"In the meanwhile," adjured the Dead Man, "believe her, James. If men would put less faith in their own four-square logic and more faith in their wives' illogical beliefs, there'd be fewer mistakes made."
"Don't ask me any more about it to-night," begged the girl in response to the amazed questioning in her lover's eyes. "I can't speak of it just yet. It's all too near—too wonderful."
"Just as you like," he agreed. "Now I must go, for I want to catch Mr. Batholommey before he goes to sleep, and make the arrangements with him for the wedding."
His arm around her, they crossed to where his hat and coat were hanging.
"I wonder if Oom Peter can see us now?" she mused, as Hartmann stooped to kiss her good-night.
"That's the great mystery of the ages," answered Hartmann. "Who can tell? But I wish he might know. I think, seen as he must see things now, he would be glad. Good-night, sweetheart."
She watched him stride down the walk. Then she came back into the room, her eyes alight.
"Oh, Oom Peter," she murmured, half aloud.
"I see," returned Peter Grimm. "I know all about it. I know, little girl. I know."
Late as was the hour, Kathrien yet lingered a few minutes longer in the room where that night her freedom and her life's crown had come to her.
She paused by the desk and lovingly caressed the rich, red mass of roses which, in memory of her uncle, she daily placed there. The cool, velvety touch of the blossoms was like a living response to her caress. And from the crimson petals arose a faint, drowsy fragrance.
Kathrien sank into the worn desk chair and gazed dreamily into the dying fire. She seemed to read there a wonderful story. Or else the grey-red embers shaped themselves into beautiful pictures. For her face was joyous beyond all belief.
"To-morrow!" she murmured to herself.
And Peter Grimm, looking down at her, smiled as he caught the whispered word.
"Yes, lievling," he answered. "To-morrow. Isn't it a marvellous word? It holds all the hopes and fears of the whole world."
"I'm so happy! I'm so happy!" she breathed.
The Dead Man laid his hand gently on the soft lustre of her hair.
"Then, good-night to you, my darling," he said in the old tender voice that had comforted her childish griefs and shared her childish delights in the bygone days. "Good-night, my darling. Love can never say 'good-bye.' I am going, little girl. I am leaving you here in your dear home that shall always be yours. Here, in the years that are to come, the way will lie clear before you. May pleasure and peace go with you, little girl of mine."
Her eyes were luminous. There was a half-smile on her lips. Peter Grimm's own eyes reflected her smile as he stroked her hair and continued to look down into her rapt face as though to impress its every detail upon his memory.
"Here on sunny, blossoming days," he went on, "when you look out on my old gardens, as a happy wife, all the flowers and trees and shrubs shall bloom enchanted to your eyes. For, love gives a heaven-light to everything. And when the home we love is our own, it becomes doubly fair."
The light in her eyes grew brighter and he stooped to brush his lips to her forehead.
"All that happens, happens again," he went on in that same caressing voice as though loath to leave her, and seeking to prolong his stay at her side. "And when, as a mother, you explain each leaf and bud, and the miracle of the growing flowers to your own little people, you will sometimes think of the days when you and I walked through the gardens and the leafy lanes together, and how I taught you all those things—even as you shall be teaching your own children. Yes,—all that happens, happens again and has happened before. You will teach them, just as I taught you. And so I shall always linger in your heart. Here, in our home, everything will keep on reminding you of me. Not in sadness nor in gloom. But as a wonderful, golden memory. You will forget only the part of me that was stubborn and unreasonable and ill-tempered—and you will remember me only as I wished to be. That is one of the gifts of God to those who have left this world. Their dear ones remember them only as kind, as loving, as good. Their faults fade from the memory and the good ever glows more and more brightly."
He paused. And still he could not leave the happy girl as she sat there in her blissful, fireside reverie.
"I shall be waiting for you, Katje," he said. "And I shall be knowing all of your life, its joys, its happy toil and its sweet rest, its lights and its passing shadows. I shall love your children with all my whole heart. And I shall be their grandfather just as though I were here. I shall be everywhere about you and yours, Katje. Always. In the stockings at Christmas, in the big, busy, teeming world of shadows, just outside your threshold; or whispering to you in the stillness of the night. And, as the years drift on, you can never know what pride I shall take in your middle life—the very best age of all! After the luxuries and the eager gaieties and the vanities and the possessions and the hot strife for gain cease to be important, we return to very simple things. For then, sunset is at hand, and the peace of Home calls to us far more clearly than the roar of the outer world. The evening of life comes bearing its own lamp."
Her face had grown graver, but still was radiant. The Dead Man smiled as he said:
"Then, as a little old grandmother—a little old child whose bedtime is drawing near, I shall still see you; happy to sit out in the sunlight of another day; asking no more of life than a few hours still to be spent with those you love;—telling your grandchildren how much more brightly the flowers used to blossom when you were young.—All that happens, happens again.
"And then, one glad day, glorified, radiant, young once more—divinely young,—you will come to us. And your mother and I shall take you in our arms again. Oh, what a meeting it will be! To you, many happy years away. To us, only a brief hour of waiting. We shall meet so perfectly then—the flight of Love to Love. And now," bending down once more and kissing her, "good-night, my own little girl."
She rose, half-dazzled by the brightness that filled her soul. Pausing to bury her face for a moment in the bowl of roses, she murmured:
"Dear, dear Oom Peter!"
Then, slowly, smilingly, she made her way up the stairs to her own room. The Dead Man's eyes followed her every light step. The Dead Man's hand was raised in unspoken benediction. Marta bustled in from the kitchen on her nightly round of window-locking and door-barring. As she passed the big wall clock, she stopped, sighed right lugubriously, and proceeded to wind the ancient timepiece by the simple old-time process of drawing down its pulley chain.
"Poor old Marta!" said Peter Grimm quizzically, as she departed. "Every time she thinks of me, she winds my clock. We're not quite forgotten after all, it seems. Good-night, old friend! There are a few tears ahead of you. But there is plenty of sunshine beyond them."
He glanced about the room, his eyes resting at last on Willem's door in the gallery above. The door swung open, and Dr. McPherson appeared on the threshold. In one hand he held a candle-stick. In the hollow of his right arm lay Willem, a Dutch patchwork bedquilt wrapped around him.
"All right, laddie," McPherson was saying in a voice whose softness would have amazed the Batholommeys. "Since you want so badly to sleep downstairs, you shall. The sofa by the fire is just as snug as your own bed. What Mistress Batholommey will say to my giving in to a sick little boy's whim, I don't know. But we don't care. Do we, Willem? And," he added, reaching the living-room and carrying the child across to the sofa, "if you want to be down here, and if you won't be happy anywhere else, here you shall be."
He laid Willem gently on the couch and covered him with the quilt.
"How do you feel, now?" he asked.
"I'm sleepy," answered Willem. "It's good to be in this room. I'll sleep finely here. Could—could I have a drink of water, please?"
The doctor crossed to the sideboard. The ice-water pitcher was empty. McPherson took up a glass.
"I'll find you some," said he. "I suppose I'll never learn my way around the labyrinths of this old house. But if I can't get to the nearest faucet, I'll wake Marta and ask her to help me. Lie still. I'll be back in a minute."
He picked up the lighted candle again, and started off on his quest. As he left the room he passed close by Peter Grimm.
"Good-night, Andrew," said the Dead Man. "I'm afraid the world will have to wait a little longer for the Big Guesser. The secret you've delved for so long and so loudly was in your own hands this evening. And you didn't know what to do with it."
The doctor left the room without hearing him. But Willem heard. Starting up on the couch, the boy cried:
"Oh, Mynheer Grimm! Where are you? I knew you were down here—That's why I wanted to come."
"Here I am," answered the Dead Man, moving forward into the range of the anxiously wandering blue eyes.
"Oh!" gleefully exclaimed the child. "I see you now! I see you now!"
"Yes? At last?"
"Oh, you've got your hat!" went on the boy excitedly. "It's off the peg. You're going!"
"Yes, Willem," replied the Dead Man. "I'm going."
"Need you go right away, Mynheer Grimm?" coaxed the child. "Can't you wait just a little while?"
"I'll wait for you, dear lad," returned Peter Grimm.
"Oh, can I go with you?" asked the boy in glad surprise. "Thank you, Mynheer Grimm! I couldn't find the way without you."
"Oh, yes, you could, Willem. God's signal light is the surest thing in all the universe. But I'll wait for you, just the same."
The boy's drowsiness, overcome for the moment by his sight of the Dead Man's loved face, had crept in upon him once more. He lay back on the couch with a happy little sigh.
And at once he was off in the wonder-aisles of dreamland—a dreamland full of circuses, of impossibly funny and friendly clowns, of street parade glories, of marvellous animals and thrilling equestrian feats.
"Sleep well," said Peter Grimm. "I wish you the very pleasantest of dreams a boy could have in this world."
The doctor's step sounded presently in the adjoining kitchen. As though awakened by it, Willem opened his eyes and sat up. The fever flush was gone from his cheeks, the fever glaze from his look. The lassitude that had weighted every joint in his sick little body had fled, to be replaced by a strange, glorious buoyancy.
With a glad shout, Willem sprang up and raced across the floor into Peter Grimm's outstretched arms.
"Huge moroche, Mynheer Grimm!" he cried. "Oh, I am well! I never was so well before. It's wonderful to be like this."
"Oh! Happy? It's like school being over!"
"Good!" laughed Peter Grimm. "It will always be like that now. Come! Let's be off."
He lifted the exalted, eager boy lightly from the floor, and swung him to a perch on his shoulder.
"Uncle Rat has come to town!" sang Willem, too rapturously happy to keep still.
"Ha-H'M!" he and Peter Grimm chorused as they moved toward the door.
"'Uncle Rat has come to town,
To buy——'"
McPherson came in.
"Here's the water, Willem," he announced, going over to the couch. "I got it at last, after barking my shins over——"
He glanced at the sofa and its occupant. Then the glass fell from his nerveless hand. He knelt in horror beside the still, white little body that lay there.
"Dead!" gasped McPherson.
"No!" exulted Peter Grimm from the doorway. "Not dead, Andrew, old friend. There never was so fair a prospect for life!"
"Oh," sighed Willem blissfully, his arm about Peter Grimm's neck, "I'm so happy! I didn't know any one could be so happy as this—or so well."
"If only the rest of them knew what they are missing! Hey, Willem?" assented Peter Grimm.
"What is Dr. McPherson looking at there on the sofa?" demanded Willem. "He seems scared—and—and—unhappy. What is he looking at, Mynheer Grimm?"
"He is looking at—nothing. And he doesn't know it. Come!"
"It's—it's so wonderful to be alive!" cried Willem.
They passed out, and the door of the house closed noiselessly behind them.
Night had given place to red dawn, and red dawn to white day.
Dr. McPherson came out of the Grimm house and sat down on the edge of the vine-bordered stoop. He was very tired. He had had a hard and trying night. In his ears were still ringing the sobs of old Marta, hastily awakened to learn of her only grandson's death;—Kathrien's quiet grief;—Mrs. Batholommey's excited, high-pitched questionings that jangled on the death hush as horribly as breaks the Venus music through the Pilgrims' Chorus.
It had been a night of stark wakefulness, of a myriad details. And McPherson had borne the brunt of it all. Now, under an opiate, Marta was asleep. Mrs. Batholommey had trotted ponderously home to bear the black tidings of a prisoned child's Release to her husband. And Kathrien had gone to her own room under the doctor's gruff command to snatch an hour's rest. McPherson himself had come out into the cool and freshness of the new-born world for a breathing space, and to think.
The June day was young. Very young. Under the early sun the grass was afire with dew diamonds. The flowers, dripping and fragrant, held up their cups to the light. The town still lay asleep. Over the suburb brooded the Hush of the primal Wilderness, creeping back furtively and momentarily to its long-lost domain.
And presently the quiet was broken by the swift recurring click of heels on the sidewalk. Some one was coming along the slumbrous Main street; and coming with nervous haste. The steps turned in at the Grimm gate. McPherson raised his blood-shot, sleep-robbed eyes and stared crossly toward the newcomer.
It was Frederik Grimm. And, recognising him, McPherson's frown deepened into a scowl.
"Is it true?" asked Frederik as he stopped in front of the doctor. "I met Mrs. Batholommey. She was just passing the hotel on her way home. I hadn't been able to sleep, so I was starting out for a walk. She told me——"
"That Willem's dead?" finished McPherson, with brutal frankness. "Yes, it's true. Did you suppose that it was a new vaudeville joke?"
Frederik stood blinking, blank-faced, apparently failing to grasp the sense of the doctor's words. The younger man's aspect dully irritated McPherson.
"Yes," he reiterated, "the boy's dead. The problem of supporting him needn't bother you now. Not that it ever did. He's dead. And it's the luckiest thing that ever happened to him."
Frederik raised one hand in instinctive protest. But he might as well have sought to stem Niagara with a straw.
The doctor's strained nerves, his genuine grief, his dislike for the dapper young man before him, combined to open wide the floodgates of honest Scottish wrath. And he saw no cause to exercise self-control.
"You're in luck!" he growled. "The law could have compelled you to pay some such munificent sum as four dollars a week for his maintenance. You're safe from that now. And I congratulate you. It'll mean an extra weekly quart of champagne or a brace of musical comedy seats for you. The law is stringent and I was going to invoke it in your case. You smashed a decent girl's life. You helped bring a nameless boy into a world that would have made his life a hell as long as he lived. Just because his father happened to be a yellow cur. And, in penalty for that sin, the power and majesty of an outraged law would have assessed you about one per cent of your yearly income. You're lucky."
Frederik winced as though he had been lashed across the face.
"I sometimes wonder," continued McPherson, urged to fresh vehemence by sight of the effect he was scoring, "if hell holds a worse criminal or a more mercilessly punished one than the man or woman who lets a little child suffer needlessly—who makes it suffer. And of all the suffering that can be heaped upon a child, everything else is like a feather's weight compared to sending it out in life with a name such as Willem would have borne. Oh, but God's merciful when He finds little children crying in the dark and leads them Home! Batholommey and the rest of them sneer at me for sticking to the old hell-fire Calvin doctrines in these days of pew-cushion religion. But I tell you, in all reverence, if there's no hell for the people who torture children, then it's time the Almighty turned awhile from pardoning sinners and built one."
"Don't worry," said Frederik shortly. "There is one. I know. I am in it."
"'Mourner's bench talk,' eh? It's cheap. Penitence is always on the free list. And in your case, as in most, it comes too late to do any good, except to salve the penitent's feelings. Willem lived in the same house with you for three years. All around him was Love. Except from the one person whose sacred duty it was to give that Love. We pitied him. We knew what he'd be facing if he lived. We made his childhood as happy as we could, so that he'd have at least one bright thing to look back on afterward. He was nothing to any of us. Except that he was a child crippled and maimed and fore-damned for life in the worst way any Unfortunate could be. We pitied him and we loved him. Did he ever hear a harsh word or see a forbidding face? Yes; he did. From one person alone. From you, his father. Even last night when he crept downstairs parched with thirst, and begged you for a drink of water——"
"Don't!" cried Frederik, in sharp agony. "Do you suppose you can tell me anything about that? Do you suppose I haven't gone over it all—yes, and over all the three years—a hundred times since I heard he was dead? Do you think you can make me feel it any more damnably than I do? If so, go ahead and try. You spoke of the need for a hell. You can spare your advice to the Almighty. He has made one. And I can't even wait until I'm dead before I walk through it."
"Through it," assented McPherson sardonically. "Through it with many a lamentable groan and a beating of the breast, and with squeaky little wails of remorse—and on through it, out onto the pleasant slopes of forgetfulness and new mischief. Take my condolences on your fearful passage through your purgatory. I fear me it will take you the best part of a week to pass entirely out of it. It's only a man-built hell, that of yours. And, according to the modern theologians, God has no worse one for you later on."
With twitching, pallid face, and anguished eyes, Frederik Grimm looked dumbly at his tormentor. Even in his agony, he felt, subconsciously, far down in his atrophied soul, that the doctor's forecast as to the duration of his remorse's torture was little exaggerated.
Yet, for the moment, his "man-built hell" was grilling and racking the stricken penitent to a point that the Spanish Inquisition's ingenuity could never have devised.
McPherson, with a sombre satisfaction, noted the younger man's misery. Then a wistful look flitted across his gnarled, bearded face.
"I wonder," he mused, his angry voice sinking to a rumble, "I wonder if you can guess—and of course you can't—what a prize you spent eight years in throwing away. You had a son. And you disowned him and turned your back on him. I've had no son. I shall never have a son. And when I go out into the dark, there'll be no man-child to carry on my name. No lad to inherit this brute body of mine with all its strength and giant endurance; this brain of mine, that has tried so hard to perfect itself and to give its possible successor the faculty for thought and work and self-mastery. My father was a strong man, a great man. And much of the little power and goodness and worthiness that exist in me, I owe to him. No man in future years can say that of me. It must be something that no childless man can understand or dream of, to feel the fingers of one's little son tugging at one. To,—Lord! What would Mother Batholommey say if she could hear me maundering and havering away like this! It means nothing to you, either. Except that you've had, and hated, and thrown away what many a better man would give half his life for."
There was a short silence. McPherson, ashamed of blurting his sacred heart secrets to a fellow he detested, sat gnawing angrily at his ragged grey moustache. Frederik, to whom the last part of the doctor's tirade had passed unheard, stood gazing sightlessly at the ground before him. And for a space, neither of them spoke.
At length Frederik looked up, almost timidly.
"Could—might I see him?" he asked.
"H'm?" grunted McPherson, starting from the maze of his own unhappy thoughts.
"I say, may I go in and see——?"
"Had three years to see him in, didn't you?" demanded McPherson. "I can't recall now that I ever saw you glance at him when you could help it. Why should you go in and see him now? You can't frighten him any more."
He checked himself.
"That last was a rotten thing for me to say," he muttered grudgingly. "I'm sorry."
But Frederik showed no signs of resentment. He was looking moodily at the ground once more, apparently engrossed in the fruitless efforts of a red ant on the walk's edge to lug away a dead caterpillar forty times its size. The doctor peered at him almost apologetically from under his grey thatch of eyebrow. The younger man's face still wore that same blank, dazed mask, as though horror had wiped it clean of expression. Again it was Frederik who broke the silence.
"I remember once," said he, in a dreary monotone, "when he was four years old. He saw a woolly lamb in a shop window and wanted it. I'd lost ninety dollars that day at the races and I was sore. He begged me to buy him the lamb. It cost only a quarter. I wouldn't. I told him he ought to be content to sponge on me for food and clothes without wanting presents, too. I remember he cried when I pulled him away from the shop window. And I hit him. I wish—I wish I'd——"
"If there's anything worse than a hardened criminal," snorted McPherson, "it's a silly, sentimental one. You say you want to go in and see him? Go ahead then. You don't have to ask my leave. It's your own house, isn't it?"
"No," answered Frederik, "it isn't."
"Huh? Oh, I remember now. You said last night you were going to give it to Kathrien. Don't worry. A promise like that isn't binding in law. And you'll repent of it almost as soon as you'll stop repenting for Willem."
"Perhaps so," agreed Frederik. "But it will be too late then. Here," he went on, pulling a long envelope from his pocket, "take charge of this, will you, and give it to Kathrien for her signature in case I don't see her?"
"What is it?" asked McPherson, mechanically taking the envelope as Frederik thrust it into his hand.
"Before I went to the hotel for a room last night," answered the other, "I called on Colonel Lawton and got him to draw it up. All it lacks is her signature."
"What——?"
"It is a deed for the house and the twelve-acre 'home plot' it stands on. That includes the two cottages over on McIntyre Street. They're both rented and in good condition. They'll bring her in nearly eight hundred a year. It's less than my uncle would have left her if he'd known——"
"He knew," interrupted McPherson decisively. "And that's why you did it. As you said last night, 'somebody has been doing your thinking for you.'"
"I'm glad for your own peace of mind that you aren't forced to give me credit for it," said Frederik in lifeless irony. "I'll go in now, if I may. I shall not stay long. And then for New York. It's the best place I know of for hastening one's journey through and out of the 'man-built hell' you spoke about. Oh, and I gave Lawton directions about Anne Marie, too. She can come home now if she wants to without being dependent upon any one for her support. You're quite right, Doctor. Somebody has been doing my thinking. I'm glad it stopped before I went broke."
With something of his old jaunty air he mounted the steps and went into the house. McPherson stared after him with a glower that somehow would not remain ferocious. Then he got up, stretched his great shaggy bulk, yawned, and started homeward for breakfast.
On the way he met Mr. Batholommey, hastily awakened and hurrying to the house of mourning.
"Doctor!" exclaimed the clergyman in agitation. "This is very distressing. Very."
"As usual," drawled McPherson, "I find I can't agree with you. To me it seems a blessed release."
"And on Kathrien's wedding day, too!" went on Mr. Batholommey, to whom McPherson's eternal disagreement had become so chronic he scarce noticed it. "At least, on the day that was to have been her wedding day! Young Hartmann waked me out of a sound sleep last night to tell me she had promised to marry him to-day. And he asked me to be at the house promptly at eleven. But, of course, now——"
"Of course, now," put in the doctor, "the wedding is going to take place just the same."
"But——!"
"I argued with Kathrien a whole half-hour this morning before she would agree to it," went on the doctor. "But at last I persuaded her it was the only thing to do. If ever she needs a husband's help and advice, now is the time. And at last I made her understand that. So, she and James will be married to-day. Just as they planned to. The only difference will be that they'll come to the rectory for the ceremony."
"It seems almost—shall I say indecorous?" protested Mr. Batholommey.
"The real things of life generally do," replied the doctor. "Good-morning. I'm going to be so indecorous as to hurry home for a bath and a breakfast instead of catching cold standing out here on a wet street discussing other people's business."
He strode on. Mr. Batholommey, murmuring dazedly to himself, took up his own journey.
Frederik Grimm turned away from looking down at the pathetically small figure in the darkened room. His face was expressionless. He had stood there but a few minutes. And his eyes, riveted on the still, white little form, had not softened nor blurred with tears.
Wearily he descended the gallery stairs into the living-room, where the morning sunlight was already turning the desk bowl of roses into a riot of burning colour.
He was halfway across the room, toward the door, when he was aware that Kathrien had risen from the desk chair and was looking at him. Her look was cold and devoid of pity as she surveyed him. But as he halted, hesitant, the sunlight fell full on his face. And in the visage that had seemed so vapidly blank to McPherson, she read much.
The cold glint died from her eyes and she stepped forward with hand outstretched.
He came haltingly toward her. He held out his hand to meet hers. But he could not touch the fingers that were waiting to press his own. His hand fell limply to his side.
She understood. And the warm pity in her face deepened.
"I am sorry," she said simply.
"He is happier," muttered the man.
"I don't mean for Willem. For you. You understand what it all means at last."
"And, too late," he assented. "It is always too late—when one understands."
"It is never too late," she denied eagerly. "Frederik, you have everything ahead of you. You can——"
"I have nothing ahead of me," he contradicted dully.
"You have wealth, youth, the power to undo what wrong you did,—to start afresh——"
"As the broken-winged bird has the power to start a new flight. Don't waste your divine sympathy on me, Kitty. It would be thrown away. In a very little time, as Dr. McPherson has kindly pointed out to me, I shall be convalescent from my attack of remorse. And then all life will lie before me, as you say. All life except the one thing that makes life worth living."
He stopped. For he saw she understood.
"You always understood," he went on, voicing his thought. "That was one of the wonderful things about you, Kitty. Even now, you saw the pain I am in. And it made you forget what you believe I am. It was sweet of you. It will be good to remember."
"I wish I could help you," she said.
"You have helped me," he answered. "For you've given me a Memory to carry till I can shake off the load—till I can get clear of McPherson's 'man-built hell.' It won't be long. So don't worry. Even now, my common sense tells me I've made a fool of myself. And I'm human enough to be more ashamed of being a fool than of being a knave. I had everything in my own hands. And I threw away the game because an attack of fright kept me from playing my winning cards. Last night I was afraid of a ghost. This morning I'm sane enough to know that ghosts were invented by the first nervous man who was alone at night. This morning I am heart-broken because my little boy lies dead. To-morrow I shall be sane enough to know that it is as lucky for me as it is for him, that he died. And in a week I'll be congratulating myself over it all and revelling in a freedom and a fortune I've always craved. So you see I'm quite incurable."
"Why do you say such things?" she cried. "You know they aren't true."
"When I said you 'always understand,' Kitty, I was wrong. You don't understand. No woman understands—that a man doesn't reform. A good man may have taken a wrong twist. And when he finds his way back to the straight road, they say he has 'reformed.' He hasn't. He's only struck his own natural gait again. As he was bound to. And my kind of man sometimes takes a momentary twist in the right direction. Then people say he has reformed. And they are just as much mistaken as they were in the other case. For, water won't run uphill after the first pressure is withdrawn."
"But in the fires of affliction——"
"The fires of affliction," he retorted sadly, "have burned away the dross from the pure gold of many a soul, I suppose. But no fires were ever heated that could burn dross fiercely enough to turn it into gold. Yet——"
He hesitated, then said, without daring to look at her:
"There's one thing I do want you to know, Kitty. Whatever I was and am, and whatever shams went to make up my daily life here—you know my love for you was true and absolute and that I loved and love you more than the whole world besides?"
"Yes," she returned, unembarrassed. "I believe that, Frederik. In part. You loved me as much as you could love any one. But——"
"Why must there be a 'but'?" he entreated.
"But," she went on with the relentlessness of the Young, "not as much as you loved yourself."
"More! Ten thousand times more!" he declared vehemently.
"No," she contradicted. "For you didn't love me enough to give me up when you knew I cared for another man. The Perfect Love would have——"
"The 'perfect love'!" he scoffed. "I have read of it. But I have yet to see it."
"You cannot see it," she replied, "for the same reason I could not see Oom Peter when he was fighting my battle here last night. My eyes were blinded by the world I live in. Perfect love is everywhere. It is within and about us. But——"
"But I would be too ignoble to recognise it if I chanced upon it? Perhaps. But why strip me of my last illusion? In the torment of my self-abasement this morning, I have clung to that one comfort: That I love you with a love which a truly worthless man could not feel. And now——"
"Don't misunderstand me," she begged, half-tearfully. "I——"
"You have shown me the truth. And I ought to thank you for it. Perhaps some day I can. If I still remember it then. Good-bye, dear. I shan't be here again. I've—I've left you a little present. Dr. McPherson will give it to you."
"But I can't take——"
"Oh, yes, you can. It isn't really from me. That's just another of my lies to make a good impression. I've gotten so in the habit of telling them that it is going to take me a long time to realise that one of the chief advantages of being a rich man is the immunity from the need to lie. The present isn't really from me. It's from Oom. Peter. You can't refuse it from him. If you doubt it's Oom Peter's own direct gift, ask Dr. McPherson. It was bad enough," he sighed, in mock despair, "for Oom Peter to squander so much of my money while he was alive, without keeping on doing it after he died. I hope he has stopped it at last. Or I'll soon be reduced to standing at the subway steps with a tin cup in my hand."
Through the forced lightness, whose effort wrung sweat from the man's forehead, Kathrien was woman enough to see the mortal agony that lay beneath. And again she held out her hand.
"Good-bye, Frederik," she said gently. "And may you be happy!"
He looked doubtfully at the shapely little hand. Then, with an awkwardness strangely foreign to his normal grace, he took the hand in both his own and stood a moment, looking down at it as though not knowing what to do with it.
Then, very simply, he fell on his knees, touched the warm, roseleaf palm to his lips, got up and, without looking back, hurried out of the house.
Kathrien watched his slender, carefully groomed figure until it was lost at a turn in the rose bushes. Then she came back into the room and stood beside Peter Grimm's old chair.
"Oom Peter!" she whispered. "This is my wedding day. You know it, don't you? And—oh, please let me think you are close—close—beside me all the time!"