“Did you order the coal for the furnace yesterday?”

“No, by George! I forgot it.” Mr. Laurence half paused, his tall figure arrested in the act of putting on his overcoat in the front hall, to which his wife had followed him, napkin in hand, from the breakfast table.

“Oh, Will! and I told you the day before, so that you’d have plenty of time.” Mrs. Laurence’s brows expressed tragic disappointment, her tone, if affectionate, was despairing. “I never saw any one like you, you never remember a thing I ask you to, any more. You don’t seem to have a mind for anything but that old law business. You’ll have to order the coal this morning.”

“But, Nan”—Mr. Laurence, with his overcoat on and hat in hand, bent his fine, thin face over his watch. “I don’t see how I can, possibly; I’ve an appointment in town, and I must go around by Herkimer Street on my way to the station to see if Lalor’s got the papers he promised me.”

[104]

“I thought you were going there to-night.” Mrs. Laurence held the door-knob fast.

“I am, but I want the papers first. Couldn’t you send one of the maids to order the coal?”

“Yes, I could, but I won’t,” said his wife. Her dark eyes flashed, her tone had the conscious defiance of the loved woman, who can trade on her charm enough to be belligerent if she feels like it. “It’s got to the place where I see to every single article we eat or wear or use in this house but the coal! And I just won’t order that. I told you about it three days ago and we must have it this morning, with all this snow on the ground, whether it makes you late for your appointment or not.”

“Then let me go now,” said Mr. Laurence tersely, putting aside the arms with which she sought to encircle him as he swooped hastily over to kiss her on his way out. The open door let in a rush of cold air, as almost visibly keen and sparkling as a scimitar, that clove the lungs for a moment, before it was closed behind him, and his wife went back to the breakfast table where her ten-year-old son awaited her to glean the information about his history lesson which he should have looked up for himself the day[105] before. It was, perhaps, the trouble with Mrs. Laurence that her brightness and her intelligence served to help only by taking the whole burden of a thing upon herself; it might be indeed the reason why Mr. Laurence’s official duties in the household had dwindled down to the ordering of coal, and the minor courtesy of getting a glass of water for her himself before she went to bed; it might be because she had never been able to see him do anything without doing it too. In the days when he had ostensibly locked up for the night she always followed around after him to see that the windows and doors were really bolted, so that gradually he left it all to her; if he poked the fire she snatched up the poker from where he had laid it to do the work over again. If he were sitting down she carried her own chair near the lamp rather than draw his attention to her need. Yet, sometimes, she had begun to have a little hurt feeling that he let her do so much. As to this matter of the coal—she could have sent Teresa to Harner’s, of course—it was before that revelling era of house-to-house telephoning on the Ridge—yet even at the thought she stiffened a little. There are certain unnoticed beams and girders that hold up an edifice; if one of these is out of plumb the whole building sags.

[106]

If Will really refused to order the coal he couldn’t be quite her Will any more.

Mr. Laurence, leaving the house, had debated momently in which of two opposite directions he should proceed, then he turned up Herkimer Street; to get the papers from Lalor was part of that “business” which, to a man, comes first. The air did not mellow after that initial plunge into it, it became almost unbearably keen not only in the blue shadows that lay along the freezing snow, but even where the sunshine set it glittering. Half of the walks were shovelled to make a narrow, icy pathway, but where there were unoccupied lots the drifts lay white and high, broken only by the deep leg-prints of commuters. As he strode swiftly on men shot from several houses; a very fat man, a tall one, a short one, their black figures sprinting madly in line across the white expanse towards the sound of a train slowing into the station.

Mr. Laurence’s brows contracted unconsciously—he ought to be on that train himself. If it were not for getting that paper from Lalor—the case was an important one, a good deal of Mr. Laurence’s future depended on it; he had taken it up rather against the advice of his closest friends, they thought it would be impossible to win it, but[107] he had that little inner conviction, that intangible sense of mastery that often spells success. It gave him a nervous power that on occasion seemed to have no end, but just because it was a matter of highly strung nerves a tiny obstruction jarred them out of use; the tension was gone beyond immediate recall—it might take hours or days even to get the instrument back to that pitch—it might never get there. It was sometimes almost in the nature of self-preservation when he shut himself off from the minor pressure, the minor affairs. In this present instance, as he strode along his mind was bent on Lalor, whose former subordinate connection with the incriminated corporation seemed to have been forgotten by every one but himself. Lalor was a shifty, uncertain genius, not to be depended on, yet from whom some central facts would have to be wrested; the trouble was to keep hold of him; he required constant bolstering up.

“Why, Mrs. Lalor!”

Laurence stopped short as he nearly collided with a very slight woman, blown at him at the turn of the corner by a sweeping gale that devastated the sunshine. “Here, turn around for a moment until that blast is over.”

He steadied her where she stood panting[108] and breathless, looking down at the top of her light-blue chiffon hat, which had rather a pale and chilly early-morning effect in connection with a tight-fitting tan jacket. In lieu of furs she wore a white, pink-flowered silk scarf tied around her throat, the long fringed ends depending below her waist. Her figure was that of a young girl, but when she raised her small, long-chinned face you saw that she was considerably older; there were innumerable fine wrinkles around her pretty eyes—which had a soft haze over them, as if she had cried a great deal—and her abundant fair hair seemed a shade or two lighter than any nature could have intended it. She had an indescribable effect of artificiality counteracted rather appealingly by something bright and courageous in her gaze. Opinion halted about Mrs. Lalor, who, as a Southern woman was not only alien in habit to the Northern community to which she had lately come, but was also looked upon debatingly by the small society of Southerners in the place, usually hospitably ready to welcome any one from home.

It was unquestionable that she came of a good family, which counted for very much, but it was rumoured that she had married against the family wishes. No one knew anything of Mr. Lalor—who, in appearance,[109] was a tall, handsome man with a drooping, reddish-brown mustache—except that he was unpleasingly dissipated and always in difficulties; it seemed to discredit his wife in some way that she lived with him. She had, besides a little flirting, attractive manner to men, a sort of an echo of past belleship, which might have been all right if she had a nice husband, but was felt to be a little stepping over the line when she hadn’t. A few women averred that there was something in her that they really liked, of whom tender-hearted little Mrs. Ramsey was one, and her neighbour, Mrs. Laurence another. The latter was by nature both generous and romantic, and with an unselfish, intelligent insight into lives that were different from her own.

There was a trustfulness in Mrs. Lalor’s attitude now which appealed to Laurence. He let go his hold of her as the wind subsided, to say:

“What are you out so early for this bitter morning? I’m just on my way to your house. Is Lalor in?”

“If you were going for those papers”—Mrs. Lalor began tugging at the breast of her jacket for a visible package—“My husband meant to bring them around last night, but he’s in bed—with a cold.” Every one knew what Mr. Lalor’s “colds” implied. “I thought[110] you might need them to-day; I was so afraid I wouldn’t catch you in time.” She drew a sharp breath that showed how she had been hurrying.

“It was awfully good of you,” said Mr. Laurence warmly, as they turned down another street together. “Lalor will be well enough to be seen this evening, I hope?”

“Yes, I’m sure he will,” said Mrs. Lalor, in a tone that guaranteed it. “But I want to ask you, Mr. Laurence”—her face became suddenly fixed and expressionless—“in seeing that you get the evidence you want, my husband will not be—prominent in any way?”

“His name need not appear at all,” said Laurence promptly. His arm hovered spasmodically near her as she went slipping and lurching alternately beside him—“Take care! You’d better not walk any farther.”

“Oh, I have to go as far as Harner’s to order a ton of furnace coal.”

“I’ll stop and order it for you, if that’s all,” said Mr. Laurence. His eyes, lightly comprehensive, took note of the clock in the church tower. “I’ve got a good five minutes before my train. You go straight home, Mrs. Lalor.”

He looked down protectingly to meet her upward gaze, which was relieved and coquettish[111] and yet, somehow, a little sad, as she answered:

“Well, if you will——! I never do anything for myself if there’s a gentleman to do it for me.”

He raised his hat before starting on, and when he looked back she waved her hand to him. The large advancing figure of Mrs. Stone—on her way home from wresting the early chop from the butcher—amply furred and heavily goloshed, her beaver hat as well as her face swathed in a thick, brown veil, threw into high relief the tawdry lightness of Mrs. Lalor’s attire.

He recollected that if he ever objected to a thin jacket on his wife she invariably professed to be “warm underneath.” Mrs. Lalor might also be warm underneath, but he had a masculine preference for having people look warm in winter-time.

Poor little woman! He shook his head as he thought of Lalor, with a quick compression of his lips. Then a long whistle from up the track sent him tearing ahead in the teeth of the wind, to thrust his head at last inside of Harner’s office and call out:

“Send a ton of furnace coal to Mrs. Lalor, 36 Herkimer Street, and be quick about it,” before settling down into that swift run back that carried him swinging up by the guard[112] rail onto the slippery steps of the last car, and out into that region where women and household matters are not.

The first thing Mrs. Laurence said when she came in at lunch time, after a morning spent abroad, was:

“How freezing cold this house is! Hasn’t the coal come yet, Teresa?”

“No, ma’am.”

“How provoking!” Mrs. Laurence stopped short in disgust. “I never saw such a place; it’s as much as your life’s worth to get anything delivered when you want it. Is that Timothy I hear in the cellar now?” Timothy was the furnace man of the Ridge. “Tell him not to let the fire go entirely out; we’ll have to manage it some way. If he comes back between two and three the coal will certainly be here then.”

But two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock passed, and no coal wagon backed up to the sidewalk in front, of the Laurences, though a succession of them passed funereally through the white street, en route for more fortunate householders. At a quarter after four she gave a joyful exclamation—one had stopped, at last, opposite her door; but the joy was short-lived—the wagon honked further along, tentatively, until it stopped at Mrs. Spicer’s half-way down the block.

[113]

In a minute more Mrs. Laurence could see the dark legs of alternate men outlined against the drifts, as they carried buckets of the precious fuel to the opening in the cellar at the side of the Spicer villa. Something seemed to shatter through her—an iconoclastic blast, that she had been striving to shut out. Could Will have possibly forgotten between the house and the station? But no, that could not be!

She dressed hastily, in the later stages of her toilet vibrating between the silver-decked dressing-table, and the window, from behind the curtains of which she took recurrent peeps. At her last look she ran hastily down the stairs and opened the front door for Mrs. Stone, who was temporarily garbed in a polo cap and her husband’s spring overcoat, into the pockets of which she had thrust her hands.

“I saw you coming along! It’s too cold to be kept waiting on anybody’s door-step. Walk right in, tea will be ready in a moment.”

“I thought I’d be sure to find you in now,” said Mrs. Stone comfortably, shedding her masculine apparel in the hall on her way to the drawing-room where she established herself with the ease of custom in a Turkish chair by the gas logs. The Ridge was apt to assemble informally at Mrs. Laurence’s for five o’clock tea; it was known that she really[114] had it whether there was any one there or not; there was always something pleasantly cosy about the little function.

Mrs. Stone watched her hostess lazily as she drew the low, china-laden table nearer the fire, and lighted the lamp under the brass kettle just brought in, her dark, graceful head bent over to watch it, and her hands showing very white against the dull red of her gown.

“It’s such a relief to get in here,” said the visitor, breaking the silence as she took the steaming cup of fragrant tea offered her, and helped herself to a tiny hot buttered scone, from a blue Canton dish. “They are getting in coal at the Budds’ this morning, and now they’re at it at the Spicers’—the noise nearly sets me crazy, the houses are so near together. O Mrs. Spicer, I didn’t hear you come in!”

Mrs. Stone looked up with a start to see another visitor walking, unannounced, into the room, a little woman in a long fur wrap with a lace scarf thrown over her head. “I was just saying—perhaps you heard me—what a noise your coal makes when it’s being put in.”

“Oh, don’t speak of it!” said Mrs. Spicer. She seemed to greet her hostess, shed her outer garments, perch herself on a little, straight-backed sofa, and take her cup of tea[115] at one and the same moment with a swiftness of movement accelerated in her further speech, which tumbled forth like a small cataract. “Don’t speak of it, no one knows what I went through last summer, when you were at the seashore and your coal was laid in. I couldn’t sit on the piazza at all, and the thermometer was in the nineties. At the end of the third day I nearly had nervous prostration. Ernest Spicer was really worried about me. I never find it any economy to lay in a stock of coal; you use it up so much faster; it seems as if you were paying out for enough to last you until you died, and then, just at the time you didn’t count on taking the money for it you have to buy more. If we laid in a mine full in July we’d have to order coal in February.”

“Well, I wish I were laying it in now,” interposed Mrs. Laurence deftly, with a sigh. “Mr. Laurence ordered some this morning, and it hasn’t come yet. I would have sent a message to Harner’s, but I have been expecting the coal wagon every moment.”

“I saw your husband speaking to Mrs. Lalor as I came back from the butcher’s,” said Mrs. Stone. She paused significantly. “Isn’t she the most noticeable thing you ever saw! She never seems to have any morning clothes.”

[116]

“I don’t believe she has any money for new ones,” suggested Mrs. Laurence gently.

“No, I don’t suppose she has, but even then—— Of course, I’m sorry for her, we all are; every one knows what Mr. Lalor is, but do you know, the other day when I attempted to allude to all that she must have to bear up under—I felt so sympathetic towards her, after what the Bents told us—she stiffened up at once; she acted as if she hadn’t the slightest idea of what I was driving at. Now that’s absurd. To hear Mrs. Lalor talk about ‘Bennie’ you’d think he was the king-pin, as Mr. Stone expresses it.”

“Oh, but I think that’s really fine of her,” said Mrs. Laurence, with proselyting zeal. “There’s a courage, a devotion about her that always appeals to me; you can’t help seeing that she’s had such a hard time. I’m sure if you knew her better you’d like her.”

“She may be devoted to her husband,” said Mrs. Spicer very fast, “but if you’d see her going in on the train—Ernest Spicer says he always avoids her when he can; he does hate to be made conspicuous. I don’t care whether she comes of a good family or not; I think she’s common.”

Mrs. Laurence shook her head wisely. “I’m sure that you’re mistaken, not that[117] I’m so well acquainted with her myself, but still——”

She took occasion later on to detain Mrs. Stone whisperingly a moment by the front door as both visitors were making their exit.

“I thought I wouldn’t say it before her—but why don’t you and Mr. Stone make a call at the Lalors to-night? Will has a little business with Mr. Lalor, and I’ll go with him. Do come.”

“Well, I’ll see,” temporized Mrs. Stone with a softening inflection.

Mrs. Stone was, as her hostess well knew, the kind of a person who, after disapproving publicly of a neighbour, privately sends her pickles. She hastened down the steps now to join her friend, her large, mannish figure in the overcoat and cap wobbling ludicrously on the narrow, slippery length of drift-bordered sidewalk under the gas-lamps that were already lighted.

The wind had gone down, but so had the mercury; the air was “bitter chill.” As Mrs. Laurence turned back into her hall the atmosphere there seemed only a few degrees warmer. Gas logs made but slight impression on the general temperature of a house in this weather; the hand that she held over the register received but the faintest, scarce-warm breath upon it. Mrs. Laurence still[118] looked for a belated rattling coal-wagon, but the hour seemed long until her husband’s return; her heart bounded romantically at the sound of his footsteps now, just as it had done when she was a girl. His face was ruefully smiling as he said after the kiss of greeting:

“You don’t know what you’ve missed—all my fault, too! I bought you a two-dollar bunch of violets—— Now wait till I get through—and left them in the train.”

“Oh, Will!” His wife’s brows drooped tragically. “That’s so like you! You’re getting too absent-minded to live. My lovely violets!” she mourned tenderly.

“Isn’t the house very cold to-night?”

“Well, I should think it might be! It’s freezing.” Mrs. Laurence’s accumulated wrath poured forth. “There hasn’t been a sign of the coal you ordered this morning, and I’ve been waiting for it all day. It’s a perfect outrage, and I want you to tell Harner so, Will. You did order it, didn’t you?”

“Why, ye——” An extraordinary expression stole over Mr. Laurence’s thin face, it was as if his consciousness had been suddenly arrested in mid-air. Well as his wife knew his expressions and what they covered, this surprisingly baffled her. He drummed with[119] his finger-tips on the edge of the dressing-table before relaxing enough to say guardedly, after a moment:

“By George! I don’t believe I did. I knew there was something—I’m awfully sorry, Anna, indeed I am.”

“You didn’t order it!—Will, please don’t drum on things that way, you know it drives me wild. Well, if you can’t remember one thing I ask you to do—if you can’t keep a single promise that you make me—— It isn’t the coal I care about—though my feet have been like stones all day—but it’s the fact that I can’t depend on you for anything. Please don’t whistle. You can attend to business matters well enough, but when it comes to the comfort of your wife and child——” an unforeseen sob broke across the words. “Of course, it’s been warm enough in your steam-heated office to-day. I’m glad it has been, I wouldn’t have had you cold for anything.” In spite of her tears she was following after him as he searched in his chiffonier drawer for a clean collar. “You’ve done it all so many times! You carried that important letter to Hetty in your pocket for six weeks before you told me.”

“Yes, and if you’re going on like this every time I tell you anything, I’ll stop it,” said Mr. Laurence doggedly. “You don’t[120] give me any credit for owning up, Nan. You wouldn’t know half the time when I make mistakes, if I didn’t tell you.”

“I don’t see what else you could have said when I asked you if you had ordered the coal.”

“I could have lied about it, I suppose,” said Mr. Laurence impatiently.

“O Will!” she gasped with horror. Her white chin went up, her dark eyes looked at him full of agitation. She put her hands on his shoulders and shook him ineffectively. “You wouldn’t—you couldn’t do that! You always tell me the truth, don’t you—all of it?”

“Usually,” assented her husband. He had finished settling his tie and now put his arms around her. “But if it’s going to make you any happier if I don’t——”

“No, no, no! You know I never could mean that—never! I could forgive you anything as long as you told me the truth.”

She clung to him as they went down to dinner together, and she forbore to allude to the state of the atmosphere, except by shivering once or twice—the gas logs sent forth a chill, blue flare. There was an odd return to that arrested, baffling expression on Mr. Laurence’s face, however, when his wife announced her intention of going around to the Lalors’ with him afterwards.

[121]

“Don’t you think it is too cold for you to go out to-night?” he asked, and she answered with a playful gleam of the sarcasm she couldn’t keep from using. “No, I think it’s too cold for me to stay in.”

It was a matter for ejaculating surprise on arriving at the Lalors’ to find the unexpected Spicers instead of the Stones, who, however, appeared in a few minutes. Mr. Spicer had a slender, correct elegance of aspect, while Mr. Stone was large, grayish, and rather portly. Beside the Spicers, a Mrs. Frere and her son, a dumb, immature youth, were already in possession of the field. Mrs. Frere’s position as a church worker carried her into connection with people whom she might not otherwise have met; the chief effect that she produced on every one now was an ardent desire that she should go. She sat in utter silence with folded hands, but her dumbness differed from that of her son in a patently avid appreciation of everything that was said or done.

Mrs. Lalor, in a low-throated, faded light green gown covered with beautiful old lace, was loud in expression of her surprise and delight at this haphazard gathering. Mr. Lalor, tall, handsome and with wandering dissipated eyes and the same droop alike to his reddish mustache and to his figure,[122] came forward also with hospitable welcome, while his wife volubly ordered not only him but the other men in behalf of her guests:

“Bennie, get that armchair out of the corner for Mrs. Laurence; be careful the top doesn’t fall off of it—we break all our things moving so often! Mr. Stone, won’t you put that footstool under Mrs. Spicer’s feet, I’m sure she’s not comfortable. Mr. Spicer, if you’ll kindly move the table near me to make more room—Bennie, run up-stairs and get the little feather hand-screen for Mrs. Stone—I know that lamp’s shining in your eyes.” She pronounced it “Shinin’ in yo’ eyes,” with a caressing, indolent inflection to her soft voice. “It’s not the least trouble for him, Mrs. Stone—Bennie always waits on me.”

There was a seductive air of luxury about Mrs. Lalor in spite of the fact that the cheap, shabby upholstered chairs and sofa were profusely covered with cheaper “drapings” on such portions as were most subject to wear, and that the mantelpiece, also draped, was simply decorated with a single pink-mouthed grinning conch shell—yet the latter was indeed under an old, old painting of a low-browed woman whose white throat and rounded cheek gleamed out from rich brown shadows—a woman who, even thus dimly[123] seen, seemed to match the lace on Mrs. Lalor’s gown.

“I only came because I thought you’d like me to,” whispered Mrs. Spicer to Mrs. Laurence in a pause of the later conversation. Mrs. Stone gave an affectionate little squeeze to her neighbour’s hand. “I thought Ernest would object, but he seemed quite willing. I wish that Mrs. Frere wasn’t here, you have to be so careful what you say before her.”

“We won’t stay very long,” murmured Mrs. Laurence assentingly. Mr. Lalor and her husband had apologetically disappeared behind closed doors to transact their business together, the latter with that last look at her over the heads of the others that meant their own special farewell. Mrs. Lalor had insisted on supplying every one with hot lemonade, on account of the coldness of the weather, calling the three men back and forth in her services and holding a little couet with them afterwards as she sat reclined in a rocking-chair.

“I reckon Mr. Eddie was right bored with only me to talk to before you all came in,” she announced with a smile directed at young Mr. Frere. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you gentlemen here. I enjoy gentlemen’s society so much. Of course, I’ve always had it till I came up No’th, and I miss it so[124] much. I wish you could have seen our po’ch at home in the old times on a Sunday evenin’, with my sister Mollie’s friends, and Emma Lily’s, and mine, all lined up waiting for us to come down.”

“Indeed!” said Mrs. Stone.

“I told Bennie when I married him I never could settle down to just one.” Mrs. Lalor paused lightly. “I was engaged to six before that. But he always said—‘George’ my name is George—‘I want you should enjoy gentleman’s society just the same as you always did.’ I was engaged first when I was fourteen.”

“Oh, Southern engagements!” said Mrs. Laurence indulgently, with a gesture that disclaimed their seriousness of intent to Mrs. Stone’s startled gaze. There seemed to be an unforeseen electrical quality in the air; she had felt it even when she first came in, but every lightest speech was oddly charged with it, you couldn’t tell what was coming. Instead of vindicating her confidence in Mrs. Lalor, the latter seemed bent on a self destruction that might drag any one else down with her. She went on now happily.

“Of course, though I always cared most for Bennie—he was such a beautiful waltzer. Sometimes even now, after breakfast, if I’m a little blue, he says, ‘Come, George, let’s have[125] a waltz,’ and he just spins me around the room while he whistles the tune. I don’t think there’s anything like dancing for keeping up the spirits. I don’t know what I’d do without Bennie up No’th here, he’s so thoughtful of me!”

“How extraordinary!” breathed little Mrs. Spicer to Mrs. Stone, athwart the rapt gaze of the silent Mrs. Frere. It was evident that neither Mr. Stone nor Mr. Spicer felt appalled, both men seemed to be impalpably walled off from the jurisdiction of their wives, as they sat smiling with interested indulgence at their hostess, with young Mr. Frere, open-mouthed, behind them.

In spite of the semi-artificiality of her aspect, Mrs. Lalor had an undoubted charm; her face looked younger and less drawn by lamplight, and her pretty, tear-soft eyes had their coquettish gleam in them, her careless attitude was full of lazy grace. She thrust out a slippered foot with its hanging length of ribbon, and gave an appealing glance at the man nearest her.

“I know you want to tie my shoe for me, Mr. Stone—no, Mr. Spicer, I didn’t say you.”

She laughed gleefully as they both jumped for position, Mr. Stone’s large bulk going down heavily on one knee with exaggerated gallantry.

[126]

“Let me fan you while he’s doing it,” cried Mr. Spicer eagerly, seizing the required implement from the table.

“You’d better fan Mrs. Stone, she looks so warm,” suggested Mrs. Lalor. “The house is so heated, it makes one’s face burn after the cold air. Wouldn’t you like a little powder to cool it?” She jumped up hospitably, leaving Mr. Stone still upon the floor. “It isn’t the slightest trouble to get it, I always keep it in this little cupboard, with a puff and a handglass—and some rouge,” she explained in a confidential tone. “Not that I care for rouge myself, Bennie doesn’t like it, but some people always use it for the evenin’.”

Mrs. Stone gasped.

“Thank you, I need nothing of the kind,” she said hastily. She, the mother of four, a member of the Guild and the Vittoria Colonna Club to be spoken to in connection with rouge! Even Mrs. Laurence’s white chin went up—this did seem “common.”

“And I really think we’ll have to be going,” added Mrs. Stone with decision, rising as she spoke, a signal imitated by Mrs. Spicer, though Mrs. Frere sat fast.

“Oh, do wait for us,” pleaded Mrs. Laurence eagerly. “Here is my husband now. You’re ready to go now, aren’t you, Will?”

“Yes, as soon as I wrap up those documents,”[127] he assented, with an unconscious exhilaration of tone that caught her ear. He disappeared into the opposite room once more. Mr. Lalor had just walked out of it, and down the length of the bare hall, with echoing steps.

“Oh, you must stay and have some more hot lemonade,” Mrs. Lalor begged warmly, and stopped suddenly short; a faint colour came into her cheek; it was as if she listened, not to the chorus, “No, not to-night——” “Thank you just the same——” “We really must go——” but to something impalpable, unguessed.

“Excuse me for just one moment,” she said and vanished swiftly into the narrow passage, leaving behind her a surprised, disapproving silence—even Mrs. Frere stood up; there was a queer, unexpected sensation that something was happening. Mrs. Laurence went out nervously to get her cloak. In that oblique glimpse down the hall to the dining-room she saw—or didn’t she really see anything?—a man’s arm stretched wildly out as if to reach something—a woman’s hand grasping it—the wavering shadow as of a struggle—and the faintest sound as of a key turning as it might be in a sideboard lock. Something must be happening——! Though only, indeed, one unimportant scene of a[128] tragedy such as these happy, protected women had no knowledge of, that long, exquisitely heart-racking, unmentionable strain of living that companies the degradation of one who is loved.

“Did your coal come to-day, Mrs. Laurence?” asked Mrs. Stone in a chill, unnatural voice. They were all getting on their wraps now.

“No, it didn’t,” answered Mrs. Laurence. Justice compelled her to add, with an effort: “It wasn’t Harner’s fault, after all. Will forgot to order it on his way to the station; he felt so badly about it, but he’s had so much business on his mind lately that I really think I mustn’t ask him to do anything more.”

“You’re more lenient than my wife would have been,” said Mr. Stone jovially. “I’d have gotten it in the neck.”

“You’d have deserved it,” agreed Mr. Spicer.

“I feel dreadfully because you’re all going so soon,” said Mrs. Lalor appearing once more, clinging with both little hands to the arm of her husband, who, sullen and dejected, towered above her. She looked wan and thin, as if some ageing mist had settled over her, but the wrinkles that had deepened around her pretty eyes did not keep them[129] from being indomitably flirtatious as she glanced back to the man who had followed them in.

“Mr. Laurence and I haven’t had a chance to tell any secrets at all!—What did you say, Mrs. Spicer? Yes, the house is warm, thanks to Mr. Laurence,” she assented gayly. “He insisted on orderin’ my coal for me this mornin’.”

There was a dead silence. To her dying day Mrs. Laurence could see that whole scene definitely before her—the embarrassed attitudes of the men; the arrested, guilty expression on her husband’s face that all might read; Mrs. Frere’s greedy joy; the compassionate gaze of Mrs. Stone and Mrs. Spicer after their swift flash of comprehension.—Yet after that one paralyzing moment she rose staunchly superior to the petty, yet excruciating entanglement of the situation. She stepped forward and kissed Mrs. Lalor good-bye in the face of her little world, with a hand-pressure that emphasized the words:

“I’m so glad Mr. Laurence could be of service to you,” before she made her exit with him. Yet there were those who felt that they were not deceived and the eyes of Mr. Stone and Mr. Spicer met as the door closed behind the husband and wife—and it[130] was a glance that confided a sinister and mutual thankfulness of escape.

The two in question walked swiftly away in silence on the starlit, drift-bordered path; the wind had gone down but it was infinitely cold. They went, part of the time, in single file, but she ignored his tentative pressure on her arm; there seemed to be an icy chasm between them. The distance to the house was short, and it was not until they were inside it that she broke forth hotly, as if they had been talking together all the way, her crimson cheeks and blazing eyes facing his tall, reluctant figure as she threw off her wraps.

“It wasn’t as if I could ever say anything to those people to explain! Oh, it’s so perfectly horrid, so maddening, so utterly ridiculous on the face of it!—They’ll think I’m jealous of her—they’ll be sorry for me. Sorry! As if I could possibly be jealous of her. They’ll think you keep everything from me, and that they know more about you than I do. How could you have put me in such a position when just a word——” She made a little sound that was half a moan. “Why you didn’t have the decency to tell me before we went there I can’t see.” Her voice rose higher. “Yes I can—you were afraid; afraid of your wife! It does seem pretty[131] bad to have you remember to do things for other people, when you can’t remember them for me, but that isn’t the point I mind most, it’s not the real thing—what I can’t stand is you not having the courage to own up, to tell me the truth. Why don’t you say something?”

“Because you’re saying it all.”

“O Will!” She gazed at him hopelessly as he stood in front of her, her hand laid detainingly on his arm. He looked very high-bred, very much a gentleman, with that air of aloof hauteur; there were circles under his dark eyes, and his lips had a compression that she well knew. If there was anything that Mr. Laurence hated temperamentally it was a shrewish woman; the ice of the winter’s night couldn’t freeze harder than he when she stormed, even though he allowed that she had righteous reason for her wrath. He spoke now, in answer to her appeal, with stiff, prideful humility:

“You know very well that I’m extremely sorry about the whole matter. As for ordering that coal for Mrs. Lalor, I meant to have told you about it when we got back, you know I never can keep anything from you; I don’t want to. I forgot it when I first came home—and then you took me by surprise, someway. And now don’t you think[132] we’ve perhaps had enough of this? I’m tired.”

“No, no; don’t go yet!” Mrs. Laurence’s hand pinioned him fast. She had known all along that she would forgive him when she had spoken her mind—what else can one do but forgive when one loves? Oh, that was but a little part of it—the forgiveness! The real need all the time was that he should be reinstated on the pedestal from which his own act had driven him. He must be, not the Will whom she forgave, but the Will whom she adored. Her certainty dropped from her; she began reasonably, to grow more and more tremulously beseeching.

“Will, please listen! I can’t bear it when you look at me as if you didn’t like me. Of course, I knew all the time that you were sorry—I knew you meant to tell me the truth! Of course, you can’t always think of it at the moment when I take you by surprise and fly at you and scold you—nobody could! I don’t wonder that you hate to tell me things, when I make it so hard for you. I ought to be a hundred times nicer than I am. When I saw her husband standing there to-night you looked so fine and beautiful and good—and truthful”—a sob, not tears, but just a sob broke athwart the words—“I[133] thank God every day on my knees that I’m married to you!”

Her arms dropped from their hold, but his were around her now, pressing her closer, and still closer; the eyes he bent upon the upturned face were smiling, yet a little moist, too—his tender voice had in it every admission that she longed for as he whispered:

“Oh, Nan—foolish, foolish Nan! Such a sweet woman——!”