-Bessie John threw her head back"then I'll tell.”

"Tell what?" Mrs. Williston's voice was sharp.

"Your family-about your annuity." "My annuity? What do you mean?" Mrs. John folded her arms and stood very straight. "I admit that it's only a shrewd guess. But I have put a lot of things together, and I'm pretty sure. Anyhow, your family could jolly well find out-and they would."

She loathed such talk, really; but, most of all just then, she loathed Aunt Blanche. "All I mean is that Miss Wheaton is to be left in peace." The words were firm, but she ended with a tired sigh.

"If you think it would grieve Cordelia ..

"I see you get me, Aunt Blanche. Good-bye.' And this time Bessie turned her back. But she rang for the parlormaid, and saw, across the twilight of the big room, the servant go with Mrs. Williston to her cab.

"Woo-oof!" she murmured as she saw the cab drive away. There was immeasurable disgust in her tone.

"Philip!" He loomed at the top of the staircase as she mounted. "Next time, I will let you come down. Or rather, if Annie can't learn always to say 'out' to Aunt Blanche, she'll have to go. New York might as well have open sewers as to have that woman at large.'

Arm in arm they went back into Bessie's room.

"What's the trouble?"

"Not precisely. That is, I didn't ravish her ears with any details. I simply couldn't: they would have delighted the old woman so. Her mouth was the greediest thing, while she waited."

"You know I don't believe, Bess"John meditated amid smoke-spirals"that your delightful Aunt Blanche really has pornographic tastes. I don't understand you: you 'Aunt Blanche' her, and then you call her the devil in person."

"Pornographic tastes? Um-perhaps not. She'd be just as pleased with delirium tremens. That's why I hate reformers: they have such catholic lusts. Any evil, almost, will satisfy them. Of course, if the world weren't rotten, they'd lose their blessed jobs, and they know it. Aunt Blanche isn't capable of anything except reforming the world. I never saw a reformer yet who would be trusted to do anything in a world that was decent already. They'd be supported by the state as incompetents. Aunt Blanche couldn't make herself normally useful in any capacity whatever: she hasn't the wit. Therefore she is given the thunderbolts of Jove to play with."

"As usual, my dear girl, you're far too sweeping."

"Of course I am. No fun, if you don't state your position with violence. But I told her she ought to get down on her knees to old Walter Leaven," Bessie finished resolutely.

"Why?" Philip John was quiet and curious.

"Because"-Bessie drew a deep breath

"Miss Wheaton? But-" Philip John

burst into laughter.

"Ah?"

threaten her in the end."

"How did you manage it?" "Told her I'd accuse her, to her family, of an annuity."

"But you don't know if she has one." "I didn't. But I do now. Because she crumbled at once. And I hinted to her that we all had good cause to be grateful to Walter Leaven. She ended by wanting to know all about Julie Fortthat little rotter."

"Did you tell her the girl had gone utterly to the bad?"

stuck to it. I would never have done one bit more than I planned to do that day in Mr. Reid's office. Never. But it wouldn't have looked nice. No, it wouldn't. I can't agree with you any farther than that. But just so far, I do. Thank heaven, it isn't an issue now. But probably I owe it to you to say that, to that extent-it isn't very far, by the way -I'm with you. I don't want to discuss it-not ever, Philip. Not now, even. We'll drop it right there."

John searched her eyes with his own.

"Right there? Sure you don't want to go a little farther?"

"Perfectly sure. So sure that I'm inordinately grateful to Mr. Leaven. It would have been beastly for both of us." "Why isn't it still rather beastly, if we don't agree?"

"Because we don't have to discuss it. And on every other point in the world we do agree, don't we? So we can drop it out of sight-like Catholics who marry Protestants and live happily ever after. Some do, you know."

Philip John smiled, very gently and tolerantly. Then he let the whole question slip forever into the limbo of events that never come to birth.

"It would make me very miserable to quarrel with you, Bess. I'm with you in hoping we shall never have to. After all, married folk can't afford it."

"And after all'"-she pleaded with him a little "is there any honor in human relations more vital than the honor of marriage and of parenthood? If there is, I can't see it, that's all."

Philip John patted her hand gently, but did not reply. Bessie, too, hushed her instinct for perfection, swathing it in a rich robe of compromise. That was all she could do, she saw quite clearly. And who should say the richness of the robe was not, in its way, true homage to the sleeping creature? Well-so far as she could contrive it, the sleeping creature should lie in state. She returned the pressure of her husband's hand. "I'm going up to the nursery," she said. "Better come along."

IX

THE view from Walter Leaven's rooms grew, in a sense, more sordid as spring advanced. The windows of the poor, hermetically sealed in winter, opened as the cold moderated. Heads and mattresses, milk bottles and green groceries, peopled the window-sills anew. Here and there, through larger openings, machinery and its servants were revealed to him. But he found his repayment in a lifted sky, remoter, bluer, and in a freer air, friendly, not yet grown brutal with heat.

He had rented a third room, across the hall, to go with his own two-a cheerless

little apartment that never held a tenant long. Of this he made his own bedroom, furnishing his former chamber for Cordelia Wheaton. When he learned from Jim Huntingdon's long cablegram that Miss Wheaton was really ill, he had gone about his feverish arrangements. He did not know in what shape he might find her, but he took it that he was to receive her from Huntingdon at San Francisco, and to bring her home to die of her slow heartaffection-without, he hoped, too much pain. Leaven had told Mr. Reid, on the very day of the abortive conference, that Cordelia's support was to be his affair and his only. She might be given to understand what Mr. Reid liked, but not a penny should come to her from any of that crew.

"Of course, I should have given most of it myself," Reid had growled, "but I wasn't going to tell them so."

"I know, I know. I should have been sure of it. But this is exclusively my affair," Leaven had replied quietly. The lawyer knew a resolve when he saw one, and he did not attempt to change Leaven's mind. That was a mineral substance, not easily impressed.

When Leaven received Cordelia from Huntingdon's kind, impatient hands, he saw how well he had guessed. It was plain that Cordelia must be accompanied through the remaining months; that her vagueness must find guiding hands on every side. The shred of her wealth that he possessed (though he had kept it intact, like a relic) would not suffice to such a household as she would need if the guiding hands were to be mercenary ones. Still less should the hands be those of the old sempstress Mrs. Williston had mentioned-irreverent, with claws inset. . . . Yes, he would take her to himself. He would bring her home, with no flourish, with a quiet taking for granted of the situation which must convince. Luckily he had time to learn, in the few hours between Huntingdon's arrival and his return, by another ship, to the passionate and sacred continent-Miss Wheaton was aware of her own physical condition. An American doctor in Hong Kong had looked her over and reported explicitly. He had only to provide for her comfort as relentlessly and uncommunicatively as a trained nurse.

He had brought her, then, to his highperched rooms, but not as a burden; as if, rather, the rooms had been merely waiting through her exile; as if the crowded objects had been heirlooms of her own. A little maid-servant came in by day to wait on Cordelia and fetch and serve her food. It was like purveying for a crippled bird: a little water, a few grains of corn. Leaven stuck to his dreary boardinghouse. A nurse slept at night in the big sitting-room.

And what of Cordelia Wheaton? Leaven himself could not guess what lay beneath her quietness. Not once had she questioned; not once had she protested; and he hardly knew whether she had cynically grasped the situation, or whether she was too sunk in fatalism to wonder or whether she merely had the finest manners in the world. Whichever it was, it was clear that she trusted him; that she was willing, if not content, to let him be her go-between with the world. Did the gray hue of death strike inward to her very heart? He could not say. He drew her sometimes to talk of life in Benares: its strange mingling of conventual and private mysticism; but she was unready with detail, over-dainty, it seemed, for concreteness. Faint implications of a point of view were there; hints of hierarchies no Occidental could recognize, and yet of a democracy positively biologic, which ignored not only classes but species. She did not preach; she only assumed and, ever so faintly, alluded. "Snake and man"-thus he had once summed up her blasphemy against civilization. Yet how gracefully she avoided insulting his humanism, save with the deep crease of her smile! She was a very great lady, in spite of all. Sometimes they drifted into reminiscence: like a pedlar, he would pull something out of the pack of their past and try to catch her eye with its glitter. But her effort was too painful: chronology fretted her like a lie not to be borne. She had already pricked the fallacy of time; soon she would have done with that of space. Her heart grew weaker as the spring came on, as if justifiably revolting against the burden of flesh it must vitalize. Leaven gave sharp directions to the doctor to save her pain. He suspected too vividly what she thought of pain! Moreover, for him, it

was the arch-enemy. He wished her to float out on a stream of diffused consciousness-which should widen to unconsciousness at the last, as a river widens to the sea. He craved for her all possible amenities of dissolution. He did not even ask her to welcome the spring as it floated in through their wide-flung windows. He only hugged to himself the fitness of her dying in a gentler air. He conspired with nurse and physician for opiates cunningly spaced, that there should be no agonies, that she should slip from one oblivion of pain into the next. Cordelia sat in her great chair, pillowed and propped into the semblance of antediluvian bulk, an object so monstrous as to take his breath away when he entered after an absence: vast, shapeless, white, like a primeval foreshadowing of the human race to be. Yet her voice, when it came, was sweet, and her eyes kind as no other eyes had ever been.

It was not the way he had dreamed of having Cordelia, in the days when he had dreamed and his heart was not sapless or his face like burnt-out slag. (Not bronze, as Bessie John had said, since bronze has blood within.) Yet Walter Leaven was happier to have her thus than he could have been to have her any time these thirty years. He had forgotten now the long ache of empty hands. It had been vouchsafed him, before she died, to serve her: to appease a lifelong craving, long since grown formal, yet still there as a sense of incompleteness, of a step in the dance not taken. His relation to her was all piety and old convention; as empty of passion as the beautiful genuflections of an acolyte.

Suddenly, one afternoon in mid-March, she spoke to him very shyly. "You loved me, didn't you, Walter?"

"I have always loved you."

"But not now?" she asked anxiously. "No-not now."

And she closed her eyes, reassured. The little passage was not grotesque to Walter Leaven, for he understood.

It had been months now since any one had been admitted to Cordelia except the doctor and the nurses. Mr. Reid, Mrs. John, Mrs. Williston, Miss Bean-all of them had been turned away and now came no more. Cordelia asked no questions about her beneficiaries. It caressed

some surviving vanity in Leaven that the only human relation she should have referred to spontaneously was his to her. The others were lost in that mist of kindness which was settling each day a little more impenetrably upon her soul. For it was a mist, through which the lamps shone ever fainter and fewer. Morphine took care of that, since a point of light would now be a point of pain.

April was a veiled month. The sun rode higher and more kindly, and Leaven, as I have said, could see from his windows life returning to the world. But within the grayness deepened. The sound of that difficult breathing kept on through the days and nights, incessant, natural as a hidden watercourse close at hand. When Leaven went forth into the streets, he missed it at the heart of the din. He was neither impatient nor sad. He would not have hastened or delayed Cordelia's death by the lifting of a secret finger. She must not suffer: of that he would make sure. But the thought of her passing brought no relief. He was consciously under no strain. What he had wanted had been vouchsafed him; and the months would not add to the gift. Nothing else, ever in all his life, could happen to him now.

Yet when the doctor told him the next days would see the end, he bestirred himself a little from his peace. He must be there at hand, every moment, lest in some last lucid instant she should wish to speak to him. He knew that the final unconsciousness would come before the heart stopped beating, and he drugged himself with coffee that he might not sleep at all. The doctor's advice he brushed aside as he would have rejected a spurious painting. He sat for hours, listening to the raucous familiar breathing, watching her closed eyelids.

On this day of late April, the sun was driving a level band of light through the western windows. He motioned to the nurse not to draw the curtain. The light was not yet upon Miss Wheaton's face, and something in his tradition craved sunlight for her at the end. As he bent over her, never taking his eyes from her closed eyelids, his mind went straying a little. He thought of the beneficiaries-all those people to whom this

woman here had given the key of the fields. He was glad they would not know the moment of her passing that they were so utterly barred out from knowledge of her. Then it came to him, with a slow insistent rush of conviction, that he himself was still in Cordelia's debt. Nothing he had done for her in this season of slow dying could equal the beauty of her complete abandoning of herself to his care. She had not troubled him with thanks, with questions, with deprecations. She had not even-oh, blessed abstention!-stated her case. She had taken him as simply as one takes God. She had been beautiful, that is, without intention; because to the very core of her, no matter what grotesqueries of creed overlaid her spirit, as grotesqueries of flesh overlaid her pure heart, she trusted him. She was unconscious of charity, whether hers or his, thereby creating a charity that he could never match.

Never? The sun turned its wide finger of light upon her eyes. They opened into what must have been to her relaxed vision, a great golden mist. Some early irrelevant moment of her life resumed her in her weakness.

"Heaven?" she murmured.

Leaven bent his face close to hers, passionately careful not to touch her or to intercept the sun.

"Nirvâna," he murmured back, with a lingering clearness. "Nirvâna." It was with no passion of sympathy, no blur of emotion, that he spoke. Leaven had never been colder than when he grasped, ostensibly, the hoarded sum of his contempt and flung it down there in the sunlight, to pay his debt. "Nirvâna,” he repeated, deliberate, insistent as a mesmerist.

The faintest smile, as if some little, some infinitesimal thing had been set straight, brushed across Cordelia's mouth. The sacrifice of his lips' integrity had not been made in vain. She had touched and remitted. . . . Then her eyes closed again, and the nurse, at a gesture from him, drew down the shade.

An hour later, in the twilight, the head dropped, and the breathing, long since almost inaudible, turned to silence. The nurse nodded; and Leaven rose.

NE does forget, doesn't one, in this individualistic, egotistical age, the essential fact that the plans of the gods, no matter how upsetting they may seem at first, have continuity and in the end bring ultimate good? We are so impatient; we have become so little willing to abide the final happening. So it was that in the beginning I resented bitterly the scurvy trick fate had played on Mansfield Carston; so it was that in the beginning I resented with not much less bitterness that I should first have become cognizant of this trick during my one month of a long-anticipated holiday. Only recently, with increasing perspective, has a sense of method back of all this occurred to me; a realization that perhaps if I had not been on a holiday, had not come straight from a lonely country, where one's senses grow

keener, the fine shades of the drama I witnessed might have been lost upon me. City dwellers apprehend things by their width; the dweller in lonely places apprehends them by their sharpness. Only.recently, too, has it begun to dawn upon me that possibly, after all, Mansfield Carston has not lost everything; instead, that he may have gained much. Already, in actual production, in the painting of lovely pictures that will not be forgotten, he had accomplished greatly; whether he had accomplished patience, whether he had accomplished that fine inner sense of things without which in the end achievement to the person who achieves is but a crippled hawk, brooding dissatisfaction, I cannot say. I do not think he had. Has he learned by now? And if he has, is his personal gain commensurate with the loss to the world? These are difficult questions to answer. I shall go