Kate Crossett—Comedienne

by Anne O'Hagan

KATE CROSSETT—COMEDIENNE
BY ANNE O'HAGAN

ILLUSTRATED BY
ROBERT A. GRAEF

Prologue.

At St. Rose's there was always excitement in the middle of the morning, when old Tim's crusty voice could be heard “whoaing” to Ginger, who, to tell the truth, needed no adjuration to stop, and when he, alighting from the covered wagon which plied between the academy and the town, stamped up the stone steps and into the waxed hardwood hall of the building.

Tim was the one creature upon whom the sisters had never been able to enforce their rule of quiet; while acknowledging them his spiritual overseers next to Father Paul himself, he still maintained an independent spirit. He testified to his manhood by refusing to step softly, to speak gently to the ancient nag, or perceptibly to lower his voice in addressing Mother Veronica. Consequently, his advent with that of the morning mail was always known at St. Rose's to the uttermost classroom. And always a little flutter ran through the building, from rooms in which sat “the big girls,” who would be “young ladies and out in the world” next year, down to those in which were the tiniest pupils, whose chubby cheeks had not yet lost the stain of tears over their separation from their home.

The fact that the mail would not be distributed until noon, when all classes were dismissed and the girls had half an hour in the gardens before dinner, was no preventive of excitement—rather a cause. There were thirty minutes of suppressed anticipation to be endured before they could file through the corridors and pause at Mother Veronica's desk in her austere little office to receive the communications, the superscriptions of which her sharp eyes, behind their bone-bowed glasses, had already keenly noted. And woe to the girl—most likely of the graduating class, “next year to be a young lady and out in the world”—who received a letter with a superscription requiring explanation.

Kate Crossett was not one of these. She was only nine, and it would be at least eight years before the sisters at St. Rose's would put upon her the seal “finished” and send her forth. That she was excited about the reception of mail indicated chiefly that she had an inordinate capacity for excitement. In the two years in which she had dwelt at St. Rose's there had been but four handwritings directed to her—her mother's, fine, sloping, so sloping as to look almost running; her father's, bold and brilliant, with old-school tendency to shading and flourishing; the round, smeared chirography of the little girl who had been her bosom friend before St. Rose's immured her, and the terse, English, literary script of her present bosom friend, Allison Ware.

Allison Ware was twenty-three to Kate's nine, but she regarded him as quite the most satisfactory playmate of her experience. He kept his high place in her regard probably by the infrequency of his appearances. He had come three or four times with her father, and had captivated Kate's fancy.

To-day—three weeks before Christmas it was—Kate's hopes were dashed by the letters she received. There was one from her mother, still known on the stage by her maiden name of Dempsey—of “the” Dempseys, as one was always informed when reference was made to her, “the” Dempseys who had managed the Dublin Theatre, who had supported Kean and Garrick, and who had always been among the reliable props of the British stage.

Mrs. Crossett, or Miss Dempsey, regretted in her hasty, eager handwriting that she was not going to be at St. Rose's for the Christmas play, on the twentieth, before the school adjourned for the holidays. She was sure that her darling would acquit herself with credit; and she could not tell her little daughter how sorry mother was not to see her first public appearance. Little daughter must remember to do exactly as Sister Mary Regina, stage manager for the academy performance, directed; she must also remember that it was a very high honor to be chosen to play the part of a herald angel, and she must strive to act with the sweetness and reverence that a herald angel would naturally feel. Poor mother's heart was fairly broken to think that she could not be with her precious pet for Christmas; some day there would be no more of these lonely, miserable holidays, but she and Kate would live together in a dear little house in the country, with a dear little pony in the stable stall, and dear little chickens in the poultry yard, and dear little roses climbing over the doors and windows, and they would be as happy as never was. And meantime they would bear their separation bravely, and Kate must not sulk or feel neglected because she had to spend her Christmas vacation at the academy, and the writer was always Kate's devoted and loving mamma, with ten thousand kisses, Delia Dempsey Crossett.

This was the first of the letters which Kate had opened. She proceeded to pull a long face, in which was threatened an outbreak of tears before she looked at the others. Kate was wholeheartedly devoted to her mother, and had looked forward since September to having the Christmas holiday like the last Christmas holiday, with that dearly loved, satisfying companion, in all the half-awesome and half-lovely, altogether entrancing surroundings of a New York hotel.

“Oh, mamma can't come to our Bethlehem play, and can't have me for Christmas. She's out in Cleveland, and has got to stay!”

The threatened tears began, but Sister Mary Regina, who had been watching the round, speaking, little face with sympathetic amusement, had a conciliatory suggestion.

“Why don't you read your other letters, Kate, my dear?” she remarked. “Maybe there will be something in them to help you bear your disappointment.”

It was characteristic of Kate that she did not believe consolation possible at that moment. With her the instant was always eternal. She gave vent to this opinion by remarking: “I don't want anything but my mamma.” But, having thus displayed her skepticism of substitute joys, she opened her father's letter, and her face grew brilliant with delight immediately.

“Oh, sister!” she cried rapturously. “Daddy's coming for the play! Daddy's going to take me for Christmas week”—she was reading, as hastily as a somewhat recent acquaintance with the art of chirography permitted, her father's epistle, and was declaring these things as she read—“to stay with him in New York! He says”—she stumbled along through Mortimer Crossett's heavy pages—“that mamma has kindly consented, and that he hopes to be able to win the consent of our kind teachers. Oh, sister, sister! Do you think Mother Veronica will let me go?”

“I think,” replied Sister Mary Regina, concealing a sparkle in her young, gray eyes behind a pair of discreet, downcast lids, “that it will depend very largely upon your deportment and your standing in your studies during the rest of the term.”

“Oh, sister, I will be good! I will be just as good! And really I didn't mean to slap Henrietta that day when she cheated in parcheesi. My hand just went out before I knew what it was going to do.”

“Just as your tongue is now running on before you know what it is going to say.” Sister Mary Regina's voice was a little stern, her eyes had lost their amused light. “Had you not promised not to refer to Henrietta's mistake again?”

“Oh, sister,” wailed Kate Crossett, “I shan't ever speak again until I have counted thirty; that is, if I am in a good humor. When I am cross or angry, I will count sixty.”

“An admirable resolution,” declared the sister, the corners of her mouth twitching again.

“And, now, do you think reverend mother will let me go?” Kate was balancing on one foot in her eagerness, and her eyes were bright and dark.

“Run along, Kate, run along. You'll get no air before your dinner if you stand here asking me questions about something that depends altogether on your own behavior. Run along, child; run along.”

“Oh, sister,” declared Kate fervently, hurling herself upon the sister, “I just love you. You're the sweetest thing!”

Sister Mary Regina could not refrain from giving her impetuous adorer a little hug and a little kiss, before she turned her shoulders around, and headed her for the door into the dismantled gardens, where the girls were running about in the bright December sunshine.

That afternoon, in consultation with her superior, she could not forbear giving voice to some doubts and misgivings that had assailed her.

“It is going to be a great responsibility, bringing up little Kate Crossett,” she said. 'Do you not feel it so, reverend mother? The child is so affectionate, so impulsive. It seems a dreadful thing that her parents could not have given her the normal home life. She's the sort of child who needs it.”

“It is our mission to see that she suffers no ill from not having it,” declared the mother superior.

“Yes, but that's the responsibility I spoke of. How people with a child like that could separate! It is incomprehensible to me.”

“I hope,” said Mother Veronica impressively, “that any divorce would seem equally incomprehensible to you, daughter.”

Sister Mary Regina was discreetly silent. Although she was not an elderly woman, she had not entered the order when she was a very young girl, nor had she been brought up in the conventual atmosphere; or, indeed, in the Roman faith. Some of the beliefs and prejudices of her earlier—less worthy days, Mother Veronica would have called them—still remained with her. But Mother Veronica was a disciplinarian who had no intention of allowing error to live in the midst of her community, even though it did not try to voice itself.

“I said,” she repeated, with some emphasis, “that I hoped any divorce would seem equally incomprehensible to you, my daughter.”

She very obviously waited for a reply.

“Divorce, yes,” said Sister Mary Regina finally. “But 1 should be deceiving you, reverend mother, if I pretended to think that every separation is unwarranted. And, after all, the Church, itself, does not deny relief of separation when conditions are impossible.”

“But this affair of the Crossetts',” said Mother Veronica, steering away from the slightly dangerous topic of permissible separations, “is an affair of divorce. Mrs. Crossett, though I understand that she was born in the Church, has been so willful a daughter of it as to appeal to the civil courts to dissolve the indissoluble union.”

“I did not know,” murmured Sister Mary Regina. “I thought they had merely separated.”

Delia Crossett quietly fainted against the back of her chair.

“To be sure,” admitted Mother Veronica handsomely, “I am not sure that she could be denied the rites of the Church on that account. The man whom she married—married in the civil sense, I mean—was already divorced from another woman. Consequently, of course, the Church would not recognize her marriage—Kate's mother—to him. Consequently, there having been no marriage, from the Church's point of view, there could be no divorce; and Mrs. Crossett, I suppose, would still be entitled to participate in the blessings of her religion.”

“In the world,” observed Sister Mary Regina demurely, “I think that many women would forego the blessings of religion rather than admit themselves not to have been the legitimate wives of the fathers of their children.”

“My daughter!” Mother Veronica's voice was almost the voice of one about to hurl “the dreadful curse of Rome.” But she modified her rebuke of her younger charge, recalling in time the disadvantages under which one so lately saved from heresy had labored.

In theatrical circles they talked more freely of the affairs of Kate's father and mother than at the school. Every one knew Delia Dempsey when, some twelve years before, she had fallen victim to Mortimer Crossett's undeniable charms. Every one liked and respected Delia. She was that rara avis, a strictly virtuous woman who judged no other woman's virtue. The theatrical life which her family had lived for generations had given her a tolerance of other people's unconventionalities, unknown in any other profession. Her own native uprightness had kept her “straight” among all the temptations of her career. When she fell in love with Mortimer Crossett, she had had a real struggle with her conscience before permitting herself to marry him, so keen was her sense of another woman's rights in him.

But Mortimer had succeeded in explaining to her that early marriage of his as the chivalrous folly of a boy entrapped by a designing older woman—poor, maligned Mrs. Lee, keeper of the boarding house in Medena, where Mortimer Crossett once fell ill, and was left behind by his company, to be nursed back to health by his drab little landlady. She, poor soul, had felt that the gates of paradise opened before her when her handsome and winning young convalescent proposed to her.

Doubtless Mortimer had been right in calling the proposal the chivalric impulse of a boy, but never was human being less fitted, physically, mentally, or temperamentally, for the part of the elderly siren than Mrs. Lee. She had accepted him with adoring gratitude for his condescension. She had married him in a dream of humble happiness. She had been content to work for him, to wait on him, to slave for him. And when he finally regained strength to go back to his profession, she saw him depart with an aching premonition of final separation.

She had made no protest when he had begged her to divorce him. She had done as he asked as simply as if he had requested a favorite dish for dinner, or the readjustment of the reading lamp.

It was hard that even for two or three years another woman should have thought of that humble, patient, deserted creature as Delia Dempsey thought of her. By the end of two or three years, Delia was much better able to interpret her husband's version of his first marriage than she had been during her brief engagement.

With all his charm, which even his enemies accorded to him; with all his wit, his good looks, his talent, Mortimer Crossett was a disappointment in every relation of life. Responsibility was something he could not understand, whether it was responsibility to a wife, a tailor, a manager, a playwright, or the public. Often, he only half learned his parts. He was guilty of the crime of interpolation. He was late to rehearsals. He had been known to appear upon the stage, more than once, half intoxicated; and occasionally his understudies had reason to rejoice when intoxication, which even politeness could not describe as “semi,” prevented his appearing at all. He lightheartedly contracted debt, and failed to pay it.

He made love to every woman whom he met—some sort of love. To the elderly it was the gay flattery of a spoiled young son or nephew that he offered; to servants it was the kindly sympathy that recognized sex beneath the disfiguring envelopes of cap and apron; to women of his own age and class it was the spontaneous tribute of an attractive man who simply could not resist them. He was as outrageously faithless to Delia Dempsey as any of his friends could have warned her beforehand he was going to be.

And Delia, who was a passionate and proud woman, and who, through exacting years of a career that made constant demands upon her emotions, and that offered temptations to light loving at every turn, had kept herself as untarnished as any Puritan maid, had resented his insults to her as his wife with a peculiar fervor.

At first she forgave his disloyalties, which began almost before their honeymoon was over, for the sake of the child that was coming. Surely, surely, fatherhood must make some noble impression upon that facile, but affectionate, nature. And after Kate was born, she forgave him again, for the familiar reasons which have made women bear misery since monogamy was instituted, “for the sake of the child.”

But the time had come when outraged womanhood could bear no more, and then she had divorced him. Even then, she had been too generous to cut him off from all intercourse with his little daughter. Although the court had awarded her the sole custody of the child, she conveyed to her husband, through his lawyers, the information that she would never interfere with his seeing Kate at suitable times. And Mortimer, who never lost the superficial manners of the gentleman, had replied to her kindness with an appreciative delicacy that made her cry for an afternoon, and had availed himself of her offer with the most forbearing infrequency.

During the child's babyhood, she had taken Kate with her everywhere. She paid Heaven knows what prices to procure nurses who were willing to travel wherever the chances and changes of theatrical life lead, and who were warranted to have no unconquerable aversion to one-night stands. Every minute that she could spare from the exacting requirements of her profession, she spent with the baby.

She would have given anything never to have been separated from the little object of her passionate adoration. That she finally sent Kate to a school much patronized by theatrical people was proof of the sacrificing nature of her love for the child. She saw her own nomadic existence unsuited to the needs of a little girl. She was lonelier and more miserable the first night after she had left Kate at St. Rose's than she had been even the first day after she had ordered Mortimer Crossett out of her life forever.

The conduct of Miss Kate Crossett at St. Rose's Academy between the date on which she received her father's invitation to spend Christmas week with him in New York, and the date of the play in which she was to enact the part of a herald angel, was of that exemplary kind which is seen upon the earth only in the weeks immediately preceding Christmas.

She had one disappointment in connection with the play. After all, her father was unable to be present at it. A telegram was received from him on the morning of the great day, regretting the impossibility of his reaching St. Rose's in time. Only the thought of the coming week made Kate able to endure that grief—that thought, and her tremendous interest in the part she was to play. Of all the children at St. Rose's, many of whom inherited histrionic talent, Kate was the most gifted. After seeing her act, with self-forgetfulness and fire, Sister Mary Regina shook her head wisely to Mother Veronica.

“I'd never give her another part,” she observed sagely.

“And why not?” inquired the reverend mother, with some astonishment.

“I'd try to eradicate all that theatrical inheritance,” replied Sister Mary Regina wisely. “I'd do nothing to foster it.”

“Nonsense, my dear sister,” replied the reverend mother, with some asperity. “Let every one improve the talent God has given him; only let it be to the glory of God and His Church.”

“Oh, I know that St. Rose's entertainments and pageants are very superior to those of any other convent school,” replied Sister Mary Regina daringly.

She had the courage of a woman who had brought a good deal of money to the convent. But she had gone a little too far this time.

“I do not allow any one to impugn my motives,” declared the autocrat of St. Rose's, all the more autocratically because there had been a modicum of truth in the criticism which Sister Mary Regina implied. And she designated a punishment for the younger woman, who accepted it meekly, but remained firmly convinced both of the ill-advisedness of allowing Kate Crossett to act, and of Mother Veronica's real reason for failing to admit that ill-advisedness.

The holidays began the twenty-first. Kate, intoxicated through all her chubby little body by her success as a herald angel, condoled with the girls who were going to spend the holidays in the school, and packed her bag seven times in an hour. It was not a matter of great work to pack it, for costume at St. Rose's was strictly prescribed, and two winter frocks of dark-blue serge, with heavy ulsters to match, made according to a regulation pattern, comprised the winter wardrobe of the little girls, and even of the “young ladies.” Of course, Mother Veronica could not oversee the attire of her charges when they reëntered the bosoms of their families; but, while they were with her, all vanity and competition were sternly checked.

In the middle of the afternoon, Kate was sent for, to come to the office. She bounded down the uncarpeted stairs, and across the waxed halls, her heart beating high with anticipation. But, instead of the tall figure, beginning to verge on portliness, of her father; instead of his smiling brown eyes and handsome face, she saw only his friend, Mr. Allison Ware. Although Allison Ware was a favorite of Kate's, she had never regarded him in the light of a possible substitute for her father, and her face fell when she beheld him.

She looked at him questioningly, without greeting, and Mother Veronica was compelled to call her attention to her lapse in good manners. Thus rebuked, Kate dropped her pretty little convent curtsy, and murmured her salutations; and then she looked from one to the other of her seniors with eager question in her eyes.

“I have here a note from your father, Kate,” said Mother Veronica. “He is detained in New York, but he has sent his friend, this gentleman, whom you know, and whom we have had the pleasure of seeing before at St. Rose's, in company with your father, to bring you to him.”

“Oh,” said Kate shyly, and then anxiously: “Is daddy sick?”

“No,” replied Mr. Ware reassuringly. “He is not sick, at all; but, as I have been explaining to the reverend mother, he is held up by rehearsals, and he sent me over to fetch you in place of himself. Will you come with me?”

“Yes,” answered Kate.

“Yes, what?” suggested Mother Veronica, frowning.

“Yes, Mr. Ware,” supplied Kate dutifully; and then she was dismissed to get her hat and ulster, and to start across the river with her guide.

Some misgiving seemed to cross Mother Veronica's mind as they were departing.

“I shall expect a letter from you to-morrow morning, Kate, my dear,” she said, “telling me exactly how you found your father. The Holland House, you said, I believe?”

She turned to Mr. Ware. The young man smiled, and nodded boyishly.

“That's where,” he assured her. And he and Kate started on their journey.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Mortimer Crossett's failure to appear at the play the day before, and failure to call for his daughter this afternoon, were both due to the same cause. Mr. Mortimer Crossett was indulging in a periodic spree. He had stumbled upon his young friend, Ware, two nights before, and had wept maudlin tears upon that young man's coat sleeve, over the fact that his wife had left him, and that he was deprived of the comfort and society of his daughter. He assured Mr. Ware that he was going to pull himself together in time to attend the Christmas festival at the convent the next day. And he invited the young man to spend a week with him and Kate at the Holland House.

To Mr. Ware, at twenty-three, all this had seemed funny; but when he had repeated it to his sister, the mother of children of Kate's age, his point of view had been suddenly changed. He had been informed that it would be outrageous—vile—for Mr. Crossett to appear at St. Rose's Academy in the condition in which he was sure to be. He was informed that it would be terribly pathetic if the child did not have her holiday.

He had been energetically constituted chief jailer and general guardian to Mr. Crossett. He had seen to the sending of the telegram on the morning of the play, and he had been sent after the little girl, who was nominally coming to visit her father, but who was, in reality, to spend most of her time with the kindly and energetic lady who was taking charge of her destiny.

To say that Kate had a satisfactory Christmas holiday would be to use a thin extract of milk and water of language in place of sparkling wine. Never had she known such complete joy. Mrs. Martin, Mr. Ware's sister, an English girl, whose husband was in charge of the New York end of his firm's business, had brought to her new home all the British traditions of Yuletide, and the old-fashioned house in which she lived was paradise for the little girl from the convent.

Her father recovered within a day or two, and appeared among the Martin young folks in his familiar character of complete charmer. There were stockings hung along the edge of the queer, convoluted, white marble mantelpiece in Mrs. Martin's room; there was a big Christmas tree, which burst in radiant splendor. upon dazzled young eyes, from the dark corner of a room which had been mysteriously closed until Christmas morning; there were jests and favors for even the littlest child at the big table on Christmas day; there was a glorious sleighing party—snow having opportunely arrived for the sole purpose of making perfect Kate Crossett's holiday, as she believed—out into the suburbs, to an inn where every one had steaming hot glasses of something, the children, milk; there were theatre parties to real theatres, an intoxicating experience; there were amateur productions in the garret, in which Kate shone, both as manager and actress, thereby maintaining the proud tradition of her mother's family; there were children's dances at the home of some friends; there was, altogether, complete joy.

Kate never had again, during her childhood, so happy a holiday. The Martins moved back to England next year, and, after a little, the memory of their hospitable, wholesome gayety grew dim in her mind. She forgot their names, and had only a confused impression of chestnut curls and laughing, rosy faces. Mrs. Martin became a mere type of pleasing motherliness, losing all her individual traits, in recollection; but Allison Ware stood out in the midst of the pleasant confusion of ideas, the one clear-cut, compelling figure, to Kate's mind. She never forgot him, although she did not see him again, Absence for a time only gave him added luster in her imagination, made more graceful his slender, boyish figure; brighter his blue eyes, more infectious his laugh, more compelling his merriment. For two or three years, Christmas holidays, even those spent with her mother, were measured by the Allison Ware standard, and fell short of what holidays might be.

He wrote to her once or twice, shortly after her return to the convent, and she answered his letters with the most undiplomatic speed and fervor. She even wrote two or three after he had ceased to reply to hers. Then she relegated him to the mental region inhabited by King Arthur and Sir Launcelot, and wrote to him no more than to these other beloved heroes.

She did not talk to her mother about him, because, being a sensitive child, she had early gained the knowledge that her mother did not care to hear of those snatches of life which were lived with her father and her father's friends.

She did not talk to her father about him, because, except for the beautifully shaded letters, and the occasionally extravagant gifts, Mortimer Crossett dropped out of her life almost as completely as Allison Ware had done. He had gone to Australia on a tour, and had remained two or three years in the South Pacific; then he had made a flying visit to America, but had missed seeing Kate, who was in the mountains with her mother for the summer. Then he had gone to London, where he remained, writing less often to his daughter, and drifting toward that oblivion which is only one degree removed from the final oblivion.

Chapter I.

As Kate Crossett looked at the superscriptions on the letters handed her by the village postmaster, a shadow fell upon them. It was caused by the interposition between her and the sunlight at the door of a large masculine body. It was an interposition which was not unfamiliar to Miss Crossett and her neighbors, being the person of young Mr. Elliott Ames.

“Good morning,” began Mr. Ames. “You are down for the mail?” Yet in some circle Mr. Ames had the reputation for original thought. Kate smiled, and did not make the unnecessary answer. “I don't seem to have anything, myself,” he added, which wasn't strange, as Mr. Ames' groom had brought the mail to Mr. Ames' stone palace on the hill, two miles from the post office, some two hours earlier, “so, may I walk along with you, if I promise not to interrupt your reading?”

Kate slipped the mail into the bag that swung from her arm.

“It's all for mother,” she announced, “and it will be very pleasant of you to walk along with me.”

She spoke with a conscious attempt at the lightness which, she felt, ought to characterize all her intercourse with Mr. Elliott Ames; but she was not entirely successful. It is difficult for a young lady of twenty to be completely airy in her manner when she has a burning recollection of a parting quite other than airy with the person whom she is addressing. Kate felt sure—in her pulses, if not in her mind—that she had ejected Mr. Ames from her mother's dwelling, two night before, only just in time to save him from some sort of declaration of his feelings. The emotion which had made his gray eyes black, which had made his face white, which had made his speech stammering and broken, had been unmistakable.

It was not experience of passion which had taught Kate the meaning of these phenomena; it was her own quickened breathing, her own failing vision, before which everything had faded except the white face and the dark eyes that glowed upon her, the thrill that had possessed her entire being for one second.

That she should have been able, in spite of the response of her own emotions, to effect a conventional leave-taking with him was a triumph to many things, perhaps chiefly to the teaching at St. Rose's Academy. And perhaps it was partly due to some caution: in her blood, implanted there during the months when her mother had begun to question the wisdom of her own yielding to overmastering love.

It ended in her statement, in an icy voice, that she wished to leave him.

At any rate, Kate had managed to effect a perfectly formal—or, at least, a sufficiently formal—farewell with her neighbor two nights ago.

She was very glad of it now, as she stepped lightly along the village street with him by her side. In the first place, it would have been so embarrassing to meet him again, had there been any actual love scene between them that night; in the second place, the climax had not yet been reached; there was a delicious, breathless sense of anticipation of it, and Kate was enough of a natural artist in life to appreciate having her climaxes ahead of her.

In the third place—here common sense took its chilling part in the confused dialogue going on beneath Kate's pretty black hair—the thing had to end, anyway; it could be nothing more than a flirtation on Elliott Ames' part; the only sons and heirs of rich bankers did not want to contract serious alliances with the penniless daughters of divorced ex-actresses.

Besides, didn't he know all the girls in New York society—wonderful creatures, of a myriad accomplishments, of multitudinous possessions? Could he not find quite as much beauty, quite as much charm as she possessed, advantageously allied with stocks and bonds, and all sorts of pleasant things, in which she was conspicuously lacking?

The conversation between the two young persons, conducted as they walked along the village street, on the bright May morning, was singularly perfunctory. Mr. Ames inquired respectfully after Mrs. Crossett's health; Miss Crossett replied with proper expressions of gratitude for his interest, and then inquired concerning the health of Mr. Elliott Ames, Senior, Mr. Elliott Ames, Junior, reassured her as to his parent's physical well-being, and thanked her for her interest in the matter. He then asked if she had been to town since they last met, and, on hearing that she had not been, congratulated her upon having escaped a horrid bore.

“Oh, then you have been?” said Kate inadvertently.

Mr. Ames leaped upon the opening.

“You know that I have been,” he answered. “You know that I could not have kept away from The Orchard, if I hadn't been in town.”

Kate's heart executed a sort of somersault in her bosom; her blood sang through her veins; common sense sternly forbade her to pursue this line of conversation, but something infinitely stronger than common sense made her reply, with demure coquetry:

“I don't think I quite know that. Why should I?”

“If you do not know already, I shall have to teach you.”

There was anticipatory triumph in Mr. Ames' voice. Kate raised her black-fringed blue eyes toward his face. It was alight and eager. His glance burned into hers.

“Oh, Kate,” he began; but then his voice broke, and he could go no farther.

The Orchard, as Mrs. Crossett called the little place in which she had come to spend her last years, in the pastoral fashion she had outlined to Kate in their Christmas letter, eleven years before, and in many other letters and talks during the long time intervening, was at the edge of the village to which it belonged, socially, much more than it did to the many-acred, many-towered estates that lay beyond the village.

It was an old-fashioned place—an old Dutch stone cottage, with occasional ells of wood or brick, standing on a little terrace that was walled up from the road. About it lay lawns and flower beds, and behind it a half acre of orchards. Beyond them again were the chicken yards of Mrs. Crossett's old ambition.

She had taken the place three years before, and had risked a considerable portion of her savings in the venture. If it was not quite as wildly successful, financially, as starring in popular plays, it satisfied the woman who had never been a star, and whose playing days were over.

It more than satisfied her; it was her dream come true. Here she had the gentle outdoor occupations that she loved, and here she had the daughter that she idolized—here, safely away from the glamour and the glitter of the footlights.

If there was one thing upon which Delia Crossett was determined, it was that her daughter should never go on the stage; should never know the homelessness, the loneliness, which might drive her, in her turn, into the arms of a man as unfit to receive her as Mortimer Crossett himself. The old wound had never altogether healed with Delia.

As she saw, through the flowered-muslin curtain of the dining room, the approach of her daughter and her daughter's escort, she half frowned. Elliott Ames was exactly the sort of man she would have desired to see her daughter marry—he was the antithesis of Mortimer Crossett in every respect. But she had a certain worldly wisdom, in spite of much sentiment, and she questioned whether a marriage would be pleasing to the Ameses, if it should come about.

In her eyes, Kate was the most beautiful, the most graceful, the most fascinating, and the most lovable of human beings. Still, she had moments of realizing that the whole world might not view Kate as she did. She would not have her darling an unwelcome bride in any house. It was the conflict of these thoughts that drove the little frown across her face as the two young people approached.

“Mumsey!” Kate's clear young voice rang through the little house. “Lots of letters for you. And Mr. Ames particularly wants to know how your rheumatism is.”

Mrs. Crossett came out of the dining room into the hall. She smiled upon the tall young man, as she took the mail bag from her daughter's hand. Kate abandoned her, and ran up the stairs.

“I'll be down in a few minutes,” she called.

She had a shy desire to defer the talk with Elliott which that lingering look between them in the street had prophesied as inevitable.

Mrs. Crossett invited the young man into the sitting room, and after she had made desultory conversation with him for a few minutes, she asked his permission to look at her mail.

Elliott, whose every sense was alert upon the stairs and the door leading to them, readily granted it. He crossed the room to make a minute examination of some wood violets planted in a bowl on the table in the south bay window. He loosened the earth about their roots, and pulled off a yellowed leaf—he and Kate had dug them up a week before; he felt an absurd desire that they should show no sign of wilting.

And while he trifled with them, he heard a sudden moan, and, looking up, saw Delia Crossett quietly fainting against the back of her chair. He sprang to her, and dashed her face with water from a glass bowl that held arbutus, at the same time calling, “Kate, Kate!” thrilled to his heart that he should be calling her thus intimately, even in this emergency.

Mortimer Crossett was dead. That was what one of the letters, at whose unfamiliar superscription Kate had stared inquisitively, in the post office, had told Mrs. Crossett; and all the old pain, and the old struggle, and the old desire to forgive, with a new sense of despair and loss, had started up in her in one spasm, and she had lost consciousness in the grip of it. Somehow, she had never thought of him as old or broken, and here these curt legal phrases told her that he had died, in an actors' home, where he had lived for two years before his death. Old and broken—that gay, magnetic, compelling presence! Dead—that man, whose living voice still lingered in her ears!

When Kate and Elliott had restored her, and she had given the letter to Kate to read, and had said that she would like to go to her room for a little while, and be alone, the two young people, sobered and cooled by the epistle, sat down together in the little sitting room.

Kate's mobile face was pale. Elliott thought it more beautiful in its colorlessness and sadness than even in its rosy gayety. She sat in a corner of the old davenport, and he in a low wicker chair drawn close before her. She was silent for a few minutes, and the ready tears swam in her blue eyes. She brushed them away, and looked at Elliott.

“I do not remember him very clearly,' she said, her soft lips quivering. “But what I do remember is something warm, and dear, and lovable. Yet I know that he was cruel to my mother, and that she suffered endlessly on his account. As a child, I could not help loving him. Now that I am a woman, and know how he made the best woman. in all the world suffer, I—I cannot help loving him still,” she ended, with a sudden burst of sobs, burying her head on the arm of the sofa.

Elliott leaned over, and touched the soft, wavy black hair tenderly.

Kate had repelled him with her look even before she spoke.

“I wish I could have kept this sorrow away from you,' he said. “I wish I could keep every sorrow away from you forever, Kate.”

His hand slipped to her shoulder. She sobbed quietly tor a few minutes, and then raised her tear-stained face.

“Poor mother!” she said. “She has had such a bitter life—such work, and loneliness, and heartache.”

“She has had you,” said Mr. Ames loyally.

“If I only could make up to her for some of it!” sighed Kate piteously.

“Let me help you,” broke in Elliott, with a return of the lover's eagerness of manner. “Let me help you. You don't know how much I admire her, how much I love her, how I want to do something for her.”

The ghost of a smile appeared on Kate's down-drooping lips. A little, rosy flush of mischief ran over her face.

“Am I to understand that you are making me a proposal for my mother?” she asked.

But Mr. Ames was in no mood for playfulness.

“I am making you a proposal to give me the right to care for your mother as a son,” he insisted seriously. “Oh, Kate, don't keep me waiting! I want the right to care for you, to cherish you, to keep you from everything harsh and cruel and disappointing in the world. I love you.”

He was very much in earnest, very sincere in his pleading.

“You might have mentioned that in the first place,” said Miss Crossett demurely.

And, even in the rapturous moment when he gathered her into his arms, it occurred to Mr. Ames to wonder at the variety of changing emotion which his Heart's Desire could display within a given time.

Chapter II.

“So, you've resigned from your committee of the Woman's Civic League?”

It was not inquiry that Elliott's words expressed as he addressed his wife, though he used a slightly interrogative inflection. He was conveying the information that he knew of her act, and also that he disapproved of it.

“Yes. I really couldn't waste any more time at those foolish committee meetings. You've no idea the amount of nonsense that's talked to every word of sense.”

“Oh, yes, I have some idea,” Mr. Ames dryly assured the sharer of his joys. “Masculine committee meetings are not always composed exclusively of statesmen. But I have always found it possible to work with my fellow men and my fellow politicians without being overcome with contempt for them and their methods. I am sorry that you thought it necessary to give up this work.”

“Work!” Kate laughed. It was a laugh of unmistakable scorn.

“Yes, work,” repeated Elliott firmly. “We are living in a democracy, you remember, not in an oligarchy. The democracy is your committee meeting magnified many times—with the fools and the knaves, the dreamers and grafters, each having a voice. I am sorry that you see the thing as you do, Kate. I had hoped that you would take an interest in my career.”

“But I do, dearest. I do, indeed. I want you to be President, if you want to be, and the hours I have spent in trying to understand the tariff are unnumbered. Truly, Elly——”

“I do wish, Kate,” said Mr. Elliott Ames, frowning, “that you would not use that absurd diminutive. You have forgotten, several times, and have done it in public. Once let the paragraphers get hold of it, and I'm a laughingstock. Elly! How can a man be taken seriously who becomes known by a nickname like that?”

“I am sorry, Elliott,” replied Kate, with an air of patient resignation. “I am very sorry”—with accentuated patience—“that I so constantly fail to please you.”

Mr. Ames, far from being mollified by this speech, which seemed to put him in the position of a carping and exigent husband, reddened angrily.

“I had not thought that I made many demands, or even requests,” he informed his wife. “Of course, you knew when we were married that my chief interests were political.”

“When we were married,” answered Kate, with the dreamy manner of one speaking of some long-past event, “I labored under the delusion that I was your chief interest. It was a pleasant delusion—while it lasted.”

“Of course you are my chief interest,” said Elliott stiffly. “But New York is not Arcady, and a man has something else to do than to weave garlands for his beloved's hair. Kate, why can't you be reasonable? Why will you be so perverse? You would be the first person in the world to object, if I were constantly at your apron strings. There never was any one who would more quickly sicken of an exclusive diet of love-making than you. Why don't you do your share toward advancing my ambition? The influence of women is beginning to count in politics—that is, in reform politics——”

“I have darkly suspected that that is what is the matter with reform politics,” interpolated Kate.

“Oh, if you despise your own sex!” Elliott said.

He turned, as though to leave the room. They were in Kate's dressing room, in the town house. It was on Gramercy Park, and the window of her room commanded the sunny square, brilliant now with patches of late snow. But as he turned to leave, Kate had an impulse of relenting.

“Don't go off mad, Elly, darling—I mean Elliott, dear,” she coaxed, with a child's inflections. “I don't mean to be exasperating. I am as proud of you as possible. But the trouble is I have no political intelligence. I can't pretend it, I can't assume it. And half of these women that you want me to work with have just as little as I; but, for one reason or another, they are willing to pretend. That's what bores me so unutterably in those committee meetings, which I have attended this winter. Of course, here and there one finds a woman who thinks, a woman who is really interested. But, for the most part, it is just a pose. You ought to have married one of these women who really understand what it is all about, and care what it is all about.”

“As if you couldn't understand anything you felt like putting your mind to,” grumbled Mr. Ames, half admiring, half condemning, his wife.

“But I told you I don't want to put my mind to it. It bores me. I don't care whether the streets are clean or dirty—much; I don't care how the tenements are built, personally. You ought to have married one of those rich girls who have been brought up to think that they owe a duty to the community, and love to meddle in all sorts of civic affairs. Though most of them do it because they want to feel important, and not because they are really interested,” she added, as a graceful afterthought.

“Are you tired of our marriage, that you are so keen to suggest other wives for me?”

“It is of your happiness and your weariness that I am thinking,” replied Kate virtuously.

“It must be your own weariness of the situation that puts the thought so constantly into your head,” declared Mr. Ames.

Kate looked stubbornly out of the window at the bright park, and played automatically with the curtain cord.

“I am not tired of anything,” she remarked, at last, “except your trying to make me over. The trouble is, Elliott, that I come of a family of lawless strollers—don't look politely horrified and protesting! Personally, I think there was a lot of sense in those old English ordinances that classed actors with vagabonds. Every now and then I feel such rebellion against the whole orderly system of conventional life. If only you would go gypsying with me, Elliott!”

“You knew you weren't marrying a gypsy,” Elliott replied to her. “Exactly why you hoped that marriage would transform me into one, I fail to see.”

“Well, and you knew that you weren't marrying a solemn, responsible woman of affairs. I fail to understand, in my turn, why you expected marriage to transform me into one.”

Having arrived at this deadlock in their intercourse, Mr. Ames stamped, with some noise, but with more dignity, from his wife's dressing room, descended the stairs, and announced, by the heavy reverberation of the closing hall door, that he had gone forth from the house.

Kate listened, shrugged her shoulders, pursed her lips, and pantomimically expressed the opinion that if that was the way he wished to act, of course she couldn't help it. The time had passed when a quarrel with her husband threw her into tears.

They had been married less than two years, and for at least one year such scenes had not been uncommon between them. When Mrs. Crossett so thankfully saw her daughter wed to a man who was the antithesis of her father, she did not take into consideration that fundamental differences of temperament between two natures sometimes lead to as great disaster as may be caused by the total weakness of one. She had rejoiced whole-heartedly in the affair, and the bitter day when all her early sorrows had been revived for her by the news of her husband's death was converted in her recollection to a day of thanksgiving, because it was the one which had assured her daughter's happier fate, as she thought.

A man of probity, a man of high ambitions, a man of grave responsibility, already shown, in spite of his youth, loved her daughter; he loved her in the way that Delia Crossett's sentimental soul applauded—without a single worldly consideration. The question of the girl's lack of fortune, of her lack of a presentable father, seemed not to occur to Elliott at all. He loved Kate for her beauty, her winsomeness, her gay, sweet April moods.

When Mrs. Crossett had suggested the possibility that his father might not give entire approval to the marriage, Elliott Ames stared in surprise. He assured Delia that his father would demand nothing of a daughter-in-law except those virtues and graces which Kate possessed in such full measure. He implied that the elder Mr. Ames would, like himself, regard any other considerations as merely vulgar.

Whether he was right in his estimate of his father's mind, or not, the elder Mr. Ames did not interpose any objection to the marriage, but, in quite the traditional way, fell a victim to the charms of his son's fiancée. If, in the bottom of his heart, Elliott. Ames felt that both of them had behaved in rather a magnificent manner, no one could be churlish enough to deny him the pleasant thought.

And yet, here, in less than two years, the lovers were quarreling like any ordinary married pair, where the gentleman has not high-mindedly ignored sordid matters, and the lady has not brought gratitude, as well as love, to the altar.

If Kate found committee meetings unendurable, she had one source of pleasure as incomprehensible to her husband as was her distaste for those solemn conclaves of earnest ladies. She belonged to a dramatic club. They had been married only a few months when a wealthy inhabitant of Huntoon's Point decided to give an entertainment for the benefit of an orphanage established in the hills back of the summer settlement. Elliott was rather pleased that his wife's talent was recognized, and that she was asked to take a leading part in the performance of a comedietta which the wealthy author of the colony—wealthy by inheritance, not by authorship—had written.

Kate was delighted. She liked the children in the orphanage, and she loved to act. She threw herself with fervor into her part, and made of her performance something really noteworthy.

Two days later the secretary of the Thalia Club, which, as everybody knows, is quite the most swagger of the amateur dramatic organizations in New York, wrote to her, craving her membership. Kate, at that time, was dutiful with that brand-new, shining dutifulness which wears off shortly after the honeymoon. She had asked Elliott's permission to join the club. And Elliott was indulgent with the young husband's untarnished indulgence of the same period. He assured her that he would rejoice to have her belong to anything that would give her so much amusement, and even went so far as to say how proud he should be when all the lesser stars of the Thalia Club paled their ineffectual fires before her splendor.

But that had been in the early days. Now the club, and Kate's devotion to its affairs, had become a matter of contention between them.

When her husband had left her in dudgeon, on the day of her resignation from the street-cleaning committee of the Women's Civic League, Kate solaced herself by going out to a French lesson. The Thalias were to give a little French play for the benefit of the Unto-the-least-of-these Settlement, and Kate was brushing up the French of St. Rose's.

Elliott objected to the French lessons and the French play with the whole-hearted zeal of a gentleman who has found that English, spoken firmly and loudly enough, will carry him through all foreign countries. It was, therefore, particularly pleasing to Kate to signalize their quarrel of that morning by taking a French lesson.

They did not meet again that day.

Elliott, as he had been at some pains to explain frequently, liked his wife to be at home at tea time, when he was likely to come up from the office where he played at being the partner of his father. Before the days of the bickerings over committees and comedies, Kate had been enthusiastically of Elliott's opinion, that the proper wifely afternoon attitude was one of welcoming expectation at her own hearth; and she would hurry home from her walk, or her shopping, or her visits, to be ready to receive him when he entered the house. But lately this custom had fallen into disuse.

To-day, Elliott, coming in at half-past four, had seen throughout the house the unmistakable, intangible marks of its mistress' absence, and had promptly determined that he would not be there when his tardy spouse returned. Accordingly, he went across the park to the Players' Club.

Kate, hurrying home from French, a little late, and a little repentant, and in a mood to be softened and made up with, learned that Mr. Ames had been in, but had gone out again without saying when he would return. She knew that he was attending a political dinner that night; she thought that it would have been graceful in him, therefore, to have spent a little while with her in the earlier evening; she felt aggrieved that he had not done this.

She felt still more aggrieved when he telephoned from the club and demanded to have his evening clothes sent across, alleging that he would be having an important conference with a political ally until too late to permit him to come home and dress.

He asked Kate politely, on the wire, if she had had a pleasant afternoon, and she had responded with exaggerated enjoyment. To his civil inquiries as to her plans for the evening, she returned somewhat vague answers. As a matter of fact, she was not going out, but it seemed somehow a confession of failure to admit as much.

It was Betty Pruett, a fellow member of the Thalia Club, who saved her from her lonely evening. Betty telephoned, just before seven, begging her to make one of a suddenly improvised dinner.

“There's to be a new man here,” Betty had excitedly said, “a playwright—Greaves has taken two plays of his, and he has promised to do a one act for the Thalias. Do say yes—and, of course, I hope Mr. Ames can come, too.”

She finished with a flat inflection which showed exactly how earnestly she hoped for Elliott's presence.

Kate accepted gladly. It seemed to her a form of revenge upon her husband. He particularly disapproved of Betty, singling her out of all the detested Thalias for a special opprobrium. It was pleasant to defy him and his wishes thus, since he had no regard for hers. She dressed herself with great care, feeling that by doing especial honor to Betty's dinner and to the unknown playwright, and to everything connected with the Thalias, she was further asserting her independence.

She was looking very beautiful, indeed, as she came down the stairs of the Pruett house, and entered the drawing room, to find her vivacious hostess in eager conversation with a tall, lean, middle-aged man, with thick, grayish hair, and a boyish face. There was something familiar about him, although she could not tell what. But when Betty introduced them she understood.

“Mrs. Ames,” caroled Betty, “I am so proud to have the honor of presenting you two to each other. Mrs. Ames, Mr. Ware, Mr. Allison Ware—the new Shakespeare, the new Sheridan! Mr. Ware, Mrs. Ames—our amateur Réjane.”

Allison Ware smiled at the voluble introduction, and extended his hand to meet Kate's outstretched one. There came into his blue eyes, set now in a myriad of tiny tired lines, a puzzled look of half recognition. He was murmuring something about pleasure and honor, when Kate, her eyes dancing with fun, exclaimed:

“You never answered my last letter!”

Mr. Ware stared at her in entire astonishment. Then he rallied his forces.

“You never wrote it,” he declared, with mock gravity.

“Oh, yes, I did—I wrote at least two of them, and you not only didn't answer, but you don't even remember me.”

“Isn't it a joke?” inquired Mr. Ware. “Have I really had the pleasure of meeting you before?”

“Don't you remember Kate Crossett?” asked Kate.

“Kate Crossett! But are you—why, of course—of course Kate Crossett would grow up! But to grow up into you—you!”

Mr. Ware's eyes expressed all the admiration which he gave Kate to understand was not to be spoken in our painfully inadequate language. At the back of her mind, through the joyousness of meeting with her old friend, through the pleased dramatic sense of a “situation,” there ran another willful, happy thought:

“This makes me quits with Elliott!”

Chapter III.

Strained as the relations between Kate and Elliott were, it is doubtful if they would so soon have reached a crisis, had it not been for the one-act play which Allison Ware provided for the Thalias. It was very smart, very satirical, and very amusing. It was called the “Solon Junior,” and it poked fun at a solemn young politician who had begun his career with the kindly intention of benefiting the human race.

It was produced, with Kate in the leading feminine rôle, the same winter that saw Elliott's party grotesquely defeated in Manhattan, although he himself managed to obtain the seat for which he was campaigning in the assembly. This was a piquant situation which the papers could not ignore when the Thalia Club's entertainment for the benefit of the Home for Crippled Children was given.

Before this time the Ameses had had many spats and many reconciliations. The restraint was wearing off the former conjugal exercises, and the fiery tenderness was lessening in the latter. During one of their periods of amicability, Kate told her husband about the witty new play. Elliott had frowned, and asked her if she did not see the unsuitability of her acting in it. Kate had stared at him out of astonished blue eyes.

“But why? It is the sort of part I can play beautifully.”

“You can play any part beautifully, my love,” Elliott had responded handsomely. “But don't you see that for the wife of a reform politician to take the leading part of a play satirizing reform politics is—well, scarcely a graceful tribute to her husband?”

“How perfectly, ridiculously self-conscious!” exclaimed Mrs. Ames petulantly. “Why, the play is laid in England.”

He patted her paternally on the shoulder and assured her that she was going to be a great success.

“But you have just told me that, although it has an English setting, its philosophy. and satire are universal. I really don't think it will look at all well for you to play in it.”

“Do you want me to give up my amusement for the winter because the managers of your party are painfully inadequate to their job?” demanded Kate, with something very like a sneer disfiguring her face.

“Whatever I may desire, I have no expectation of your doing anything but what you please,” snapped Elliott, abruptly leaving his wife.

After that, they did not speak for two weeks, except in the presence of the servants, or of the public. Kate threw herself with great fervor into the rehearsals; Elliott absorbed himself in party work. She refused to go to Albany with him at the opening of the legislative session, alleging a rehearsal.

When he went to his train without pleading with her, she wept half the afternoon upon the sofa in her dressing room, and telephoned to the stage manager of the Thalias that she would be unable to rehearse that day.

As for Elliott, he stared out of the car window all the way up the Hudson, unable to see across the river, although the day was brilliantly clear, because of the hot and angry mist in his eyes.

The play was given the second week in January, and might have escaped with more or less perfunctory notice, even then, had not the entertainment been preceded by the “act” of a titled Englishwoman, who was affording New York society a mild sensation by her barefoot dancing. Any performance in which she appeared was sure of a full attendance of reporters, and of “display heads” in the newspapers.

When her much-heralded performance had been followed by the brilliant satire on reform politics, in which the wife of the most prominent young political reformer of the season played the leading part, the situation was piquant to the last degree for the purveyors of news; and the next morning every paper gave equal space to the bare feet of the Lady Marion and the lines of Mrs. Jimmy Clivedon, in “Solon Junior.”

The quarrel which followed between Elliott and Kate was the most bitter and searching that they had ever had. It ended in her statement, flashed out at him in an icy voice, and with a steely glance, that she wished to leave him. He replied, growing pale, and speaking with a sudden quiet self-restraint that somehow struck more anguish to Kate's soul than any of his previous louder, less-guarded utterances, that she was doubtless right, and that he had for some time been coming to the same opinion himself. He had bowed to her, then, with a certain formality, as though already they were upon the footing of strangers, and had left her.

Through Kate's anger and sense of injustice a curious chill of fear ran. She had fairly to scourge herself to keep alive her indignation, and to refrain from crying out: “Oh, he wants to leave me; he wants to leave me! I'm so lonely.”

That night a message reached her, through one of the servants, that he had gone out to the house at Huntcon's Point; he would be in town the next morning, and would communicate with her at once.

Her first sense of bewilderment, her first premonitions of pain and loneliness, had disappeared, burned up in the anger she had carefully nourished all day. She had worked herself up finally to believe that she did, indeed, desire freedom from Elliott, that she was abused and downtrodden by his inordinate selfishness. She had talked to herself about her talent, and her right to its development and use; she had re-enforced herself with recollections of all her people—their dramatic gifts, their temperamental disdain of the stupidly conventional life.

In all her outbursts of temper and pettishness up to this time, there had been no real expectation of a dissolution of her marriage. That was a bugaboo which she used to frighten Elliott. Never, until he had given the notion seriousness by accepting it, had it been serious to her. But now it was real, and she busied her mind to find justification for its sudden reality.

The next morning she awaited the telephone message from Elliott with a sense of excited expectation. Would the night have confirmed him in his resolution, or would it have made him see the impossibility of living apart from her? Her own thoughts were all in a turmoil. She knew, with some humiliation, that she herself might be veered in any direction by her husband's attitude. She was not fixed in her anger against him. Each time that the telephone rang, she rushed quickly to it, and then paused before taking down the receiver. She did not wish to seem too eager, too tremulous, too expectant—or anything—so she allowed the servants to answer, and each time until eleven o'clock it was some casual message, unconnected with the great business of the day.

At eleven her maid answered the ringing bell, and Kate sat pretending to read while she listened to the disjointed remarks across the room.

“Yes, this is Mrs. Ames' house. Yes, I think Mrs. Ames is at home. Who shall I say wishes to speak with her? Please repeat. I don't understand—I am to—prepare——” Then she jiggled the hook, and said impatiently: “Operator, can't you give us a better connection? I cannot hear.” And then, after a moment: “Prepare her—oh!” The last word was a mere long-drawn breath of horror.

Kate was halfway across the room. Her face was very white. One thought beat in her brain, one fear flowed icily through her veins. She was to be “prepared” to learn that Elliott was dead—Elliott, who had left her in anger; Elliott, who might never look at her again with kinder eyes than those cold and steady ones he had turned upon her yesterday morning.

“Give me the telephone,” she cried, snatching the receiver from the servant's hand.

The girl looked at her with fright and pity in her eyes.

“Oh, Mrs. Ames!” she exclaimed pitifully. “Let me tell you——”

“Hello,” Kate was saying, in an unexpectedly steady voice. “This is Mrs. Ames. Who is speaking? What is the matter? Answer me quickly, please.”

She listened, and her face, that had seemed pale from the first moment that she had scented calamity, grew whiter and whiter; her blue eyes seemed frozen in an expression of terror. But she kept the receiver to her ear, her pallid lips to the mouthpiece. After a minute or two, she said, still quite steadily:

“I will be there at once.”

“Elsie,” she added, turning to her terror-stricken maid, “my mother has been killed in an automobile accident at Huntoon's Point. I am going out at once. Get me some clothes, and find out how soon the train leaves.”

In some inconsequential way, as she waited for the girl, who was moving around with smothered ejaculations of pity, to get out her street clothes, she thought of the day on which news of her father's death had been brought. That had been very different. She had had a lover then who lived but to comfort her, to save her from all harshness and cruelty of life. And now there was no one with her to bear this horrible blow. There were no arms to support her trembling figure, there was no breast upon which she might shut out the vision of that dear frame mangled, that dear, sad face unrecognizable.

She was at The Orchard two hours later. The quaint little house seemed full of people to her as she entered—people who fell back before her, and allowed her to make her way unaddressed to her mother's bedroom. Death had not been so terrible as her tortured imagination had pictured. The great machine had thrown Delia Crossett to one side, and it was a blow upon her head, and no fearful weight of dragging wheels, that had killed her. Death had done its familiar work of smoothing all the lines from the patient face. It seemed very beautiful to Kate as it lay upon the pillow, in spite of the remote austerity which it never had worn for her in life.

When she came out of the room, the doctor, who had been waiting to see her, told her how it had happened; and then she learned that it had been one of her husband's cars, returning after leaving him at the station, which had caused her mother's death.

To her, that was the end of all things. In her silent, frenzied grief—a grief now tinged by the remorseful thought that she had neglected her mother of late—she called her husband the murderer of Delia Crossett.

When he hastened out, having been intercepted with the news as he reached town, she looked at him out of stony eyes. He hurried toward her, his face working with tenderness, and pity, and horror. He had been a devoted son-in-law to Delia Crossett, many times making up to her, in his serious, responsible way, for her gay daughter's little neglects. His hands were outstretched toward Kate. All the past had been obliterated, for him, by the tragedy of the morning, just as it had been crystallized, for her, into a permanent estrangement.

Kate, standing very tall and statuesque before him, had repelled him with her look even before she spoke. When she did speak, it was to say:

“I never wish to see you again. Never, never, never!”

Chapter IV.

Every one who had the privilege of addressing Elliott intimately—and he was aggrieved to find how many persons claimed it—assured him that his wife had been slightly unstrung by shock, and that she would, of course, return to her normal self in a short time.

Elliott had a premonition that these pleasing prophecies were not based upon an exhaustive knowledge of Kate's disposition and moods. However, he agreed with his advisers that it was best to let her have her own way for a while after the tragedy. She said that she wished to live in her mother's house, and this she did. Her father-in-law, an amiable, rubicund gentleman, used to visit her there, and entreat her to return with him to the big stone house in the hills. Kate was very gentle with him, but very firm about doing as she pleased. When he drew moving pictures of Elliott's loneliness and misery, at first she was silent; but one day, about three weeks after her mother's death, she interrupted his vivid description of his son's sad state by asking:

“Has Elliott never told you, Mr. Ames, that he and I had already agreed to separate before this happened?”

“God bless my soul! Hasn't Elliott been behaving himself?”

It was from the late Mrs. Ames, and not from his father, that Elliott had inherited that high ethical sense which impelled him to go forth and reform the world, and to lead a sternly upright life. To the elder Mr. Ames' conventional mind, the statement that Kate and her husband had planned to separate meant only one thing—that Elliott had been “cutting up,” and had been found out.

Kate informed her father-in-law that, to the best of her knowledge and belief, Elliott's conduct as a husband had been impeccable. But, she added, they had discovered their temperaments to be totally incompatible. They were very unhappy, they had no common interests; she was willing to take the blame for the whole affair, and ascribe it all to the strain of vagabondage in her blood; but the truth was that she could not stand the sort of life that Elliott particularly loved, and he had no sympathy with her tastes and ambitions.

“God bless my soul!” murmured Mr. Ames again, this time in a subdued and puzzled key.

He had reasoned with his charming daughter-in-law, pouring a great flood of worldly wisdom into her pretty ears. He had told her that most marriages were between incompatible temperaments, but if people only had common sense, and avoided intercourse before lunch time, they could worry along quite comfortably.

But Kate had been deaf to all arguments, and the conversation had ended in his promising to be the bearer to Elliott of a message from her to the effect that she would like to see his lawyers, to arrange for the separation upon which they had agreed.

When the papers appeared with the cheerful announcement that Mrs. Elliott Ames had taken up her residence in Reno, for the usual purpose, there was a mild buzzing among her intimates in the Thalia Club, and elsewhere.

“I don't see why she stood that muff of a husband as long as she did,” said Betty Pruett to her husband—her third, one having been lost to her by death, and one by the same Western process that Kate was about to try.

“What's she going to do?” inquired Mr. Pruett, voicing the thought of many in his words. “Hasn't got any money, has she?”

“Oh, I suppose the muff will give her a decent allowance,” replied Betty cheerfully. “He's that kind—highly honorable, grave, and all the rest of it. Besides”—here Betty sighed—“Kate Ames has talent, real talent. She is the only amateur I ever saw who had, except myself.”

“So! You think the young lady will go on the stage! Well, my dear young woman, don't you get any notions in your head——”

“Don't worry,” replied Betty, half sadly. “I'm thirty-eight to Kate's twenty-four or five. I am too old—they wouldn't have me.”

“That Ware fellow—weren't he and Mistress Kate quite thick for a while, before he went over to England?” pursued Mr. Pruett, with that interest in personal affairs which he would have been first to proclaim an exclusive attribute of the feminine sex.

“Kate wouldn't be such a fool,” answered Betty Pruett decidedly. “After all, she's had the experience of living with a gentleman.”

“Oh, you admit you've asked a man who wasn't a gentleman to your house?” her husband teased her.

“I'd hate to think how many answering that description I have asked to my house. But I haven't married them, Jimmy, dear. I got through with marrying that kind when I was nineteen.”

And, with this delicate reference to the husband she had lost via the courts, Mrs. Pruett went downstairs to await her dinner guests.

When Kate returned from Reno, the intoxicating fever of independence burned in her. She was young, full-blooded, passionately gay-hearted, in spite of a certain soft lovingness which she had. She had cared for her mother fondly, and had been horror-stricken at the manner of her death. But she was alive, she was well, she was young. She was conscious of talent. She knew the happiness of impersonating some other being than herself.

She had asked for no settlement from Elliott, and had, indeed, refused the offer which his lawyers made to her. She had intimated to them that she expected to be able to earn her own living, and that, meantime, her mother's estate was amply equal to her modest wants. She had established a man and his wife, in whom her mother had had great confidence, at The Orchard, and they were conducting the chicken business quite successfully for her, and also taking care of the house.

But when she returned to the East, it was not to Huntoon's Point, and to the poultry farm, that she first made her way, but to a hotel, whence she communicated with Mr. Hartley Greaves. In the days when she had been an amateur, Hartley Greaves had seen her act two or three times, and had taken occasion to tell her that, as a manager, he regretted her fortunate marriage, which had deprived the stage of a rare comedienne. Of course, she hardly hoped that Mr. Greaves would be quite so flattering now.

Mr. Greaves had been involved in a professional war with the syndicate. He had conducted it not without success. It was he who had starred the actress, Hedwig Ulla, in the only series of Ibsen productions that had ever been known to make money, as he boasted; it was he who had imported the Russian actress who was to steal some of Nazimova's thunder, and who actually managed to do it; it was he who had starred Mrs. Jerome Towers during the two years of her noisy, spectacular quarrel with her first manager; and it was he who had “discovered” Lorraine Olston, who had been such a success last year.

But Mr. Greaves constantly found himself in the position of all gentlemen adventuring outside the prescribed circle; others constantly made capital out of his efforts; thus far his chief success was in being a schoolmaster whose pupils the syndicate admitted to its ranks on certificate, so to speak. That ravening body snatched his stars from his dramatic sky, and set them in its own. This season Lorraine Olston had signed with it; last year it had been the foreign ladies. Mrs. Jerome Towers had effected a reconciliation with her original managers, and had gone back to them.

Mr. Greaves poked his head into the little room, and observed jovially, “I hear your ex was in front to-night.”

Mr. Greaves had a company, to be sure, and a play or two from which he hoped something. But he was not as brilliantly well off in the matter of talent as he could wish. He received Kate's message, therefore, with more interest than he might have had in it a few years earlier. He went to the St. Regis to see her almost at the hour she had suggested; of course, it would not have done for him to go at exactly the hour.

He wondered, as the lift carried him softly up to her suite, if she was drawing a large alimony from her late husband, and decided that she must be, otherwise she would surely not be staying at this hotel. Mr. Greaves had not had the benefit of an acquaintance with Mortimer Crossett to help him in reading Kate's character. He was glad to believe that she was in receipt of a large income; he even hoped that it might be large enough to make her willing to finance the production of a play herself.

He could not disguise his grief at the discovery that Kate was planning to take money out of the theatrical profession, rather than to bring it into it.

“It's a great pity, Mrs. Ames—or Miss Crossett, to call you by your professional name,” he observed. “Of course, if you were going with the syndicate, money would be no object to them. But neither would the sort of play in which you would appear be the proper vehicle for you; they would not provide the proper setting, the proper support. They would plan to exploit you for all that you were worth. Your divorce——”

“If there might be only some way in which I could prevent the divorce being mentioned in connection with my work!” sighed Kate.

“Under my management as little reference as possible will be made to it,” replied Mr. Greaves virtuously. “I shall have no mention of the subject at all in the notices sent out from my office, although, of course, the newspapers will inevitably comment upon it. But if you were with the syndicate, they would play up your divorce more than your whole family connection, your talent, or your play.”

“Well, I am sorry I haven't a barrel of money to put into the venture,” said Kate, smiling sweetly. “But I haven't. All my income is derived from the sale of eggs and broilers——”

“Gad! If you get as much for fresh eggs as my wife has to pay for them,” commented Mr. Greaves, “you ought to be able to put on anything.”

“I am not selling enough,” laughed Kate. “And, as I was saying, since that is my only source of revenue, I want to go on the stage to earn money, rather than to sink money.”

Excited as she was about her future, absorbed as she was in her own plans, Kate was subtly aware of a faint change in Mr. Greaves' manner toward her. When she communed with herself afterward on the subject, she was unable to “place” the difference; but at the time it seemed to her that there was a sort of atmospheric change in the room. It was as indefinable as a slight lowering of the temperature. Yet she was convinced that Hartley Greaves, the manager, who had been all deference and intelligent flattery toward her up to this time, had become Hartley Greaves, the slightly familiar, the slightly arrogant.

“You've got a lot to learn, in spite of your talent,' Mr. Greaves announced, after he had studied her for a few minutes.

“I'm willing to work hard enough to learn,” said Kate eagerly.

“It's one thing to appear before an audience of friendly people, all of them your admirers, who are giving away their money any way, and are grateful if any return is made for it, and to appear before a perfectly cold audience, who have paid to be entertained, not to help a charity.”

“I know it,” replied Kate humbly.

“Of course,” Mr. Greaves conceded kindly, “you've got generations of it in your blood—that'll help.”

Kate's eyes filled with nervous tears. She thought of her mother and her father.

“I'd try not to disgrace my forbears.” She smiled a little tremulously.

“I won't let you disgrace them,” Mr. Greaves promised her emphatically. “But you'll have to put yourself under my charge for six months or so. You've got to learn how to use your voice; you've got to learn how to listen. You've got a good carriage,” he added, leaning back and surveying her critically. “I always liked to see you walk—you didn't lose control of your legs when you had to cross the stage. Your body is flexible.”

In spite of herself, Kate felt the blood mount to her face at this frank inventory of her points.

“Have you got anything,” she began nervously, trying to change the subject, “in hand for me now?”

“I have got a play of Ware's in my desk that's the finest thing since Sheridan wrote 'The School for Scandal,'” Mr. Greaves flaunted himself. “If Olston hadn't been a fool, she could have made the hit of her life in it. But, no—she had to run after the beck and call of an extra fifty per week. And what's happened to her? Two rotten failures—two Labrador frosts—and she's sitting in her hotel room, waiting for the Sneeds to find her a play that will succeed. The Sneeds! They would have turned down 'Hamlet' if they had had a chance—they did turn down 'Jim, the Penman.' They don't know a live play from a wooden box of salted codfish.”

“And you think perhaps I could try the part that Miss Olston gave up?” Kate tried to recall Mr. Greaves from the congenial subject of the rival firm's stupidities.

“That's what I am going to give you your chance in,” replied Mr. Greaves cheerfully. “You'd better get your lawyers in, if you think you need them, and I will be around to-morrow morning with some little papers for you to sign. It's too late in the season for us to do anything in New York this year, but we'll have a copyrighting performance up in Utica, and I will try you on the dog in Kansas City in May or June. That'll give Ware a chance to make over the play, if it needs it, before we come into the city next fall. It will give you some eight or nine months of good hard labor, too, before you make your Broadway appearance—and you need it, my lady, for all you were the star of the Thalia Club. Gad, but the fashionable amateurs are the limit!”

Kate subdued an impulse to clasp him by the hand and kiss it. She observed, in the second of rejecting the notion, that the cuff above the hand was not spotless, and that the knuckles themselves showed a little office grime; moreover, the hand, like the rest of Mr. Greaves' person, was pudgy. By some uncontrolled vagary, Elliott's hand, strong, lean, firm, and steady—the hand of a man, and of a gentleman, as well—obtruded itself upon her recollection.

The vision slightly chilled her enthusiasm.

Mr. Greaves, however, did not notice that, and, as she thanked him, and said how ready she would be for the lawyers and the papers in the morning, he patted her paternally on the shoulder and assured her that she was going to be a great success—that Olston would be tearing out her eyes and her hair in less than a year, from pure jealousy.

Kate opened the ventilators after Mr. Greaves had gone, and wondered why she had never noticed his offensive manner in the old days, when he had directed two or three rehearsals for the Thalia Club. It was impossible, she decided, that his manner had undergone any real change in so brief a period.

The next evening all the papers contained the information that Mrs. Elliott Ames, who had just returned from Reno, after having happily effected an escape from marital chains, had signed with Mr. Greaves a three years' contract. Pictures of Kate and of Elliott, old pictures of Kate's mother and father, all their old, painful, pitiful story, pictures of Kate's grandmother and great-uncles, pictures of Elliott Ames, Senior, and of the Ames' “palace” at Huntoon's Point, were published in the more spectacular sheets.

When Kate saw them she had a moment's fright—how angry they would make Elliott, how frightfully distasteful to him the whole thing would be! Then she shook herself. She was happily freed from Elliott and his likes and dislikes, his absurd prejudices, his silly narrowness! Never again would she be frightened by the thought of a glowering glance from him, or a stern word, or a contemptuous question! She was free of him, and had entered into her own life! She looked at the paper again, and vigorously put down the nascent inquiry as to how she was going to like her own life herself.

Chapter V.

Allison Ware came back from England to superintend the rehearsals of his play, “The Weaker Vessel,” a sparkling little comedy, whose brilliant, big-hearted heroine was, by some saving grace of originality, not too reminiscent of Bernard Shaw's Candida, or of Barrie's heroine in “What Every Woman Knows.” And he and Kate became more friendly even than they had been a during the brief resumption of their acquaintance the winter the Thalias had played in his comedietta. Kate was thrown much more upon him than she had been before, when her life had been full of other interests than those purely theatrical.

He still kept for her much of the charm he had had in the days when her father had brought him to the convent, and she thrust aside, or elbowed out of her mind, the critical thoughts of him, which her later sophistication suggested: She had not moved in New York society for four or five years without learning the hallmarks of dissipation, but when she saw them on Allison Ware's face, she told herself that all men of genius were men of occasional excesses.

What was unforgivable animalism in a banker or a broker or a business man of any sort become the mark of a delicately strung organism in an artist. What would have been dishonesty in the ordinary man of affairs was merely the temperamental inability to deal with practical matters in a man of genius. Thus Kate put down the criticisms that suggested themselves concerning her refound old playfellow.

He had joined them first at Utica, where they had gone for the purpose of giving a performance which would serve to copyright the play. Kate had no acquaintances in the town, and neither had Allison Ware, and the idle hours before the performance they spent together.

He was very good-looking, in spite of the excesses which, more than his years, had served to bleach his hair and line his face. He had the graceful, boyish figure which she remembered from St. Rose's days, and his eyes had never lost the trick of sympathetic laughter which had made one Christmas holiday so memorable.

That they were capable also of expressing great admiration without words was something which Kate was not seasoned enough against the arts of flattery to withstand. When he told her that it was after seeing her in “Solon Junior” that he had written “The Weaker Vessel,” with her in mind as the heroine, she felt a swelling surety of success and exaltation.

He told her about her father, too, on that day when they walked about the streets of Utica, killing time. With most delicate artistry, he managed to suggest a reverent sympathy with Kate's mother, with a tolerant, irrepressible affection for her father. Kate's eyes filled with ready tears at his tone.

“You always understood the poor, dear, weak darling!” she cried.

She thought how she had once or twice tried to make Elliott see her fascinating father with her eyes, and how Elliott had been obviously unable to consider Mortimer Crossett anything but a contemptible travesty upon manhood. The primary virtues loomed so large in Elliott's scheme of existence, she thought bitterly, that he had no room for the graces.

Later, in Kansas City, Allison developed all sorts of pleasing congenialities. He always had time to explore out-of-the-way corners of the town, and to make little picnics beyond it. He had excellent tastes, tinged with imagination; he could please a woman's fancy by a gift without making it from some famous shop. Poor Elliott had labored under the disadvantage of knowing only the most expensive places in which to buy tributes for his beloved one.

Besides all these minor bonds between them, there was always the great bond of the part and the play. Allison was able to rage with Kate concerning the stupidity of the leading man, they were able together to rail at the mistaken economics of Hartley Greaves, whose settings, they both firmly declared, were atrocious. Their lives touched each other at every point during this period.

When “The Weaker Vessel” came to New York, its success was somewhat phenomenal. Kate leaped at once into a position of favorite, such as most actresses attain only after years. The older generation of theatregoers welcomed the daughter of her father and mother. The generation which had no recollection of those bygone celebrities was enormously amused by the delicate fun and satire of the play, and by the piquant charm of the heroine.

Kate's friends, old and new, some dating back even to St. Rose's days, trooped to her first night. For once the applause of a premier appearance was not contradicted by the wisdom of the next morning's papers, or by the chilliness of dwindling houses through the next two weeks.

Kate was almost in too great a whirl of excitement and pleasure during the days immediately preceding the New York opening to have much leisure for introspection. Once or twice a day, perhaps, the thought of her ex-husband crossed her mind. It was a slightly annoying thought—hardly disagreeable enough to be dignified with the name of pain, but distinctly troublesome. It was an interruption to joyful reveries. It would chill the glow of her expectations; it would stop the glad onward rush of anticipation.

Sometimes she hoped that he would be present on her opening night, to see and to suffer under the brilliancy of her success. Then she would hope that he would not be present; he would be a blighting influence, he would help spoil things.

“As if there were the slightest danger of his darkening the doors of any theatre where I am playing!” she usually ended her meditations on this subject, impatient of herself.

When the great night itself actually arrived, with its smiling, friendly faces all blurred into one welcoming beam across the footlights, with its appreciative ripples of laughter, its tumultuous bursts of applause, its tributes of flowers, beneath the weight of which the ushers staggered as they hurried forward at the end of the second act, Kate entirely forgot Elliott and her half worriment concerning him.

She did not remember him on the stage—there she remembered nothing except the part she was playing—she did not remember him behind the scenes, where Hartley Greaves, dropping the mask of solemn simplicity which he wore always before his public, walked back and forth among the dressing rooms, almost sobbing in his delight, and assuring his star, and her support, and the rapturous playwright, “We've done it this time; we've got 'em, sure.”

She did not think of him, when, in response of the flattering din, which would not cease, at the end of the second act, she came out again and again to bow her thanks. In the joyful enthusiasm of the moment every one had been called for—the star, her leading man, the whole company, the manager, and the author. Ware had made a speech, admirable for its brevity, and Mr. Greaves, resuming his wide-eyed, ponderous manner, had weightedly given thanks to its audience for its reception of the play.

It was Betty Pruett who started a last call for a speech from the star; she stood up in the box in which she had seated half of the party which she had brought to see Kate Crossett's début, and had called, with an appearance of fervent artlessness which was fine acting, in its way: “Kate Crossett!”

The call had been taken up all over the house, where Kate's friends were freely sprinkled, and where the rest of the audience, good-humored and facilely enthusiastic, were perfectly willing to follow their lead.

When she came on, in response to that call, Kate was genuinely moved. She was borne up on wings of exaltation, but a feeling of humility mingled with it. A thousand emotions surged through her—the thought of how proud her father would have been, how grieved her mother, over her appearance in that profession, the thought of how easily won was popular favor—a shuddering sense of how easily it was lost. She had a palpitant moment's realization of the narrow ledge that divides success from defeat.

Her emotion was genuine when she extended her graceful arms in a sort of appeal and a sort of thanksgiving to her audience, and cried out, with an effect of total artlessness:

“Oh, I don't deserve it—I don't deserve it, but I am so glad! I thank you all with all my heart.”

But in all those tumultuous moments there was no thought of Elliott—of Elliott, who, having sworn by all his gods that he would never see his ex-wife act, and, having fortified this good resolution on this particular night by making several engagements, found his feet irresistibly led to the theatre before which her name was emblazoned in electric letters a foot high, and as irresistibly led within it.

He would not buy a seat—nothing would have induced him to meet the battery of eyes that would be turned upon him if he should walk down the orchestra aisle. He intended merely to stay for a few minutes, safe and obscure in the darkness behind the seats.

But he found himself staying on and on through the whole of the charming act, listening again with unwilling admiration to the vibrant, eager notes of Kate's musical voice, watching—and loathing himself as he watched—all her graceful motions.

He caught her hands and kissed them.

He had never felt her charm more strongly than he did as he stood there in the dark, and watched her bitterly. He had never known what jealousy was until it rose upon him in a red, engulfing wave as he saw her head upon her lover's shoulder, her lover's hand upon her lustrous hair. He could have hurled an imprecation at all of them—company, author, and manager, and at the audience, too, tinkling with laughter, murmuring appreciation,

He had stood rooted to the spot when the curtain went down upon the act, and the lights flared up all over the house. He knew from the loud, steady applause that he was safe for a few minutes yet—that the men would not begin hurrying to the lobbies until that had died down.

He listened to Allison Ware's witty speech of thanks with jaws almost ground together in futile rage against this trick of graceful expression.

And then he saw his old enemy, Mrs. Pruett, rise and call for his wife. He hated her—Betty Pruett—with a new intensity of fierceness; he felt that he could not bear it, if Kate responded, that he could not endure to see her thankful for this noisy tumult.

But neither could he leave the spot where he was planted. He stayed, he watched the graceful, lithesome figure, saw the arms outstretched in that sweet gesture of generous surrender that he had known so well, heard the broken voice.

When the final burst of applause following her speech had died down, he was barely able to jerk himself away from the spot, and escape through the doors into the garish street before the crowd of Kate's admirers streamed out after him.

He did not escape entirely unnoticed, however, and when Kate was dressing, after the last act, for the big, gay, resplendent supper party that Letty Pruett was giving to all concerned in the evening's success, Mr. Greaves poked his head into the little room where she sat in a blinding glare of electricity, scrubbing the make-up from her face with cold cream, and observed jovially:

“I hear your ex was in front to-night. Came to scoff and remained to pray, I suppose?”

Kate's maid, at a gesture, interposed herself between the star and the dressing-room door. One of the things to which the late Mrs. Ames could not accustom herself was this free-and-easy intercourse behind the scenes. No one could be more of a martinet than Greaves in observing the letter of the law about the admission of outsiders to the dressing rooms, but there his formality ceased. He had already given Kate to understand that he considered her “too damn particular,” because she objected to holding intercourse with gentlemen while in the process of making up or of unmaking.

“Good Lord, girl,” he had exclaimed roughly, “aren't you twice as thoroughly clothed in that kimono thing as in the evening clothes you have been wearing the last three or four years? And if you weren't, what difference do you suppose it would make to me?”

Kate had endeavored to make him understand that it was not his feelings she was interested in preserving from shock, but her own. But the distinction passed lightly over Mr. Greaves' head, and he continued, as before, to poke his head through the curtain that hung in front of her door, and to converse with her as she sat before her big mirrors, or stood behind her big screen.

To-night, when Elsie had barricaded her mistress from too close a survey on the part of the manager, Kate answered his observation about Elliott in a frigid voice.

“Mr. Ames had met Mr. Ware,” she remarked, rather idiotically, “and I dare say wanted to see his play.”

Hartley Greaves laughed.

“Well, it doesn't matter what brings 'em, so long as they come,” he replied good-naturedly.

“I'll have the boy take that floral junk over to your hotel in a cab, if you say so. Gad, but I've seen the time when I should have liked to convert it into cash! But things are coming our way now—things are coming our way.”

He went off again through the narrow passages, and Kate heard his voice and his chuckling, unaffected laughter, as he paused here and there to say a self-gratulatory word or two. Later, at Mrs. Pruett's supper party, he was all that was grave and reticent. His smile was infrequent, and he had the air of a man pondering plans not to be lightly spoken.

“I sometimes think that he's the best actor of all of us,” said Kate to Allison Ware, who shared her taxicab to the door of her hotel, after the tumultuously triumphant party had disbanded.

“Whatever he is, he's a made man now, thanks to you. And I'm a made man, thanks to you. I've had three requests for interviews about plays already. The syndicate is sitting up and taking notice, but it isn't Greaves, and it isn't I—it's you, it's all you, little Kate, of the convent!”

He caught her hands, which were ungloved since the supper, and kissed them. Kate tried to withdraw them—she had a sudden, obscure sense of indignity. But he would not let them go, he kissed them again and again. The cab slowed up at the entrance of the Gotham before she could recover herself.

“You must never do such a thing as that again,” she told him breathlessly, as the carriage porter opened the door.

Allison laughed.

“Not kiss my benefactress' hand?” he answered, with tender mockery in his voice.

And Kate felt, childishly, that she could not make the answer that hovered on her lips:

“Not in that way.”

But she went to bed with the feeling of those ardent kisses, not of gratitude alone, upon her soft flesh, and before her eyes the vision of a hurt and angry man hurrying out of the theatre to the sound of loud applause.

Chapter VI.

“My dear Kate, you don't stand upon your rights as the most charming star in America. You should be short with Greaves. He's not the only managerial pebble on the theatrical beach, and you should let him know it. Think what Dawson, think what Levy and Greenfield would offer you.”

“Unfortunately, I have some feeling of gratitude for Mr. Greaves,” Kate answered Allison Ware. It was a year and a half after her brilliant début. “He spent an enormous amount of pains on me—he believed in me, and gave me my chance. I can't throw him over.”

Allison looked at her with a certain cold anger in his deliberate stare.

“But did no one else have any part in your success? I had labored under the delusion that you were full of heartfelt thanks to me for providing you with so fitting a vehicle as 'The Weaker Vessel' proved.”

“There was much mutual exchange of gratitude, if I remember our opening aright,” said Kate coldly. “But, anyway, I understand that your play isn't ready?”

“Greaves has seen the scenario, and pretended to like it very much,” replied Allison, in an aggrieved way. “I claim to be something of an artist. I can't write it as though I were a glazier, putting in so many panes of glass a day. But there is no sense of his flying off the handle, and forcing you into that thing of Miss Anstrauther's. The wit is about as delicate as a bludgeon, the situations are of the hoariest antiquity. It will be suicidal for you to appear in it, and if Greaves weren't a mutton-headed old goat, he'd see it himself. I suppose the truth of the matter is that he's able to beat her down, because it's her first play, and because she's a woman; and he thinks that the name which you have made for yourself in my play will carry off anything for a season or two. But I tell you, my dear girl, he was never more mistaken in his life, and neither were you, if you agree with him. Any of the other men, if you'd break with Greaves, would wait for 'Twickenham Ferry,' and you could go on duplicating the success you've had.”

There was a good deal of eagerness in his tone, although he endeavored to disguise it beneath the bored air of one repeating platitudes merely for another's guidance.

“To tell the truth,” Allison pursued, in a new voice, pressing some advantage which he thought he had gained, “I simply can't bear to have you appear in another man's play, or another woman's, either. Your success and mine were bound up together. It isn't just the selfishness of the playwright that I feel, it's the selfishness of—ah, you know, Kate; you know!”

He had sunk on his knees beside the chair in which she half reclined. He caught her hand, hanging limply over the arm of the chair.

“It's the selfishness of the lover, Kate,” he told her. “You've known how I've been feeling these last three months, since I came back from England, haven't you? I think I have been feeling that way a good deal longer—perhaps ever since you were a chubby-faced little Kate Crossett, of the convent garden; but at last I've come to know how I feel. You've guessed it, haven't you, Kate?”

Kate looked at him almost gravely.

“I think I have guessed it a little,” she answered steadily. “Since you came back, I mean. I almost thought you had forgotten about me the year you were back in England. You treated me as you did once when I was a little girl—you never even answered my letters.”

She smiled down into the handsome face below her. It occurred to her, even then, that there were very few men who could remain upon their knees as long as Allison, and suffer no loss of dignity or of grace.

“I was sure you understood,” he said softly. “We've been such good comrades, haven't we, Kate? That's been the marvel of it, to me. Love and passion—of course, I haven't reached my age without thinking I knew something about them. But companionship, equal, and free, and unafraid—that was a new thing in my experience with women.”

He lightly kissed the tapering white fingers, and rose.

Kate waited the logical conclusion of his remarks. She was prepared to put him to the trouble of removing some of her scruples against the second marriages of divorcées, and had also made up her mind to let him know that nothing would induce her to give up her career. But, of course, her reason told her, Allison would not want her to do that. She had, however, no immediate opportunity for learning his views on the subject. His next words were not a proposal.

“Well, to return to our original topic,” said Allison lightly. “Can't you get Greaves to keep 'The Weaker Vessel' a little while longer? I'll guarantee to have 'Twickenham Ferry' ready for rehearsal in three months.”

Curiously chilled, Kate heard herself replying: “But I really don't think that Greaves thinks as well of your scenario as he does of Miss Anstrauther's play. He says—tell me, Allison, is it true—that you're falling into the mistake of all the dramatists who have made a single strike, and are trying to palm off a juvenile on him.”

“Greaves and his like think that plays are like batter cakes,” sneered Allison, “the last one from the griddle always the best. As a matter of fact, it's the idea that's been maturing in a man's mind for years that is the one worth developing. I've had the theme for 'Twickenham Ferry' in my mind for twenty years. But that doesn't make it any less the novel and worth while.”

Kate continued to look nonplused and slightly unhappy.

“Perhaps you also think that Miss Anstrauther's play is better than mine gives promise of being?” Vanity and anger were again apparent in the man's tones.

“I'm not going to be browbeaten into saying that I like the idea for 'Twickenham Ferry' as well as the idea for 'The Weaker Vessel.' I don't think, of course, that the Anstrauther girl can handle situations as deftly, or write as heavenly conversations as you do. But I'm blessed, my dear Allison”—Kate began to recover her spirits as she freed her mind, and spoke with certain gayety—“if I don't think her little play has a bully good idea!”

“There never was an actress yet who knew the least thing about the quality of a play,” declared Kate's visitor. “So you won't persuade Greaves to wait for a really good play for you? Well, you'll be sorry when Maude Adams is making the hit of her life in it.”

He walked toward the table where his hat lay, and took it up. Kate watched him with a curious, baffled feeling growing upon her. Had it been a dream of hers that the man was on his knees before her, telling her of his love, not half an hour since? Was she under the spell of some strange delusion? She determined to make a test.

“If I should refuse to appear in Miss Anstrauther's comedy, and should insist upon yours, Allison,” she told him, “the new manager who sought to engage my distinguished services would have an awful bill to pay. Greaves has been a perfect duck about letting me draw advances.”

“You mean you're in debt to that designing old fellow?” Allison demanded, in a virtuously shocked tone.

“Not to him personally,” Kate replied haughtily. “I've had advances of my salary, that's all.”

“You must be the most extravagant human being that God ever created! Why, you haven't a living creature to help, have you? And I dare say you draw a handsome alimony in the bargain. What do you do with your money, Kate?”

“I most emphatically do not draw any alimony,” declared Kate furiously. “You must have a very low idea of the woman you pretend to—to admire so much, if you think me capable of such a thing. As for the rest”—Mortimer Crossett's daughter sighed, and half laughed—“well, I'm sure I don't know where the money goes. I don't feel extravagant.”

Allison looked at her, at the laces and silks that enveloped her charming person, at the exquisite room which housed her, at the flowers which adorned it.

“Oh, no, you're not extravagant! You haven't a single extravagant taste!”

He moved toward her, his eyes brightening at the potent influence of her grace and beauty. When he reached her side, she was conscious of a tremor that shook her. He passed his arm about her shoulders, half drawing her to him.

“Kate, you're irresistible,” he whispered; and, with a light brushing of her hair with his lips, he was gone.

She stood still when he had left her, a prey to a mixture of feelings. Something in him undeniably charmed her, something revolted; and to-day, certainly, something had outraged her. Did he think that she was a woman to be halfway wooed? She stamped an angry foot at the thought.

As the days passed, she found herself less and less able to understand Allison's attitude. He had finally succeeded in persuading Greaves to pigeon-hole Miss Anstrauther's play, and was working with might and main on “Twickenham Ferry.” He repeated to Kate, over and over again, his reason for desiring her to appear in that, rather than in any play by “an outsider.” He assumed constantly that their lives were to be joined, that their intercourse was to know no cessation. He made love to her in all the ways at his command, sending her flowers and little gifts, consulting her wishes about her new part, spending with her all the leisure that both of them could command.

He made no further reference to her early attitude about “Twickenham Ferry,” but seemed to take it for granted that Greaves had met her wishes as fully as his own in substituting that piece for the one upon which he had almost decided. And Kate, in turn, had tried to banish from her mind the recollection of something cold, ugly, unutterably selfish, which had revealed itself in him on that day.

Kate suffered a good deal in her relations with her author. Her vanity was impaled upon a dilemma. She assured herself a hundred times a day that she was too proud a woman, that she occupied too dignified a position, to tolerate for an instant an equivocal position in any man's affection.

Yet pride forbade her, quite as strongly as it reprobated the idea of an undefined “affair” with Allison Ware, to discover exactly where she stood with him. The idea of asking “what his intentions were” naturally did not appeal to her. There was something sordid, vulgar, in the notion of saying to a gentleman who has just called one the only unmixed joy his existence has ever known: “Yes, that's all very fine, but when are you going to ask me to marry you?”

Things did not come to a crisis, with its accompanying lucidity, until some six months later. “Twickenham Ferry” had been rushed through to some sort of a completion, had been rehearsed, and had been tried out in what Allison Ware called the provinces.

No one was any too well satisfied with the results. Hartley Greaves made the situation agreeable by openly swearing at himself for a fool to have taken it. Ware, on the other hand, declared that he was a fool to have given it to a manager who did not understand the first principles of stage mechanism. Kate felt that the heroine, Anita, of Twickenham Ferry, was nothing but a puppet, provided with a set of stage strings. Nevertheless, somehow the thing had managed to hang together, and the New York season was booked.

There was no such fanfare of triumph over it as over its predecessor, but it managed “to get across,” as the stage lingo has it, for all three of the principals engaged in its production were too talented to bungle badly. Ware's deft situations and witty lines, Greaves' wizardry of setting, and Kate's magnetic charm could not fail entirely of their effect with audiences prepared to be pleased.

It was different with the critics. They “regretted” the thinness and the triteness of Mr. Ware's plot, and they declared it a pity if that promising young man—Allison's forty-odd years were treated as infancy by the paternal reviewers of the New York drama—were going to content himself with slovenly work, or that charming young comedienne going to lend herself to inadequate rôles, making no demands upon her real talent. Nevertheless, together they pulled the play through.

She went alone to the House of Representatives.

They all felt a good deal relieved when the enthusiasm of the opening night, though a bit perfunctory, reassured them as to their fate for the time being. The tension of the last few weeks was lessened. Some courteous compunction as to their treatment of one another during the period of stress began to occur to them.

There was no Betty Pruett in town this time to convert this affair into one of social glorification, and it was a strictly theatrical party that celebrated the release from forebodings of failure.

They all grew a little reckless in their relief, and Kate was quite sure that Allison was exhibiting his recklessness in the most foolish of all manners, by drinking too much champagne. That was the reason that she would not let him take her home, but preferred to drive with her manager and his wife to her hotel.

“Gad, Katie, girl,” declared Greaves, mopping his brow, at the recollection of all the misgivings he had had, “but I am glad the thing pulled through as well as it has. It was against my better judgment that I gave in to you and Ware, but it seems as though, for once, I shouldn't be obliged to pay the price of my good nature.”

“To me and Ware?” Kate questioned him. “But I didn't try to persuade you to pigeonhole Caroline Anstrauther's play. I think myself it was better than this.”

“I like that! When you threatened to go over to the enemy if I didn't fix it up with Ware!”

“I threaten to go over to the enemy! I certainly did no such thing.” Kate spoke sharply, and her manager attempted to soothe her.

“Oh, now, don't get riled. It's turned out all very well, and I admit that you didn't come threatening to me in person. But Ware gave me your message, and I could understand easily enough you didn't want to have to talk it out with me yourself, if there was any way of avoiding it.”

“I never sent you any message,” declared Kate vehemently.

“All right, then. You didn't. But I can see as far into a millstone as the next man, and, of course, I understood how you would feel about the play, feeling as you did about Allison. It's all right, Kate; it's all right. But maybe you can see now why I'm so dead set against married stars—that is, stars married to actors or actresses. There's always a rumpus about giving them both parts in the same play. It's bad enough when your leading woman is—friends, eh?—with a playwright.”

Kate scarcely knew what she answered in her bewildered mortification. How much of the implication that she had intended to take a stand in regard to Allison's play was her manager's imagination, and how much was due to Allison's own adroit innuendo, she could not tell. But she resolved that the situation was intolerable, and must end at once.

To-morrow morning he was coming to a twelve-o'clock breakfast with her, and they were bound for an exhibition of pictures later. The picture exhibition should wait while she clarified the air of misunderstanding. What, should she, Kate Crossett, daughter of her parents, wife of her husband, favorite of the public, friend of the brilliant and the great—should she be put into a doubtful position by this playwright? Yet she confessed, sadly enough, to her hungry heart, that she wanted love, and felt but half alive without it.

She made herself particularly charming at breakfast. Allison responded easily enough to the fascination which she did not scruple to employ. She wanted to get the situation again into her own hands, to be the mistress of her own destiny, and of his. There was but one way for her to accomplish that, and that was by making him propose to her unmistakably and finally.

She felt her spirit rising as she led matters toward the desired climax. Once her mood was dashed by the sudden thought that this wag not the attitude of love. A woman in love, waiting for the words which are to decide her future, would not feel so completely armed to control the situation. But she pushed the thought aside.

The feeling of mastery gradually fell away from her as the hour wore on. Allison's response to her beauty, her grace, her coquetry, was unmistakable. He talked extravagantly, like a poet lover, and he made plans for himself and for her as though all their lives were to be spent together, doing a common work and sharing a common fame. Try as she would, she could not induce him to say the words that her self-respect demanded to hear.

Suddenly she interrupted him in a rhapsody on the sort of summer they could have together in Norway—“We could make up such a nice little party,” he had said—to remark: “But suppose I should be married?”

Her vanity had its instant reward. He grew white, consternation, bewilderment, written on his face. There wag no doubt, at any rate, of his feeling. She rejoiced, and she half pitied him.

“But—you couldn't—why, every one told me that you turned Hetherington down before I came back last spring and that he had kept every one else from getting anywhere near you. And that's what I've been endeavoring to do myself, Kate, dear, ever since!” His face had regained some of its natural color, his voice its gayety. But his eyes still searched her anxiously. “I'm not going to let anybody marry you,” he ended daringly.

She looked at him gravely.

“It seems to me that plain speaking is, after all, the most dignified thing,” she said seriously. “You know there's only one way to keep a woman from marrying another man, Allison, and that is to marry her yourself. Don't think I am trying to propose to you,” she added hastily, blushing in spite of herself, “but I only wanted to call your attention to the fact you take me too much for granted.”

She was surprised at the effect her words had upon him. He was still a little pale, and there was a new look, half shame and half defiance, in his blue eyes. He sat down opposite her, and faced her with compressed lips for a minute. She watched him, trying to smile, in order to show that she thought herself at ease, in control of the situation.

“I've been an awful fool,” he said, at last. “I saw you didn't know, and, like an ostrich, I thought by burying my head in the sand to keep things hidden forever.” Her heart began to flutter, and the color to ebb away from her face. “Kate, don't you know that nothing on earth could have kept me from asking you to marry me, from forcing you to marry me, from catching you up and flinging you across my charger, and galloping with you to the uttermost end of the earth, except—one thing?”

“You mean”—Kate's lips moved slowly to form the words, but they were scarcely audible—“you mean that you are married?”

He nodded mutely. She leaned back among her cushions, her eyes shining black and splendid in the sudden pallor of her face. After a minute's wretched silence, he began to speak.

“I'm a scoundrel, Kate; a blackguard. You can never forgive me. But you could if you knew the strength of the temptation to which I yielded.”

“Don't be conventional about it,” Kate begged him. “Of course, you have been rather outrageous; but, on the whole, it's rather amusing to think of me, a seasoned woman of the world, as I fondly call myself; an actress of some time's standing—oh, altogether, a sophisticated creature—being the—shall we call it victim?—of your little masquerade.”

“You must not talk like that, Kate,” replied Allison gravely, almost paternally. “Cheap cynicism is not for your lips. Of course, you didn't question me; of course, you took me for granted as an honest man. Had you not known me when you were a child? Had you not clung to my hand when your topknot scarcely reached above my waist? If you had not believed in me, if you had applied any cheap, vulgar tests to me, you would not have been yourself—noble, truthful, proud-spirited, free-minded—the woman I worship.”

The earnestness of his manner, the convincing ring of his words, the little reference to the old garden, and to her father, brought a rush of self-pitying tears to Kate's eyes. She closed her lids upon them, but he saw them, and, with a little, broken cry of pity and pleading, he was on his knees by her side, and was begging her forgiveness.

At last she gave it—that lofty sort of forgiveness which tries to imply that there has been no possibility of real offense. She had listened to his story of his marriage—a boy's foolish escapade, nearly a quarter of a century before. For one thing, her good taste thanked him—he made no charges against his wife, denounced her tor nothing, and took all the blame for the wreck of his life, as he called it, upon his own shoulders. It was some balm, too, to her wounds, that he should tell her that he and his wife were virtually separated, and had been for years.

But when he followed this declaration up with a suggestion which not even his most delicate art of expression could keep delicate, that she should allow him to make the actual separation a legal one—to divorce his wife, in short, in order that he might marry her, Kate Crossett, she revolted.

It was characteristic, perhaps, of both of them that the later afternoon should see them walking together in the park, enjoying each other's society, enjoying the day, the lights and shadows, the moving show, with that freshness, that keenness of enjoyment which follows a general purging of the emotions among the “temperamental.” Certainly, there seemed to be no shadow upon their converse, and people walking, riding, and driving, pointed them out to one another, for billboards had made Kate's face a well-known one, and Allison's features had been given a wide publicity by the attentive Sunday press.

They were a distinguished-looking pair, and many heads were turned as they passed. They looked particularly and abominably cheerful, and interested in each other, in the eyes of a thin young man who was taking his afternoon exercise on his horse. He was rather near-sighted, and he had discarded his glasses during the hour's canter, so that he had to turn to look after them to make quite sure who they were.

At any rate, he did turn to look at them, jerking his beast up short as he did so. And then one of the “who's who in New York” habitués of the mall remarked to another:

“That's young Ames—the new congressman, They say he works like a dog at it—politics. And he has oodles of money. I wish I had his chance.”

Chapter VII.

It was Town Twaddle, that lively purveyor of news about people who do not wish to have it reported, that helped Mr. Allison Ware in the suit upon which he entered vigorously now—to win Kate's consent to the plan he had outlined.

At first she had refused to hear of it. He pointed out to her that, after all, her obstinacy, her Puritanism, her whatever-it-was, accomplished but one thing—his unhappiness. It did not help the little Englishwoman, growing old in her Kentish village; it did not give her the society which she had not had for fifteen years, and had not missed for twelve.

He had always supported her, of course, he said magnificently; and, of course, he always would. That she herself had not long since applied for a divorce was merely because her provincial point of view was so behind the times, and also, perhaps, because she might foolishly believe that divorce would end her income. Let him go to her, let him explain to her the situation as it really was. For all he knew, for all Kate knew, divorce might prove as great a godsend to her in England as to him in America.

But Kate forbade such talk, and even occasionally enforced her injunctions against it. She gave him to understand that their intimate comradeship must soon end, instructing him that she really did not care for unconventional relations, but she obligingly kept deferring the date of its ending. And then along came Town Twaddle.

Town Twaddle, in a paragraph following an account of the opening of the Colorado Senator Sullivan's new palace in Washington, and preceding an account of Elliott Ames' maiden speech in Congress, printed a third, in which it stated that it knew upon the most reliable authority that Miss C-rn-l-- S-ll-v-n, daughter of Senator S-ll-v-n, one of the millionaire lawmakers from a Western State, was engaged to a rising young New York politician, recently returned to the National Congress, Mr. Ell---t A---s. In order that the readers might have another clue by which to guess the identity of the New York congressman, it was added that all his friends would be particularly ready to congratulate him, upon the public announcement of this engagement, because of the unhappy outcome of a former matrimonial venture of his.

Kate read this veiled allusion, and was promptly and illogically very angry. She did not often trouble herself about Elliott, in these busy, flattered days of hers. Sometimes, when the familiar manners of her chief associates grated upon her a little, she had a flashing recollection of his reticences, his reserves. After all, she would say, living with a gentleman rather spoiled one for living among mere men.

Sometimes when Allison's shiftlessness in the matter of work and in the matter of money irritated her, the inevitable comparison suggested itself with Elliott—whom she had been used to consider a very martinet in his devotion to work and in his business transactions.

Sometimes when the talk of the women with whom she was now chiefly associated irked and irritated her, she had a moment's kindly recollection of the once-hated committee meetings.

But, on the whole, she gave Elliott little thought.

She was not particularly an analytical person, and she did not attempt to define what the overwhelming anger she felt upon reading that paragraph in Town Twaddle denoted in her. But anger she felt, anger and appalling desolation. The pleasant present was wiped out for the second, and she felt like a child, suddenly deserted by his play-fellows, and, looking wrathfully around upon the spot where they have been, to discover that his guardians, too, have fled, and that he is alone in the universe.

It was the flush of rage that incarnadined her cheeks when she read the paragraph, and it was the tears of rage and self-pity that wet them when she flung herself at last upon Allison Ware's shoulder, and cried out that she was willing to do what he wanted; that she was so alone, so alone, so alone!

Chapter VIII.

“Twickenham Ferry” had only a lasting enough success to “save its face,” as Greaves put it. Two months on Broadway, and then the road. There was nothing in it to warrant the hope that they might go on with it another year.

But Ware, a week or two after the secret understanding with Kate concerning their future, had brought a new scenario to Greaves. It embodied an idea which both gentlemen believed to be original. And the manager thought that if it were worked up in Allison's best way, it would efface the half failure of the present play.

Allison was to bring the finished product to Greaves at a certain date. Kate, too, was enthusiastic over the new piece. Curiously enough, she found the necessity for all sorts of extraneous enthusiasms growing upon her as her engagement—if her understanding with Allison could be called by that name—progressed. Love most emphatically did not fill up her days.

Allison had made a flying trip to England to set in motion the machinery for obtaining his freedom from his wife. To Kate he urged this as an excuse for not having finished the work he had undertaken for Greaves in the specified time. Kate looked rather ominous.

“You know I've been writing you that he has something else up his sleeve,” she said.

“He can't have anything as good,” declared Allison, with the laughing air of self-mocking vanity which became him very well. “Besides which, of course, the future Mrs. Ware——”

“Please don't do that,” interrupted Kate sharply.

“Forgive me, my dear. I know I am a barbarian, devoid of good taste. But, you see, it happens to make me very happy to think those four words. I'll try not to offend again, however.”

“Oh, I suppose I'm a nagging beast, and I ought to beg your pardon,” said Kate contritely. “I seem to be one of those logical females who brazenly do the things they are ashamed to mention!”

He silenced her with a kiss, and went on with voluble excuses for not having finished the play.

They served more or less well with Kate—she had to be satisfied with them, and she really was enthusiastic about the plot and the character which she was to impersonate.

Mr. Greaves, however, was not so easily managed. He had had another play submitted, upon which he was ready to stake his managerial reputation. Allison had already burdened him with one merely tepid success, and he felt under no particular obligations to that author. He bought the other play, at first maintaining that he was going to have one of the lesser stars appear in it, and then suddenly insisting that Kate should begin rehearsing in it.

She noted a slim, flowerlike young girl, and, by her side, Elliott Ames.

Kate rebelled, and Allison rebelled. Theatrical tempers run high, once they are started. Within two weeks from the time when he had insisted that she begin rehearsing “Mayfair Number Nine,” Kate had broken with him.

“She's dippy about that fake Ware,” elegantly observed Mr. Greaves. “See the lemon that he handed to me last season! She'll wake up when it's too late. She had a clause in her contract that it could be terminated after two years, in case she were not allowed a voice in selecting her plays and companies. I was a ninny to let her have it, but I thought she'd have some gratitude, some reason, in her, seeing that she was not a professional. Well, she'll come to her senses some day—probably when she's walking back from Kalamazoo. A woman that I made, mind you, and see the trick she plays me!”

Meantime, representatives from Sneed, and from Levy & Greenfeld, visited Miss Crossett, only to be informed that she thought of taking a rest, and would not consider any new contracts until the fall.

This had been Allison's advice to her. He had had an intoxicating vision of himself, as not only a playwright, but a play producer; he saw a theatre which he managed, in which plays written by him were the chief entertainment offered a delighted public, and in which his wife—his prospective wife, not the unfortunate little woman in England, who was dazedly and obediently working to sunder the tie between them—should be the leading woman.

“If only we could get the money together, we could do it!” he would cry exultantly.

“But neither of us is a business person, Allison, my dear,” Kate would tell him.

“Oh, don't talk that business man's nonsense, as though there was something special or sacred about it. Any man of intelligence who had the time to put his mind to it could do as well as these financial wizards. It's all a question of brains, and some of us have been turning ours to work that seems a little more important to us. But, of course, it we ever should get started on this venture, I'd leave off writing, for the time being, until I got the management well systematized!”

Kate looked a little doubtful, but she was beginning to find out that Allison was not the same pleasant person when contradicted that he was when one agreed with him. So she said nothing.

A few months later, he came to her exultant over the progress of a new scheme of his.

“Bentley is willing to back me—and you,” he added so swiftly that it could be called an afterthought, “to the extent of twenty thousand. Now, all that we have to do is to get another backer for another twenty, and the thing's done. With forty thousand in hand, I guarantee to give you the best play, with the best company and the best stage settings, that has been seen for a long time.”

“I'm sure I wish I had twenty thousand,” said Kate, with a little grimace.

“Well, surely you can get it, among your rich friends,” answered Allison, a little impatiently.

“I shouldn't think of doing such a thing,” was her emphatic reply.

“You have our joint interest warmly at heart, haven't you?” There was the frequent sneer in Allison's voice and on Allison's face.

“I still feel that I have some dignity of my own to maintain, although, perhaps, I have not much self-respect left,” she responded bitterly.

She had the irritating feminine trick of bemoaning situations into which her own temerity had drawn her.

“You make my position a trifle hard, Kate.”

Allison assumed a certain sorrowful gravity, which always brought Kate's penitence into action. She apologized, and they resumed the discussion of the ways and means of raising money.

In two or three days Allison succeeded in finding backers to the extent of the other twenty thousand dollars of which he felt the need. But there was the constraint in his manner of one who feels that he has been obliged to do a good deal more than his share in a joint undertaking.

Hartley Greaves, Sneed, Levy & Greenfeld, and all the syndicate men, and all the rebellious managers, smiled broadly when they saw the announcement of the outcome of Kate's temporary retirement.

Miss Kate Crossett announces a new play by Allison Ware, entitled “The Silver Cord,” which she will produce with her own company of players. She will open with a two weeks' engagement at the New National Theatre in Washington, D. C., beginning October 9th.

“That means that she'll be ready to come and eat from my hand by December first, at the latest,” observed Mr. Hartley Greaves. “Poor Kate! Such a gifted being, and such a blamed fool!”

Chapter IX.

Exactly why Kate, with a thousand worries burdening her mind, with engagements with costumers, scenic artists, property men, candidates for admission to her company, ladies who wished to give her luncheons of honor, and a hundred other people, should deliberately choose to go up to the House of Representatives one afternoon during the week before she opened in Washington, only the divinity which has special charge over women of impulse can tell.

She went alone, and rather heavily veiled.

It is a matter of record among the pages that she bestowed fifty cents upon one of them who did her the service of pointing out Representative Ames' desk. It was vacant at the time, and proceedings were altogether uninteresting. Men got up at times and droned forth speeches or remarks with the manner of gentlemen talking in their sleep. No one seemed to pay much attention to them, and Kate felt that politeness was a lost art, along with oratory, in the nation's capitol.

By and by she had the felicity of seeing Elliott go down the aisle to his desk, and begin reading some communications that pages had left there. She had an inspiring view of the back of his head, and it gave her a curious sensation of pity to discover that his hair was growing thin. Allison's distinguished gray locks were thick, and would have been curly if he had allowed them to grow long enough.

When she returned to the theatre, she found, of course, that not less than fifty people had been imperatively anxious to see her. Allison was in a high rage, and tried to take her publicly to task for deserting the post of duty.

Relations between them were strained almost to the point of snapping, and were only superficially restored by the opening, two nights later.

Kate's enthusiasm as an actress had been almost obliterated by her anxieties as a producer. She had been too harassed for too long a time to enter into the light and joyous spirit of Allison's latest heroine. Moreover, she had a sudden, sneaking suspicion that the light and joyous spirit of that young lady was that of a well-articulated French doll.

Even with all the disadvantages under which they labored, the chief one being, according to the next morning's critics, the inadequacy and occasional incoherence of the new play, the situation between Allison and Kate might have remained at least amicable, had it not been for an entrance during the first act into one of the boxes.

It was rather a gala occasion altogether, the President, with some of his aides and some of his guests of the evening, being present, and occupying two of the lower boxes, under a brilliant decoration of flags and banners. The performance had had to wait the arrival of the Presidential party before beginning, and this delay had put the nervous men and women almost literally on pins and needles.

But when the first act was well under way, there was another entrance, into a box opposite the Presidential party's, which was more disastrous to Kate. A party of six it was, and, somehow, her eyes were drawn toward them in the midst of one of her most telling scenes. She noted, half unseen, the stout and prosperous elders of the party, and then, among the juniors, a slim, flowerlike young girl, and, by her side, Elliott Ames.

She was not a trained enough actress to keep the shock of the second from affecting her. She halted, stumbled, could not recover herself for a perceptible moment. In the wings a panic almost seized the members of the company, who were watching the progress of the play. Fright and fury combined seized Allison.

Although Kate recovered herself in time, without the aid of the prompter, and although the audience kindly tried to make up to its favorite for her moment of humiliation, there was a bitter, tense scene between the lovers when Kate went off the stage.

“You ruined the act! You've spoiled my work!”

Allison did not need to curse her in language; his angry eyes and snarling lips were enough.

“Let me pass,” said Kate, mastering herself with difficulty.

She hated him with her whole heart in that moment, and she hated him all the more because her eyes were full of the slender girl in the box with Elliott. No later applause, no later seeming success, such as any first night of a favorite actress or playwright is bound to achieve, compensated for that moment.

After the performance Kate went immediately to her hotel, nor did Allison attempt to see her, or to apologize.

The next day he placed himself beyond the pale of her forgiveness by giving out an interview, after he had read the strictures on his drama, in which he pleasantly observed that he thought all fair-minded critics in the audience that night must have agreed that there was no opportunity of judging the play, because it had been so haltingly produced. He added an insulting remark, to the effect that the amateur was apt to be stampeded in an emergency.

The reporter who had obtained this gem for his evening paper hurried to Kate's hotel with it, to induce her to reply. By a severe effort of her will, she kept behind her lips the rejoinder that Allison Ware had never been heard of as a playwright until she had appeared in his first play, and contented herself with merely remarking, in the quietest possible tone, that she was sure Mr. Ware must have been misquoted or misunderstood, for she had never had any reason to regard him as other than a gentleman.

Two days later she had arranged with Hartley Greaves for the transfer of her managerial interest in the play to him, and for the substitution of another leading woman. She told that unbelieving manager that she was going to confine herself to chicken raising as a means of livelihood in the future.

Allison she had steadfastly refused to see, and had held no communication with him, except to send him back by registered mail all the gifts she had received from him.

So, in a fiasco more public, and in a humiliation more poignant, than that which had ended the first chapter of her career in womanhood, her second closed.

Epilogue.

Kate had had a dim recollection of peace connected with a farmhouse in the Virginia hills, where she and her mother had once spent a summer together. It was there, and not to the little house of sorrowful recollections at Huntoon's Point, that she decided to go after the collapse of all her high theatric hopes.

There she spent the winter, at first brooding upon the successive failures of her life, and gradually reaching a healthier state of mind.

In the beginning, it seemed to her that the whole world must be ringing with the tale of her astonishing folly. By and by she began to be shrewdly aware that the world had other things with which to ring. From pitying herself as the special prey of a malignant fate, she grew, in time, to regard herself with a lenient humor, as a victim of her own headstrong impetuosity, her feminine vanity, and her feminine selfishness.

And finally, among the hills, a chastened health of body and mind came back to her. She resolved no longer to hide there—for it was from an instinct of concealment that she had chosen them for her retreat—but to go back to her own place, and to make something at least useful, and at least moderately enjoyable, out of the remainder of her days.

In Washington she had only a few minutes in which to change trains. She was glad of it, for her cheeks still flushed hotly at the thought of her last appearance in that city. She pulled down her chiffon hat veil over the filmier face veil of net, as she crossed the station, and she signaled her maid to hurry with her bag.

The seat opposite hers, in the parlor car—Kate would always live en princesse as long as she had a dollar with which to purchase a minute of a princess' state—was already occupied with a man's overcoat when she took her place. Elsie arranged a cushion at her back, placed a footstool before her, and fished some magazines from her portmanteau before going into the day coach behind her. But Kate did not raise the heavy cloud of chiffon until the outskirts of the city were passed and they were speeding through the country, just blossoming into spring green.

It happened that she lifted her hands to raise the veil at the moment when the owner of the overcoat on the opposite seat returned from the smoking car. He lurched against her upraised elbow, and, in the second of mutual apology, their eyes met.

Kate's hands fell limply into her lap, her veil half hanging still. The man dropped into his seat as though he had been flung there by some external force, and they continued to stare at each other with widened eyes.

“Where did you go?” demanded Elliott Ames suddenly. “Last fall—after—after——”

“After my single phenomenal appearance as an actress-manager?” Kate tried to make her voice light. “I went into Virginia, to a place I knew, for a rest. Why?”

“I looked for you—I wanted to find you. I thought”—he colored sensitively—“that there might be difficulties connected with ending up the business. I hope you won't think I was impertinent. I couldn't help wanting to be of service.”

How fine and considerate, how strong and restful, he seemed! Kate's eyes shone with belated appreciation of his merits. She explained that, thanks to her old manager, she had not been in very sore straits.

Then awkward silence fell between them.

It was broken by Elliott's offer to remove himself and his belongings to the smoking car, if she desired it. She begged him not to trouble, and took up one of the magazines, as though she contemplated reading it. But a question hovered upon her lips, and she could not repress it. Life would have to become a sterner schoolmistress yet with Kate Crossett to teach her not to yield to her impulses.

“I—I saw in the paper—that is, I heard a rumor—or somehow I gained the impression—that you were going to marry Miss Sullivan, of Colorado. Is it so?”

She tried very hard to keep her tones those of friendly interest. Elliott's face brightened, and she thought its brightness was due to Miss Cornelia Sullivan. A queer, new pain gripped her. It was not like the angry, overmastering jealousy which she had felt when she first read the report; but it seemed likely to be a more permanent guest in her heart. It was humble, chastened.

But what was it that he was saying?

“Do you mean to say that it would make the least difference in the world to you if it were true?” he demanded, in a voice that somehow opened the gates of hope and happiness to her. “Oh, Kate,” he went on, as her brimming eyes answered his question, “I would have given worlds to have been able to—to marry her, or any one,” with reckless impartiality, “but I never could get even near it. You simply wouldn't let me.”

 

The next morning's papers had lively news wherewith to brighten the tale of strife, disaster, and crime with which their columns were loaded. “Divorced pair remarry: Camden, New Jersey, the scene of the second nuptials of Congressman Elliott Ames and Miss Kate Crossett, the actress,” the headlines declared.

And so intelligent and lively interest does the world take in the personal affairs of its favorites that the chief wonder it expressed was contained in the words: “But why on earth at Camden, New Jersey?”