamiliar person.

“She is visiting the poor people, monsieur—sir, I mean,” stumbled the man.

“Why do you call me Monsieur?” said Tim with a pale look that still further confused the man.

“I—I have got used to addressing M. Laurent, sir,” said the man, still with that odd look of doubt and wavering recognition.

“He is here?” said Terry sharply.

“He has left, sir.”

And the man, now convinced of his master's identity, hurried out to take the portmanteau from the car.

Unutterably cold and dreary looked the whole place, Terry thought, as he entered, and glanced up the staircase down which he and Noémie had so often romped together, and he turned abruptly and went out towards the sea-shore.

“Visiting the poor! What hypocrisy would she not practise next?” he asked himself savagely, as he picked his way among the huge boulders that cumbered the ground.

Terry's temper had altered considerably for the worse since his departure from Wrostella, so had his looks as well, and indeed it was difficult to recognise in this pale, thwarted, weary man, the bright-faced young fellow who had wooed and won difficult Noémie with such extraordinary completeness and despatch.

He had been away barely a month, and already—he saw it in a gasp of astonishment and rage—his own wife did not know him.

She came quickly out of one of the cabins, laughing, with a little child clinging to her skirts, and half-looking at him, looked away again as from a stranger, and turned to detach the little thin hands that would have held her back.

It was more than Terry could bear. He had loved her passionately, jealously, after the fashion of an Irishman, not an Englishman; and when she seemed to deny him thus openly, his blood took fire, and he sprang forward and seized her arm.

“Come home, madam!” he said. “Is the house so dull without your lover that you cannot bear to stay alone in it?”

She turned upon him a look of terror, thinking some madman had overtaken her, then turned pale as she recognised him and gasped out,

“Terry!”

“At your service,” he said, dragging her away, and Noémie all at once felt herself turning very cold and calm, and the contempt in her: voice was merciless as she said,

“You are bruising my arm. I can walk alone.”

A bitter east wind was blowing up from the sea, loosening her dark curls, and flapping the capes of his ulster about his ears, and driving his hat over his brows. He loosed her and put up both hands, but he was too late, the wind had carried away his hat, and with it—as Noémie, in one lightning moment of horror believed—his head.

She stood still aghast, watching him as he sprang after the two objects, now overtaking, now being eluded by them, until he finally captured both, and disappeared as if shot from a catapult, into Wrostella.

Well, Noémie was young, was healthy, she had not suffered long enough to become fundamentally changed, and finally, when she grasped the situation, she sat down on a boulder, and laughed—laughed till she nearly cried. In every possible character under the sun had she imagined Terry on his return, from Judas Iscariot down to Don Juan, but Terry in the character of a man who wore a wig had never occurred to her, and the discovery was even more ludicrous than startling.

Presently she wiped her eyes, which were as warm, as full of Southern glow as ever; and indeed, at the bottom of her heart was the vivifying, all-sustaining fact that Terry was alive, that she had got him back again, and whether he wore a wig, or had become in his manners perfectly brutal, Terry was here, and—joy broke out in every dimple and curve of her young face—more in love with her than ever.

No matter what duels be might have fought, or in what flagitious circumstances he might have entangled himself, Terry was jealous—jealous to the extent of forgetting that he was a gentleman—and that must mean very tremendous jealousy indeed.

So that it was in high spirits, and with all high tragedy knocked out of her head (indeed, she had quite forgotten all the high-falutin speeches with which she had intended to denounce and upbraid him), that she entered Wrostella, and sent at once to Alphonse to say that Mr. Fitzgerald had returned, and would he send in something very nice for luncheon?

That is a woman's way. Her own heart, her husband's comfort, these are the things that occupy her mind most.

Alphonse swallowed the insult magnanimously. When, indeed, had he ever failed to send in good things—even though he had been degraded to the post of baker in ordinary to the village? Then she ran up-stairs singing. But half-an-hour may make all the difference in one's mood, and when Terry and she met at luncheon—approaching the table from opposite ends of the house—there was not a whit to choose between the cold politeness with which they greeted each other, and passed the usual compliments of the table.

Tim, stationed once more behind his masters chair, was divided between radiant delight and alert curiosity as to what had passed between the pair; and if, under his smart serving-jacket some uncomfortable qualms threatened to arise, he choked them down, thinking, as Noémie had done, that nothing mattered much so long as Terry was there in the flesh before him.

Once in the midst of that thin formal talk, conducted without looking at each other, Noémie stole a glance at the sunny curls that still clustered thickly above Terry's white, thin face, and she thought that but for the uncourteous wind, she might never have discovered the fraud; and yet, in some subtle way, it produced a harsh note of dissonance in his whole appearance, that, together with his worn look, had made his own servant and his wife fail to recognise him.

And while she pondered as to what strange accident could have brought him to such sad necessity, he, on his part, was covertly watching her, and finding a great alteration in her looks and ways.

He had left a girl, he found a woman. The girl who had fallen out of love with him as passionately and quickly as she had fallen into it, was gone; and the woman who looked her mistake fully and resolutely in the face, and accepted it, was here.

She spoke casually of M. Laurent, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that he should stay there in Terry's absence, and made no allusion whatever to the illness that had occasioned it.

Of Paris, and their approaching return to it, she spoke airily, and with keen pleasure; and as she sat there facing him, as politely charming as if he were an utter stranger, he told himself that this was marriage à la mode with a vengeance, but that he would be hanged if he played the rôle for which she had evidently cast him.

Anyway, Noémie most consistently maintained hers. From the moment that she had seen Tim arranging his master's effects in a room as far as possible from hers, she had abandoned all idea of attempting any understanding with her husband, and the longing she had felt to creep into his arms and tell him all the truth about that awful night, left her. Tim could tell him if he pleased, and Terry could think what he pleased, and indeed a strange look that she surprised sometimes on the face of the latter gave her reason to think that he did know, and regarded her with a kind of horror, as if her mad impulse of the moment had been a crime committed in cold blood, and rigorously to be expiated as one.

“”

Noémie needed all her courage to carry her through that period of her life, and it did not fail her. Save at meal times, the husband and wife never met; but often, quite unsuspected by her, he watched her on her merciful errands among the poor; and while he scoffed at the idea of any real good being done (as well try to put the Atlantic through a sieve, he thought, as to materially improve the position of these people), he could not but see how such work ennobled and beautified her, for it is the universal and not the selfish love that raises man and woman.

He went to meet her one afternoon as she was coming homeward, and said, abruptly:

“Don't you think that you are rather a contradiction? that you can be so tender-hearted, yet try to kill a man?”

She drew a sharp breath, then looked at him with glorious brown eyes, full of scorn.

“My sin,” she said, “was unpremeditated—committed in a paroxysm of blind terror, but what of yours? I ask no questions—not of the woman for whom you went to fight a duel, not the reasons for the grotesque tricks you have played with your appearance, or why I have been tried, found guilty, and judged unfit to be your wife, without being allowed to say one single word in self-defence. You deserted me in sight of my household, you have returned to shame me openly in their presence, and I look to you no longer for the comfort, support, and help that you swore to me but a very few months ago, and now, you are no more to me than any stranger I may meet. Perhaps my heart might have broken, had I not found the one, the only alleviation to suffering, which is to do good unto others. And that joy,” added the girl triumphantly, “even you cannot take from me.”

They were at the doors of Wrostella by now, and passed in together.

Noémie moved towards the staircase, but he asked if she would mind coming for a moment into the study.

She came and stood in the bare, ugly room, with the cold wintry sunlight shining on her, waiting for him to speak.

The rose of her skin showed vividly against the blackness of her furs, she was absolutely lovely, but cold, unapproachable as ice, and as utterly indifferent to his authority as his love, and the thought of how entirely she had put him outside her life, stung him to madness, and he said:—

“Why did you not do your work more thoroughly while you were about it?”

Her lips curled, she turned to leave him, but he stood in her path.

“You looked me straight in the eyes,” he said, quietly, “before you fired; it was not a moment's madness, but a deliberate aim—and you meant to kill me. You were tired of me, and wished to replace me with M. Laurent.”

Noémie had fallen back before him, her arms outstretched as if to beat him off, her face a mere grey mask of quivering horror, half out of her senses with the shock of his words.

She tried to speak but could not, tried again, and gasped out in an unearthly whisper, “It was Tim!”

Quite unconsciously she had seized his arm and was shaking it with all her force.

He did not answer, and her dazed eyes wandered up to his head.

“Take it off,” she said suddenly, but he drew himself up to his full height and refused.

“Better not,” he said. “Wait till the wound has healed. It was only a scalp one, but” he paused, and his haggard, white face filled up the pause.

“Oh! my God!” cried Noémie, beating her breast, “and you thought I did it on purpose—I! Could I have become a murderess in the little time since you left me? Oh! there must be some means to rid the world of such a monster!” and she was rushing from the room when Terry caught her in his arms.

“Noémie! Little one!” he cried. “You did not want to put me out of the way, after all. It was me you loved, not Laurent?”

Eyes, voice, passionate embrace, all told the same story, and a faint colour came into Noémie's face, that seemed to have “wilted” suddenly during the violent emotions of the past moments. But she put both hands on his shoulders, holding 1im back, and said,

“How came you there, and by what secret way—to spy on me?”

Terry looked thoroughly ashamed, but the elixir of happiness had already made him himself again. Thin and pale he might be, and a country-made wig he might wear, but he was Terry, and the frost about Noémie's heart was melting fast.

“We parted in anger,” he said, “and I would not tell you that my best friend had been killed in a duel—or rather murdered, for there was foul play and his widow, not knowing that I was married, wrote imploring me to revenge his death. I found the man, and we fought on the French frontier, and he was severely wounded. I had left an address with Tim to which he could write, and on my return to town found a letter awaiting me. He said that my nest was being kept warm by a stranger, and I had better return at once—unobserved. He added that he would be on the watch at Wrostella from midnight till morning for me, and the second midnight after receiving his letter I arrived.”

Noémie drew herself out of his arms, and looked at him with proud enquiry and indignation.

“I don't know what he meant. He opened to me before I could knock, and led me upstairs. He showed me a secret door in the panelled wall of your room, explained to me how it opened from inside, and bade me go in,  'for that someone was expected.'  I entered. I approached the mirror before which you sat, caught your words, and then—you looked me straight in the eyes, and fired from over your shoulder.... The shot took effect on my head. I fell for the moment, then dragged myself up, and noiselessly escaped as I had entered. It was all clear to me—that you recognised and meant to kill me, afterwards saying that you fired in self-defence, supposing me to be a stranger; and M. Laurent's presence in the house supplied the reason.”

I fainted outside from loss of blood; Tim carried me into the shooting gallery, tended me, and dressed the wound. Then he put me to bed in a small room beyond the gallery; and there, keeping every one away with stories of the ghost, nursed me till I was convalescent. The wound was not serious, but all my hair at the top came off, and when I was able to travel, I went by night to Londonderry and got fitted out—and very badly fitted—as you see. M. Laurent departed—I returned. At first I resolved on having the matter out with you, and I was violent, as you know, and natural. Then you were so cold that you froze me, and I thought, 'This is a duel—we will see whose pride lasts out longest.' But to-day—seeing you so sweet, so womanly to all the world but me—I broke down, and——”

He drew her gently but firmly into his arms.

“Forgive me, Noémie,” he said, “it was pure jealousy—jealousy right through, and that Iago, Tim—he may have meant well, but out he goes. Kiss me, Noémie, kiss me, sweetheart, and forgive me—forgive me and forget the past month.”

Her young arms went softly up and round his neck.

“I'll forgive it all and forget it all,” she said, with her lips to his ear, “if you'll only forget and forgive poor Noémie's crime.”


text: Talk:The Boy-Man

title: Talk:The Boy-Man


text:
One Way of Love (Lee)/Chapter 1

YOUNG man was walking slowly along the country road.

His eyes, fixed moodily before him, saw nothing. But his feet kept to the narrow path that skirted its edge, avoiding the wheel-tracks and hoof-prints of the frozen surface, and keeping well within the line of stiffened asters and golden-rod that rose in gray stalks beside the stone wall on either side.

Beyond the wall fields of stubble stretched, brown and bare, in the twilight. Everywhere hung the cold, unvarying light, except along the western horizon, where a band of orange glowed against the darkening sky. Its brightness fell upon the shoulders of the young man, emphasizing the listless stoop and the slow, dispirited walk. The air of dejection might have belonged to a man of sixty.

No other human being was in sight. Presently he turned his head and looked back, listening. The movement brought his face into the glow of light: It was a strange face, the dark, troubled eyes full of inquiry, the flexible lips, slightly parted, waiting upon silence. Slowly a smile of amusement crept into the eyes, spread over the face, and drew from the lips a quick laugh.

“Uncle Eben and Aunt Jerusha!” The listless shoulders straightened themselves, and the young man faced about, looking back.

Far up the road, outlined against the orange sky, a high farm wagon was approaching. The old horse made his way over the hubs with spasmodic, seesaw leaps.

The two figures planted firmly on the high seat seemed in no way incommoded by the gait. Both were bundled in shawls and furs. That one was a man might be gathered from the grayish fringe of beard that depended from under the blue and white tippet wound tightly around head and ears. One hand reaching in front of the bundled chest, palm down and knuckles out, grasped the crossed reins and pulled gently now and then with a seesaw motion. The other figure, sitting stiffly erect, ended in a brown veil.

The young man waited till the clumsy wagon was abreast of him. He clambered over the end and, kneeling in the straw, laid an affectionate hand on each bundled figure.

The brown veil nodded graciously and stiffly. “How's the folks, Richard?” came from its folds.

“All well. Aren't you frozen?”

There was no reply from the veil. A wheezy chuckle from Uncle Eben and a gentle pull on the reins were the only response.

The wagon rattled and bumped in the silence. The sky had deepened from orange to purple and hung its light around them. In the distance a gray, weather-beaten house lifted itself, tinged with the glowing light.

“There's Mother,” said the young man. “She's seen you.”

A tall, raw-boned woman, with a large shawl pinned over her head, squaw-fashion, was coming down the path to the gate.

“Well, where did you come from?” she called out as they drew rein. “I was just thinking about you to-day.”

Her mouth was stretched in a smile of conventional welcome, but the high-pitched voice was cordial, and the dark eyes, as youthful as those of her son, looked out in pleased surprise. The rest of the face framed in the shawl was seamed with care and hard work. It beamed with good-humor and concern as she watched Uncle Eben, who, having descended from the high wagon with deliberation, was helping Aunt Jerusha to alight. The old lady hitched cautiously along the seat, put one ample foot tentatively on the step, glanced suspiciously at the motionless Jack, and was at last deposited on the ground.

With a smile on his lips the young man watched the absurd figure, supported on either side by his mother and Uncle Eben, waddle up to the front door. But as he turned towards the barn with Jack the smile disappeared and the listless look returned.

He was fighting his first real battle. Hard work, poverty, the heavy mortgage, had not served to darken his spirit. But to-night as he came by Emily Hutton's he had seen a yellow-wheeled buggy at the gate. It meant that Edwards, the storekeeper from Plainfield, was in the house, was perhaps at this minute talking to Emily. Richard's eyes smarted at the thought. He turned the hay-cutter swiftly and mixed old Jack's supper.

Perhaps Jack was surprised, a moment later, to feel an arm thrown about his neck. He turned his head inquiringly, munching. But there was no one else to see—the boy was weeping out the bitterness of his heart. She had smiled at him with her big, black eyes, and once, on a sleighing party, her head had rested for a moment on his shoulder. His heart beat faster with the thought. And now Edwards—this was the third time this week. She would marry him A sob ended the thought.

Jack turned his head with a soft whinny. The boy raised his head, half-shamefaced. His hat had fallen to the floor and his eyes were full of tears. He looked very boyish to be crying for a lost love.

He threw his arm again across Jack's neck and stood for a moment with his face pressed in the thick fur. Then he straightened himself and clenched his hands. He would rather die than have the folks in the house know about it! His lips were firmly closed as he stepped into the fading light, a wooden pail in each hand, and crossed the barnyard to the old pump.

When he had filled the pails he dashed the water over his face and eyes. He turned back to the barn, his head erect, and whistling softly under his breath.

“There!”—he thrust the brimming pail under old Jack's nose and patted the thick coat,—“drink that. It's well salted. It ought to agree with you.” With a smile of somewhat determined cheerfulness he turned away to finish the chores.

title: One Way of Love (Lee)/Chapter 1