268
KATE'S WINTER IN WASHINGTON.
with him hand-in-hand in all his plans and ambitions.”
‘Flirting is your one fault, Lily,” Kate said.
“I confess, fair saint, mea maxima culpa— doesn’t that sound learned? But I can say what few women can now-a-days—it means nothing; and my lord and master knows it.”
‘Then he is never troubled?”
“Only by a ghost! My dear, he has always been jealous of a dead man—the man, of course! Mercy! I dare say, if he had lived, he would not have been half the man Phil is; but, just because he had the luck to die, he is an angel in my eyes.”
‘One never can tell whether you are in jest; or earnest,”’ said Kate.
“Oh, my dear! I am just as much in earnest. as if I pursed a long face, and did high tragedy But, after all, Phil and I get on better than most people; we don’t quarrel, and we have lots of fun together.”
Kate, of course, had known before that there was not much affection between her friends. She was sorry, but it was too common a fact to shock her any more than it does the rest of us in similar cases.
Fond as she was of Lily, she was rather inclined to lay the blame on her. Marsden had posed before Kate in the heavy poetic style which he could so well assume, and she felt con- vinced that at least he was a sad, unhappy man, and pitied him accordingly
He had adopted the confidential dodge with her, too; and his manner was so unlike flirting, that it never occurred to her there could be anything wrong or dangerous in the intimacy into which he had led her. She pitied him, and believed that his life was a disappointment; and he told her marvelous romances, and looked up in her face with those wonderful eyes, that would have sent a thrill to the heart of his own grandmother, if she had been a perfect statue of propriety.
That in any of his schemes he dreamed of making money she never for an instant suspected. She really thought he took all that trouble for other people out of sheer kindness of heart. His own career had been thwarted and blighted; in his stories some powerful enemy, mysterious and ever-present as that diabolical X in an algebraic problem, was; meeting him at every turn, and Philip could not crush him, (though he had the means in his hand,) because the innocent would suffer. Into the bargain, he had no motive for being am- bitious—no home-interest, no one to care! Lily was the dearest woman in the world, but wholly wedded to society, capable of friendship, but not love; and he, oh, bless me! Leander or Romeo never had such gushing hearts at eighteen as this poet of thirty-five, who never put his woes in verse.
It was all delightfully sketchy and vague, and wonderfully interesting to sage eighteen, learned in Owen Meredith, and all manner of modern philosophers—at least the order who put their wisdom and misanthropy into poetry and novels.
Kate was thinking of it all while Lily talked— a little more seriously than was her wont; and loving Lily, and seeing how pretty she looked, she could not find it in her heart to blame her either, so pitied both husband and wife because fate had bound them together, each admirable, but unsuited to one another.
‘‘Bless me! where have we strayed to!” exclaimed Mrs. Marsden, pausing suddenly in the sentimental verbiage she had been talking, which sounded so fine, and in reality meant so little. ‘What Owen says of women, I suppose, is true of men,
‘Those free from faults have beds beneath the willow.’”
She sighed, then laughed in a bewitching way.
‘‘Now let us come back to the actual,” said she. ‘What are you going to wear te Mrs. Hanson’s tonight?”
With all her poetry and political ambitions, Kate was woman enough to be devoted to dress— so the pair plunged into millinery at once, and were happy.
That afternoon Harry Everett saw Kate drive past with Phil Marsden. You can tell how he felt; you know the pain and agony which any human being must endure, who sees one beloved going in direct opposition to one’s wishes and ideas of right.
Harry was not jealous, he knew Kate too thoroughly for that—but he loved her; and though in his solitary hours he could not help acknowledging that he had goaded her on by his ill-timed expostulations and attempts to draw the reins too tightly, he could not keep back the hardness and bitterness which rose in his mind.
He sauntered down the avenue, and passing Galt’s, saw Mrs. Rawson’s carriage at the door, and just then out of the shop came the lady herself, accompanied by Circe, and Circe laid her pretty claws on him at once, metaphorically.
‘‘ He shall go with us, Mrs. Rawson,” said she.
‘My husband has run off with a young woman, and we will have him for cavalier.”
(TO BE CONTINUED. )
