VI

Some days passed before Granice could obtain a word with the District Attorney: he began to think that Allonby avoided him.

But when they were face to face Allonbys jovial countenance showed no sign of embarrassment. He waved his visitor to a chair, and leaned across his desk with the encouraging smile of a consulting physician.

Granice broke out at once: That detective you sent me the other day—

Allonby raised a deprecating hand.

—I know: it was Stell the alienist. Why did you do that, Allonby?

The others face did not lose its composure. Because I looked up your story first—and theres nothing in it.

Nothing in it? Granice furiously interposed.

Absolutely nothing. If there is, why the deuce dont you bring me proofs? I know youve been talking to Peter Ascham, and to Denver, and to that little ferret McCarren of the Explorer. Have any of them been able to make out a case for you? No. Well, what am I to do?

Granices lips began to tremble. Why did you play me that trick?

About Stell? I had to, my dear fellow: its part of my business. Stell is a detective, if you come to that—every doctor is.

The trembling of Granices lips increased, communicating itself in a long quiver to his facial muscles. He forced a laugh through his dry throat. Well—and what did he detect?

In you? Oh, he thinks its overwork—overwork and too much smoking. If you look in on him some day at his office hell show you the record of hundreds of cases like yours, and advise you what treatment to follow. Its one of the commonest forms of hallucination. Have a cigar, all the same.

But, Allonby, I killed that man!

The District Attorneys large hand, outstretched on his desk, had an almost imperceptible gesture, and a moment later, as if an answer to the call of an electric bell, a clerk looked in from the outer office.

Sorry, my dear fellow—lot of people waiting. Drop in on Stell some morning, Allonby said, shaking hands.

McCarren had to own himself beaten: there was absolutely no flaw in the alibi. And since his duty to his journal obviously forbade his wasting time on insoluble mysteries, he ceased to frequent Granice, who dropped back into a deeper isolation. For a day or two after his visit to Allonby he continued to live in dread of Dr. Stell. Why might not Allonby have deceived him as to the alienists diagnosis? What if he were really being shadowed, not by a police agent but by a mad-doctor? To have the truth out, he suddenly determined to call on Dr. Stell.

The physician received him kindly, and reverted without embarrassment to the conditions of their previous meeting. We have to do that occasionally, Mr. Granice; its one of our methods. And you had given Allonby a fright.

Granice was silent. He would have liked to reaffirm his guilt, to produce the fresh arguments which had occurred to him since his last talk with the physician; but he feared his eagerness might be taken for a symptom of derangement, and he affected to smile away Dr. Stells allusion.

You think, then, its a case of brain-fag—nothing more?

Nothing more. And I should advise you to knock off tobacco. You smoke a good deal, dont you?

He developed his treatment, recommending massage, gymnastics, travel, or any form of diversion that did not—that in short—

Granice interrupted him impatiently. Oh, I loathe all that—and Im sick of travelling.

Hm. Then some larger interest—politics, reform, philanthropy? Something to take you out of yourself.

Yes. I understand, said Granice wearily.

Above all, dont lose heart. I see hundreds of cases like yours, the doctor added cheerfully from the threshold.

On the doorstep Granice stood still and laughed. Hundreds of cases like his—the case of a man who had committed a murder, who confessed his guilt, and whom no one would believe! Why, there had never been a case like it in the world. What a good figure Stell would have made in a play: the great alienist who couldnt read a mans mind any better than that!

Granice saw huge comic opportunities in the type.

But as he walked away, his fears dispelled, the sense of listlessness returned on him. For the first time since his avowal to Peter Ascham he found himself without an occupation, and understood that he had been carried through the past weeks only by the necessity of constant action. Now his life had once more become a stagnant backwater, and as he stood on the street corner watching the tides of traffic sweep by, he asked himself despairingly how much longer he could endure to float about in the sluggish circle of his consciousness.

The thought of self-destruction recurred to him; but again his flesh recoiled. He yearned for death from other hands, but he could never take it from his own. And, aside from his insuperable physical reluctance, another motive restrained him. He was possessed by the dogged desire to establish the truth of his story. He refused to be swept aside as an irresponsible dreamer—even if he had to kill himself in the end, he would not do so before proving to society that he had deserved death from it.

He began to write long letters to the papers; but after the first had been published and commented on, public curiosity was quelled by a brief statement from the District Attorneys office, and the rest of his communications remained unprinted. Ascham came to see him, and begged him to travel. Robert Denver dropped in, and tried to joke him out of his delusion; till Granice, mistrustful of their motives, began to dread the reappearance of Dr. Stell, and set a guard on his lips. But the words he kept back engendered others and still others in his brain. His inner self became a humming factory of arguments, and he spent long hours reciting and writing down elaborate statements of his crime, which he constantly retouched and developed. Then gradually his activity languished under the lack of an audience, the sense of being buried beneath deepening drifts of indifference. In a passion of resentment he swore that he would prove himself a murderer, even if he had to commit another crime to do it; and for a sleepless night or two the thought flamed red on his darkness. But daylight dispelled it. The determining impulse was lacking and he hated too promiscuously to choose his victim... So he was thrown back on the unavailing struggle to impose the truth of his story. As fast as one channel closed on him he tried to pierce another through the sliding sands of incredulity. But every issue seemed blocked, and the whole human race leagued together to cheat one man of the right to die.

Thus viewed, the situation became so monstrous that he lost his last shred of self-restraint in contemplating it. What if he were really the victim of some mocking experiment, the centre of a ring of holiday-makers jeering at a poor creature in its blind dashes against the solid walls of consciousness? But, no—men were not so uniformly cruel: there were flaws in the close surface of their indifference, cracks of weakness and pity here and there...

Granice began to think that his mistake lay in having appealed to persons more or less familiar with his past, and to whom the visible conformities of his life seemed a final disproof of its one fierce secret deviation. The general tendency was to take for the whole of life the slit seen between the blinders of habit: and in his walk down that narrow vista Granice cut a correct enough figure. To a vision free to follow his whole orbit his story would be more intelligible: it would be easier to convince a chance idler in the street than the trained intelligence hampered by a sense of his antecedents. This idea shot up in him with the tropic luxuriance of each new seed of thought, and he began to walk the streets, and to frequent out-of-the-way chop-houses and bars in his search for the impartial stranger to whom he should disclose himself.

At first every face looked encouragement; but at the crucial moment he always held back. So much was at stake, and it was so essential that his first choice should be decisive. He dreaded stupidity, timidity, intolerance. The imaginative eye, the furrowed brow, were what he sought. He must reveal himself only to a heart versed in the tortuous motions of the human will; and he began to hate the dull benevolence of the average face. Once or twice, obscurely, allusively, he made a beginning—once sitting down at a mans side in a basement chop-house, another day approaching a lounger on an east-side wharf. But in both cases the premonition of failure checked him on the brink of avowal. His dread of being taken for a man in the clutch of a fixed idea gave him an unnatural keenness in reading the expression of his interlocutors, and he had provided himself in advance with a series of verbal alternatives, trap-doors of evasion from the first dart of ridicule or suspicion.

He passed the greater part of the day in the streets, coming home at irregular hours, dreading the silence and orderliness of his apartment, and the critical scrutiny of Flint. His real life was spent in a world so remote from this familiar setting that he sometimes had the mysterious sense of a living metempsychosis, a furtive passage from one identity to another—yet the other as unescapably himself!

One humiliation he was spared: the desire to live never revived in him. Not for a moment was he tempted to a shabby pact with existing conditions. He wanted to die, wanted it with the fixed unwavering desire which alone attains its end. And still the end eluded him! It would not always, of course—he had full faith in the dark star of his destiny. And he could prove it best by repeating his story, persistently and indefatigably, pouring it into indifferent ears, hammering it into dull brains, till at last it kindled a spark, and some one of the careless millions paused, listened, believed...

It was a mild March day, and he had been loitering on the west-side docks, looking at faces. He was becoming an expert in physiognomies: his eagerness no longer made rash darts and awkward recoils. He knew now the face he needed, as clearly as if it had come to him in a vision; and not till he found it would he speak. As he walked eastward through the shabby reeking streets he had a premonition that he should find it that morning. Perhaps it was the promise of spring in the air—certainly he felt calmer than for many days...

He turned into Washington Square, struck across it obliquely, and walked up University Place. Its heterogeneous passers always allured him—they were less hurried than in Broadway, less enclosed and classified than in Fifth Avenue. He walked slowly, watching for his face.

At Union Square he felt a sudden relapse into discouragement, like a votary who has watched too long for a sign from the altar. Perhaps, after all, he should never find his face... The air was languid, and he felt tired. He walked between the bald grass-plots and the twisted trees, making for an empty seat. Presently he passed a bench on which a girl sat alone, and something as definite as the twitch of a cord made him stop before her. He had never dreamed of telling his story to a girl, had hardly looked at the womens faces as they passed. His case was mans work: how could a woman help him? But this girls face was extraordinary—quiet and wide as a clear evening sky. It suggested a hundred images of space, distance, mystery, like ships he had seen, as a boy, quietly berthed by a familiar wharf, but with the breath of far seas and strange harbours in their shrouds... Certainly this girl would understand. He went up to her quietly, lifting his hat, observing the forms—wishing her to see at once that he was a gentleman.

I am a stranger to you, he began, sitting down beside her, but your face is so extremely intelligent that I feel... I feel it is the face Ive waited for... looked for everywhere; and I want to tell you—

The girls eyes widened: she rose to her feet. She was escaping him!

In his dismay he ran a few steps after her, and caught her roughly by the arm.

Here—wait—listen! Oh, dont scream, you fool! he shouted out.

He felt a hand on his own arm; turned and confronted a policeman. Instantly he understood that he was being arrested, and something hard within him was loosened and ran to tears.

Ah, you know—you know Im guilty!

He was conscious that a crowd was forming, and that the girls frightened face had disappeared. But what did he care about her face? It was the policeman who had really understood him. He turned and followed, the crowd at his heels...

VII

In the charming place in which he found himself there were so many sympathetic faces that he felt more than ever convinced of the certainty of making himself heard.

It was a bad blow, at first, to find that he had not been arrested for murder; but Ascham, who had come to him at once, explained that he needed rest, and the time to review his statements; it appeared that reiteration had made them a little confused and contradictory. To this end he had willingly acquiesced in his removal to a large quiet establishment, with an open space and trees about it, where he had found a number of intelligent companions, some, like himself, engaged in preparing or reviewing statements of their cases, and others ready to lend an interested ear to his own recital.

For a time he was content to let himself go on the tranquil current of this existence; but although his auditors gave him for the most part an encouraging attention, which, in some, went the length of really brilliant and helpful suggestion, he gradually felt a recurrence of his old doubts. Either his hearers were not sincere, or else they had less power to aid him than they boasted. His interminable conferences resulted in nothing, and as the benefit of the long rest made itself felt, it produced an increased mental lucidity which rendered inaction more and more unbearable. At length he discovered that on certain days visitors from the outer world were admitted to his retreat; and he wrote out long and logically constructed relations of his crime, and furtively slipped them into the hands of these messengers of hope.

This occupation gave him a fresh lease of patience, and he now lived only to watch for the visitors days, and scan the faces that swept by him like stars seen and lost in the rifts of a hurrying sky.

Mostly, these faces were strange and less intelligent than those of his companions. But they represented his last means of access to the world, a kind of subterranean channel on which he could set his statements afloat, like paper boats which the mysterious current might sweep out into the open seas of life.

One day, however, his attention was arrested by a familiar contour, a pair of bright prominent eyes, and a chin insufficiently shaved. He sprang up and stood in the path of Peter McCarren.

The journalist looked at him doubtfully, then held out his hand with a startled deprecating, Why—?

You didnt know me? Im so changed? Granice faltered, feeling the rebound of the others wonder.

Why, no; but youre looking quieter—smoothed out, McCarren smiled.

Yes: thats what Im here for—to rest. And Ive taken the opportunity to write out a clearer statement—

Granices hand shook so that he could hardly draw the folded paper from his pocket. As he did so he noticed that the reporter was accompanied by a tall man with grave compassionate eyes. It came to Granice in a wild thrill of conviction that this was the face he had waited for...

Perhaps your friend—he is your friend?—would glance over it—or I could put the case in a few words if you have time? Granices voice shook like his hand. If this chance escaped him he felt that his last hope was gone. McCarren and the stranger looked at each other, and the former glanced at his watch.

Im sorry we cant stay and talk it over now, Mr. Granice; but my friend has an engagement, and were rather pressed—

Granice continued to proffer the paper. Im sorry—I think I could have explained. But youll take this, at any rate?

The stranger looked at him gently. Certainly—Ill take it. He had his hand out. Good-bye.

Good-bye, Granice echoed.

He stood watching the two men move away from him through the long light hall; and as he watched them a tear ran down his face. But as soon as they were out of sight he turned and walked hastily toward his room, beginning to hope again, already planning a new statement.

Outside the building the two men stood still, and the journalists companion looked up curiously at the long monotonous rows of barred windows.

So that was Granice?

Yes—that was Granice, poor devil, said McCarren.

Strange case! I suppose theres never been one just like it? Hes still absolutely convinced that he committed that murder?

Absolutely. Yes.

The stranger reflected. And there was no conceivable ground for the idea? No one could make out how it started? A quiet conventional sort of fellow like that—where do you suppose he got such a delusion? Did you ever get the least clue to it?

McCarren stood still, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked up in contemplation of the barred windows. Then he turned his bright hard gaze on his companion.

That was the queer part of it. Ive never spoken of it—but I did get a clue.

By Jove! Thats interesting. What was it?

McCarren formed his red lips into a whistle. Why—that it wasnt a delusion.

He produced his effect—the other turned on him with a pallid stare.

He murdered the man all right. I tumbled on the truth by the merest accident, when Id pretty nearly chucked the whole job.

He murdered him—murdered his cousin?

Sure as you live. Only dont split on me. Its about the queerest business I ever ran into... Do about it? Why, what was I to do? I couldnt hang the poor devil, could I? Lord, but I was glad when they collared him, and had him stowed away safe in there!

The tall man listened with a grave face, grasping Granices statement in his hand.

Here—take this; it makes me sick, he said abruptly, thrusting the paper at the reporter; and the two men turned and walked in silence to the gates.

The End

THE DILETTANTE

As first published in Harpers Monthly, December 1903

It was on an impulse hardly needing the arguments he found himself advancing in its favor, that Thursdale, on his way to the club, turned as usual into Mrs. Vervains street.

The as usual was his own qualification of the act; a convenient way of bridging the interval—in days and other sequences—that lay between this visit and the last. It was characteristic of him that he instinctively excluded his call two days earlier, with Ruth Gaynor, from the list of his visits to Mrs. Vervain: the special conditions attending it had made it no more like a visit to Mrs. Vervain than an engraved dinner invitation is like a personal letter. Yet it was to talk over his call with Miss Gaynor that he was now returning to the scene of that episode; and it was because Mrs. Vervain could be trusted to handle the talking over as skilfully as the interview itself that, at her corner, he had felt the dilettantes irresistible craving to take a last look at a work of art that was passing out of his possession.

On the whole, he knew no one better fitted to deal with the unexpected than Mrs. Vervain. She excelled in the rare art of taking things for granted, and Thursdale felt a pardonable pride in the thought that she owed her excellence to his training. Early in his career Thursdale had made the mistake, at the outset of his acquaintance with a lady, of telling her that he loved her and exacting the same avowal in return. The latter part of that episode had been like the long walk back from a picnic, when one has to carry all the crockery one has finished using: it was the last time Thursdale ever allowed himself to be encumbered with the debris of a feast. He thus incidentally learned that the privilege of loving her is one of the least favors that a charming woman can accord; and in seeking to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment he had developed a science of evasion in which the woman of the moment became a mere implement of the game. He owed a great deal of delicate enjoyment to the cultivation of this art. The perils from which it had been his refuge became naively harmless: was it possible that he who now took his easy way along the levels had once preferred to gasp on the raw heights of emotion? Youth is a high-colored season; but he had the satisfaction of feeling that he had entered earlier than most into that chiaroscuro of sensation where every half-tone has its value.

As a promoter of this pleasure no one he had known was comparable to Mrs. Vervain. He had taught a good many women not to betray their feelings, but he had never before had such fine material to work in. She had been surprisingly crude when he first knew her; capable of making the most awkward inferences, of plunging through thin ice, of recklessly undressing her emotions; but she had acquired, under the discipline of his reticences and evasions, a skill almost equal to his own, and perhaps more remarkable in that it involved keeping time with any tune he played and reading at sight some uncommonly difficult passages.

It had taken Thursdale seven years to form this fine talent; but the result justified the effort. At the crucial moment she had been perfect: her way of greeting Miss Gaynor had made him regret that he had announced his engagement by letter. It was an evasion that confessed a difficulty; a deviation implying an obstacle, where, by common consent, it was agreed to see none; it betrayed, in short, a lack of confidence in the completeness of his method. It had been his pride never to put himself in a position which had to be quitted, as it were, by the back door; but here, as he perceived, the main portals would have opened for him of their own accord. All this, and much more, he read in the finished naturalness with which Mrs. Vervain had met Miss Gaynor. He had never seen a better piece of work: there was no over-eagerness, no suspicious warmth, above all (and this gave her art the grace of a natural quality) there were none of those damnable implications whereby a woman, in welcoming her friends betrothed, may keep him on pins and needles while she laps the lady in complacency. So masterly a performance, indeed, hardly needed the offset of Miss Gaynors door-step words—To be so kind to me, how she must have liked you!—though he caught himself wishing it lay within the bounds of fitness to transmit them, as a final tribute, to the one woman he knew who was unfailingly certain to enjoy a good thing. It was perhaps the one drawback to his new situation that it might develop good things which it would be impossible to hand on to Margaret Vervain.

The fact that he had made the mistake of underrating his friends powers, the consciousness that his writing must have betrayed his distrust of her efficiency, seemed an added reason for turning down her street instead of going on to the club. He would show her that he knew how to value her; he would ask her to achieve with him a feat infinitely rarer and more delicate than the one he had appeared to avoid. Incidentally, he would also dispose of the interval of time before dinner: ever since he had seen Miss Gaynor off, an hour earlier, on her return journey to Buffalo, he had been wondering how he should put in the rest of the afternoon. It was absurd, how he missed the girl.... Yes, that was it; the desire to talk about her was, after all, at the bottom of his impulse to call on Mrs. Vervain! It was absurd, if you like—but it was delightfully rejuvenating. He could recall the time when he had been afraid of being obvious: now he felt that this return to the primitive emotions might be as restorative as a holiday in the Canadian woods. And it was precisely by the girls candor, her directness, her lack of complications, that he was taken. The sense that she might say something rash at any moment was positively exhilarating: if she had thrown her arms about him at the station he would not have given a thought to his crumpled dignity. It surprised Thursdale to find what freshness of heart he brought to the adventure; and though his sense of irony prevented his ascribing his intactness to any conscious purpose, he could but rejoice in the fact that his sentimental economies had left him such a large surplus to draw upon.

Mrs. Vervain was at home—as usual. When one visits the cemetery one expects to find the angel on the tombstone, and it struck Thursdale as another proof of his friends good taste that she had been in no undue haste to change her habits. The whole house appeared to count on his coming; the footman took his hat and overcoat as naturally as though there had been no lapse in his visits; and the drawing-room at once enveloped him in that atmosphere of tacit intelligence which Mrs. Vervain imparted to her very furniture.

It was a surprise that, in this general harmony of circumstances, Mrs. Vervain should herself sound the first false note.

You? she exclaimed; and the book she held slipped from her hand.

It was crude, certainly; unless it were a touch of the finest art. The difficulty of classifying it disturbed Thursdales balance.

Why not? he said, restoring the book. Isnt it my hour? And as she made no answer, he added gently, Unless its some one elses?

She laid the book aside and sank back into her chair. Mine, merely, she said.

I hope that doesnt mean that youre unwilling to share it?

With you? By no means. Youre welcome to my last crust.

He looked at her reproachfully. Do you call this the last?

She smiled as he dropped into the seat across the hearth. Its a way of giving it more flavor!

He returned the smile. A visit to you doesnt need such condiments.

She took this with just the right measure of retrospective amusement.

Ah, but I want to put into this one a very special taste, she confessed.

Her smile was so confident, so reassuring, that it lulled him into the imprudence of saying, Why should you want it to be different from what was always so perfectly right?

She hesitated. Doesnt the fact that its the last constitute a difference?

The last—my last visit to you?

Oh, metaphorically, I mean—theres a break in the continuity.

Decidedly, she was pressing too hard: unlearning his arts already!

I dont recognize it, he said. Unless you make me— he added, with a note that slightly stirred her attitude of languid attention.

She turned to him with grave eyes. You recognize no difference whatever?

None—except an added link in the chain.

An added link?

In having one more thing to like you for—your letting Miss Gaynor see why I had already so many. He flattered himself that this turn had taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase.

Mrs. Vervain sank into her former easy pose. Was it that you came for? she asked, almost gaily.

If it is necessary to have a reason—that was one.

To talk to me about Miss Gaynor?

To tell you how she talks about you.

That will be very interesting—especially if you have seen her since her second visit to me.

Her second visit? Thursdale pushed his chair back with a start and moved to another. She came to see you again?

This morning, yes—by appointment.

He continued to look at her blankly. You sent for her?

I didnt have to—she wrote and asked me last night. But no doubt you have seen her since.

Thursdale sat silent. He was trying to separate his words from his thoughts, but they still clung together inextricably. I saw her off just now at the station.

And she didnt tell you that she had been here again?

There was hardly time, I suppose—there were people about— he floundered.

Ah, shell write, then.

He regained his composure. Of course shell write: very often, I hope. You know Im absurdly in love, he cried audaciously.

She tilted her head back, looking up at him as he leaned against the chimney-piece. He had leaned there so often that the attitude touched a pulse which set up a throbbing in her throat. Oh, my poor Thursdale! she murmured.

I suppose its rather ridiculous, he owned; and as she remained silent, he added, with a sudden break—Or have you another reason for pitying me?

Her answer was another question. Have you been back to your rooms since you left her?

Since I left her at the station? I came straight here.

Ah, yes—you could: there was no reason— Her words passed into a silent musing.

Thursdale moved nervously nearer. You said you had something to tell me?

Perhaps I had better let her do so. There may be a letter at your rooms.

A letter? What do you mean? A letter from her? What has happened?

His paleness shook her, and she raised a hand of reassurance. Nothing has happened—perhaps that is just the worst of it. You always hated, you know, she added incoherently, to have things happen: you never would let them.

And now—?

Well, that was what she came here for: I supposed you had guessed. To know if anything had happened.

Had happened? He gazed at her slowly. Between you and me? he said with a rush of light.

The words were so much cruder than any that had ever passed between them that the color rose to her face; but she held his startled gaze.

You know girls are not quite as unsophisticated as they used to be. Are you surprised that such an idea should occur to her?

His own color answered hers: it was the only reply that came to him.

Mrs. Vervain went on, smoothly: I supposed it might have struck you that there were times when we presented that appearance.

He made an impatient gesture. A mans past is his own!

Perhaps—it certainly never belongs to the woman who has shared it. But one learns such truths only by experience; and Miss Gaynor is naturally inexperienced.

Of course—but—supposing her act a natural one— he floundered lamentably among his innuendoes—I still dont see—how there was anything—

Anything to take hold of? There wasnt—

Well, then—? escaped him, in crude satisfaction; but as she did not complete the sentence he went on with a faltering laugh: She can hardly object to the existence of a mere friendship between us!

But she does, said Mrs. Vervain.

Thursdale stood perplexed. He had seen, on the previous day, no trace of jealousy or resentment in his betrothed: he could still hear the candid ring of the girls praise of Mrs. Vervain. If she were such an abyss of insincerity as to dissemble distrust under such frankness, she must at least be more subtle than to bring her doubts to her rival for solution. The situation seemed one through which one could no longer move in a penumbra, and he let in a burst of light with the direct query: Wont you explain what you mean?

Mrs. Vervain sat silent, not provokingly, as though to prolong his distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her, it was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It was the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything; and she had lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not wanted, that she seemed unable to produce one on the spot.

At last she said slowly: She came to find out if you were really free.

Thursdale colored again. Free? he stammered, with a sense of physical disgust at contact with such crassness.

Yes—if I had quite done with you. She smiled in recovered security. It seems she likes clear outlines; she has a passion for definitions.

Yes—well? he said, wincing at the echo of his own subtlety.

Well—and when I told her that you had never belonged to me, she wanted me to define my status—to know exactly where I had stood all along.

Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the clue. And even when you had told her that—

Even when I had told her that I had had no status—that I had never stood anywhere, in any sense she meant, said Mrs. Vervain, slowly—even then she wasnt satisfied, it seems.

He uttered an uneasy exclamation. She didnt believe you, you mean?

I mean that she did believe me: too thoroughly.

Well, then—in Gods name, what did she want?

Something more—those were the words she used.

Something more? Between—between you and me? Is it a conundrum? He laughed awkwardly.

Girls are not what they were in my day; they are no longer forbidden to contemplate the relation of the sexes.

So it seems! he commented. But since, in this case, there wasnt any— he broke off, catching the dawn of a revelation in her gaze.

Thats just it. The unpardonable offence has been—in our not offending.

He flung himself down despairingly. I give it up!—What did you tell her? he burst out with sudden crudeness.

The exact truth. If I had only known, she broke off with a beseeching tenderness, wont you believe that I would still have lied for you?

Lied for me? Why on earth should you have lied for either of us?

To save you—to hide you from her to the last! As Ive hidden you from myself all these years! She stood up with a sudden tragic import in her movement. You believe me capable of that, dont you? If I had only guessed—but I have never known a girl like her; she had the truth out of me with a spring.

The truth that you and I had never—

Had never—never in all these years! Oh, she knew why—she measured us both in a flash. She didnt suspect me of having haggled with you—her words pelted me like hail. He just took what he wanted—sifted and sorted you to suit his taste. Burnt out the gold and left a heap of cinders. And you let him—you let yourself be cut in bits—she mixed her metaphors a little—be cut in bits, and used or discarded, while all the while every drop of blood in you belonged to him! But hes Shylock—and you have bled to death of the pound of flesh he has cut out of you. But she despises me the most, you know—far the most— Mrs. Vervain ended.

The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room: they seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind of intimacy on which at any moment, a visitor might intrude without perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though a grand opera-singer had strained the acoustics of a private music-room.

Thursdale stood up, facing his hostess. Half the room was between them, but they seemed to stare close at each other now that the veils of reticence and ambiguity had fallen.

His first words were characteristic. She does despise me, then? he exclaimed.

She thinks the pound of flesh you took was a little too near the heart.

He was excessively pale. Please tell me exactly what she said of me.

She did not speak much of you: she is proud. But I gather that while she understands love or indifference, her eyes have never been opened to the many intermediate shades of feeling. At any rate, she expressed an unwillingness to be taken with reservations—she thinks you would have loved her better if you had loved some one else first. The point of view is original—she insists on a man with a past!

Oh, a past—if shes serious—I could rake up a past! he said with a laugh.

So I suggested: but she has her eyes on this particular portion of it. She insists on making it a test case. She wanted to know what you had done to me; and before I could guess her drift I blundered into telling her.

Thursdale drew a difficult breath. I never supposed—your revenge is complete, he said slowly.

He heard a little gasp in her throat. My revenge? When I sent for you to warn you—to save you from being surprised as I was surprised?

Youre very good—but its rather late to talk of saving me. He held out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave-taking.

How you must care!—for I never saw you so dull, was her answer. Dont you see that its not too late for me to help you? And as he continued to stare, she brought out sublimely: Take the rest—in imagination! Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell her I lied to her—shes too ready to believe it! And so, after all, in a sense, I shant have been wasted.

His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the look back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this contact of naked souls.

It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He went up to his friend and took her hand.

You would do it—you would do it!

She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.

Good-by, he said, kissing it.

Good-by? You are going—?

To get my letter.

Your letter? The letter wont matter, if you will only do what I ask.

He returned her gaze. I might, I suppose, without being out of character. Only, dont you see that if your plan helped me it could only harm her?

Harm her?

To sacrifice you wouldnt make me different. I shall go on being what I have always been—sifting and sorting, as she calls it. Do you want my punishment to fall on her?

She looked at him long and deeply. Ah, if I had to choose between you—!

You would let her take her chance? But I cant, you see. I must take my punishment alone.

She drew her hand away, sighing. Oh, there will be no punishment for either of you.

For either of us? There will be the reading of her letter for me.

She shook her head with a slight laugh. There will be no letter.

Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his look. No letter? You dont mean—

I mean that shes been with you since I saw her—shes seen you and heard your voice. If there is a letter, she has recalled it—from the first station, by telegraph.

He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile. But in the mean while I shall have read it, he said.

The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful emptiness of the room.

The End

THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD HAND

As first published in Atlantic Monthly, August 1904

I

Above all, the letter ended, dont leave Siena without seeing Doctor Lombards Leonardo. Lombard is a queer old Englishman, a mystic or a madman (if the two are not synonymous), and a devout student of the Italian Renaissance. He has lived for years in Italy, exploring its remotest corners, and has lately picked up an undoubted Leonardo, which came to light in a farmhouse near Bergamo. It is believed to be one of the missing pictures mentioned by Vasari, and is at any rate, according to the most competent authorities, a genuine and almost untouched example of the best period.

Lombard is a queer stick, and jealous of showing his treasures; but we struck up a friendship when I was working on the Sodomas in Siena three years ago, and if you will give him the enclosed line you may get a peep at the Leonardo. Probably not more than a peep, though, for I hear he refuses to have it reproduced. I want badly to use it in my monograph on the Windsor drawings, so please see what you can do for me, and if you cant persuade him to let you take a photograph or make a sketch, at least jot down a detailed description of the picture and get from him all the facts you can. I hear that the French and Italian governments have offered him a large advance on his purchase, but that he refuses to sell at any price, though he certainly cant afford such luxuries; in fact, I dont see where he got enough money to buy the picture. He lives in the Via Papa Giulio.

Wyant sat at the table dhote of his hotel, re-reading his friends letter over a late luncheon. He had been five days in Siena without having found time to call on Doctor Lombard; not from any indifference to the opportunity presented, but because it was his first visit to the strange red city and he was still under the spell of its more conspicuous wonders—the brick palaces flinging out their wrought-iron torch-holders with a gesture of arrogant suzerainty; the great council-chamber emblazoned with civic allegories; the pageant of Pope Julius on the Library walls; the Sodomas smiling balefully through the dusk of mouldering chapels—and it was only when his first hunger was appeased that he remembered that one course in the banquet was still untasted.

He put the letter in his pocket and turned to leave the room, with a nod to its only other occupant, an olive-skinned young man with lustrous eyes and a low collar, who sat on the other side of the table, perusing the Fanfulla di Domenica. This gentleman, his daily vis-a-vis, returned the nod with a Latin eloquence of gesture, and Wyant passed on to the ante-chamber, where he paused to light a cigarette. He was just restoring the case to his pocket when he heard a hurried step behind him, and the lustrous-eyed young man advanced through the glass doors of the dining-room.

Pardon me, sir, he said in measured English, and with an intonation of exquisite politeness; you have let this letter fall.

Wyant, recognizing his friends note of introduction to Doctor Lombard, took it with a word of thanks, and was about to turn away when he perceived that the eyes of his fellow diner remained fixed on him with a gaze of melancholy interrogation.

Again pardon me, the young man at length ventured, but are you by chance the friend of the illustrious Doctor Lombard?

No, returned Wyant, with the instinctive Anglo-Saxon distrust of foreign advances. Then, fearing to appear rude, he said with a guarded politeness: Perhaps, by the way, you can tell me the number of his house. I see it is not given here.

The young man brightened perceptibly. The number of the house is thirteen; but any one can indicate it to you—it is well known in Siena. It is called, he continued after a moment, the House of the Dead Hand.

Wyant stared. What a queer name! he said.

The name comes from an antique hand of marble which for many hundred years has been above the door.

Wyant was turning away with a gesture of thanks, when the other added: If you would have the kindness to ring twice.

To ring twice?

At the doctors. The young man smiled. It is the custom.

It was a dazzling March afternoon, with a shower of sun from the mid-blue, and a marshalling of slaty clouds behind the umber-colored hills. For nearly an hour Wyant loitered on the Lizza, watching the shadows race across the naked landscape and the thunder blacken in the west; then he decided to set out for the House of the Dead Hand. The map in his guidebook showed him that the Via Papa Giulio was one of the streets which radiate from the Piazza, and thither he bent his course, pausing at every other step to fill his eye with some fresh image of weather-beaten beauty. The clouds had rolled upward, obscuring the sunshine and hanging like a funereal baldachin above the projecting cornices of Doctor Lombards street, and Wyant walked for some distance in the shade of the beetling palace fronts before his eye fell on a doorway surmounted by a sallow marble hand. He stood for a moment staring up at the strange emblem. The hand was a womans—a dead drooping hand, which hung there convulsed and helpless, as though it had been thrust forth in denunciation of some evil mystery within the house, and had sunk struggling into death.

A girl who was drawing water from the well in the court said that the English doctor lived on the first floor, and Wyant, passing through a glazed door, mounted the damp degrees of a vaulted stairway with a plaster Ćsculapius mouldering in a niche on the landing. Facing the Ćsculapius was another door, and as Wyant put his hand on the bell-rope he remembered his unknown friends injunction, and rang twice.

His ring was answered by a peasant woman with a low forehead and small close-set eyes, who, after a prolonged scrutiny of himself, his card, and his letter of introduction, left him standing in a high, cold ante-chamber floored with brick. He heard her wooden pattens click down an interminable corridor, and after some delay she returned and told him to follow her.

They passed through a long saloon, bare as the ante-chamber, but loftily vaulted, and frescoed with a seventeenth-century Triumph of Scipio or Alexander—martial figures following Wyant with the filmed melancholy gaze of shades in limbo. At the end of this apartment he was admitted to a smaller room, with the same atmosphere of mortal cold, but showing more obvious signs of occupancy. The walls were covered with tapestry which had faded to the gray-brown tints of decaying vegetation, so that the young man felt as though he were entering a sunless autumn wood. Against these hangings stood a few tall cabinets on heavy gilt feet, and at a table in the window three persons were seated: an elderly lady who was warming her hands over a brazier, a girl bent above a strip of needle-work, and an old man.

As the latter advanced toward Wyant, the young man was conscious of staring with unseemly intentness at his small round-backed figure, dressed with shabby disorder and surmounted by a wonderful head, lean, vulpine, eagle-beaked as that of some art-loving despot of the Renaissance: a head combining the venerable hair and large prominent eyes of the humanist with the greedy profile of the adventurer. Wyant, in musing on the Italian portrait-medals of the fifteenth century, had often fancied that only in that period of fierce individualism could types so paradoxical have been produced; yet the subtle craftsmen who committed them to the bronze had never drawn a face more strangely stamped with contradictory passions than that of Doctor Lombard.

I am glad to see you, he said to Wyant, extending a hand which seemed a mere framework held together by knotted veins. We lead a quiet life here and receive few visitors, but any friend of Professor Clydes is welcome. Then, with a gesture which included the two women, he added dryly: My wife and daughter often talk of Professor Clyde.

Oh yes—he used to make me such nice toast; they dont understand toast in Italy, said Mrs. Lombard in a high plaintive voice.

It would have been difficult, from Doctor Lombards manner and appearance to guess his nationality; but his wife was so inconsciently and ineradicably English that even the silhouette of her cap seemed a protest against Continental laxities. She was a stout fair woman, with pale cheeks netted with red lines. A brooch with a miniature portrait sustained a bogwood watch-chain upon her bosom, and at her elbow lay a heap of knitting and an old copy of The Queen.

The young girl, who had remained standing, was a slim replica of her mother, with an apple-cheeked face and opaque blue eyes. Her small head was prodigally laden with braids of dull fair hair, and she might have had a kind of transient prettiness but for the sullen droop of her round mouth. It was hard to say whether her expression implied ill-temper or apathy; but Wyant was struck by the contrast between the fierce vitality of the doctors age and the inanimateness of his daughters youth.

Seating himself in the chair which his host advanced, the young man tried to open the conversation by addressing to Mrs. Lombard some random remark on the beauties of Siena. The lady murmured a resigned assent, and Doctor Lombard interposed with a smile: My dear sir, my wife considers Siena a most salubrious spot, and is favorably impressed by the cheapness of the marketing; but she deplores the total absence of muffins and cannel coal, and cannot resign herself to the Italian method of dusting furniture.

But they dont, you know—they dont dust it! Mrs. Lombard protested, without showing any resentment of her husbands manner.

Precisely—they dont dust it. Since we have lived in Siena we have not once seen the cobwebs removed from the battlements of the Mangia. Can you conceive of such housekeeping? My wife has never yet dared to write it home to her aunts at Bonchurch.

Mrs. Lombard accepted in silence this remarkable statement of her views, and her husband, with a malicious smile at Wyants embarrassment, planted himself suddenly before the young man.

And now, said he, do you want to see my Leonardo?

Do I? cried Wyant, on his feet in a flash.

The doctor chuckled. Ah, he said, with a kind of crooning deliberation, thats the way they all behave—thats what they all come for. He turned to his daughter with another variation of mockery in his smile. Dont fancy its for your beaux yeux, my dear; or for the mature charms of Mrs. Lombard, he added, glaring suddenly at his wife, who had taken up her knitting and was softly murmuring over the number of her stitches.

Neither lady appeared to notice his pleasantries, and he continued, addressing himself to Wyant: They all come—they all come; but many are called and few are chosen. His voice sank to solemnity. While I live, he said, no unworthy eye shall desecrate that picture. But I will not do my friend Clyde the injustice to suppose that he would send an unworthy representative. He tells me he wishes a description of the picture for his book; and you shall describe it to him—if you can.

Wyant hesitated, not knowing whether it was a propitious moment to put in his appeal for a photograph.

Well, sir, he said, you know Clyde wants me to take away all I can of it.

Doctor Lombard eyed him sardonically. Youre welcome to take away all you can carry, he replied; adding, as he turned to his daughter: That is, if he has your permission, Sybilla.

The girl rose without a word, and laying aside her work, took a key from a secret drawer in one of the cabinets, while the doctor continued in the same note of grim jocularity: For you must know that the picture is not mine—it is my daughters.

He followed with evident amusement the surprised glance which Wyant turned on the young girls impassive figure.

Sybilla, he pursued, is a votary of the arts; she has inherited her fond fathers passion for the unattainable. Luckily, however, she also recently inherited a tidy legacy from her grandmother; and having seen the Leonardo, on which its discoverer had placed a price far beyond my reach, she took a step which deserves to go down to history: she invested her whole inheritance in the purchase of the picture, thus enabling me to spend my closing years in communion with one of the worlds masterpieces. My dear sir, could Antigone do more?

The object of this strange eulogy had meanwhile drawn aside one of the tapestry hangings, and fitted her key into a concealed door.

Come, said Doctor Lombard, let us go before the light fails us.

Wyant glanced at Mrs. Lombard, who continued to knit impassively.

No, no, said his host, my wife will not come with us. You might not suspect it from her conversation, but my wife has no feeling for art—Italian art, that is; for no one is fonder of our early Victorian school.

Friths Railway Station, you know, said Mrs. Lombard, smiling. I like an animated picture.

Miss Lombard, who had unlocked the door, held back the tapestry to let her father and Wyant pass out; then she followed them down a narrow stone passage with another door at its end. This door was iron-barred, and Wyant noticed that it had a complicated patent lock. The girl fitted another key into the lock, and Doctor Lombard led the way into a small room. The dark panelling of this apartment was irradiated by streams of yellow light slanting through the disbanded thunder clouds, and in the central brightness hung a picture concealed by a curtain of faded velvet.

A little too bright, Sybilla, said Doctor Lombard. His face had grown solemn, and his mouth twitched nervously as his daughter drew a linen drapery across the upper part of the window.

That will do—that will do. He turned impressively to Wyant. Do you see the pomegranate bud in this rug? Place yourself there—keep your left foot on it, please. And now, Sybilla, draw the cord.

Miss Lombard advanced and placed her hand on a cord hidden behind the velvet curtain.

Ah, said the doctor, one moment: I should like you, while looking at the picture, to have in mind a few lines of verse. Sybilla—

Without the slightest change of countenance, and with a promptness which proved her to be prepared for the request, Miss Lombard began to recite, in a full round voice like her mothers, St. Bernards invocation to the Virgin, in the thirty-third canto of the Paradise.

Thank you, my dear, said her father, drawing a deep breath as she ended. That unapproachable combination of vowel sounds prepares one better than anything I know for the contemplation of the picture.

As he spoke the folds of velvet slowly parted, and the Leonardo appeared in its frame of tarnished gold:

From the nature of Miss Lombards recitation Wyant had expected a sacred subject, and his surprise was therefore great as the composition was gradually revealed by the widening division of the curtain.

In the background a steel-colored river wound through a pale calcareous landscape; while to the left, on a lonely peak, a crucified Christ hung livid against indigo clouds. The central figure of the foreground, however, was that of a woman seated in an antique chair of marble with bas-reliefs of dancing mćnads. Her feet rested on a meadow sprinkled with minute wild-flowers, and her attitude of smiling majesty recalled that of Dosso Dossis Circe. She wore a red robe, flowing in closely fluted lines from under a fancifully embroidered cloak. Above her high forehead the crinkled golden hair flowed sideways beneath a veil; one hand drooped on the arm of her chair; the other held up an inverted human skull, into which a young Dionysus, smooth, brown and sidelong as the St. John of the Louvre, poured a stream of wine from a high-poised flagon. At the ladys feet lay the symbols of art and luxury: a flute and a roll of music, a platter heaped with grapes and roses, the torso of a Greek statuette, and a bowl overflowing with coins and jewels; behind her, on the chalky hilltop, hung the crucified Christ. A scroll in a corner of the foreground bore the legend: Lux Mundi.

Wyant, emerging from the first plunge of wonder, turned inquiringly toward his companions. Neither had moved. Miss Lombard stood with her hand on the cord, her lids lowered, her mouth drooping; the doctor, his strange Thoth-like profile turned toward his guest, was still lost in rapt contemplation of his treasure.

Wyant addressed the young girl.

You are fortunate, he said, to be the possessor of anything so perfect.

It is considered very beautiful, she said coldly.

Beautiful—beautiful! the doctor burst out. Ah, the poor, worn out, over-worked word! There are no adjectives in the language fresh enough to describe such pristine brilliancy; all their brightness has been worn off by misuse. Think of the things that have been called beautiful, and then look at that!

It is worthy of a new vocabulary, Wyant agreed.

Yes, Doctor Lombard continued, my daughter is indeed fortunate. She has chosen what Catholics call the higher life—the counsel of perfection. What other private person enjoys the same opportunity of understanding the master? Who else lives under the same roof with an untouched masterpiece of Leonardos? Think of the happiness of being always under the influence of such a creation; of living into it; of partaking of it in daily and hourly communion! This room is a chapel; the sight of that picture is a sacrament. What an atmosphere for a young life to unfold itself in! My daughter is singularly blessed. Sybilla, point out some of the details to Mr. Wyant; I see that he will appreciate them.

The girl turned her dense blue eyes toward Wyant; then, glancing away from him, she pointed to the canvas.

Notice the modeling of the left hand, she began in a monotonous voice; it recalls the hand of the Mona Lisa. The head of the naked genius will remind you of that of the St. John of the Louvre, but it is more purely pagan and is turned a little less to the right. The embroidery on the cloak is symbolic: you will see that the roots of this plant have burst through the vase. This recalls the famous definition of Hamlets character in Wilhelm Meister. Here are the mystic rose, the flame, and the serpent, emblem of eternity. Some of the other symbols we have not yet been able to decipher.

Wyant watched her curiously; she seemed to be reciting a lesson.

And the picture itself? he said. How do you explain that? Lux Mundi—what a curious device to connect with such a subject! What can it mean?

Miss Lombard dropped her eyes: the answer was evidently not included in her lesson.

What, indeed? the doctor interposed. What does life mean? As one may define it in a hundred different ways, so one may find a hundred different meanings in this picture. Its symbolism is as many-faceted as a well-cut diamond. Who, for instance, is that divine lady? Is it she who is the true Lux Mundi—the light reflected from jewels and young eyes, from polished marble and clear waters and statues of bronze? Or is that the Light of the World, extinguished on yonder stormy hill, and is this lady the Pride of Life, feasting blindly on the wine of iniquity, with her back turned to the light which has shone for her in vain? Something of both these meanings may be traced in the picture; but to me it symbolizes rather the central truth of existence: that all that is raised in incorruption is sown in corruption; art, beauty, love, religion; that all our wine is drunk out of skulls, and poured for us by the mysterious genius of a remote and cruel past.

The doctors face blazed: his bent figure seemed to straighten itself and become taller.

Ah, he cried, growing more dithyrambic, how lightly you ask what it means! How confidently you expect an answer! Yet here am I who have given my life to the study of the Renaissance; who have violated its tomb, laid open its dead body, and traced the course of every muscle, bone, and artery; who have sucked its very soul from the pages of poets and humanists; who have wept and believed with Joachim of Flora, smiled and doubted with Ćneas Sylvius Piccolomini; who have patiently followed to its source the least inspiration of the masters, and groped in neolithic caverns and Babylonian ruins for the first unfolding tendrils of the arabesques of Mantegna and Crivelli; and I tell you that I stand abashed and ignorant before the mystery of this picture. It means nothing—it means all things. It may represent the period which saw its creation; it may represent all ages past and to come. There are volumes of meaning in the tiniest emblem on the ladys cloak; the blossoms of its border are rooted in the deepest soil of myth and tradition. Dont ask what it means, young man, but bow your head in thankfulness for having seen it!

Miss Lombard laid her hand on his arm.

Dont excite yourself, father, she said in the detached tone of a professional nurse.

He answered with a despairing gesture. Ah, its easy for you to talk. You have years and years to spend with it; I am an old man, and every moment counts!

Its bad for you, she repeated with gentle obstinacy.

The doctors sacred fury had in fact burnt itself out. He dropped into a seat with dull eyes and slackening lips, and his daughter drew the curtain across the picture.

Wyant turned away reluctantly. He felt that his opportunity was slipping from him, yet he dared not refer to Clydes wish for a photograph. He now understood the meaning of the laugh with which Doctor Lombard had given him leave to carry away all the details he could remember. The picture was so dazzling, so unexpected, so crossed with elusive and contradictory suggestions, that the most alert observer, when placed suddenly before it, must lose his coordinating faculty in a sense of confused wonder. Yet how valuable to Clyde the record of such a work would be! In some ways it seemed to be the summing up of the masters thought, the key to his enigmatic philosophy.

The doctor had risen and was walking slowly toward the door. His daughter unlocked it, and Wyant followed them back in silence to the room in which they had left Mrs. Lombard. That lady was no longer there, and he could think of no excuse for lingering.

He thanked the doctor, and turned to Miss Lombard, who stood in the middle of the room as though awaiting farther orders.

It is very good of you, he said, to allow one even a glimpse of such a treasure.

She looked at him with her odd directness. You will come again? she said quickly; and turning to her father she added: You know what Professor Clyde asked. This gentleman cannot give him any account of the picture without seeing it again.

Doctor Lombard glanced at her vaguely; he was still like a person in a trance.

Eh? he said, rousing himself with an effort.

I said, father, that Mr. Wyant must see the picture again if he is to tell Professor Clyde about it, Miss Lombard repeated with extraordinary precision of tone.

Wyant was silent. He had the puzzled sense that his wishes were being divined and gratified for reasons with which he was in no way connected.

Well, well, the doctor muttered, I dont say no—I dont say no. I know what Clyde wants—I dont refuse to help him. He turned to Wyant. You may come again—you may make notes, he added with a sudden effort. Jot down what occurs to you. Im willing to concede that.

Wyant again caught the girls eye, but its emphatic message perplexed him.

Youre very good, he said tentatively, but the fact is the picture is so mysterious—so full of complicated detail—that Im afraid no notes I could make would serve Clydes purpose as well as—as a photograph, say. If you would allow me—

Miss Lombards brow darkened, and her father raised his head furiously.

A photograph? A photograph, did you say? Good God, man, not ten people have been allowed to set foot in that room! A photograph?

Wyant saw his mistake, but saw also that he had gone too far to retreat.

I know, sir, from what Clyde has told me, that you object to having any reproduction of the picture published; but he hoped you might let me take a photograph for his personal use—not to be reproduced in his book, but simply to give him something to work by. I should take the photograph myself, and the negative would of course be yours. If you wished it, only one impression would be struck off, and that one Clyde could return to you when he had done with it.

Doctor Lombard interrupted him with a snarl. When he had done with it? Just so: I thank thee for that word! When it had been re-photographed, drawn, traced, autotyped, passed about from hand to hand, defiled by every ignorant eye in England, vulgarized by the blundering praise of every art-scribbler in Europe! Bah! Id as soon give you the picture itself: why dont you ask for that?

Well, sir, said Wyant calmly, if you will trust me with it, Ill engage to take it safely to England and back, and to let no eye but Clydes see it while it is out of your keeping.

The doctor received this remarkable proposal in silence; then he burst into a laugh.

Upon my soul! he said with sardonic good humor.

It was Miss Lombards turn to look perplexedly at Wyant. His last words and her fathers unexpected reply had evidently carried her beyond her depth.

Well, sir, am I to take the picture? Wyant smilingly pursued.

No, young man; nor a photograph of it. Nor a sketch, either; mind that,—nothing that can be reproduced. Sybilla, he cried with sudden passion, swear to me that the picture shall never be reproduced! No photograph, no sketch—now or afterward. Do you hear me?

Yes, father, said the girl quietly.

The vandals, he muttered, the desecrators of beauty; if I thought it would ever get into their hands Id burn it first, by God! He turned to Wyant, speaking more quietly. I said you might come back—I never retract what I say. But you must give me your word that no one but Clyde shall see the notes you make.

Wyant was growing warm.

If you wont trust me with a photograph I wonder you trust me not to show my notes! he exclaimed.

The doctor looked at him with a malicious smile.

Humph! he said; would they be of much use to anybody?

Wyant saw that he was losing ground and controlled his impatience.

To Clyde, I hope, at any rate, he answered, holding out his hand. The doctor shook it without a trace of resentment, and Wyant added: When shall I come, sir?

To-morrow—to-morrow morning, cried Miss Lombard, speaking suddenly.

She looked fixedly at her father, and he shrugged his shoulders.

The picture is hers, he said to Wyant.

In the ante-chamber the young man was met by the woman who had admitted him. She handed him his hat and stick, and turned to unbar the door. As the bolt slipped back he felt a touch on his arm.

You have a letter? she said in a low tone.

A letter? He stared. What letter?

She shrugged her shoulders, and drew back to let him pass.