The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Ambitious Man, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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Title: An Ambitious Man

Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Release Date: April, 2005  [EBook #7866]
[This file was first posted on May 28, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, AN AMBITIOUS MAN ***




Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk



AN AMBITIOUS MAN




CHAPTER I



Preston Cheney turned as he ran down the steps of a handsome house on
"The Boulevard," waving a second adieu to a young woman framed
between the lace curtains of the window.  Then he hurried down the
street and out of view.  The young woman watched him with a gleam of
satisfaction in her pale blue eyes.  A fine-looking young fellow,
whose Roman nose and strong jaw belied the softly curved mouth with
its sensitive darts at the corners; it was strange that something
warmer than satisfaction did not shine upon the face of the woman
whom he had just asked to be his wife.

But Mabel Lawrence was one of those women who are never swayed by any
passion stronger than worldly ambition, never burned by any fires
other than those of jealousy or anger.  Her meagre nature was truly
depicted in her meagre face.  Nature is ofttimes a great lair and a
cruel jester, giving to the cold and vapid woman the face and form of
a sensuous siren, and concealing a heart of volcanic fires, or the
soul of a Phryne, under the exterior of a spinster.  But the old dame
had been wholly frank in forming Miss Lawrence.  The thin, flat chest
and narrow shoulders, the angular elbows and prominent shoulder-
blades, the sallow skin and sharp features, the deeply set, pale blue
eyes, and the lustreless, ashen hair, were all truthful exponents of
the unfurnished rooms in her vacant heart and soul places.

Miss Lawrence turned from the window, and trailed her long silken
train across the rich carpet, seating herself before the open
fireplace.  It was an appropriate time and situation for a maiden's
tender dreams; only a few hours had passed since the handsomest and
most brilliant young man in that thriving eastern town had asked her
to be his wife, and placed the kiss of betrothal upon her virgin
lips.  Yet it was with a sense of triumph and relief, rather than
with tenderness and rapture, that the young woman meditated upon the
situation--triumph over other women who had shown a decided interest
in Mr Cheney, since his arrival in the place more than eighteen
months ago, and relief that the dreaded role of spinster was not to
be her part in life's drama.

Miss Lawrence was twenty-six--one year older than her fiance; and she
had never received a proposal of marriage or listened to a word of
love in her life before.  Let me transpose that phrase--she had never
before received a proposal of marriage, and had never in her life
listened to a word of love; for Preston had not spoken of love.  She
knew that he did not love her.  She knew that he had sought her hand
wholly from ambitious motives.  She was the daughter of the Hon.
Sylvester Lawrence, lawyer, judge, state senator, and proposed
candidate for lieutenant-governor in the coming campaign.  She was
the only heir to his large fortune.

Preston Cheney was a penniless young man from the West.  A self-made
youth, with an unusual brain and an overwhelming ambition, he had
risen from chore boy on a western farm to printer's apprentice in a
small town, thence to reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent,
and after two or three years of travel gained in this manner he had
come to Beryngford and bought out a struggling morning paper, which
was making a mad effort to keep alive, changed its political
tendencies, infused it with western activity and filled it with
cosmopolitan news, and now, after eighteen months, the young man
found himself coming abreast of his two long established rivals in
the editorial field.  This success was but an incentive to his
overwhelming ambition for place, power and riches.  He had seen just
enough of life and of the world to estimate these things at double
their value; and he was, beside, looking at life through the
magnifying glass of youth.  The Creator intended us to gaze on
worldly possessions and selfish ambitions through the small end of
the lorgnette, but youth invariably inverts the glass.

To the young editor, the brief years behind him seemed like a long
hard pull up a steep and rocky cliff.  From the point to which he had
attained, the summit of his desires looked very far away, much
farther than the level from which he had arisen.  To rise to that
summit single-handed and alone would require unremitting effort
through the very best years of his manhood.  His brain, his strength,
his ability, his ambitions, what were they all in the strife after
place and power, compared to the money of some commonplace adversary?
Preston Cheney, the native-born American directly descended from a
Revolutionary soldier, would be handicapped in the race with some
Michael Murphy whose father had made a fortune in the saloon
business, or who had himself acquired a competency as a police
officer.

America was not the same country which gave men like Benjamin
Franklin, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley a chance to rise from
the lower ranks to the highest places before they reached middle
life.  It was no longer a land where merit strove with merit, and the
prize fell to the most earnest and the most gifted.  The tremendous
influx of foreign population since the war of the Rebellion and the
right of franchise given unreservedly to the illiterate and the
vicious rendered the ambitious American youth now a toy in the hands
of aliens, and position a thing to be bought at the price set by un-
American masses.

Thoughts like these had more and more with each year filled the mind
of Preston Cheney, until, like the falling of stones and earth into a
river bed, they changed the naturally direct current of his impulses
into another channel.  Why not further his life purpose by an
ambitious marriage?  The first time the thought entered his mind he
had cast it out as something unclean and unworthy of his manhood.
Marriage was a holy estate, he said to himself, a sacrament to be
entered into with reverence, and sanctified by love.  He must love
the woman who was to be the companion of his life, the mother of his
children.

Then he looked about among his early friends who had married, as
nearly all the young men of the middle classes in America do marry,
for love, or what they believed to be love.  There was Tom Somers--a
splendid lad, full of life, hope and ambition when he married Carrie
Towne, the prettiest girl in Vandalia.  Well, what was he now, after
seven years?  A broken-spirited man, with a sickly, complaining wife
and a brood of ill-clad children.  Harry Walters, the most infatuated
lover he had ever seen, was divorced after five years of discordant
marriage.

Charlie St Clair was flagrantly unfaithful to the girl he had pursued
three years with his ardent wooings before she yielded to his suit.
Certainly none of these love marriages were examples for him to
follow.  And in the midst of these reveries and reflections, Preston
Cheney came to Beryngford, and met Sylvester Lawrence and his
daughter Mabel.  He met also Berene Dumont.  Had he not met the
latter woman he would not have succumbed--so soon at least--to the
temptation held out by the former to advance his ambitious aims.

He would have hesitated, considered, and reconsidered, and without
doubt his better nature and his good taste would have prevailed.  But
when fate threw Berene Dumont in his way, and circumstances brought
about his close associations with her for many months, there seemed
but one way of escape from the Scylla of his desires, and that was to
the Charybdis of a marriage with Miss Lawrence.

Miss Lawrence was not aware of the part Berene Dumont had played in
her engagement, but she knew perfectly the part her father's
influence and wealth had played; but she was quite content with
affairs as they were, and it mattered little to her what had brought
them about.  To be married, rather than to be loved, had been her
ambition since she left school; being incapable of loving, she was
incapable of appreciating the passion in any of its phases.  It had
always seemed to her that a great deal of nonsense was written and
talked about love.  She thought demonstrative people very vulgar, and
believed kissing a means of conveying germs of disease.

But to be a married woman, with an establishment of her own, and a
husband to exhibit to her friends, was necessary to the maintenance
of her pride.

When Miss Lawrence's mother, a nervous invalid, was informed of her
daughter's engagement, she burst into tears, as over a lamb offered
on the altar of sacrifice; and Judge Lawrence pressed a kiss on the
lobe of Mabel's left ear which she offered him, and told her she had
won a prize in the market.  But as he sat alone over his cigar that
night, he sighed heavily, and said to himself, "Poor fellow, I wish
Mabel were not so much like her mother."



CHAPTER II



"Baroness Brown" was a distinctive figure in Beryngford.  She came to
the place from foreign parts some three years before the arrival of
Preston Cheney, and brought servants, carriages and horses, and
established herself in a very handsome house which she rented for a
term of years.  Her arrival in this quiet village town was of course
the sensation of the hour, or rather of the year.  She was known as
Baroness Le Fevre--an American widow of a French baron.  Large,
voluptuous, blonde, and handsome according to the popular idea of
beauty, distinctly amiable, affable and very charitable, she became
at once the fashion.

Invitations to her house were eagerly sought after, and her
entertainments were described in column articles by the press.

This state of things continued only six months, however.  Then it
began to be whispered about that the Baroness was in arrears for her
rent.  Several of her servants had gone away in a high state of
temper at the titled mistress who had failed to pay them a cent of
wages since they came to the country with her; and one day the
neighbours saw her fine carriage horses led away by the sheriff.

A week later society was electrified by the announcement of the
marriage of Baroness Le Fevre to Mr Brown, a wealthy widower who
owned the best shoe store in Beryngford.

Mr Brown owned ten children also, but the youngest was a boy of
sixteen, absent in college.  The other nine were married and settled
in comfortable homes.

Mr Brown died at the expiration of a year.  This one year had taught
him more of womankind than he had learned in all his sixty and nine
years before; and, feeling that it is never too late to profit by
learning, Mr Brown discreetly made his will, leaving all his property
save the widow's "thirds" equally divided among his ten children.

The Baroness made a futile effort to break the will, on the ground
that he was not of sound mind when it was drawn up; but the effort
cost her several hundred of her few thousand dollars and the
increased enmity of the ten Brown children, and availed her nothing.
An important part of the widow's third was the Brown mansion, a
large, commodious house built many years before, when the village was
but a country town.  Everybody supposed the Baroness, as she was
still called, half in derision and half from the American love of
mouthing a title, would offer this house for sale, and depart for
fresh fields and pastures new.  But the Baroness never did what she
was expected to do.

Instead of offering her house for sale, she offered "Rooms to Let,"
and turned the family mansion into a fashionable lodging-house.

Its central location, and its adjacence to several restaurants and
boarding houses, rendered it a convenient place for business people
to lodge, and the handsome widow found no trouble in filling her
rooms with desirable and well-paying patrons.  In a spirit of fun,
people began to speak of the old Brown mansion as "The Palace," and
in a short time the lodging-house was known by that name, just as its
mistress was known as "Baroness Brown."

The Palace yielded the Baroness something like two hundred dollars a
month, and cost her only the wages and keeping of three servants; or
rather the wages of two and the keeping of three; for to Berene
Dumont, her maid and personal attendant, she paid no wages.

The Baroness did not rise till noon, and she always breakfasted in
bed.  Sometimes she remained in her room till mid-afternoon.  Berene
served her breakfast and lunch, and looked after the servants to see
that the lodgers' rooms were all in order.  These were the services
for which she was given a home.  But in truth the young woman did
much more than this; she acted also as seamstress and milliner for
her mistress, and attended to the marketing and ran errands for her.
If ever a girl paid full price for her keeping, it was Berene, and
yet the Baroness spoke frequently of "giving the poor thing a home."

It had all come about in this way.  Pierre Dumont kept a second-hand
book store in Beryngford.  He was French, and the national
characteristic of frugality had assumed the shape of avarice in his
nature.  He was, too, a petty tyrant and a cruel husband and father
when under the influence of absinthe, a state in which he was usually
to be found.

Berene was an only child, and her mother, whom she worshipped, said,
when dying, "Take care of your poor father, Berene.  Do everything
you can to make him happy.  Never desert him."

Berene was fourteen at that time.  She had never been at school, but
she had been taught to read and write both French and English, for
her mother was an American girl who had been disinherited by her
grandparents, with whom she lived, for eloping with her French
teacher--Pierre Dumont.  Rheumatism and absinthe turned the French
professor into a shopkeeper before Berene was born.  The grandparents
had died without forgiving their granddaughter, and, much as the
unhappy woman regretted her foolish marriage, she remained a patient
and devoted wife to the end of her life, and imposed the same
patience and devotion when dying on her daughter.

At sixteen, Berene was asked to sacrifice herself on the altar of
marriage to a man three times her age; one Jacques Letellier, who
offered generously to take the young girl as payment for a debt owed
by his convivial comrade, M. Dumont.  Berene wept and begged
piteously to be spared this horrible sacrifice of her young life,
whereupon Pierre Dumont seized his razor and threatened suicide as
the other alternative from the dishonour of debt, and Berene in
terror yielded her word and herself the next day to the debasing
mockery of marriage with a depraved old gambler and roue.

Six months later Jacques Letellier died in a fit of apoplexy and
Berene was freed from her chains; but freed only to keep on in a life
of martyrdom as servant and slave to the caprices of her father,
until his death.  When he was finally well buried under six feet of
earth, Berene found herself twenty years of age, alone in the world
with just one thousand dollars in money, the price brought by her
father's effects.

Without education or accomplishments, she was the possessor of youth,
health, charm, and a voice of wonderful beauty and power; a voice
which it was her dream to cultivate, and use as a means of support.
But how could she ever cultivate it?  The thousand dollars in her
possession was, she knew, but a drop in the ocean of expense a
musical education would entail.  And she must keep that money until
she found some way by which to support herself.

Baroness Brown had attended the sale of old Dumont's effects.  She
had often noticed the young girl in the shop, and in the street, and
had been struck with the peculiar elegance and refinement of her
appearance.  Her simple lawn or print gowns were made and worn in a
manner befitting a princess.  Her nails were carefully kept, despite
all the household drudgery which devolved upon her.

The Baroness was a shrewd woman and a clever reasoner.  She needed a
thrifty, prudent person in her house to look after things, and to
attend to her personal needs.  Since she had opened the Palace as a
lodging-house, this need had stared her in the face.  Servants did
very well in their places, but the person she required was of another
and superior order, and only to be obtained by accident or by
advertising and the paying of a large salary.  Now the Baroness had
been in the habit of thinking that her beauty and amiability were
quite equivalent to any favours she received from humanity at large.
Ever since she was a plump girl in short dresses, she had learned
that smiles and compliments from her lips would purchase her friends
of both sexes, who would do disagreeable duties for her.  She had
never made it a custom to pay out money for any service she could
obtain otherwise.  So now as she looked on this young woman who,
though a widow, seemed still a mere child, it occurred to her that
Fate had with its usual kindness thrown in her path the very person
she needed.

She offered Berene "a home" at the Palace in return for a few small
services.  The lonely girl, whose strangely solitary life with her
old father had excluded her from all social relations outside,
grasped at this offer from the handsome lady whom she had long
admired from a distance, and went to make her home at the Palace.



CHAPTER III



Berene had been several months in her new home when Preston Cheney
came to lodge at the Palace.

He met her on the stairway the first morning after his arrival, as he
was descending to the street door.

Bringing up a tray covered with a snowy napkin, she stepped to one
side and paused, to make room for him to pass.

Preston was not one of those young men who find pastime in
flirtations with nursery maids or kitchen girls.  The very thought of
it offended his good taste.  Once, in listening to the boastful tales
of a modern Don Juan, who was relating his gallant adventures with a
handsome waiter girl at a hotel, Preston had remarked, "I would as
soon think of using my dinner napkin for a necktie, as finding
romance with a servant girl."

Yet he appreciated a snowy, well-laundried napkin in its place, and
he was most considerate and thoughtful in his treatment of servants.

He supposed Berene to be an upper servant of the house, and yet, as
he glanced at her, a strange and unaccountable feeling of interest
seized upon him.  The creamy pallor of her skin, colourless save for
the full red lips, the dark eyes full of unutterable longing, the
aristocratic poise of the head, the softly rounded figure, elegant in
its simple gown and apron, all impressed him as he had never before
been impressed by any woman.

It was several days before he chanced to see her again, and then only
for a moment as she passed through the hall; but he heard a trill of
song from her lips, which added to his interest and curiosity.  "That
girl is no common servant," he said to himself, and he resolved to
learn more about her.

It had been the custom of the Baroness to keep herself quite hidden
from her lodgers.  They seldom saw her, after the first business
interview.  Therefore it was a matter of surprise to the young editor
when he came home from his office one night, just after twelve
o'clock, and found the mistress of the mansion standing in the hall
by the register, in charming evening attire.

She smiled upon him radiantly.  "I have just come in from a benefit
concert," she said, "and I am as hungry as a bear.  Now I cannot
endure eating alone at night.  I knew it was near your hour to
return, so I waited for you.  Will you go down to the dining-room
with me and have a Welsh rarebit?  I am going to make one in my
chafing dish."

The young man hid his surprise under a gallant smile, and offering
the Baroness his arm descended to the basement dining-room with her.
He had heard much about the complicated life of this woman, and he
felt a certain amount of natural curiosity in regard to her.  He had
met her but once, and that was on the day when he had called to
engage his room, a little more than two weeks past.

He had thought her an excellent type of the successful American
adventuress on that occasion, and her quiet and dull life in this
ordinary town puzzled him.  He could not imagine a woman of that
order existing a whole year without an adventure; as a rule he knew
that those blonde women with large hips and busts, and small waists
and feet, are as unable to live without excitement as a fish without
water.

Yet, since the death of Mr Brown, more than a year past, the Baroness
had lived the life of a recluse.  It puzzled him, as a student of
human nature.

But, in fact, the Baroness was a skilled general in planning her
campaigns.  She seldom plunged into action unprepared.

She knew from experience that she could not live in a large city and
not use an enormous amount of money.

She was tired of taking great risks, and she knew that without the
aid of money and a fine wardrobe she was not able to attract men as
she had done ten years before.

As long as she remained in Beryngford she would be adding to her
income every month, and saving the few thousands she possessed.  She
would be saving her beauty, too, by keeping early hours and living a
temperate life; and if she carefully avoided any new scandal, her
past adventures would be dim in the minds of people when, after a
year or two more of retirement and retrenchment, she sallied forth to
new fields, under a new name, if need be, and with a comfortably
filled purse.

It was in this manner that the Baroness had reasoned; but from the
hour she first saw Preston Cheney, her resolutions wavered.  He
impressed her most agreeably; and after learning about him from the
daily papers, and hearing him spoken of as a valuable acquisition to
Beryngford's intellectual society, the Baroness decided to come out
of her retirement and enter the lists in advance of other women who
would seek to attract this newcomer.

To the fading beauty in her late thirties, a man in the early
twenties possesses a peculiar fascination; and to the Baroness,
clothed in weeds for a husband who died on the eve of his seventieth
birthday, the possibility of winning a young man like Preston Cheney
overbalanced all other considerations in her mind.  She had never
been a vulgar coquette to whom all men were prey.  She had always
been more or less discriminating.  A man must be either very
attractive or very rich to win her regard.  Mr Brown had been very
rich, and Preston Cheney was very attractive.

"He is more than attractive, he is positively FASCINATING," she said
to herself in the solitude of her room after the tete-a-tete over the
Welsh rarebit that evening.  "I don't know when I have felt such a
pleasure in a man's presence.  Not since--"  But the Baroness did not
allow herself to go back so far.  "If there is any fruit I DETEST, it
is DATES," she often said laughingly.  "Some people delight in a good
memory--I delight in a good forgettory of the past, with its telltale
milestones of birthdays and anniversaries of marriages, deaths and
divorces."

"Mr Cheney said I looked very young to have been twice married.
Twice!" and she laughed aloud before her mirror, revealing the pink
arch of her mouth, and two perfect sets of yellow-white teeth, with
only one blemishing spot of gold visible.  "I wonder if he meant it,
though?" she mused.  "And the fact that I DO wonder is the sure proof
that I am really interested in this man.  As a rule, I never believe
a word men say, though I delight in their flattery all the same.  It
makes me feel comfortable even when I know they are lying.  But I
should really feel hurt if I thought Mr Cheney had not meant what he
said.  I don't believe he knows much about women, or about himself
lower than his brain.  He has never studied his heart.  He is all
ambition.  If an ambitious and unsophisticated youth of twenty-five
or twenty-eight does get infatuated with a woman of my age--he is a
perfect toy in her hands.  Ah, well, we shall see what we shall see."
And the Baroness finished her massage in cold cream, and put her
blonde head on the pillow and went sound asleep.

After that first tete-a-tete supper the fair widow managed to see
Preston at least once or twice a week.  She sent for him to ask his
advice on business matters, she asked him to aid her in changing the
position of the furniture in a room when the servants were all busy,
and she invited him to her private parlour for lunch every Sunday
afternoon.  It was during one of these chats over cake and wine that
the young man spoke of Berene.  The Baroness had dropped some remarks
about her servants, and Preston said, in a casual tone of voice which
hid the real interest he felt in the subject, "By the way, one of
your servants has quite an unusual voice.  I have heard her singing
about the halls a few times, and it seems to me she has real talent."

"Oh, that is Miss Dumont--Berene Dumont--she is not an absolute
servant," the Baroness replied; "she is a most unfortunate young
woman to whom my heart went out in pity, and I have given her a home.
She is really a widow, though she refuses to use her dead husband's
name."

"A widow?" repeated Preston with surprise and a queer sensation of
annoyance at his heart; "why, from the glimpse I had of her I thought
her a young girl."

"So she is, not over twenty-one at most, and woefully ignorant for
that age," the Baroness said, and then she proceeded to outline
Berene's history, laying a good deal of stress upon her own
charitable act in giving the girl a home.

"She is so ignorant of life, despite the fact that she has been
married, and she is so uneducated and helpless, I could not bear to
see her cast into the path of designing people," the Baroness said.
"She has a strong craving for an education, and I give her good books
to read, and good advice to ponder over, and I hope in time to come
she will marry some honest fellow and settle down to a quiet, happy
home life.  The man who brings us butter and eggs from the country is
quite fascinated with her, but she does not deign him a glance."  And
then the Baroness talked of other things.

But the history he had heard remained in Preston Cheney's mind and he
could not drive the thought of this girl away.  No wonder her eyes
were sad!  Better blood ran in her veins than coursed under the pink
flesh of the Baroness, he would wager; she was the unfortunate victim
of a combination of circumstances, which had defrauded her of the
advantages of youth.

He spoke with her in the hall one morning not long after that; and
then it grew to be a daily occurrence that he talked with her a few
moments, and before many weeks had passed the young man approached
the Baroness with a request.

"I have become interested in your protegee Miss Dumont," he said.
"You have done so much for her that you have stirred my better nature
and made me anxious to emulate your example.  In talking with her in
the hall one day I learned her great desire for a better education,
and her anxiety to earn money.  Now it has occurred to me that I
might aid her in both ways.  We need two or three more girls in our
office.  We need one more in the type-setting department.  As The
Clarion is a morning paper, and you never need Miss Dumont's services
after five o'clock, she could work a few hours in the office, earn a
small salary, and gain something in the way of an education also, if
she were ambitious enough to do so.  Nearly all my early education
was gained as a printer.  She tells me she is faulty in the matter of
spelling, and this would be excellent training for her.  You have,
dear madam, inspired the girl with a desire for more knowledge, and I
hope you will let me carry on the good work you have begun."

Preston had approached the matter in a way that could not fail to
bring success--by flattering the vanity and pride of the Baroness.
So elated was she with the agreeable references to herself, that she
never suspected the young man's deep personal interest in the girl.
She believed in the beginning that he was showing Berene this kind
attention solely to please the mistress.

Berene entered the office as type-setter, and made such astonishing
progress that she was promoted to the position of proof-reader ere
six months had passed.  And hour by hour, day by day, week by week,
the strange influence which she had exerted on her employer, from the
first moment of their meeting, grew and strengthened, until he
realised with a sudden terror that his whole being was becoming
absorbed by an intense passion for the girl.

Meantime the Baroness was growing embarrassing in her attentions.
The young man was not conceited, nor prone to regard himself as an
object of worship to the fair sex.  He had during the first few
months believed the Baroness to be amusing herself with his society.
He had not flattered himself that a woman of her age, who had seen so
much of the world, and whose ambitions were so unmistakable, could
regard him otherwise than as a diversion.

But of late the truth had forced itself upon him that the woman
wished to entangle him in a serious affair.  He could not afford to
jeopardise his reputation at the very outset of his career by any
such entanglement, or by the appearance of one.  He cast about for
some excuse to leave the Palace, yet this would separate him in a
measure from his association with Berene, beside incurring the enmity
of the Baroness, and possibly causing Berene to suffer from her anger
as well.

He seemed to be caught like a fly in a net.  And again the thought of
his future and his ambitions confronted him, and he felt abashed in
his own eyes, as he realised how far away these ambitions had seemed
of late, since he had allowed his emotions to overrule his brain.

What was this ignorant daughter of a French professor, that she
should stand between him and glory, riches and power?  Desperate
diseases needed desperate remedies.  He had been an occasional caller
at the Lawrence homestead ever since he came to Beryngford.  Without
being conceited on the subject, he realised that Mabel Lawrence would
not reject him as a suitor.

The masculine party is very dull, or the feminine very deceptive,
when a man makes a mistake in his impressions on this subject.

That afternoon the young editor left his office at five o'clock and
asked Miss Lawrence to be his wife.



CHAPTER IV



Preston Cheney walked briskly down the street after he left his
fiancee, his steps directed toward the Palace.  It was seven o'clock,
and he knew the Baroness would be at home.

He had determined upon heroic treatment for his own mental disease
(as he regarded his peculiar sentiments toward Berene Dumont), and he
had decided upon a similar course of treatment for the Baroness.

He would confide his engagement to her at once, and thus put an end
to his embarrassing position in the Palace, as well as to establish
his betrothal as a fact--and to force himself to so regard it.  It
was strange reasoning for a young man in the very first hour of his
new role of bridegroom elect, but this particular groom elect had
deliberately placed himself in a peculiar position, and his reasoning
was not, of course, that of an ardent and happy lover.

Already he was galled by his new fetters; already he was feeling a
sense of repulsion toward the woman he had asked to be his wife:  and
because of these feelings he was more eager to nail himself hand and
foot to the cross he had builded.

He was obliged to wait some time before the Baroness came into the
reception-room; and when she came he observed that she had made an
elaborate toilet in his honour.  Her sumptuous shoulders billowed
over the low-cut blue corsage like apple-dumplings over a china dish.
Her waist was drawn in to an hourglass taper, while her ample hips
spread out beneath like the heavy mason work which supports a slender
column.  Tiny feet encased in pretty slippers peeping from beneath
her silken skirts looked oddly out of proportion with the rest of her
generous personality, and reminded Preston of the grotesque cuts in
the humorous weeklies, where well-known politicians were represented
with large heads and small extremities.  Artistic by nature, and with
an eye to form, he had never admired the Baroness's type of beauty,
which was the theme of admiration for nearly every other man in
Beryngford.  Her face, with its infantine colouring, its large,
innocent azure eyes, and its short retrousse features, he conceded to
be captivatingly pretty, however, and it seemed unusually so this
evening.  Perhaps because he had so recently looked upon the sharp,
sallow face of his fiancee.

Preston frequently came to his room about this hour, after having
dined and before going to the office for his final duties; but he
seldom saw the Baroness on these occasions, unless through her own
design.

"You were surprised to receive my message, no doubt, saying I wished
to see you," he began.  "But I have something I feel I ought to tell
you, as it may make some changes in my habits, and will of course
eventually take me away from these pleasant associations."  He paused
for a second, and the Baroness, who had seated herself on the divan
at his side, leaned forward and looked inquiringly in his face.

"You are going away?" she asked, with a tremor in her voice.  "Is it
not very sudden?"

"No, I am not going away," he replied, "not from Beryngford--but I
shall doubtless leave your house ere many months.  I am engaged to be
married to Miss Mabel Lawrence.  You are the first person to whom I
have imparted the news, but you have been so kind, and I feel that
you ought to know it in time to secure a desirable tenant for my
room."

Again there was a pause.  The rosy face of the Baroness had grown
quite pale, and an unpleasant expression had settled about the
corners of her small mouth.  She waved a feather fan to and fro
languidly.  Then she gave a slight laugh and said:

"Well, I must confess that I am surprised.  Miss Lawrence is the last
woman in the world whom I would have imagined you to select as a
wife.  Yet I congratulate you on your good sense.  You are very
ambitious, and you can rise to great distinction if you have the
right influence to aid you.  Judge Lawrence, with his wealth and
position, is of all men the one who can advance your interests, and
what more natural than that he should advance the interests of his
son-in-law?  You are a very wise youth and I again congratulate you.
No romantic folly will ever ruin your life."

There was irony and ridicule in her voice and face, and the young man
felt his cheek tingle with anger and humiliation.  The Baroness had
read him like an open book--as everyone else doubtless would do.  It
was bitterly galling to his pride, but there was nothing to do, save
to keep a bold front, and carry out his role with as much dignity as
possible.

He rose, spoke a few formal words of thanks to the Baroness for her
kindness to him, and bowed himself from her presence, carrying with
him down the street the memory of her mocking eyes.

As he entered his private office, he was amazed to see Berene Dumont
sitting in his chair fast asleep, her head framed by her folded arms,
which rested on his desk.  Against the dark maroon of her sleeve, her
classic face was outlined like a marble statuette.  Her long lashes
swept her cheek, and in the attitude in which she sat, her graceful,
perfectly-proportioned figure displayed each beautiful curve to the
best advantage.

To a noble nature, the sight of even an enemy asleep, awakes
softening emotions, while the sight of a loved being in the
unconsciousness of slumber stirs the fountain of affection to its
very depths.

As the young editor looked upon the girl before him, a passion of
yearning love took possession of him.  A wild desire to seize her in
his arms and cover her pale face with kisses, made his heart throb to
suffocation and brought cold beads to his brow; and just as these
feelings gained an almost uncontrollable dominion over his reason,
will and judgment, the girl awoke and started to her feet in
confusion.

"Oh, Mr Cheney, pray forgive me!" she cried, looking more beautiful
than ever with the flush which overspread her face.  "I came in to
ask about a word in your editorial which I could not decipher.  I
waited for you, as I felt sure you would be in shortly--and I was so
TIRED I sat down for just a second to rest--and that is all I knew
about it.  You must forgive me, sir!--I did not mean to intrude."

Her confusion, her appealing eyes, her magnetic voice were all fuel
to the fire raging in the young man's heart.  Now that she was for
ever lost to him through his own deliberate action, she seemed
tenfold more dear and to be desired.  Brain, soul, and body all
seemed to crave her; he took a step forward, and drew in a quick
breath as if to speak; and then a sudden sense of his own danger, and
an overwhelming disgust for his weakness swept over him, and the
intense passion the girl had aroused in his heart changed to
unreasonable anger.

"Miss Dumont," he said coldly, "I think we will have to dispense with
your services after to-night.  Your duties are evidently too hard for
you.  You can leave the office at any time you wish.  Good-night."

The girl shrank as if he had struck her, looked up at him with wide,
wondering eyes, waited for a moment as if expecting to be recalled,
then, as Mr Cheney wheeled his chair about and turned his back upon
her, she suddenly sped away without a word.

She left the office a few moments later; but it was not until after
eleven o'clock that she dragged herself up two flights of stairs
toward her room on the attic floor at the Palace.  She had been
walking the streets like a mad creature all that intervening time,
trying to still the agonising pain in her heart.  Preston Cheney had
long been her ideal of all that was noble, grand and good, she
worshipped him as devout pagans worshipped their sacred idols; and,
without knowing it, she gave him the absorbing passion which an
intense woman gives to her lover.

It was only now that he had treated her with such rough brutality,
and discharged her from his employ for so slight a cause, that the
knowledge burst upon her tortured heart of all he was to her.

She paused at the foot of the third and last flight of stairs with a
strange dizziness in her head and a sinking sensation at her heart.

A little less than half-an-hour afterwards Preston Cheney unlocked
the street door and came in for the night.  He had done double his
usual amount of work and had finished his duties earlier than usual.
To avoid thinking after he sent Berene away, he had turned to his
desk and plunged into his labour with feverish intensity.  He wrote a
particularly savage editorial on the matter of over-immigration, and
his leaders on political questions of the day were all tinctured with
a bitterness and sarcasm quite new to his pen.  At midnight that pen
dropped from his nerveless hand, and he made his way toward the
Palace in a most unenviable state of mind and body.

Yet he believed he had done the right thing both in engaging himself
to Miss Lawrence and in discharging Berene.  Her constant presence
about the office was of all things the most undesirable in his new
position.

"But I might have done it in a decent manner if I had not lost all
control of myself," he said as he walked home.  "It was brutal the
way I spoke to her; poor child, she looked as if I had beat her with
a bludgeon.  Well, it is just as well perhaps that I gave her good
reason to despise me."

Since Berene had gone into the young man's office as an employe her
good taste and another reason had caused her to avoid him as much as
possible in the house.  He seldom saw more than a passing glimpse of
her in the halls, and frequently whole days elapsed that he met her
only in the office.  The young man never suspected that this fact was
due in great part to the suggestion of jealousy in the manner of the
Baroness toward the young girl ever after he had shown so much
interest in her welfare.  Sensitive to the mental atmosphere about
her, as a wind harp to the lightest breeze, Berene felt this
unexpressed sentiment in the breast of her "benefactress" and strove
to avoid anything which could aggravate it.

With a lagging step and a listless air, Preston made his way up the
first of two flights of stairs which intervened between the street
door and his room.  The first floor was in darkness; but in the upper
hall a dim light was always left burning until his return.  As he
reached the landing, he was startled to see a woman's form lying at
the foot of the attic stairs, but a few feet from the door of his
room.  Stooping down, he uttered a sudden exclamation of pained
surprise, for it was upon the pallid, unconscious face of Berene
Dumont that his eyes fell.  He lifted the lithe figure in his sinewy
arms, and with light, rapid steps bore her up the stairs and in
through the open door of her room.

"If she is dead, I am her murderer," he thought.  But at that moment
she opened her eyes and looked full into his, with a gaze which made
his impetuous, uncontrolled heart forget that any one or anything
existed on earth but this girl and his love for her.



CHAPTER V



One of the greatest factors in the preservation of the Baroness's
beauty had been her ability to sleep under all conditions.  The woman
who can and does sleep eight or nine hours out of each twenty-four is
well armed against the onslaught of time and trouble.

To say that such women do not possess heart enough or feeling enough
to suffer is ofttimes most untrue.

Insomnia is a disease of the nerves or of the stomach, rather than
the result of extreme emotion.  Sometimes the people who sleep the
most profoundly at night in times of sorrow, suffer the more
intensely during their waking hours.  Disguised as a friend,
deceitful Slumber comes to them only to strengthen their powers of
suffering, and to lend a new edge to pain.

The Baroness was not without feeling.  Her temperament was far from
phlegmatic.  She had experienced great cyclones of grief and loss in
her varied career, though many years had elapsed since she had known
what the French call a "white night."

But the night following her interview with Preston Cheney she never
closed her eyes in sleep.  It was in vain that she tried all known
recipes for producing slumber.  She said the alphabet backward ten
times; she counted one thousand; she conjured up visions of sheep
jumping the time-honoured fence in battalions, yet the sleep god
never once drew near.

"I am certainly a brilliant illustration of the saying that there is
no fool like an old fool," she said to herself as the night wore on,
and the strange sensation of pain and loss which Preston Cheney's
unexpected announcement had caused her gnawed at her breast like a
rat in a wainscot.

That she had been unusually interested in the young editor she knew
from the first; that she had been mortally wounded by Cupid's shaft
she only now discovered.  She had passed through a divorce, two
"affairs" and a legitimate widowhood, without feeling any of the keen
emotions which now drove sleep from her eyes.  A long time ago,
longer than she cared to remember, she had experienced such emotions,
but she had supposed such folly only possible in the high tide of
early youth.  It was absurd, nay more, it was ridiculous to lie awake
at her time of life thinking about a penniless country youth whose
mother she might almost have been.  In this bitterly frank fashion
the Baroness reasoned with herself as she lay quite still in her
luxurious bed, and tried to sleep.

Yet despite her frankness, her philosophy and her reasoning, the
rasping hurt at her heart remained--a hurt so cruel it seemed to her
the end of all peace or pleasure in life.

It is harder to bear the suffocating heat of a late September day
which the year sometimes brings, than all the burning June suns.

The Baroness heard the click of Preston's key in the street door, and
she listened to his slow step as he ascended the stairs.  She heard
him pause, too, and waited for the sound of the opening of his room
door, which was situated exactly above her own.  But she listened in
vain, her ears, brain and heart on the alert with surprise,
curiosity, and at last suspicion.  The Baroness was as full of
curiosity as a cat.

It was not until just before dawn that she heard his step in the
hall, and his door open and close.

An hour later a sharp ring came at the street door bell.  A message
for Mr Preston, the servant said, in answer to her mistress's
question as she descended from the room above.

"Was Mr Preston awake when you rapped on his door?" asked the
Baroness.

"Yes, madame, awake and dressed."

Mr Preston ran hurriedly through the halls and out to the street a
moment later; and the Baroness, clothed in a dressing-gown and silken
slippers, tiptoed lightly to his room.  The bed had not been occupied
the whole night.  On the table lay a note which the young man had
begun when interrupted by the message which he had thrown down beside
it.

The Baroness glanced at the note, on which the ink was still moist,
and read, "My dear Miss Lawrence, I want you to release me from the
ties formed only yesterday--I am basely unworthy--" here the note
ended.  She now turned her attention to the message which had
prevented the completion of the letter.  It was signed by Judge
Lawrence and ran as follows:-


"My Dear Boy,--My wife was taken mortally ill this morning just
before daybreak.  She cannot live many hours, our physician says.
Mabel is in a state of complete nervous prostration caused by the
shock of this calamity.  I wish you would come to us at once.  I fear
for my dear child's reason unless you prove able to calm and quiet
her through this ordeal.  Hasten then, my dear son; every moment
before you arrive will seem an age of sorrow and anxiety to me.  "S.
LAWRENCE."


A strange smile curved the corners of the Baroness's lips as she
finished reading this note and tiptoed down the stairs to her own
room again.

Meantime the hour for her hot water arrived, and Berene did not
appear.  The Baroness drank a quart of hot water every morning as a
tonic for her system, and another quart after breakfast to reduce her
flesh.  Her excellent digestive powers and the clear condition of her
blood she attributed largely to this habit.

After a few moments she rang the bell vigorously.  Maggie, the
chambermaid, came in answer to the call.

"Please ask Miss Dumont" (Berene was always known to the other
servants as Miss Dumont) "to hurry with the hot water," the Baroness
said.

"Miss Dumont has not yet come downstairs, madame."

"Not come down?  Then will you please call her, Maggie?"

The Baroness was always polite to her servants.  She had observed
that a graciousness of speech toward her servants often made up for a
deficiency in wages.  Maggie ascended to Miss Dumont's room, and
returned with the information that Miss Dumont had a severe headache,
and begged the indulgence of madame this morning.

Again that strange smile curved the corners of the Baroness's lips.

Maggie was requested to bring up hot water and coffee, and great was
her surprise to find the Baroness moving about the room when she
appeared with the tray.

Half-an-hour later Berene Dumont, standing by an open window with her
hands clasped behind her head, heard a light tap on her door.  In
answer to a mechanical "Come," the Baroness appeared.

The rustle of her silken morning gown caused Berene to turn suddenly
and face her; and as she met the eyes of her visitor the young
woman's pallor gave place to a wave of deep crimson, which dyed her
face and neck like the shadow of a red flag falling on a camellia
blossom.

"Maggie tells me you are ill this morning," the Baroness remarked
after a moment's silence.  "I am surprised to find you up and
dressed.  I came to see if I could do anything for you."

"You are very kind," Berene answered, while in her heart she thought
how cruel was the expression in the face of the woman before her, and
how faded she appeared in the morning light.  "But I think I shall be
quite well in a little while, I only need to keep quiet for a few
hours."

"I fear you passed a sleepless night," the Baroness remarked with a
solicitous tone, but with the same cruel smile upon her lips.  "I see
you never opened your bed.  Something must have been in the air to
keep us all awake.  I did not sleep an hour, and Mr Cheney never
entered his room till near morning.  Yet I can understand his
wakefulness--he announced his engagement to Miss Mabel Lawrence to me
last evening, and a young man is not expected to woo sleep easily
after taking such an important step as that.  Judge Lawrence sent for
him a few hours ago to come and support Miss Mabel during the trial
that the day is to bring them in the death of Mrs Lawrence.  The
physician has predicted the poor invalid's near end.  Sorrow follows
close on joy in this life."

There was a moment's silence; then Miss Dumont said:  "I think I will
try to get a little sleep now, madame.  I thank you for your kind
interest in me."

The Baroness descended to her room humming an air from an old opera,
and settled to the task of removing as much as possible all evidences
of fatigue and sleeplessness from her countenance.

It has been said very prettily of the spruce-tree, that it keeps the
secret of its greenness well; so well that we hardly know when it
sheds its leaves.  There are women who resemble the spruce in their
perennial youth, and the vigilance with which they guard the secret
of it.  The Baroness was one of these.  Only her mirror shared this
secret.

She was an adept at the art of preservation, and greatly as she
disliked physical exertion, she toiled laboriously over her own
person an hour at least every day, and never employed a maid to
assist her.  One's rival might buy one's maid, she reasoned, and it
was well to have no confidant in these matters.

She slipped off her dressing-gown and corset and set herself to the
task of pinching and mauling her throat, arms and shoulders, to
remove superfluous flesh, and strengthen muscles and fibres to resist
the flabby tendencies which time produces.  Then she used the dumb-
bells vigorously for fifteen minutes, and that was followed by five
minutes of relaxation.  Next she lay on the floor flat upon her face,
her arms across her back, and lifted her head and chest twenty-five
times.  This exercise was to replace flesh with muscle across the
abdomen.  Then she rose to her feet, set her small heels together,
turned her toes out squarely, and, keeping her body upright bent her
knees out in a line with her hips, sinking and rising rapidly fifteen
times.  This produced pliancy of the body, and induced a healthy
condition of the loins and adjacent organs.

To further fight against the deadly enemy of obesity, she lifted her
arms above her head slowly until she touched her finger tips, at the
same time rising upon her tiptoes, while she inhaled a long breath,
and as slowly dropped to her heels, and lowered her arms while she
exhaled her breath.  While these exercises had been taking place, a
tin cup of water had been coming to the boiling point over an alcohol
lamp.  This was now poured into a china bowl containing a small
quantity of sweet milk, which was always brought on her breakfast
tray.

The Baroness seated herself before her mirror, in a glare of cruel
light which revealed every blemish in her complexion, every line
about the mouth and eyes.

"You are really hideously passee, mon amie," she observed as she
peered at herself searchingly; "but we will remedy all that."

Dipping a soft linen handkerchief in the bowl of steaming milk and
water, she applied it to her face, holding it closely over the brow
and eyes and about the mouth, until every pore was saturated and
every weary drawn tissue fed and strengthened by the tonic.  After
this she dashed ice-cold water over her face.  Still there were
little folds at the corners of the eyelids, and an ugly line across
the brow, and these were manipulated with painstaking care, and
treated with mysterious oils and fragrant astringents and finally
washed in cool toilet water and lightly brushed with powder, until at
the end of an hour's labour, the face of the Baroness had resumed its
roseleaf bloom and transparent smoothness for which she was so
famous.  And when by the closest inspection at the mirror, in the
broadest light, she saw no flaw in skin, hair, or teeth, the Baroness
proceeded to dress for a drive.  Even the most jealous rival would
have been obliged to concede that she looked like a woman of twenty-
eight, that most fascinating of all ages, as she took her seat in the
carriage.

In the early days of her life in Beryngford, when as the Baroness Le
Fevre she had led society in the little town, Mrs Lawrence had been
one of her most devoted friends; Judge Lawrence one of her most
earnest, if silent admirers.  As "Baroness Brown" and as the landlady
of "The Palace" she had still maintained her position as friend of
the family, and the Lawrences, secure in their wealth and power, had
allowed her to do so, where some of the lower social lights had
dropped her from their visiting lists.

The Baroness seemed to exercise a sort of hypnotic power over the
fretful, nervous invalid who shared Judge Lawrence's name, and this
influence was not wholly lost upon the Judge himself, who never
looked upon the Baroness's abundant charms, glowing with health,
without giving vent to a profound sigh like some hungry child
standing before a confectioner's window.

The news of Mrs Lawrence's dangerous illness was voiced about the
town by noon, and therefore the Baroness felt safe in calling at the
door to make inquiries, and to offer any assistance which she might
be able to render.  Knowing her intimate relations with the mistress
of the house, the servant admitted her to the parlour and announced
her presence to Judge Lawrence, who left the bedside of the invalid
to tell the caller in person that Mrs Lawrence had fallen into a
peaceful slumber, and that slight hopes were entertained of her
possible recovery.  Scarcely had the words passed his lips, however,
when the nurse in attendance hurriedly called him.  "Mrs Lawrence is
dead!" she cried.  "She breathed only twice after you left the room."

The Baroness, shocked and startled, rose to go, feeling that her
presence longer would be an intrusion.

"Do not go," cried the Judge in tones of distress.  "Mabel is nearly
distracted, and this news will excite her still further.  We thought
this morning that she was on the verge of serious mental disorder.  I
sent for her fiance, Mr Cheney, and he has calmed her somewhat.  You
always exerted a soothing and restful influence over my wife, and you
may have the same power with Mabel.  Stay with us, I beg of you,
through the afternoon at least."

The Baroness sent her carriage home and remained in the Lawrence
mansion until the following morning.  The condition of Miss Lawrence
was indeed serious.  She passed from one attack of hysteria to
another, and it required the constant attention of her fiance and her
mother's friend to keep her from acts of violence.

It was after midnight when she at last fell asleep, and Preston
Cheney in a state of complete exhaustion was shown to a room, while
the Baroness remained at the bedside of Miss Lawrence.

When the Baroness and Mr Cheney returned to the Palace they were
struck with consternation to learn that Miss Dumont had packed her
trunk and departed from Beryngford on the three o'clock train the
previous day.

A brief note thanking the Baroness for her kindness, and stating that
she had imposed upon that kindness quite too long, was her only
farewell.  There was no allusion to her plans or her destination, and
all inquiry and secret search failed to find one trace of her.  She
seemed to vanish like a phantom from the face of the earth.

No one had seen her leave the Palace, save the laundress, Mrs Connor;
and little this humble personage dreamed that Fate was reserving for
her an important role in the drama of a life as yet unborn.



CHAPTER VI



Whatever hope of escape from his self-imposed bondage Preston Cheney
had entertained when he began the note to his fiancee which the
Baroness had read, completely vanished during the weeks which
followed the death of Mrs Lawrence.

Mabel's nervous condition was alarming, and her father seemed to rely
wholly upon his future son-in-law for courage and moral support
during the trying ordeal.  Like most large men of strong physique,
Judge Lawrence was as helpless as an infant in the presence of an
ailing woman; and his experience as the husband of a wife whose
nerves were the only notable thing about her, had given him an
absolute terror of feminine invalids.

Mabel had never been very fond of her mother; she had not been a
loving or a dutiful daughter.  A petulant child and an irritable,
fault-finding young woman, who had often been devoid of sympathy for
her parents, she now exhibited such an excess of grief over the death
of her mother that her reason seemed to be threatened.

It was, in fact, quite as much anger as grief which caused her
nervous paroxysms.  Mabel Lawrence had never since her infancy known
what it was to be thwarted in a wish.  Both parents had been slaves
to her slightest caprice and she had ruled the household with a look
or a word.  Death had suddenly deprived her of a mother who was
necessary to her comfort and to whose presence she was accustomed,
and her heart was full of angry resentment at the fate which had
dared to take away a member of her household.  It had never entered
her thoughts that death could devastate HER home.

Other people lost fathers and mothers, of course; but that Mabel
Lawrence could be deprived of a parent seemed incredible.  Anger is a
strong ingredient in the excessive grief of every selfish nature.

Preston Cheney became more and more disheartened with the prospect of
his future, as he studied the character and temperament of his
fiancee during her first weeks of loss.

But the net which he had woven was closing closer and closer about
him, and every day he became more hopelessly entangled in its meshes.

At the end of one month, the family physician decided that travel and
change of air and scene was an imperative necessity for Miss
Lawrence.  Judge Lawrence was engaged in some important legal matters
which rendered an extended journey impossible for him.  To trust
Mabel in the hands of hired nurses alone, was not advisable.  It was
her father who suggested an early marriage and a European trip for
bride and groom, as the wisest expedient under the circumstances.

Like the prisoner in the iron room, who saw the walls slowly but
surely closing in to crush out his life, Preston Cheney saw his
wedding day approaching, and knew that his doom was sealed.

There were many desperate hours, when, had he possessed the slightest
clue to the hiding-place of Berene Dumont, he would have flown to
her, even knowing that he left disgrace and death behind him.  He
realised that he now owed a duty to the girl he loved, higher and
more imperative by far than any he owed to his fiancee.  But he had
not the means to employ a detective to find Berene; and he was not
sure that, if found, she might not spurn him.  He had heard and read
of cases where a woman's love had turned to bitter loathing and
hatred for the man who had not protected her in a moment of weakness.
He could think of no other cause which would lead Berene to disappear
in such a mysterious manner at such a time, and so the days passed
and he married Mabel Lawrence two months after the death of her
mother, and the young couple set forth immediately on extended
foreign travels.  Fifteen months later they returned to Beryngford
with their infant daughter Alice.  Mrs Cheney was much improved in
health, though still a great sufferer from nervous disorders, a
misfortune which the child seemed to inherit.  She would lie and
scream for hours at a time, clenching her small fists and growing
purple in the face, and all efforts of parents, nurses or physicians
to soothe her, served only to further increase her frenzy.  She
screamed and beat the air with her thin arms and legs until nature
exhausted itself, then she fell into a heavy slumber and awoke in
good spirits.

These attacks came on frequently in the night, and as they rendered
Mrs Cheney very "nervous," and caused a panic among the nurses, it
devolved upon the unhappy father to endeavour to soothe the violent
child.  And while he walked the floor with her or leaned over her
crib, using all his strong mental powers to control these unfortunate
paroxysms, no vision came to him of another child lying cuddled in
her mother's arms in a distant town, a child of wonderful beauty and
angelic nature, born of love, and inheriting love's divine qualities.

A few months before the young couple returned to their native soil,
they received a letter which caused Preston the greatest
astonishment, and Mabel some hours of hysterical weeping.  This
letter was written by Judge Lawrence, and announced his marriage to
Baroness Brown.  Judge Lawrence had been a widower more than a year
when the Baroness took the book of his heart, in which he supposed
the hand of romance had long ago written "finis," and turning it to
his astonished eyes revealed a whole volume of love's love.

It is in the second reading of their hearts that the majority of men
find the most interesting literature.

Before the Baroness had been three months his wife, the long years of
martyrdom he had endured as the husband of Mabel's mother seemed like
a nightmare dream to Judge Lawrence; and all of life, hope and
happiness was embodied in the woman who ruled his destiny with a
hypnotic sway no one could dispute, yet a woman whose heart still
throbbed with a stubborn and lawless passion for the man who called
her husband father.



CHAPTER VII



More than two decades had passed since Preston Cheney followed the
dictates of his ambition and married Mabel Lawrence.

Many of his early hopes and desires had been realised during these
years.  He had attained to high political positions; and honour and
wealth were his to enjoy.  Yet Senator Cheney, as he was now known,
was far from a happy man.  Disappointment was written in every
lineament of his face, restlessness and discontent spoke in his every
movement, and at times the spirit of despair seemed to look from the
depths of his eyes.

To a man of any nobility of nature, there can be small satisfaction
in honours which he knows are bought with money and bribes; and to
the proud young American there was the additional sting of knowing
that even the money by which his honours were purchased was not his
own.

It was the second Mrs Lawrence (still designated as the "Baroness" by
her stepdaughter and by old acquaintances) to whom Preston owed the
constant reminder of his dependence upon the purse of his father-in-
law.  In those subtle, occult ways known only to a jealous and
designing nature, the Baroness found it possible to make Preston's
life a torture, without revealing her weapons of warfare to her
husband; indeed, without allowing him to even smell the powder, while
she still kept up a constant small fire upon the helpless enemy.

Owing to the fact that Mabel had come as completely under the
hypnotic influence of the Baroness as the first Mrs Lawrence had been
during her lifetime, Preston was subjected to a great deal more of
her persecutions than would otherwise have been possible.  Mabel was
never happier than when enjoying the companionship of her new mother;
a condition of things which pleased the Judge as much as it made his
son-in-law miserable.

With a malicious adroitness possible only to such a woman as the
second Mrs Lawrence, she endeared herself to Mrs Cheney, by a
thousand flattering and caressing ways, and by a constant exhibition
of sympathy, which to a weak and selfish nature is as pleasing as it
is distasteful to the proud and strong.  And by this inexhaustible
flow of sympathetic feeling, she caused the wife to drift farther and
farther away from her husband's influence, and to accuse him of all
manner of shortcomings and faults which had not suggested themselves
to her own mind.

Mabel had not given or demanded a devoted love when she married
Preston Cheney.  She was quite satisfied to bear his name, and do the
honours of his house, and to be let alone as much as possible.  It
was the name, not the estate, of wifehood she desired; and motherhood
she had accepted with reluctance and distaste.

Never was a more undesired or unwelcome child born than her daughter
Alice, and the helpless infant shared with its father the resentful
anger which dominated her unwilling mother the wretched months before
its advent into earth life.

To be let alone and allowed to follow her own whims and desires, and
never to be crossed in any wish, was all Mrs Cheney asked of her
husband.

This role was one he had very willingly permitted her to pursue,
since with every passing week and month he found less and less to win
or bind him to his wife.  Wretched as this condition of life was, it
might at least have settled into a monotonous calm, undisturbed by
strife, but for the molesting "sympathy" of the Baroness.

"Poor thing, here you are alone again," she would say on entering the
house where Mabel lounged or lolled, quite content with her situation
until the tone and words of her stepmother aroused a resentful
consciousness of being neglected.  Again the Baroness would say:

"I do think you are such a brave little darling to carry so smiling a
face about with all you have to endure."  Or, "Very few wives would
bear what you bear and hide every vestige of unhappiness from the
world.  You are a wonderful and admirable character in my eyes."  Or,
"It seems so strange that your husband does not adore you--but men
are blind to the best qualities in women like you.  I never hear Mr
Cheney praising other women without a sad and almost resentful
feeling in my heart, realising how superior you are to all of his
favourites."  It was the insidious effect of poisoned flattery like
this, which made the Baroness a ruling power in the Cheney household,
and at the same time turned an already cold and unloving wife into a
jealous and nagging tyrant who rendered the young statesman's home
the most dreaded place on earth to him, and caused him to live away
from it as much as possible.

His only child, Alice, a frail, hysterical girl, devoid of beauty or
grace, gave him but little comfort or satisfaction.  Indeed she was
but an added disappointment and pain in his life.  Indulged in every
selfish thought by her mother and the Baroness, peevish and petulant,
always ailing, complaining and discontented, and still a victim to
the nervous disorders inherited from her mother, it was small wonder
that Senator Cheney took no more delight in the role of father than
he had found in the role of husband.

Alice was given every advantage which money could purchase.  But her
delicate health had rendered systematic study of any kind impossible,
and her twentieth birthday found her with no education, with no use
of her reasoning or will powers, but with a complete and beautiful
wardrobe in which to masquerade and air her poor little attempts at
music, art, or conversation.

Judge Lawrence died when Alice was fifteen years of age, leaving both
his widow and his daughter handsomely provided for.

The Baroness not only possessed the Beryngford homestead, but a house
in Washington as well; and both of these were occupied by tenants,
for Mabel insisted upon having her stepmother dwell under her own
roof.  Senator Cheney had purchased a house in New York to gratify
his wife and daughter, and it was here the family resided, when not
in Washington or at the seaside resorts.  Both women wished to
forget, and to make others forget, that they had ever lived in
Beryngford.  They never visited the place and never referred to it.
They desired to be considered "New Yorkers" and always spoke of
themselves as such.

The Baroness was now hopelessly passee.  Yet it was the revealing of
the inner woman, rather than the withering of the exterior, which
betrayed her years.  The woman who understands the art of bodily
preservation can, with constant toil and care, retain an appearance
of youth and charm into middle life; but she who would pass that
dreaded meridian, and still remain a goodly sight for the eyes of
men, must possess, in addition to all the secrets of the toilet,
those divine elixirs, unselfishness and love for humanity.  Faith in
divine powers, too, and resignation to earthly ills, must do their
part to lend the fading eye lustre and to give a softening glow to
the paling cheek.  Before middle life, it is the outer woman who is
seen; after middle life, skilled as she may be by art and however
endowed my nature, yet the inner woman becomes visible to the least
discerning eye, and the thoughts and feelings which have dominated
her during all the past, are shown upon her face and form like
printed words upon the open leaves of a book.  That is why so many
young beauties become ugly old ladies, and why plain faces sometimes
are beautiful in age.

The Baroness had been unremitting in the care of her person, and she
had by this toil saved her figure from becoming gross, retaining the
upright carriage and the tapering waist of youth, though she was upon
the verge of her sixtieth birthday.  Her complexion, too, owing to
her careful diet, her hours of repose, and her knowledge of skin
foods and lotions, remained smooth, fair and unfurrowed.  But the
long-guarded expression in her blue eyes of childlike innocence had
given place to the hard look of a selfish and unhappy nature, and the
lines about the small mouth accented the expression of the eyes.

It was, despite its preservation of Nature's gifts, and despite its
forced smiles, the face of a selfish, cruel pessimist, disappointed
in her past and with no uplifting faith to brighten the future.

The Baroness had been the wife of Judge Lawrence a number of years,
before she relinquished her hopes of one day making Preston Cheney
respond to the passion which burned unquenched in her breast.  It had
been with the idea of augmenting the interests of the man whom she
believed to be her future lover, that she aided and urged on her
husband in his efforts to procure place and honour for his son-in-
law.

It was this idea which caused her to widen the breach between wife
and husband by every subtle means in her power; and it was when this
idea began to lose colour and substance and drop away among the
wreckage of past hopes, that the Baroness ceased to compliment and
began to taunt Preston Cheney with his dependence upon his father-in-
law, and to otherwise goad and torment the unhappy man.  And Preston
Cheney grew into the habit of staying anywhere longer than at home.

During the last ten years the Baroness had seemed to abandon all
thoughts of gallant adventure.  When the woman who has found life and
pleasures only in coquetry and conquest is forced to relinquish these
delights, she becomes either very devout or very malicious.

The Baroness was devoid of religious feelings, and she became,
therefore, the most bitter and caustic of cynical critics at heart,
though she guarded her expression of these sentiments from policy.

Yet to Mabel she expressed herself freely, knowing that her listener
enjoyed no conversation so much as that of gossip and criticism.  A
beautiful or attractive woman was the target for her most cruel
shafts of sarcasm, and indeed no woman was safe from her secret
malice save Mabel and Alice, over whom she found it a greater
pleasure to exercise her hypnotic control.  For Alice, indeed, the
Baroness entertained a peculiar affection.  The fact that she was the
child of the man to whom she had given the strongest passion of her
life, and the girl's lack of personal beauty, and her unfortunate
physical condition, awoke a medley of love, pity and protection in
the heart of this strange woman.



CHAPTER VIII



The Baroness had always been a churchgoing woman, yet she had never
united with any church, or subscribed to any creed.

Religious observance was only an implement of social warfare with
her.  Wherever her lot was cast, she made it her business to discover
which church the fashionable people of the town frequented, and to
become a familiar and liberal-handed personage in that edifice.

Judge Lawrence and his family were High Church Episcopalians, and the
second Mrs Lawrence slipped gracefully into the pew vacated by the
first, and became a much more important feature in the congregation,
owing to her good health and extreme desire for popularity.  Mabel
and Alice were devout believers in the orthodox dogmas which have
taken the place of the simple teachings of Christ in so many of our
churches to-day.  They believed that people who did not go to church
would stand a very poor chance of heaven; and that a strict
observance of a Sunday religion would ensure them a passport into
God's favour.  When they returned from divine service and mangled the
character and attire of their neighbours over the Sunday dinner-
table, no idea entered their heads or hearts that they had sinned
against the Holy Ghost.  The pastor of their church knew them to be
selfish, worldly-minded women; yet he administered the holy sacrament
to them without compunction of conscience, and never by question or
remark implied a doubt of their true sincerity in things religious.
They believed in the creed of his church, and they paid liberally for
the support of that church.  What more could he ask?

This had been true of the pastor in Beryngford, and it proved equally
true of their spiritual adviser in Washington and in New York.

Just across the aisle from the Lawrences sat a rich financier, in his
sumptuously cushioned pew.  During six days of each week he was
engaged in crushing life and hope out of the hearts of the poor,
under his juggernaut wheels of monopoly.  His name was known far and
near, as that of a powerful and cruel speculator, who did not
hesitate to pauperise his nearest friends if they placed themselves
in his reach.  That he was a thief and a robber, no one ever denied;
yet so colossal were his thefts, so bold and successful his
robberies, the public gazed upon him with a sort of stupefied awe,
and allowed him to proceed, while miserable tramps, who stole
overcoats or robbed money drawers, were incarcerated for a term of
years, and then sternly refused assistance afterward by good people,
who place no confidence in jail birds.

But each Sunday this successful robber occupied his high-priced
church pew, devoutly listening to the divine word.

He never failed to partake of the holy communion, nor was his right
to do so ever questioned.

The rector of the church knew his record perfectly; knew that his
gains were ill-gotten blood money, ground from the suffering poor by
the power of monopoly, and from confiding fools by smart lures and
scheming tricks.  But this young clergyman, having recently been
called to preside over the fashionable church, had no idea of being
so impolite as to refuse to administer the bread and wine to one of
its most liberal supporters!

There were constant demands upon the treasury of the church; it
required a vast outlay of money to maintain the splendour and
elegance of the temple which held its head so high above many others;
and there were large charities to be sustained, not to mention its
rector's princely salary.  The millionaire pewholder was a liberal
giver.  It rarely occurs to the fashionable dispensers of spiritual
knowledge to ask whether the devil's money should be used to gild the
Lord's temple; nor to question if it be a wise religion which allows
a man to rob his neighbours on weekdays, to give to the cause of
charity on Sundays.

And yet if every clergyman and priest in the land were to make and
maintain these standards for their followers, there might be an
astonishing decrease in the needs of the poor and unfortunate.

Were every church member obliged to open his month's ledgers to a
competent jury of inspectors, before he was allowed to take the holy
sacrament and avow himself a humble follower of Christ, what a
revolution might ensue!  How church spires would crumble for lack of
support, and poorhouses lessen in number for lack of inmates!

But the leniency of clergymen toward the shortcomings of their
wealthy parishioners is often a touching lesson in charity to the
thoughtful observer who stands outside the fold.

For how could they obtain money to convert the heathen, unless this
sweet cloak of charity were cast over the sins of the liberal rich?
Christ is crucified by the fashionable clergymen to-day more cruelly
than he was by the Jews of old.

Senator Cheney was not a church member, and he seldom attended
service.  This was a matter of great solicitude to his wife and
daughter.  The Baroness felt it to be a mistake on the part of
Senator Cheney, and even Judge Lawrence, who adored his son-in-law,
regretted the young man's indifference to things spiritual.  But with
all Preston Cheney's worldly ambitions and weaknesses, there was a
vein of sincerity in his nature which forbade his feigning a faith he
did not feel; and the daily lives of the three feminine members of
his family were so in disaccord with his views of religion that he
felt no incentive to follow in their footsteps.  Judge Lawrence he
knew to be an honest, loyal-hearted, God and humanity loving man.  "A
true Christian by nature and education," he said of his father-in-
law, "but I am not born with his tendency to religious observance,
and I see less and less in the churches to lead me into the fold.  It
seems to me that these religious institutions are getting to be vast
monopolistic corporations like the railroads and oil trusts, and the
like.  I see very little of the spirit of Christ in orthodox people
to-day."

Meanwhile Senator Cheney's purse was always open to any demand the
church made; he believed in churches as benevolent if not soul-saving
institutions, and cheerfully aided their charitable work.

The rector of St Blank's, the fashionable edifice where the ladies of
the Cheney household obtained spiritual manna in New York, died when
Alice was sixteen years old.  He was a good old man, and a sincere
Episcopalian, and whatever originality of thought or expression he
may have lacked, his strict observance of the High Church code of
ethics maintained the tone of his church and rendered him an object
of reverence to his congregation.  His successor was Reverend Arthur
Emerson Stuart, a young man barely thirty years of age, heir to a
comfortable fortune, gifted with strong intellectual powers and
dowered with physical attractions.

It was not a case of natural selection which caused Arthur Stuart to
adopt the church as a profession.  It was the result of his middle
name.  Mrs Stuart had been an Emerson--in some remote way her family
claimed relationship with Ralph Waldo.  Her father and grandfather
and several uncles had been clergymen.  She married a broker, who
left her a rich widow with one child, a son.  From the hour this son
was born his mother designed him for the clergy, and brought him up
with the idea firmly while gently fixed in his mind.

Whatever seed a mother plants in a young child's mind, carefully
watches over, prunes and waters, and exposes to sun and shade, is
quite certain to grow, if the soil is not wholly stony ground.

Arthur Stuart adored his mother, and stifling some commercial
instincts inherited from the parental side, he turned his attention
to the ministry and entered upon his chosen work when only twenty-
five years of age.  Eloquent, dramatic in speech, handsome, and
magnetic in person, independent in fortune, and of excellent lineage
on the mother's side, it was not surprising that he was called to
take charge of the spiritual welfare of fashionable St Blank's Church
on the death of the old pastor; or that, having taken the charge, he
became immensely popular, especially with the ladies of his
congregation.  And from the first Sabbath day when they looked up
from their expensive pew into the handsome face of their new rector,
there was but one man in the world for Mabel Cheney and her daughter
Alice, and that was the Reverend Arthur Emerson Stuart.

It has been said by a great and wise teacher, that we may worship the
god in the human being, but never the human being as God.  This
distinction is rarely drawn by women, I fear, when their spiritual
teacher is a young and handsome man.  The ladies of the Rev. Arthur
Stuart's congregation went home to dream, not of the Creator and
Maker of all things, nor of the divine Man, but of the handsome face,
stalwart form and magnetic voice of the young rector.  They feasted
their eyes upon his agreeable person, rather than their souls upon
his words of salvation.  Disappointed wives, lonely spinsters and
romantic girls believed they were coming nearer to spiritual truths
in their increased desire to attend service, while in fact they were
merely drawn nearer to a very attractive male personality.

There was not the holy flame in the young clergyman's own heart to
ignite other souls; but his strong magnetism was perceptible to all,
and they did not realise the difference.  And meantime the church
grew and prospered amazingly.

It was observed by the congregation of St Blank's Church, shortly
after the advent of the new rector, that a new organist also occupied
the organ loft; and inquiry elicited the fact that the old man who
had officiated in that capacity during many years, had been retired
on a pension, while a young lady who needed the position and the
salary had been chosen to fill the vacancy.

That the change was for the better could not be questioned.  Never
before had such music pealed forth under the tall spires of St
Blank's.  The new organist seemed inspired; and many people in the
fashionable congregation, hearing that this wonderful musician was a
young woman, lingered near the church door after service to catch a
glimpse of her as she descended from the loft.

A goodly sight she was, indeed, for human eyes to gaze upon.  Young,
of medium height and perfectly symmetry of shape, her blonde hair and
satin skin and eyes of velvet darkness were but her lesser charms.
That which riveted the gaze of every beholder, and drew all eyes to
her whereever she passed, was her air of radiant health and
happiness, which emanated from her like the perfume from a flower.

A sad countenance may render a heroine of romance attractive in a
book, but in real life there is no charm at once so rare and so
fascinating as happiness.  Did you ever think how few faces of the
grown up, however young, are really happy in expression?  Discontent,
restlessness, longing, unsatisfied ambition or ill health mar ninety
and nine of every hundred faces we meet in the daily walks of life.
When we look upon a countenance which sparkles with health and
absolute joy in life, we turn and look again and yet again, charmed
and fascinated, though we do not know why.

It was such a face that Joy Irving, the new organist of St Blank's
Church, flashed upon the people who had lingered near the door to see
her pass out.  Among those who lingered was the Baroness; and all day
she carried about with her the memory of that sparkling countenance;
and strive as she would, she could not drive away a vague, strange
uneasiness which the sight of that face had caused her.

Yet a vision of youth and beauty always made the Baroness unhappy,
now that both blessings were irrevocably lost to her.

This particular young face, however, stirred her with those half-
painful, half-pleasurable emotions which certain perfumes awake in
us--vague reminders of joys lost or unattained, of dreams broken or
unrealised.  Added to this, it reminded her of someone she had known,
yet she could not place the resemblance.

"Oh, to be young and beautiful like that!" she sighed as she buried
her face in her pillow that night.  "And since I cannot be, if only
Alice had that girl's face."

And because Alice did not have it, the Baroness went to sleep with a
feeling of bitter resentment against its possessor, the beautiful
young organist of St Blank's.



CHAPTER IX



Up in the loft of St Blank's Church the young organist had been
practising the whole morning.  People paused on the street to listen
to the glorious sounds, and were thrilled by them, as one is only
thrilled when the strong personality of the player enters into the
execution.

Down into the committee-room, where several deacons and the young
rector were seated discussing some question pertaining to the well-
being of the church, the music penetrated too, causing the business
which had brought them together, to be suspended temporarily.

"It is a sin to talk while music like that can be heard," remarked
one man.  "You have found a genius in this new organist, Rector."

The young man nodded silently, his eyes half closed with an
expression of somewhat sensuous enjoyment of the throbbing chords
which vibrated in perfect unison with the beating of his strong
pulses.

"Where does she come from?" asked the deacon, as a pause in the music
occurred.

"Her father was an earnest and prominent member of the little church
down-town of which I had charge during several years," replied the
young man.  "Miss Irving was scarcely more than a child when she
volunteered her services as organist.  The position brought her no
remuneration, and at that time she did not need it.  Young as she
was, the girl was one of the most active workers among the poor, and
I often met her in my visits to the sick and unfortunate.  She had
been a musical prodigy from the cradle, and Mr Irving had given her
every advantage to study and perfect her art.

"I was naturally much interested in her.  Mr Irving's long illness
left his wife and daughter without means of support, at his death,
and when I was called to take charge of St Blank's, I at once
realised the benefit to the family as well as to my church could I
secure the young lady the position here as organist.  I am glad that
my congregation seem so well satisfied with my choice."

Again the organ pealed forth, this time in that passionate music
originally written for the Garden Scene in Faust, and which the
church has boldly taken and arranged as a quartette to the words,
"Come unto me."

It may be that to some who listen, it is the divine spirit which
makes its appeal through those stirring strains; but to the rector of
St Blank's, at least on that morning, it was human heart, calling
unto human heart.  Mr Stuart and the deacons sat silently drinking in
the music.  At length the rector rose.  "I think perhaps we had
better drop the matter under discussion for to-day," he said.  "We
can meet here Monday evening at five o'clock if agreeable to you all,
and finish the details.  There are other and more important affairs
waiting for me now."

The deacons departed, and the young rector sank back in his chair,
and gave himself up to the enjoyment of the sounds which flooded not
only the room, but his brain, heart and soul.

"Queer," he said to himself as the door closed behind the human
pillars of his church.  "Queer, but I felt as if the presence of
those men was an intrusion upon something belonging personally to me.
I wonder why I am so peculiarly affected by this girl's music?  It
arouses my brain to action, it awakens ambition and gives me courage
and hope, and yet--"  He paused before allowing his feeling to shape
itself into thoughts.  Then closing his eyes and clasping his hands
behind his head while the music surged about him, he lay back in his
easy-chair as a bather might lie back and float upon the water, and
his unfinished sentence took shape thus:  "And yet stronger than all
other feelings which her music arouses in me, is the desire to
possess the musician for my very own for ever; ah, well! the Roman
Catholics are wise in not allowing their priests and their nuns to
listen to all even so-called sacred music."

It was perhaps ten minutes later that Joy Irving became conscious
that she was not alone in the organ loft.  She had neither heard nor
seen his entrance, but she felt the presence of her rector, and
turned to find him silently watching her.  She played her phrase to
the end, before she greeted him with other than a smile.  Then she
apologised, saying:  "Even one's rector must wait for a musical
phrase to reach its period.  Angels may interrupt the rendition of a
great work, but not man.  That were sacrilege.  You see, I was really
praying, when you entered, though my heart spoke through my fingers
instead of my lips."

"You need not apologise," the young man answered.  "One who receives
your smile would be ungrateful indeed if he asked for more.  That
alone would render the darkest spot radiant with light and welcome to
me."

The girl's pink cheek flushed crimson, like a rose bathed in the
sunset colours of the sky.

"I did not think you were a man to coin pretty speeches," she said.

"Your estimate of me was a wise one.  You read human nature
correctly.  But come and walk in the park with me.  You will overtax
yourself if you practise any longer.  The sunlight and the air are
vying with each other to-day to see which can be the most
intoxicating.  Come and enjoy their sparring match with me; I want to
talk to you about one of my unfortunate parishioners.  It is a
peculiarly pathetic case.  I think you can help and advise me in the
matter."

It was a superb morning in early October.  New York was like a
beautiful woman arrayed in her fresh autumn costume, disporting
herself before admiring eyes.

Absorbed in each other's society, their pulses beating high with
youth, love and health; the young couple walked through the crowded
avenues of the great city, as happily and as naturally as Adam and
Eve might have walked in the Garden of Eden the morning after
Creation.

Both were city born and city bred, yet both were as unfashionable and
untrammelled by custom as two children of the plains.

In the very heart of the greatest metropolis in America, there are
people who live and retain all the primitive simplicity of village
life and thought.  Mr Irving had been one of these.  Coming to New
York from an interior village when a young man, he had, through
simple and quiet tastes and religious convictions, kept himself
wholly free from the social life of the city in which he lived.
After his marriage his entire happiness lay in his home, and Joy was
reared by parents who made her world.  Mrs Irving sympathised fully
with her husband in his distaste for society, and her delicate health
rendered her almost a recluse from the world.

A few pleasant acquaintances, no intimates, music, books, and a large
share of her time given to charitable work, composed the life of Joy
Irving.

She had never been in a fashionable assemblage; she had never
attended a theatre, as Mr Irving did not approve of them.

Extremely fond of outdoor life, she walked, unattended, wherever her
mood led her.  As she had no acquaintances among society people, she
knew nothing and cared less for the rules which govern the
promenading habits of young women in New York.  Her sweet face and
graceful figure were well known among the poorer quarters of the
city, and it was through her work in such places that Arthur Stuart's
attention had first been called to her.

As for him, he was filled with that high, but not always wise,
disdain for society and its customs, which we so often find in town-
bred young men of intellectual pursuits.  He was clean-minded,
independent, sure of his own purposes, and wholly indifferent to the
opinions of inferiors regarding his habits.

He loved the park, and he asked Joy to walk with him there, as freely
as he would have asked her to sit with him in a conservatory.  It was
a great delight to the young girl to go.

"It seems such a pity that the women of New York get so little
benefit from this beautiful park," she said as they strolled along
through the winding paths together.  "The wealthy people enjoy it in
a way from their carriages, and the poor people no doubt derive new
life from their Sunday promenades here.  But there are thousands like
myself who are almost wholly debarred from its pleasures.  I have
always wanted to walk here, but once I came and a rude man in a
carriage spoke to me.  Mother told me never to come alone again.  It
seems strange to me that men who are so proud of their strength, and
who should be the natural protectors of woman, can belittle
themselves by annoying or frightening her when alone.  I am sure that
same man would never think of speaking to me now that I am with you.
How cowardly he seems when you think of it!  Yet I am told there are
many like him, though that was my only experience of the kind."

"Yes, there are many like him," the rector answered.  "But you must
remember how short a time man has been evolving from a lower animal
condition to his present state, and how much higher he is to-day than
he was a hundred years ago even, when occasional drunkenness was
considered an attribute of a gentleman.  Now it is a vice of which he
is ashamed."

"Then you believe in evolution?" Joy asked with a note of surprise in
her voice.

"Yes, I surely do; nor does the belief conflict with my religious
faith.  I believe in many things I could not preach from my pulpit.
My congregation is not ready for broad truths.  I am like an eclectic
physician--I suit my treatment to my patient--I administer the old
school or the new school medicaments as the case demands."

"It seems to me there can be but one school in spiritual matters,"
Joy said gravely--"the right one.  And I think one should preach and
teach what he believes to be true and right, no matter what his
congregation demands.  Oh, forgive me.  I am very rude to speak like
that to you!"  And she blushed and paled with fright at her boldness.

They were seated on a rustic bench now, under the shadow of a great
tree.

The rector smiled, his eyes fixed with pleased satisfaction on the
girl's beautiful face, with its changing colour and expression.  He
felt he could well afford to be criticised or rebuked by her, if the
result was so gratifying to his sight.  The young rector of St
Blank's lived very much more in his senses than in his ideals.

"Perhaps you are right," he said.  "I sometimes wish I had greater
courage of my convictions.  I think I could have, were you to
stimulate me with such words often.  But my mother is so afraid that
I will wander from the old dogmas, that I am constantly checking
myself.  However, in regard to the case I mentioned to you--it is a
delicate subject, but you are not like ordinary young women, and you
and I have stood beside so many sick-beds and death-beds together
that we can speak as man to man, or woman to woman, with no false
modesty to bar our speech.

"A very sad case has come to my knowledge of late.  Miss Adams, a
woman who for some years has been a devout member of St Blank's
Church, has several times mentioned her niece to me, a young girl who
was away at boarding school.  A few months ago the young girl
graduated and came to live with this aunt.  I remember her as a
bright, buoyant and very intelligent girl.  I have not seen her now
during two months; and last week I asked Miss Adams what had become
of her niece.  Then the poor woman broke into sobs and told me the
sad state of affairs.  It seems that the girl Marah is her daughter.
The poor mother had believed she could guard the truth from her
child, and had educated her as her niece, and was now prepared to
enjoy her companionship, when some mischief-making gossip dug up the
old scandal and imparted the facts to Marah.

"The girl came to Miss Adams and demanded the truth, and the mother
confessed.  Then the daughter settled into a profound melancholy,
from which nothing seemed to rouse her.  She will not go out, remains
in the house, and broods constantly over her disgrace.

"It occurred to me that if Marah Adams could be brought out of
herself and interested in some work, or study, it would be the
salvation of her reason.  Her mother told me she is an accomplished
musician, but that she refuses to touch her piano now.  I thought you
might take her as an understudy on the organ, and by your influence
and association lead her out of herself.  You could make her
acquaintance through approaching the mother who is a milliner, on
business, and your tact would do the rest.  In all my large and
wealthy congregation I know of no other woman to whom I could appeal
for aid in this delicate matter, so I am sure you will pardon me.  In
fact, I fear were the matter to be known in the congregation at all,
it would lead to renewed pain and added hurts for both Miss Adams and
her daughter.  You know women can be so cruel to each other in subtle
ways, and I have seen almost death-blows dealt in church aisles by
one church member to another."

"Oh, that is a terrible reflection on Christians," cried Joy, who, a
born Christ-woman, believed that all professed church members must
feel the same divine spirit of sympathy and charity which burned in
her own sweet soul.

"No, it is a simple truth--an unfortunate fact," the young man
replied.  "I preach sermons at such members of my church, but they
seldom take them home.  They think I mean somebody else.  These are
the people who follow the letter and not the spirit of the church.
But one such member as you, recompenses me for a score of the others.
I felt I must come to you with the Marah Adams affair."

Joy was still thinking of the reflection the rector had cast upon his
congregation.  It hurt her, and she protested.

"Oh, surely," she said, "you cannot mean that I am the only one of
the professed Christians in your church who would show mercy and
sympathy to poor Miss Adams.  Surely few, very few, would forget
Christ's words to Mary Magdalene, 'Go and sin no more,' or fail to
forgive as He forgave.  She has led such a good life all these
years."

The rector smiled sadly.

"You judge others by your own true heart," he said.  "But I know the
world as it is.  Yes, the members of my church would forgive Miss
Adams for her sin--and cut her dead.  They would daily crucify her
and her innocent child by their cold scorn or utter ignoring of them.
They would not allow their daughters to associate with this blameless
girl, because of her mother's misstep.

"It is the same in and out of the churches.  Twenty people will
repeat Christ's words to a repentant sinner, but nineteen of that
twenty interpolate a few words of their own, through tone, gesture or
manner, until 'Go and sin no more' sounds to the poor unfortunate
more like 'Go just as far away from me and mine as you can get--and
sin no more!'  Only one in that score puts Christ's merciful and
tender meaning into the phrase and tries by sympathetic association
to make it possible for the sinner to sin no more.  I felt you were
that one, and so I appealed to you in this matter about Marah Adams."

Joy's eyes were full of tears.  "You must know more of human nature
than I do," she said, "but I hate terribly to think you are right in
this estimate of the people of your congregation.  I will go and see
what I can do for this girl to-morrow.  Poor child, poor mother, to
pass through a second Gethsemane for her sin.  I think any girl or
boy whose home life is shadowed, is to be pitied.  I have always had
such a happy home, and such dear parents, the world would seem
insupportable, I am sure, were I to face it without that background.
Dear papa's death was a great blow, and mother's ill health has been
a sorrow, but we have always been so happy and harmonious, and that,
I think, is worth more than a fortune to a child.  Poor, poor Marah--
unable to respect her mother, what a terrible thing it all is!"

"Yes, it is a sad affair.  I cannot help thinking it would have been
a pardonable lie if Miss Adams had denied the truth when the girl
confronted her with the story.  It is the one situation in life where
a lie is excusable, I think.  It would have saved this poor girl no
end of sorrow, and it could not have added much to the mother's
burden.  I think lying must have originated with an erring woman."

Joy looked at her rector with startled eyes.  "A lie is never
excusable," she said, "and I do not believe it ever saves sorrow.
But I see you do not mean what you say, you only feel very sorry for
the girl; and you surely do not forget that the lie originated with
Satan, who told a falsehood to Eve."



CHAPTER X



Ever since early girlhood Joy Irving had formed a habit of jotting
down in black and white her own ideas regarding any book, painting,
concert, conversation or sermon, which interested her, and
epitomising the train of thought to which they led.

The evening after her walk and talk with the rector of St Blank's,
she took out her note-book, which bore a date four years old under
its title "My Impressions," and read over the last page of entries.
They had evidently been written at the close of some Sabbath day and
ran as follows:-


Many a kneeling woman is more occupied with how her skirts hang than
how her prayers ascend.  I am inclined to think we all ought to wear
a uniform to church if we would really worship there.  God must grow
weary looking down on so many new bonnets.

I wore a smart hat to church to-day, and I found myself criticising
every other woman's bonnet during service, so that I failed in some
of my responses.

If we could all be compelled by some mysterious power to THINK ALOUD
on Sunday, what a veritable holy day we would make of it!  Though we
are taught from childhood that God hears our thoughts, the best of us
would be afraid to have our nearest friends know them.

I sometimes think it is a presumption on the part of any man to rise
in the pulpit and undertake to tell me about a Creator with whom I
feel every whit as well acquainted as he.  I suppose such thoughts
are wicked, however, and should be suppressed.

It is a curious fact, that the most aggressively sensitive persons
are at heart the most conceited.

I wish people smiled more in church aisles.  In fact, I think we all
laugh at one another too much and smile at one another too seldom.

After the devil had made all the trouble for woman he could with the
fig leaf, he introduced the French heel.

It is well to see the ridiculous side of things, but not of people.

Most of us would rather be popular than right.


To these impressions Joy added the following:-


It is not the interior of one's house, but the interior of one's mind
which makes home.

It seems to me that to be, is to love.  I can conceive of no state of
existence which is not permeated with this feeling toward something,
somebody or the illimitable "nothing" which is mother to everything.

I wish we had more religion in the world and fewer churches.

People who believe in no God, invariably exalt themselves into His
position, and worship with the very idolatry they decry in others.

Music is the echo of the rhythm of God's respirations.

Poetry is the effort of the divine part of man to formulate a worthy
language in which to converse with angels.

Painting and sculpture seem to me the most presumptuous of the arts.
They are an effort of man to outdo God in creation.  He never made a
perfect form or face--the artist alone makes them.

I am sure I do not play the organ as well at St Blank's as I played
it in the little church where I gave my services and was unknown.
People are praising me too much here, and this mars all spontaneity.

The very first hour of positive success is often the last hour of
great achievement.  So soon as we are conscious of the admiring and
expectant gaze of men, we cease to commune with God.  It is when we
are unknown to or neglected by mortals, that we reach up to the
Infinite and are inspired.

I have seen Marah Adams to-day, and I felt strangely drawn to her.
Her face would express all goodness if it were not so unhappy.
Unhappiness is a species of evil, since it is a discourtesy to God to
be unhappy.

I am going to do all I can for the girl to bring her into a better
frame of mind.  No blame can be attached to her, and yet now that I
am face to face with the situation, and realise how the world regards
such a person, I myself find it a little hard to think of braving
public opinion and identifying myself with her.  But I am going to
overcome such feelings, as they are cowardly and unworthy of me, and
purely the result of education.  I am amazed, too, to discover this
weakness in myself.

How sympathetic dear mamma is!  I told her about Marah, and she wept
bitterly, and has carried her eyes full of tears ever since.  I must
be careful and tell her nothing sad while she is in such a weak state
physically.

I told mamma what the rector said about lying.  She coincided with
him that Mrs Adams would have been justified in denying the truth if
she had realised how her daughter was to be affected by this
knowledge.  A woman's past belongs only to herself and her God, she
says, unless she wishes to make a confidant.  But I cannot agree with
her or the rector.  I would want the truth from my parents, however
much it hurt.  Many sins which men regard as serious only obstruct
the bridge between our souls and truth.  A lie burns the bridge.

I hope I am not uncharitable, yet I cannot conceive of committing an
act through love of any man, which would lower me in his esteem, once
committed.  Yet of course I have had little experience in life, with
men, or with temptation.  But it seems to me I could not continue to
love a man who did not seek to lead me higher.  The moment he stood
before me and asked me to descend, I should realise he was to be
pitied--not adored.

I told mother this, and she said I was too young and inexperienced to
form decided opinions on such subjects, and she warned me that I must
not become uncharitable.  She wept bitterly as she thought of my
becoming narrow or bigoted in my ideas, dear, tender-hearted mamma.

Death should be called the Great Revealer instead of the Great
Destroyer.

Some people think the way into heaven is through embroidered altar
cloths.

The soul that has any conception of its own possibilities does not
fear solitude.

A girl told me to-day that a rude man annoyed her by staring at her
in a public conveyance.  It never occurred to her that it takes four
eyes to make a stare annoying.

Astronomers know more about the character of the stars than the
average American mother knows about the temperament of her daughters.

To some women the most terrible thought connected with death is the
dates in the obituary notice.

As a rule, when a woman opens the door of an artistic career with one
hand, she shuts the door on domestic happiness with the other.



CHAPTER XI



The rector of St Blank's Church dined at the Cheney table or drove in
the Cheney establishment every week, beside which there were always
one or two confidential chats with the feminine Cheneys in the
parsonage on matters pertaining to the welfare of the church, and
occasionally to the welfare of humanity.

That Alice Cheney had conceived a sudden and consuming passion for
the handsome and brilliant rector of St Blank's, both her mother and
the Baroness knew, and both were doing all in their power to further
the girl's hopes.

While Alice resembled her mother in appearance and disposition,
propensities and impulses occasionally exhibited themselves which
spoke of paternal inheritance.  She had her father's strongly
emotional nature, with her mother's stubbornness; and Preston
Cheney's romantic tendencies were repeated in his daughter, without
his reasoning powers.  Added to her father's lack of self-control in
any strife with his passions, Alice possessed her mother's hysterical
nerves.  In fact, the unfortunate child inherited the weaknesses and
faults of both parents, without any of their redeeming virtues.

The passion which had sprung to life in her breast for the young
rector, was as strong and unreasoning as the infatuation which her
father had once experienced for Berene Dumont; but instead of
struggling against the feeling as her father had at least attempted
to do, she dwelt upon it with all the mulish persistency which her
mother exhibited in small matters, and luxuriated in romantic dreams
of the future.

Mabel was wholly unable to comprehend the depth or violence of her
daughter's feelings, but she realised the fact that Alice had set her
mind on winning Arthur Stuart for a husband, and she quite approved
of the idea, and saw no reason why it should not succeed.  She
herself had won Preston Cheney away from all rivals for his favour,
and Alice ought to be able to do the same with Arthur, after all the
money which had been expended upon her wardrobe.  Senator Cheney's
daughter and Judge Lawrence's granddaughter, surely was a prize for
any man to win as a wife.

The Baroness, however, reviewed the situation with more concern of
mind.  She realised that Alice was destitute of beauty and charm, and
that Arthur Emerson Stuart (it would have been considered a case of
high treason to speak of the rector of St Blank's without using his
three names) was independent in the matter of fortune, and so dowered
with nature's best gifts that he could have almost any woman for the
asking whom he should desire.  But the Baroness believed much in
propinquity; and she brought the rector and Alice together as often
as possible, and coached the girl in coquettish arts when alone with
her, and credited her with witticisms and bon-mots which she had
never uttered, when talking of her to the young rector.

"If only I could give Alice the benefit of my past career," the
Baroness would say to herself at times.  "I know so well how to
manage men; but what use is my knowledge to me now that I am old?
Alice is young, and even without beauty she could do so much, if she
only understood the art of masculine seduction.  But then it is a
gift, not an acquired art, and Alice was not born with the gift."

While Mabel and Alice had been centring their thoughts and attentions
on the rector, the Baroness had not forgotten the rector's mother.
She knew the very strong affection which existed between the two, and
she had discovered that the leading desire of the young man's heart
was to make his mother happy.  With her wide knowledge of human
nature, she had not been long in discerning the fact that it was not
because of his own religious convictions that the rector had chosen
his calling, but to carry out the lifelong wishes of his beloved
mother.

Therefore she reasoned wisely that Arthur would be greatly influenced
by his mother in his choice of a wife; and the Baroness brought all
her vast battery of fascination to bear on Mrs Stuart, and succeeded
in making that lady her devoted friend.

The widow of Judge Lawrence was still an imposing and impressive
figure wherever she went.  Though no longer a woman who appealed to
the desires of men, she exhaled that peculiar mental aroma which
hangs ever about a woman who has dealt deeply and widely in affairs
of the heart.  It is to the spiritual senses what musk is to the
physical; and while it may often repulse, it sometimes attracts, and
never fails to be noticed.  About the Baroness's mouth were hard
lines, and the expression of her eyes was not kind or tender; yet she
was everywhere conceded to be a universally handsome and attractive
woman.  Quiet and tasteful in her dressing, she did not accentuate
the ravages of time by any mistaken frivolities of toilet, as so many
faded coquettes have done, but wisely suited her vestments to her
appearance, as the withering branch clothes itself in russet leaves,
when the fresh sap ceases to course through its veins.  New York City
is a vast sepulchre of "past careers," and the adventurous life of
the Baroness was quietly buried there with that of many another
woman.  In the mad whirl of life there is small danger that any of
these skeletons will rise to view, unless the woman permits herself
to strive for eminence either socially or in the world of art.

While the Cheneys were known to be wealthy, and the Senator had
achieved political position, there was nothing in their situation to
challenge the jealousy of their associates.  They moved in one of the
many circles of cultured and agreeable people, which, despite the
mandate of a M'Allister, formed a varied and delightful society in
the metropolis; they entertained in an unostentatious manner, and
there was nothing in their personality to incite envy or jealousy.
Therefore the career of the Baroness had not been unearthed.  That
the widow of Judge Lawrence, the stepmother of Mrs Cheney, was known
as "The Baroness" caused some questions, to be sure, but the simple
answer that she had been the widow of a French baron in early life
served to allay curiosity, while it rendered the lady herself an
object of greater interest to the majority of people.

Mrs Stuart, the rector's mother, was one of those who were most
impressed by this incident in the life of Mrs Lawrence.  "Family
pride" was her greatest weakness, and she dearly loved a title.  She
thought Mrs Lawrence a typical "Baroness," and though she knew the
title had only been obtained through marriage, it still rendered its
possessor peculiarly interesting in her eyes.

In her prime, the Baroness had been equally successful in cajoling
women and men.  Though her day for ruling men was now over, she still
possessed the power to fascinate women when she chose to exert
herself.  She did exert herself with Mrs Stuart, and succeeded
admirably in her design.

And one day Mrs Stuart confided her secret anxiety to the ear of the
Baroness; and that secret caused the cheek of the listener to grow
pale and the look of an animal at bay to come into her eyes.

"There is just one thing that gives me a constant pain at my heart,"
Mrs Stuart had said.  "You have never been a mother, yet I think your
sympathetic nature causes you to understand much which you have not
experienced, and knowing as you do the great pride I feel in my son's
career, and the ambition I have for him to rise to the very highest
pinnacle of success and usefulness, I am sure you will comprehend my
anxiety when I see him exhibiting an undue interest in a girl who is
in every way his inferior, and wholly unsuited to fill the position
his wife should occupy."

The Baroness listened with a cold, sinking sensation at her heart

"I am sure your son would never make a choice which was not agreeable
to you," she ventured.

"He might not marry anyone I objected to," Mrs Stuart replied, "but I
dread to think his heart may be already gone from his keeping.  Young
men are so susceptible to a pretty face and figure, and I confess
that Joy Irving has both.  She is a good girl, too, and a fine
musician; but she has no family, and her alliance with my son would
be a great drawback to his career.  Her father was a grocer, I
believe, or something of that sort; quite a common man, who married a
third-class actress, Joy's mother.  Mr Irving was in very comfortable
circumstances at one time, but a stroke of paralysis rendered him
helpless some four years ago.  He died last year and left his widow
and child in straitened circumstances.  Mrs Irving is an invalid now,
and Joy supports her with her music.  Mr Irving and Joy were members
of Arthur Emerson's former church (Mrs Stuart always spoke of her son
in that manner), and that is how my son became interested in the
daughter--an interest I supposed to be purely that of a rector in his
parishioner, until of late, when I began to fear it took root in
deeper soil.  But I am sure, dear Baroness, you can understand my
anxiety."

And then the Baroness, with drawn lips and anguished eyes, took both
of Mrs Stuart's hands in hers, and cried out:

"Your pain, dear madam, is second to mine.  I have no child, to be
sure, but as few mothers love I love Alice Cheney, my dear husband's
granddaughter.  My very life is bound up in her, and she--God help
us, she loves your son with her whole soul.  If he marries another it
will kill her or drive her insane."

The two women fell weeping into each other's arms.



CHAPTER XII



Preston Cheney conceived such a strong, earnest liking for the young
clergyman whom he met under his own roof during one of his visits
home, that he fell into the habit of attending church for the first
time in his life.

Mabel and Alice were deeply gratified with this intimacy between the
two men, which brought the rector to the house far oftener than they
could have tastefully done without the co-operation of the husband
and father.  Besides, it looked well to have the head of the
household represented in the church.  To the Baroness, also, there
was added satisfaction in attending divine service, now that Preston
Cheney sat in the pew.  All hope of winning the love she had so
longed to possess, died many years before; and she had been cruel and
unkind in numerous ways to the object of her hopeless passion, yet
like the smell of dead rose leaves long shut in a drawer, there clung
about this man the faint, suggestive fragrance of a perished dream.

She knew that he did not love his wife, and that he was disappointed
in his daughter; and she did not at least have to suffer the pain of
seeing him lavish the affection she had missed, on others.

Mr Cheney had been called away from home on business the day before
the new organist took her place in St Blank's Church.  Nearly a month
had passed when he again occupied his pew.

Before the organist had finished her introduction, he turned to
Alice, saying:

"There has been a change here in the choir, since I went away, and
for the better.  That is a very unusual musician.  Do you know who it
is?"

"Some lady, I believe; I do not remember her name," Alice answered
indifferently.  Like her mother, Alice never enjoyed hearing anyone
praised.  It mattered little who it was, or how entirely out of her
own line the achievements or accomplishments on which the praise was
bestowed, she still felt that petty resentment of small creatures who
believe that praise to others detracts from their own value.

A fortune had been expended on Alice's musical education, yet she
could do no more than rattle through some mediocre composition, with
neither taste nor skill.

The money which has been wasted in trying to teach music to unmusical
people would pay our national debt twice over, and leave a competency
for every orphan in the land.

When the organist had finished her second selection, Mr Cheney
addressed the same question to his wife which he had addressed to
Alice.

"Who is the new organist?" he queried.  Mabel only shook her head and
placed her finger on her lip as a signal for silence during service.

The third time it was the Baroness, sitting just beyond Mabel, to
whom Mr Cheney spoke.  "That's a very remarkable musician, very
remarkable," he said.  "Do you know anything about her?"

"Yes, wait until we get home, and I will tell you all about her," the
Baroness replied.

When the service was over, Mr Cheney did not pass out at once, as was
his custom.  Instead he walked toward the pulpit, after requesting
his family to wait a moment.

The rector saw him and came down into the aisle to speak to him.

"I want to congratulate you on the new organist," Mr Cheney said,
"and I want to meet her.  Alice tells me it is a lady.  She must have
devoted a lifetime to hard study to become such a marvellous mistress
of that difficult instrument."

Arthur Stuart smiled.  "Wait a moment," he said, "and I will send for
her.  I would like you to meet her, and like her to meet your wife
and family.  She has few, if any, acquaintances in my congregation."

Mr Cheney went down the aisle, and joined the three ladies who were
waiting for him in the pew.  All were smiling, for all three believed
that he had been asking the rector to accompany them home to dinner.
His first word dispelled the illusion.

"Wait here a moment," he said.  "Mr Stuart is going to bring the
organist to meet us.  I want to know the woman who can move me so
deeply by her music."

Over the faces of his three listeners there fell a cloud.  Mabel
looked annoyed, Alice sulky, and a flush of the old jealous fury
darkened the brow of the Baroness.  But all were smiling deceitfully
when Joy Irving approached.

Her radiant young beauty, and the expressions of admiration with
which Preston Cheney greeted her as a woman and an artist, filled
life with gall and wormwood for the three feminine listeners.

"What! this beautiful young miss, scarcely out of short frocks, is
not the musician who gave us that wonderful harmony of sounds.  My
child, how did you learn to play like that in the brief life you have
passed on earth?  Surely you must have been taught by the angels
before you came."

A deep blush of pleasure at the words which, though so extravagant,
Joy felt to be sincere, increased her beauty as she looked up into
Preston Cheney's admiring eyes.

And as he held her hands in both of his and gazed down upon her it
seemed to the Baroness she could strike them dead at her feet and
rejoice in the act.

Beside this radiant vision of loveliness and genius, Alice looked
plainer and more meagre than ever before.  She was like a wayside
weed beside an American Beauty rose.

"I hope you and Alice will become good friends," Mr Cheney said
warmly.  "We should like to see you at the house any time you can
make it convenient to come, would we not Mabel?"

Mrs Cheney gave a formal assent to her husband's words as they turned
away, leaving Joy with the rector.  And a scene in one of life's
strangest dramas had been enacted, unknown to them all.

"I would like you to be very friendly with that girl, Alice," Mr
Cheney repeated as they seated themselves in the carriage.  "She has
a rare face, a rare face, and she is highly gifted.  She reminds me
of someone I have known, yet I can't think who it is.  What do you
know about her, Baroness?"

The Baroness gave an expressive shrug.  "Since you admire her so
much," she said, "I rather hesitate telling you.  But the girl is of
common origin--a grocer's daughter, and her mother quite an inferior
person.  I hardly think it a suitable companionship for Alice."

"I am sure I don't care to know her," chimed in Alice.  "I thought
her quite bold and forward in her manner."

"Decidedly so!  She seemed to hang on to your father's hand as if she
would never let go," added Mabel, in her most acid tone.  "I must
say, I should have been horrified to see you act in such a familiar
manner toward any stranger."  A quick colour shot into Preston
Cheney's cheek and a spark into his eye.

"The girl was perfectly modest in her deportment to me," he said.
"She is a lady through and through, however humble her birth may be.
But I ought to have known better than to ask my wife and daughter to
like anyone whom I chanced to admire.  I learned long ago how futile
such an idea was."

"Oh, well, I don't see why you need get so angry over a perfect
stranger whom you never laid eyes on until to-day," pouted Alice.  "I
am sure she's nothing to any of us that we need quarrel over her."

"A man never gets so old that he is not likely to make a fool of
himself over a pretty face," supplemented Mabel, "and there is no
fool like an old fool."

The uncomfortable drive home came to an end at this juncture, and
Preston Cheney retired to his own room, with the disagreeable words
of his wife and daughter ringing in his ears, and the beautiful face
of the young organist floating before his eyes.

"I wish she were my daughter," he said to himself; "what a comfort
and delight a girl like that would be to me!"

And while these thoughts filled the man's heart the Baroness paced
her room with all the jealous passions of her still ungoverned nature
roused into new life and violence at the remembrance of Joy Irving's
fresh young beauty and Preston Cheney's admiring looks and words.

"I could throttle her," she cried, "I could throttle her.  Oh, why is
she sent across my life at every turn?  Why should the only two men
in the world who interest me to-day, be so infatuated over that girl?
But if I cannot remove so humble an obstacle as she from my pathway,
I shall feel that my day of power is indeed over, and that I do not
believe to be true."



CHAPTER XIII



Two weeks later the organ loft of St Blank's Church was occupied by a
stranger.  For a few hours the Baroness felt a wild hope in her heart
that Miss Irving had been sent away.

But inquiry elicited the information that the young musician had
merely employed a substitute because her mother was lying seriously
ill at home.

It was then that the Baroness put into execution a desire she had to
make the personal acquaintance of Joy Irving.

The desire had sprung into life with the knowledge of the rector's
interest in the girl.  No one knew better than the Baroness how to
sow the seeds of doubt, distrust and discord between two people whom
she wished to alienate.  Many a sweetheart, many a wife, had she
separated from lover and husband, scarcely leaving a sign by which
the trouble could be traced to her, so adroit and subtle were her
methods.

She felt that she could insert an invisible wedge between these two
hearts, which would eventually separate them, if only she might make
the acquaintance of Miss Irving.  And now chance had opened the way
for her.

She made her resolve known to the rector.

"I am deeply interested in the young organist whom I had the pleasure
of meeting some weeks ago," she said, and she noted with a sinking
heart the light which flashed into the man's face at the mere mention
of the girl.  "I understand her mother is seriously ill, and I think
I will go around and call.  Perhaps I can be of use.  I understand
Mrs Irving is not a churchwoman, and she may be in real need, as the
family is in straitened circumstances.  May I mention your name when
I call, in order that Miss Irving may not think I intrude?"

"Why, certainly," the rector replied with warmth.  "Indeed, I will
give you a card of introduction.  That will open the way for you, and
at the same time I know you will use your delicate tact to avoid
wounding Miss Irving's pride in any way.  She is very sensitive about
their straitened circumstances; you may have heard that they were
quite well-to-do until the stroke of paralysis rendered her father
helpless.  All their means were exhausted in efforts to restore his
health, and in the employment of nurses and physicians.  I think they
have found life a difficult problem since his death, as Mrs Irving
has been under medical care constantly, and the whole burden falls on
Miss Joy's young shoulders, and she is but twenty-one."

"Just the age of Alice," mused the Baroness.  "How differently
people's lives are ordered in this world!  But then we must have the
hewers of wood and the drawers of water, and we must have the
delicate human flowers.  Our Alice is one of the latter, a frail
blossom to look upon, but she is one of the kind which will bloom out
in great splendour under the sunshine of love and happiness.  Very
few people realise what wonderful reserve force that delicate child
possesses.  And such a tender heart!  She was determined to come with
me when she heard of Miss Irving's trouble, but I thought it unwise
to take her until I had seen the place.  She is so sensitive to her
surroundings, and it might be too painful for her.  I am for ever
holding her back from overtaxing herself for others.  No one dreams
of the amount of good that girl does in a secret, quiet way; and at
the same time she assumes an indifferent air and talks as if she were
quite heartless, just to hinder people from suspecting her charitable
work.  She is such a strange, complicated character."

Armed with her card of introduction, the Baroness set forth on her
"errand of mercy."  She had not mentioned Miss Irving's name to Mabel
or Alice.  The secret of the rector's interest in the girl was locked
in her own breast.  She knew that Mabel was wholly incapable of
coping with such a situation, and she dreaded the effect of the news
on Alice, who was absorbed in her love dream.  The girl had never
been denied a wish in her life, and no thought came to her that she
could be thwarted in this, her most cherished hope of all.

The Baroness was determined to use every gun in her battery of
defence before she allowed Mabel or Alice to know that defence was
needed.

The rector's card admitted her to the parlour of a small flat.  The
portieres of an adjoining room were thrown open presently, and a
vision of radiant beauty entered the room.

The Baroness could not explain it, but as the girl emerged from the
curtains, a strange, confused memory of something and somebody she
had known in the past came over her.  But when the girl spoke, a more
inexplicable sensation took possession of the listener, for her voice
was the feminine of Preston Cheney's masculine tones, and then as she
looked at the girl again the haunting memories of the first glance
were explained, for she was very like Preston Cheney as the Baroness
remembered him when he came to the Palace to engage rooms more than a
score of years ago.  "What a strange thing these resemblances are!"
she thought.  "This girl is more like Senator Cheney, far more like
him, than Alice is.  Ah, if Alice only had her face and form!"

Miss Irving gave a slight start, and took a step back as her eyes
fell upon the Baroness.  The rector's card had read, "Introducing Mrs
Sylvester Lawrence."  She had known this lad by sight ever since her
first Sunday as organist at St Blank's, and for some unaccountable
reason she had conceived a most intense dislike for her.  Joy was
drawn toward humanity in general, as naturally as the sunlight falls
on the earth's foliage.  Her heart radiated love and sympathy toward
the whole world.  But when she did feel a sentiment of distrust or
repulsion she had learned to respect it.

Our guardian angels sometimes send these feelings as danger signals
to our souls.

It therefore required a strong effort of her will to go forward and
extend a hand in greeting to the lady whom her rector and friend had
introduced.

"I must beg pardon for this intrusion," the Baroness said with her
sweetest smile; "but our rector urged me to come and so I felt
emboldened to carry out the wish I have long entertained to make your
acquaintance.  Your wonderful music inspires all who hear you to know
you personally; the service lacked half its charm on Sunday because
you were absent.  When I learnt that your absence was occasioned by
your mother's illness, I asked the rector if he thought a call from
me would be an intrusion, and he assured me to the contrary.  I used
to be considered an excellent nurse; I am very strong, and full of
vitality, and if you would permit me to sit by your mother some
Sunday when you are needed at church, I should be most happy to do
so.  I should like to make the acquaintance of your mother, and
compliment her on the happiness of possessing such a gifted and
dutiful daughter."

Like all who sat for any time under the spell of the second Mrs
Lawrence, Joy felt the charm of her voice, words and manner, and it
began to seem as if she had been very unreasonable in entertaining
unfounded prejudices.

That the rector had introduced her was alone proof of her worthiness;
and the gracious offer of the distinguished-looking lady to watch by
the bedside of a stranger was certainly evidence of her good heart.
The frost disappeared from her smile, and she warmed toward the
Baroness.  The call lengthened into a visit, and as the Baroness
finally rose to go, Joy said:

"I will take you in and introduce you to mamma now.  I think it will
do her good to meet you," and the Baroness followed the graceful girl
through a narrow hall, and into a room which had evidently been
intended for a dining-room, but which, owing to its size and its
windows opening to the south, had been utilised as a sick chamber.

The invalid lay with her face turned away from the door.  But by the
movement of the delicate hand on the counterpane, Joy knew that her
mother was awake.

"Mamma, I have brought a lady, a friend of Dr Stuart's, to see you,"
Joy said gently.  The invalid turned her head upon the pillow, and
the Baroness looked upon the face of--Berene Dumont.

"Berene!"

"Madam!"

The two spoke simultaneously, and the invalid had started upright in
bed.

"Mamma, what is the matter?  Oh, please lie down, or you will bring
on another haemorrhage," cried the startled girl; but her mother
lifted her hand.

"Joy," she said in a firm, clear voice, "this lady is an old
acquaintance of mine.  Please go out, dear, and shut the door.  I
wish to see her alone."

Joy passed out with drooping head and a sinking heart.  As the door
closed behind her the Baroness spoke.

"So that is Preston Cheney's daughter," she said.  "I always had my
suspicions of the cause which led you to leave my house so suddenly.
Does the girl know who her father is?  And does Senator Cheney know
of her existence, may I ask?"

A crimson flush suffused the invalid's face.  Then a flame of fire
shot into the dark eyes, and a small red spot only glowed on either
pale cheek.

"I do not know by what right you ask these questions, Baroness
Brown," she answered slowly; and her listener cringed under the old
appellation which recalled the miserable days when she had kept a
lodging-house--days she had almost forgotten during the last decade
of life.

"But I can assure you, madam," continued the speaker, "that my
daughter knows no father save the good man, my husband, who is dead.
I have never by word or line made my existence known to anyone I ever
knew since I left Beryngford.  I do not know why you should come here
to insult me, madam; I have never harmed you or yours, and you have
no proof of the accusation you just made, save your own evil
suspicions."

The Baroness gave an unpleasant laugh.

"It is an easy matter for me to find proof of my suspicions if I
choose to take the trouble," she said.  "There are detectives enough
to hunt up your trail, and I have money enough to pay them for their
trouble.  But Joy is the living evidence of the assertion.  She is
the image of Preston Cheney, as he was twenty-three years ago.  I am
ready, however, to let the matter drop on one condition; and that
condition is, that you extract a promise from your daughter that she
will not encourage the attentions of Arthur Emerson Stuart, the
rector of St Blank's; that she will never under any circumstances be
his wife."

The red spots faded to a sickly yellow in the invalid's cheeks.  "Why
should you ask this of me?" she cried.  "Why should you wish to
destroy the happiness of my child's life?  She loves Arthur Stuart,
and I know that he loves her!  It is the one thought which resigns me
to death; the thought that I may leave her the beloved wife of this
good man."

The Baroness leaned lower over the pillow of the invalid as she
answered:  "I will tell you why I ask this sacrifice of you."

"Perhaps you do not know that I married Judge Lawrence after the
death of his first wife.  Perhaps you do not know that Preston
Cheney's legitimate daughter is as precious to me as his illegitimate
child is to you.  Alice is only six months younger than Joy; she is
frail, delicate, sensitive.  A severe disappointment would kill her.
She, too, loves Arthur Stuart.  If your daughter will let him alone,
he will marry Alice.  Surely the illegitimate child should give way
to the legitimate.

"If you are selfish in this matter, I shall be obliged to tell your
daughter the true story of her life, and let her be the judge of what
is right and what is wrong.  I fancy she might have a finer
perception of duty than you have--she is so much like her father."

The tortured invalid fell back panting on her pillow.  She put out
her hands with a distracted, imploring gesture.

"Leave me to think," she gasped.  "I never knew that Preston Cheney
had a daughter; I did not know he lived here.  My life has been so
quiet, so secluded these many years.  Leave me to think.  I will give
you my answer in a few days; I will write you after I reflect and
pray."

The Baroness passed out, and Joy, hastening into the room, found her
mother in a wild paroxysm of tears.  Late that night Mrs Irving
called for writing materials; and for many hours she sat propped up
in bed writing rapidly.

When she had completed her task she called Joy to her side.

"Darling," she said, placing a sealed manuscript in her hands, "I
want you to keep this seal unbroken so long as you are happy.  I know
in spite of your deep sorrow at my death, which must come ere long,
you will find much happiness in life.  You came smiling into
existence, and no common sorrow can deprive you of the joy which is
your birthright.  But there are numerous people in the world who may
strive to wound you after I am gone.  If slanderous tales or cruel
reports reach your ears, and render you unhappy, break this seal, and
read the story I have written here.  There are some things which will
deeply pain you, I know.  Do not force yourself to read them until a
necessity arises.  I leave you this manuscript as I might leave you a
weapon for self-defence.  Use it only when you are in need of that
defence."

The next morning Mrs Irving was weakened by another and most serious
haemorrhage of the lungs.  Her physician was grave, and urged the
daughter to be prepared for the worst.

"I fear your mother's life is a matter of days only," he said.



CHAPTER XIV



The Baroness went directly from the home which she had entered only
to blight, and sent her card marked "urgent" to Mrs Stuart.

"I have come to tell you an unpleasant story," she said--"a painful
and revolting story, the early chapters of which were written years
ago, but the sequel has only just been made known to me.  It concerns
you and yours vitally; it also concerns me and mine.  I am sure, when
you have heard the story to the end, you will say that truth is
stranger than fiction, indeed:  and you will more than ever realise
the necessity of preventing your son from marrying Joy Irving--a
child who was born before her mother ever met Mr Irving; and whose
mother, I daresay, was no more the actual wife of Mr Irving in the
name of law and decency than she had been the wife of his many
predecessors."

Startled and horrified at this beginning of the story, Mrs Stuart was
in a state of excited indignation at the end.  The Baroness had
magnified facts and distorted truths until she represented Berene
Dumont as a monster of depravity; a vicious being who had been for a
short time the recipient of the Baroness's mistaken charity, and who
had repaid kindness by base ingratitude, and immorality.  The man
implicated in the scandal which she claimed was the cause of Berene's
flight was not named in this recital.

Indeed the Baroness claimed that he was more sinned against than
sinning, and that it was a case of mesmeric influence, or evil eye,
on the part of the depraved woman.

Mrs Lawrence took pains to avoid any reference to Beryngford also;
speaking of these occurrences having taken place while she spent a
summer in a distant interior town, where, "after the death of the
Baron, she had rented a villa, feeling that she wanted to retire from
the world."

"My heart is always running away with my head," she remarked, "and I
thought this poor creature, who was shunned and neglected by all,
worth saving.  I tried to befriend her, and hoped to waken the better
nature which every woman possesses, I think, but she was too far gone
in iniquity.

"You cannot imagine, my dear Mrs Stuart, what a shock it was to me on
entering that sickroom to-day, my heart full of kindly sympathy, to
encounter in the invalid the ungrateful recipient of my past favours;
and to realise that her daughter was no other than the shameful
offspring of her immoral past.  In spite of the girl's beauty, there
is an expression about her face which I never liked; and I fully
understand now why I did not like it.  Of course, Mrs Stuart, this
story is told to you in strict confidence.  I would not for the world
have dear Mrs Cheney know of it, nor would I pollute sweet Alice with
such a tale.  Indeed, Alice would not understand it if she were told,
for she is as ignorant and innocent as a child in arms of such
matters.  We have kept her absolutely unspotted from the world.  But
I knew it was my duty to tell you the whole shameful story.  If worst
comes to worst, you will be obliged to tell your son perhaps, and if
he doubts the story send him to me for its verification."

Worst came to the worst before twenty-four hours had passed.  The
rector received word that Mrs Irving was rapidly failing, and went to
act the part of spiritual counsellor to the invalid, and sympathetic
friend to the suffering girl.

When he returned his mother watched his face with eager, anxious
eyes.  He looked haggard and ill, as if he had passed through a
severe ordeal.  He could talk of nothing but the beautiful and brave
girl, who was about to lose her one worshipped companion, and who ere
many hours passed would stand utterly alone in the world.

"I never saw you so affected before by the troubles and sorrows of
your parishioners," Mrs Stuart said.  "I wonder, Arthur, why you take
the sorrows of this family so keenly to heart."

The young rector looked his mother full in the face with calm, sad
eyes.  Then he said slowly:

"I suppose, mother, it is because I love Joy Irving with all my
heart.  You must have suspected this for some time.  I know that you
have, and that the thought has pained you.  You have had other and
more ambitious aims for me.  Earnest Christian and good woman that
you are, you have a worldly and conventional vein in your nature,
which makes you reverence position, wealth and family to a marked
degree.  You would, I know, like to see me unite myself with some
royal family, were that possible; failing in that, you would choose
the daughter of some great and aristocratic house to be my bride.
Ah, well, dear mother, you will, I know, concede that marriage
without love is unholy.  I am not able to force myself to love some
great lady, even supposing I could win her if I did love her."

"But you might keep yourself from forming a foolish and unworthy
attachment," Mrs Stuart interrupted.  "With your will-power, your
brain, your reasoning faculties, I see no necessity for your allowing
a pretty face to run away with your heart.  Nothing could be more
unsuitable, more shocking, more dreadful, than to have you make that
girl your wife, Arthur."

Mrs Stuart's voice rose as she spoke, from a quiet reasoning tone to
a high, excited wail.  She had not meant to say so much.  She had
intended merely to appeal to her son's affection for her, without
making any unpleasant disclosures regarding Joy's mother; she thought
merely to win a promise from him that he would not compromise himself
at present with the girl, through an excess of sympathy.  But already
she had said enough to arouse the young man into a defender of the
girl he loved.

"I think your language quite too strong, mother," he said, with a
reproving tone in his voice.  "Miss Irving is good, gifted, amiable,
beautiful, beside being young and full of health.  I am sure there
could be nothing shocking or dreadful in any man's uniting his
destiny with such a being, in case he was fortunate enough to win
her.  The fact that she is poor, and not of illustrious lineage, is
but a very worldly consideration.  Mr Irving was a most intelligent
and excellent man, even if he was a grocer.  The American idea of
aristocracy is grotesquely absurd at the best.  A man may spend his
time and strength in buying and selling things wherewith to clothe
the body, and, if he succeeds, his children are admitted to the
intimacy of princes; but no success can open that door to the
children of a man who trades in food, wherewith to sustain the body.
We can none of us afford to put on airs here in America, with
butchers and Dutch peasant traders only three or four generations
back of our 'best families.'  As for me, mother, remember my loved
father was a broker.  That would damn him in the eyes of some people,
you know, cultured gentleman as he was."

Mrs Stuart sat very still, breathing hard and trying to gain control
of herself for some moments after her son ceased speaking.  He, too,
had said more than he intended, and he was sorry that he had hurt his
mother's feelings as he saw her evident agitation.  But as he rose to
go forward and beg her pardon, she spoke.

"The person of whom we were speaking has nothing whatever to do with
Mr Irving," she said.  "Joy Irving was born before her mother was
married.  Mrs Irving has a most infamous past, and I would rather see
you dead than the husband of her child.  You certainly would not want
your children to inherit the propensities of such a grandmother?  And
remember the curse descends to the third and fourth generations.  If
you doubt my words, go to the Baroness.  She knows the whole story,
but has revealed it to no one but me."

Mrs Stuart left the room, closing the door behind her as she went.
She did not want to be obliged to go over the details of the story
which she had heard; she had made her statement, one which she knew
must startle and horrify her son, with his high ideals of womanly
purity, and she left him to review the situation in silence.  It was
several hours before the rector left his room.

When he did, he went, not to the Baroness, but directly to Mrs
Irving.  They were alone for more than an hour.  When he emerged from
the room, his face was as white as death, and he did not look at Joy
as she accompanied him to the door.

Two days later Mrs Irving died.



CHAPTER XV



The congregation of St Blank's Church was rendered sad and solicitous
by learning that its rector was on the eve of nervous prostration,
and that his physician had ordered a change of air.  He went away in
company with his mother for a vacation of three months.  The day
after his departure Joy Irving received a letter from him which read
as follows:-


"My Dear Miss Irving,--You may not in your deep grief have given me a
thought.  If such a thought has been granted one so unworthy, it must
have taken the form of surprise that your rector and friend has made
no call of condolence since death entered your household.  I want to
write one little word to you, asking you to be lenient in your
judgment of me.  I am ill in body and mind.  I feel that I am on the
eve of some distressing malady.  I am not able to reason clearly, or
to judge what is right and what is wrong.  I am as one tossed between
the laws of God and the laws made by men, and bruised in heart and in
soul.  I dare not see you or speak to you while I am in this state of
mind.  I fear for what I may say or do.  I have not slept since I
last saw you.  I must go away and gain strength and equilibrium.
When I return I shall hope to be master of myself.  Until then,
adieu.  "ARTHUR EMERSON STUART."


These wild and incoherent phrases stirred the young girl's heart with
intense pain and anxiety.  She had known for almost a year that she
loved the young rector; she had believed that he cared for her, and
without allowing herself to form any definite thoughts of the future,
she had lived in a blissful consciousness of loving and being loved,
which is to the fulfilment of a love dream, like inhaling the perfume
of a rose, compared to the gathered flower and its attending thorns.

The young clergyman's absence at the time of her greatest need had
caused her both wonder and pain.  His letter but increased both
sentiments without explaining the cause.

It increased, too, her love for him, for whenever over-anxiety is
aroused for one dear to us, our love is augmented.

She felt that the young man was in some great trouble, unknown to
her, and she longed to be able to comfort him.  Into the maiden's
tender and ardent affection stole the wifely wish to console and the
motherly impulse to protect her dear one from pain, which are strong
elements in every real woman's love.

Mrs Irving had died without writing one word to the Baroness; and
that personage was in a state of constant excitement until she heard
of the rector's plans for rest and travel.  Mrs Stuart informed her
of the conversation which had taken place between herself and her
son; and of his evident distress of mind, which had reacted on his
body and made it necessary for him to give up mental work for a
season.

"I feel that I owe you a debt of gratitude, dear Baroness," Mrs
Stuart had said.  "Sad as this condition of things is, imagine how
much worse it would be, had my son, through an excess of sympathy for
that girl at this time, compromised himself with her before we
learned the terrible truth regarding her birth.  I feel sure my son
will regain his health after a few months' absence, and that he will
not jeopardise my happiness and his future by any further thoughts of
this unfortunate girl, who in the meantime may not be here when we
return."

The Baroness made a mental resolve that the girl should not be there.

While the rector's illness and proposed absence was sufficient
evidence that he had resolved upon sacrificing his love for Joy on
the altar of duty to his mother and his calling, yet the Baroness
felt that danger lurked in the air while Miss Irving occupied her
present position.  No sooner had Mrs Stuart and her son left the
city, than the Baroness sent an anonymous letter to the young
organist.  It read:


"I do not know whether your mother imparted the secret of her past
life to you before she died, but as that secret is known to several
people, it seems cruelly unjust that you are kept in ignorance of it.
You are not Mr Irving's child.  You were born before your mother
married.  While it is not your fault, only your misfortune, it would
be wise for you to go where the facts are not so well known as in the
congregation of St Blank's.  There are people in that congregation
who consider you guilty of a wilful deception in wearing the name you
do, and of an affront to good taste in accepting the position you
occupy.  Many people talk of leaving the church on your account.
Your gifts as a musician would win you a position elsewhere, and as I
learn that your mother's life was insured for a considerable sum, I
am sure you are able to seek new fields where you can bide your
disgrace.

"A WELL-WISHER."


Quivering with pain and terror, the young girl cast the letter into
the fire, thinking that it was the work of one of those half-crazed
beings whose mania takes the form of anonymous letters to unoffending
people.  Only recently such a person had been brought into the courts
for this offence.  It occurred to her also that it might be the work
of someone who wished to obtain her position as organist of St
Blank's.  Musicians, she knew, were said to be the most jealous of
all people, and while she had never suffered from them before, it
might be that her time had now come to experience the misfortunes of
her profession.

Tender-hearted and kindly in feeling to all humanity, she felt a
sickening sense of sorrow and fear at the thought that there existed
such a secret enemy for her anywhere in the world.

She went out upon the street, and for the first time in her life she
experienced a sense of suspicion and distrust toward the people she
met; for the first time in her life, she realised that the world was
not all kind and ready to give her back the honest friendship and the
sweet good-will which filled her heart for all her kind.  Strive as
she would, she could not cast off the depression caused by this vile
letter.  It was her first experience of this cowardly and despicable
phase of human malice, and she felt wounded in soul as by a poisoned
arrow shot in the dark.  And then, suddenly, there came to her the
memory of her mother's words--"If unhappiness ever comes to you, read
this letter."

Surely this was the time she needed to read that letter.  That it
contained some secret of her mother's life she felt sure, and she was
equally sure that it contained nothing that would cause her to blush
for that beloved mother.

"Whatever the manuscript may have to reveal to me," she said, "it is
time that I should know."  She took the package from the hiding
place, and broke the seal.  Slowly she read it to the end, as if
anxious to make no error in understanding every phase of the long
story it related.  Beginning with the marriage of her mother to the
French professor, Berene gave a detailed account of her own sad and
troubled life, and the shadow which the father's appetite for drugs
cast over her whole youth.  "They say," she wrote, "that there is no
personal devil in existence.  I think this is true; he has taken the
form of drugs and spirituous liquors, and so his work of devastation
goes on."  Then followed the story of the sacrilegious marriage to
save her father from suicide, of her early widowhood; and the proffer
of the Baroness to give her a home.  Of her life of servitude there,
her yearning for an education, and her meeting with "Apollo," as she
designated Preston Cheney.  "For truly he was like the glory of the
rising day to me, the first to give me hope, courage and unselfish
aid.  I loved him, I worshipped him.  He loved me, but he strove to
crush and kill this love because he had worked out an ambitious
career for himself.  To extricate himself from many difficulties and
embarrassments, and to further his ambitious dreams, he betrothed
himself to the daughter of a rich and powerful man.  He made no
profession of love, and she asked none.  She was incapable of giving
or inspiring that holy passion.  She only asked to be married.

"I only asked to be loved.  Knowing nothing of the terrible conflict
in his breast, knowing nothing of his new-made ties, I was wounded to
the soul by his speaking unkindly to me--words he forced himself to
speak to hide his real feelings.  And then it was that a strange fate
caused him to find me fainting, suffering, and praying for death.
The love in both hearts could no longer be restrained.  Augmented by
its long control, sharpened by the agony we had both suffered,
overwhelmed by the surprise of the meeting, we lost reason and
prudence.  Everything was forgotten save our love.  When it was too
late I foresaw the anguish and sorrow I must bring into this man's
life.  I fear it was this thought rather than repentance for sin
which troubled me.  Well may you ask why I did not think of all this
before instead of after the error was committed.  Why did not Eve
realise the consequences of the fall until she had eaten of the
apple?  Only afterward did I learn of the unholy ties which my lover
had formed that very day--ties which he swore to me should be broken
ere another day passed, to render him free to make me his wife in the
eyes of men, as I already was in the sight of God.

"Yet a strange and sudden resolve came to me as I listened to him.
Far beyond the thought of my own ruin, rose the consciousness of the
ruin I should bring upon his life by allowing him to carry out his
design.  To be his wife, his helpmate, chosen from the whole world as
one he deemed most worthy and most able to cheer and aid him in
life's battle--that seemed heaven to me; but to know that by one
rash, impetuous act of folly, I had placed him in a position where he
felt that honour compelled him to marry me--why, this thought was
more bitter than death.  I knew that he loved me; yet I knew, too,
that by a union with me under the circumstances he would antagonise
those who were now his best and most influential friends, and that
his entire career would be ruined.  I resolved to go away; to
disappear from his life and leave no trace.  If his love was as
sincere as mine, he would find me; and time would show him some wiser
way for breaking his new-made fetters than the rash and sudden method
he now contemplated.  He had forgotten to protect me with his love,
but I could not forget to protect him.  In every true woman's love
there is the maternal element which renders sacrifice natural.

"Fate hastened and furthered my plans for departure.  Made aware that
the Baroness was suspicious of my fault, and learning that my lover
was suddenly called to the bedside of his fiancee, I made my escape
from the town and left no trace behind.  I went to that vast haystack
of lost needles--New York, and effaced Berene Dumont in Mrs Lamont.
The money left from my father's belongings I resolved to use in
cultivating my voice.  I advertised for embroidery and fine sewing
also, and as I was an expert with the needle, I was able to support
myself and lay aside a little sum each week.  I trimmed hats at a
small price, and added to my income in various manners, owing to my
French taste and my deft fingers.

"I was desolate, sad, lonely, but not despairing.  What woman can
despair when she knows herself loved?  To me that consciousness was a
far greater source of happiness than would have been the knowledge
that I was an empress, or the wife of a millionaire, envied by the
whole world.  I believed my lover would find me in time, that we
should be reunited.  I believed this until I saw the announcement of
his marriage in the press, and read that he and his bride had sailed
for an extended foreign tour; but with this stunning news, there came
to me the strange, sweet, startling consciousness that you, my
darling child, were coming to console me.

"I know that under the circumstances I ought to have been borne down
to the earth with a guilty shame; I ought to have considered you as a
punishment for my sin--and walked in the valley of humiliation and
despair.

"But I did not.  I lived in a state of mental exaltation; every
thought was a prayer, every emotion was linked with religious
fervour.  I was no longer alone or friendless, for I had you.  I sang
as I had never sung, and one theatrical manager, who happened to call
upon my teacher during my lesson hour, offered me a position at a
good salary at once if I would accept.

"I could not accept, of course, knowing what the coming months were
to bring to me, but I took his card and promised to write him when I
was ready to take a position.  You came into life in the depressing
atmosphere of a city hospital, my dear child, yet even there I was
not depressed, and your face wore a smile of joy the first time I
gazed upon it.  So I named you Joy--and well have you worn the name.
My first sorrow was in being obliged to leave you; for I had to leave
you with those human angels, the sweet sisters of charity, while I
went forth to make a home for you.  My voice, as is sometimes the
case, was richer, stronger and of greater compass after I had passed
through maternity.  I accepted a position with a travelling
theatrical company, where I was to sing a solo in one act.  My
success was not phenomenal, but it WAS success nevertheless.  I
followed this life for three years, seeing you only at intervals.
Then the consciousness came to me that without long and profound
study I could never achieve more than a third-rate success in my
profession.

"I had dreamed of becoming a great singer; but I learned that a voice
alone does not make a great singer.  I needed years of study, and
this would necessitate the expenditure of large sums of money.  I had
grown heart-sick and disgusted with the annoyances and vulgarity I
was subjected to in my position.  When you were four years old a good
man offered me a good home as his wife.  It was the first honest love
I had encountered, while scores of men had made a pretence of loving
me during these years.

"I was hungering for a home where I could claim you and have the joy
of your daily companionship instead of brief glimpses of you at the
intervals of months.  My voice, never properly trained, was beginning
to break.  I resolved to put Mr Irving to a test; I would tell him
the true story of your birth, and if he still wished me to be his
wife, I would marry him.

"I carried out my resolve, and we were married the day after he had
heard my story.  I lived a peaceful and even happy life with Mr
Irving.  He was devoted to you, and never by look, word or act,
seemed to remember my past.  I, too, at times almost forgot it, so
strange a thing is the human heart under the influence of time.
Imagine, then, the shock of remembrance and the tidal wave of
memories which swept over me when in the lady you brought to call
upon me I recognised--the Baroness.

"It is because she threatened to tell you that you were not born in
wedlock that I leave this manuscript for you.  It is but a few weeks
since you told me the story of Marah Adams, and assured me that you
thought her mother did right in confessing the truth to her daughter.
Little did you dream with what painful interest I listened to your
views on that subject.  Little did I dream that I should so soon be
called upon to act upon them.

"But the time is now come, and I want no strange hand to deal you a
blow in the dark; if any part of the story comes to you, I want you
to know the whole truth.  You will wonder why I have not told you the
name of your father.  It is strange, but from the hour I knew of his
marriage, and of your dawning life, I have felt a jealous fear lest
he should ever take you from me; even after I am gone, I would not
have him know of your existence and be unable to claim you openly.
Any acquaintance between you could only result in sorrow.

"I have never blamed him for my past weakness, however I have blamed
him for his unholy marriage.  Our fault was mutual.  I was no
ignorant child; while young in years, I had sufficient knowledge of
human nature to protect myself had I used my will-power and my
reason.  Like many another woman, I used neither; unlike the
majority, I did not repent my sin or its consequences.  I have ever
believed you to be a more divinely born being than any children who
may have resulted from my lover's unholy marriage.  I die strong in
the belief.  God bless you, my dear child, and farewell."

Joy sat silent and pale like one in a trance for a long time after
she had finished reading.  Then she said aloud, "So I am another like
Marah Adams; it was this knowledge which caused the rector to write
me that strange letter.  It was this knowledge which sent him away
without coming to say one word of adieu.  The woman who sent me the
message, sent it to him also.  Well, I can be as brave as my mother
was.  I, too, can disappear."

She arose and began silently and rapidly to make preparations for a
journey.  She felt a nervous haste to get away from something--from
all things.  Everything stable in the world seemed to have slipped
from her hold in the last few days.  Home, mother, love, and now hope
and pride were gone too.  She worked for more than two hours without
giving vent to even a sigh.  Then suddenly she buried her face in her
hands and sobbed aloud:  "Oh, mother, mother, you were not ashamed,
but I am ashamed for you!  Why was I ever born?  God forgive me for
the sinful thought, but I wish you had lied to me in place of telling
me the truth."



CHAPTER XVI



Just as Mrs Irving had written her story for her daughter to read,
she told it, in the main, to the rector a few days before her death.

Only once before had the tale passed her lips; then her listener was
Horace Irving; and his only comment was to take her in his arms and
place the kiss of betrothal on her lips.  Never again was the painful
subject referred to between them.  So imbued had Berene Dumont become
with her belief in the legitimacy of her child, and in her own
purity, that she felt but little surprise at the calm manner in which
Mr Irving received her story, and now when the rector of St Blank's
Church was her listener, she expected the same broad judgment to be
given her.  But it was the calmness of a great and all-forgiving love
which actuated Mr Irving, and overcame all other feelings.

Wholly unconventional in nature, caring nothing and knowing little of
the extreme ideas of orthodox society on these subjects, the girl
Berene and the woman Mrs Irving had lived a life so wholly secluded
from the world at large, so absolutely devoid of intimate
friendships, so absorbed in her own ideals, that she was incapable of
understanding the conventional opinion regarding a woman with a
history like hers.

In all those years she had never once felt a sensation of shame.  Mr
Irving had requested her to rear Joy in the belief that she was his
child.  As the matter could in no way concern anyone else, Mrs
Irving's lips had remained sealed on the subject; but not with any
idea of concealing a disgrace.  She could not associate disgrace with
her love for Preston Cheney.  She believed herself to be his
spiritual widow, as it were.  His mortal clay and legal name only
belonged to his wife.

Mr Irving had met Berene on a railroad train, and had conceived one
of those sudden and intense passions with which a woman with a past
often inspires an innocent and unworldly young man.  He was sincerely
and truly religious by nature, and as spotless as a maiden in mind
and body.

When he had dreamed of a wife, it was always of some shy, innocent
girl whom he should woo almost from her mother's arms; some gentle,
pious maid, carefully reared, who would help him to establish the
Christian household of his imagination.  He had thought that love
would first come to him as admiring respect, then tender friendship,
then love for some such maiden; instead it had swooped down upon him
in the form of an intense passion for an absolute stranger--a woman
travelling with a theatrical company.  He was like a sleeper who
awakens suddenly and finds a scorching midday sun beating upon his
eyes.  A wrecked freight train upon the track detained for several
hours the car in which they travelled.  The passengers waived
ceremony and conversed to pass the time, and Mr Irving learnt
Berene's name, occupation and destination.  He followed her for a
week, and at the end of that time asked her hand in marriage.

Even after he had heard the story of her life, he was not deterred
from his resolve to make her his wife.  All the Christian charity of
his nature, all its chivalry was aroused, and he believed he was
plucking a brand from the burning.  He never repented his act.  He
lived wholly for his wife and child, and for the good he could do
with them as his faithful allies.  He drew more and more away from
all the allurements of the world, and strove to rear Joy in what he
believed to be a purely Christian life, and to make his wife forget,
if possible, that she had ever known a sorrow.  All of sincere
gratitude, tenderness, and gentle affection possible for her to feel,
Berene bestowed upon her husband during his life, and gave to his
memory after he was gone.

Joy had been excessively fond of Mr Irving, and it was the dread of
causing her a deep sorrow in the knowledge that she was not his
child, and the fear that Preston Cheney would in any way interfere
with her possession of Joy, which had distressed the mother during
the visit of the Baroness, rather than unwillingness to have her sin
revealed to her daughter.  Added to this, the intrusion of the
Baroness into this long hidden and sacred experience seemed a
sacrilege from which she shrank with horror.  But she now told the
tale to Arthur Stuart frankly and fearlessly.

He had asked her to confide to him whatever secret existed regarding
Joy's birth.

"There is a rumour afloat," he said, "that Joy is not Mr Irving's
child.  I love your daughter, Mrs Irving, and I feel it is my right
to know all the circumstances of her life.  I believe the story which
was told my mother to be the invention of some enemy who is jealous
of Joy's beauty and talents, and I would like to be in a position to
silence these slanders."

So Mrs Irving told the story to the end; and having told it, she felt
relieved and happy in the thought that it was imparted to the only
two people whom it could concern in the future.

No disturbing fear came to her that the rector would hesitate to make
Joy his wife.  To Berene Dumont, love was the law.  If love existed
between two souls she could not understand why any convention of
society should stand in the way of its fulfilment.

Arthur Stuart in his role of spiritual confessor and consoler had
never before encountered such a phase of human nature.  He had
listened to many a tale of sin and folly from women's lips, but
always had the sinner bemoaned her sin, and bitterly repented her
weakness.  Here instead was what the world would consider a fallen
woman, who on her deathbed regarded her weakness as her strength, her
shame as her glory, and who seemed to expect him to take the same
view of the matter.  When he attempted to urge her to repent, the
words stuck in his throat.  He left the deathbed of the unfortunate
sinner without having expressed one of the conflicting emotions which
filled his heart.  But he left it with such a weight on his soul,
such distress on his mind that death seemed to him the only way of
escape from a life of torment.

His love for Joy Irving was not killed by the story he had heard.
But it had received a terrible shock, and the thought of making her
his wife with the probability that the Baroness would spread the
scandal broadcast, and that his marriage would break his mother's
heart, tortured him.  Added to this were his theories on heredity,
and the fear that there might, nay, must be, some dangerous tendency
hidden in the daughter of a mother who had so erred, and who in dying
showed no comprehension of the enormity of her sin.  Had Mrs Irving
bewailed her fall, and represented herself as the victim of a wily
villain, the rector would not have felt so great a fear of the
daughter's inheritance.  A frail, repentant woman he could pity and
forgive, but it seemed to him that Mrs Irving was utterly lacking in
moral nature.  She was spiritually blind.  The thought tortured him.
To leave Joy at this time without calling to see her seemed base and
cowardly; yet he dared not trust himself in her presence.  So he sent
her the strangely worded letter, and went away hoping to be shown the
path of duty before he returned.

At the end of three months he came home stronger in body and mind.
He had resolved to compromise with fate; to continue his calls upon
Joy Irving; to be her friend and rector only, until by the passage of
time, and the changes which occur so rapidly in every society, the
scandal in regard to her birth had been forgotten.  And until by
patience and tenderness, he won his mother's consent to the union.
He felt that all this must come about as he desired, if he did not
aggravate his mother's feeling or defy public opinion by too
precipitate methods.

He could not wholly give up all thoughts of Joy Irving.  She had
grown to be a part of his hopes and dreams of the future, as she was
a part of the reality of his present.  But she was very young; he
could afford to wait, and while he waited to study the girl's
character, and if he saw any budding shoot which bespoke the maternal
tree, to prune and train it to his own liking.  For the sake of his
unborn children he felt it his duty to carefully study any woman he
thought to make his wife.

But when he reached home, the surprising intelligence awaited him
that Miss Irving had left the metropolis.  A brief note to the church
authorities, resigning her position, and saying that she was about to
leave the city, was all that anyone knew of her.

The rector instituted a quiet search, but only succeeded in learning
that she had conducted her preparations for departure with the
greatest secrecy, and that to no one had she imparted her plans.

Whenever a young woman shrouds her actions in the garments of
secrecy, she invites suspicion.  The people who love to suspect their
fellow-beings of wrong-doing were not absent on this occasion.

The rector was hurt and wounded by all this, and while he resented
the intimation from another that Miss Irving's conduct had been
peculiar and mysterious, he felt it to be so in his own heart.

"Is it her mother's tendency to adventure developing in her?" he
asked himself.

Yet he wrote her a letter, directing it to her at the old number,
thinking she would at least leave her address with the post-office
for the forwarding of mail.  The letter was returned to him from that
cemetery of many a dear hope, the dead-letter office.  A personal in
a leading paper failed to elicit a reply.  And then one day six
months after the disappearance of Joy Irving, the young rector was
called to the Cheney household to offer spiritual consolation to Miss
Alice, who believed herself to be dying.  She had been in a decline
ever since the rector went away for his health.

Since his return she had seen him but seldom, rarely save in the
pulpit, and for the last six weeks she had been too ill to attend
divine service.

It was Preston Cheney himself, at home upon one of his periodical
visits, who sent for the rector, and gravely met him at the door when
he arrived, and escorted him into his study.

"I am very anxious about my daughter," he said.  "She has been a
nervous child always, and over-sensitive.  I returned yesterday after
an absence of some three months in California, to find Alice in bed,
wasted to a shadow, and constantly weeping.  I cannot win her
confidence--she has never confided to me.  Perhaps it is my fault;
perhaps I have not been at home enough to make her realise that the
relationship of father and daughter is a sacred one.  This morning
when I was urging her to tell me what grieved her, she remarked that
there was but one person to whom she could communicate this sorrow--
her rector.  So, my dear Dr Stuart, I have sent for you.  I will
conduct you to my child, and I leave her in your hands.  Whatever
comfort and consolation you can offer, I know will be given.  I hope
she will not bind you to secrecy; I hope you may be able to tell me
what troubles her, and advise me how to help her."

It was more than an hour before the rector returned to the library
where Preston Cheney awaited him.  When the senator heard his
approaching step, he looked up, and was startled to see the pallor on
the young man's face.  "You have something sad, something terrible to
tell me!" he cried.  "What is it?"

The rector walked across the room several times, breathing deeply,
and with anguish written on his countenance.  Then he took Senator
Cheney's hand and wrung it.  "I have an embarrassing announcement to
make to you," he said.  "It is something so surprising, so
unexpected, that I am completely unnerved."

"You alarm me, more and more," the senator answered.  "What can be
the secret which my frail child has imparted to you that should so
distress you?  Speak; it is my right to know."

The rector took another turn about the room, and then came and stood
facing Senator Cheney.

"Your daughter has conceived a strange passion for me," he said in a
low voice.  "It is this which has caused her illness, and which she
says will cause her death, if I cannot return it."

"And you?" asked his listener after a moment's silence.

"I?  Why, I have never thought of your daughter in any such manner,"
the young man replied.  "I have never dreamed of loving her, or
winning her love."

"Then do not marry her," Preston Cheney said quietly.  "Marriage
without love is unholy.  Even to save life it is unpardonable."

The rector was silent, and walked the room with nervous steps.  "I
must go home and think it all out," he said after a time.  "Perhaps
Miss Cheney will find her grief less, now that she has imparted it to
me.  I am alarmed at her condition, and I shall hope for an early
report from you regarding her."

The report was made twelve hours later.  Miss Cheney was delirious,
and calling constantly for the rector.  Her physician feared the
worst.

The rector came, and his presence at once soothed the girl's
delirium.

"History repeats itself," said Preston Cheney meditatively to
himself.  "Alice is drawing this man into the net by her alarming
physical condition, as Mabel riveted the chains about me when her
mother died.

"But Alice really loves the rector, I think, and she is capable of a
much stronger passion than her mother ever felt; and the rector loves
no other woman at least, and so this marriage, if it takes place,
will not be so wholly wicked and unholy as mine was."

The marriage did take place three months later.  Alice Cheney was not
the wife whom Mrs Stuart would have chosen for her son, yet she urged
him to this step, glad to place a barrier for all time between him
and Joy Irving, whose possible return at any day she constantly
feared, and whose power over her son's heart she knew was
undiminished.

Alice Cheney's family was of the best on both sides; there were
wealth, station, and honour; and a step-grandmamma who could be
referred to on occasions as "The Baroness."  And there was no
skeleton to be hidden or excused.

And Arthur Stuart, believing that Alice Cheney's life and reason
depended upon his making her his wife, resolved to end the bitter
struggle with his own heart and with fate, and do what seemed to be
his duty, toward the girl and toward his mother.  When the wedding
took place, the saddest face at the ceremony, save that of the groom,
was the face of the bride's father.  But the bride was radiant, and
Mabel and the Baroness walked in clouds.



CHAPTER XVII



Alice did not rally in health or spirits after her marriage, as her
family, friends and physician had anticipated.  She remained nervous,
ailing and despondent.

"Should maternity come to her, she would doubtless be very much
improved in health afterward," the doctor said, and Mabel,
remembering how true a similar prediction proved in her case, despite
her rebellion against it, was not sorry when she knew that Alice was
to become a mother, scarcely a year after her marriage.

But Alice grew more and more despondent as the months passed by; and
after the birth of her son, the young mother developed dementia of
the most hopeless kind.  The best specialists in two worlds were
employed to bring her out of the state of settled melancholy into
which she had fallen, but all to no avail.  At the end of two years,
her case was pronounced hopeless.  Fortunately the child died at the
age of six weeks, so the seed of insanity which in the first Mrs
Lawrence was simply a case of "nerves," growing into the plant
hysteria in Mabel, and yielding the deadly fruit of insanity in
Alice, was allowed by a kind providence to become extinct in the
fourth generation.

This disaster to his only child caused a complete breaking down of
spirit and health in Preston Cheney.

Like some great, strongly coupled car, which loses its grip and goes
plunging down an incline to destruction, Preston Cheney's will-power
lost its hold on life, and he went down to the valley of death with
frightful speed.

During the months which preceded his death, Senator Cheney's only
pleasure seemed to be in the companionship of his son-in-law.  The
strong attachment between the two men ripened with every day's
association.  One day the rector was sitting by the invalid's couch,
reading aloud, when Preston Cheney laid his hand on the young man's
arm and said:  "Close your book and let me tell you a true story
which is stranger than fiction.  It is the story of an ambitious man
and all the disasters which his realised ambition brought into the
lives of others.  It is a story whose details are known to but two
beings on earth, if indeed the other being still exists on earth.  I
have long wanted to tell you this story--indeed, I wanted to tell it
to you before you made Alice your wife, yet the fear that I would be
wrecking the life and reason of my child kept me silent.  No doubt if
I had told you, and you had been influenced by my experience against
a loveless marriage, I should to-day be blaming myself for her
condition, which I see plainly now is but the culmination of three
generations of hysterical women.  But I want to tell you the story
and urge you to use it as a warning in your position of counsellor
and friend of ambitious young men.

"No matter what else a man may do for position, don't let him marry a
woman he does not love, especially if he crucifies a vital passion
for another, in order to do this."  Then Preston Cheney told the
story of his life to his son-in-law; and as the tale proceeded, a
strange interest which increased until it became violent excitement,
took possession of the rector's brain and heart.  The story was so
familiar--so very familiar; and at length, when the name of BERENE
DUMONT escaped the speaker's lips, Arthur Stuart clutched his hands
and clenched his teeth to keep silent until the end of the story
came.

"From the hour Berene disappeared, to this very day, no word or
message ever came from her," the invalid said.  "I have never known
whether she was dead or alive, married, or, terrible thought, perhaps
driven into a reckless life by her one false step with me.  This last
fear has been a constant torture to me all these years.

"The world is cruel in its judgment of woman.  And yet I know that it
is woman herself who has shaped the opinions of the world regarding
these matters.  If men had had their way since the world began, there
would be no virtuous women.  Woman has realised this fact, and she
has in consequence walled herself about with rules and conventions
which have in a measure protected her from man.  When any woman
breaks through these conventions and errs, she suffers the scorn of
others who have kept these self-protecting and society-protecting
laws; and, conscious of their scorn, she believes all hope is lost
for ever.

"The fear that Berene took this view of her one mistake, and plunged
into a desperate life, has embittered my whole existence.  Never
before did a man suffer such a mental hell as I have endured for this
one act of sin and weakness.  Yet the world, looking at my life of
success, would say if it knew the story, 'Behold how the man goes
free.'  Free!  Great God! there is no bondage so terrible as that of
the mind.  I have loved Berene Dumont with a changeless passion for
twenty-three years, and there has not been a day in all that time
that I have not during some hours endured the agonies of the damned,
thinking of all the disasters and misery that might have come into
her life through me.  Heaven knows I would have married her if she
had remained.  Strange and intricate as the net was which the devil
wove about me when I had furnished the cords, I could and would have
broken through it after that strange night--at once the heaven and
the hell of my memory--if Berene had remained.  As it was--I married
Mabel, and you know what a farce, ending in a tragedy, our married
life has been.  God grant that no worse woes befell Berene; God grant
that I may meet her in the spirit world and tell her how I loved her
and longed for her companionship."

The young rector's eyes were streaming with tears, as he reached over
and clasped the sick man's hands in his.  "You will meet her," he
said with a choked voice.  "I heard this same story, but without
names, from Berene Dumont's dying lips more than two years ago.  And
just as Berene disappeared from you--so her daughter disappeared from
me; and, God help me, dear father--doubly now my father, I crushed
out my great passion for the glorious natural child of your love, to
marry the loveless, wretched and UNNATURAL child of your marriage."

The sick man started up on his couch, his eyes flaming, his cheeks
glowing with sudden lustre.

"My child--the natural child of Berene's love and mine, you say; oh,
my God, speak and tell me what you mean; speak before I die of joy so
terrible it is like anguish."

So then it became the rector's turn to take the part of narrator.
When the story was ended, Preston Cheney lay weeping like a woman on
his couch; the first tears he had shed since his mother died and left
him an orphan of ten.

"Berene living and dying almost within reach of my arms--almost
within sound of my voice!" he cried.  "Oh, why did I not find her
before the grave closed between us?--and why did no voice speak from
that grave to tell me when I held my daughter's hand in mine?--my
beautiful child, no wonder my heart went out to her with such a gush
of tenderness; no wonder I was fired with unaccountable anger and
indignation when Mabel and Alice spoke unkindly of her.  Do you
remember how her music stirred me?  It was her mother's heart
speaking to mine through the genius of our child.

"Arthur, you must find her--you must find her for me!  If it takes my
whole fortune I must see my daughter, and clasp her in my arms before
I die."

But this happiness was not to be granted to the dying man.  Overcome
by the excitement of this new emotion, he grew weaker and weaker as
the next few days passed, and at the end of the fifth day his spirit
took its flight, let us hope to join its true mate.

It had been one of his dying requests to have his body taken to
Beryngford and placed beside that of Judge Lawrence.

The funeral services took place in the new and imposing church
edifice which had been constructed recently in Beryngford.  The quiet
interior village had taken a leap forward during the last few years,
and was now a thriving city, owing to the discovery of valuable stone
quarries in its borders.

The Baroness and Mabel had never been in Beryngford since the death
of Judge Lawrence many years before; and it was with sad and bitter
hearts that both women recalled the past and realised anew the
disasters which had wrecked their dearest hopes and ambitions.

The Baroness, broken in spirit and crushed by the insanity of her
beloved Alice, now saw the form of the man whom she had hopelessly
loved for so many years, laid away to crumble back to dust; and yet,
the sorrows which should have softened her soul, and made her heart
tender toward all suffering humanity, rendered her pitiless as the
grave toward one lonely and desolate being before the shadows of
night had fallen upon the grave of Preston Cheney.

When the funeral march pealed out from the grand new organ during the
ceremonies in the church, both the Baroness and the rector, absorbed
as they were in mournful sorrow, started with surprise.  Both gazed
at the organ loft; and there, before the great instrument, sat the
graceful figure of Joy Irving.  The rector's face grew pale as the
corpse in the casket; the withered cheek of the Baroness turned a
sickly yellow, and a spark of anger dried the moisture in her eyes.

Before the night had settled over the thriving city of Beryngford,
the Baroness dropped a point of virus from the lancet of her tongue
to poison the social atmosphere where Joy Irving had by the merest
accident of fate made her new home, and where in the office of
organist she had, without dreaming of her dramatic situation, played
the requiem at the funeral of her own father.



CHAPTER XVIII



Joy Irving had come to Beryngford at the time when the discoveries of
the quarries caused that village to spring into sudden prominence as
a growing city.  Newspaper accounts of the building of the new
church, and the purchase of a large pipe organ, chanced to fall under
her eye just as she was planning to leave the scene of her
unhappiness.

"I can at least only fail if I try for the position of organist
there," she said, "and if I succeed in this interior town, I can hide
myself from all the world without incurring heavy expense."

So all unconsciously Joy fled from the metropolis to the very place
from which her mother had vanished twenty-two years before.

She had been the organist in the grand new Episcopalian Church now
for three years; and she had made many cordial acquaintances who
would have become near friends, if she had encouraged them.  But
Joy's sweet and trustful nature had received a great shock in the
knowledge of the shadow which hung about her birth.  Where formerly
she had expected love and appreciation from everyone she met, she now
shrank from forming new ties, lest new hurts should await her.

She was like a flower in whose perfect heart a worm had coiled.  Her
entire feeling about life had undergone a change.  For many weeks
after her self-imposed exile, she had been unable to think of her
mother without a mingled sense of shame and resentment; the adoring
love she had borne this being seemed to die with her respect.  After
a time the bitterness of this sentiment wore away, and a pitying
tenderness and sorrow took its place; but from her heart the twin
angels, Love and Forgiveness, were absent.  She read her mother's
manuscript over, and tried to argue herself into the philosophy which
had sustained the author of her being through all these years.

But her mind was shaped far more after the conventional pattern of
her paternal ancestors, who had been New England Puritans, and she
could not view the subject as Berene had viewed it.

In spite of the ideality which her mother had woven about him, Joy
entertained the most bitter contempt for the unknown man who was her
father, and the whole tide of her affections turned lavishly upon the
memory of Mr Irving, whom she felt now more than ever so worthy of
her regard.

Reason as she would on the supremacy of love over law, yet the bold,
unpleasant fact remained that she was the child of an unwedded
mother.  She shrank in sensitive pain from having this story follow
her, and the very consciousness that her mother's experience had been
an exceptional one, caused her the greater dread of having it known
and talked of as a common vulgar liaison.

There are two things regarding which the world at large never asks
any questions--namely, How a rich man made his money, and how an
erring woman came to fall.  It is enough for the world to know that
he is rich--that fact alone opens all doors to him, as the fact that
the woman has erred closes them to her.

There was a common vulgar creature in Beryngford, whose many amours
and bold defiance of law and order rendered her name a synonym for
indecency.  This woman had begun her career in early girlhood as a
mercenary intriguer; and yet Joy Irving knew that the majority of
people would make small distinctions between the conduct of this
creature and that of her mother, were the facts of Berene's life and
her own birth to be made public.

The fear that the story would follow her wherever she went became an
absolute dread with her, and caused her to live alone and without
companions, in the midst of people who would gladly have become her
warm friends, had she permitted.

Her book of "Impressions" reflected the changes which had taken place
in the complexion of her mind during these years.  Among its entries
were the following:-


People talk about following a divine law of love, when they wish to
excuse their brute impulses and break social and civil codes.

No love is sanctioned by God, which shatters human hearts.

Fathers are only distantly related to their children; love for the
male parent is a matter of education.

The devil macadamises all his pavements.

A natural child has no place in an unnatural world.

When we cannot respect our parents, it is difficult to keep our ideal
of God.

Love is a mushroom, and lust is its poisonous counterpart.

It is a pity that people who despise civilisation should be so
uncivil as to stay in it.  There is always darkest Africa.

The extent of a man's gallantry depends on the goal.  He follows the
good woman to the borders of Paradise and leaves her with a polite
bow; but he follows the bad woman to the depths of hell.

It is easy to trust in God until he permits us to suffer.  The
dentist seems a skilled benefactor to mankind when we look at his
sign from the street.  When we sit in his chair he seems a brute,
armed with devil's implements.

An anonymous letter is the bastard of a diseased mind.

An envious woman is a spark from Purgatory.

The consciousness that we have anything to hide from the world
stretches a veil between our souls and heaven.  We cannot reach up to
meet the gaze of God, when we are afraid to meet the eyes of men.

It may be all very well for two people to make their own laws, but
they have no right to force a third to live by them.

Virtue is very secretive about her payments, but the whole world
hears of it when vice settles up.

We have a sublime contempt for public opinion theoretically so long
as it favours us.  When it turns against us we suffer intensely from
the loss of what we claimed to despise.

When the fruit must apologise for the tree, we do not care to save
the seed.

It is only when God and man have formed a syndicate and agreed upon
their laws, that marriage is a safe investment.

The love that does not protect its object would better change its
name.

When we say OF people what we would not say TO them, we are either
liars or cowards.

The enmity of some people is the greatest compliment they can pay us.


It was in thoughts like these that Joy relieved her heart of some of
the bitterness and sorrow which weighed upon it.  And day after day
she bore about with her the dread of having the story of her mother's
sin known in her new home.

As our fears, like our wishes, when strong and unremitting, prove to
be magnets, the result of Joy's despondent fears came in the scandal
which the Baroness had planted and left to flourish and grow in
Beryngford after her departure.  An hour before the services began,
on the day of Preston Cheney's burial, Joy learned at whose rites she
was to officiate as organist.  A pang of mingled emotions shot
through her heart at the sound of his name.  She had seen this man
but a few times, and spoken with him but once; yet he had left a
strong impression upon her memory.  She had felt drawn to him by his
sympathetic face and atmosphere, the sorrow of his kind eyes, and the
keen appreciation he had shown in her art; and just in the measure
that she had been attracted by him, she had been repelled by the
three women to whom she was presented at the same time.  She saw them
all again mentally, as she had seen them on that and many other days.
Mrs Cheney and Alice, with their fretful, plain, dissatisfied faces,
and their over-burdened costumes, and the Baroness, with her cruel
heart gazing through her worn mask of defaced beauty.

She had been conscious of a feeling of overwhelming pity for the
kind, attractive man who made the fourth of that quartette.  She knew
that he had obtained honours and riches from life, but she pitied him
for his home environment.  She had felt so thankful for her own happy
home life at the time; and she remembered, too, the sweet hope that
lay like a closed-up bud in the bottom of her heart that day, as the
quartette moved away and left her standing alone with Arthur Stuart.

It was only a few weeks later that the end came to all her dreams,
through that terrible anonymous letter.

It was the Baroness who had sent it, she knew--the Baroness whose
early hatred for her mother had descended to the child.  "And now I
must sit in the same house with her again," she said, "and perhaps
meet her face to face; and she may tell the story here of my mother's
shame, even as I have felt and feared it must yet be told.  How
strange that a 'love child' should inspire so much hatred!"

Joy had carefully refrained from reading New York papers ever since
she left the city; and she had no correspondents.  It was her wish
and desire to utterly sink and forget the past life there.  Therefore
she knew nothing of Arthur Stuart's marriage to the daughter of
Preston Cheney.  She thought of the rector as dead to her.  She
believed he had given her up because of the stain upon her birth,
and, bitter as the pain had been, she never blamed him.  She had
fought with her love for him and believed that it was buried in the
grave of all other happy memories.

But as the earth is wrenched open by volcanic eruptions and long
buried corpses are revealed again to the light of day, so the
unexpected sight of Arthur Stuart, as he took his place beside Mabel
and the Baroness during the funeral services, revealed all the pent-
up passion of her heart to her own frightened soul.

To strong natures, the greater the inward excitement the more quiet
the exterior; and Jay passed through the services, and performed her
duties, without betraying to those about her the violent emotions
under which she laboured.

The rector of Beryngford Church requested her to remain for a few
moments, and consult with him on a matter concerning the next week's
musical services.  It was from him Joy learned the relation which
Arthur Stuart bore to the dead man, and that Beryngford was the
former home of the Baroness.

Her mother's manuscript had carefully avoided all mention of names of
people or places.  Yet Joy realised now that she must be living in
the very scene of her mother's early life; she longed to make
inquiries, but was prevented by the fear that she might hear her
mother's name mentioned disrespectfully.

The days that followed were full of sharp agony for her.  It was not
until long afterward that she was able to write her "impressions" of
that experience.  In the extreme hour of joy or agony we formulate no
impressions; we only feel.  We neither analyse nor describe our
friends or enemies when face to face with them, but after we leave
their presence.  When the day came that she could write, some of her
reflections were thus epitomised:


Love which rises from the grave to comfort us, possesses more of the
demons' than the angels' power.  It terrifies us with its
supernatural qualities and deprives us temporarily of our reason.

Suppressed steam and suppressed emotion are dangerous things to deal
with.

The infant who wants its mother's breast, and the woman who wants her
lover's arms, are poor subjects to reason with.  Though you tell the
former that fever has poisoned the mother's milk, or the latter that
destruction lies in the lover's embrace, one heeds you no more than
the other.

The accumulated knowledge of ages is sometimes revealed by a kiss.
Where wisdom is bliss, it is folly to be ignorant.

Some of us have to crucify our hearts before we find our souls.

A woman cannot fully know charity until she has met passion; but too
intimate an acquaintance with the latter destroys her appreciation of
all the virtues.

To feel temptation and resist it, renders us liberal in our judgment
of all our kind.  To yield to it, fills us with suspicion of all.

There is an ecstatic note in pain which is never reached in
happiness.

The death of a great passion is a terrible thing, unless the dawn of
a greater truth shines on the grave.

Love ought to have no past tense.

Love partakes of the feline nature.  It has nine lives.

It seems to be difficult for some of us to distinguish between
looseness of views, and charitable judgments.  To be sorry for
people's sins and follies and to refuse harsh criticism is right; to
accept them as a matter of course is wrong.

Love and sorrow are twins, and knowledge is their nurse.

The pathway of the soul is not a steady ascent, but hilly and broken.
We must sometimes go lower, in order to get higher.

That which is to-day, and will be to-morrow, must have been
yesterday.  I know that I live, I believe that I shall live again,
and have lived before.

Earth life is the middle rung of a long ladder which we climb in the
dark.  Though we cannot see the steps below, or above, they exist all
the same.

The materialist denying spirit is like the burr of the chestnut
denying the meat within.

The inevitable is always right.

Prayer is a skeleton key that opens unexpected doors.  We may not
find the things we came to seek, but we find other treasures.

The pessimist belongs to God's misfit counter.

Art, when divorced from Religion, always becomes a wanton.

To forget benefits we have received is a crime.  To remember benefits
we have bestowed is a greater one.

To some men a woman is a valuable book, carefully studied and
choicely guarded behind glass doors.  To others, she is a daily
paper, idly scanned and tossed aside.



CHAPTER XIX



While Joy battled with her sorrow during the days following Preston
Cheney's burial, she woke to the consciousness that her history was
known in Beryngford.  The indescribable change in the manner of her
acquaintances, the curiosity in the eyes of some, the insolence or
familiarity of others, all told her that her fears were realised; and
then there came a letter from the church authorities requesting her
to resign her position as organist.

This letter came to the young girl on one of those dreary autumn
nights when all the desolation of the dying summer, and none of the
exhilaration of the approaching winter, is in the air.  She had been
labouring all day under a cloud of depression which hovered over her
heart and brain and threatened to wholly envelop her; and the letter
from the church committee cut her heart like a poniard stroke.
Sometimes we are able to bear a series of great disasters with
courage and equanimity, while we utterly collapse under some slight
misfortune.  Joy had been a heroine in her great sorrows, but now in
the undeserved loss of her position as church organist, she felt
herself unable longer to cope with Fate.

"There's no place for me anywhere," she said to herself.  Had she
known the truth, that the Baroness had represented her to the
committee as a fallen woman of the metropolis, who had left the city
for the city's good, the letter would not have seemed to her so
cruelly unjust and unjustifiable.

Bitter as had been her suffering at the loss of Arthur Stuart from
her life, she had found it possible to understand his hesitation to
make her his wife.  With his fine sense of family pride, and his
reverence for the estate of matrimony, his belief in heredity, it
seemed quite natural to her that he should be shocked at the
knowledge of the conditions under which she was born; and the thought
that her disappearance from his life was helping him to solve a
painful problem, had at times, before this unexpected sight of him,
rendered her almost happy in her lonely exile.  She had grown
strangely fond of Beryngford--of the old streets and homes which she
knew must have been familiar to her mother's eyes, of the new church
whose glorious voiced organ gave her so many hours of comfort and
relief of soul, of the tiny apartment where she and her heart
communed together.  She was catlike in her love of places, and now
she must tear herself away from all these surroundings and seek some
new spot wherein to hide herself and her sorrows.

It was like tearing up a half-rooted flower, already drooping from
one transplanting.  She said to herself that she could never survive
another change.  She read the letter over which lay in her hand, and
tears began to slowly well from her eyes.  Joy seldom wept; but now
it seemed to her she was some other person, who stood apart and wept
tears of sympathy for this poor girl, Joy Irving, whose life was so
hemmed about with troubles, none of which were of her own making; and
then, like a dam which suddenly gives way and allows a river to
overflow, a great storm of sobs shook her frame, and she wept as she
had never wept before; and with her tears there came rushing back to
her heart all the old love and sorrow for the dead mother which had
so long been hidden under her burden of shame; and all the old
passion and longing for the man whose insane wife she knew to be a
more hopeless obstacle between them than this mother's history had
proven.

"Mother, Arthur, pity me, pity me!" she cried.  "I am all alone, and
the strife is so terrible.  I have never meant to harm any living
thing!  Mother Arthur, GOD, how can you all desert me so?"

At last, exhausted, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

She awoke the following morning with an aching head, and a heart
wherein all emotions seemed dead save a dull despair.  She was
conscious of only one wish, one desire--a longing to sit again in the
organ loft, and pour forth her soul in one last farewell to that
instrument which had grown to seem her friend, confidant and lover.

She battled with her impulse as unreasonable and unwise, till the day
was well advanced.  But it grew stronger with each hour; and at last
she set forth under a leaden sky and through a dreary November rain
to the church.

Her head throbbed with pain, and her hands were hot and feverish, as
she seated herself before the organ and began to play.  But with the
first sounds responding to her touch, she ceased to think of bodily
discomfort.

The music was the voice of her own soul, uttering to God all its
desolation, its anguish and its despair.  Then suddenly, with no
seeming volition of her own, it changed to a passion of human love,
human desire; the sorrow of separation, the strife with the emotions,
the agony of renunciation were all there; and the November rain,
beating in wild gusts against the window-panes behind the musician,
lent a fitting accompaniment to the strains.

She had been playing for perhaps an hour, when a sudden exhaustion
seized upon her, and her hands fell nerveless and inert upon her lap;
she dropped her chin upon her breast and closed her eyes.  She was
drunken with her own music.

When she opened them again a few moments later, they fell upon the
face of Arthur Stuart, who stood a few feet distant regarding her
with haggard eyes.  Unexpected and strange as his presence was, Joy
felt neither surprise nor wonder.  She had been thinking of him so
intensely, he had been so interwoven with the music she had been
playing, that his bodily presence appeared to her as a natural
result.  He was the first to speak; and when he spoke she noticed
that his voice sounded hoarse and broken, and that his face was drawn
and pale.

"I came to Beryngford this morning expressly to see you, Joy," he
said.  "I have many things to say to you.  I went to your residence
and was told by the maid that I would find you here.  I followed, as
you see.  We have had many meetings in church edifices, in organ
lofts.  It seems natural to find you in such a place, but I fear it
will be unnatural and unfitting to say to you here, what I came to
say.  Shall we return to your home?"

His eyes shone strangely from dusky caverns, and there were deep
lines about his mouth.

"He, too, has suffered," thought Joy; "I have not borne it all
alone."  Then she said aloud:

"We are quite undisturbed here; I know of nothing I could listen to
in my room which I could not hear you say in this place.  Go on."

He looked at her silently for a moment, his cheeks pale, his breast
heaving.  Before he came to Beryngford, he had fought his battle
between religion and human passion, and passion had won.  He had cast
under his feet every principle and tradition in which he had been
reared, and resolved to live alone henceforth for the love and
companionship of one human being, could he obtain her consent to go
with him.

Yet for the moment, he hesitated to speak the words he had resolved
to utter, under the roof of a house of God, so strong were the
influences of his early training and his habits of thought.  But as
his eyes feasted upon the face before him, his hesitation vanished,
and he leaned toward her and spoke.  "Joy," he said, "three years ago
I went away and left you in sorrow, alone, because I was afraid to
brave public opinion, afraid to displease my mother and ask you to be
my wife.  The story your mother told me of your birth, a story she
left in manuscript for you to read, made a social coward of me.  I
was afraid to take a girl born out of wedlock to be my life
companion, the mother of my children.  Well, I married a girl born in
wedlock; and where is my companion?"  He paused and laughed
recklessly.  Then he went on hurriedly:  "She is in an asylum for the
insane.  I am chained to a corpse for life.  I had not enough moral
courage three-years ago to make you my wife.  But I have moral
courage enough now to come here and ask you to go with me to
Australia, and begin a new life together.  My mother died a year ago.
I donned the surplice at her bidding.  I will abandon it at the
bidding of Love.  I sinned against heaven in marrying a woman I did
not love.  I am willing to sin against the laws of man by living with
the woman I do love; will you go with me, Joy?"  There was silence
save for the beating of the rain against the stained window, and the
wailing of the wind.

Joy was in a peculiarly overwrought condition of mind and body.  Her
hours of extravagant weeping the previous night, followed by a day of
fasting, left her nervous system in a state to be easily excited by
the music she had been playing.  She was virtually intoxicated with
sorrow and harmony.  She was incapable of reasoning, and conscious
only of two things--that she must leave Beryngford, and that the man
whom she had loved with her whole heart for five years, was asking
her to go with him; to be no more homeless, unloved, and alone, but
his companion while life should last.

"Answer me, Joy," he was pleading.  "Answer me."

She moved toward the stairway that led down to the street door; and
as she flitted by him, she said, looking him full in the eyes with a
slow, grave smile, "Yes, Arthur, I will go with you."

He sprang toward her with a wild cry of joy, but she was already
flying down the stairs and out upon the street.

When he joined her, they walked in silence through the rain to her
door, neither speaking a word, until he would have followed her
within.  Then she laid her hand upon his shoulder and said gently but
firmly:  "Not now, Arthur; we must not see each other again until we
go away.  Write me where to meet you, and I will join you within
twenty-four hours.  Do not urge me--you must obey me this once--
afterward I will obey you.  Good-night."

As she closed the door upon him, he said, "Oh, Joy, I have so much to
tell you.  I promised your father when he was dying that I would find
you; I swore to myself that when I found you I would never leave you,
save at your own command.  I go now, only because you bid me go.
When we meet again, there must be no more parting; and you shall hear
a story stranger than the wildest fiction--the story of your father's
life.  Despite your mother's secretiveness regarding this portion of
her history, the knowledge has come to me in the most unexpected
manner, from the lips of the man himself."

Joy listened dreamily to the words he was saying.  Her father--she
was to know who her father was?  Well, it did not matter much to her
now--father, mother, what were they, what was anything save the fact
that he had come back to her and that he loved her?

She smiled silently into his eyes.  Glance became entangled with
glance, and would not be separated.

He pushed open the almost closed door and she felt herself enveloped
with arms and lips.

A second later she stood alone, leaning dizzily against the door;
heart, brain and blood in a mad riot of emotion.

Then she fell into a chair and covered her burning face with her
hands as she whispered, "Mother, mother, forgive me--I understand--I
understand."



CHAPTER XX



The first shock of the awakened emotions brings recklessness to some
women, and to others fear.

The more frivolous plunge forward like the drunken man who leaps from
the open window believing space is water.

The more intense draw back, startled at the unknown world before
them.

The woman who thinks love is all ideality is more liable to follow
into undreamed-of chasms than she who, through the complexity of her
own emotions, realises its grosser elements.

It was long after midnight when Joy fell into a heavy sleep, the
night of Arthur Stuart's visit.  She heard the drip of the dreary
November rain upon the roof, and all the light and warmth seemed
stricken from the universe save the fierce fire in her own heart.

When she woke in the late morning, great splashes of sunlight were
leaping and quivering like living things across the foot of her bed;
she sprang up, dazed for a moment by the flood of light in the room,
and went to the window and looked out upon a sun-kissed world smiling
in the arms of a perfect Indian summer day.

A happy little sparrow chirped upon the window sill, and some
children ran across the street bare-headed, exulting in the soft air.
All was innocence and sweetness.  Mind and morals are greatly
influenced by weather.  Many things seem right in the fog and gloom,
which we know to be wrong in the clear light of a sunny morning.  The
events of the previous day came back to Joy's mind as she stood by
the window, and stirred her with a sense of strangeness and terror.
The thought of the step she had resolved to take brought a sudden
trembling to her limbs.  It seemed to her the eyes of God were
piercing into her heart, and she was afraid.

Joy had from her early girlhood been an earnest and sincere follower
of the Christian religion.  The embodiment of love and sympathy
herself, it was natural for her to believe in the God of Love and to
worship Him in outward forms, as well as in her secret soul.  It was
the deep and earnest fervour of religion in her heart, which rendered
her music so unusual and so inspiring.  There never was, is not and
never can be greatness in any art where religious feeling is lacking.

There must be the consciousness of the Infinite, in the mind which
produces infinite results.

Though the artist be gifted beyond all other men, though he toil
unremittingly, so long as he says, "Behold what I, the gifted and
tireless toiler, can achieve," he shall produce but mediocre and
ephemeral results.  It is when he says reverently, "Behold what
powers greater than I shall achieve through me, the instrument," that
he becomes great and men marvel at his power.

Joy's religious nature found expression in her music, and so
something more than a harmony of beautiful sounds impressed her
hearers.

The first severe blow to her faith in the church as a divine
institution, was when her rector and her lover left her alone in the
hour of her darkest trials, because he knew the story of her mother's
life.  His hesitancy to make her his wife she understood, but his
absolute desertion of her at such a time, seemed inconsistent with
his calling as a disciple of the Christ.

The second blow came in her dismissal from the position of organist
at the Beryngford Church, after the presence of the Baroness in the
town.

A disgust for human laws, and a bitter resentment towards society
took possession of her.  When a gentle and loving nature is roused to
anger and indignation, it is often capable of extremes of action; and
Arthur Stuart had made his proposition of flight to Joy Irving in an
hour when her high-wrought emotions and intensely strung nerves made
any desperate act possible to her.  The sight of his face, with its
evidences of severe suffering, awoke all her smouldering passion for
the man; and the thought that he was ready to tread his creed under
his feet and to defy society for her sake, stirred her with a wild
joy.  God had seemed very far away, and human love was very precious;
too precious to be thrown away in obedience to any man-made law.

But somehow this morning God seemed nearer, and the consciousness of
what she had promised to do terrified her.  Disturbed by her
thoughts, she turned towards her toilet-table and caught sight of the
letter of dismissal from the church committee.  It acted upon her
like an electric shock.  Resentment and indignation re-enthroned
themselves in her bosom.

"Is it to cater to the opinions and prejudices of people like THESE
that I hesitate to take the happiness offered me?" she cried, as she
tore the letter in bits and cast it beneath her feet.  Arthur Stuart
appeared to her once more, in the light of a delivering angel.  Yes,
she would go with him to the ends of the earth.  It was her
inheritance to lead a lawless life.  Nothing else was possible for
her.  God must see how she had been hemmed in by circumstances, how
she had been goaded and driven from the paths of peace and purity
where she had wished to dwell.  God was not a man, and He would be
merciful in judging her.

She sent her landlady two months' rent in advance, and notice of her
departure, and set hurriedly about her preparations.


Twenty-five years before, when Berene Dumont disappeared from
Beryngford, she had, quite unknown to herself, left one devoted
though humble friend behind, who sincerely mourned her absence.

Mrs Connor liked to be spoken of as "the wash-lady at the Palace."
Yet proud as she was of this appellation, she was not satisfied with
being an excellent laundress.  She was a person of ambitions.  To be
the owner of a lodging-house, like the Baroness, was her leading
ambition, and to possess a "peany" for her young daughter Kathleen
was another.

She kept her mind fixed on these two achievements, and she worked
always for those two results.  And as mind rules matter, so the
laundress became in time the landlady of a comfortable and
respectable lodging-house, and in its parlour a piano was the chief
object of furniture.

Kathleen Connor learned to play; and at last to the joy of the
lodgers, she married and bore her "peany" away with her.  During the
time when Mrs Connor was the ambitious "wash-lady" at the Palace,
Berene Dumont came to live there; and every morning when the young
woman carried the tray down to the kitchen after having served the
Baroness with her breakfast, she offered Mrs Connor a cup of coffee
and a slice of toast.

This simple act of thoughtfulness from the young dependant touched
the Irishwoman's tender heart and awoke her lasting gratitude.  She
had heard Berene's story, and she had been prepared to mete out to
her that disdainful dislike which Erin almost invariably feels
towards France.  Realising that the young widow was by birth and
breeding above the station of housemaid, Mrs Connor and the servants
had expected her to treat them with the same lofty airs which the
Baroness made familiar to her servants.  When, instead, Berene
toasted the bread for Mrs Connor, and poured the coffee and placed it
on the kitchen table with her own hands, the heart of the wash-lady
melted in her ample breast.  When the heart of the daughter of Erin
melts, it permeates her whole being; and Mrs Connor became a secret
devotee at the shrine of Miss Dumont.

She had never entertained cordial feelings toward the Baroness.  When
a society lady--especially a titled one--enters into competition with
working people, and yet refuses to associate with them, it always
incites their enmity.  The working population of Beryngford, from the
highest to the lowest grades, felt a sense of resentment toward the
Baroness, who in her capacity of landlady still maintained the airs
of a grand dame, and succeeded in keeping her footing with some of
the most fashionable people in the town.

Added to these causes of dislike, the Baroness was, like many
wealthier people, excessively close in her dealings with working
folk, haggling over a few cents or a few moments of wasted time,
while she was generosity itself in association with her equals.

Mrs Connor, therefore, felt both pity and sympathy for Miss Dumont,
whose position in the Palace she knew to be a difficult one; and when
Preston Cheney came upon the scene the romantic mind of the motherly
Irishwoman fashioned a future for the young couple which would have
done credit to the pen of a Mrs Southworth.

Mr Cheney always had a kind word for the laundress, and a tip as
well; and when Mrs Connor's dream of seeing him act the part of the
Prince and Berene the Cinderella of a modern fairy story, ended in
the disappearance of Miss Dumont and the marriage of Mr Cheney to
Mabel Lawrence, the unhappy wash-lady mourned unceasingly.

Ten years of hard, unremitting toil and rigid economy passed away
before Mrs Connor could realise her ambition of becoming a landlady
in the purchase of a small house which contained but four rooms,
three of which were rented to lodgers.  The increase in the value of
her property during the next five years, left the fortunate
speculator with a fine profit when she sold her house at the end of
that time, and rented a larger one; and as she was an excellent
financier, it was not strange that, at the time Joy Irving appeared
on the scene, "Mrs Connor's apartments" were as well and favourably
known in Beryngford, if not as distinctly fashionable, as the Palace
had been more than twenty years ago.

So it was under the roof of her mother's devoted and faithful mourner
that the unhappy young orphan had found a home when she came to hide
herself away from all who had ever known her.

The landlady experienced the same haunting sensation of something
past and gone when she looked on the girl's beautiful face, which had
so puzzled the Baroness; a something which drew and attracted the
warm heart of the Irishwoman, as the magnet draws the steel.  Time
and experience had taught Mrs Connor to be discreet in her treatment
of her tenants; to curb her curiosity and control her inclination to
sociability.  But in the case of Miss Irving she had found it
impossible to refrain from sundry kindly acts which were not included
in the terms of the contract.  Certain savoury dishes found their way
mysteriously to Miss Irving's menage, and flowers appeared in her
room as if by magic, and in various other ways the good heart and
intentions of Mrs Connor were unobtrusively expressed toward her
favourite tenant.  Joy had taken a suite of four rooms, where, with
her maid, she lived in modest comfort and complete retirement from
the social world of Beryngford, save as the close connection of the
church with Beryngford society rendered her, in the position of
organist, a participant in many of the social features of the town.
While Joy was in the midst of her preparations for departure, Mrs
Connor made her appearance with swollen eyes and red, blistered face.

"And it's the talk of that ould witch of a Baroness, may the divil
run away with her, that is drivin' ye away, is it?" she cried
excitedly; "and it's not Mrs Connor as will consist to the daughter
of your mother, God rest her soul, lavin' my house like this.  To
think that I should have had ye here all these years, and never known
ye to be her child till now, and now to see ye driven away by the
divil's own!  But if it's the fear of not being able to pay the rint
because ye've lost your position, ye needn't lave for many a long day
to come.  It's Mrs Connor would only be as happy as the queen herself
to work her hands to the bone for ye, remembering your darlint of a
mother, and not belavin' one word against her, nor ye."

So soon as Joy could gain possession of her surprised senses, she
calmed the weeping woman and began to question her.

"My good woman," she said, "what are you talking about?  Did you ever
know my mother, and where did you know her?"

"In the Palace, to be sure, as they called the house of that imp of
Satan, the Baroness.  I was the wash-lady there, for it's not Mrs
Conner the landlady as is above spakin' of the days when she wasn't
as high in the world as she is now; and many is the cheerin' cup of
coffee or tay from your own mother's hand, that I've had in the
forenoon, to chirk me up and put me through my washing, bless her
sweet face; and niver have I forgotten her; and niver have I ceased
to miss her and the fine young man that took such an interest in her
and that I'm as sure loved her, in spite of his marrying the Judge's
spook of a daughter, as I am that the Holy Virgin loves us all; and
it's a foine man that your father must have been, but young Mr Cheney
was foiner."

So little by little Joy drew the story from Mrs Connor and learned
the name of the mysterious father, so carefully guarded from her in
Mrs Irving's manuscript, the father at whose funeral services she had
so recently officiated as organist.

And strangest and most startling of all, she learned that Arthur
Stuart's insane wife was her half-sister.

Added to all this, Joy was made aware of the nature of the reports
which the Baroness had been circulating about her; and her feeling of
bitter resentment and anger toward the church committee was modified
by the knowledge that it was not owing to the shadow on her birth,
but to the false report of her own evil life, that she had been asked
to resign.

After Mrs Connor had gone, Joy was for a long time in meditation, and
then turned in a mechanical manner to her delayed task.  Her book of
"Impressions" lay on a table close at hand.

And as she took it up the leaves opened to the sentence she had
written three years before, after her talk with the rector about
Marah Adams.


"It seems to me I could not love a man who did not seek to lead me
higher; the moment he stood below me and asked me to descend, I
should realise he was to be pitied, not adored!"


She shut the book and fell on her knees in prayer; and as she prayed
a strange thing happened.  The room filled with a peculiar mist, like
the smoke which is illuminated by the brilliant rays of the morning
sun; and in the midst of it a small square of intense rose-coloured
light was visible.  This square grew larger and larger, until it
assumed the size and form of a man, whose face shone with immortal
glory.  He smiled and laid his hand on Joy's head.  "Child, awake,"
he said, and with these words vast worlds dawned upon the girl's
sight.  She stood above and apart from her grosser body, untrammelled
and free; she saw long vistas of lives in the past through which she
had come to the present; she saw long vistas of lives in the future
through which she must pass to gain the experience which would lead
her back to God.  An ineffable peace and serenity enveloped her.  The
divine Presence seemed to irradiate the place in which she stood--she
felt herself illuminated, transfigured, sanctified by the holy flame
within her.

When she came back to the kneeling form by the couch, and rose to her
feet, all the aspect of life had changed for her.



CHAPTER XXI



Joy Irving had unpacked her trunks and set her small apartment to
rights, when the postman's ring sounded, and a moment later a letter
was slipped under her door.

She picked it up, and recognised Arthur Stuart's penmanship.  She sat
down, holding the unopened letter in her hands.

"It is Arthur's message, appointing a time and place for our
meeting," she said to herself.  "How long ago that strange interview
with him seems!--yet it was only yesterday.  How utterly the whole of
life has changed for me since then!  The universe seems larger, God
nearer, and life grander.  I am as one who slept and dreamed of
darkness and sorrow, and awakes to light and joy."

But when she opened the envelope and read the few hastily written
lines within, an exclamation of surprise escaped her lips.  It was a
brief note from Arthur Stuart and began abruptly without an address
(a manner more suggestive of strong passion than any endearing
words).


"The first item which my eye fell upon in the telegraphic column of
the morning paper, was the death of my wife in the Retreat for the
Insane.  I leave by the first express to bring her body here for
burial.

"A merciful providence has saved us the necessity of defying the laws
of God or man, and opened the way for me to claim you before all the
world as my worshipped wife so soon as propriety will permit.

"I shall see you at any hour you may indicate after to-morrow, for a
brief interview.

"ARTHUR EMERSON STUART."


Joy held the letter in her hand a long time, lost in profound
reflection.  Then she sat down to her desk and wrote three letters;
one was to Mrs Lawrence; one to the chairman of the church committee,
who had requested her resignation; the third was to Mr Stuart, and
read thus:


"My Dear Mr Stuart,--Many strange things have occurred to me since I
saw you.  I have learned the name of my father, and this knowledge
reveals the fact to me that your unfortunate wife was my half-sister.
I have learned, too, that the loss of my position here as organist is
not due to the narrow prejudice of the committee regarding the shadow
on my birth, but to malicious stories put in circulation by Mrs
Lawrence, relating to me.

"Infamous and libellous tales regarding my life have been told, and
must be refuted.  I have written to Mrs Lawrence demanding a letter
from her, clearing my personal character, or giving her the
alternative of appearing in court to answer the charge of defamation
of character.  I have also written to the church committee requesting
them to meet me here in my apartments to-morrow, and explain their
demand for my resignation.

"I now write to you my last letter and my farewell.

"In the overwrought and desperate mood in which you found me, it did
not seem a sin for me to go away with the man who loved me and whom I
loved, before false ideas of life and false ideas of duty made him
the husband of another.  Conscious that your wife was a hopeless
lunatic whose present or future could in no way be influenced by our
actions, I reasoned that we wronged no one in taking the happiness so
long denied us.

"The last three years of my life have been full of desolation and
sorrow.  From the day my mother died, the stars of light which had
gemmed the firmament for me, seemed one by one to be obliterated,
until I stood in utter darkness.  You found me in the very blackest
hour of all--and you seemed a shining sun to me.

"Yet so soon as my tired brain and sorrow-worn heart were able to
think and reason, I realised that it was not the man I had worshipped
as an ideal, who had come to me and asked me to lower my standard of
womanhood.  It was another and less worthy man--and this other was to
be my companion through time, and perhaps eternity.  When I learned
that your insane wife was my sister, and that knowing this fact you
yet planned our flight, an indescribable feeling of repulsion awoke
in my heart.

"I confess that this arose more from a sentiment than a principle.
The relationship of your wife to me made the contemplated sin no
greater, but rendered it more tasteless.

"Had I gone away with you as I consented to do, the world would have
said, she but follows her fatal inheritance--like mother like
daughter.  There were some bitter rebellious hours, when that thought
came to me.  But to-day light has shone upon me, and I know there is
a law of Divine Heredity which is greater and more powerful than any
tendency we derive from parents or grandparents.  I have believed
much in creeds all my life; and in the hour of great trials I found I
was leaning on broken reeds.  I have now ceased to look to men or
books for truth--I have found it in my own soul.  I acknowledge no
unfortunate tendencies from any earthly inheritance; centuries of
sinful or weak ancestors are as nothing beside the God within.  The
divine and immortal ME is older than my ancestral tree; it is as old
as the universe.  It is as old as the first great Cause of which it
is a part.  Strong with this consciousness, I am prepared to meet the
world alone, and unafraid from this day onward.  When I think of the
optimistic temperament, the good brain, and the vigorous body which
were naturally mine, and then of the wretched being who was my
legitimate sister, I know that I was rightly generated, however
unfortunately born, just as she was wrongly generated though legally
born.

"My father, I am told, married into a family whose crest is traced
back to the tenth century.  I carry a coat-of-arms older yet--the
Cross; it dates back eighteen hundred years--yes, many thousand
years, and so I feel myself the nobler of the two.  Had you been more
of a disciple of Christ, and less of a disciple of man, you would
have realised this truth long ago, as I realise it to-day.  No man
should dare stand before his fellows as a revealer of divine
knowledge until he has penetrated the inmost recesses of his own
soul, and found God's holy image there; and until he can show others
the way to the same wonderful discovery.  The God you worshipped was
far away in the heavens, so far that he could not come to you and
save you from your baser self in the hour of temptation.  But the
true God has been miraculously revealed to me.  He dwells within; one
who has found Him, will never debase His temple.

"Though there is no legal obstacle now in the path to our union,
there is a spiritual one which is insurmountable.  I NO LONGER LOVE
YOU.  I am sorry for you, but that is all.  You belonged to my
yesterday--you can have no part in my to-day.  The man who tempted me
in my weak hour to go lower, could not help me to go higher.  And my
face is set toward the heights.

"I must prove to that world that a child born under the shadow of
shame, and of two weak, uncontrolled parents, can be virtuous,
strong, brave and sensible.  That she can conquer passion and
impulse, by the use of her divine inheritance of will; and that she
can compel the respect of the public by her discreet life and lofty
ideals.

"I shall stay in this place until I have vindicated my name and
character from every aspersion cast upon them.  I shall retain my
position of organist, and retain it until I have accumulated
sufficient means to go abroad and prepare myself for the musical
career in which I know I can excel.  I am young, strong and
ambitious.  My unusual sorrows will give me greater power of
character if I accept them as spiritual tonics--bitter but
strengthening.

"Farewell, and may God be with you.

"Joy Irving."


When the rector of St Blank's returned from the Beryngford Cemetery,
where he had placed the body of his wife beside her father, he found
this letter lying on his table in the hotel.




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