CHAPTER I.

The road was very lonely. The ruddy-gold sunshine of the late afternoon shot in long rays between the trees and overlaid the clay surface with light, but discovered no marks of wheels except those fresh tracks which followed the automobile and stopped with it. There had been no interruptions to the harangue of the man standing in the road; nothing to indicate this strip of forest was within a few miles of the cities of Jersey and New York. And the man in the motor-car had listened immovably, in silent acknowledgment of that power of compulsion in the pistol held by the other.

It had been a long speech, vehemently egotistical and bitter with self-pity. The speaker was young—a thin, shabby, sallow youth, with an overhanging brow contradicted by his weak chin; a face where obstinacy and irresolution warred ruinously.

"I'd almost rather kill you, anyhow," he finished, his thin voice rising; "but I guess you won't wait for that! Are you going to take me back, Mr. Egerton?"

The man in the car moved for the first time, lifting his arm from the steering-wheel on which he had been leaning.

"No," he returned composedly.

Checked, the other stared at him.

"I tell you I'll kill you unless you do!" he cried.

"I heard you."

"You think I won't do it? I tell you I'd like to do it—I'd like to!"

"Oh, no, you would not," Egerton contradicted. "No man in our state of civilization likes to kill another. We have lost the capacity for it. You might commit murder, but you would not like it. Besides, there are consequences."

"Why won't you take me back, then?" the other demanded, weakly furious. "You turned me out like a dog—after promising me so much! I've got a right to kill you, if you won't take me back."

"I will tell you why, Germain, if you want me to repeat what we both know," Egerton responded. There was neither obstinacy nor irresolution in his face, but the settled determination of a man who was accustomed to consider himself and to be considered just and absolute. His calm self-confidence was not free from a suspicion of arrogance. "How old are you? Twenty? I am twelve years older than you. Because your father was once my tutor, I took you into my office as my secretary, and promised to advance you, if we agreed. Last winter I found you were engaged in an elaborate system of garbling my accounts, to save yourself the trouble of work you were paid to do. I discharged you. Well?"

"I never stole from you," Germain cried savagely.

"No, you lied to me," was the cutting reply. "And I would as soon keep a thief about me as a liar."

"You turned me out in the middle of winter—"

"In February, and I gave you three months' wages. You could have found work."

"I spent all long ago. I had to live. When I did look for work, every one wanted to know who employed me last; and when they heard your name, and that I had no recommendation, they wouldn't take me. You turned me out to starve. Now you'll take me back, or I'll kill you! No one will find you until to-morrow—perhaps not for days. I'll have time to get away. Unless"—he paused before a sudden apprehension—"unless you told some one you were coming here?"

A path of escape opened, but Mark Egerton did not take it. His eyes slightly narrowed; he studied his gaunt, scarcely sane young antagonist. "If I said that I had, you would take my word for it, Germain?"

"I—yes."

"Yet you do not understand why I discharged you?"

"Will you take me back?" snarled Germain, sallow with rage and shame, levelling the pistol in his shaking hand. "It's the last time!"

"No," said Egerton.

His broad chest offered a fair mark as he leaned back in the seat, his motor-coat falling open. He did not believe that Germain would have the courage to shoot. There was neither fear nor anger in Egerton's glance, as he watched the other man.

Perhaps it was the challenge of that curiosity that struck a spark from the crumbling substance of Germain's resolution. He fired three times in rapid succession.

The first two shots took effect, the last went wide, as Egerton started to his feet, then fell back into the cushioned seat.

"I didn't think you had it in you, Germain!" he panted, raising his left hand to the crimson spot that sprang into view against his shoulder. His right arm hung at his side, a red line staining the sleeve.

Germain made no answer, staring with lowered head at the man before him, while shaken by a succession of nervous tremors. There was not remorse in his expression, nor triumph; merely stunned consternation.

"I will give you another chance," Egerton offered presently. "Drive me to the nearest place where there is a surgeon, and I will make no charge against you. Here"—he put his fingers into a pocket—" I will add to that enough money to enable you to get away from the neighborhood. Unless"—as the other did not speak—"you mean to finish me."

A strong shudder ran over the youth. Suddenly dropping the pistol, he turned and fled, crashing through the light undergrowth and striking against trees and bushes in his frenzy of haste to escape.

Abandoned, Egerton lay still for a few moments, then aroused himself and put his finger on the button of the car's electric horn. A long, raucous wail shattered the forest hush. Two miles the sound would carry, according to the signal's manufacturers. Here, on the heights of the Palisades, that might be necessary.

Approaching steps through the woods first suggested the danger that Germain, alarmed by the horn, might return to silence the signal and the signaller. Egerton drew himself erect in the seat, his finger still pressing the button.

"Perhaps you might shut off your klaxon," spoke a voice behind him; a voice singularly agreeable in its cool freshness and youth. "If you are calling for help, I am all there is likely to be."

Egerton turned eagerly, and encountered the meditative dark eyes of a slight, chestnut-haired, rather shabby young man who stood in the road.

"I have been shot," Egerton explained concisely. "Can you drive the machine to some place where I can find a surgeon?"

"Shot?" The dark eyes lightened, appraising him. "I should say so! You need the surgeon before the drive."

"I know that. Can you––"

"I'm not qualified, but I've seen some such work done. We will have to try it."

As he spoke, the young man slipped off his coat and rolled back his sleeves with a delightful readiness and cordiality altogether surprising to the colder Egerton. It was a friend, not a passer-by, who swung himself into the automobile beside the wounded man and took charge of him.

Egerton submitted with the passivity of growing weakness. Indeed, there was skill in the deftness with which his motor-coat was removed and the undergarments cut and laid back.

"Where do you carry your emergency equipment?" was the first query.

"I do not carry one," the patient confessed.

"Then you had better get one. I've seen a man's life saved by himself, after a bad fall, with a strip of linen as a tourniquet. Have you any tire-tape in your kit, and clean cotton-waste?"

"Yes, both. But—"

"My name is Lauria, Roger Lauria."

"I am Mark Egerton, of Egerton, New Jersey. If I get beyond identifying myself, you will find cards and letters in my coat there."

"The police are going to ask something more," Lauria drily reminded him. "I suppose you hardly shot yourself, nor did I do it; and there appears to be no one else present. Steady, please, while I tighten this."

Egerton's straight brows contracted. For the moment he answered nothing, considering.

Lauria had underrated himself. With the cotton-waste and strips of handkerchief, held in place by adhesive tape, he quickly improvised dressings that checked the flow of blood from the two wounds. Walking back a hundred feet, he brought water from one of the many brooks that thread their way through the cliffs to the Hudson River, far below. On feeling the revivifying coolness, Egerton glanced up at his nurse and smiled.

"You are qualified as a doctor," he complimented. "Or perhaps you are one?"

"No, not I! But I've seen enough such work done, although I never before saw a bullet-wound."

"Why, what are you?"

The question was put with Egerton's usual assured directness. Lauria slightly raised his eyebrows, as if before a violation of what he considered courtesy.

"I have witnessed some aviation," he returned, with marked reserve. "Shall you mind if I tie you in the car? The going may be bad."

"Of course not. It is fifteen miles to my home; can you take me there?"

"I can, but I should rather not."

"Why?"

Lauria started the motor and took the driver's seat, his sensitive, dark face touched with a smile half-ironic.

"Because there is a surgeon nearer, Mr. Egerton. Has it occurred to you that people might be interested in the spectacle of my driving across-country with you shot and tied in the car?"

"I could explain."

"Perhaps," Lauria qualified significantly.

Egerton said nothing, protest silenced by the sharp anguish sent through him by a jerk of the automobile, and his succeeding faintness. He had fancied his wounds trivial, but now doubt gripped him. He compelled himself to clearness of thought.

"I want this kept out of the newspapers," he stated presently. "My parents are travelling abroad. My mother is not strong, and some garbled account of this might reach her and shock her dangerously. It will be time enough to bring the police into this if I die—and I do not expect to."

"Few of us do," returned Lauria. "You"—with a keen glance—"you want to shield the one who shot you?"

"No," Egerton contradicted, his gray eyes hard with contempt. "He is an employee who was discharged for lying; it is a matter of indifference to me whether he is in prison or out. But if he is arrested and tried, the whole affair will be dragged through the newspapers. However, you must be protected. If there is any question, I was shot by Lewis Germain, formerly my secretary."

Lauria bent his head, gravely accepting the confidence.

"Just get me home," Egerton forced himself to continue. "But if––"

The forest suddenly seemed to fade from his sight; he had an impression that the automobile was sinking.

When he reopened his eyes, he naturally completed the sentence interrupted by the attack of giddiness.

"—if I die, my father will hunt the right man down, if it takes a lifetime and a fortune."

The forest of rustling leaves and checkered sun and shade had given place to walls. The face that bent above him was framed in Lauria's bright chestnut hair, and had Lauria's large velvet-dark eyes, yet––

"I beg your pardon," Egerton apologized dreamily, striving to rise. "You see, I thought you were a man—I was a bit confused, back there!"

The dark eyes grew yet softer and deeper; warm as a hearth-fire glows warm, ruddy depth within depth. And warm color suddenly flushed the face with rose—no pale tint, but the deep rose of a Jacqueminot. The first Lauria appeared beside the delicate replica of himself.

"Lie still, Mr. Egerton," he counselled. "A surgeon will be here directly. You are in my house—it was the nearest."

Egerton made an effort.

"Send for my manager—Black," he urged. "He'll know."

CHAPTER II.

Maria Clelia Endicott de Lauria rested her dimpled young elbows on the breakfast-table and looked across at her brother.

"He is very rich, your Mr. Egerton," she observed, rather in assertion than question.

Roger set down his fine old cup of cracked porcelain, his eyes meeting the girl's with mingled curiosity and amusement.

"So they say, little sister. Why, might one ask?"

"Because he has so many things," was the prompt reply. "Oh, I have watched, from the cliff where no one can see me! It is like a play, now he is well enough to take the air; it is even a pageant. First appears the Japanese servant and arranges a chair under the trees. He disappears, and returns with a table, on which he proceeds to place a tray of little glasses, cordials, books, papers, cigars everything! Then a pause: enter Mr. Egerton, pale, interesting, leaning on the doctor's arm, or yours. More activity of the Japanese, more cushions, more rugs. Presently appears that superintendent from his factories; reports, offers papers to be signed, takes notes of orders, and retires in favor of a stenographer, to whom His Serene Highness dictates a few letters. After which, Mr. Egerton sets up a leather picture-frame and looks at it all day."

"Clelia!"

She laughed at him, tilting her small, defiant head, around which she wound her broad and shining braids of hair like a Greek girl.

"Oh, he does not know I exist, sir! I have merely taken my sewing to the rocks above the lodge, which musty building you have bestowed upon him as a dwelling. That is, he does not know I exist unless he remembers seeing two of you, the afternoon when you brought him there and I met you. Do I look like a man, then?"

Mock indignation was in the query. But indeed the sister and brother resembled each other as much as a young girl can resemble a young man. They were of the one type, as types are seen preserved in certain European families where race and caste have been guarded for centuries. No student could mistake a Bourbon for a Stuart, for example. The recurrent characteristics are plain in a study of portraits taken through generations, in spite of individual differences in appearance. So these two were of one house: the curve of their dark eyebrows, a noble moulding of brow and head, and a certain look of blended reserve and deeply ardent feeling stamped them.

But just now Roger's face was troubled, while Clelia's rippled with mirth. He glanced around the large, faded room before answering; a dining-room designed for the days when banquets were given in homes instead of hotels, and hospitality was comprehended in the house.

"The Egertons founded and own all the village of Egerton. All the inhabitants work in their huge factory. It is a model town; almost like an English village, I believe. It is the father who made the fortune and business, but he practically has put it all into his son's hands. They have the reputation of being strong, clever, hard men, honorable to a quixotic degree; who are never unjust and seldom gentle."

Surprised in her turn, the laughter deepened in her eyes. "How much you know, Roger!"

"I have talked with his superintendent," Lauria confessed. "He likes to talk, and I––"

"Like to listen," she promptly completed. "Did I not say that Mr. Egerton was interesting?"

"The successful always are," he said, with a short, impatient sigh.

"He did not make his success; he inherited it. You are making yours," she answered with swift tact. "Yes, you are. For you to earn enough money to support yourself and Father and me, just with your pencil and without special training—that is wonderful!"

Roger bent his head as if to avoid her eyes; a slow flush reddened his clear, dark skin. After a moment he rose.

"I must go," he said. "There is an appointment I must keep. Do not expect me until evening."

"About the sketches, of course."

"Of course," he echoed mechanically.

In spite of his professed haste, he remained standing beside his chair. "Clelia—do not watch Egerton too much."

Startled, her color rose with the sensitive readiness that distinguished them both.

"Why?" she asked frankly and proudly.

He again glanced around the once-magnificent room, then down at the table, where exquisite china was set forth upon a coarse, patched cloth, and a bubble-frail vase of Venetian glass held a few field-flowers and autumn leaves.

"We are why. Wait until I mend our tapestries."

She understood, her pride twin with his.

"We are we," she retorted. "But he shall never see me, or come here, certainly. I only watched because—because it was all so different. You know I never go anywhere and there is so little to watch."

But she did not say that she would go no more to the cliff above the lodge.

After Roger had left, she went out into the large, cavernous kitchen, with its rows of unused pantries and huge, unused range. In one corner an old woman was busied at the small oil-stove that served the family needs.

"The chocolate is ready?" Clelia questioned, taking a worn silver tray and proceeding to arrange a breakfast service upon it. "Such a day, Martha dear! Surely your rheumatism is better to-day?"

"A day for young folks," the old woman grumbled. "There will be frost in two weeks. The chocolate has been standing; the master will have waited. Already Mr. Roger was late and angered him."

Clelia cast a dismayed regard at the clock on the wall, hurriedly set the chocolate-pot on the tray, and went out. In the hall she paused to gather two scarlet geraniums that nodded outside a window. One she laid on the folded napkin, the other she tucked in her braids above one small ear.

All up the stairs she climbed oval windows were set, looking across the sweep of mountain and distant river. Her eager gaze had miles to quest over. The October air danced with sunlight as champagne dances with amber bubbles, and was as heady. Carefully holding the tray level, the girl finally stopped altogether, drawing a deep breath.

"Such a day!" she exclaimed, half-aloud. "After all, he will never know; soon he will be well and go away. And he looks always in the picture-frame! Once more––"

It was almost at the moment of Clelia's decision that Mark Egerton waved away his stenographer and set up the three-sided leather frame upon his table, in the plot of lawn behind the lodge. As always, he opened a book and laid it upon his knee, then fixed his gaze and his attention upon the standing picture-case. Only, it did not contain a picture.

Perhaps it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that Egerton had experienced as much astonishment as pain in enduring his illness. He had never been ill; he had held the healthy man's half-scornful incredulity of illness. And to be thrown so low by a Germain!

He bore a good deal of suffering in grim silence, but he was not a patient invalid. And as he improved, to disgusted astonishment succeeded disgusted ennui. He had been in that condition of mind when, ten days before this morning, his physician had established him in the garden to take the air. From that condition he had been definitely rescued by a mirror-backed tray.

The sun-bubbles continued to dance in the amber October haze, a pair of squirrels chattered and frolicked along the edge of the little cliff that overhung the garden. Egerton's gaze persisted in fidelity to the leather-framed object of Clelia's curiosity. Occasionally he would slightly change its position. Once when the Japanese approached on some errand, his master abruptly swept the case shut; only to set it up again after the man's departure.

The frame contained a triplicate mirror. It reflected a section of yellow-gray cliff, a mass of tree-branches clothed in red and yellow foliage, and a vagrant sunbeam. And as a little clock on the table chimed the quarter-hour, into the reflected picture stole a flash of pink.

Clelia de Lauria seated herself on the old stone bench, set her sewing-basket on her knee, and took forth the cravat she was designing for Roger. But instead of sewing she rested her chin in her small palm and looked down at the gentleman in the garden below. Yes, he sat gazing into the picture-frame, as usual; his head half turned from her and affording an interesting study of his profile. Her red mouth curled like the petal of a flower, her eyes warmed to blended laughter and exasperation. Of whom was that absorbing portrait? What must a girl do or be to win such devotion as that? From a man like Egerton, too! The laughter died out of her expression and left it purely wistful.

"I am like the Lady of Shalott," she mused. "I sit apart in my enchanted tower and watch the reflections of the people who go past on the high-road. Only, there is no Sir Lancelot for me to look at and break the spell. To be sure, I have looked at Mr. Egerton; but no webs have flown apart nor magic glasses shattered—and I certainly shall not die and drift down the brook into his garden. And he is by no means dressed in jewelled armor; although he looks very nice."

It had never occurred to her as strange that, when all the paraphernalia of illness was about him, Egerton never had allowed himself an invalid's latitude of costume. Always he was carefully dressed, as if to appear in his office, even when obviously ill and in pain.

"He has had a bad time," she told herself, taking up the cravat. "Roger said he suffered a great deal. But now he is much better. Soon he can go home."

The sharp crack of a snapping stick startled her out of revery. She turned her head, then sprang up as she saw the shabby figure of a man gliding away among the tree-trunks.

She had forgotten the contents of her lap. The sewing-basket tilted, slipped—a whole cascade of bright spools, needle-balls, scissors, and thimble poured over the little cliff and rattled into the garden below. Egerton rose impetuously, overturning on his part the leather frame and a whole row of glasses and decanters.

Clelia's impulse was toward flight, but it was too late. Her attempt to capture the basket had carried her to the edge of the cliff, and she found herself looking down into Egerton's gray eyes.

His remark was more disconcerting than the discovery.

"I have been hoping this would happen, for a week," he said.

Native dignity rescued her. Moreover, she had no time to analyze his statement.

"I am sorry to have startled you," she regretted distantly. "My basket slipped from my hand. Good-morning.”

"You will allow me to gather up your things, Miss Lauria?"

"It does not matter."

But it did matter, and her slight hesitation gave an opportunity to a man used to taking his own way. Egerton had no idea of permitting this visionary dryad to evade him so readily.

"Surely I need not introduce myself, after the hospitality your brother has shown me?" he questioned. "Please do not refuse this small service where I owe so much."

He was quite unconscious of the imperative note in his speech. The girl did not resent it; on the contrary, it pleased her indecision. She sat down.

Egerton had overrated his strength. When he stooped to pick up the basket, the sharp stab of resulting pain drained his face of color. But he neither rang for his servant nor pleaded weakness. Instead, he changed his method; in place of stooping, he knelt on one knee to recover the scattered articles. Even so, he had no breath for speech until the task was ended.

"I will come up to see if the tally is complete," he said, when he rose.

"It will not be," she returned. "My thimble fell down a crack in the rock. The gnomes have it."

"I might dynamite the rock."

"Please, no! It was only a celluloid thimble, that I bought from a peddler because it was red."

Egerton was already coming toward her, around the end of the cliff. It was not a long distance, but it was steep and much farther than he had yet walked alone. When the two stood opposite each other, all constraint vanished before his obvious exhaustion. Clelia sprang forward, her delicate dark face suddenly anxious.

"Please sit down!" she exclaimed. "Oh, you should not have come here—you are ill!"

Egerton shook his head in denial, but nevertheless he very willingly sank down on the bench beside her.

"Next week I will do better," he apologized, after a moment. "Will you count the spools?"

She accepted the basket, but set it down to face him impulsively.

"We are cruel, we others!" she flashed. "I am cruel! I knew it hurt you to pick up those things, yet I let you—I watched to see if you would keep on."

Egerton fixed his eyes on her in an astonished pleasure with which her beauty had nothing to do. He was not imaginative, but he had the sensation of being confronted with some ardent, fierce, yet fine lady of old Spain or Italy; of the days when melting tenderness and purity were not incompatible with flashes of savagery, and a white lily might sheathe a steel sword.

"Why not?" he countered. "You want no cravens in your high places. Did I pass the test?"

Her eyes did not fall, but the rich color flushed her cheeks.

"Yes," she answered, and turned away her head.

"Thank you. You see, I have led too prosaic a life to have had much practice. If I had known I was to meet a princess of chivalry in the forest, I should have tried to qualify."

"To qualify?"

"Why, yes. Instead of dropping her glove into the lion-pit, she dropped her work-basket into the garden, but the principle is the same. I stabbed myself on a needle, by the way; do I receive credit for that?"

She dimpled involuntarily. It was a curious interview between these two, who had never before spoken to each other, yet who might almost have been said to have passed the last ten days together.

"You are forgiving, Mr. Egerton. I might have made you ill."

"It would have been worth while," he said meditatively, and quite honestly. "Other people have adventures; I have always been too busy. Do you know how I spend my life, Miss Lauria? I make soap."

"You mind that?"

"No, I like it. I make good soap."

Her glance sprang to meet his with the luminous earnestness that he had learned to know in Roger Lauria.

"That is worth while—to make something well!" she exclaimed. "And—to succeed. We are old. For centuries we have made nothing; we were of those for whom things are made. Now we rust away, we accomplish nothing."

"Pardon me—we?"

She made a slight gesture, half-weary, half-proud.

"We of my house. Roger and I are Americans, but our name was one of Spain's greatest six centuries ago. The first Roger de Lauria conquered Sicily and gave it to his king."

Recollections of half-forgotten history stirred in Egerton's mind. He had guessed rightly, then, the atmosphere for this girl; slender, yet deep-bosomed, deep-eyed, vividly alive.

Before he found words to answer her, the snapping of underbrush came clearly to their ears, followed by the unmistakable sounds of some one moving through the tangled park, not far away. Clelia uttered a faint exclamation, recalled to thought of the man she had seen.

"Who is it?" Egerton questioned.

"I do not know. A man who is creeping through the park. I had forgotten, but that was how I dropped the basket: he startled me."

"Some tramp," Egerton said, rising. "I will send him off."

"No, no! You are not fit," she protested, dismayed. "He can do no harm; let him go on."

Egerton smiled.

"I shall not fight him," he reassured. "Please wait here."

He did not stay for her assent. Checked, the girl stood an instant, then sprang noiselessly in pursuit.

The man in the underbrush was on his hands and knees at the edge of the cliff, staring down into the little square garden below. He was rather a boy than a man, whose weak, haggard face was now tensely eager as he looked down at the empty chair beside the invalid's table. But he heard the step behind him and started up, to confront Egerton.

The two regarded each other in a silence filled with many thoughts.

"So, Germain, you came back," the older man observed. "What for?"

The other wet his dry lips.

"There was nothing in the papers," he said hoarsely. “I hadn't money to get farther away than New York. I—I had to know whether you were alive––I walked back."

"Decidedly alive. You blundered, as usual."

"I'm glad," Germain stammered tremulously, almost imploringly. "I—I was crazy! Give me another chance, Mr. Egerton. Don't give me up. Let me go, sir. I've hidden, and nearly starved—let me go."

"Am I keeping you?"

"But the police––"

"If I have not already informed the police, it is for reasons of my own," Egerton coldly returned. "Those reasons have not changed. You can go."

"Mr. Egerton, I—I haven't a cent. I haven't slept in a bed for nights; and I'm hungry."

"That," Egerton stated definitely, "is your own affair."

When he turned, after watching the cringing figure out of sight, Clelia was behind him.

"I am going," she said hurriedly, veiling her dark eyes from him. "You have been very good; I thank you."

Egerton looked at her keenly.

"Something is wrong. What have I done?" he asked.

"Nothing; nothing that was not your right. I was told this morning that you were always just and never gentle. I understand now."

The indictment was unexpected. He had never considered himself in that light, but he recognized the portrait.

"If you concede the justice, I cannot complain," he submitted. "But I hope the rest is not quite so bad! You heard me with Germain; well, I allowed him to go. Was that so cruel?"

"No, but hard!" her retort leaped. "We can be cruel; you are hard. Mr. Egerton, in your place, I should either have sent to prison the man who shot me, or have warmed and fed him."

With the last word she would have bowed and left him, but he was before her.

"Forgive me, Miss Lauria; you must not go alone through the woods while that maniac is there."

"I am not afraid."

"But I am. My motor-car is here; let my man drive you home. Why should you refuse?" as her lips parted.

She did not know how to answer him, or why the offer that seemed so natural to him shattered her ideas of convention.

"I will explain to your brother," he added.

She recalled Roger's parting injunction to avoid Mark Egerton. Yet, after all, why? Never in all her monotonous life had come such an adventure; why not accept its fulness, since probably there never would come such another? Without spoken reply, she slowly turned and walked beside her escort down the slope.

Egerton studied her breathlessly; with the acute attention of one who finds near him a thing only glimpsed afar. He liked everything about her; her alien romance, her fearless directness, even her difficulty of approach. But her simple, cheap, pink cotton frock seemed to him absurdly incongruous as a dress for this regal young beauty; absurd as the idea of a celluloid thimble upon her small, taper finger. He was by nature quick in decision, and he had been half in love before the sewing-basket rolled to his feet. Now the fancy-vapor was crystallizing.

In the garden down at which Clelia had so often gazed, they stopped. Egerton placed a chair, and his guest took it passively. He touched a bell on the table.

"Suki, have Ferguson bring the car to the door," he said to the Japanese who appeared. "A tramp has been seen in the park, and Miss Lauria must not cross it alone. And bring my overcoat."

"You should not go out," Clelia objected. "You have not yet."

"I have not yet," he admitted. "But that was less because I could not, than because I did not want to."

Some significance in his accent caught her curiosity. "You do not care for driving, perhaps?”

"Not for that reason. When I am able to go driving, I shall have no excuse for remaining longer in Mr. Lauria's house—and garden."

Confused without knowing why, she turned to the table beside her. Her glance fell on the three-sided leather frame that had so long puzzled and challenged her interest.

The mirror faced toward her. And as she gazed in dawning consternation, she saw a reflection of the brown and gold trees fringing the upper cliff, the gray corner of a stone bench; the bench where she had sat in fancied concealment day after day. "I have been hoping this would happen for a week," he had said when her basket fell.

Egerton rose with her as she swayed to her feet, her face crimson. Too late he saw the mirror and put out his hand to close it.

The action was a confession. Recognizing the fact, he forestalled her anger with apology.

"Forgive me! I first saw you by chance ten days ago, Miss Lauria. After that, I was lost. I remembered seeing you when your brother brought me here. When I found your favorite nook was up there, I—well, I was guilty of watching you. I had no right, I deserve all you may say—forgive me."

She faced him fairly, in spite of her scarlet shame.

"You had the right, since, in watching me, you must have seen that I looked at you. But I never will forgive you, never!"

He stepped before her as she would have fled into the park.

"The servants," he quietly reminded her.

She saw Suki advancing with the coat, and through the gates beyond glimpsed the chauffeur beside his car. Her pride alarmed in a new cause, she paused, steadying herself.

"They must not see you running from me," Egerton gravely urged. "Let my man take you home. Surely I have no need to say that I will not now annoy you with my escort."

Her head still held high, she turned away. She had no weapon against this attack, whose wisdom was so obvious.

Egerton walked silently beside her to the automobile. When she had entered it, he held out to her the leather-framed mirror.

"If I may not be pardoned, I may be punished," he said. "I shall not buy another."

Taken by surprise, she faltered, meeting his glance with shamed, lovely eyes. Suddenly she recalled the fixed attention he had given that mirror; the mirror she had fancied a portrait, but which had shown her own image. The flattery of that tribute was honest.

"There will be nothing for one to reflect," she signified, but she took the glass.

"I accept the rebuke. Yet now a reflection would not content me."

There was no misunderstanding the seriousness of his gray eyes, nor his quiet resolution. Clelia leaned back in the car, averting her face while he gave the directions to the chauffeur.

The forgotten sewing-basket was brought to its mistress an hour later by Suki, who started flying echoes in the great, lonely house by tugging valiantly at the rusted bell of the front door. Accompanying the returned article was a mass of red roses which Egerton must have sent far to find, tied with more heavy satin ribbon than the frugal Clelia had ever owned for her own adornment.

The flowers were not returned. Suki never knew the reason for the lavish reward he received upon coming back to his master with empty hands.

Mark Egerton and Roger de Lauria had become excellent friends during the four weeks since Germain had shot his former employer. They interested each other, although neither was a man who gave friendship readily or lightly. At least a part of every day, the young host was a guest in the lodge.

The evening after the encounter with Clelia, during such a visit, Egerton produced a diminutive morocco case.

"I had the honor of meeting Miss Lauria yesterday," he said. "By the way, have I not blundered and should it not be de Lauria?"

"It should, but the de sounds like an affectation in America, and I drop it in casual use," Roger explained. "You met my sister, you say?"

"Yes; she was walking in your park when the fellow who attacked me came prowling about. Fortunately, I saw him, and persuaded Miss de Lauria to take the car home instead of walking through the woods. But a thimble rolled from the basket she carried, and was lost in the garden here. Will you permit me the great pleasure of replacing it? It is outrageous that I should impose myself and my homicidal employees upon you this way!"

"The man who shot you!" exclaimed Roger. "He came back?"

"Oh, merely to see if I were alive. Thank you"—as the other mechanically accepted the box. "My mother is in Italy, Lauria, or she would call upon your sister. As it is, will you not both waive ceremony and consent to drive with me to-morrow?"

Astonished, Roger demurred.

"I am afraid––"

Egerton interrupted with his sudden smile.

"Are you going to leave me crushed under a weight of hospitality that I may not return ever so slightly, Lauria? Besides—I am lonely."

The tact that assumed a debt instead of imposing one shamed Roger into a complaisance he had not intended and made refusal ungracious. And the drive would be a rare, an unprecedented pleasure for Clelia.

"Thank you. If my sister is not engaged––" he slowly yielded. He looked rather curiously at the dainty morocco case in his hand, but he was too well-bred to open it.

"I hope she will not refuse me," Egerton answered. "Pray, say so, for me."

"Certainly. Egerton, you have met many men; what is your idea of a coward? A man who is afraid?"

The question was put abruptly; with a sombre force that seemed to have burst through restraints. It struck in Egerton recollection of the girl who had watched him painfully gathering the contents of her basket, "to see if he would keep on."

"Not always," he replied thoughtfully. "I should rather say, a man who lets his fear hinder what he has to do."

Roger's sensitive face lighted and cleared.

"That, yes! To keep on—that is something! I could not bear––My father was a soldier, you know. He came to New York nearly forty years ago, a veteran of war in his twenty-sixth year; his health shaken by wounds, possessing the right to wear a dozen decorations, his name everywhere honored—and an exile from his own country. He had fought on the losing side. He meant to return when his strength permitted. But time escaped; the daughter of a New York house of merchant-princes fell in love with him and he with her. He never went back."

Keenly interested, Egerton listened.

"Then you are American by blood as well as by birth," he commented.

"On my mother's side, yes. This house and place were hers. There was a porter in this old lodge then; they say the place throbbed with gayety and hospitality, like a feverish pulse. For it was a fever. One day the fortune was gone; swept away overnight in a great panic that shook New York. My mother died soon after, when Clelia was born."

"Your father?"

"Returned to the only profession he recognized. He entered the American army. But he was again wounded, in Mexico, and compelled to retire forever. Never omit the de from our name should you chance to meet him, Egerton. He is punctilious to the last degree, and the strictest disciplinarian I can conceive."

The story admitted no comment. Egerton was silent, thinking of his own father; a fighter also, but on how different a field! And he preferred him in his heart to the gentleman who could claim the title of cousin from the King of Spain.

He did not guess at all the significance to himself of Roger de Lauria's story, or the overthrow it held for his own honor.

Presently Roger rose and took his leave, when Egerton noticed for the first time his pallor and the drawn lines of fatigue about his mouth and eyes.

"You look tired, Lauria," he observed, with curt sympathy.

"I am. Good-night," said Roger, as briefly.

Clelia was in her room when her brother reached home. She came to the door in a blue kimono over her night-dress to receive the box and the message he brought. The lamp she carried lighted softly her flushed young face and broad braids of shining hair; the thin, cheap material of her robes fell into graceful folds about her supple body. Looking at her, Roger saw her with new eyes and a new sense of guardianship.

"What is in the box?" he asked.

Clelia readily opened the case, and they looked together at the toy it contained: a thimble of rose-red coral carved like lace. Egerton was too fine to offend by a trace of costly metals or jewels; the value of the gift was masked by its simplicity.

"It is pretty," Roger commented. "Will you go for the drive tomorrow? I suppose you can hardly accept this, and refuse."

"No; I will go," Clelia murmured.

She was quivering with excitement. With feminine unreason, she forgave Egerton his fault, not because she had provoked and originated it, but because he had remembered her thimble was red.

When the door had closed, she crossed to the table and set the coral thimble beside the roses. The leather-framed mirror confronted her; dimpling and smiling, she bent to see her face reflected. How had she looked to him, she wondered? At least, he had cared to watch!

CHAPTER III.

The drive was enchantingly successful. The ready color flooded Clelia's face when Egerton thanked her for accepting the thimble, but some quality in his manner dispelled the last constraint between them.

When they passed the lodge on the return, Egerton invited his guests to enter for a Japanese tea. Suki served them with a feast as daintily exotic as the eastern fairies' banquets of perfume. Naturally, Egerton had permitted no more additions to the faded old furnishings of the lodge than absolute necessity demanded; to do more would have seemed to reflect upon his hosts. But even so, the place had caught an atmosphere of freshness and luxury. The two De Laurias felt it, and Clelia breathed it like a native air.

"I am so much better that I shall have no excuse for remaining here longer," Egerton regretted, when his guests rose to leave. "I must go home."

"I hope you will stay as long as you find the lodge comfortable. It was unused until you came, and will be so after you go," Roger answered, but he regarded Egerton a trifle oddly. "I know you are a man of many affairs; no doubt you are anxious to get back to them."

Egerton met the regard squarely.

"I am engaged in the most important affair of my life," he asserted.

When a man has reached thirty years of age without trifling away his emotions in sentimental episodes, love comes to him as a serious thing. It came so to Mark Egerton, with the first romance of his crowded, practical life. Without a thought of being unkind, his father had so required of Mark his own enormous industry, that the weeks following Germain's assault were almost Egerton's first leisure.

He was debarred from the usual methods of courtship by the Laurias' aloofness and reserve. He could not meet Clelia in general society. Delicate sounding convinced him that he would not be allowed to call on her; or, at least, that he would cause humiliation and discomfort by doing so. His position as her brother's guest made it impossible to violate the family conventions by asking her to see him alone.

But he filled her house with flowers, sent daily. Once or twice he again lured her and Roger to drive or take tea with him. One morning he met old Martha in the park, and found out what church Clelia and her brother attended.

He attended that service on the following Sunday. He was late, his chauffeur having trouble to find the tiny obscure chapel, and he never afterward forgot the exquisite change in Clelia's face when she lifted her head and saw him. The sun struck through the stained-glass window above her, so that she knelt in a shimmering haze of violet and amber and crimson light. Her eyes did not fall from his, but suddenly widened and grew splendidly unafraid.

He knew then. He had won.

The next day he walked to the great, gray house in the centre of the little park. He walked, because he did not want to flaunt his wealth before the others' poverty. The last week had wrought wonders in his recovery.

He thought of many things as he passed under the rustling trees: of his father's often expressed wish that Mark should bring home a wife, and of his mother's certain delight in this daughter. For it never had occurred to the close-knit Egertons that the son's marriage could separate them. Why should it? John Egerton and Mark, his son, were a unit in their undemonstrative, unvoiced devotion to each other.

The bell jangled mournfully through the house, in a wing of which the family now lived. It was many moments before the massive, black-walnut door was swung open, by Clelia herself.

That Egerton should come this way, with this natural simplicity, was the one possibility her dreaming fancy had not conceived.

"Oh!" she faltered, aghast as a child.

"Did you not know I must come?" he asked, his gray eyes carrying their undisguised message, his breathing quickened. "Will you send me away?"

She moved back, quite without words, and led him into the dim, faded drawing-room. There was a faint fragrance mingled with the atmosphere of the long unused place, a blending of mustiness and the ghost of past perfumes. Even in his preoccupation and eagerness, Egerton noticed it with a vague sense of oppression.

"Roger is not home," Clelia murmured, as they paused opposite each other.

"I did not come to see Roger," he answered. "I came to see you; and, if you permit, your father."

The direct openness of this wooing left little room for coquetry. But Clelia herself was candid and of strong, few passions. She lifted her eyes to Egerton's.

"Yes," she uttered. "Yes."

Quite suddenly she was in his arms, fresh lips ardent in meeting.

"You will forgive me now for watching you in the mirror. You understand that I could not help it," Egerton said, after a while. No one could have judged him cold as he smiled down at his betrothed.

"I watched you first," she confessed happily.

"Because I was a curiosity: the man who got himself shot. Oh, I did not flatter myself on that score!"

"You might have." Her glowing face sobered. "You will not think me won too easily, Mark? I will not change ever. If I gave swiftly, I gave for always."

—"But trust me, gentlemen, I will prove more true than those who hold more distance"—the old words recurred to Egerton. Like the immortal girl-wife, this girl would keep faith before life, he felt the certain knowledge. There was as much reverence as passion in the kiss he bent to give.

"I also," he promised. "I may make mistakes. I will not fail."

"Word of an Egerton?" she challenged, seriousness lost in mischief, her dark eyes laughing behind their sweeping lashes.

"Word of an Egerton. And it has never been broken, my dear—my dear!"

It was quite half an hour later when Egerton ran up the broad stairs to interview General de Lauria. The time spent had included the grave business of measuring Clelia's small third finger for a ring.

"But I cannot wear it until my father allows," she told him.

"Suppose I were some penniless pretender, and he turned me from your door; would you elope with me?"

She refused to smile at such a supposition.

"I should die. There have been girls of my house who have died so, or in a convent."

"You would not come to me?"—incredulously.

"Disobey my father, Mark? Oh, no! You could not trust a wife who had done that. It would be wrong; there would be no blessing upon us."

Enchanted with the quaint fervor, he laughed outright.

"I knew you were a mediæval lady, the first time we met," he retorted.

He had refused to wait for Roger's return, or to allow Clelia the embarrassment of presenting her lover to her father. He sent up his card by old Martha, and went to the interview alone.

The room he entered was lofty and sombrely handsome, with the heavy frieze of raised plasterwork, the white-marble mantel and dark panelling, in vogue fifty years ago. It was as fresh as loving service could make it, yet Egerton was conscious of the blended mustiness and perfume that he had breathed below, and of the same sense of stifled oppression.

The old man who rose to receive him was the genius of the place, yet strangely alien. Tall, spare, with piercing dark eyes thrown into relief by his invalid's pallor and the fine, thin lines of white eyebrows pencilled like a woman's, Juan de Lauria imposed the double respect yielded soldier and patrician. Inflexible, probably narrow, marked by stern endurance and the sternness that would exact like endurance from others, he was a force, and as such to be reckoned.

"I meet you with pleasure, Mr. Egerton," he greeted his guest. "We already know each other through my son. I am rejoiced that you have recovered from your wounds."

"They were too slight to be called so, to you, General," Egerton returned, his ease of a man of the active world meeting the other's stately formality. "If they had been more serious, I must have forgotten them to-day. But I have to thank you and your family for much kindness and hospitality."

The General bowed, and the two men considered each other in frank appraisal. The scrutiny satisfied both, and cleared the way for what was to come.

"I think you anticipate my errand, sir," Egerton said. "That is, if you have found leisure to read the credentials I sent through your son?"

"I have read them, Mr. Egerton."

"Thank you. Then, I would ask your consent to the marriage of Miss de Lauria and myself."

"Does that mean you already have her consent?"

"I did not have it last night, when I sent to you. I have now."

It was not in him to speak of his love for Clelia, or promise her happiness. The idea did not even occur to him. All that was implied in his proposal. But the reticence pleased the Spaniard's own dignity.

"I like you, and all I hear of you, Mr. Egerton," the General stated deliberately. "I appreciate your courtesy in remembering I am a foreigner and treating me as one, instead of taking my daughter in the fashion of this country. You have entirely satisfied me of your honor, position, and wealth."

"Thank you," Egerton acknowledged, with the quiet assurance of one who has never doubted himself.

"There is one more point. Since I have met you, I speak of it as a mere formality: one gentleman recognizes another, sir." He paused, his glance slowly travelling over the room as if in pursuit of something the younger man could not see. "I am an exile, Mr. Egerton, but I am the head of a house that is old and of high descent. You are in trade; that is nothing! All Americans are practical. But of course I can give my daughter only to the descendant of a line of gentlemen."

Egerton's hand fell to the arm of his chair and gripped it. His gray eyes narrowing, he kept his expression impassive only by an effort physically exhausting. A line of gentlemen? His grandfather had boiled soap and peddled it through a New Jersey town. His father had taken the petty trade and expanded it to an enterprise of millions. A race of gentlemen? No, but a race of men!

"We prize other qualities, General de Lauria," he compelled himself to answer evenly. "Energy, honesty, clean hands and names, have been our standard of measurement, not the counting of dead ancestors." The soldier's eye kindled.

"Sir, those are our personal duties. We owe also a duty to our forebears," he retorted. "It is final: my children shall never marry into another class than mine. I do not doubt you are of it, Mr. Egerton; give me the papers to show that, as you have to show less important things."

"I have no such papers here," Egerton slowly temporized. "Suppose, for the sake of argument, that they did not exist?"

"Then I should shake hands with you, sir, and regret that an alliance between us was impossible."

The magnificent word with its suggestion of high diplomatic contracts came oddly from the lips of the ruined soldier. But it was saved from absurdity by the loftiness that pushed Egerton's millions aside as of no moment. It was the spirit with which a Hindu might gather his rags about him and starve in silence, rather than share the food of a low-caste neighbor. Egerton did not smile.

"Miss de Lauria might think differently," he countered.

"Very probably. But she would obey me, sir."

It was true. Clelia's lover knew it, and that he faced a barrier there was no passing. Almost for the first time in his life, he sought refuge in an evasion.

"You will give me time to answer," he found himself saying, through his whirling confusion of thought. "I was unprepared––"

Mechanically he rose with the last word, breaking off the half-truth on his lips with a revulsion strong as nausea. He looked at the old man as a modern Faust at his tempter.

General de Lauria rose also, all gracious acquiescence. Somehow Egerton got out of the room; into the hall.

Out of the shadows Clelia's face blossomed, a glowing flower in the sombre place. Egerton caught her to him, rough in his unbearable passion and repentance. What had he done? What tragedy had he brought this girl, to whom he had promised happiness? The very softness of her body in his arms reproached him with her helplessness.

"Mark," she whispered, terrified by his silence, "what is it? Oh, what is wrong?"

The change in her irradiated face, the frightened clasp of her slight fingers, made a coward of him. He bent his head and answered with a kiss that drew back her color as fire leaps to fuel.

"You are my wife," he said, hoarse with feeling. "Come now—come with me. What have others to do with us? I would throw down my world for you—will you for me?"

He felt her shiver and stiffen in his embrace; her gaze clung to his in dawning fear.

"If I cannot marry you, Mark, I will never marry. My father––"

"If he refused me, would you send me away? For his prejudice, would you condemn us both to that?"

"You know—I should have to! Mark, what has happened?"

Her cry steadied him. Again, for the second time in a few moments, he used the weakling's shield and temporized.

"Nothing yet. Your father has sent me for further credentials. I will come back."

"He—has not––"

"Refused me? No, no! But remember I am not of your race; I hoped you might answer me differently."

All his will could not keep the bitterness from that reproach. The shuffling step of the old servant sounded near, preventing further speech. His moment with his betrothed was ended; and he was glad! But Clelia flung up both hands and drew down his head with a movement of passionate comprehension; her dark eyes wide to his and deep-warmed with that glow he had once before seen and compared to the rich glow of a hearth that is the heart of a home. She said nothing, yet gave him to see the answer he desired across the barrier she could never overthrow.

They did not kiss each other, but in that long meeting of glances was their true marriage; the marriage for which there is no divorce.

The gray October sunshine harshly dazzled Egerton when he stood outside. He walked on with a sense of blinded confusion. He was not aware that he had passed the limits of the park and was on the highroad to Englewood, until the roar of a motor fell into silence beside him, and he saw his own chauffeur leaning across the wheel to salute him.

"I've just taken Mr. Black home, sir," the man was saying. "As I came along, I thought you might wish to ride, sir."

"Yes. Get out," Egerton curtly directed.

"Sir?"

"I will take the machine. You can walk to the house."

Astonished, the chauffeur obeyed rather uneasily.

"It's the six-seventy, Mr. Egerton," he reminded his employer.

"She's—excuse me—a heavy car for a driver who isn't feeling well."

In fact, Egerton had not driven at all since his illness. But he merely nodded thanks for the caution, and took the seat behind the steering-wheel. Nor did he turn toward the lodge, but swung the powerful car into a cross-road and shot away, leaving the chauffeur gazing blankly after him.

His own arrogance! It was with that reproach Egerton scourged himself; his arrogance, which had made it inconceivable to him that he should be barred from any family. He had been humble enough before Clelia, yes; he was too masculine not to yield that to her womanhood. But he had not dreamed possible a refusal from her penniless father. He had not troubled to consider her family's viewpoint; he had arrogated to himself all rights—as he had always done.

Well, why not? After all, he had done nothing to forfeit such rights. An angry red settled in his cheeks and temples, as a juster judgment sprang up to refute the first. No, it was not the rich man's arrogance that had led him into this sharp trap; it was his own consciousness of clean hands, clean name, and clean success that entitled him to claim his wife where he found her. Ancestry? No Arthurian knight ever held a stricter standard and example for his son than John Egerton had set for his. And Mark had satisfied him.

That would not help Clelia—Clelia, whom he had taught to love him as women of her kind love but once; Clelia, who because of him would wither into dry spinsterhood in the withered house. There could be no reversal of the decision against him. Years could not change this, nor death that changes so much. Tradition had clutched bony hands upon the young girl.

The car droned on steadily. Where, Egerton neither knew nor cared. He did not know that he made turns, or obeyed the signals of the road. Once he halted to avoid scattering a group of picnicking children, but a moment later he could not have told that he had seen them.

What could he do?

Once, several years before, the agent of a genealogical bureau had brought a portfolio of new-old parchment and papers to the senior Egerton. He had offered to construct a family tree for the rich man. The name was a fine old English one, the agent said; it would be easy to supply a link or two, and connect this American with the old line. Mark Egerton still remembered the armorial bearings and emblazoned colors on the documents which the man hurried back into the portfolio, after his father's scathing and contemptuous dismissal. He even remembered the agent's name, and that the bureau was in New York.

He had never lied in his life.

It was of Clelia he thought; for her he raged and rebelled. The tragedy to her defenseless youth, the long, bleak years for her, were the goads urging him. There was a stern stoicism in the Egertons; if they were hard with others, they also were hard with themselves. He loved Clelia, but he would have accepted his own suffering and left her, had he alone been concerned. It was not romantic, but it was so. He would have lived without her, rather than live in the loathsome prison-house of a lie. He had wooed her deliberately and with success; had he the right to deny the bond and leave her to pay the penalty for his lack of caution?

He had been driving for hours. The sun had fallen so low that rays almost level stretched long shadows across road and countryside. He might have gone on until night if a shouted command had not halted him.

"No admittance without a ticket!" a raucous voice shouted. "Reserved seat, one dollar. Park your car front, five dollars. Finest meet in Jersey—see Laurence's dip o' death!"

Egerton passed a hand across his damp forehead. He awoke to realization that for some time he had formed one of a moving stream of vehicles; following with them simply because that required less exertion than to turn aside and choose a route of his own. Battle had been waged in him, devastating as physical pain. Suddenly he felt the reaction: a lassitude making him almost incapable of effort.

He found himself opposite a canvas fence, beyond which presumably lay the lauded exhibition. Behind him impatient voices called to him to go ahead or pull aside. Well, why not enter? Somewhere he must rest before he could drive farther; here he would at least attract no remark.

"Darin' loop o' death," the barker insisted, jumping upon the running-board to thrust forward a handful of pink tickets.

Egerton found a five-dollar bill and gave it to the man. He was almost too exhausted to drive his car forward and into the enclosure indicated.

It was an aviation meet. Not one of moment, merely an adjunct to a county fair. Opposite Egerton stretched a rough green field, on which rested a biplane surrounded by a group of men. The aviator was not in the machine, nor was there any indication of a flight in prospect. Uninterested and indifferent, Egerton lay rather than sat in the deep-cushioned seat of his car, his listless hand slipping from the steering-wheel.

After a moment, the driver of the next automobile turned to survey the latest arrival.

"Too late for the afternoon and too early for the evening," he observed genially. "Guess the barker worked you—what? All over until moon-rise, unless Laurence comes back."

Egerton compelled himself to courtesy; partly because any speech was a relief from thought.

"I happened in. It doesn't matter. That is Laurence's machine?"

"Lord, no! Laurence flies a monoplane. He started on a cross-country flight with a bag of fool picture-postals—the crowd breaks its neck to send 'em by air! Maybe he's broken his neck doing it—there's been a nasty wind." He chuckled at his own wit. "He promised to do some trick work, but——"

A roar from the jesting, peanut-munching crowd interrupted him.

"There he comes!"  "Over the flats!"  "He'll make it!"

Against a sky rapidly tinting sunset primrose, Egerton saw the dark spot whose core held a man. He had seen much aviation, yet the old thrill touched him at the witness of man's achievement of the world-old ambition.

"He'll just about make it," the motorist beside him judged critically. "You know, he gets fifty dollars if he makes it before sundown. That's what he's working for! Have you had a long run? You look all in."

"Yes," Egerton gave absent reply. He fixed curious gray eyes on the man who was risking his life to earn fifty dollars. The sum was so pitifully small; he himself would so gladly have given a hundred times that for an answer to the problem wrenching him. What was honor? Was he to keep faith with himself, or with Clelia? Was it honorable to protect with a lie the woman whose love he had taken, or to speak the truth and let her suffer the result? The reiterated question beat at his weary brain.

The spot in the sky had become a line. Now it was changing from black to white, as the sun-rays struck the aeroplane's broad wings. The roar and throb of it came to the ear. The crowd, a surface of upturned faces, cheered perfunctorily. Many were already preparing to go home. A band burst into brassy "ragtime," as the exquisite machine swept curving down and drifted to earth like a tired dragon-fly.

Before it came to a stop on its tiny wheels, a man was running across the field toward the monoplane, bawling through a megaphone. The aviator paused in the act of leaving his seat, facing the other man with a gesture of evident protest. Interest caught, the crowd halted to watch the discussion.

"His manager means to chase him up again," translated Egerton's neighbor. "Don't want to go, either!"

The aviator did not want to go, obviously. Grasping the meaning of the scene, the spectators began to applaud; whistling and clapping after the manner of an audience demanding an encore, greedy for additional entertainment. The man with the megaphone became violent in his insistence.

Egerton sat up, a bracing rush of indignation tingling through him. The brutal callousness of the crowd to the danger of their human plaything stung him to sharp disgust. But before he could plan to take action, the aviator yielded in exasperated surrender and swung himself again into his seat. There seemed to Egerton a familiarity in the poise and carriage of the man's slender, supple figure. He vaguely wondered at what other aero meet he had seen him.

"Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Laurence will give his exhibition flight, as announced," the megaphone rasped. "Time of cross-country flight, one hour and sixteen minutes. Don't miss to-night: the first moonlight aeroplane ascension made in this State."

The crash of the band mingled with the boisterous applause of the people and the explosions of the motor.

"If that man is killed, it will be murder," Egerton stated his conviction.

The driver of the next car stopped rolling a cigarette to nod at him. "You win," he agreed. "Of course, such a thing could never happen at an authorized aero meet. But what does the mob care? Why, out west I saw a mob badger an aviator into going up with a machine he knew was out of order! They bawled him out for a coward, and he couldn't stand it. He fell a thousand feet—and the mob tore the clothing off what was left of him, for souvenirs."

The monoplane had fled across the field, and was up. Against the primrose yellow sky it circled, a white moth of Brobdingnag.

The next five minutes held the spectators shudderingly content. The airman swung in giddy loops; dropped in deadly plunges from which he retrieved himself in bare time; raced and played with death.

"A new man," commented Egerton's companion. "They're the most reckless every time. I'll bet he hasn't had his first fall yet. Lord!"

The monoplane had shot down, righted itself at the last moment, and ran along the ground not far from them. All around rose sounds of starting automobiles and departing people too much occupied to applaud the toy that had stopped.

"Well, good-night," the man in the next car called, sending his machine backward out of the line.

Egerton did not answer. At that moment the aviator had stepped to the ground, removing his cap and goggles with a gesture of infinite fatigue. He was Roger de Lauria.

There was no need to ask why he had done this, not to the one who knew his family's poverty and pride. The whole story opened before Egerton like an unfolding scroll. He remembered the day when Roger's aid and skill had saved him from bleeding to death after Germain's attack, and Roger's brief explanation of that skill: he had seen something of aviation. He read the pretence of "business" which had enabled Clelia's brother to account both for absences and the money doubtless brought home.

Roger was still leaning against the aeroplane when a hand fell upon his shoulder.

"Come with me," Egerton bade brusquely.

Amazed, Roger turned, then slowly flushed like a boy detected in a fault.

"Thanks; I have a moonlight flight for this evening," he declined.

"I think not. Come to dinner with me, at least. I have driven over here, and am too played out to drive back. Can you run my car?"

"Yes, but––" He raised his head, with Clelia's proud directness of glance. "I can't break my engagement here, Egerton. I—can't afford it. My sketches never have paid; never will."

"My dear Roger, I hope you will enter into business life with me," Egerton quietly answered. "I am going to marry your sister."

So the decision was made.

CHAPTER IV.

It was characteristic of Mark Egerton that, his resolution once fixed, he neither wavered in it nor flinched from doing well the thing he hated. As a preliminary, he telephoned to the lodge and sent his Japanese servant to the De Lauria house with the message that Roger was spending the night in New York, with him. He also despatched a messenger to Clelia from the first office they found, bearing a box of roses and a few lines written on a card to the effect that her father would receive next morning the desired papers and their engagement be established.

Roger drove the car where he was directed, passive in the hands of his future brother-in-law.

"I won't say I never imagined this, because I did," he frankly told Egerton. "But—well, I kept my hands off. I think I should have liked it better if you had not so much more than we."

Egerton smiled grimly. His pride of wealth had been severely chastened. But it was not that which ached like a wound.

Over the dinner, in the dining-room of a hotel distinguished for elegance rather than ostentation—Egerton detested his music and menu blended—Roger confided a little more.

"I got into aviation because we had to have money," he related, hesitating in the unaccustomed choice of words that put aside reserve. "My father would no more think of selling our house, my mother's home, than he would of selling his sword. But he is a soldier, not a business man; he did mortgage the place long ago. Well, the interest was neglected, perhaps forgotten. Early this summer I was notified that we must pay a considerable sum by the first of the year or lose the property. I hadn't been educated to earn money, Egerton. My father had his own views for me, and enforced them." He gave a short, impatient sigh that told a history of its own, and was silent for a moment. "One day I happened to be in Palisades Park when an aviator exhibiting there called for some one to go up with him. I went, and we became friends. He was good-natured enough to teach me to fly the machine; the rest followed naturally enough. I had before learned something of gas engines and how to drive an automobile, because I was almost desperate enough to hire out as a chauffeur. But when it came to the point—I wasn't built for a servant."

"How did you fall into the hands of that slave-driver who sent you up to-day when you were already tired out?" Egerton demanded, his eyes narrowing dangerously as indignation returned. "And what possessed you to risk your life ten times in as many minutes to please that Roman mob? It was courage gone mad!"

"But there is no courage about it," Roger answered simply. "I get frightfully airsick, and I have to nerve myself up to every flight I make. That is why I do those tricks when I am up: just because I'm so furious with myself for being afraid that I take chances to feel that I won't give in. I told you the other night that I was a coward."

Egerton put his cigar in his finger-bowl and stared at his companion.

"Are you?" he drily asked. "Then, if we are so complex, perhaps I am an honest man."

Very naturally, Roger failed to understand.

"I had no money to buy and run aeroplanes, so I hired myself to a man who had," he presently completed his explanation. "He was rather a brute; just a circus speculator in sensations, not recognized by clubs or aero authorities. Of course I don't have to ask you not to tell my father or Clelia."

"No. Our suite is engaged, upstairs. Can you amuse yourself for a few hours, if I excuse myself? I have a business engagement."

"Certainly. But it's night––"

Egerton shrugged, rising.

"You have spoken of money, Roger. It has a few privileges, yes. The man who has it needs no clocks."

Roger laughed. He was profoundly excited; it could not be otherwise, since all life had altered with this marriage. But he showed no outward sign except the unusual color burning in his dark cheek.

Egerton did not take his car, but walked to the office that was to carry out his plan. A woman feeling as deeply would have eaten nothing, but he had dined and felt the physical benefit in renewed strength.

He walked slowly, watching the glittering lights and theatre-seeking crowds with a heavy sense of finality; as if he were leaving on a journey, almost as a man might who faces a term in prison and knows he can never return in the same way to the same things. Indeed, Egerton knew that he never again would face his world quite as he did to-night, before he had broken his code. There was no romance in the situation, to him; he was not lying to possess Clelia, but to protect her. And he was not of those who sin with reckless verve and laugh in the face of reproach. He had no pleasant modern doctrines of self-excuse and a personal right to happiness. In doing this thing, he suffered an intensity of feeling that changed him for the rest of his life, as heat changes crystal formations; changed even the quality of his love for Clelia.

It made no difference to him that manufactured ancestries and "family trees " were common and accepted things all over the world, so that the vanity was smilingly overlooked by general consent.

When Egerton returned to the hotel, near midnight, he briefly informed Roger that next morning he would have ready the papers to be delivered to General de Lauria.

"I should like the marriage to take place as soon as possible," he added. "Oblige me by forwarding that."

"I think that is for my sister to decide," Roger corrected a trifle stiffly, yet smiling, too.

"Naturally. But I imagine her decision would have very little effect without her father's," Egerton retorted, with a touch of bitterness.

"You've found that out?" Roger laughed. "Well, the same thing drove me to aviation; the decision was against my being anything but a soldier in the army Don Carlos is some day to form. Of course, I will do all I can, Egerton. I will talk to Clelia. By the way, I'm taking her this." He spread out an illustrated theatre circular, with a pleasant effort to dispel the other man's irritation. "Fine painting of Gérome's, that! She and I were always wild about Julius Cæsar—she'd like to see this!"

"Would she?" said Egerton. "I will get a box for Wednesday's matinée, then, if you will play chaperon for us."

Taken unawares by the matter-of-fact proposition, Roger looked up quickly, his oversensitive pride alert.

"Oh, you know––I did not mean that!" he demurred.

Egerton wheeled on him, brows coming together above his flashing gray eyes.

"Why not?" he challenged. "Your sister is engaged to be my wife; why should she not accompany me with her brother to any proper place? I do not understand you."

Astounded, Roger also rose.

"I beg your pardon," he stammered. "Of course, there is no reason. It was only—you surprised me."

"You will come?"

"Certainly."

Egerton paused, amazed at himself. But he was paying dearly for Clelia; at least, he would not be disputed in the rights so hardly bought. "It is for me to apologize," he acknowledged, scarcely less haughtily, however. "We are both over-tired, I fancy. I will say good-night."

The next day Roger carried the Egerton family's records to his father. And in return Mark Egerton received an invitation to dinner.

The guest never knew how great a concession that invitation was, or how much effort and grave thought the dinner cost his fiancée and old Martha.

welcome to his daughter's "futur." Clelia was enchanting in her evening-gown; no man could have guessed that it was her first, made by herself from a many flounced, pink tulle skirt drawn from a venerable trunk long forgotten. The roses at her belt were of more value than the costume they supplemented. But rose-color and roses harmonized with each other; with cream-and-rose skin, the sheen of chestnut hair, and the contrast of velvet dark eyes.

It was not etiquette that Egerton and his fiancée should be left alone on this occasion. But when they were on their way to the dining-room, he paused in the shadowed hall to place a ring upon her finger and raise the little hand to his lips. Roger and his father had been detained by the mislaying of the old gentleman's cane.

"Let me take you home soon," Egerton urged, under his breath. "Do not play with me; be generous. Consent to our early marriage, Clelia."

The impatient pain and appeal of his tone deeply stirred the girl, even through her happy, excited confusion of thought. Indeed, Egerton found his position intolerably false. Mortification bit into him, his disgrace confronted him at every step under this roof. He had ignored General de Lauria in making his decision, as a narrow bigot unworthy of consideration; but he had not anticipated eating the bigot's bread and salt.

They were at the dining-room door, and the other two were approaching, but Clelia lifted her shining regard to her lover's.

"Yes," she whispered, too proud for evasion, giving with both hands.

His glance thanked her, enveloped her in a gratitude acute as pain.

The dinner partook of the nature of a state function. The conversation, led by General de Lauria, was of heavy, impersonal topics. Martha waited with all the dumb respectability of the long-departed butler and his assistants. Roger alone was conscious of the party's incongruities: of Egerton's success-stamped presence in the fated house of failure; of the simple meal served upon exquisite old porcelain; of Clelia herself, playing hostess in her home-made frock, with the beautiful diamond blazing on her hand.

When Clelia left the gentlemen together, Egerton pressed his wish for an early marriage. There was no reason for delay. He had cabled to his parents, but they were established at Sorrento for the winter and probably would not wish to come home for the wedding. If they did, a week should give enough time. Two weeks was the least time possible, General de Lauria exclaimed. Egerton seizing that admission, the marriage finally was set within the next fortnight; subject to Clelia's consent.

Clelia did not fail him.

That night—Egerton's last at the lodge, since convention sent him back to his own house during the engagement—the Japanese met his master's return with a cablegram that had been received.

The message was laconic, as all from that sender.

Congratulations. Leave Black to run factory six weeks. Bring wife to see us. Mother's love.    John Egerton

Mark Egerton crushed the paper in his hand and stood looking straight before him. For the first time in his life, he did not want to see his father.

CHAPTER V.

The twelve days before the wedding passed with a fleet, crowded strangeness for all concerned. Egerton burned with a feverish energy and unrest. Unperceived, his imperious will ruled both houses. He installed Roger in the advertising department of the great manufactory, where artistic and literary abilities became commercial assets. With the salary he fixed, comfort returned to the Laurias without a charity they would have refused.

The theatre party was but one of the pleasures and drives he arranged. And he showered Clelia with gifts, until she protested.

"You make every visit a Christmas Eve," she remonstrated playfully, when he wound around her neck a chain of cut amber clear as water, from which depended a fragile, glistening fan.

"When you are my wife, I will buy you everything you fancy," he answered, with a sombre force beyond her fathoming. "There is nothing you cannot have. If you want to please me, ask me for something—anything!"

Standing before him, she looked into his eyes.

"Why?" she asked. "If you had nothing, Mark, you would be the same to me."

"But you want the rest? You want what I can give you?" he demanded, almost fiercely. "All women do! You must."

"Oh, yes, I do," she avowed honestly, with a sigh of utter content. "I shall love the frocks and furs—and satin shoes! I adore shoes." She advanced a foot truly Andalusian, arched, diminutive, round of ankle. "I can gloat over mere pictures of them. Oh, and the theatre—and the motor-cars! Imagine going to the opera in satin shoes and a motor-car! You will have a ruinously extravagant wife, Mark. May I have a tiny, fluffy white dog to hold in my lap when we drive?"

He kissed her passionately.

Of course Mr. Egerton's command to his son was to be obeyed. Mark Egerton had arranged to take his wife on the six-weeks trip to Italy as a wedding journey. After all, he preferred meeting his father again in a strange city, instead of on the hearth he felt he had dishonored.

On the twelfth day, when sunlight poured through those stained-glass windows beneath which Clelia had knelt a few weeks before, Mark Egerton met his bride at the altar of the plain little church in the woods. She had chosen the place, and the bare simplicity of the ceremony. There were no bridesmaids, no guests except old Martha and the chauffeurs of the two cars. Roger de Lauria attended Egerton. Clelia entered with her father, suiting her young steps to his lameness. But she wore the maiden's white satin and veil, and Egerton had sent her masses of heavily-sweet orange-blossoms.

There was no interruption of the marriage. It had not occurred to Egerton that there might be. But discovery of his deception was not probable, except by his father. By him, indeed, it was inevitable, unless Mark were singularly favored by chances in the years to come.

But Egerton thought of nothing except Clelia, until at last he kissed his wife; his, no longer to be held from him. What followed was merely a confused succession of events: the drive to the old house, where Clelia changed her dress and where the usual untasted breakfast was served; the farewells that drew her first tears of the day, and finally their entrance into the limousine that was to take them to New York.

Alone in the car, it was as if peace and silence abruptly succeeded long-continued tumult. After a few moments, Clelia looked at her husband from under her long lashes, up-curled like a child's; awaiting his first speech with sudden timidity and a bride's quivering doubt of the unknown.

What Egerton said was the least romantic remark possible.

"The little white dog is in our suite on the steamer," he told her. "If you don't like him, I will find another."

Enfin seules or mine own forever never were more effective. With a glad little sound that was half a sob, Clelia nestled into his arms.

"How dear of you to remember!" she cried, against his shoulder. "I love you–I love you!"

CHAPTER VI.

Mr. and Mrs. Mark Egerton returned home at the end of two months. The wedding journey had been flawless from every standpoint. John Egerton and his wife had adopted their daughter-in-law with a prompt warmth that won swift response from Clelia.

"I always told Mark to marry his wife when he found her, and bring her home," Mr. Egerton stated, at their meeting, holding both the girl's small hands enclosed in one of his. "I chose mine, and I'm no Turk that I should choose his, too. Take her from the chorus or the college, so she was the right one! But I see he and I have the same choice, after all."

"Yet he didn't take her from either," Clelia laughed, all flushed and enchantingly shy.

Mr. Egerton's keen gray eyes studied the sweet, candid face, then his glance went to his own wife.

"Neither did I," he said drily.

Mrs. Egerton and the girl met as two who found in each other a relationship until then denied; one had never known her mother, the other had coveted a daughter in all the loneliness of a woman whose men are much occupied away from her.

The first impression became fixed and deepened during the visit. Clelia was frankly delighted that her home would be with Mrs. Egerton and the burly, autocratic, iron-gray man who was so like Mark.

Mark Egerton had his emotions in those weeks in Sorrento. Too proud to ask Clelia not to speak of matters that might precipitate discovery of the manufactured ancestry, he suffered dumbly the uncertainty of when some innocent remark of hers should convict him.

But all had gone well. His father noticed no change in him for which marriage might not account; nor heeded the rare flush that reddened to his son's brow when they first clasped hands.

When he was again in their American home, now piled high with glittering snow without and ruddy with firelight within, alone with Clelia until spring should bring the return of his parents, Egerton felt his first respite and peace.

"You are glad to be back," Clelia laughed at him, the second evening. "Confess you have pined for your factories! You have been a prince in exile."

"Wandering with a fairy princess, rather," he corrected, looking at her with the grave, steady tenderness that was never to fail her. It was after dinner, and she stood straight and slim before him in her narrow pale-blue gown, beneath whose looped border of white fur showed one little foot in its "satin shoe," recalling promises kept. "But I am glad to be at work again. I was not trained to idleness."

She seated herself on the arm of his chair, slipping one round, bare arm about his neck. The little Pomeranian dog trotted over and settled beside them, resting its head against its master's foot.

"I am the happiest girl alive," she confided. "Tell me, when Mr. Black talked so long to you, this afternoon, and you looked so serious, did it mean that anything was wrong at the factory? Strikes, or something?"

"No, not that. Our business is run on the profit-sharing plan; we have no strikes. But the cost of living is very high. The men want higher pay."

"Shall you give it to them?"

"I am only the junior partner," he reminded her. "My father decides. At first, I should have refused. The men have all they can justly expect, for our expenses are greater, too. But I have been thinking; after all, we are rich and they are not. If we all received but bare justice, few of us would not ask for mercy." He gave the short, impatient sigh that had become a new habit with him. "I will write to my father."

"Mark, how did they ever call you hard?"

"They call me what I have earned, Clelia, no doubt."

Her head drooped until her bright chestnut locks touched his brown hair. Her hand in his, they lapsed into silence, watching the fire on their hearth.

Peace continued through the winter days. Roger came and went; he radiated cheer and energy, and fully earned his salary in value to his department. Clelia drove frequently to the old mansion on the Palisades, now rejuvenated to comfort and kept so by a brisk young servant installed as aid to Martha. Once General de Lauria broke his retirement to pass a week-end in his daughter's home.

And still not even a word of ancestry troubled the calm. Egerton began to feel a dawning wonder if this peace might not endure, after all. He was so happy with Clelia that optimism became natural.

Clelia was not with him the February afternoon when he met the first reminder of the autumn days he resolutely strove to ignore. He was driving through lower New York, on his way home, when the limousine was halted by a traffic officer. Egerton idly glanced out the window, and saw the cause of the stoppage in a squad of men; that wretched flotsam of the city, the unemployed who find brief work after each snow-storm in cleaning New York's choked streets. They were shovelling desperately; half-clothed, half-fed men, haggard from the biting cold.

Egerton looked at them, first with that half-contemptuous pity the successful man feels toward the failures, then with startled attention as he recognized the nearest worker. He opened the car door.

"Germain!" he summoned.

The man turned, starting and trembling; almost letting fall the shovel from his stiff hands. His light-blue eyes fixed upon Egerton in utter, cringing terror.

"Is this the best you can do for yourself?" Egerton curtly asked.

Germain moistened his cracked lips.

"I've nearly starved," he said, his voice hoarse. "It's honest! But it doesn't always snow."

Six months before, Egerton, would have tossed the other a bank-note and have driven on. Now he swung wider the door.

"Get in," he bade.

Stupefied, Germain stared. The traffic officer had raised his hand, and the limousine began to roll forward, one of a slow-moving procession. "Get in," Egerton repeated imperatively.

Germain obeyed, and sank upon the cushioned seat opposite his former employer, gazing at him in a sort of hypnosis. His poor clothing was saturated with snow-water, and he shivered constantly.

Egerton did not speak for some time. When he did so, the car was nearing the ferry to New Jersey.

"You say this work is honest; have you done any that was not?"

"No, sir. Not–not since––"

Egerton understood, and smiled grimly.

"We will ignore that, unless you force me to recall it. No one knows that you shot me, except my wife and her brother. Germain, because your father was my friend, I will give you another chance before I let you starve. I will have you fed and decently clothed to-night, and tomorrow you can have work in our shipping department. If you make good, very well. If not, I am done with you. Do you want to try?"

Germain's weak chin quivered; nothing in his knowledge of the other man had prepared him for this. Brokenly fervent, he stammered gratitude.

“I will! I–I was crazy that time! I've often seen you passing, Mr. Egerton, but never hoped you would help me–you said that–that you'd not have a liar around you."

arrogant self-sureness rose and struck him in the face. Who was he, to rate himself above this man? He turned aside to the window, and endured his bitter lesson in humility.

In humility, but not with humility. Being very human, there surged over him such a disgust and loathing for Germain that he could scarcely suffer his neighborhood. And suddenly it seemed to him that the odor of Germain's wet garments combined with the fragrance of lilies contained in a vase fixed to the limousine's wall, producing the same oppressive, suffocating atmosphere of mustiness and faint perfume as he breathed and hated in the old De Lauria house.

It was not in Egerton to break a promise either to the ear or to the hope. But when he saw Roger on the sidewalk of the village, half an hour later, he abruptly checked the car and called his brother-in-law.

After the first astonishment, Roger willingly and good-naturedly undertook the charge. Germain, secretly uneasy in Egerton's presence, accepted the new guardian with equal willingness. So Egerton drove home alone.

But the winter peace was broken, not to be reëstablished. When he entered the house Clelia ran to meet him.

"There is a cablegram for you," she announced. "I hope nothing is wrong, Mark."

He gave his coat and hat to the man, and drew Clelia's hand through his arm.

"Open it next time," he advised, smiling into the wide dark eyes. "But my father is of an impatient temperament; he never writes when a cable will do."

The message was laconic as usual. It answered a long and carefully considered letter from Egerton in regard to the factory operatives' plea for higher wages.

No advance. Refuse everything. Am returning next month.

Egerton handed the message to his wife, with a deepening of the shadow Germain had left on his expression. Next month! He had not anticipated this result.

"What will you do?" Clelia soberly asked, after reading. "The poor men!"

"As he directs, certainly. I have no choice."

She studied him, her delicate, vivid face intent.

"You are thinking of something, Mark?"

"Something, clairvoyant lady," he admitted. "If I cannot raise the men's wages to meet high prices, I might reverse the process."

"You mean––"

"Lower the prices to reach the incomes. The men buy in small quantities, so pay the highest retail cost. But I could buy wholesale from the producers, at a great saving. In short, I could run the village grocery and butcher-shop so that they would be self-supporting, yet supply the people at rates within their means."

"Splendid!" she cried, clapping her hands delightedly. "You will? You will?"

He paused.

"Yes," he said definitely. And after a moment: "They will be home next month."

Naturally, she knew he spoke of his parents.

"Two months before we expected," she nodded. "You are glad, dear?"

"Yes," said Egerton. He shivered slightly, as if the outdoor chill were still with him, and suddenly crushed Clelia to his side.

Fate had ended her truce with him. As if to mark it, the cold weather broke that evening in one of those wild, unheralded rain-storms that sweep the Atlantic coast and beat to sodden ugliness the gleaming white snow-stretches.

Curiously enough, his kindness to Germain brought about Egerton's first disaster. For Roger de Lauria's charge, warmed, fed, and clothed, talked weakly and fulsomely of his benefactor.

"He's a gentleman," he came to a climax, at last. "I don't care if he doesn't know who his grandfather was–he's a gentleman."

Roger had been listening tolerantly, while completing a sketch for a soap-powder advertisement. But at this he raised his head.

"What?" he exclaimed sharply.

"He is a gentleman."

"No doubt. What do you mean by such an outrageous statement as that he doesn't know his parentage?"

"Not his parents," Germain corrected, his vanity offended. "Everybody knows that John Egerton grew up in the next town and married the minister's daughter. But his father swung into town off a freight train, as old folks can tell you, and settled down to making soft and hard soap for the farmers' wives. No one cared enough to ask where he came from, I guess; anyhow, no one knows anything more about him than his name. He married a girl from here, too, who had a bit of a farm. But he was always cooking kinds of soap, they say; and people thought it was good stuff. I guess it was. John Egerton has made millions, building up the business his father started in 1850, in a brick outhouse. But Mark Egerton is a gentleman."

Roger laid down his pencils and walked to the window. The story carried the impress of truth; it was difficult to conceive a mistake so circumstantially narrated. No one could have looked at Germain and supposed him lying. Yet–the alternative was that Mark Egerton had lied. Roger felt the giddiness of a man whose world shakes under him. Egerton, the irreproachable, whose Lycurgian severity distinguished little difference between theft and lying, huddling together "small vices" scornfully–Egerton, to do that! Why? Roger mocked at the idea.

Why?

The answer leaped up, undesired: to obtain Clelia.

After some moments he turned to Germain.

"You had better go to bed," he said brusquely. "I am going home."

It was nearly ten o'clock, and the drenching storm was at its height. Where the snow lay too heavily to have yet been dissolved, the mass yielded underfoot, with the oozing resiliency of a wet sponge. But Roger de Lauria forced his way through wind and downpour, facing a tempest not so easily breasted. He was not going home. Instead, he went to Egerton's house.

Mr. and Mrs. Egerton had driven into New York, to the opera, the butler told him; relieving him of his dripping garments as a matter of course. Mr. de Lauria was a member of the family, whose presence was natural at all times. Declining refreshment, Roger went into the library.

The rich comfort of the room enveloped and quieted the guest; the subdued glow of light cast through wine-hued shades was warm as the glow from the deep hearth. Clelia's Pomeranian sat up in the depths of a huge leather chair and yawned with a display of pink tongue. Struck keenly with all this life had brought to his sister, Roger sat down, his high-bred, sensitive face very grave. Suddenly he was glad he had not found Egerton home.

There was an alternative. Mark or his father might have traced back the history of the grandfather, and so have established in all honesty the family records that had contented General de Lauria. The village and factory gossips might not have learned that fact. On an impulse, he rose and went to a drawer where he had seen Egerton thrust that document which had cost so much, on receiving the record from the General.

It was still there. Roger carried it to the table, under the lamp. There was nothing to show any error or deception. The line ran smoothly back, without a break. The grandfather was set down as the son of a New England divine of note. From there, the line went to England; the younger branch of a titled house long extinct. There was nothing wrong; yet the critic was not convinced, warned by some such delicate sense as that by which gem-experts are said to distinguish the false stones from the true merely in touching them.

Roger de Lauria leaned his chin in his hand, looking down at the document. He considered deliberately what he and his owed Egerton: Clelia's radiant happiness, his father's old age made comfortable and free from care, he himself rescued from his desperate, hopeless struggle against the family's ruin. He remembered the evening Egerton had found him on the aviation field. And he knew that he cared not at all whether Mark Egerton were descended from a king or a thief. No, nor whether he had once stooped to fight prejudice with deceit!

What, supposing the incredible true and that Egerton had lied–what was the best aid his brother by marriage could give him?

Eleven o'clock struck; and in due time, the half-hour. Just after midnight, the outer doors opened and reclosed, a girl's clear laugh sounded in the hall. Roger and the little dog started up together as Clelia and Egerton entered.

"Roger? How nice!" she exclaimed welcome. "We will have supper à trois. Oh, what a night!"

"It is bad," her brother agreed, still distant in thought; more intent upon her than upon her speech.

She laughed at him. She was altogether dazzling in her white and gold costume, her bright hair banded with a gold fillet from which a white plume drooped to her shoulder. The extravagant fashion of the day suited her; it was hard to believe she had ever gone clad in cotton frocks and that her little boots had been shabby.

"Bad? Glorious–where we were! Oh, I wanted to bury my face on Mark's nice, convenient shoulder and weep with such music!"

She sank down on the bench before the piano, her fingers finding the melody her fancy repeated.

"'Oh, thou divine, pure evening star,'" she sang, in her fresh, limpid voice that rippled as naturally as a brook, and was as innocent of training.

Egerton had crossed to the fireside. Now, as he turned his smiling glance from his wife to his brother-in-law, his eye was caught by the document upon the table, and he saw the hateful colors of crest and lozenge glinting under the lamplight.

Once before Roger had seen that flashing change in Egerton's face. In spite of himself, he shrank from the power of concentrated anger with which the other turned upon him.

"What are you doing with that?" Egerton demanded. Roger made the one answer which admitted no retort.

"I am sorry if you did not want me to see it. It was in an open drawer."

Egerton paused. He was accustomed to reading men, and he bent all his trained acuteness of scrutiny upon this one. Clelia's music flowed around them, smothering passion in its smooth currents. In the interval, the butler entered, marshalling the supper array.

Roger de Lauria was Latin enough to be inscrutable when he chose. Egerton had convicted himself, but the other made no sign. Instead, he turned to Clelia and lightly arrested her fingers as they fled across the keys.

"Little sister, ask Mark to let me share his bread and salt," he said. "I have offended him."

The request was playfully spoken, but Egerton moved and changed color. He recognized that if Roger suspected him, his anger had proved him guilty. If it were so, and Roger still asked to be his guest––

"If you care to stay, you are welcome," he slowly gave the invitation.

"Thank you. Then, I will stay," Roger accepted.

Amused and surprised, Clelia had risen, and now went over to take her place at the supper-table. The two men exchanged an indefinable regard, as they followed her. A stranger would have reversed their positions, for Egerton's glance was coldly steadfast, even stern, while Roger's dark eyes fell and took shelter behind their lashes like a woman's.

CHAPTER VII.

Mark Egerton looked long at the message brought to his breakfast-table.

"You must go alone," Clelia bravely repeated, although her lip quivered childishly with disappointment. "Your father and mother must not come home for the first time since our marriage, to find an empty house."

"It could not be more awkward. I have never left you alone, Clelia."

"I know, dear. But–but we must. I can ask Roger to stay with me while you are in Chicago."

Roger? He bent his head. Did Roger know, or did he not? That was the question which had beat like a pulse in Egerton's tired brain. If the first, what was he doing—what would he do? Would he tell his sister? Certainly he had not yet done so. To Egerton's puritanical judgment, it was not possible that Roger could ignore the thing.

He had forgotten his watcher. Suddenly Clelia was beside him, leaning against his shoulder.

"What is it, Mark? You would rather I did not have Roger? Dear, something is wrong! You have changed."

"I? No!" he exclaimed, almost fiercely, crushing her fragrant softness to him. "Will you, Clelia? Can you change? Once you put me off for duty–your family––"

She stopped him, deep southern eyes open to his. "You are my duty–my family–all. I am yours, your woman. Mark?"

He hid his eyes against her breast, as some time their children might do, but he did not confess.

So when a blast of March wind, a masterful voice raised in commands, and the slam of baggage announced the John Egertons' arrival, Wednesday morning, Clelia came alone down the stairs to give welcome.

Mr. Egerton gathered his son's wife into his arms and kissed her with assured kinship.

"Prettier than ever," he approved. "What's this, Mark in Chicago and you here? Tired of each other, eh?"

"I was to go," she refuted the insinuation, turning to Mrs. Egerton. "But you and Mamma were coming––"

"And you stayed to welcome the old folks?" His keen, naturally stern gray eyes softened as he looked at the girl-woman. "Think of that, Grace: we've got a daughter who stays home for us while our son goes gadding over the country! What is all this nonsense I hear about Mark? Turning philanthropist, is he? Are you responsible for that? It will make trouble."

"Oh, no," she disclaimed warmly. "It is Mark who is so kind to the men that I am quite sure they never would make trouble or strike."

"Strike!" echoed the master, in a tone that shook the chandelier. His face hardened like chilling metal. "Let them try it. I am going to see Black."

"But indeed there is no trouble," she pleaded in dismay. "And it is time for luncheon."

"And you stayed home to give it to us, and I was leaving you," Mr. Egerton added, relaxing. "Well, later, then."

But the scene had suggested an idea to Clelia. Could anxiety as to his father's attitude toward the new methods have caused Mark's growing depression? She resolved that she would relate all to Mrs. Egerton, and secure an ally in her for Mark and his men.

The opportunity came after luncheon, when the two ladies retired to the agreeable task of having trunks and gifts unpacked.

Mr. Egerton came upon the exhausted ladies at five o'clock, when he swung into his wife's room. Clelia, clad in an amazing gold-colored negligée brought from Vienna and crowned by a tasselled cap of Venetian seed-pearl work, her lap filled with a varied collection of souvenirs, sat on a cushion with her head against Mrs. Egerton's knee.

"Don't scatter," Mr. Egerton advised. "I ought to be one of this group."

"John," said his wife, pink-cheeked with the pleasure of this new companionship, "I never had any one to pet before. You know I always wanted a girl."

"We've got her," he returned, lowering his large frame into a chair. He looked across to the girl's questioning dark eyes. "Well, I've seen Black, gone over the factories and through the village. Mark is all right. The business is in good shape, and his shops do support themselves. But"—his face abruptly lost its geniality, hardening to contempt—"Germain is back, Grace. I saw him skulking about, peering out at me. Mark chose to give him another chance, it seems."

"You did not dismiss him, John?" Mrs. Egerton anxiously deprecated. "He was very young."

"My son's word is my word,” her husband answered, with a rugged dignity. "Since Mark took him, he stays. But it's the first time I've had a proved liar in the place. Clelia, your brother and I had a long talk. I like him. He'll be head of his department in six months. We drove up to call on your father, and they will both be here to dinner to-morrow night. Mark will be home by then I heard from him."

So all was well, and Mark was coming home. All the evening, while she played or chatted, Clelia held that undercurrent of thought. It was like the lilt of some gay little refrain, setting all her world to music.

Before she went to bed, she sat for a long time, holding the three-sided, leather-framed mirror of famous memory. She fancied, dreaming awake, that those days of betrothal and first love were like the rising of a beautiful, rapid brook that rushed with vehement eagerness, sun-shot and full of sound. But now the brook had flowed into the lake, clear and still, and deep beyond all measuring.

CHAPTER VIII.

One dinner-guest came early. It was scarcely twilight and not quite the hour when Mark Egerton was expected to arrive, when General de Lauria was established in the library.

He was engaged in stately conversation with his host. The two men possessed a curious interest for each other. Not widely apart in years, they were yet of different periods, of different worlds; opposed in training, in prejudices, even in standards. It was strange to both to find even conversation in common.

A steel and inlaid helmet brought home by the travellers at last furnished a theme upon which to meet.

"It is Milan work, of the sixteenth century," the General fixed authoritatively, handling the piece with zest. "Bayard might have worn it, or the Gran Capitán. It has seen service; here it is dented, and here a spear ran through. Some gentleman had his death-wound in this. His foe had the motto of your house, Mr. Egerton: 'Gare mon bras!' He struck heavily."

"There are no mottoes for my house. But we're hard hitters, too," said Mr. Egerton drily.

"Pardon me, sir; my memory cannot be so weak. That is the legend given with your coat-of-arms in the papers your son sent me at the time of his marriage. Clelia, you remember?"

"Yes, Father," Clelia replied, from her seat near a window overlooking the entrance. "I am quite sure it was as you say."

John Egerton looked from one to the other, amazed and puzzled. "There is some mistake," he asserted. "Mark could have sent no such thing, for it does not exist."

"I saw it, Mr. Egerton," the other insisted, no less assured. "It is on your family records–your family tree."

"There are no such things."

"If there had not been, sir, your son could not have married my daughter," retorted the General, striking his palm on the arm of his chair. "He knew that when he sent me the documents."

There was a pause.

"The documents?" Mr. Egerton repeated, past anger. "The documents?"

Clelia had risen. With the one thought of defending Mark, she hurried to the drawer where the record had been flung the night of Roger's examination. Coming between the men, she triumphantly dropped the proof upon the table and snapped on the lamps.

Rustling and crackling, the parchment unrolled. John Egerton bent over it, and read.

All day Clelia had watched for her husband, but she did not hear his arrival now. Unwarned, intent on finding his wife, Mark Egerton threw off his wraps with an eager impatience that took note of nothing. A maid opened the library door, and he walked into the presence of the court of honor.

Clelia started forward with a cry of welcome and relief, but her father-in-law threw out his arm and put her back.

"Not now," he forbade.

Mark halted. All his life he remembered that impression of the warmly-lighted room, the group facing him, the document he had bought and hated again outspread upon the table. He was not a coward; he came forward, but with the color suddenly wiped from his face.

"Mark, this man and your wife say you are responsible for this forged cheat," Mr. Egerton opened, his voice hoarse from the restraint forced upon it, "that you used this trick to get her. Is it true?"

He expected a denial; in the face of all proof, that expectation was plain in his eyes. And the son knew his denial would be believed against the evidence of the world. But there never had been anything but truth between these two; there never would be.

"Yes," Egerton answered, very quietly.

There was a silence of utter incredulity. John Egerton leaned forward, his gray eyes fixed on the gray eyes so like them, his face suddenly quite gray and lined.

"You put our name, the name I made and kept clean, to that lie? It wasn't good enough? You, Mark Egerton, pieced together these tawdry rags and hung them on us–to get a woman?"

Mark's eyes did not fall, although the biting accusation, stripped of every excuse, drove the color to his cheeks in two red spots. He said nothing. It was not possible that he should bare here the netted mesh of feeling which had entangled him; make indecent exposure of the compassion, the desire to protect, the tenderness so far removed from reckless passion.

"It is true, sir? You obtained my daughter under false pretences?" General de Lauria's thin voice broke the pause; the words stammered with violent agitation. "You deceived me—deceived her into a marriage we should have refused."

With a cry Clelia ran to her husband, clasping both small hands over his arm and lifting her face to him.

"No!" she denied passionately. "Mark, I thank you for taking me. I thank you for marrying me before I knew, so that I have the right to be yours. Mark, dear Mark, I will give all I can, all I owe–where you go, I will go; as you live, I will live, and honor you all my life. Oh, you others!" She faced the judges, splendid in defiance. "How can you know him, yet not know he did that–not to 'get the woman, but because the woman loved him? Mark"–she turned impetuously to him and hid her burning face against the arm she clasped–"never was a daughter of my house so honored in her marriage-day as I."

The room was left silent.

"Gentlemen," Mark said, when he could command his voice, "you will excuse me while I take my wife to her room."

"Were we in my country, sir, I should take her to my house," flung General de Lauria, his lean, trembling fingers gripping his cane.

"I think not," was the coldly steady reply. "To my father, I have no answer. To you, I will say that I took this way to defend your daughter only when I found your idle prejudice of birth making a prison-wall around her. Idle, sir"–as the other would have spoken. "For, whether I was or was not fit to be your daughter's husband, that parchment record could not have changed me. And you had already declared me fit as a man."

"You lied," reiterated Mr. Egerton, unstirred.

"Yes," his son agreed, as laconically. He looked down at Clelia's bent head, and gently drew her a step toward the door.

Before they reached it, his mother rose from a seat half-hidden by the window curtains and took Clelia into her own arms.

"Give me my girl, Mark," she bade. "And, John, do you overcome your sinful pride!"

Amazed, John Egerton stared at her. The matron in evening-gown and jewels had reverted to her church-bred youth, and spoke as the country clergyman's daughter he had married.

"Grace!" he rebuked.

She confronted him fearlessly, in the rebellion of the gentle. "John, I've done as you bade for thirty-six years. I want you to listen now. For I know! Mark, a year ago would you have done the good you did this winter? When before did you make the troubles of the men your own? When did you lend your time to manage shops so your men might be better fed, or plan to buy coal for the village with that for the factories so that the houses might be better warmed? Before you had yourself done wrong, would you have showed pity to the boy Germain? You have been hard men; so sure of your own righteousness that you had no mercy. Do you remember ten years ago, John, when you closed the factory in midwinter? I pleaded with you, but you would not listen. You were right and the men were wrong; you said they suffered what they earned. Mark would not do that now. John, John, Mark will be a better man than you have ever been, because he has been taught. God does not put us on earth to make no mistakes, but to learn from them."

It is not the woman recognized as forceful who can be the most impressive. Both men were startled and profoundly stirred by the rising of this household judge, so loving and so loved. To Mark Egerton, it seemed that he saw into himself as one sees a dark landscape by a lightning-flash. He had learned humiliation; now he bent his head and learned humility.

As if abashed at the new prominence into which she had been swept, Mrs. Egerton had retreated to a couch and seated herself, drawing the awed Clelia down beside her. John Egerton looked attentively at her, then at his son. He was not a man of much imagination, but now that he used his eyes he saw on Mark's face the writing of this experience: the line between the brows, the weariness of eyes and mouth, and the gravity that had become constant. He was not softened, but he comprehended Mark better.

"First, burn that," he required curtly, motioning toward the table. Without a word Mark took the false record and dropped it into the open fire. At least, the Egertons were united in hatred of that emblazoned cheat.

In the pause, the closing of the heavy outer door was heard by all. The last dinner-guest had arrived. Almost at once the library door opened and Roger de Lauria was in the room.

His first regard as he came across the floor was caught by the blazing hearth and blackening parchment.

"I am late!" he exclaimed, holding out his hand to Mark Egerton. His vivid glance flashed over the group. "I hope, not too late."

Courtesy to his hostess, combined with an outraged wrath whose violence suffocated speech, had held General de Lauria dumb. But now he pulled himself erect, rigid with passion.

"Roger, this man–this man––"

Roger raised his hand, checking the outburst. His dark face was glowing.

"Wait, sir," he besought. "Only wait! I know. Mark, don't bend your frown on me; I chanced to learn, quite by accident, last month. And—well, I wanted to help you. Let me finish, please. I saw your genealogical expert. He told me that the record was made in good faith. He said that he was not a faker, but an investigator; if he had not believed the record true, he would not have offered it to you, Mr. Egerton, years ago. But you would have nothing of it."

"Then, nor now," said John Egerton grimly.

"You cannot help what is, sir," Roger retorted. "The man got out his papers and showed me. The link missing, Mr. Egerton, was the proved identification of your father with a younger son of the Reverend Ethan Mark Egerton, who ran away from home early in life. You see how probable–the name is not a common one. Well, I set out on the back trail. I enlisted Germain to help me, Mark. It is really he who has done this; I never saw a man work so hard. And we succeeded. We found an old tradition that the first Egerton had spoken of living in Trenton. It was true. We traced him from there, where he worked in a chemist's shop, step by step back to New England and the school from which he had been expelled for causing an explosion by taking chemicals to his room. That was the clue, always; his chemistry, of which his perfected soap was one development. The record you bought last autumn was your own."

General de Lauria uttered an ejaculation of boundless relief, sinking back into his chair exhausted by emotion. Clelia was already across the room and in her brother's arms, Mrs. Egerton following her.

Only Mark and John Egerton were left looking into each other's eyes with one ironic question in common: what had this to do with the matter?

But it was all in all to the others. And before gratitude and relief could become embarrassing, the situation was drawn into the safe waters of the prosaic: Williams drew aside the curtains and announced dinner. The three words came like a breath of outer air across the heated atmosphere of a theatre. The soldier rose first to the duty of courtesy.

"I am happy in this"—General de Lauria recovered stately composure. "Very happy! But my instinct in such matters is seldom at fault. Let us forget past unpleasantness. Mrs. Egerton, allow me the honor––"

She laid her plump hand on her guest's arm, and they led the way.

"Mark, it is all over," Clelia breathed, lifting her earnest face to him. "Dear, you will never be troubled now! All is right."

He kissed her.

"Go with Roger," he urged gently. "I must change these travelling clothes."

She obeyed, with a happy backward glance that was a caress.

"Is all right, Mark?" drily asked Mr. Egerton, behind him. Mark turned, almost savagely.

"No," he flared. "Do you think I can be made honest by accident, sir? You have said it: I lied. Well, I am not a hypocrite; I shall live happily, no doubt. But it will never be the same."

John Egerton nodded slowly. Then, and then only, he stretched forth his hand to his son.