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CHAPTER I

Phyllis Ladd lost her mother at twelve; and this bereavement, especially terrible to an only child, brought with it two consequences that had a far-reaching effect on her character. An ardent, high-strung nature, acquainted so early with a poignant sorrow, gets an outlook on the world that is so just and true as to constitute a misfortune in itself. A child ought not to think; ought not to suffer; ought not to understand. Individuality, sympathy, sensibility awaken--qualities that go to make a charming human being--but which have to be paid for in the incessant balance of our complex existence. Phyllis' school-fellows were no longer the same to her; she felt herself a person apart; though she played as gaily as any of them, and chattered her head off, and tripped blithely along Chestnut Avenue entwined in the arms of her companions, she was aware, down in her secret heart, that she was "different."

At twelve, then, her path diverged from the commonplace, in which, as we all have to admit, however reluctantly, the chances for a happy life are best.

The second consequence of her mother's death was to bring her into contact with a scarcely known individual--her father. This grave, handsome man, who sat behind a newspaper at breakfast, and who was not seen again till dinner time; who drove away every morning behind a liveried coachman and a pair of shining bays to a region called "the office"; whose smile and voice were always a shy delight to her--this demigod, admired, unknown, from whom there emanated a delicious sense of security and strength, now suddenly drew her to his heart, and became her world, her all.

Robert T. R. Ladd was the president of the K. B. and O. Railway. Rich himself, and the son of a rich man, his interests in Carthage were varied and many, engaging his activities far beyond the great road that was associated with his name. Carthage was an old-fashioned city; and the boys who had grown up together and succeeded their fathers were clannish to a degree little known in the newer parts of this country. Joe, who was prominent in electricity and gas, might want to consolidate a number of scattered plants, and to that end would seek the assistance of Tom and Harry and Bob. George, perhaps, in forecasting the growth of Carthage a little too generously, was in temporary straits with his land-scheme--well, he would ask Tom and Bob to tide him over, making a company of himself, and taking them in. Frank and his brother, in converting their private bank into the Fifth National--induced as much as anything by the vanity of seeing their own names on their own greenbacks--would feel the need of a strong local man on the new directorate. Would Bob oblige them? "Why, with pleasure, though if somebody else would do as well--" "Oh, we must have you, old fellow."

Such was Carthage--at least the Carthage of Chestnut Avenue, of the long lines of stately and beautiful mansions on what was called the West Side, the Carthage that supported the Symphony Orchestra, owned the parterre boxes at the opera, dined, drove, danced, and did business together--as compact and jealous a little aristocracy as any in Hungary or Silesia. Of course there was another Carthage--several other Carthages--one a teeming riverside quarter where English was an unknown tongue, a place black with factory chimneys, full of noise and refuse, dirt and ugliness, where forty thousand nondescript foreigners pigged together, and contributed forty thousand pairs of very grimy and unwilling hands to the material advancement of the city and state. There was a business Carthage, with banks and sky-scrapers, and vast webs of wires that darkened the sky. There was a pleasure Carthage that awoke only at night, blazing out with a myriad lights, and a myriad enticements. There was a middle-class residence Carthage; a second-class residence Carthage; an immense, poor, semi-disreputable, altogether dreary Carthage that was popularly alluded to as "South of the slot," the name dating from the time of the first cable-car line, now long since discarded.

But to return to Phyllis Ladd.

In losing her mother, it might be said she had discovered her father. At first perhaps it was pity, loneliness, almost terror that caused Mr. Ladd to take this little creature in his arms, and hold her as he might a shield. He had idolized his wife; he hardly knew how to go on living without her; one day, in his office, as his old friend Latham was leaving him, he had pulled open a drawer, and taken a loaded revolver from it. "Latham," he said, with a very slight tremor in his voice, "would you mind putting this damned thing in your pocket--I--I--find it tempts me."

Yes, his little daughter was a shield; he held her slim body between himself and despair; he told her this again and again, as he sat with bowed head and suffusing eyes in the shadow of an irrevocable happiness. And she in whom there stirred, mysteriously, dimly, the tenderness of the sublime love that had called her into being--she, even while she mingled her tears with his, felt within herself the welling of an exquisite joy. To love, to solace, to protect, here again instincts were prematurely awakened; here again her little feet departed from the commonplace to carry her far afield.

In time, as weeks and months rolled on, the blow, so unendurable at first, so crushing and terrible, softened, as such things will, and a busy world again engrossed a busy man. But the intimacy between father and daughter remained, and continued unimpaired. Indeed, it grew even closer, for now laughter came into it, and gay bubbling little confidences, and a delightful hour before bedtime, full of eagerness and zest. Mr. Ladd, cigar in mouth, and his keen handsome face as deferential as any courtier's, listened to the interminable doings of Satty and Nelly and Jessie, with an enjoyment that never seemed to tire.

He, too, had his budget of the day, which, often begun whimsically, not seldom ended in a serious exposition of his difficulties and problems. It amused him to state such complexities in simple language; to bring them down, by some homely metaphor, to the comprehension of this adorable little coquette, who tried with so many childish arts to dazzle and ensnare him. Even at thirteen she was learning the value of drawing out a man about himself; she was quite willing to understand the Interstate Commerce Law, and become pink and indignant over a new classification of "Coal at the pit's mouth"--if it meant her father would hold her a little tighter, and give her one of those sudden glances of approval.

Such intercourse with a shrewd, strong, brilliant mind--to a child naturally precocious and adaptive--could not fail to have far-reaching consequences on her development. She caught something of her father's independence; of his lofty and yet indulgent outlook on a universe made up so largely of fools and knaves; learned the greatest and rarest of all imaginative processes--to put oneself in the other fellow's shoes. When Joe Howard turned traitor at the state legislature, and sold out the K. B. and O. on the new mileage bill, her wrath at his duplicity rose to fever. "Well, there's his side to it," said Mr. Ladd, with unexpected serenity. "He hasn't a cent; he's mortgaged up to the ears; and has a sick daughter dying of consumption. He's a well-meaning man, and I suppose would be honest if he could. But if I were in his place, and your life was at stake, and the doctor ordered you to some ten-dollar-a-minute place in Colorado or somewhere, I guess I'd sell out the K. B. and O. too!"

And for that he got a hug that nearly choked him.

"Money and love, my lamb," he said to her once, "those are the wheels the old wagon runs on. Miss Simpkins will fluff you up with a whole lot of fancy fixings--but I tell you, it boils right down to that."

"Papa," she asked him on another occasion, with round wondering eyes, "if it's all like that, why are you honorable and noble and splendid?"

"I don't know," he answered, smiling. "I guess it's pride more than anything else. Theoretically the man with the fewest scruples gets farthest in the race; but thank the Lord, most of us are handicapped with some good qualities that stick to us like poor relations."

"But Miss Simpkins says that anybody who is bad gets punished for it sooner or later. She says that was why her brother-in-law's house burned down; because he was so uncharitable."

"It may be so with the people Miss Simpkins is acquainted with," said Mr. Ladd, "but it doesn't hold in the railroad business, nor anywhere else that I have seen, and I can't help thinking she's a trifle more hopeful than the traffic can bear!"

This philosophy, so picturesquely expressed, so genial, so amiably cynical, was not perhaps the best training for an unusually impressionable mind. Miss Simpkins learned to dread Phyllis' preface: "But Papa says--" What Papa said was often a bombshell that blew shams to pieces; tore down the pretty pink scenery of conventional illusions; and drove cobble-stones through the gauze that separated Miss Simpkins and her kind from the real world beyond. It was a harsh process, and bad for gauze.

At first, not knowing how else to maintain a fairly large establishment, Mr. Ladd had sought the services of a "managing housekeeper." But the trouble with her--or rather with them, for he had a succession--was that the "managing" was considerably overdone. They were discharged, the one after the other, without having "managed" to achieve their one consuming ambition, which was to capture the rich widower, and lead him to the altar. After a while, growing weary of being hunted, and altogether at his wits' end, he invited his unmarried sister, Henrietta Ladd, to take the foot of his table, and a place at his hearth.

She was a thin, plain, elderly woman, with a very low voice and a deceptive appearance of meekness. The casual guest at Mr. Ladd's board might have taken her for a silent saint, who, unwillingly sojourning in this vale of tears, was waiting with ladylike impatience for a heavenly crown. In some ways this description would have fitted Aunt Henrietta well enough, though it took no account of a perverse and interfering nature that was more than trying to live with. The silent saint attempted to rule her brother and her niece with a rod of iron, and so far succeeded that her two years "tenure of the gubernatorial chair" (as Mr. Ladd bitterly called it), was fraught with quarrels and unhappiness. Her tyranny, like all tyrannies, ended in a revolution. Mr. Ladd brought his "unmarried misery"--also his own phrase--to a sharp conclusion, and Henrietta departed with a large check and a still larger ill-will.

"Phyllis," he said, "I guess we'll just have to rustle along by our poor little selves. The people who take charge of us seem to take charge too hard. They mean well, but why should they stamp on us?--Yes, let's try it ourselves."

And Phyllis, not quite fifteen years old, became the acknowledged mistress of the big house.

In her demure head she knew that to fail would be to incur a danger that was almost too terrible to contemplate. Her father might be persuaded into marrying again, and the thought of such a catastrophe sobered and restrained her. She was on her mettle, and was determined to succeed. She had her check-book, her desk, her receipted bills. She had her morning interviews with the cook; sent curtains to the cleaners; rang up various tradespeople on the telephone; gently criticized Mary's window-cleaning, and George's nails, and busied herself with these, and innumerable other little cares, while Miss Simpkins waited in the study, restlessly drumming her long, lean fingers on a French grammar.

Of course, she did several foolish, impulsive things, but no more than some little bride might have done in the first novelty of controlling a large household. She gave a tramp one of her father's best suits of clothes; she was prevailed upon by the servants to buy many things that neither they nor anybody else could possibly need--including an electrically driven knife-cleaner, and a cook's table, so compact and ingenious, that it would have been priceless on an airship, though in her own spacious kitchen it was decidedly out of place; and it took her several months to discover that James was apparently feeding five elephants instead of five horses.

But she was quick to learn better; and with the innate capacity she inherited from her father, she soon had everything running on oiled wheels. And all this, if you please, at fifteen, with quite a bit of stocking between her dress and her trimly-shod feet.

It was seldom that her father ever ventured into the realm of criticism; but once or twice, in his smiling, easy-going way, he gently pulled her up.

"I don't know much about these things," he remarked once, "but don't there seem to be a lot of new dresses in this family?"

"One can't go naked, Papa."

"Admitting that, my dear, which with people of our position would certainly give rise to comment--couldn't we compromise on--well--going half-naked, and perhaps show a more Spartan spirit, besides, in regard to our hats?"

Phyllis' eyes filled with tears; and flushing with shame, she pressed her hot cheek against the back of the chair she was sitting in, and felt herself the most miserable, disgraced, unworthy little creature in the whole world.

Mr. Ladd's voice deepened, as it always did when he was moved.

"My darling," he said, "don't feel badly about it, because it is only a trifle. But it is not kind to your companions to dress better than they do, and I am sure you do not wish them to feel envious or resentful. I just ask you to bear it in mind, that's all, and be somewhat on your guard."

"I will, Papa."

"Now come and kiss your daddy, and tell him you're not cross with him for being such an old fuss-cat."

"Y-y-ou are n-not an old fu-u-uss-cat, but the dearest, darlingest, bestest--"

"Do you think it's right to bite a railroad president's ear?"

"Yes, if you love him!"

"Or muss up the only hair he has, which isn't very much?"

"Yes, if it helps you to think."

"What's that--thinking?"

"Yes, Papa."

"It worries me, dearest, to have you doing anything as serious as that."

"Papa, it is serious. Listen!"

"I'm listening,"

"I've a wonderful idea--I'm going to give a party!"

"Splendid--hope you'll ask me!"

"And I'm going to invite Satty Morrison, and Julia Grant, and Hetty Van Buren, and Maisie Smith, and the two Patterson girls, and perhaps Alicia Stewart--and we are going to have ice-cream, and lady's-fingers, and chocolate-cake, and Christmas crackers, if I can buy them this time of year--and, Papa, it's going to be a hat-party."

"Oh, a hat-party, goodness me, what's that?"

"To give away all the silly, extravagant hats I've bought--though I'll have to get two new ones to make them go round--but you won't mind that, will you?"

"No, indeed--not for a hat-party."

And next day the invitations were out.

This scandalous way of bringing up an only daughter caused many people to shake their heads.

"It'll end in a peck of trouble for Mr. Ladd some day," said the old cats, with which Carthage was as liberally stocked as any other great and flourishing American city. "Mark my words, my dear, no good can come of bringing up a girl like a wild Indian, and he'll have nobody to blame but himself if she goes headlong to the bad."

CHAPTER II

At twenty, Phyllis Ladd was one of the prettiest girls in Carthage. A little above medium height, slim, dark, and glowing like a rose, she moved with that charming consciousness of beauty that is in itself almost a distinction. The French and Spanish in her mother's southern blood showed itself in her slender feet and hands, in her grace, her voice, her gentle, gracious, and engaging manners. One could not long talk to her without realizing that behind those sparkling eyes there was a fine and highly-sensitive nature, whimsical, original and intrepid; and to know her well was to perceive that she was one of those women who would love with rare intensity; and whose future, for good or evil, for happiness or disaster, was irretrievably dependent on the heart.

In a dim sort of way she had the consciousness of this herself; her flirtations went no further than to dance with the same partner three or four times in the course of the same evening; and Carthage, which gave its young people a great deal of innocent liberty--and which its young people took with the greediness of children--in time got to consider her, in spite of deceptive appearances, as being cold, proud, and "exclusive." Certainly her exclusiveness drew the line at being kissed by boisterous young men, and though their company pleased and amused her, she refused to single out one of them for any special favor.

"They are all such idiots, Papa," she said plaintively. "Aren't there any real men anywhere--real men that a girl could love?"

"I'm sure I don't know," returned Mr. Ladd. "I haven't come across one I'd trust a yellow dog to, let alone my daughter. But, frankly, I'm prejudiced on the young-man question--anybody would be who has to run a railroad with them!"

"Papa," she cried, throwing her arms around his neck, and her mood changing to one of her gayest phantasies, "let's go away together, you and I, and see if we can't find him. The Quest of the Golden Young Man! There must be one somewhere, and we'll look for him in every hidy-hole in the world--in street-cars and banks, and ice-cream places, and cellars, and factories, and mountains, and ships--just you and me, with a little steamer-trunk--and we'll run across him in the unlikeliest spot--and he may be a bandit in a cave, or a wild, roystering cow-boy shooting up one of those awful little western towns--but we'll know right off that he's our Golden Young Man--and we'll take him, and put him in a crate, and bring him home in the baggage-car, and poke him with a long sharp stick till he's willing to marry me!"

The Quest of the Golden Young Man! It began sooner than Phyllis could ever have believed possible, and with a companion she would have been the last to dream of. Mr. Ladd had a married sister in Washington, the wife of a highly-placed treasury official. Mrs. Sam Fensham was a very fashionable, energetic, pushing woman, wholly absorbed in the task of pulling competitors off the social ladder, and planting her own faultless French shoes on the empty rung. Brother and sister had about as much in common as you could spread on a dime; but Robert Ladd had all the American's admiration of ability, no matter in what direction it was exercised; and Sally Fensham dearly loved her fraternal relationship to the K. B. and O.

This social strategist had volunteered one of her rare visits to Carthage under the stress of bad financial weather. Brother Bob, who regularly brightened her Christmas with a check in four figures, had some peculiarities of purse and heart that Mrs. Fensham was well acquainted with. You might dash him off a letter, slashed with underlining, and piteous in the extremity of its cri de coeur, and get nothing in reply but two pages of humorous typewriting, wanting to know why two people, without children, could not manage to scrape along in Washington on sixteen thousand dollars a year?

But Brother Bob, face to face, was a very different person. If you sat on the arm of his chair, and talked of pa and ma and the old days, and perhaps cried a little, not altogether insincerely, over faces and things long since vanished--if, indeed, under the spell of that grave, kindly brother, you somehow shed your cares into an infinite tenderness, and forgot everything save that you loved him best of any one on earth--if--but it always happened--you did not need to give another thought, to what, after all, was the real object of your visit.

In a day or two, Brother Bob would say; "Sally, just how many dollars would make you feel eighteen again, and as though you were waiting for Elmer Boyd to take you out sleighing?"

You could answer thirty-seven hundred, and get it as readily as a postage stamp; and with it a look of such honest affection, such a glisten in those fine eyes, that your words of thanks stammered a little on your tongue.

Well, here was Aunt Sally again--arm-chair--pa and ma--the old days--check--and in her restless, scheming eyes the birth of a vague idea that grew ever more and more alluring,--nothing else than to take this very pretty niece of hers back to Washington, and enhance the Fensham position by a splendid marriage. She had a vision of balls and dinner-parties, all paid for by her millionaire brother; a showy French limousine; unlimited boxes at the theater and opera; and a powerful nephew-to-be, with a name to hoist the portcullis of many a proud social stronghold, and allow the wife of a highly-placed treasury official to squeeze in. The Motts, the Glendennings, the Pastors, the Van Schaicks--the Port Arthurs of Washington society--Sarah Fensham would assail all of them, holding before her one of their cherished sons, and defying them to shoot. A fascinating prospect indeed, and one not beyond realization, considering the girl's beauty, and her father's money.

On the subject being broached to Brother Bob, it was met with a hostility only comparable to a Polar bear being robbed of its cub. The whole marriage-market business nauseated him, he declared; his daughter should never be set up on the counter to be priced and pawed over; not only would her natural refinement revolt at it, but he inconsistently and with much warmth announced that Carthage was full of splendid young men, the sons of his old associates, amongst whom Phyllis should find her husband when the time came, and a fellow worth fifty of those Washington dudes and dough-heads.

"It's all very well for you to talk," said Sally coldly, "but I should say it was more for Phyllis to decide than for you."

"She wouldn't hear of such a thing," protested Mr. Ladd heatedly. "She is a quiet, home-loving girl, and wouldn't put herself in a show-window for anything on earth."

"My house is not a show-window; and what is there immodest or wrong in her meeting the nicest men in America?"

"Besides, she wouldn't care to leave me."

Angry as she was, there was something in this remark that suddenly touched Sally Fensham. She was hard and aggressive, but her heart was not altogether withered, and under extraordinary circumstances could even be moved.

"My poor Bob," she said, holding the lapels of his coat, and looking up at him; "do you not know that Phyllis may meet a man to-day at dinner, and to-morrow at tea, and the day after drive with him for an hour in the Park--and then what's father or mother or anything in the world if she loves him? Bob, dear, just get it out of your head that you are going to keep Phyllis. When the right man comes you will no more count to her than--than that chair!--Oh, yes, of course, every girl loves her father in a way--but you have only been keeping her heart warm--and once it's set on fire--good-by! And, Bob, dear, listen, is it not common sense to let her see the right kind of young men; to sift them and weigh them a bit? Is it a marriage-market to admit none but those who are presentable and well-bred and come of nice people? Is that a show-window? No, it's giving a girl a chance to choose--the chance I wish to Heaven I'd had. We simply try to get the nicest man there is, and you are more apt to get a prize from a hundred than from six!"

"That applies just as much to Carthage as to Washington."

"Bob, you don't know what you've been risking. Your whole way of living is utterly crazy. Why, anybody--anybody could come here, and make love to her, and carry her off under your nose--some awful commercial traveler or cheap pianist with frowzy hair--Oh, Bob, girls are such fools--such crazy, crazy fools!"

"Phyllis isn't."

"Was I?"

"No, I don't think you were."

"But didn't I marry Sam Fensham?"

"I don't see that that--"

Sally laughed; and it was not a pleasant laugh to hear in its self-revelation. Sam was notoriously more successful as a treasury official than as a husband.

"Bob, she has to go to Washington with me, and you must put your hand in your pocket, and do things handsomely."

"Against her will?"

Again Sally laughed, more harshly and cynically than before.

"Just you ask her," she said.

That night Mr. Ladd did so, and saw with a sinking heart the electrifying effect it had on her.

Go! Why, she'd jump out of her shoes to go, and wasn't daddy the dearest, darlingest, adorablest person in the world to propose it! And Aunt Sally's kindness--wasn't it wonderful! She would meet senators and ambassadors, and dance in the White House with lovely barons and counts, and try out her French on a real Frenchman and see if he could understand it!--A winter in Washington! What could be more exciting, more delirious!

Mr. Ladd affected to share her delight, and manfully concealed his true feelings, which were altogether bitter and sad. But he was a brave old fellow, and knew how to take his disappointments smilingly. Besides, what claim had he to resist the inevitable? What right? What justification? He would have bitten his tongue out before he would have reproached her, or marred, by the slightest word, her overflowing and girlish exuberance. It was only as they kissed each other good night that the pent-up appeal came.

"Don't forget your old dad in the shuffle," he said. "It's--it's going to be very hard for him without you, Phyllis."

Her instant contrition was very sweet to him, very comforting and dear. In fact, he had to struggle pretty desperately to allay the storm of tenderness he evoked.--No, no, he wanted her to go to Washington. It was the right thing to do--the only thing to do. A girl ought to see something of the big world before she married and settled down.--Oh, every girl said that to herself, but you couldn't get away from the fact that they were made for men, and men for them, and a father just held the fort till the Golden Young Man arrived.

How they laughed, with tears in their eyes! How infinitely precious was the love that bound them together! Dad was never to be lost in the shuffle--never, never; and he was to write every day, and she was to write; and if it were a hundred Washingtons she'd come straight back to him if he were lonely, for to her there was only one real Golden Young Man, and that was her darling, darling father.

Yet as Mr. Ladd shut the study door, and returned to his seat beside the lamp, he knew in spite of himself that he had said good-by. His guardianship was over; near, now, was that unknown man, that unknown rival, for whose pleasure he had lavished twenty years of incessant care and devotion. Though Ladd was hardly a believer, the wish came out with the fervency of a prayer: "Oh, my God, let him be worthy of her!"

CHAPTER III

She did write every day; sometimes the merest snippets, sometimes long, graphic letters, full of the new life and the new people. Her début had been an immense success. Eddie Phelps, a horrid, tallowy, patronizing person, but socially a dictator, had put the stamp of his approval on her, and she had managed to receive it and not burst--which, if Papa only knew it, was a very remarkable feat. But, anyway, she had been hall-marked "sterling," and was enjoying herself furiously. And the young men were so different from Carthage, so much more polished and elegant--and pertinacious. Washington young men simply didn't know what "No" meant, and it was like shoveling snow to get rid of them. But Aunt Sarah was a regular White Wings, and the poor, the detrimental, and the fast--every one, in fact, who wasn't a first-class parti with references from his last place--got carted away before he knew what had struck him.

And Aunt Sally! "Why, Papa, we didn't know her at all. She is as young as I am, and twice as eager, and dances her stockings through every other night. Washington is divided between the people who hate her, and the people who love her, and they put a tremendous zip into either end of it. What she really wants is to marry me at the cold end, and strengthen her position as she calls it; and though I say it, who shouldn't, the cold-end young men are coming in fast. When one proposes to me, she calls it a scalp, and looks, oh, so pleased! But if I see any of them working up to that I try to stop him in time, though it's awfully exciting just the same. That's why I've only three scalps to report instead of about eight. Oh, Papa, what fun it is!"

In time her letters began to change, and there were little signs of disillusionment. One was almost a tract on worldliness, in which she talked about Vanity Fair, and dancing on coffins, and the inner hunger of the soul. There were also increasing references to J. Whitlock Pastor, always coupled with "ideals." J. Whitlock Pastor was quite a remarkable young man of thirty, with "a beautiful austerity," and "fine mind." His people were immensely wealthy, and immensely fashionable--even in Carthage there was a sacredness about the name of Pastor--and Phyllis said there was something splendid in his taking up forestry as a life work, and devoting himself to it, heart and soul, when he had been born--not with a silver spoon--but with a bird's-egg diamond in his mouth.

If there was anything to be said against J. Whitlock Pastor, it was that he was almost too good to be true. He wanted to leave the world better for his having been, and all that--and seemed to have what might be called an excruciating sense of duty. "A very quiet and rather a sad man," wrote Phyllis, "whom one might easily mistake for a muff if one hadn't seen him on horseback. He rides superbly, and I never saw a ring-master in a circus who could come anywhere near him."

All this worked up to a telegram that reached Mr. Ladd a few weeks later: "I accepted him last night, and, Papa, please come on quick and bless us."

Mr. Ladd hastened to Washington as speedily as his affairs would allow, which was five days later, and arrived just in time to dress for the introductory dinner at Mrs. Pastor's--J. Whitlock's mother's. He tried to imagine he was delighted, and caught his daughter in his arms with the enthusiasm of a stage parent. But Phyllis was so pale, so calm, so undemonstrative that he hardly knew what to make of her. He put her cool indifference down to Washington training, but still it puzzled and troubled him. It was so unlike a girl who had met her fate--so unlike another pair of lovers that had been so much in his head that day--Genivieve de Levancour, and a certain Bob Ladd. The contrast gave him a certain sense of foreboding.

In the carriage she was very silent, and nestled against him like a tired child. He repeated his congratulations; he strove again to be delighted; joked, not without effort, about the exalted position of the Pastors, and what a come-down it was for them to marry such poor white trash as the Ladds. Then it occurred to him that perhaps this jarred upon her! "Forgive me, Phyllis," he said humbly. "I--I hardly know what I am saying. I--I guess I'm trying to hide what this recalls to me--what this means to me."

She pressed his hand, and snuggled it against her cheek, but still shrouded herself in reserve.

"Papa," she said suddenly, "you'd stick to me through thick and thin, wouldn't you? Whatever I did--however foolish or silly I might be, you'd always love me, wouldn't you?"

"By God, yes," he answered, "though why on earth you should ask--"

"Only to make sure," she exclaimed, brightening. "Just to be certain that my old-dog father hadn't changed. Now say bow-wow, just to show that you haven't!"

Mr. Ladd, very much mystified, and not at all comfortable in his mind, obediently bow-wowed. It set Phyllis off in a peal of laughter, and it was with apparent hilarity that both descended at the Pastor's front door.

Whitlock's mother received them in the drawing-room. She was a stately, gray-haired woman, with a subdued voice, and a graciousness that was almost oppressive. Her guests had hardly been seated, when J. Whitlock himself appeared, and excused himself, with faultless and somewhat unnecessary courtesy, for not having been found awaiting their arrival. Mr. Ladd saw before him a tall, thin young man, of a polished and somewhat cold exterior, with a dryness of expression that was positively parching. Like one of those priceless enamels of the Orient, one felt that J. Whitlock Pastor had been roasted and glazed, roasted and glazed, roasted and glazed until the substance beneath had become but a matter of conjecture. The enamel was magnificent--but where was the man? Mr. Ladd, with a choking sense of disappointment, began to suspect there was none.

J. Whitlock opened the proceedings much as the czar might have opened a Duma. He recited a neat, dry, commonplace little address of welcome, and sounded a key-note of constraint and formality that was rigorously maintained throughout the evening. The address was seconded by the empress-dowager, and then it was Mr. Ladd's turn to swear loyalty to the throne, and burst into cheers. He did so as well as he could, but it was a poor, lame attempt; and when, almost in despair, he went up to J. Whitlock, and impulsively wrung the Imperial hand, the very atmosphere seemed to shiver at the sacrilege.

A frigid dinner followed in a dining-room of overpowering magnificence. There was a high-class conversation to match, interrupted from time to time by a small British army--small in number--but prodigal of inches, and calves, and chest-measure--who stealthily pounced on plates, obtruded thumbs, and stopped breathing when they served you. Mr. Ladd, smarting with an inexplicable resentment, compounded of jealousy, scorn and chagrin, writhed in his chair, and tugged at his mustache, and gazed from his daughter to his prospective son-in-law with melancholy wonder.

Yet Phyllis seemed to be perfectly contented, sitting there so demure, elegant and self-possessed at the terrible board of the Romanoffs. Mr. Ladd could have wished that she had shown a little more assertion, a little more--well, he hardly knew what but something to offset the unconscious arrogance of these people, and to show them that a Ladd was as good as they were, if not a darned sight better! But Phyllis, if anything, was too much the other way. There was a humility in her sweetness, her deference, her touching desire to please. To her father she seemed to have accepted too readily, too gratefully, her beggar-maid position at that kingly table.

But as he watched her some doubts assailed him. He remembered how singular she had been in the carriage, how over-wrought, and unlike her usual self. Her eyes, fixed so constantly on her intended's, had in them more pleading than love; more a curious, studying, seeking look, as though she, too, was trying to penetrate the enamel, and see beneath. But her voice softened as she spoke to him; she smiled and colored at his allusions to "us" and "our"; she shyly referred to their projected honeymoon in the western forests, and spoke rapturously of galloping through the glades at the head of twenty rangers, all sunburned and jingling and armed to the teeth.

What was an old fellow to make of it, anyway? One could bring up a girl from a baby, and still not know her. Mr. Ladd was very much perplexed.

After dinner, the ladies left the two men at their coffee, and retired. The British Army set out liqueurs, cigars, a spirit-lighter, and then noiselessly vanished. Now that they were alone together, Mr. Ladd hoped that J. Whitlock would unbend; hoped that the long-deferred process of making his acquaintance would begin. He might not be an ideal son-in-law, but it was horse-sense to make the best of him. You had to take the son-in-law God gave you. Besides, the man that Phyllis loved was bound to have a fine nature; and if he could unveil it to her, he surely could unveil it to her father. So, between sips of Benedictine, and through the haze of a good cigar, Mr. Ladd essayed the task.

He commenced by describing his own early manhood; his courtship of Phyllis' mother; his marriage in face of a thousand difficulties. Again and again he faltered; it was all so sacred; his eyes were often moist--but he persevered; he had to win this young man, and how better than by appealing to the sentiment that unites all true lovers? The elderly railroad president could not bear utterly to be left out of these two young lives. His daughter was lost to him; at best a husband leaves little for a father; this stranger had it now in his power to make that little almost nothing. Small wonder, then, that Mr. Ladd struggled for his shred of happiness; put pride on one side; exerted every faculty he possessed to attract the friendship of Phyllis' master. For a husband is a master; a woman is the slave of the man she loves; forty centuries have changed nothing but the words, and the size and metal of the ring.

It used to be of iron, and was worn on the neck.

Mr. Ladd's gaze, that had been fixed in vacancy, of a sudden fell full on J. Whitlock's face. What he saw was an expression so cold, so delicately supercilious, so patiently polite, that he stopped as suddenly as though he had been struck by lightning. Was it for this, then, that he had opened this holy of holies, into which no human being before had ever looked,--this inmost recess of his soul, now profaned, it seemed to him, for ever? For a second his shame transcended even his disappointment. He had dishonored the dead, besides dishonoring himself. He had allowed this tall, thin, bored creature to hear things too dear, too intimate, to be spoken even to Phyllis. My God, what an old fool he had been, what an ass!

"Had we not better join the ladies?" inquired J. Whitlock, after the pause had lasted long enough to redeem the proposal from any appearance of rudeness.

"I suppose we had," returned Mr. Ladd, in a tone as dry as his host's; and together they both sought the drawing-room.

A long, long hour followed before, in decency, a very flustered, embittered, and upset middle-aged gentleman could dare to say his adieux. From the frescoed ceiling the painted angels must certainly have wept at the sight beneath; or, if they did not weep, they surely yawned. The labored conversation, the make-believe cordiality, the awful gap when a topic fell to rise no more, certainly made it an evening that never could be forgotten. Blessed Briton who said: "Mr. Ladd's kerridge!" Twice blessed Briton who handed them into it, and uttered the magic word "'Ome!"