CHAOS.

She began to hate Cryder with a mortal hatred. When he left her he had flown down the perspective of her past, but now he seemed to be crawling back—nearer—nearer—

Had it not been for him she might have loved Quintard. But he had scraped the gloss from life. He had made love commonplace, vulgar. She felt a sort of moral nausea whenever she thought of love. What an ideal would love have been with Quintard in this house! There was a barbaric, almost savage element in his nature which made him seem a part of these rooms and of that Indian wilderness.

And every nook and corner was eloquent of Cryder! Sometimes she thought she would take another house. But she asked herself: Of what use? She had nothing left to give Quintard, and her house was his delight. She no longer pretended to analyze herself or to speculate on the future. Once, when sitting alone by Bessie’s bed in the night, she had opened the door of her mental photograph gallery and glanced down the room to that great, bare plate at the end. It was bare no longer. On its surface was an impression—what, she did not pause to ascertain. She shut the door hurriedly and turned the key.

At times all the evil in her nature was dominant. She dreaded hearing Quintard speak the word which would thrust her face to face with her future; but the temptation was strong to see the lightning flash in his eyes, to shake his silence as a rock shakes above the quivering earth. And Quintard kept his control because he saw that she was trying to tempt him, and he determined that he would not yield an inch until he was ready.

She made up her mind to go away from all memory of Cryder and live on some Mediterranean island with Quintard. She was not fit to be any man’s wife, and life could never be what it might have been; but at least she would have him, and she could not live without him. There were softer moments, when she felt poignant regret for the mistake of her past, when she had brief, fleeting longings for a higher life of duty, and of a love that was something more than intellectual companionship and possession.

Quintard’s book came out and aroused a hot dispute. He was accused of coarseness and immorality on the one side, and granted originality and vigor on the other. The ultra-conservative faction refused him a place in American literature. The radical and advanced wing said that American literature had some blood in its veins at last. Hermia took all the papers, and a day seldom passed that Quintard’s name, either in execration or commendation, did not meet her eyes. The derogatory articles cut her to the quick or aroused her to fury; and the adulation he received delighted her as keenly as if offered to herself.

He was with her in his periods of elation and depression, and it was at such times that the better part of her nature was stirred. He needed her. She could give him that help and comfort and sympathy without which his life would be barren. She knew that under the hard, outer crust of her nature lay the stunted germs of self-abnegation and sacrifice, and there were moments when she longed with all the ardor of her quickening soul to give her life to this man’s happiness and good. Then the mood would pass, and she would look back upon it with impatience.

LIFE FROM DEATH.

Hermia was in bed one morning when her maid brought her the papers. She opened one, then sat suddenly erect, and the paper shook in her hands. She read the headlines through twice—details were needless. Then she dropped the paper and fell back on the pillows. A train had gone over an embankment in the South, and Ogden Cryder’s name was in the list of dead.

She lay staring at the painted canopy of her bed. It seemed to her that with Cryder’s life her past was annihilated, that the man took with him every act and deed of which she had been a part. A curtain seemed to roll down just behind her. A drama had been enacted, but it was over. What had it been about? She had forgotten. She could recall nothing. That curtain shut out every memory.

She pressed her hands over her eyes. She was free! She could take up her life from this hour and forget that any man had entered it but Grettan Quintard. Cryder? Who was he? Had he ever lived? What did he look like? She could not remember. She could recall but one face—a face which should never be seen in this room.

Though her mood was not a hard one, she felt no pity for Cryder. Love had made every object in life insignificant but herself and her lover.

She would marry Quintard. She would be all that in her better moments she had dreamed of being—that and more. She had great capacity for good in her; her respect and admiration for Quintard’s higher qualities had taught her that. She threw up her arms and struck her open palms against the bed’s head. And how she loved him! What exultation in the thought of her power to give him happiness!

For a few days Quintard felt as if he were walking on the edge of a crater. The hardness in her nature seemed to have melted and gone. The defiant, almost cynical look had left her eyes; they were dreamy, almost appealing. She made no further effort to tempt him, but he had a weird feeling that if he touched her he would receive an electric shock. He did not suspect the cause of the sudden change, nor did he care to know. It was enough that it was.

IDEALS RESTORED.

They were sitting together one evening in the jungle. The night was hot and the windows were open, but the curtains were drawn. The lamps were hidden behind the palms, and the room was full of mellow light. Hermia sat on a bank of soft, green cushions, and Quintard lay beside her. Hermia wore a loose gown of pale-green mull, that fell straight from her bosom’s immovable swell, and her neck and arms were bare. She had clasped her hands about her knee and was leaning slightly forward. Beside her was a heavy mass of foliage, and against it shone her hair and the polished whiteness of her skin.

“Now that you are famous, and your book has been discussed threadbare, what are you going to do next?” she asked him.

“I want to write some romances about the princely houses of India—of that period which immediately antedates the invasion of the East India Company. I spent a year in northern and western India, and collected a quantity of material. We know little of the picturesque side of India outside of Macaulay, Crawford, and Edwin Arnold, and it is immensely fertile in romance and anecdote. There never were such love-affairs, such daring intrigues, such tragedies! And the setting! It would take twenty vocabularies to do it justice; but it is gratifying to find a setting upon which one vocabulary has not been twenty times exhausted. And then I have half promised Mrs. Trennor-Secor to dramatize Rossetti’s ‘Rose Mary’ for her. She wants to use it at Newport this summer, or rather, she wanted something, and I suggested that. I have always intended to do it. But I feel little in the humor for writing at present, to tell you the truth.”

He stopped abruptly, and Hermia clasped her hands more tightly about her knee. “What are your plans for ‘Rose Mary’?” she asked. “I hope you will have five or six voices sing the Beryl songs behind the altar. The effect would be weird and most impressive.”

“That is a good idea,” said Quintard. “How many ideas you have given me!”

“Tell me your general plan,” she said quickly.

He sketched it to her, and she questioned him at length, nervously keeping him on the subject as long as she could. The atmosphere seemed charged; they would never get through this evening in safety! If he retained his self-control, she felt that she should lose hers.

She pressed her face down against her knee, and his words began to reach her consciousness with the indistinctness of words that come through ears that are the outposts of a dreaming brain. When he finished he sat suddenly upright, and for a few moments uttered no word. He sat close beside her, almost touching her, and Hermia felt as if her veins’ rivers had emptied their cataracts into her ears. Her nerves were humming in a vast choir. She made a rigid attempt at self-control, and the effort made her tremble. Quintard threw himself forward, and putting his hand to her throat forced back her head. Her face was white, but her lips were burning. Quintard pressed his mouth to hers—and Hermia took her ideals to her heart once more.

Time passed and the present returned to them. He spoke his first word. “We will be married before the week is out. Promise.”

He left her suddenly, and Hermia sank back and down amidst the cushions. Once or twice she moved impatiently. Why was he not with her? The languor in her veins grew heavier and wrapped her about as in a covering. She slept.

AN AWAKENING.

When Hermia awoke there was a rattle of wagons in the street, and the dawn struggled through the curtains. There was a chill in the air and she shivered a little. She lay recalling the events of the night. Suddenly she sat upright and cast about her a furtive glance of horror. Then she sat still and her teeth chattered.

Cryder’s face looked at her from behind every palm! It grinned mockingly down from every tree! It sprang from the cushions and pressed itself close to her cheek! The room was peopled with Cryder!

She sprang to her feet and threw her arms above her head. “O God!” she cried; “it was but for a night! for a night!”

She fled down the room, Cryder, in augmenting swarm, pursuing her. She flew up the stairs and into her room, and there flung herself on the floor in such mortal agony as she could never know again, because the senses must be blunted ever after. Last night, in Quintard’s arms, as heaven’s lightning flashed through her heart, every avenue in it had been rent wide. The great mystery of life had poured through, flooding them with light, throwing into cloudless relief the glorious heights and the muttering depths. Last night she had dwelt on the heights, and in that starry ether had given no glance to the yawning pits below. But sleep had come; she had slid gently, unwittingly down; she had awakened to find herself writhing on the sharp, jutting rocks of a rayless cavern, on whose roof of sunset gold she had rambled for days and weeks with a security which had in it the blindness of infatuation.

She marry Quintard and live with him as the woman he loved and honored above all women! She try to scale those heights where was to be garnered something better worth offering her lover than any stores in her own sterile soul! That hideous, ineffaceable brand seemed scorching her breast with letters of fire. If she had but half loved Cryder—but she had not loved him for a moment. With her right hand she had cast the veil over her eyes; with her left, she had fought away all promptings that would have rent the veil in twain. Every moment, from beginning to awakening, she had shut her ears to the voice which would have whispered that her love was a deliberate delusion, created and developed by her will. No! she had no excuse. She was a woman of brains; there was no truth she might not have grasped had she chosen to turn her eyes and face it.

She flung her arms over her head, grasping the fringes of the rug, and twisting them into a shapeless mass. She moaned aloud in quick, short, unconscious throbs of sound. She was five-and-twenty, and life was over. She had wandered through long years in a wilderness as desolate as night, and she had reached the gates of the city to find them shut. They had opened for a moment and she had stood within them; then a hand had flung her backward, and the great, golden portals had rushed together with an impetus which welded them for all time. She made no excuses for herself; she hurled no anathemas against fate. Her intellect had been given to her to save her from the mistakes of foolish humanity, a lamp to keep her out of the mud. She had shaded the lamp and gone down into the mire. She had known by experience and by thought that no act of man’s life passed without a scar; that the scars knit together and formed the separate, indestructible constituent fibers of his character. And each fiber influenced eternally the structure as a whole. She had known this, and yet, without a glance into the future, without a stray thought tossed to issues, she had burnt herself as indifferently as a woman who has nothing to lose. It was true that great atonement was in her power, that in a life’s reach of love and duty the scar would fade. But that was not in the question. With such tragic natures there is no medium. She could not see a year in the future that would not be haunted with memories and regrets; an hour when that scar would not burn.

If life could not be perfect, she would have nothing less. She had dealt her cards, she would accept the result. She had had it in her to enjoy a happiness possible only to women of her intellect and temperament. She had deliberately put happiness out of her life, and there could be but one end to the matter.

She sprang to her feet. She had no tears, but it seemed as if something had its teeth at her vitals and was tearing them as a tiger tears its victim. She walked aimlessly up and down the room until exhausted, then went mechanically to bed.

THE DOCTRINE OF THE INEVITABLE.

Late in the day her maid awoke her and said that Mrs. Dykman was down-stairs.

Hermia hesitated; then she bade the girl bring the visitor up to her boudoir. It was as well for several reasons that Mrs. Dykman should know.

She thrust her feet into a pair of night-slippers, drew a dressing-gown about her, and went into the next room. Mrs. Dykman, as she entered a moment later, raised her level brows.

“Hermia!” she said, “what is the matter?”

Hermia glanced at herself in the mirror. She shuddered a little at her reflection. “Several things,” she said, briefly. “Sit down.”

Mrs. Dykman, with an extremely uncomfortable sensation, took a chair. On the occasion of her first long conversation with Hermia she had made up her mind that her new-found relative would one day electrify the world by some act which her family would strive to forget. How she wished Hermia had been cast in that world’s conventional mold! It had come! She was convinced of that, as she looked at Hermia’s face. What had she done?

“I have something to tell you,” said Hermia; and then she stopped.

“Well?”

Mrs. Dykman uttered only one word; but before that calm, impassive expectancy there was no retreat. She looked as immovable, yet as compelling, as a sphinx.

Hermia told her story to the end. At so low an ebb was her vitality that not a throb of excitement was in her voice.

When she had finished, Mrs. Dykman drew a breath of relief. It was all very terrible, of course, but she had felt an indefinable dread of something worse. She knew with whom she had to deal, however, and decided upon her line of argument without the loss of a moment. For Hermia to allow any barrier to stand between herself and Quintard was ridiculous.

“It is a very unfortunate thing,” she said, in a tone intended to impress Hermia with its lack of horror; “but has it occurred to you that it could not be helped?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember that for more years than you can count you nursed and trained and hugged the idea of an adventurous love-affair? The moment you got the necessary conditions you thought of nothing but of realizing your dream. To have changed your ideas would have involved the changing of your whole nature. The act was as inevitable as any minor act in life which is the direct result of the act which preceded it. You could no more have helped having an intrigue than you could help having typhoid fever if your system were in the necessary condition. I think that is a logical statement of the matter.”

“I do not deny it,” said Hermia indifferently; “but why was I so blind as to mistake the wrong man for the right?”

“The men of your imagination were so far above reality that all men you met were a disappointment. Cryder was the first who had any of the qualities you demanded. And there was much about Cryder to please; he was one of the most charming men I ever met. You found it delightful to be with a man who, you thought, understood you, and whose mind was equal to your own. You were lonely, too—you wanted a companion. If Quintard had come first, there would have been no question of mistake; but, as the case stands, it was perfectly natural for you to imagine yourself in love with Cryder.”

Hermia turned her head listlessly against the back of the chair and stared at the wall. It was all true; but what difference did it make?

Mrs. Dykman went on: “Moreover—although it is difficult for you to accept such a truth in your present frame of mind—the affair did you good, and your chances of happiness are greater than if you took into matrimony neither experience nor the memory of mistakes. If you had met Quintard first and married him, you would have carried with you through life the regret that you had never realized your wayward dreams. You would have continued to invest an intrigue with all the romance of your imagination; now you know exactly how little there is in it. What is more, you have learned something of the difference in men, and will be able to appreciate a man like Quintard. You will realize how few men there are in the world who satisfy all the wants of a woman’s nature. There is no effect in a picture without both light and shade. The life you will have with Quintard will be the more complete and beautiful by its contrast to the emptiness and baldness of your attempt with Cryder.”

Hermia placed her elbows on her knees and pressed her hands against her face. “You are appealing to my intellect,” she said; “and what you say is very clever, and worthy of you. But, if I had met Quintard in time, he would have dispelled all my false illusions and made me more than content with what he offered in return. No, I have made a horrible mistake, and no logic will help me.”

“But look at another side of the question. You have given yourself to one man; Heaven knows how many love affairs Grettan Quintard has had. You know this; you heard him acknowledge it in so many words. And yet you find no fault with him. Why, then, is your one indiscretion so much greater than his many? Your life until you met Quintard was your own to do with as it pleased you. If you chose to take the same privilege that the social code allows to men, the relative sin is very small; about positive right and wrong I do not pretend to know anything. With the uneven standard of morality set up by the world and by religion, who does? But relatively you are so much less guilty than Quintard that the matter is hardly worth discussing. And, if he never discovers that you give him less than he believes, it will not hurt him. When you are older, you will have a less tender regard for men than you have to-day.”

Hermia leaned back and sighed heavily. “Oh, it is not the abstract sin,” she said. “It is that it was, and that now I love.”

“Hermia,” said Mrs. Dykman, sternly, “this is unworthy of a woman of your brains and character. You have the strongest will of any woman I have ever known; take your past by the throat and put it behind you. Stifle it and forget it. You have the power, and you must surely have the desire.”

“No,” said Hermia, “I have neither the power nor the desire. That is the one thing in my life beyond the control of my will.”

“Then there is but one thing that will bring back your normal frame of mind, and that is change. I will give you a summer in London and a winter in Paris. I promise that at the end of that time you will marry Quintard.”

“Well,” said Hermia, listlessly, “I will think of it.” She was beginning to wish her aunt would go. She had made her more disgusted with life than ever.

Mrs. Dykman divined that it was time to leave the girl alone, and rose. She hesitated a moment and then placed her hand on Hermia’s shoulder. “I have had every experience that life offers to women,” she said—and for the first time in Hermia’s knowledge of her those even tones deepened—“every tragedy, every comedy, every bitterness, every joy—everything. Therefore, my advice has its worth. There is little in life—make the most of that little when you find it. You are facing a problem that more than one woman has faced before, and you will work it out as other women have done. It was never intended that a life-time of suffering should be the result of one mistake.” Then she gathered her wraps about her and left the room.

Shortly after, Hermia drove down to her lawyer’s office and made a will. She left bequests to Helen Simms and Miss Newton, and divided the bulk of her property between Bessie, Miss Starbruck, and Mrs. Dykman.

BETWEEN DAY AND NIGHT.

Hermia sat by the window waiting for Quintard. It was the saddest hour of the day—that hour of dusk when the lamplighter trudges on his rounds. How many women have sat in their darkening rooms at that hour with their brows against the glass and watched their memories rise and sing a dirge! Even a child—if it be a woman-child—is oppressed in that shadow-haunted land between day and night, for the sadness of the future is on her. It is the hour when souls in their strain feel that the tension must snap; when tortured hearts send their cries through forbidding brains. The sun has gone, the lamps are unlit, the shadows lord and mock until they are blotted out under falling tears.

Hermia rose suddenly and left the room. She went into the dining-room and drank a glass of sherry. She wore a black gown, and her face was as wan as the white-faced sky; but in a moment the wine brought color to her lips and cheeks. Then she went into the jungle and lit the lamps.

She was standing by one of the date-trees as Quintard entered. As he came up to her he took her hand in both his own, but he did not kiss her; he almost dreaded a renewal of last night’s excitement. Hermia, moreover, was a woman whose moods must be respected; she did not look as if she were ready to be kissed.

“Are you ill?” he asked, with a tenderness in his voice which made her set her teeth. “Your eyes are hollow. I am afraid you did not sleep. I”—the dark color coming under his skin—“did not sleep either.”

“I slept,” said Hermia—“a little; but I have a headache.”

They went to the end of the room and sat down, she on the bank, he opposite, on a seat made to represent a hollowed stump.

They talked of many things, as lovers do in those intervals between the end of one whirlwind and the half-feared, half-longed-for beginning of another. He told her that the Poet’s Club, after a mighty battle which had threatened disruption, had formally elected him a member. Word had been sent to his rooms late in the afternoon. Then he told her that they were to be married on Thursday, and to sail for Europe in the early morning on his yacht. He spoke of the places they would visit, the old cities he had loved to roam about alone, where idle talk would have shattered the charm. And he would take her into the heart of nature and teach her to forget that the world of men existed. And the sea—they both loved the sea better than all. He would teach her how every ocean, every river, every stream spoke a language of its own, and told legends that put to shame those of forest and mountain, village and wilderness. They would lie on the sands and listen to the deep, steady voice of the ocean telling the secrets she carried in her stormy heart—secrets that were safe save when some mortal tuned his ear to her tongue. He threw back his head and quoted lingeringly from the divinest words that have ever been written about the sea:

Hermia leaned forward and pressed her hands into his. “Come!” she said.

He dropped on the cushion beside her and caught her to him in an embrace that hurt her; and under his kiss the coming hour was forgotten.

After a time he pushed her back among the cushions and pressed his lips to her throat. Suddenly he stood up. “I am going,” he said. “We will be married at eight o’clock on Thursday night. I shall not see you until then.”

She stood up also. “Wait a moment,” she said, “I want to say something to you before you go.” She looked at him steadily and said: “I was everything to Ogden Cryder.”

For a moment it seemed as if Quintard had not understood. He put out his hand as if to ward off a blow, and looked at her almost inquiringly.

“What did you say?” he muttered.

“I tried to believe that I loved him, and failed. There is no excuse. I knew I did not. I tell you this because I love you too well to give you what you would have spurned had you known; and I tell you that you may forget me the sooner.”

Quintard understood. He crossed the short distance between them and looked into her face.

Hermia gave a rapturous cry. All that was brutal and savage in her nature surged upward in response to the murderous passion in this man who was bone of herself. Never had she been so at one with him; never had she so worshiped him as in that moment when she thought he was going to kill her. Then, like a flash, he left her.

THE REALIZATION OF IDEALS.

She stood motionless for a few moments, then went up-stairs. As she crossed the hall she saw that the front-door was open, but she was too listless to close it. She went to her boudoir and sank into a chair. In the next room was a bottle of potassium cyanide which she had brought up from the butler’s pantry. It had been purchased to scour John Suydam’s silver, which had the rust of generations on it. She would get it in a few moments. She had a fancy to review her life before she ended it. All those years before the last two—had they ever really existed? Had there been a time when life had been before her? when circumstances had not combined to push her steadily to her destruction? No temptations had come to the plain, unattractive girl in the little Brooklyn flat. Though every desire had been ungratified, still her life had been unspoiled, and she had possessed a realm in which she had found perfect joy. Was it possible that she and that girl were the same? She was twenty years older and her life was over; that girl’s had not then begun. If she could be back in that past for a few moments! If, for a little time, she could blot out the present before she went into the future! She lifted her head. In a drawer of her wardrobe was an old brown-serge dress. She had kept it to look at occasionally, and with it assure, and reassure, herself that the present was not a dream. She had a fancy to look for a moment as she had looked in those days when all things were yet to be.

She went into her bedroom and took out the dress. It was worn at the seams and dowdy of cut. She put it on. She dipped her hair into a basin of water, wrung it out, and twisted it in a tight knot at the back of her head, leaving her forehead bare. Then she went back to the boudoir and looked at herself in the glass. Yes, she was almost the same. The gown did not meet, but it hung about her in clumsy folds; the water made her hair lifeless and dull; and her skin was gray. Only her eyes were not those of a girl who had never looked upon the realities of life. Yes, she could easily be ugly again; but with ugliness would not come two years’ annihilation.

She threw herself into a chair, and, covering her eyes with her hand, cried a little. To the hopes, the ambitions, the dreams, the longings, which had been her faithful companions throughout her life, she owed those tears. She would shed none for her mistakes. She dropped her hand and let her head fall back with a little sigh of content. At least there was one solution for all misery, and nothing could take it from her. Death was so easy to find; it dwelt in a little bottle in the next room. In an hour she would be beyond the reach of memories. What mattered this little hour of pain? There was an eternity of forgetfulness beyond. Another hour, and she would be like a bubble that had burst on the surface of a lake. Then an ugly thought flashed into her brain, and she pressed her hands against her eyes. Suppose there were a spiritual existence and she should meet Cryder in it! Suppose he were waiting for her at the threshold, and with malignant glee should link her to him for all eternity! His egoism would demand just such revenge for her failure to love him!

She sprang to her feet. With difficulty she kept from screaming aloud. Was she mad?

Then the fear left her eyes and her face relaxed. If the soul were immortal, and if each soul had its mate, hers was Quintard, and Cryder could not claim her. She felt a sudden fierce desire to meet Cryder again and pour out upon him the scorn and hatred which for the moment forced love from her heart.

She dropped her hands to her sides and gazed at the floor for a while, forgetting Cryder. Then she walked toward her bedroom. As she reached the pillars she stopped and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth with a shudder of distaste. Cyanide of potassium was bitter, she had heard. She had always hated bitter things—quinine and camphor and barks; her mother used to give her a horrible tea when she was a child. * * * The taste seemed to come into her mouth and warp it. * * *

She flung her handkerchief to the floor with an impatient gesture and went into the next room.

A moment later she raised her head and listened. Then she drew a long, shuddering breath. Some one was springing up the stairs.

She thrust her hands into her hair and ruffled it about her face; it was half dry, and the gold glinted through the damp.

Quintard threw open the door of the boudoir and was at her side in an instant. His face was white and his lips were blue, but the fierceness was gone from his eyes.

“You were going to kill yourself,” he said.

“Yes,” she replied, “I shall kill myself.”

“I knew it! Sit down and listen to me.”

He pushed her on to a divan and sat in front of her.

“I find by my watch that it is but an hour since I left you,” he went on. “I had thought the world had rolled out of its teens. For most of that hour I was mad. Then came back that terrible hunger of heart and soul, a moment of awful, prophetic solitude. Let your past go. I cannot live without you.”

Hermia bent her body until her forehead touched her knees. “I cannot,” she said; “I never could forget, nor could you.”

“I would forget, and so will you. I will make you forget.”

She shook her head. “Life—nothing would ever be the same to me; nor to you—now that I have told you.”

He hesitated a moment. “You did right to tell me,” he said, “for your soul’s peace. And I—I love you the better for what you have suffered. And, my God! think of life without you! Let it go; we will make our past out of our future.”

He sat down beside her and took her in his arms, then drew her across his lap and laid her head against his shoulder.

“We are the creatures of opportunity, of circumstance,” he said; “we must bow to the Doctrine of the Inevitable. Inexorable circumstance waited too long to rivet our links; that is all. Circumstance is rarely kind save to the commonplace, for it is only the commonplace who never make mistakes. But no circumstance shall stand between us now. I love you, and you are mine.”

He drew her arms about his neck and kissed her softly on her eyes, her face, her mouth.

“You have suffered,” he whispered, “but let it be over and forgotten. Poor girl! how fate all your life has stranded you in the desert, and how you have beaten your wings against the ground and fought to get out. Come to me and forget—forget—”

She tightened her arm about his neck and pressed his face against her shoulder. Then she took the cork from the phial hidden in her sleeve. With a sudden instinct Quintard threw back his head, and the movement knocked the phial from her hand. It fell to the floor and broke.

For a moment he looked at her without speaking. Under the reproach in his eyes her lids fell.

He spoke at last. “Have you not thought of me once, Hermia? Are you so utterly absorbed in yourself, in your desire to bury your misery in oblivion, that you have not a thought left for my suffering, for my loneliness, and for my remorse? Do you suppose I could ever forget that you killed yourself for me? You are afraid to live; you can find no courage to carry through life the gnawing at your soul. You have pictured every horror of such an existence. And yet, by your own act, you willingly abandon one whom you profess to love, to a life full of the torments which you so terribly and elaborately comprehend.”

Hermia lay still a moment, then slipped from his arms and rose to her feet. For a few moments she walked slowly up and down the room, then stood before him. The mask of her face was the same, but through it a new spirit shone. It was the supreme moment of Hermia’s life. She might not again touch the depths of her old selfishness, but as surely would she never a second time brush her wings against the peaks of self’s emancipation.

“You are right,” she said; “I had not thought of you. I have sulked in the lap of my own egoism all my life. That a human soul might get outside of itself has never occurred to me—until now. I will live and rejoice in my own abnegation, for the sacrifice will give me something the better to offer you. I have suffered, and I shall suffer as long as I live—but I believe you will be the happier for it.”

He stood up and grasped her hands. “Hermia!” he exclaimed beneath his breath, “Hermia, promise it! Promise me that you will live, that you will never kill yourself. There might be wild moments of remorse—promise.”

“I promise,” she said.

“Ah! you are true to yourself at last.” Suddenly he shook from head to foot, and leaned heavily against her.

She put her arms about him. “What is the matter?” she asked through white lips.

“There is a trouble of the heart,” he murmured unsteadily, “it is not dangerous. The tension has been very strong to-night—but—to-morrow”—and then he fell to the floor.

She was beside him still when Miss Starbruck entered the room. The old lady’s eyes were angry and defiant, and her mouth was set in a hard line. For the first time in her life she was not afraid of Hermia.

“I heard his voice some time ago,” she said, hoarsely, “and at first I did not dare face you and come in. But you are my dead sister’s child, and I will do my duty by you. You shall not disgrace your mother’s blood—why is he lying there like that?”

Hermia rose and confronted her, and involuntarily Miss Starbruck lowered her eyes.

“He is dead,” said Hermia, “and I——have promised to live.”

THE END.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Spellings and hyphenation have been retained as in the original. Punctuation has been corrected without note.