of the special was to take them to the junction where the "Bellefleur" would be attached to the night express—a special favor for the President of the A. and P. The Senator had insisted on their having his camp in the Adirondacks for a month. Isabelle would have preferred her own little log hut in the firs of Dog Mountain, which she and Vickers had built. There they could be really quite alone, forced to care for themselves. But the Colonel could not understand her bit of sentiment, and John thought they ought not to offend the amiable Senator, who had shown himself distinctly friendly. So they were to enter upon their new life enjoying these luxuries of powerful friends.
The porters made haste to put the bags in the car, and the engine snorted.
"Good-by, Mr. Gerrish," Isabelle called to the station agent, who was watching them at a respectful distance. Suddenly he seemed to be an old friend, a part of all that she was leaving behind.
"Good-by, Miss Price—Mrs. Lane," he called back. "Good luck to you!"
"Dear old Vick," Isabelle murmured caressingly, "I hate most to leave you behind."
"Better stay, then—it isn't too late," he joked. "We could elope with the ponies—you always said you would run off with me!"
She hugged him more tightly, burying her head in his neck, shaking him gently. "Dear old Vick! Don't be a fool! And be good to Dad, won't you?"
"I'll try not to abuse him."
"You know what I mean—about staying over for the summer. Oh dear, dear!" There was a queer sob in her voice, as if now for the first time she knew what it was. The old life was all over. Vick had been so much of that! And she had seen little or nothing of him since his return from Europe, so absorbed had she been in the bustle of her marriage. Up there on Dog Mountain which swam in the haze of the June afternoon they had walked on snowshoes one cold January night, over the new snow by moonlight, talking marvellously of all that life was to be. She believed then that she should never marry, but remain always Vick's comrade—to guide him, to share his triumphs. Now she was abandoning that child's plan. She shook with nervous sobs.
"The engineer says we must start, dear," Lane suggested. "We have only just time to make the connection."
Vickers untwisted his sister's arms from his neck and placed them gently in her husband's hands.
"Good-by, girl," he called.
Sinking into a chair near the open door, Isabelle gazed back at the hills of Grafton until the car plunged into a cut. She gave a long sigh. "We're off!" her husband said joyously. He was standing beside her, one hand resting on her shoulder.
"Yes, dear!" She took his strong, muscled hand in hers. But when he tried to draw her to him, she shrank back involuntarily, startled, and looked at him with wide-open eyes as if she would read Destiny in him—the Man, her husband.
For this was marriage, not the pantomime they had lived through all that day. That was demanded by custom; but now, alone with this man, his eyes alight with love and desire, his lips caressing her hair, his hands drawing her to him—this was marriage!
Her eyes closed as if to shut out his face—"Don't, don't!" she murmured vaguely. Suddenly she started to her feet, her eyes wide open, and she held him away from her, looking into him, looking deep into his soul.
CHAPTER IV
It was a hot, close night. After the Bellefleur had been coupled to the Western express at the junction, Lane had the porters make up a bed for Isabelle on the floor of the little parlor next the observation platform, and here at the rear of the long train, with the door open, she lay sleepless through the night hours, listening to the rattle of the trucks, the thud of heavy wheels on the rails, disturbed only when the car was shifted to the Adirondack train by the blue glare of arc lights and phantom figures rushing to and fro in the pallid night.
The excitement of the day had utterly exhausted her; but her mind was extraordinarily alive with impressions—faces and pictures from this great day of her existence, her marriage. And out of all these crowding images emerged persistently certain ones—Aline, with the bloom almost gone, the worn air of something carelessly used. That was due to the children, to cares—the Gorings were poor and the two years abroad must have been a strain. All the girls at St. Mary's had thought that marriage ideal, made all of love. For there was something of the poet in Eugene Goring, the slim scholar, walking with raised head and speaking with melodious voice. He was a girl's ideal. … And then came Nan Lawton, with her jesting tone, and sly, half-shut eyes. Isabelle remembered how brilliant Nan's marriage was, how proud she herself had been to have a part in it. Nan's face was blotted by Alice Johnston's with her phlegmatic husband. She was happy, serene, but old and acquainted with care.
Why should she think of them, of any other marriage? Hers was to be different—oh, yes, quite exceptional and perfect, with an intimacy, a mutual helpfulness. … The girls at St. Mary's had all had their emotional experiences, which they confessed to one another; and she had had hers, of course, like her affair with Fosdick; but so innocent, so merely kittenish that they had almost disappeared from memory. These girls at St. Mary's read poetry, and had dreams of heroes, in the form of football players. They all thought about marriage, coming as they did from well-to-do parents, whose daughters might be expected to marry. Marriage, men, position in the world—all that was their proper inheritance.
After St. Mary's there had been two winters in St. Louis—her first real dinners and parties, her first real men. Then a brief season in Washington as Senator Thomas's guest, where the horizon, especially the man part of it, had considerably widened. She had made a fair success in Washington, thanks to her fresh beauty and spirit, and also, she was frank to confess, thanks to the Senator's interest and the reputation of her father's wealth. Then had come a six months with her mother and Vickers in Europe, from which she returned abruptly to get engaged, to begin life seriously.
These experimental years had seemed to her full of radiant avenues, any one of which she was free to enter, and for a while she had gone joyously on, discovering new avenues, pleasing herself with trying them all imaginatively. At the head of all these avenues had stood a man, of course. She could recall them all: the one in St. Louis who had followed her to Washington, up the Nile, would not be turned away. Once he had touched her, taken her hand, and she had felt cold—she knew that his was not her way. In Washington there had been a brilliant congressman whom the Senator approved of—an older man. She had given him some weeks of puzzled deliberation, then rejected him, as she considered sagely, because he spoke only to her mind. Perhaps the most dangerous had been the Austrian whom she had met in Rome. She almost yielded there; but once when they were alone together she had caught sight of depths in him, behind his black eyes and smiling lips, that made her afraid—deep differences of race. The Prices were American in an old-fashioned, clean, plain sense. So when he persisted, she made her mother engage passage for home and fled with the feeling that she must put an ocean between herself and this man, fled to the arms of the man she was to marry, who somehow in the midst of his busy life managed to meet her in New York.
But why him? Out of all these avenues, her possibilities of various fate, why had she chosen him, the least promising outwardly? Was it done in a mood of reaction against the other men who had sought her? He was most unlike them all, with a background of hard struggle, with limitations instead of privileges such as they had. The Colonel's daughter could understand John Lane's persistent force—patient, quiet, sure. She remembered his shy, inexperienced face when her father first brought him to the house for dinner. She had thought little of him then—the Colonel
