the truth? Even if concealment succeeds all along the line, will it prevent the boy from following in his father's steps if he has inherited his father's nature as well as his face? Wouldn't it be a deterrent in that case to know early in life that such instincts can't be indulged with impunity in the society of gentlemen? You will never have the courage to keep the boy out of your life altogether as you are doing now. Sooner or later you will bring him back, he will bring himself back, and then, on the threshold of life, he will have an example of successful dishonesty put before him. Mrs. Erlton! you can't keep up the fiction always; so it is better for you, for me, for him, to tell the truth--and I mean to tell it."
She rose swiftly to her feet and faced him, thrusting her hair back from her forehead passionately, as if to clear away aught that might obscure her brain.
"And for my husband?" she asked. "Have you no word for him? Is he not to be thought of at all? You asked me just now if I loved him, and I was a coward. Well! I do not love him--more's the pity, for I can't make up the loss of that to him anyhow. But there is enough pity in his life without that. Can't you see it? The pity that such things should be in life at all. You called me a religious woman just now. I'm not, really. It is the pity of such things without a remedy that drives me to believe, and the pity of it which drives me back again upon myself, as you have driven me now. For you are right! Do you think I can't see the shame? Do you think I don't know that it is too late--that I should have thought of all this before I called my boy's nature out of the dark? And yet----" her face grew sharp with a pitiful eagerness, she moved forward and laid her hand on his arm. "It is all so dark! You said just now that I couldn't keep up the fiction; but need it be a fiction always? What do we know? God gives men a chance sometimes. He gives the whole world a chance sometimes of atoning for many sins. A Spirit moves on the Waters of life bringing something to cleanse and heal. It may be moving now. Give my husband his chance, Mr. Greyman, and I will pray that, whatever it is, it may come quickly."
He had listened with startled eyes; now his hand closed on hers in swift negation.
"Don't pray for that," he said, in a quick low voice, "it may come too soon for some of us, God knows--too soon for many a good man and true!" Then, as if vexed at his own outburst, he drew back a step, looking at her with a certain resentment.
"You plead your cause well, Mrs. Erlton, and it is a stronger argument than you perhaps guess. So let him have this chance that is coming. Let us all have it, you and I into the bargain. No don't be grateful, please, for he may prove himself a coward, among other things. So may I, for that matter. One never knows until the chance comes for being a hero--or the other thing."
"When the chance comes we shall see," she said, trying to match his light tone. "Till then, good-by--you have been very kind." She held out her hand, but he did not take it.
"Pardon me! I have been very rude, and you----" he paused in his half-jesting words, stooped over her outstretched hand and kissed it.
Kate stood looking at the hand with a slight frown after his horse's hoofs died away; and then with a smile she shut the jewel case. Not that she closed the incident also; for full half an hour later she was still going over all the details of the past interview. And everything seemed to hinge on that unforeseen appeal of hers for a chance of atonement, on that unpremeditated strange suggestion that a Spirit might even then be moving on the face of the waters; until, in that room gay with English flowers, and peaceful utterly in its air of security, a terror seized on her body and soul. A causeless terror, making her strain eyes and ears as if for a hint of what was to come and make cowards or heroes of them all.
But there was only the flowerful garden beyond the arched veranda, only the soft gurgle of the doves. Yet she sat with quivering nerves till the sight of the gardener coming as usual with his watering pot made her smile at the unfounded tragedy of her imaginings.
As she passed into the veranda she called to him, in the jargon which served for her orders, not to forget a plentiful supply to the heartsease and the sweet peas; for she loved her poor clumps of English annuals more than all the scented and blossoming shrubs which in those late March days turned the garden into a wilderness of strange perfumed beauty. But her cult of home was a religion with her; and if a visitor remarked that anything in her environment was reminiscent of the old country, she rejoiced to have given another exile what was to her as the shadow of a rock in a thirsty land.
So, her eye catching something barely up to western mark in the pattern of a collar her tailor was cutting for her new dress, she crossed over to where he squatted in the further corner of the veranda.
"That isn't right. Give me something to cut--here! this will do."
She drew a broad sheet of native paper from the bundle of scraps beside him, and began on it with the scissors; too full of her idea to notice the faint negation of the man's hand. "There!" she said after a few deft snippings, "that is new fashion."
"Huzoor!" assented the tailor submissively as, apparently from tidiness, he put away the remainder of the paper, before laying the new-cut pattern on the cloth.
His mistress looked down at it critically. There was a broad line of black curves and square dots right across the pattern suggestive of its having been cut from a title-page. But to her ignorance of the Persian character they were nothing but the curves and dots, though the tailor's eyes read clearly in them "The Sword is the Key of Heaven."
For he, in company with thousands of other men, had been reading the famous pamphlet of that name; reading it with that thrill of the heart-strings which has been the prelude to half the discords and harmonies of history. Since, quaintly enough, those who may hope to share your heaven are always friends, those who can with certainty be consigned to hell, your enemies.
"That is all right," she said. "Cut it well on the bias, so that it won't pucker."
As she turned away, she felt the vast relief of being able to think of such trivialities again after the strain and stress of the hours since her husband had come home from the race course, full of excited maledictions on the mean, underhand bribery and spying which might make it necessary for him to send in his papers--if he could. Kate had heard stories of a similar character before; since Major Erlton knew by experience that she had his reputation more at heart than he had himself, and that her brain was clearer, her tact greater than his. But she had never heard one so hopeless. Unless this jockey Greyman, who, her husband said, was so mixed up with native intrigue as to have any amount of false evidence at his command, could be silenced, her labor of years was ruined. So long after her husband had gone off to his bed to sleep soundly, heavily, after the manner of men, Kate had lain awake in hers after the manner of women, resolving to risk all, even to a certain extent honesty, in order to silence this man, this adventurer; who no doubt was not one whit better than her husband.
And now? As her mind flashed back over that interview the one thing that stood out above all others was the bearing, the deference of the man as he had stooped to kiss her hand. For the life of her, she--who protested even to herself that such things had no part in her life--could not help a joy in the remembrance; a quick recognition that here was a man who could put romance into a woman's life. The thought was one, however, from which to escape by the first distraction at hand. This happened to be the cockatoo, which, after a bath and plentiful food, looked a different bird on its new perch.
"Pretty, pretty poll," she said hastily, with tentative white finger tickling its crest. The bird, in high good humor, bent its head sideways and chuckled inarticulately; yet to an accustomed ear the sound held the cadence of the Great Cry, and the tailor, who had heard it given wrathfully, looked up from his work.
"Oh, Miffis Erlton! what a boo'ful new polly," came a silvery lisp. She turned with a radiant smile to greet her next door neighbor's little boy, a child of about three years
