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Fanny winced. It was cruel. But the cruelty was not hers. It was Fate's. She too had hoped for the very marriage her mother had so ardently desired. But Loftus had not cared. Occupied elsewhere he had sailed away. As well then Annandale as another.

"You see, you know," she said in a wretched effort at smoothing things over, "he is quite a hero."

But this was too much. Mrs. Price shook her head like a battle horse and fairly neighed.

"Because he saved your clothes? If it had been your life and you had said 'Thank you' it would have been ample. But your clothes! Not mine; the beast had not sense enough for that, but yours! I do hope you will give that as an excuse to Sylvia!"

CHAPTER X
A VICTIM

SYLVIA had gone from Newport. She was then at Lenox. It was there the previous autumn that her interest in Annandale had begun. The interest had so deepened that she gave him her heart. Never before had she given that to anyone. Annandale had taken it and then, one night, he had so bruised it that she thought it broken. He had written that he had not meant to. His letter had been full of regrets, of protestations, of bad grammar. Such things may palliate, but they do not cure. Only time can do that.

Time is a strange emollient. In its mysterious potency it softens without our knowledge. Suddenly a whisper, a breeze that passes, shows that it has done its work. With Sylvia time was having its will. Furtively she had found herself wondering, as Annandale had wondered, how it should fare with her, and how with him, could the past be effaced and the old days renewed. But those days were gone, she decided. Though into that decision a doubt would creep, not indeed concerning the departure, but concerning her attitude and the justice of it.

Annandale had sinned. He had sinned wantonly, grievously. From an atmosphere of vice – an atmosphere from which, under pain of her displeasure, she had distinctly warned him – he had staggered to her, its pollution about him, reeking with drink, talking abundantly about nothing imaginable, and at her just remonstrance had become instantly irritable, refusing almost to leave the house.

So had his condition and the spectacle of it shocked her that, for awhile, memory of him and of it was repellent. In her own eyes she felt degraded. That men drank, she knew. But in her sphere of life they drank either moderately or else in haunts invisible to her. And it was precisely from such a haunt he had come, a shameless haunt, one that sullied her even to know of.

Yes, he had sinned, wantonly, grievously, almost unforgivably. Almost, she reflected, but perhaps not quite. In his letter of protest and regret he had told her that he remembered nothing, nothing whatever, absolutely nothing at all, save one vague, brief vision of herself. The rest, the beginning, the end, the inter-spaces were, he assured her, blank. At first she had thought that sheer nonsense. But, later, the earnest way in which it was put impressed her. Then on the heels of that communication there had followed one from Orr, indorsing what Annandale said, declaring that it was all quite possible, adding that, in certain temperaments, memory when influenced by toxics will play tricks stranger than the average mind can comfortably credit.

These letters she had not answered. Logically she could not admit the validity of the statements which they contained. But the heart has logic which logic does not know. Then, too, is there not that within us that prompts us to believe less what we should than what we wish? Sylvia's reason, guided by her inexperience, refused at first to accept the idea that any sane man could act as Annandale had and afterward be oblivious of it. That remorse there should be was only natural, but that there should be no memory of anything whatever seemed to her absurd.

But there was her cousin's assurance to the contrary. Then imperceptibly, little by little, that assurance, filtering through the saddened girl, took possession of her, insisting on recognition, telling her that, though her lover had erred, yet, in erring, he was more to be pitied than condemned. Dominated by drink, which, Orr added, he had promised to renounce, he had gone to that haunt and, contaminated there, knew not what he did. But she, instead of realizing that, she who was to have been his in sickness and health, for better, for worse, she, in her pride, had dismissed him.

He had erred, Sylvia told herself, deeply, grievously, but so, too, had she. She had condemned when she should have condoned; she had spurned him when it was her solicitude that he needed.

At the sure cognition of that, it was as though from her eyes a bandage had fallen. Then at once in her tender conscience she beheld herself, detestable in pride, a girl without a heart, one of whom he, no doubt, was well rid of.

It was during the process of this awakening that the conflagration at Narragansett Pier occurred. Sylvia read of it. She read, too, of certain prowesses which the dismissed had displayed.

The account, very inexact as such accounts always are, was also highly colored, spun out for space purposes for much more than the space was worth. Had you not known better you would have taken it for granted that the heroism of Annandale was on a par with that of Leonidas at Thermopylæ and even of Roosevelt at San Juan. It quite stirred you.

It stirred Sylvia. The paper fell from her. But the past returned. At once it seemed to her that it might be mended and the old days renewed. The hero of whom the paper told she knew now that she had wholly loved, and she knew, too, that wholly she still loved him.

Time had done its work ridiculously, inopportunely, yet effectively at last. But the gates of life are double. On one stands written "Too Soon." On the other "Too Late." It is unfortunate to get wedged between them. Of that fact Sylvia became rapidly aware. On the morrow she began a letter to Annandale. Before it was finished there came one from Fanny, announcing that she was to be Annandale's wife.

In certain crises of the emotions there is a certain sense of unreality. Even as Sylvia read what Fanny said she could not grasp it. When presently she did, she could not believe it. But there it was. Then immediately she experienced the agony which comes when we battle in dream with the intangible and the dread, when we know it is dream and yet feel it is death.

"It is all my fault," she cried. She found but that. At the moment she was in that condition which precedes the great commotion of tears, when the strangulation of agony is subsiding and contracted nerves distend. But the tears did not come. The pain was infinite. There was a weight which she felt not without but within, a weight so heavy that she thought she could not bear it. It racked her. Only her mind was active. "It is my fault," she repeated. Then she added, "And my cross."

From a crisis such as this, in a nature such as hers, the soul issues as from an orgy. It has supped on sorrow. It is fed. It ceases to look back. It looks forward, marveling indeed that it should look at all, yet looking. Life's burdens are more bearable than the despairful think. Until the eyes are closed and the heart no longer beats, in some way, somehow, they can be carried.

Sylvia took up her cross. It was leaden. But in the effort she was aided. Pride helped her. The assistance of pride may be poor, yet is it not better than none? To Sylvia it was useful. It enabled her to answer Fanny's letter.

"You have my congratulations, Fanny dear," she wrote, "all of them, my best and warmest, and so has Arthur too. Please say so to him and tell him that, in marrying by dearest friend, he and I must be dear friends also."

Then the tears did come, swiftly, like the ripple of the rain. On the table where she sat she put her head down and sobbed, paroxysmally, as sobs a child.

THE GENERAL SESSIONS

CHAPTER I
DISENCHANTMENT

" IL SEGRETO– "

Marie's voice rang out, clear and fluid, scattering notes through the room, filling it with them, charging the air with melody, then, like a chorus entering a crypt, it sank in diminishing accords and, sinking, died slowly away.

The segreto indeed! The secret of happiness was remoter now than when, under the teaching of the ex-first lady, she had first attacked the score. But her voice had improved. It was fuller, more resonant and ample.

Marie, too, had improved. In face and figure beauty had developed. Her manner was securer, her eyes more grave, her smile less frequent. The bud had blossomed.

In the process a year had gone. From high Norman downs she had watched the summer pass. Autumn had met her in the Elysian Fields. There the wolfish winter had approached. At the first bite there had been a flight to Havre, the return to New York. Now it was spring again. Through the open windows of the Arundel came the city's hum and with it the subtleties and enticements of May.

A year had gone. But there are years that count double. There are others so vast that in them you may have evolved a world, seen it glow and subside. The solitudes of space appal. The solitudes of the heart may be as endless as they. In those where Marie loitered a world had had its birth and subsidence, a world with gem-like hopes for stars, a world lighted by a sun so eager that its rays had made her blind. There had been aspirations, gorgeous and tangental as comets are. There had been the colorless ether of which dreams are made. For cosmic matter there was love. A year had gone. In it, these wonders had formed and fled.

Marie got from the piano. It had no secret to tell. But there was another which the year had revealed, a secret which, at first opaque and obscure, little by little had taken shape and changed from an impossibility into a monstrous fact. Marie had begun by disavowing it. She had disowned it, would have none of it. But disavowals cease. In certain conditions we get used to monsters. The soul makes itself at home with what it must. The monster to which Marie was accustoming herself was the knowledge that her lover had lied.

In departing with him from the den of the ex-first lady it was not merely with faith and trust, but with absolute certainty that marriage, if delayed, was only postponed; that a week, a month at the furthest, would see her his wife.

On the way she had stopped and wired to Gay street, telling her father not to worry, that she had gone to be married, that she would write to him soon.

Whether he had worried she could only surmise. But soon she had written, inclosing a photograph of Loftus, one which she had colored, an excellent likeness that displayed his chiseled features, wonderful eyes and thin, black mustache with a perfection of precision that was lifelike. Above it she wrote: "Marie's Husband." It would please her father, she was sure, and in the letter she told him prettily, in a little, cajoling way which he loved, that while, for the moment, he must not know where she was, yet shortly she was planning to come and surprise him – to surprise him more than he could ever imagine, and show him that he could be very, very proud of her, but prouder still, much, much prouder of the man she had married.

The plan, delightful to her, first the illness of her lover's mother, then the lady's absence from town, prevented her from at once effecting. Then, greatly to her uneasiness, she found that the plan must be yet further delayed. Mrs. Loftus had gone to her manor on the Hudson, where, her son declared, he could not take Marie "like that." Financially it was stupid to rush things. Gradually his mother must be prepared. Moreover, as preparation could be decently managed only in town, to which she would not now return until autumn, it would be a good idea to run over to Europe.

So spoke Royal Loftus. It was all false as an obituary. Financially he was entirely independent of his mother, who, at the time, was not at her manor, but just around the corner and never better in her life. But Marie, wholly infatuated, quite willing to believe that the moon was made of green cheese if only he took the trouble to so inform her, accepted it all for gospel.

The delay, of course, was a deep disappointment. She felt it, and felt it acutely. But in Europe she supposed that people would not know, and would not care a rap if they did, Loftus hastened to assure her.

To his project, therefore, she yielded. Presently she was glad that she had. The journey itself was a joy. At the Arundel he had come and gone. Often she had been lonely. Often she had sat through hours that limped themselves away, waiting for him, waiting fruitlessly. But during the journey and after it, on the high Norman downs, always she had him with her. Therein was the joy.

The places, new to her and fragrant, to which he took her interested her very much, but very much, too, as accessories might. It was from him that their real charm emanated. He also enjoyed himself, but less rapturously, in a fashion more detached. He found time to busy himself with the news of the world, with menus, with wines – occupations which to her were extraordinary. Marie did not know what she ate; as for the world, it was sublimated in him, a fact which she confided to him – of which, if she had not, he would have been perfectly aware and which he accepted at first as but a proper tribute to himself, but which ended by boring him distinctly. An excess of anything disagrees with the best.

The first symptoms of indigestion declared themselves in Paris. They had there a large suite in a big hotel. So large was the suite that frequently Marie could not find Loftus in it. He was off, returning when he saw fit, refusing to be questioned, yawning at reproaches, but otherwise perfectly civil, agreeing with her that it was not nice to be left alone, yet leaving her alone whenever he felt like it.

On the Norman downs the fresh fragrance of life had put a higher color on her cheeks, marking them with the flush of happiness and health. But in this game of hide and nowhere to seek her face became pallid as the curious white sky which in autumn stretches itself over Paris. Then stealthily, like a wolf, winter approached. The cheerlessness of it Loftus hated, as all New Yorkers do. To Marie, however, it was welcome. It meant a return to the Arundel, where she felt that the marriage so long delayed could not be further postponed.

The illusion was pleasant but not permanent. On re-emerging in the noise and sunshine of New York Loftus ceased to bother himself with the invention of excuses. He told Marie that his mother would not listen to anything of the kind, a statement which, while frank, was not exact. Mrs. Loftus had never heard of it, or for that matter, of the girl, and Loftus saw no reason whatever why she should. Yet if not frank, he was patient. Marie, on the other hand, took it all very hard. Humiliation possessed her. By day it confronted her, spectrally. At night it came to her, sat by her side, plucked at her sleeve, awoke her. It was a thing she could not get away from, could not forget; what is worse, she could not understand. It tortured her, and concerning it she tormented him constantly, displaying a persistence that was annoying and pathetic – the persistence of a child. It was as such that he treated it with yawning indifference, quite as though it were but a whim which, other things intervening, she would forget.

Other things did intervene. Among them was an adventure in Central Park. One afternoon a brougham in which she was driving crossed a victoria where sat a remarkably pretty woman with Loftus at her side.

Marie's eyes filled. Had he struck her he would have hurt her far less. When next she saw him she told him so. The idea amused him. He was not a ruffian, only a cad. Like the whim, he waved the little tragedy away.

"That was Mrs. Annandale," he announced unabashedly, "a very old friend of mine. I have known her all my life."

"Mrs. Annandale!" Marie exclaimed. "Not the wife of the Mr. Annandale whom you brought here last year?"

Loftus stared at her. He did not understand. Yet then, neither did she.

"Why," she continued, "you told me he was to marry a dark young lady."

"Yes," said Loftus, fumbling as he spoke for a cigarette. "But I told you also not to use that expression. Say girl or young woman. If you want to be fantastic, say young gentlewoman, but never young lady. You are right, though. Annandale was to have married a Miss Waldron, but she threw him over and he married somebody else."

To Marie all this was inexplicable. She did not understand how a man thrown over by one girl could so speedily marry another. She did not understand, either, what Loftus could be doing with her. To her mind driving presupposed an intimacy which acquaintance might explain but did not excuse. The matter perplexed her, and not unnaturally. It is only through our own heart that it is possible to attempt to read the heart of another. In her heart Marie knew that nothing earthly could induce her to appear as intimate with a man as Loftus had with that woman. Yet, though she knew that, she knew also that many of her views, like many of her expressions, were not in tune with the tone of the set in which Loftus moved.

None the less a fact remained. To her other men did not exist. To him other women existed. However she tried to console herself with difference in breeding, that fact, remaining, pricked. It pricked perhaps the harder because of this particular woman's looks. The woman herself was hateful. How, she wondered, could Loftus drive about with her when, with herself, he would barely be seen.

And why wouldn't he? In those days Marie's whys were many. But at the end of every one of them the answer which she always found was that it was all because she was not his wife. Yet there always another why recurred. Why was she not what he had sworn she should be?

The possible disinheritance which hitherto he had imaginatively displayed had no terrors of any kind for her. On bread and kisses she would have lived with him joyfully in a slum. To luxury she was unused. That with which she was surrounded she would not have missed in the least. On the contrary, it had grown odious to her; it suggested a form of compensation the very thought of which was sickening. It was not for this that she had left Gay street, but for him and an honest name.

In the prolonged absence of the latter there were times when her soul seemed to slink into the obscurities of her being and swoon there for shame. There were times when she could not look at herself in the glass. Quite as often she had found it difficult to look at her servants.

After the episode in Central Park the increasing sense of degradation affected her so deeply that with a weary idea of preserving such self-respect as she might, summoning those servants she dismissed them – securing, meanwhile, from an agency a woman able to do what little was essential, a negress named Blanche who talked Irish.

When Loftus discovered what she had done he was for having the servants immediately back. He liked to have the girl entertain for him. He liked to have his friends come to the aviary and hear the bird sing. But Marie, with an air of determination that was new to him, refused.

"They do not respect me," she said. "I don't blame them for that. Nor can you. When we are married it will be different.

"When we are," she added with slow scorn.

CHAPTER II
THE MOTE IN THE EYE

A PHILOSOPHER has noted that at certain periods a great many stupid people have a good deal of stupid money. This condition, describable as plethora, is succeeded by another catalogued as panic.

The number of stupid people who at this time stalked the streets unchecked was phenomenal. Among them was Annandale. It was not a beggarly twenty-five thousand a year that he had, but fifty, with, in addition, more to come. This, though measurably satisfactory, was not brilliant. Not brilliant, that is, as Mrs. Price used that term. Still it was sufficient to remove him from the menagerie of paupers in which she had classed him. Assured whereof, Mrs. Price, pocketing further objections, gave in. Two months by the clock after the episodes at Narragansett she assisted at his marriage to her daughter. A little later Annandale took a house in Gramercy Park.

This house, leased fully furnished from November to June, Fanny selected. She liked the neighborhood. Annandale, whose bachelor quarters had, of course, been given up, liked it too. It was convenient. He had got an idea that he ought to have something to do. The something which he hit on consisted in going downtown every day and standing, in a broker's office, over a ticker. Such were the quantities of stupid money afloat that the ticker was very loquacious. It talked and talked, generally in jumps. As it jumped Annandale bought. As it continued to jump, he made. Whereupon he regarded himself as a born financier. It was an illusion which that year very many men shared.

But the illusion was agreeable to him. It was equally so to Fanny. It took him out of the way and induced pleasant dreams. He talked of drags and yachts. On fifty thousand a year these things are impossibilities. But Annandale, believing himself a born financier, believed, too, that the day was not remote when they would solidify into facts. Pending which, Fanny, from her own carriage, distributed to Annette, Juliette and the rest of them such orders as she liked.

It was in this carriage that Marie had seen her with Loftus. Others also saw her. Fanny being a little more than a bride and Loftus a good deal more than a beau, the spectacle caused comment. There were, though, other things that the future had in charge which were to cause more. But among those who beheld the particular spectacle was Fanny's husband.

Annandale was in a hansom with Mr. Skitt, the broker in whose office he looked over the tape. As Fanny drove by, Annandale raised his hat, then, with a mimic which he meant to be humorously indignant, he shook his stick at Loftus much as though he were saying, "Aha! making up to my wife!"

Loftus entering into the spirit of the jest, ducked his head in feigned alarm.

"That's a deuced pretty woman," remarked Mr. Skitt when the carriage had passed.

"It is Mrs. Annandale," his client returned with some hauteur.

"Oh, beg pardon, I didn't know."

"Yes," Annandale resumed, "and that was Loftus, an old friend of mine."

"Any relation to the Loftus?" Mr. Skitt, glad that the subject was out of the way, inquired.

"He is the Loftus," Annandale, now entirely mollified, replied.

Others, however, took the spectacle less lightly. To Marie it was distressing. To Mrs. Price it was absurd. Mrs. Price had not seen it, but she heard of it. To air a few views on the subject she pounced in on Fanny the very next day. Loftus, however, was there at the time. She had to wait until he was gone. Then she let drive.

"Do you fancy," she asked fiercely, "that this is London? Do you?" she repeated and menacingly pulled off a glove. "Don't you know that you cannot have men hanging about you, and of all men that man? Great heavens, if you wanted him you should have taken him at the start."

Fanny lit a cigarette, made a ring of smoke, poked a finger through it and in a sugary, demure little way which she sometimes affected, answered serenely: "At the finish perhaps I may yet."

"What!" cried Mrs. Price.

But from the door a servant was announcing Miss Waldron. The girl swam in. Necessarily, for the time being, the subject was dropped. Later Mrs. Price got back to it, but without notable result, without obtaining either any elucidation of Fanny's rather curious remark.

That though, with graver things, the future had in charge. Meanwhile Fanny, with nine servants and a housekeeper to run them, led the life of any other young society woman, the life of an objet de luxe.

This form of existence would have been quite to her liking if – Yet is there not always an If? A poet declaimed on the subject two thousand years ago. Times have changed, customs with them, but not the human heart. Barring great wealth and its fanfares and accompaniments, Fanny had enough to throw the average woman into stupors of envy, enough also to even satisfy her, if only instead of one man she had married another. Annandale was very nice. He had but one defect. But that defect was fatal. He did not happen to be somebody else.

This defect Fanny had fancied that she could overlook. She was young, therefore ignorant, and, in fancying that she could ignore that fatal defect, fancied also that she had the ability to order herself about, to command her nature and dictate to her heart. The fallacy is common. Many of us have entertained it and kept at it too until the discovery is made that the heart is a force which we must yield to or break.

Fanny became aware of this shortly after Loftus returned. There in her existence was the If. As a consequence, although Annandale was quite perfect to her, his perfection was as nothing to his one defect.

Of this defect Annandale was wholly unconscious. Yet, though he could not see the mote in his own eye, there was one in Fanny's which, though he saw, he was unable to define. It is true on the mote question he was not an expert. A husband, particularly when he happens to be big and blond, seldom is. Then, too, the effect of the mote was odd. It affected Fanny's disposition. When he approached her he could not but notice that she became elusive. He could not but perceive that she was as afraid of a kiss as of a bee.

"What is the matter with you?" he inquired on one occasion when she appeared even more tantalizingly intangible than he had seen her yet.

"Women are the very devil," he muttered as, without answering, she moved yet further away.

The question, though, was very unreasonable. So at least Mrs. Price, whom he tried to take into his confidence, assured him with fine scorn. "The idea of a man asking his wife what is the matter with her!" she exclaimed. "A man ought to know. If he doesn't, how in the world can he expect her to?"

But that was before the episode with Loftus in the Park. Had Annandale gone to Mrs. Price then she would have been quite capable of putting a flea in his ear. That opportunity he neglected. Stocks were soaring. On paper he was making money hand over fist. He had no time to bother with women's whims. When men do have time for such things the time has passed.

Even then it had gone. One night early in May Fanny had a few people in, among whom were Loftus and Sylvia Waldron.

Sylvia, who long since had let bygones be bygones, was now as sisterly as ever with Fanny, and with Annandale on terms friendly and frank, an attitude which, as Fanny put it, "made it so easy, don't you know, all around." Yet then in putting it in that way Fanny may have been actuated by the fellow-feeling which makes us all so wondrous kind. With Loftus she was rather friendly herself.

That, however, by the way. During the dinner a telegram was brought to Annandale. It concerned the morrow's market and interested him considerably. As soon as he decently could he got away to confer with Skitt. Later the other guests began to go. But Loftus lingered. Presently he and Fanny were alone.

"How is the lady?" Fanny negligently inquired.

Her arms and neck were bare. Her dress, immaterial as cobwebs, was of starbeams' restful hue. About her throat was a string of opals. They were colorful, though less so than her eyes and mouth.

She was seated on a sofa. Loftus was standing. As always, he was superiorly sent out. Other men who got their things at the same places that he got his never succeeded, however they tried, in appearing half so well.

"Do you know," Fanny continued, "she has improved vastly since that day when I saw you trying to pick her up. How did you ever manage? Tell me."

Loftus, his hands in his pockets, shrugged a shoulder.

"And she is so delightfully disdainful," Fanny ran on. "In Central Park this afternoon she turned up her nose at me. It is a very pretty nose, Royal, did you know that?"

"I know that it is a bit out of joint," Loftus condescended at last to reply.

"Dear me! Fancy that! But then the course of true love never did run smooth."

Loftus assumed an air of great weariness. "Do drop it," he said. "You know very well that I have never cared for anyone but you."

"Oh, of course," Fanny promptly and pleasantly retorted. "I may have had a doubt or two about it. But when you put this lady in a flat around the corner, then, naturally, you convinced me. It was a rather circuitous way, though, to go at it, don't you think?"

Beside her on the sofa Loftus flopped. "Why do you always go back to that?" he asked, with the same affectation of weariness.

Fanny turned from him. "I don't seem to be able to get away from it," she answered, but less promptly and pleasantly than before. Her fair face had grown serious. From her eyes the bantering look had gone. "Besides," she added after a moment, "you took her to Europe, and that did seem a trifle steep."

"Would you like her to go back there?" Loftus tentatively inquired.

In and out from Fanny's skirt a white slipper, butterflied with gold, moved restlessly. "I should have preferred that you had let her alone. It was not nice of you. It was not nice at all."

From him she had turned to the carpet. She was looking at it still. "I wonder," she presently resumed, "if you ever suspected how it hurt me." Pausing a bit she looked up. "But you have been so dense, Royal."

Loftus was about to interrupt. She checked him. "The first time I saw you I was just fifteen. That is eight years ago. Since then I can honestly say that until I accepted Arthur I had never thought of anyone but you. Never. Not once. Can you realize now how this affair of yours affected me? It hurt. If it had not been for that, do you suppose I would have taken the prince in the fairy tale? You were my prince."

"But," Loftus protested, "this affair, as you call it, came about only faute de mieux, faute de toi. Why cannot I – why cannot we – ?"