Fennel and rue, a novel. Illustrated by Charlotte Harding

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W. D. HOW ELLS

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SHE STARTED UP, AND WITH A QUICK FLINGING OF HER VEIL ASIDE
TURNED TO LOOK OUT OF THE WINDOW "

FENNEL AND RUE

A Nnn^l

BY
W. D. H O W E L L S

ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLOITE HARDING

U

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

1908

\SoS

Copyright, 1908, by Harper & Brothers.

^ii rights reserved.
Published March, 1908.

ILLUSTRATIONS

'she started up, and with a quick flinging of her

VEIL ASIDE TURNED TO LOOK OUT OP THE WINDOW" Frontitpiw

"aRMIQER asked me IP I HAD EVER HEARD ANYTHING

MORE PROM THAT GIRL'" Facing p. 20

"l AM AFRAID I STARTLED YOU. I WAS JUST COMING

FOR A BOOK TO READ MYSELF TO SLEEP WITH*" . " 70

'VERRIAN ROSE AWKWARDLY AND STOOD A LONG MOMENT

BEFORE HIS CHAIR" " 100

FENNEL AND RUE

FENNEL AND RUE

The success of Verrian did not come early, and it
did not come easily. He had been trying a long time
to get his work into the best magazines, and when he
had won the favor of the editors, whose interest he had
perhaps had from the beginning, it might be said that
they began to accept his work from their consciences,
because in its way it was so good that they could not
justly refuse it. The particular editor who took Ver-
rian's serial, after it had come back to the author from
the editors of the other leading periodicals, was in fact
moved mainly by the belief that the story would please
the better sort of his readers. These, if they were not
so numerous as the worse, he felt had now and then the
right to have their pleasure studied.

It was a serious story, and it was somewhat bitter,
as Verrian himself was, after his struggle to reach the
public with work which he knew merited recognition.
But the world which does not like people to take them-
selves too seriously also likes them to take themselves
seriously, and the bitterness in Verrian's story proved
agreeable to a number of readers unexpectedly great.
It intimated a romantic personality in the author, and
the world still likes to imagine romantic things of au-
thors. It likes especially to imagine them of novelists,
now that there are no longer poets ; and when it began

1

FENNEL AND KUE

to like Verrian's serial, it began to write him all sorts
of letters, directly, in care of the editor, and indirectly
to the editor, whom they asked about Verrian more
than about his story.

It was a man's story rather than a woman's story, as
these may be distinguished; but quite for that reason
women seemed peculiarly taken with it. Perhaps the
women had more leisure or more courage to write to the
author and the editor; at any rate, most of the letters
were from women; some of the letters were silly and
fatuous enough, but others were of an intelligence which
was none the less penetrating for being emotional rather
than critical. These maids or matrons, whoever or
whichever they were, knew wonderfully well what the
author would be at, and their interest in his story im-
plied a constant if not a single devotion. Now and
then Yerrian was tempted to answer one of them, and
under favor of his mother, who had been his confidant
at every point of his literary career, he yielded to the
temptation ; but one day there came a letter asking an
answer, which neither he nor his mother felt competent
to deal with. They both perceived that they must
refer it to the editor of the magazine, and it seemed to
them so important that they decided Verrian must go
with it in person to the editor. Then he must be so
far ruled by him, if necessary, as to give him the letter
and put himself, as the author, beyond an appeal
which he found peculiarly poignant.

The letter, which had overcome the tacit misgiv-
ings of his mother as they read it and read it again to-
gether, was from a girl who had perhaps no need to
confess herself young, or to own her inexperience of
the world where stories were written and printed. She
excused herself with a delicacy which Verrian's corre-
spondents by no means always showed for intruding

2

FENNEL AND RUE

upon him, and then pleaded the power his story had
over her as the only shadow of right she had in ad-
dressing him. Its fascination, she said, had begun
with the first number, the first chapter, almost the first
paragraph. It was not for the plot that she cared;
she had read too many stories to care for the plot; it
was the problem involved. It was one which she had
so often pondered in her own mind that she felt, in a
way she hoped he would not think conceited, almost as
if the story was written for her. She had never been
able to solve the problem; how he would solve it she
did not see how she could wait to know; and here she
made him a confidence without which, she said, she
should not have the courage to go on. She was an
invalid, and her doctor had told her that, though she
might live for months, there were chances that she
might die at any moment suddenly. He would think it
strange, and it was strange that she should tell him this,
and stranger still that she should dare to ask him what
she was going to ask. The story had yet four months
to run, and she had begun to have a morbid foreboding
that she should not live to read it in the ordinary course.
She was so ignorant about writers that she did not know
whether such a thing was ever done, or could be done ;
but if he could tell her how the story was to come out
he would be doing more for her than anything else
that could be done for her on earth. She had read that
sometimes authors began to print their serial stories
before they had written them to the end, and he might
not be sure of the end himself; but if he had finished
this story of his, and could let her see the last pages
in print, she would owe him the gratitude she could
never express.

The letter was written in an educated hand, and there
were no foibles of form or excesses of fashion in the

3

FENNEL AND RUE

stationery to mar the character of sincerity the simple
wording conveyed. The postal address, with the date,
was fully given, and the name signed at the end was
evidently genuine.

Verrian himself had no question of the genuineness
of the letter in any respect; his mother, after her first
misgivings, which were perhaps sensations, thought as
he did about it. She said the story dealt so profoundly
with the deepest things that it was no wonder a person,
standing like that girl between life and death, should
wish to know how the author solved its problem. Then
she read the letter carefully over again, and again
Verrian read it, with an effect not different from that
which its first perusal had made with him. His faith
in his work was so great, so entire, that the notion of
any other feeling about it was not admissible.

" Of course," he said, with a sigh of satisfaction,
" I must show the letter to Armiger at once."

" Of course," his mother replied. " He is the editor,
and you must not do anything without his approval."

The faith in the writer of the letter, which was pri-
mary with him, was secondary with her, but perhaps
for that reason she was all the more firmly grounded
in it.

n

There was nothing to cloud the editor's judgment,
when Verrian came to him, except the fact that he was
a poet as well as an editor. He read in a silence as
great as the author's the letter which Verrian sub-
mitted. Then he remained pondering it for as long a
space before he said, " That is very touching."

Verrian jumped to his question. " Do you mean that
we ought to send her the proofs of the story V

" No," the editor faltered, but even in this decision
he did not deny the author his sympathy. " You've
touched bottom in that story, Verrian. You may go
higher, but you can never go deeper."

Verrian flushed a little. " Oh, thank you !"

" I'm not surprised the girl wants to know how you
manage your problem — such a girl, standing in the
shadow of the other world, which is always eclipsing
this, and seeing how you've caught its awful outline."

Verrian made a grateful murmur at the praise.
" That is what my mother felt. Then you have no
doubt of the good faith — "

" No," the editor returned, with the same quantity,
if not the same quality, of reluctance as before. " You
see, it would be too daring."

" Then why not let her have the proofs ?"

" The thing is so unprecedented — "

" Our doing it needn't form a precedent."

" No."

" And if you've no doubt of its being a true case — "

5

FENNEL AND EUE

" We must prove that it is, or, rather, we must make
her prove it. I quite feel with you about it. If I were
to act upon my own impulse, my own convictions, I
should send her the rest of the story and take the
chances. But she may be an enterprising journalist
in disguise — it's astonishing what women will do when
they take to newspaper work — and we have no right
to risk anything, for the magazine's sake, if not yours
and mine. Will you leave this letter with me V

" I expected to leave the whole affair in your hands.
Do you mind telling me what you propose to do ? Of
course, it won't be anything — abrupt — "

" Oh no ; and I don't mind telling you what has oc-
curred to me. If this is a true case, as you say, and
I've no question but it is, the writer will be on con-
fidential terms with her pastor as well as her doctor;
and I propose asking her to get him to certify, in any
sort of general terms, to her identity. I will treat the
matter delicately — Or, if you prefer to write to her
yourself — "

" Oh no, it's much better for you to do it ; you can
do it authoritatively."

" Yes, and if she isn't the real thing, but merely
a woman journalist trying to work us for a ' story ' in
her Sunday edition, we shall hear no more from her."

" I don't see anything to object to in your plan,"
Verrian said, upon reflection. " She certainly can't
complain of our being cautious."

" No, and she won't. I shall have to refer the matter
to the house — "

"Oh, will you?"

"Why, certainly! I couldn't take a step like that
without the approval of the house."

" No," Verrian assented, and he made a note of the
writer's address from the letter. Then, after a moment

FENNEL AND EUE

spent in looking hard at the letter, he gave it back to the
editor and went abruptly away.

He had proof, the next morning, that the editor had
acted promptly, at least so far as regarded the house.
The house had approved his plan, if one could trust the
romantic paragraph which Yerrian found in his paper
at breakfast, exploiting the fact concerned as one of the
interesting evidences of the hold his serial had got with
the magazine readers. He recognized in the paragraph
the touch of the good fellow who prepared the weekly
bulletins of the house, and offered the press literary
intelligence in a form ready for immediate use. The
case was fairly stated, but the privacy of the author's
correspondent was perfectly guarded; it was not even
made known that she was a woman. Yet Verrian felt,
in reading the paragraph, a shock of guilty dismay, as
if he had betrayed a confidence reposed in him, and
he handed the paper across the table to his mother with
rather a sick look.

After his return from the magazine office the day be-
fore, there had been a good deal of talk between them
about that girl. Mrs. Verrian had agreed with him
that no more interesting event could have happened to
an author, but she had tried to keep him from taking
it too personally, and from making himself mischievous
illusions from it. She had since slept upon her anxie-
ties, with the effect of finding them more vivid at
waking, and she had been casting about for an opening
to penetrate him with them, when fortune put this
paragraph in her way.

" Isn't it disgusting ?" he asked. " I don't see how
Armiger could let them do it. I hope to heaven she'll
never see it!"

His mother looked up from the paragraph and asked,
"Why?"

7

FENNEL AND RUE

" Why ? What would she think of me ?"

" I don't know. She might have expected something
of the kind."

" How expect something of the kind ? Am I one of
the self -advertisers ?"

" Well, she must have realized that she was doing
rather a bold thing."

"Bold?"

" Venturesome," Mrs. Verrian compromised to the
kindling anger in her son's eyes.

" I don't understand jou, mother. I thought you
agreed with me about the writer of that letter — her
sincerity, simplicity."

" Sincerity, yes. But simplicity — Philip, a thor-
oughly single-minded girl never wrote that letter. You
can't feel such a thing as I do. A man couldn't. You
can paint the character of women, and you do it won-
derfully— ^but, after all, you can't know them as a
woman does."

" You talk," he answered, a little sulkily, " as if
you knew some harm of the girl."

" No, my son, I know nothing about her, except that
she is not single-minded, and there is no harm in not
being single-minded. A great many single-minded
women are fools, and some double-minded women are
good."

" Well, single-minded or double-minded, if she is
what she says she is, what motive on earth could she
have in writing to me except the motive she gives ? You
don't deny that she tells the truth about herself ?"

" Don't I say that she is sincere ? But a girl doesn't
always know her own motives, or all of them. She
may have written to you because she would like to
begin a correspondence with an author. Or she may
have done it out of the love of excitement. Or for

8

FENNEL AND KUE

the sake of distraction, to get away from herself and
her gloomy forebodings."

" And should you blame her for that ?"

" No, I shouldn't. I should pity her for it. But, all
the same, I shouldn't want you to be taken in by her."

" You think, then, she doesn't care anything about
the story?"

" I think, very probably, she cares a great deal about
it. She is a serious person, intellectually at least, and
it is a serious story. No wonder she would like to
know, at first hand, something about the man who
wrote it."

This flattered Yerrian, but he would not allow its
reasonableness. He took a gulp of coffee before saying,
uncandidly, " I can't make out what you're driving at,
mother. But, fortunately, there's no hurry about your
meaning. The thing's in the only shape we could pos-
sibly give it, and I am satisfied to leave it in Armiger's
hands. I'm certain he will deal wisely with it — and
kindly."

" Yes, I'm sure he'll deal kindly. I should be very
unhappy if he didn't. He could easily deal more wise-
ly, though, than she has."

Verrian chose not to follow his mother in this. " All
is," he said, with finality, " I hope she'll never see that
loathsome paragraph."

" Oh, very likely she won't," his mother consoled him.

m

OiTLY four days after he had seen Armiger, Verrian
received an envelope covering a brief note to himself
from the editor, a copy of the letter he had written to
Verrian's unknown correspondent, and her answer in
the original. Verrian was alone when the postman
brought him this envelope, and he could indulge a cer-
tain passion for method by which he read its contents
in the order named; if his mother had been by, she
would have made him read the girl's reply first of all.
Armiger wrote :

" My dear Verrian", — I enclose two exhibits which
will possess you of all the facts in the case of the young
lady who feared she might die before she read the end
of your story, but who, you will be glad to find, is like-
ly to live through the year. As the story ends in our
October number, she need not be supplied with advance
sheets. I am sorry the house hurried out a paragraph
concerning the matter, but it will not be followed by an-
other. Perhaps you will feel, as I do, that the incident
is closed. I have not replied to the writer, and you
need not return her letter. lYours ever,

"M. Armiger."

The editor's letter to the young lady read :

" Dear Madam, — Mr. P. S. Verrian has handed me
your letter of the 4th, and I need not tell you that it has
interested us both.

10

FENNEL AND EUE

" I am almost as much gratified as he by the testi-
mony your request bears to the importance of his work,
and if I could have acted upon my instant feeling I
should have had no hesitation in granting it, though it
is so very unusual as to be, in my experience as an
editor, unprecedented. I am sure that you would not
have made it so frankly if you had not been prepared
to guard in return any confidence placed in you; but
you will realize that as you are quite unknown to us,
we should not be justified in taking a step so unusual
as you propose without having some guarantee besides
that which Mr. Verrian and I both feel from the charac-
ter of your letter. Simply, then, for purposes of
identification, as the phrase is, I must beg you to ask
the pastor of your church, or, better still, your family
physician, to write you a line saying that he knows you,
as a sort of letter of introduction to me. Then I will
send you the advance proofs of Mr. Verrian's story.
You may like to address me personally in the care of
the magazine, and not as the editor.

" Yours very respectfully,

" M. Armigek."

The editor's letter was dated the 6th of the month;
the answer, dated the 8th, betrayed the anxious haste of
the writer in replying, and it was not her fault if what
she wrote came to Verrian when he was no longer able to
do justice to her confession. Under the address given
in her first letter she now began, in a hand into which
a kindlier eye might have read a pathetic perturbation :

" Dear Sir, — I have something awful to tell you. I
might write pages without making you think better
of me, and I will let you think the worst at once. I
am not what I pretended to be. I wrote to Mr. Verrian

11

FENNEL AND KUE

saying what I did, and asking to see the rest of his story
on the impulse of the moment. I had been reading it,
for I think it is perfectly fascinating; and a friend
of mine, another girl, and I got together trying to guess
how he would end it, and we began to dare each other
to write to him and ask. At first we did not dream of
doing such a thing, but we went on, and just for the fun
of it we drew lots to see which should write to him.
The lot fell to me; but we composed that letter to-
gether, and we put in about my dying for a joke. We
never intended to send it; but then one thing led to
another, and I signed it with my real name and we
sent it. We did not really expect to hear anything
from it, for we supposed he must get lots of letters
about his story and never paid any attention to them.
We did not realize what we had done till I got your
letter yesterday. Then we saw it all, and ever since
we have been trying to think what to do, and I do not
believe either of us has slept a moment. We have come
to the conclusion that there was only one thing we
could do, and that was to tell you just exactly how it
happened and take the consequences. But there is no
reason why more than one person should be brought into
it, and so I will not let my friend sign this letter with
me, but I will put my own name alone to it. You may
not think it is my real name, but it is; you can find
out by writing to the postmaster here. I do not know
whether you will publish it as a fraud for the warning
of others, but I shall not blame you if you do. I
deserve anything. * Yours truly,

'^ Jerusha Peregrine Brown."

If Verrian had been an older man life might have
supplied him with the means of judging the writer of
this letter. But his experience as an author had not

12

FENNEL AND KUE

been very great, and such as it was it had hardened
and sharpened him. There was nothing wild or whirl-
ing in his mood, but in the deadly hurt which had been
inflicted upon his vanity he coldly and carefully studied
what deadlier hurt he might inflict again. He was of
the crueller intent because he had not known how much
of personal vanity there was in the seriousness with
which he took himself and his work. He had supposed
that he was respecting his ethics and aesthetics, his
ideal of conduct and of art, but now it was brought home
to him that he was swollen with the conceit of his own
performance, and that, however well others thought of
it, his own thought of it far outran their will to honor
it. He wished to revenge himself for this consciousness
as well as the offence offered him; of the two the con-
sciousness was the more disagreeable.

His mother, dressed for the street, came in where he
sat quiet at his desk, with the editor's letters and the
girl's before him, and he mutely referred them to her
with a hand lifted over his shoulder. She read them, and
then she said, " This is hard to bear, Philip. I wish I
could bear it for you, or at least with you ; but I'm late
for my engagement with Mrs. Alfred, as it is — No, I
will telephone her I'm detained and we'll talk it over — "

" 'No, no ! Not on any account ! I'd rather think it
out for myself. You couldn't help me. After all, it
hasn't done me any harm — "

" And you've had a great escape ! And I won't say a
word more now, but I'll be back soon, and then we —
Oh, I'm so sorry I'm going."

Verrian gave a laugh. " You couldn't do anything
if you stayed, mother. Do go!"

" Well — " She looked at him, smoothing her muff
with her hand a moment, and then she dropped a fond
kiss on his cheek and obeyed him.

13

IV

Verrian still sat at his desk, thinking, with his burn-
ing face in his hands. It was covered with shame for
what had happened to him, but his humiliation had no
quality of pity in it. He must write to that girl, and
write at once, and his sole hesitation was as to the form
he should give his reply. He could not address her as
Dear Miss Brown or as Dear Madam. Even Madam
was not sharp and forbidding enough ; besides. Madam,
alone or with the senseless prefix, was archaic, and
Verrian wished to be very modern with this most of-
fensive instance of the latest girl. He decided upon
dealing with her in the third person, and trusting to his
literary skill to keep the form from clumsiness.

He tried it in that form, and it was simply disgusting,
the attitude stiff and swelling, and the diction affected
and unnatural. With a quick reversion to the impos-
sible first type, he recast his letter in what was now
the only possible shape.

" My dear Miss Brown, — The editor of the Ameri-
can Miscellany has sent me a copy of his recent letter
to you and your own reply, and has remanded to me
an affair which resulted from my going to him with
your request to see the close of my story now publish-
ing in his magazine.

" After giving the matter my best thought, I have
concluded that it will be well to enclose all the exhibits
to you, and I now do this in the hope that a serious

14

FENNEL AND EUE

study of them will enable you to share my surprise at
the moral and social conditions in which the business
could originate. I willingly leave with you the ques-
tion which is the more trustworthy, your letter to me
or your letter to him, or which the more truly repre-
sents the interesting diversity of your nature. I con-
fess that the first moved me more than the second, and
I do not see why I should not tell you that as soon as
I had your request I went with it to Mr. Armiger and
did what I could to prompt his compliance with it. In
putting these papers out of my hands, I ought to ac-
knowledge that they have formed a temptation to make
literary use of the affair which I shall now be the bet-
ter fitted to resist. You will, of course, be amused by
the ease with which you could abuse my reliance on
your good faith, and I am sure you will not allow any
shame for your trick to qualify your pleasure in its
success.

" It will not be necessary for you to acknowledge this
letter and its enclosures. I will register the package,
so that it will not fail to reach you, and I will return
any answer of yours unopened, or, if not recognizably
addressed, then unread.

" Yours sincerely,

" P. S. Veerian."

He read and read again these lines, with only the
sense of their insufficiency in doing the effect of the
bitterness in his heart. If the letter was insulting,
it was by no means as insulting as he would have
liked to make it. Whether it would be wounding enough
was something that depended upon the person whom he
wished to wound. All that was proud and vain and
cruel in him surged up at the thought of the trick that
had been played upon him, and all that was sweet aud

15

FENNEL AND KUE

kind and gentle in him, when he believed the trick was
a genuine appeal, turned to their counter qualities.
Yet, feeble and inadequate as his letter was, he knew
that he could not do more or worse by trying, and he
so much feared that by waiting he might do less and
better that he hurried it into the post at once. If his
mother had been at hand he would have shown it her,
though he might not have been ruled by her judgment
of it. He was glad that she was not with him, for either
she would have had her opinion of what would be more
telling, or she would have insisted upon his delaying
any sort of reply, and he could not endure the thought
of difference or delay.

He asked himself whether he should let her see the
rough first draft of his letter or not, and he decided
that he would not. But when she came into his study
on her return he showed it her.

She read it in silence, and then she seemed to tempo-
rize in asking, " Where are her two letters ?"

" I've sent them back with the answer."

His mother let the paper drop from her hands.
" Philip ! You haven't sent thisT

" Yes, I have. It wasn't what I wanted to make it,
but I wished to get the detestable experience out of
my mind, and it was the best I could do at the moment.
Don't you like it?"

" Oh — " She seemed beginning to say something,
but without saying anything she took the fallen leaf
up and read it again.

" Well 1" he demanded, with impatience.
. " Oh, you may have been right. I hope you've not
been wrong."

"Mother!"

" She deserved the severest things you could say; and

yet-"

16

FENNEL AND RUE

" Well ?"

" Perhaps she was punished enough already."

" What do you mean ?"

" I don't like your being — vindictive."

" Vindictive ?"

" Being so terribly just, then." She added, at his
blank stare, " This is killing, Philip."

He gave a bitter laugh. '^ I don't think it will kill
her. She isn't that kind."

" She's a girl." his mother said, with a kind of sad
absence.

" But not a single-minded girl, you warned me. I
wish I could have taken your warning. It would have
saved me from playing the fool before myself and
giving myself away to Armiger, and letting him give
himself away. I don't think Miss Brown will suffer
much before she dies. She will ' get together,' as she
calls it, with that other girl and have ^ a real good time '
over it. You know the village type and the village con-
ditions, where the vulgar ignorance of any larger world
is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Don't be
troubled by my vindictiveness or my justice, mother!
I begin to think I have done justice and not fallen short
of it, as I was afraid."

Mrs. Verrian sighed, and again she gave his letter
back to her son. " Perhaps you are right, Philip. She
is probably so tough as not to feel it very painfully."

" She's not so tough but she'll be very glad to get
out of it so lightly. She has had a useful scare, and
I've done her a favor in making the scare a sharp one.
I suppose," Verrian mused, " that she thinks I've kept
copies of her letters."

" Yes. Why didn't you ?" his mother asked.

Verrian laughed, only a little less bitterly than be-
fore. " I shall begin to believe you're all alike, mother.

17

FENNEL AND RUE

I didn't keep copies of her letters because I wanted to
get ker and her letters ont of my mind, finally and
forever. Besides, I didn't choose to emulate her du-
plicity by any sort of dissimulation.

'' I see what you mean," his mother said. " And, of
course, you have taken the only honorable way."

Then they were both silent for a time, thinking their
several thoughts.

Verrian broke the silence to say, "I wish I knew
what sort of ^ other girl ' it was that she ^ got together
with.' "

"Why?"

" Because she wrote a more cultivated letter than this
magnanimous creature who takes all the blame to her-
self."

" Then you don't believe they're both the same ?"

" They are both the same in stationery and chirog-
raphy, but not in literature."

" I hope you won't get to thinking about Tier, then,"
his mother entreated, intelligibly but not definitely.

" Not seriously," Verrian reassured her. " I've had
my medicine."

Continuity is so much the lesson of experience that
in the course of a life by no means long it becomes the
instinctive expectation. The event that has happened
will happen again ; it will prolong itself in a series of
recurrences by which each one's episode shares in the
unending history of all. The sense of this is so per-
vasive that humanity refuses to accept death itself as
final. In the agonized affections, the shattered hopes,
of those who remain, the severed life keeps on un-
brokenly, and when time and reason prevail, at least as
to the life here, the defeated faith appeals for fulfil-
ment to another world, and the belief of immortality
holds against the myriad years in which none of the
numberless dead have made an indisputable sign in wit-
ness of it. The lost limb still reports its sensations to
the brain; the fixed habit mechanically attempts its
repetition when the conditions render it impossible.

Verrian was aware how deeply and absorbingly he
had brooded upon the incident which he had done his
utmost to close, when he found himself expecting an
answer of some sort from his unknown correspondent.
He perceived, then, without owning the fact, that he
had really hoped for some protest, some excuse, some
extenuation, which in the end would suffer him to be
more merciful. Though he had wished to crush her
into silence, and to forbid her all hope of his forgive-
ness, he had, in a manner, not meant to do it. He had
kept a secret place in his soul where the sinner against
3 19

FENNEL AND RUE

him could find refuge from his justice, and when this
sanctuary remained unattempted he found himself with
a regret that he had barred the way to it so effectually.
The regret was so vague, so formless, however, that he
could tacitly deny it to himself at all times, and ex-
plicitly deny it to his mother at such times as her touch
taught him that it was tangible.

One day, after ten or twelve days had gone by, she
asked him, " You haven't heard anything more from
that girl V

" What girl ?" he returned, as if he did not know ;
and he frowned. " You mean the girl that wrote me
about my story?"

" Yes."

He continued to frown rather more darkly. " I
don't see how you could expect me to hear from her,
after what I wrote. But, to be categorical, I haven't,
mother."

" Oh, of course not. Did you think she would be so
easily silenced ?"

" I did what I could to crush her into silence."

" Yes, and you did quite right ; I am more and more
convinced of that. But such a very tough young per-
son might have refused to stay crushed. She might
very naturally have got herself into shape again and
smoothed out the creases, at least so far to try some
further defence."

" It seems that she hasn't," Verrian said, still darkly,
but not so f rowningly.

" I should have fancied," his mother suggested, " that
if she had wanted to open a correspondence with you —
if that was her original object — she would not have let
it drop so easily."

"Has she let it drop easily? I thought I had left
her no possible chance of resuming it."

20

ARMIGEB ASKED ME IF I HAD EVER HEARD ANYTHING MORE
FROM THAT GIRL ' "

FENNEL AND RUE

" That is true," his mother said, and for the time
she said no more about the matter.

'Not long after this he came home from the magazine
office and reported to her from Armiger that the story
was catching on more and more with the best class of
readers. The editor had shown Verrian some references
to it in newspapers of good standing and several let-
ters about it.

" I thought you might like to look at the let-
ters," Verrian said, and he took some letters from
his pocket and handed them to her across the lunch-
table. She did not immediately look at them, because
he went on to add something that they both felt to be
more important. " Armiger says there has been some
increase of the sales, which I can attribute to my story
if I have the cheek."

" That is good."

"And the house wants to publish the book. They
think, down there, that it will have a very pretty suc-
cess— not be a big seller, of course, but something com-
fortable."

Mrs. Verrian's eyes were suffused witH pride and
fondness. " And you can always think, Philip, that
this has come to you without the least lowering of
your standard, without forsaking your ideal for a mo-
ment."

" That is certainly a satisfaction."

She kept her proud and tender gaze upon him. " No
one will ever know as I do how faithful you have been
to your art. Did any of the newspapers recognize that
— or surmise it, or suspect it ?"

" No, that isn't the turn they take. They speak of
the strong love interest involved in the problem. And
the abundance of incident. I looked out to keep some-
thing happening, you know. I'm sorry I didn't ask

21

FENNEL AND RUE

Armiger to let me bring the notices home to ;^ii. I'm
not sure that I did wisely not to subscribe to that press-
clippings bureau."

His mother smiled. " You mustn't let prosperity cor-
rupt you, Philip. Wouldn't seeing what the press is
saying of it distract you from the real aim you had in
your story ?"

" We're all weak, of course. It might, if the story
were not finished ; but as it is, I think I could be proof
against the stupidest praise."

" Well, for my part, I'm glad you didn't subscribe
to the clippings bureau. It would have been a disturb-
ing element." She now looked down at the letters as
if she were going to take them up, and he followed the
direction of her eyes. As if reminded of the fact by
this, he said :

" Armiger asked me if I had ever heard anything
more from that girl."

" Has he f* his mother eagerly asked, transferring
her glance from the letters to her son's face.

" E'ot a word. I think I silenced her thoroughly."

" Yes," his mother said. " There could have been
no good object in prolonging the affair and letting her
confirm herself in the notion that she was of sufficient
importance either to you or to him for you to continue
the correspondence with her. She couldn't learn too
distinctly that she had done a very wrong thing in try-
ing to play such a trick on you."

" That was the way I looked at it," Verrian said,
but he drew a light sigh, rather wearily.

" I hope," his mother said, with a recurrent glance
at the letters, " that there is nothing of that silly kind
among these."

" N"o, these are blameless enough, unless they are
to be blamed for being too flattering. That girl seems

22

FENNEL AND KUE

to be sole of her kind, unless the girl that she ' got to-
gether with ' was really like her."

" I don't believe there was any other girl. I never
thought there was more than one."

" There seemed to be two styles and two grades of
culture, such as they were."

" Oh, she could easily imitate two manners. She
must have been a clever girl," Mrs. Verrian said, with
that admiration for any sort of cleverness in her sex
which even very good women cannot help feeling.

" Well, perhaps she was punished enough for both
the characters she assumed," Verrian said, with a smile
that was not gay.

" Don't think about her !" his mother returned, with
a perception of his mood. " I'm only thankful that
she's out of our lives in every sort of way."

VI

Vereian said nothing, but he reflected with a sort of
gloomy amusement how impossible it was for any wom-
an, even a woman so wide-minded and high-principled
as his mother, to escape the personal view of all things
and all persons which women take. He tacitly noted the
fact, as the novelist notes whatever happens or appears
to him, but he let the occasion drop out of his mind as
soon as he could after it had dropped out of his talk.

The night when the last number of his story came
to them in the magazine, and was already announced
as a book, he sat up with his mother celebrating, as
he said, and exulting in the future as well as the past.
They had a little supper, which she cooked for him in
a chafing-dish, in the dining-room of the tiny apart-
ment where they lived together, and she made some
coffee afterwards, to carry off the effect of the l^ewburg
lobster. Perhaps because there was nothing to carry
off the effect of the coffee, he heard her, through the
partition of their rooms, stirring restlessly after he had
gone to bed, and a little later she came to his door, which
she set ajar, to ask, " Are you awake, Philip ?"

" You seem to be, mother," he answered, with an
amusement at her question which seemed not to have
imparted itself to her when she came in and stood
beside his bed in her dressing-gown.

" You don't think we have judged her too harshly,
Philip?"

" Do you, mother ?"

24

FENNEL AND KUE

" No, I think we couldn't be too severe in a thing
like that. She probably thought you were like some
of the other story-writers ; she couldn't feel differences,
shades. She pretended to be taken with the circum-
stances of your work, but she had to do that if she
wanted to fool you. Well, she has got her come-uppings,
as she would probably say."

Verrian replied, thoughtfully, " She didn't strike me
as a country person — at least, in her first letter."

" Then you still think she didn't write both ?"

" If she did, she was trying her hand in a personality
she had invented."

" Girls are very strange," his mother sighed. " They
like excitement, adventure. It's very dull in those lit-
tle places. I shouldn't wish you to think any harm
of the poor thing."

" Poor thing ? Why this magnanimous compassion,
mother ?"

" Oh, nothing. But I know how I was myself when
I was a girl. I used almost to die of hunger for some-
thing to happen. Can you remember just what you said
in your letter ?"

Verrian laughed. " No, I can't. But I don't believe
I said half enough. You're nervous, mother."

" Yes, I am. But don't you get to worrying. I mere-
ly got to thinking how I should hate to have anybody's
unhappiness mixed up with this happiness of ours. I
do so want your pleasure in your success to be pure,
not tainted with the pain of any human creature."

Verrian answered with light cynicism : " It will be
tainted with the pain of the fellows who don't like me,
or who haven't succeeded, and they'll take care to let
me share their pain if ever they can. But if you mean
that merry maiden up country, she's probably thinking,
if she thinks about it at all, that she's the luckiest

25

PENNEL AND KUE

girl in the United States to have got out of an awful
scrape so easily. At the worst, I only had fun with her
in my letter. Probably she sees that she has nothing
to grieve for but her own break."

" JSTo, and you did just as you should have done ; and
I am glad you don't feel bitterly about it. You don't,
do you?"

" ISTot the least."

His mother stooped over and kissed him where he lay
smiling. " Well, that's good. After all, it's you I cared
for. 'Now I can say good-night." But she lingered to
tuck him in a little, from the persistence of the mother
habit. ^^ I wish you may never do anything that you
will be sorry for."

" Well, I won't — if it's a good action."

They laughed together, and she left the room, still
looking back to see if there was anything more she
could do for him, while he lay smiling, intelligently
for what she was thinking, and patiently for what she
was doing.

VII

EvEiT in the time whicli was then coming and which
now is, when successful authors are almost as many as
millionaires, Verrian's book brought hira a pretty celeb-
rity ; and this celebrity was in a way specific. It related
to the quality of his work, which was quietly artistic
and psychological, whatever liveliness of incident it ut-
tered on the surface. He belonged to the good school
which is of no fashion and of every time, far both from
actuality and unreality ; and his recognition came from
people whose recognition was worth having. With this
came the wider notice which was not worth having,
like the notice of Mrs. Westangle, since so well known
to society reporters as a society woman, which could not
be called recognition of him, because it did not involve
any knowledge of his book, not even its title. She did
not read any sort of books, and she assimilated him by
a sort of atmospheric sense. She was sure of nothing
but the attention paid him in a certain very goodish
house, by people whom she heard talking in unintel-
ligible but unmistakable praise, when she said, casually,
with a liquid glitter of her sweet, small eyes, " I wish
you would come down to my place, Mr. Verrian. I'm
asking a few young people for Christmas week. Will
you?"

" Why, thank you — ^thank you very much," Verrian
said, waiting to hear more in explanation of the hos-
pitality launched at him. He had never seen Mrs.
Westangle till then, or heard of her, and he had not the

27

FENNEL AND KUE

least notion where she lived. But she seemed to have
social authority, though Verrian, in looking round at his
hostess and her daughter, who stood near, letting peo-
ple take leave, learned nothing from their common
smile. Mrs. Westangle had glided close to him, in the
way she had of getting very near without apparently
having advanced by steps, and she stood gleaming and
twittering up at him.

" I shall send you a little note ; I won't let you for-
get," she said. Then she suddenly shook hands with the
ladies of the house and was flashingly gone.

Yerrian thought he might ask the daughter of the
house, " And if I don't forget, am I engaged to spend
Christmas week with her ?"

The girl laughed. " If she doesn't forget, you are.
But you'll have a good time. She'll know how to
manage that." Other guests kept coming up to take
leave, and Verrian, who did not want to go just yet,
was retired to the background, where the girl's voice,
thrown over her shoulder at him, reached him in the
words, as gay as if they were the best of the joke, " It's
on the Sound."

The inference was that Mrs. Westangle's place was
on the Sound ; and that was all Verrian knew about it
till he got her little note. Mrs. Westangle knew how
to write in a formless hand, but she did not know how
to spell, and she had thought it best to have a secretary
who could write well and spell correctly. Though, as
far as literacy was concerned, she was such an almost
incomparably ignorant woman, she had all the knowl-
edge the best society wants, or, if she found herself out
of any, she went and bought some ; she was able to buy
almost anything.

Verrian thanked the secretary for remembering him,
in the belief that he was directly thanking Mrs. West-

28

FENNEL AND EUE

angle, whose widespread consciousness his happiness in
accepting did not immediately reach; and in the very
large house party, which he duly joined under her roof,
he was aware of losing distinctiveness almost to the
point of losing identity. This did not quite happen
on the way to Belford, for, when he went to take his
seat in the drawing-room car, a girl in the chair front-
ing him put out her hand with the laugh of Miss
Macroyd.

" She did remember you !" she cried out. " How
delightful ! I don't see how she ever got onto you "
— she made the slang her own — " in the first place, and
she must have worked hard to be sure of you since."

Verrian hung up his coat and put his suit-case be-
hind his chair, the porter having put it where he could
not wheel himself vis-a-vis with the girl. " She took
all the time there was," he answered. " I got my in-
vitation only the day before yesterday, and if I had
been in more demand, or had a worse conscience — "

" Oh, do say worse conscience 1 It's so much more
interesting," the girl broke in.

" — I shouldn't have the pleasure of going to Seasands
with you now," he concluded, and she gave her laugh.
" Do I understand that simply my growing fame
wouldn't have prevailed with her ?"

Anything seemed to make Miss Macroyd laugh.
" She couldn't have cared about that, and she wouldn't
have known. You may be sure that it was a social
question with her after the personal question was set-
tled. She must have liked your looks!" Again Miss
Macroyd laughed.

" On that side I'm invulnerable. It's only a literary
vanity to be soothed or to be wounded that I have,"
Verrian said.

" Oh, there wouldn't be anything personal in her
29

FENNEL AND RUE

liking your looks. It would be merely deciding that
personally you would do," Miss Macroyd laughed, as
always, and Verrian put on a mock seriousness in ask-
ing:

" Then I needn't be serious if there should happen to
be anything so Westangular as a Mr. Westangle ?"

" Not the least in the world."

" But there is something ?"

^^ Oh, I believe so. But not probably at Seasands."

" Is that her house ?"

" Yes. Every other name had been used, and she
couldn't say Soundsands."

" Then where would the Mr. Westangular part more
probably be found?"

" Oh, in Montana or Mesopotamia, or any of those
places. Don't you know about him? How ignorant
literary people can be ! Why, he was the Amalgamated
Clothespin. You haven't heard of that ?"

She went on to tell him, with gay digressions, about
the invention which enabled Westangle to buy up the
other clothespins and merge them in his own — to become
a commercial octopus, clutching the throats of other
clothespin inventors in the tentacles of the Westangle
pin. " But he isn't in clothespins now. He's in mines,
and banks, and steamboats, and railroads, and I don't
know what all ; and Mrs. Westangle, the second of her
name, never was in clothespins."

Miss Macroyd laughed all through her talk, and she
was in a final burst of laughing when the train slowed
into Stamford. There a girl came into the car trailing
her skirts with a sort of vivid debility and overturn-
ing some minor pieces of hand -baggage which her
draperies swept out of their shelter beside the chairs.
She had to take one of the seats which back against the
wall of the state-room, where she must face the whole

30

FENNEL AND KUE

length of the car. She sat weakly fallen back in the
chair and motionless, as if almost unconscious; but
after the train had begun to stir she started up, and with
a quick flinging of her veil aside turned to look out of
the window. In the flying instant Verrian saw a color-
less face with pinched and sunken eyes under a worn-
looking forehead, and a withered mouth whose lips
parted feebly.

On her part, Miss Macroyd had doubtless already
noted that the girl was, with no show of expensiveness,
authoritatively well gowned and personally hatted. She
stared at her, and said, " What a very hunted and es-
caping effect."

" She does look rather — fugitive," Verrian agreed,
staring too.

" One might almost fancy — an asylum."

" Yes, or a hospital."

They continued Both to stare at her, helpless for what-
ever different reasons to take their eyes away, and they
were still interested in her when they heard her asking
the conductor, " Must I change and take another train
before we get to Belf ord ? My friends thought — "

" No, this train stops at Southfield," the conductor
answered, absently biting several holes into her draw-
ing-room ticket.

" Can she be one of usf Miss Macroyd demanded, in
a dramatic whisper.

" She might be anything," Verrian returned, try-
ing instantly, with a whir of his inventive machinery, to
phrase her. He made a sort of luxurious failure of it,
and rested content with her face, which showed itself
now in profile and now fronted him in full, and now
was restless and now subsided in a look of delicate
exhaustion. He would have said, if he would have said
anything absolute, that she was a person who had some-

31

EENNEL AND HUE

thing on her mind; at instants she had that hunted
air, passing at other instants into that air of escape.
He discussed these appearances with Miss Macroyd, but
found her too frankly disputatious; and she laughed
too much and too loud.

VIII

At Soiithfield, where they all descended, Miss Mac-
royd promptly possessed herself of a groom, who came
forward tentatively, touching his hat. " Miss Mac-
royd V^ she suggested.

" Yes, miss," the man said, and led the way round
the station to the victoria which, when Miss Macroyd's
maid had mounted to the place beside her, had no room'
for any one else.

Verrian accounted for her activity upon the theory
of her quite justifiable wish not to arrive at Seasands
with a young man whom she might then have the effect
of having voluntarily come all the way with ; and after
one or two circuits of the station it was apparent to him
that he was not to have been sent for from Mrs. West-
angle's, but to have been left to the chances of the
local drivers and their vehicles. These were reduced
to a single carryall and a frowsy horse whose rough
winter coat recalled the aspect of his species in the
period following the glacial epoch. The mud, as of a
world-thaw, encrusted the wheels and curtains of the
carryall.

Verrian seized upon it and then went into the wait-
ing-room, where he had left his suit-case. He found
the stranger there in parley with the young woman in
the ticket-office about a conveyance to Mrs. Westangle's.
It proved that he had secured not only the only thing
of the sort, but the only present hope of any other, and
in the hard case he could not hesitate with distress so

83

FENNEL AND KUE

interesting. It would have been brutal to drive off and
leave that girl there, and it would have been a vulgar
flourish to put the entire vehicle at her service. Be-
sides, and perhaps above all, Verrian had no idea of
depriving himself of such a chance as heaven seemed to
offer him.

He advanced with the delicacy of the highest-bred
hero he could imagine, and said, " I am going to Mrs.
Westangle's, and I'm afraid I've got the only con-
veyance— such as it is. If you would let me offer you
half of it? Mr. Verrian," he added, at the light of
acceptance instantly kindling in her face, which flushed
thinly, as with an afterglow of invalidism.

" Why, thank you ; I'm afraid I must, Mr. Merriam,"
and Verrian was aware of being vexed at her failure
to catch his name; the name of Verrian ought to have
been unmistakable. " The young lady in the office says
there won't be another, and I'm expected promptly."
She added, with a little tremor of the lip, " I don't
understand why Mrs. Westangle — " But then she
stopped.

Verrian interpreted for her : " The sea-horses must
have given out at Seasands. Or probably there's some
mistake," and he reflected bitterly upon the selfishness
of Miss Macroyd in grabbing that victoria for herself
and her maid, not considering that she could not know,
and has no business to ask, whether this girl was going
to Mrs. Westangle's, too. "Have you a check?" he
asked. " I think our driver could find room for some-
thing besides my valise. Or I could have it come — "

" Not at all," the girl said. " I sent my trunk ahead
by express."

A frowsy man, to match the frowsy horse, looked in
impatiently. " Any other baggage ?"

" No," Verrian answered, and he led the way out

34

FENNEL AND KUE

after the vanishing driver. " Our chariot is back here
in hiding, Miss — "

" Shirley," she said, and trailed before him through
the door he opened.

He felt that he did not do it as a man of the world
would have done it, and in putting her into the ram-
shackle carryall he knew that he had not the grace of
the sort of man who does nothing else. But Miss
Shirley seemed to have grace enough, of a feeble and
broken sort, for both, and he resolved to supply his
own lack with sincerity. He therefore set his jaw
firmly and made its upper angles jut sharply through
his clean-shaven cheeks. It was well that Miss Shirley
had some beauty to spare, too, for Verrian had scarcely
enough for himself. Such distinction as he had was
from a sort of intellectual tenseness which showed
rather in the gaunt forms of his face than in the gray
eyes, heavily lashed above and below, and looking seri-
ous but dull with their rank, black brows. He was
chewing a cud of bitterness in the accusal he made him-
self of having forced Miss Shirley to give her name;
but with that interesting personality at his side, under
the same tattered and ill-scented Japanese goat-skin,
he could not refuse to be glad, with all his self-blame.

" I'm afraid it's rather a long drive — for you. Miss
Shirley," he ventured, with a glance at her face, which
looked very little under her hat. " The driver says it's
five miles round through the marshes."

" Oh, I shall not mind," she said, courageously, if
not cheerfully, and he did not feel authorized further to
recognize the fact that she was an invalid, or at best a
convalescent.

" These wintry tree-forms are fine, though," he found
himself obliged to conclude his apology, rather irrele-
vantly, as the wheels of the rattling and tilting carry-
4 35

FENNEL AND RUE

all crunclied the surface of the road in the succession of
jerks responding to the alternate walk and gallop of
the horse.

"Yes, they are," Miss Shirley answered, looking
around with a certain surprise, as if seeing them now
for the first time. " So much variety of color ; and that
burnished look that some of them have." The trees,
far and near, were giving their tones and lustres in the
low December sun.

" Yes," he said, " it's decidedly more refined than the
autumnal coloring we brag of."

" It is," she approved, as with novel conviction.
^' The landscape is really beautiful. So nice and fiat,"
she added.

He took her intention, and he said, as he craned his
neck out of the carryall to include the nearer road-
side stretches, with their low bushes lifting into remoter
trees, " It's restful in a way that neither the mountains
nor the sea, quite manage."

" Oh yes," she sighed, with a kind of weariness which
explained itself in what she added : " It's the kind of
thing you'd like to have keep on and on." She seemed
to say that more to herself than to him, and his eyes
questioned her. She smiled slightly in explaining : " I
suppose I find it all the more beautiful because this is
my first real look into the world after six months in-
doors."

" Oh !" he said, and there was no doubt a prompting
in his tone.

She smiled still. " Sick people are terribly egotisti-
cal, and I sui^pose it's my conceit of having been the
centre of the universe so lately that makes me mention
it" And here she laughed a little at herself, showing
a charming little peculiarity in the catch of her upper
lip on her teeth. " But this is divine — this air and this

30

FENNEL AND KUE

sight." She put her head out of her side of the carry-
all, and drank them in with her lungs and eyes.

When she leaned back again on the seat she said,
" I can't get enough of it."

"But isn't this old rattletrap rather too rough for
you?" he asked.

" Oh no," she said, visiting him with a furtive
turn of her eyes. " It's quite ideally what invalids in
easy circumstances are advised to take — carriage ex-
ercise."

" Yes, it's certainly carriage exercise," Verrian ad-
mitted in the same spirit, if it was a drolling spirit.
He could not help being amused by the situation in
which they had been brought together, through the
vigorous promptitude of Miss Macroyd in making the
victoria her own, and the easy indifference of Mrs.
Westangle as to how they should get to her house. If
he had been alone he might have felt the indifference
as a slight, but as it was he felt it rather a favor. If
Miss Shirley was feeling it a slight, she was too secret
or too sweet to let it be known, and he thought that was
nice of her. Still, he believed he might recognize the
fact without deepening a possible hurt of hers, and he
added, with no apparent relevance, " If Mrs. Westangle
was not looking for us on this train, she will find that
it is the unexpected which happens."

" We are certainly going to happen," the girl said,
with an acceptance of the plural which deepened the
intimacy of the situation, and which was not displeasing
to Verrian when she added, " If our friend's vehicle
holds out." Then she turned her face full upon him,
with what affected him as austere resolution, in con-
tinuing, " But I can't let you suppose that you're con-
veying a society person, or something of that sort, to
Mrs. Westangle's." His own face expressed his mystifi-

37

FENNEL AND RUE

cation, and she concluded, " I'm simply going there to
begin my work."

He smiled provisionally in temporizing with the rid-
dle. " Yon women are wonderful, nowadays, for the
work you do."

" Oh, but," she j)rotested, nervously, anxiously, " it
isn't good work that I'm going to do — I understand
what you mean — it's work for a living. I've no busi-
ness to be arriving with an invited guest, but it seemed
to be a question of arriving or not at the time when I
was due."

IX

Verrian stared at her now from a visage that was an
entire blank, though behind it conjecture was busy, and
he was asking himself whether his companion was some
new kind of hair - dresser, or uncommonly cultivated
manicure, or a nursery governess obeying a hurry call to
take a place in Mrs. Westangle's household, or some sort
of amateur housekeeper arriving to supplant a profes-
sional. But he said nothing.

Miss Shirley said, with a distress which was genuine,
though he perceived a trace of amusement in it, too,
" I see that I will have to go on."

" Oh, do !" he made out to utter.

" I am going to Mrs. Westangle's as a sort of mistress
of the revels. The business is so new that it hasn't
got its name yet, but if I fail it won't need any. I
invented it on a hint I got from a girl who undertakes
the floral decorations for parties. I didn't see why
Bome one shouldn't furnish suggestions for amusements,
as well as flowers. I was always rather lucky at that
in my own f am — at my father's — " She pulled herself
sharply up, as if danger lay that way. " I got an
introduction to Mrs. Westangle, and she's to let mie try.
I am going to her simply as part of the catering, and
I'm not to have any recognition in the hospitalities. So
it wasn't necessary for her to send for me at the station,
except as a means of having me on the ground in good
season. I have to thank you for that, and — I thank
you." She ended in a sigh.

39

FENNEL AND EUE

" It's very interesting," Verrian said, and he hoped
he was not saying it in any ignoble way.

He was very presently to learn. Eound a turn of the
road there came a lively clacking of horses' shoes on
the hard track, with the muted rumble of rubber-tired
wheels, and Mrs. Westangle's victoria dashed into view.
The coachman had made a signal to Verrian's driver,
and the vehicles stopped side by side. The footman
instantly came to the door of the carryall, touching his
hat to Verrian.

" Going to Mrs. Westangle's, sir f

" Yes."

"Mrs. Westangle's carriage. Going to the station
for you, sir."

" Miss Shirley," Verrian said, " will you change ?"

" Oh no," she answered, quickly, " it's better for me
to go on as I am. But the carriage was sent for you.
You must — "

Verrian interrupted to ask the footman, " How far
is it yet to Mrs. Westangle's ?"

" About a mile, sir."

" I think I won't change for such a short distance.
I'll keep on as I am," Verrian said, and he let the goat-
skin, which he had half lifted to free Miss Shirley for
dismounting, fall back again. " Go ahead, driver."

She had been making several gasping efforts at
speech, accompanied with entreating and protesting
glances at Verrian in the course of his brief colloquy
with the footman. Now, as the carryall lurched for-
ward again, and the victoria wheeled and passed them
on its way back, she caught her handkerchief to her
face, and to Verrian's dismay sobbed into it. He let
her cry, as he must, in the distressful silence which he
could not be the first to break. Besides, he did not
know how she was taking it all till she suddenly with-

40

FENNEL AND EUE

drew her handkerchief and pulled do^vn her veil. Then
she spoke three heart-broken words, " How could you 1"
and he divined that he must have done wrong.

" What ought I to have done ?" he asked, with sullen
humility.

" You ought to have taken the victoria."

"How could I?"

" You ought to have done it."

" I think you ought to have done it yourself, Miss
Shirley," Verrian said, feeling like the worm that
turns. He added, less resentfully, " We ought both to
have taken it."

" No, Mrs. Westangle might have felt, very properly,
that it was presumptuous in me, whether I came alone
in it or with you. Now we shall arrive together in
this thing, and she will be mortified for you and vexed
with me. She will blame me for it, and she will be
right, for it would have been very well for me to
drive up in a shabby station carryall; but an invited
guest — "

" No, indeed, she shall not blame you. Miss Shirley.
I will make a point of taking the whole responsibility.
I will tell her—"

" Mr. Merriam !" she cried, in anguish. " Will you
please do nothing of the kind ? Do you want to make
bad worse? Leave the explaining altogether to me,
please. Will you promise that ?"

" I will promise that — or anything — if you insist,"
Verrian sulked.

She instantly relented a little. " You mustn't think
me unreasonable. But I was determined to carry my
undertaking through on business principles, and you
have spoiled my chance — I know you meant it kindly —
or, if not spoiled, made it more difficult. Don't think
me ungrateful, Mr. Merriam — "

41

FENNEL AND KUE

" My name isn't Merriani," he resented, at last, a
misnomer which had annoyed him from the first.

" Oh, I am so glad 1 Don't tell me what it is !" she
said, giving a langh which had to go on a little before
he recognized the hysterical quality in it. When she
could check it she explained : " Now we are not even
acquainted, and I can thank a stranger for the kindness
you have shown me. I am truly grateful. Will you do
me another favor ?"

" Yes," Verrian assented ; but he thought he had a
right to ask, as though he had not promised, " What is
it?"

" Not to speak of me to Mrs. Westangle unless she
speaks of me first."

" That's simple. I don't know that I should have any
right to speak of you."

" Oh yes, you would. She will expect you, perhaps,
to laugh about the little adventure, and I would rather
she began the laughing — ^you have been so good."

'^ All right. But wouldn't my silence make it rather
more awkward ?"

" I will take care of the awkwardness, thank you.
And you promise ?"

" Yes, I promise."

" That is very good of you." She put her hand im-
pulsively across the goat-skin, and gave his, with which
he took it in some surprise, a quick clasp. Then they
were both silent, and they got out of the carryall un-
der Mrs. Westangle's porte-cocJiere without having ex-
changed another word. Miss Shirley did not bow to
him or look at him in parting.

VERRiAisr kept seeing before his inner eyes tlie thin
face of the girl, dimmed rather than lighted with her
sick eyes. When she should be stronger, there might
be a pale flush in it, like sunset on snow, but Verrian
had to imagine that. He did not find it difficult to im-
agine many things about the girl, whom, in another
mood, a more judicial mood, he might have accused of
provoking him to imagine them. As it was, he could
not help noting to that second self which we all have
about us, that her confidences, such as they were, had
perhaps been too voluntary ; certainly they had not been
quite obligatory, and they could not be quite accounted
for, except upon the theory of nerves not yet perfectly
under her control. To be sure, girls said all sorts of
things to one, ignorantly and innocently; but she did
not seem the kind of girl who, in different circum-
stances, would have said anything that she did not
choose or that she did not mean to say. She had been
surprisingly frank, and yet, at heart, Verrian would
have thought she was a very reticent person or a secret
person — that is, mentally frank and sentimentally se-
cret ; possibly she was like most women in that. What
he was sure of was that the visual impression of her
which he had received must have been very vivid to
last so long in his consciousness ; all through his prepa-
rations for going down to afternoon tea her face re-
mained subjectively before him, and when he went
down and found himself part of a laughing and chat-

43

FENNEL AND KUE

tering company in the library he still found it, in his
inner sense, here, there, and yonder.

He was aware of suffering a little disappointment in
Mrs. Westangle's entire failure to mention Miss Shir-
ley, though he was aware that his disappointment was
altogether unreasonable, and he more reasonably de-
cided that if she knew anything of his arrival, or the
form of it, she had too much of the making of a
grande dame to be recognizant of it. He did not
know from her whether she had meant to send for
him at the station or not, or whether she had sent her
carriage back for him when he did not arrive in it at
first. Nothing was left in her manner of such slight
specialization as she had thrown into it when, at the
Macroyds', she asked him down to her house party ; she
seemed, if there were any difference, to have acquired
an additional ignorance of who and what he was, though
she twittered and flittered up close to his elbow, after
his impersonal welcome, and asked him if she might
introduce him to the young lady who was pouring tea
for her, and who, after the brief drama necessary for
possessing him of a cup of it, appeared to have no more
use for him than Mrs. Westangle herself had. There
were more young men than young women in the room,
but he imagined the usual superabundance of girlhood
temporarily absent for repair of the fatigues of the jour-
ney. Every girl in the room had at least one man talk-
ing to her, and the girl who was pouring tea had one on
each side of her and was trying to fix them both with an
eye lifted towards each, while she struggled to keep her
united gaze watchfully upon the tea-urn and those who
came up with cups to be filled or refilled.

Verrian thought his fellow-guests were all amiable
enough looking, though he made his reflection that they
did not look, any of them, as if they would set the Sound

44

FENNEL AND RUE

on fire; and again he missed the companion of his ar-
rival.

After he had got his cup of tea, he stood sipping it
with a homeless air which he tried to conceal, and cast
a furtive eye round the room till it rested upon the
laughing face of Miss Macroyd. A young man was
taking away her teacup, and Verrian at once went up
and seized his place.

" How did you get here ?" she asked, rather shame-
lessly, since she had kept him from coming in the vic-
toria, but amusingly, since she seemed to see it as a
joke, if she saw it at all.

" I walked," he answered.

"Truly?"

" No, not truly."

" But, truly, how did you ? Because I sent the car-
riage back for you."

" That was very thoughtful of you. But I found a
delightful public vehicle behind the station, and I
came in that. I'm so glad to know that it wasn't Mrs.
Westangle who had the trouble of sending the carriage
back for me."

Miss Macroyd laughed and laughed at his resent-
ment. " But surely you met it on the way ? I gave
the man a description of you. Didn't he stop for
you?"

" Oh yes, but I was too proud to change by that time.
Or perhaps I hated the trouble."

Miss Macroyd laughed the more; then she purpose-
ly darkened her countenance so as to suit it to her
lugubrious whisper, " How did she get here ?"

"What she?"

" The mysterious fugitive. Wasn't she coming here,
after all ?"

" After all your trouble in supposing so ?" Verrian

45

FENNEL AND RUE

reflected a moment, and then lie said, deliberately, " I
don't know."

Miss Macroyd was not going to let him off like that.
" You don't know how she came, or you don't know
whether she was coming ?"

" I didn't say."

Her laugh resounded again. " Now you are trying
to be wicked, and that is very wrong for a novelist."

" But what object could I have in concealing the fact
from you. Miss Macroyd?" he entreated, with mock
earnestness.

" That is what I want to find out."

" What are you two laughing so about ?" the voice
of Mrs. Westangle twittered at Verrian's elbow, and,
looking down, he found her almost touching it. She
had a very long, narrow neck, and, since it was long and
narrow, she had the good sense not to palliate the fact
or try to dress the effect of it out of sight. She took
her neck in both hands, as it were, and put it more on
show, so that you had really to like it. Now it lifted
her face, though she was not a tall person, well towards
the level of his ; to be sure, he was himself only of the
middle height of men, though an aquiline profile helped
him up.

He stirred the tea which he had ceased to drink, and
said, " I wasn't ' laughing so about,' Mrs. Westangle.
It was Miss Macroyd."

" And I was laughing so about a mysterious stranger
that came up on the train with us and got out at your
station."

" And I was trying to make out what was so funny
in a mysterious stranger, or even in her getting out at
your station."

Mrs. Westangle was not interested in the case, or
else she failed to seize the joke. At any rate, she turned

46

FENNEL AND KUE

from them without further question and went away to
another part of the room, where she semi-attached her-
self in like manner to another couple, and again left it
for still another. This was possibly her idea of look-
ing after her guests; but when she had looked after
them a little longer in that way she left tlie room and
let them look after themselves till dinner.

" Come, Mr. Verrian," Miss Macroyd resumed,
" what is the secret ? I'll never tell if you tell me."

" You won't if I don't."

" Now you are becoming merely trivial. You are
ceasing even to be provoking." Miss Macroyd, in token
of her displeasure, laughed no longer.

" Am I ?" he questioned, thoughtfully. " Well, then,
I am tempted to act upon impulse."

" Oh, do act upon impulse for once," she urged. I'm
sure you'll enjoy it."

" Do you mean that I'm never impulsive ?"

" I don't think you look it."

" If you had seen me an hour ago you would have
said I was very impulsive. I think I may have ex-
hausted myself in that direction, however. I feel the
impulse failing me now."

XI

His impulse really had failed him. It had been to
tell Miss Macroyd about his adventure and frankly
trust her with it. He had liked her at several former
meetings rather increasingly, because she had seemed
open and honest beyond the most of women, but her pig-
gish behavior at the station had been rather too open and
honest, and the sense of this now opportunely inter-
vened between him and the folly he was about to com-
mit. Besides, he had no right to give Miss Shirley's
part in his adventure away, and, since the affair was
more vitally he/s than his, to take it at all out of her
hands. The early - falling dusk had favored an un-
noticed advent for them, and there were other chances
that had helped keep unknown their arrival together at
Mrs. Westangle's in that squalid carryall, such as
Miss Shirley's having managed instantly to slip in-doors
before the man came out for Verrian's suit-case, and of
her having got to her own appointed place long before
there was any descent of the company to the after-
noon tea.

It was not for him now to undo all that and begin
the laughing at the affair, which she had pathetically
intimated that she would rather some one else should
begin. He recoiled from his imprudence with a shock,
but he had the pleasure of having mystified Miss
Macroyd. He felt dismissal in the roving eye which
she cast from him round the room, and he willingly
let another young man replace him at her side.

48

FENNEL AND KUE

Yet he was not altogether satisfied. A certain meaner
self that there was in him was not pleased with his
relegation even merely in his own consciousness to the
championship of a girl who was going to make her
living in a sort of menial way. It had better be owned
for him that, in his visions of literary glory, he had
figured in social triumphs which, though vague, were
resplendent with the glitter of smart circles. He had
been so ignorant of such circles as to suppose they would
have some use for him as a brilliant young author;
and though he was outwearing this illusion, he still
would not have liked a girl like Julia Macroyd, whose
family, if not smart, was at least chicj to know that he
had come to the house with a professional mistress of
the revels, until Miss Shirley should have approved
herself chic, too. The notion of such an employment as
hers was in itself chic, but the girl was merely a paid
part of the entertainment, as yet, and had not risen
above the hireling status. If she had sunk to that level
from a higher rank it would be all right, but there was
no evidence that she had ever been smart. Verrian
would, therefore, rather not be mixed up with her — at
any rate, in the imagination of a girl like Julia Mac-
royd ; and as he left her side he drew a long breath of
relief and went and put down his teacup where he had
got it.

By this time the girl who was " pouring " had ex-
hausted one of the two original guards on whom she had
been dividing her vision, and Verrian made a pre-
tence, which she favored, that he had come up to push
the man away. The man gracefully submitted to be
dislodged, and Verrian remained in the enjoyment
of one of the girFs distorted eyes till, yet another man
coming up, she abruptly got rid of Verrian by pre-
senting him to yet another girl. In such manoeuvres

49

yy

FENNEL AND RUE

the hour of afternoon tea will pass ; and the time really
wore on till it was time to dress for dinner.

By the time that the guests came down to dinner they
were all able to participate in the exchange of the
discovery which each had made, that it was snowing out-
doors, and they kept this going till one girl had the
good-luck to say, " I don't see anything so astonishing
in that at this time of year. !Now, if it was snowing in-
doors, it would be different."

This relieved the tension in a general laugh, and a
young man tried to contribute further to the gayety
by declaring that it would not be surprising to have it
snow in-doors. He had once seen the thing done in
a crowded hall, one night, when somebody put up a
window, and the freezing current of air congealed the
respiration of the crowd, which came down in a light
fall of snow-flakes. He owned that it was in Boston.

" Oh, that excuses it, then," Miss Macroyd said. But
she lost the laugh which was her due in the rush which
some of the others made to open a window and see
whether it could be made to snow in-doors there.

" Oh, it isn't crowded enough here," the young man
explained who had alleged the scientifl.c marvel.

" And it isn't Boston," Miss Macroyd tried again on
the same string, and this time she got her laugh.

The girl who had first spoken remained, at the risk
of pneumonia, with her arm prettily lifted against the
open sash, for a moment peering out, and then reported,
in dashing it down with a shiver, " It seems to be a
very soft snow."

" Then it will be rain by morning," another pre-
dicted, and the girl tried hard to think of something
to say in support of the hit she had made already. But
she could not, and was silent almost through the whole
first course at dinner.

60

FENNEL AND EUE

In spite of its being a soft snow, it continued to fall
as snow and not as rain. It lent the charm of stormy
cold without to the brightness and warmth within.
Much later, when between waltzes some of the dancers
went out on the verandas for a breath of air, they came
back reporting that the wind was rising and the snow
was drifting.

Upon the whole, the snow was a great success, and her
guests congratulated Mrs. Westangle on having thought
to have it. The felicitations included recognition of the
originality of her whole scheme. She had downed the
hoary superstition that people had too much of a good
time on Christmas to want any good time at all in the
week following ; and in acting upon the well-known fact
that you never wanted a holiday so much as the day
after you had one, she had made a movement of the
highest social importance. These were the ideas which
Verrian and the young man of the in-doors snow-storm
urged upon her; his name was Bushwick, and he and
Verrian found that they were very good-fellows after
they had rather supposed the contrary.

Mrs. Westangle received their ideas with the twit-
tering reticence that deceived so many people when they
supposed she knew what they were talking about.

XII

At breakfast, wkere the guests were reasonably
punctual, they were all able to observe, in the rapid
succession in which they descended from their rooms,
that it had stopped snowing and the sun was shining
brilliantly.

" There isn't enough for sleighing," Mrs. Westangle
proclaimed from the head of the table in her high twit-
ter, " and there isn't any coasting here in this flat coun-
try for miles."

" Then what are we going to do with it ?" one of the
young ladies humorously pouted.

" That's what I was going to suggest," Mrs. West-
angle replied. She pronounced it sujjest, but no one
felt that it mattered. " And, of course," she con-
tinued, " you needn't any of you do it if you don't
like."

" We'll all do it, Mrs. Westangle," Bushwick said.
" We are unanimous in that."

" Perhaps you'll think it rather funny — odd," she
said.

" The odder the better, I think," Verrian ventured,
and another man declared that nothing Mrs. Westangle
would do was odd, though everything was original.

" Well, there is such a thing as being too original,"
she returned. Then she turned her head aside and
looked down at something beside her plate and said,
without lifting her eyes, " You know that in the Middle
Ages there used to be flower-fights among the young

52

FENNEL AND KUE

nobility in Italy. The women held a tower, and the
men attacked it with roses and flowers generally."

" Why, is this a speech ?" Miss Macroyd interrupted.

" A speech from the throne, yes," Bushwick solemnly
corrected her. " And she's got it written down, like a
queen — ^haven't you, Mrs. Westangle ?"

" Yes, I thought it would be more respectful."

" She coming out," Bushwick said to Verrian across
the table.

" And if I got mixed up I could go back and straight-
en it," the hostess declared, with a good-humored
candor that took the general fancy, " and you could
understand without so much explaining. We haven't
got flowers enough at this season," she went on, looking
down again at the paper beside her plate, " but we hap-
pen to have plenty of snowballs, and the notion is to
have the women occupy a snow tower and the men at-
tack them with snowballs."

" Why," Bushwick said, " this is the snow-fort busi-
ness of our boyhood! Let's go out and fortify the
ladies at once." He appealed to Verrian and made a
feint of pushing his chair back. " May we use water-
soaked snowballs, or must they all be soft and harm-
less?" he asked of Mrs. Westangle, who was now the
centre of a storm of applause and question from the
whole table.

She kept her head and referred again to her paper.
" The missiles of the assailants are to be very soft
snowballs, hardly more than mere clots, so that nobody
can be hurt in the assault, but the defenders may repel
the assailants with harder snowballs."

" Oh," Miss Macroyd protested, " this is consulting
the weakness of our sex."

" In the fury of the onset we'll forget it," Verrian
reassured her.

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FENNEL AND KUE

"Do you think you really will, Mr. Verrian?" she
asked. " What is all our athletic training to go for if
you do V

Mrs. Westangle read on :

" The terms of capitulation can be arranged on the
ground, whether the castle is carried or the assailing
party are made prisoners by its defenders."

" Hopeless captivity in either case !" Bushwick la-
mented.

" Isn't it rather academic ?" Miss Macroyd asked of
Verrian, in a low voice.

" I'm afraid, rather," he owned.

" But why are you so serious ?" she pursued.

"Am I serious?" he retorted, with a trace of exas-
peration; and she laughed.

Their parley was quite lost in the clamor which raged
up and down the table till Mrs. Westangle ended it
by saying, " There's no obligation on any one to take
part in the hostilities. There won't be any conscrip-
tion; it's a free fight that will be open to everybody."
She folded the paper she had been reading from and
put it in her lap, in default of a pocket. She went on
impromptu :

" You needn't trouble about building the fort, Mr.
Bushwick. I've had the farmer and his men working
at the castle since daybreak, and the ladies will find
it all ready for them, when they're ready to defend
it, down in the meadow beyond the edge of the birch-
lot. The battle won't begin till eleven o'clock."

She rose, and the clamor rose again with her, and her
guests crushed about her, demanding to be allowed at
least to go and look at the castle immediately.

One of the men's voices asked, " May I be one of the
defenders, Mrs. Westangle ? I want to be on the win-
ning side, sure."

54

FENNEL AND KUE

" Oh, is this going to be a circus chariot-race ?" an-
other lamented.

" No, indeed," a girl cried, " it's to be the real thing."

It fell to Verrian, in the assortment of couples in
which Mrs. Westangle's guests sallied out to view the
proposed scene of action, to find himself, not too willing-
ly, at Miss Macroyd's side. In his heart and in his
mind he was defending the amusement which he instant-
ly divined as no invention of Mrs. Westangle's, and
both his heart and his mind misgave him about this
first essay of Miss Shirley in her new enterprise. It
was, as Miss Macroyd had suggested, academic, and
at the same time it had a danger in it of being tom-
boyish. Golf, tennis, riding, boating, swimming — all
the vigorous sports in which women now excel — were
boldly athletic, and yet you could not feel quite that
they were tomboyish. Was it because the bent of
Miss Shirley was so academic that she was perilling
upon tomboyishness without knowing it in this primal
inspiration of hers? Inwardly he resented the word
academic, although outwardly he had assented to it
when Miss Macroyd proposed it. To be academic would
be even more fatal to Miss Shirley's ambition than to
be tomboyish, and he thought with pathos of that touch
about the Italian nobility in the Middle Ages, and how
little it could have moved the tough fancies of that
crowd of well-groomed young people at the breakfast-
table when Mrs. Westangle brought it out with her
ignorant acceptance of it as a social force. After all.
Miss Macroyd was about the only one who could have
felt it in the way it was meant, and she had chosen to
smile at it. He wondered if possibly she could feel the
secondary pathos of it as he did. But to make talk
with her he merely asked:

" Do you intend to take part in the fray ?"

65

FENNEL AND RUE

" !Not unless I can be one of the reserve corps that
won't need to be brought np till it's all over. I've no
idea of getting my hair down."

" Ah/' he sighed, " you think it's going to be
rude."

" That is one of the chances. But you seem to be
suffering about it, Mr. Verrian!" she said, and, of
course, she laughed.

" Who ? I ?" he returned, in the temptation to deny
it. But he resisted. " I always suffer when there's any-
thing silly happening, as if I were doing it myself.
Don't you?"

" No, thank you, I believe not. But perhaps you
are doing this? One can't suppose Mrs. Westangle
imagined it."

" No, I can't plead guilty. But why isn't it predi-
cable of Mrs. Westangle?"

" You mustn't ask too much of me, Mr. Verrian.
Somehow, I won't say how, it's been imagined for her.
She's heard of its being done somewhere. It can't be
supposed she's read of it, anywhere."

" No, I dare say not."

Miss Macroyd came out with her laugh. " I should
like to know what she makes of you, Mr. Verrian, when
she is alone with herself. She must have looked you
up and authenticated you in her own way, but it would
be as far from your way as — well, say — the Milky
Way."

" You don't think she asked me because she met me
at your house ?"

" No, that wouldn't be enough, from her point of
view. She means to go much further than we^ve ever
got."

" Then a year from now she wouldn't ask me ?"

" It depends upon who asks you in the mean time.

56

FENNEL AND RUE

You miglit get to be a fad, and then she would feel
that she would have to have you."

" You're not flattering me V

" Do you find it flattering ?"

" It isn't exactly my idea of the reward IVe been
working for. What shall I do to be a fad ?"

" Well, rather degrading stunts, if you mean in the
smart set. Jump about on all fours and pick up a
woman's umbrella with your teeth, and bark. Anything
else would be easier for you among chic people, where
your brilliancy would count."

"Brilliancy? Oh, thank you! Goon."

" Now, a girl — if you were a girl — "

" Oh yes, if I were a girl 1 That will be so much
more interesting."

" A girl," Miss Macroyd continued, " might do it by
posing effectively for amateur photography. Or do-
ing something original in dramatics or pantomimics or
recitation — but very original, because chic people are
critical. Or if she had a gift for getting up things
that would show other girls off; or suggesting amuse-
ments; but that would be rather in the line of swell
people, who are not good at getting up things and are
glad of help."

" I see, I see !" Verrian said, eagerly. But he walked
along looking down at the snow, and not meeting the
laughing glance that Miss Macroyd cast at his face.
"Well?"

" I believe that's all," she said, sharply. She added,
less sharply : " She couldn't afford to fail, though, at
any point. The fad that fails is extinguished forever.
Will these simple facts do for fiction? Or is it for
somebody in real life you're asking, Mr. Verrian ?"

" Oh, for fiction. And thank you very much. Oh,
that's rather pretty !"

57

XIII

They had come into the meadow where the snow
hattle was to he, and on its slope, against the dark weft
of the young birch-trees, there was a mimic castle out-
lined in the masonry of white blocks quarried from the
drifts and built up in courses like rough blocks of
marble. A decoration of green from the pines that
mixed with the birches had been suggested rather than
executed, and was perhaps the more effective for its
sketchiness.

" Yes, it's really beautiful," Miss Macroyd owned,
and though she did not join her cries to those of the
other girls, who stood scattered about admiring it, and
laughing and chattering with the men whose applause,
of course, took the jocose form, there was no doubt but
she admired it. " What I can't understand is how Mrs.
Westangle got the notion of this. There's the soprano
note in it, and some woman must have given it to her."

" 'Not contralto, possibly ?" Verrian asked.

" I insist upon the soprano," she said.

But he did not notice what she said. His eyes were
following a figure which seemed to be escaping up
through the birches behind the snow castle and plough-
ing its way through the drifts ; in front of the structure
they had been levelled to make an easier battle-field.
He knew that it was Miss Shirley, and he inferred that
she had been in the castle directing the farm - hands
building it, and now, being caught by the premature
arrival of the contesting forces, had fled before them

58

FENNEL AND EUE

and left her subordinates to finish the work. He felt,
with a throe of helpless sympathy, that she was under-
taking too much. It was hazardous enough to attempt
the practice of her novel profession under the best of
circumstances, but to keep herself in abeyance so far
as not to be known at all in it, and, at the same time,
to give way to her interest in it to the extent of coming
out, with her infirmly established health, into that
wintry weather, and superintending the preparations
for the first folly she had planned, was a risk altogether
too great for her.

" Who in the world," Miss Macroyd suddenly de-
manded, " is the person floundering about in the birch
woods ?"

" Perhaps the soprano," Verrian returned, hardily.

Bushwick detached himself from a group of girls
near by and intercepted any response from Miss Mac-
royd to Verrian by calling to her before he came up,
" Are you going to be one of the enemy. Miss Mac-
royd?"

" No, I think I will be neutral." She added, '' Is
there going to be any such thing as an umpire ?"

" We hadn't thought of that. There could be. The
ofiice could be created; but, you know, it's the post of
danger."

Verrian joined the group that Bushwick had left.
He found a great scepticism as to the combat, mixed
with some admiration for the castle, and he set himself
to contest the prevalent feeling. What was the matter
with a snow-fight? he demanded. It would be great
fun. Decidedly he was going in for it. He revived the
drooping sentiment in its favor, and then, flown with his
success, he went from group to group and couple to
couple, and animated all with his zeal, which came, he
hardly knew whence; what he pretended to the others

59

FENNEL AND RUE /

was that they were rather bound not to let Mrs. West-
angle's scheme fall through. Their doubts vanished
before him, and the terms of the battle were quickly
arranged. He said he had read of one of those mediaeval
flower-fights, and he could tell them how that was done.
Where it would not fit into the snow-fight, they could
trust to inspiration ; every real battle was the effect of
inspiration.

He came out, and some of the young women and most
of the young men, who had dimly known of him as
a sort of celebrity, and suspected him of being a prig,
were reconciled, and accepted him for a nice fellow, and
became of his opinion as to the details of the amusement
before them.

It was not very Homeric, when it came off, or very
mediaeval, but it was really lots of fun, or far more
fun than one would have thought. The storming of the
castle was very sincere, and the fortress was honestly
defended. Miss Macroyd was made umpire, as she
wished, and provided with a large snowball to sit on
at a safe distance; as she was chosen by the men, the
girls wanted to have an umpire of their own, who would
be really fair, and they voted Verrian into the office.
But he refused, partly because he did not care about
being paired off with Miss Macroyd so conspicuous-
ly, and partly because he wished to help the fight
along.

Attacks were made and repelled, and there were feats
of individual and collective daring on the side of the
defenders which were none the less daring because the
assailants stopped to cheer them, and to disable them-
selves by laughing at the fury of the foe. A detachment
of the young men at last stormed the castle and so
weakened its walls that they toppled inward; then the
defenders, to save themselves from being buried under

60

FENNEL AND KUE

the avalanche, swarmed out into the open and made the
entire force of the enemy prisoners.

The men pretended that this was what might have
been expected from the beginning, but by this time the
Berserker madness had possessed Miss Macroyd, too;
she left her throne of snow and came forward shouting
that it had been perfectly fair, and that the men had
been really beaten, and they had no right to pretend
that they had given themselves up purposely. The sex-
partisanship, which is such a droll fact in women when
there is any question of their general opposition to men,
possessed them all, and they stood as one girl for the
reality of their triumph. This did not prevent them
from declaring that the men had behaved with out-
rageous unfairness, and that the only one who fought
with absolute sincerity from first to last was Mr.
Verrian.

^Neither their unity of conviction concerning the gen-
eral fact nor the surprising deduction from it in Ver-
rian's case operated to make them refuse the help of
their captives in getting home. When they had bound
up their tumbled hair, in some cases, and repaired the
ravages of war among their feathers and furs and
draperies, in other cases, they accepted the hands of the
late enemy at difficult points of the path. But they ran
forward when they neared the house, and they were
prompt to scream upon Mrs. Westangle that there never
had been such a success or such fun, and that they were
almost dead, and soon as they had something to eat they
were going to bed and never going to get up again.

In the details which they were able to give at lunch-
eon, they did justice to Verrian's noble part in the
whole affair, which had saved the day, not only in
keeping them up to the work when they had got think-
ing it couldnH be carried through, but in giving the

61

FENNEL AND EUE

combat a validity wLicli it would not have had without
him. They had to thank him, next to Mrs. Westangle
herself, whom they praised beyond any articulate ex-
pression, for thinking up such a delightful thing. They
wondered how she could ever have thought of it — such
a simple thing too ; and they were sure that when peo-
ple heard of it they would all be wanting to have snow
battles.

Mrs. Westangle took her praises as passively, if not
as modestly, as Yerrian received his. She made no
show of disclaiming them, but she had the art, invalu-
able in a woman who meant to go far in the line she had
chosen, of not seeming to have done anything, or of
not caring whether people liked it or not. Verrian
asked himself, as he watched her twittering back at
those girls, and shedding equally their thanks and
praises from her impermeable plumage, how she would
have behaved if Miss Shirley's attempt had been an
entire failure. He decided that she would have ignored
the failure with the same impersonality as that with
which she now ignored the success. It appeared that in
one point he did her injustice, for when he went up to
dress for dinner after the long stroll he took towards
night he found a note under his door, by which he must
infer that Mrs. Westangle had not kept the real facts
of her triumph from the mistress of the revels.

" Dear Mr. Verriax, — I am not likely to see you,
but I must thank you. M. Shirley.

" P. S. Don't try to answer, please."

Verrian liked the note, he even liked the impulse
which had dictated it, and he imderstood the impulse ;
but he did not like getting the note. If Miss Shirley
meant business in taking up the line of life she had

FENNEL AND KUE

professed to have entered upon seriously, she had better,
in the case of a young man whose acquaintance she had
chanced to make, let her gratitude wait. But when
did a woman ever mean business, except in the one great
business ?

XIY

To have got that sillily superfluous note to Verrian
without any one's knowing besides, Miss Shirley
must have stolen to his door herself and slipped it
under. In order to do this unsuspected and unseen,
she must have found out in some sort that would not
give her away which his room was, and then watched
her chance. It all argued a pervasiveness in her, after
such a brief sojourn in the house, and a mastery of
finesse that he did not like, though, he reflected, he was
not authorized to like or dislike anything about her.
He was thirty-seven years old, and he had not lived
through that time, with his mother at his elbow to
suggest inferences from facts, without being versed in
wiles which, even when they were honest, were always
wiles, and in lures which, when they were of the most
gossamer tenuity, were yet of texture close enough to
make the man who blundered through them aware that
they had been thrown across his path. He understood,
of course, that they were sometimes helplessly thrown
across it, and were mere expressions of abstract woman
with relation to abstract man, but that did not change
their nature. He did not abhor them, but he believed
he knew them, and he believed now that he detected
one of them in Miss Shirley's note. Of course, one
could take another view of it. One could say to one's
self that she was really so fervently grateful that she
could not trust some accident to bring them together in
a place where she was merely a part of the catering,

64

FENNEL AND EUE

as she said, and he was a guest, and that she was ex-
cusable, or at least mercifully explicable, in her wish
to have him know that she appreciated his goodness.
Verrian had been very good, he knew that; he had
saved the day for the poor thing when it was in danger
of the dreariest kind of slump. She was a poor thing,
as any woman was who had to make her own way, and
she had been sick and was charming. Besides, she
had found out his name and had probably recognized
a quality of celebrity in it, unknown to the other young
people with whom he found himself so strangely as-
sorted under Mrs. Westangle's roof.

In the end, and upon the whole, Verrian would rather
have liked, if the thing could have been made to happen,
meeting Miss Shirley long enough to disclaim meriting
her thanks, and to ascribe to the intrinsic value of her
scheme the brilliant success it had achieved. This
would not have been true, but it would have been en-
couraging to her; and in the revery which followed
upon his conditional desire he had a long imaginary
conversation with her, and discussed all her other
plans for the revels of the week. These had not the
trouble of defining themselves very distinctly in the
conversation in order to win his applause, and their
consideration did not carry him with Miss Shirley be-
yond the strictly professional ground on which they met.

She had apparently invented nothing for that even-
ing, and the house party was left to its own resources
in dancing and sitting out dances, which apparently
fully sufficed it. They were all tired, and broke up
early. The women took their candles and went off to
bed, and the men went to the billiard-room to smoke.
On the way down from his room, where he had gone to
put on his smoking- jacket, Verrian met Miss Macroyd
coming up, candle in hand, and received from her a

65

FENNEL AND KUE

tacit intimation that he might stop her for a joking
good-night.

" I hope you'll sleep well on your laurels as umpire,"
he said.

" Oh, thank you," she returned, " and I hope your
laurels won't keep you awake. It must seem to you as
if it was blowing a perfect gale in them."

" What do you mean ? I did nothing."

^' Oh, I don't mean your promotion of the snow bat-
tle. But haven't you heard ?" He stared. " You've
been found out!"

" Found out ?" Yerrian's soul was filled with the joy
of literary fame.

" Yes. You can't conceal yourself now. You're
Verrian the actor."

" The actor ?" Verrian frowned blackly in his dis-
gust, so blackly that Miss Macroyd laughed aloud.

" Yes, the coming matinee idol. One of the girls
recognized you as soon as you came into the house, and
the name settled it, though, of course, you're supposed
to be here incognito."

The mention of that name which he enjoyed in com-
mon with the actor made Verrian furious, for when the
actor first appeared with it in JSTew York Verrian had
been at the pains to find out that it was not his real
name, and that he had merely taken it because of the
weak quality of romance in it, which Verrian himself
had always disliked. But, of course, he could not vent
his fury on Miss Macroyd. All he could do was to ask,
" Then they have got my photograph on their dressing-
tables, with candles burning before it ?"

" 1^0, I don't believe I can give you that comfort.
The fact is, your acting is not much admired among the
girls here, but they think you are unexpectedly nice
as a private person."

66

FENNEL AND KUE

" That's something. x\iid does Mrs. Westangle think
I'm the actor, too ?"

" How should Mrs. Westangle know what she thinks ?
And if she doesn't, how should I ?"

" That's true. And are you going to give me away ?"

" I haven't done it yet. But isn't it best to be hon-
est?"

" It mightn't be a success."

"The honesty?"

" My literary celebrity."

" There's that," Miss Macroyd rejoiced. " Well, so
far I've merely said I was sure you were not Verrian
the actor. I'll think the other part over." She went
on up-stairs, with the sound of her laugh following her,
and Verrian went gloomily back to the billiard-room,
where he found most of the smokers conspicuously yawn-
ing. He lighted a fresh cigar, and while he smoked
they dropped away one by one till only Bushwick was
left.

" Some of the fellows are going Thursday," he said.
" Are you going to stick it out to the bitter end ?"

Till then it had not occurred to Verrian that he was
not going to stay through the week, but now he said,
" I don't know but I may go Thursday. Shall you ?"

" I might as well stay on. I don't find much doing
in real estate at Christmas. Do you ?"

This was fishing, but it was better than openly taking
him for that actor, and Verrian answered, unresent-
fully, " I don't know. I'm not in that line exactly."

" Oh, I beg your pardon," Bushwick said. " I
thought I had seen your name with that of a West
Side concern."

" No, I have a sort of outside connection with the
publishing business."

" Oh," Bushwick returned, politely, and it would
6 67

FENNEL AND RUE

have been reassuringly if Verrian had wished not to be
known as an author. The secret in which he lived in
that regard was apparently safe from that young, ami-
able, good-looking real-estate broker. He inferred, from
the absence of any allusion to the superstition of the
women aa to his profession, that it had not spread to
Bushwick at least, and this inclined him the more to
like him. They sat up talking pleasantly together about
impersonal affairs till Bushwick finished his cigar.
Then he started for bed, saying, " Well, good-night. I
hope Mrs. Westangle won't have anything so active on
the tapis for to-morrow.''

" Try and sleep it off. Good-night."

XV

Vereian remained to finish liis cigar, but at the end
he was not yet sleepy, and he thought he would get
a book from the library, if that part of the house were
still lighted, and he looked out to see. Apparently it
was as brilliantly illuminated as when the company had
separated there for the night, and he pushed across the
foyer hall that separated the billiard-room from the
drawing-room and library. He entered the drawing-
room, and in the depths of the library, relieved against
the rows of books in their glass cases, he startled Miss
Shirley from a pose which she seemed to be taking there
alone.

At the instant of their mutual recognition she gave
a little muted shriek, and then gasped out, " I beg your
pardon," while he was saying, too, ^^ I beg your pardon."

After a tacit exchange of forgiveness, he said, " I am
afraid I startled you. I was just coming for a book to
read myself asleep with. I — "

" ]N'ot at all," she returned. " I was just—" Then
she did not say what, and he asked :

" Making some studies ?"

" Yes," she owned, with reluctant promptness.

" I mustn't ask what," he suggested, and he made an
effort to smile away what seemed a painful perturbation
in her as he went forward to look at the book-shelves,
from which, till then, she had not slipped aside.

" I'm in your way," she said, and he answered, " 'Not
at all." He added to the other sentence he had spoken,

69

FENNEL AND EUE

•■' If it's going to be as good as what you gave us to-
day-"

" You are very kind." She hesitated, and then she
said, abruptly : " What I did to-day owed everything to
you, Mr. Verrian," and while he desisted from search-
ing the book-shelves, she stood looking anxiously at him,
with the pulse in her neck visibly throbbing. Her agita-
tion was really painful, but Verrian did not attribute
it to her finding herself there alone with him at mid-
night ; for though the other guests had all gone to bed,
the house was awake in some of the servants, and an
elderly woman came in presently bringing a breadth
of silvery gauze, which she held up, asking if it was
that.

" Not exactly, but it will do nicely, Mrs. Stager.
Would you mind getting me the very pale-blue piece —
that electric blue?"

" I'm looking for something good and dull," Verrian
said, when the woman was gone.

" Travels are good, or narratives, for sleeping on,"
she said, with a breathless effort for calm. ^' 1 found,"
she panted, " in my own insomnia, that merely the
broken-up look of a page of dialogue in a novel racked
my nerves so that I couldn't sleep. But narratives were
beautifully soothing."

" Thank you," he responded ; " that's a good idea."
And stooping, with his hands on his knees, he ranged
back and forth along the shelves. " But Mrs. West-,
angle's library doesn't seem to be very rich in narrative."

He had not his mind on the search perhaps, and per-
haps she knew it. She presently said, " I wish I dared
ask you a favor — I mean your advice, Mr. Verrian."

He lifted himself from his stooping posture and
looked at her, smiling. " Would that take much cour-
age?" His smile was a little mocking; he was think-

70

I AM AFRAID I STARTLED YOU. I WAS .J ' i '
BOOK TO READ MYSELF TO SLEEP WITH

iNG FOR A

FENNEL AND RUE

ing that a girl who would hurry that note to him, and
would personally see that it did not fail to reach him,
would have the courage for much more.

She did not reply directly. " I should have to ex-
plain, but I know you won't tell. This is going to
be my piece de resistance, my grand stunt. I'm going
to bring it off the last night." She stopped long enough
for Verrian to revise his resolution of going away with
the fellows who were leaving the middle of the week,
and to decide on staying to the end. " I am going to
call it Seeing GhostsJ^

" That's good," Verrian said, provisionally.

" Yes, I might say I was surprised at my thinking
it up."

" That would be one form of modesty."

" Yes," she said, with a wan smile she had, " and then
again it mightn't be another." She went on, abruptly,
" As many as like can take part in the performance.
It's to be given out, and distinctly understood before-
hand, that the ghost isn't a veridical phantom, but just
an honest, made-up, every-day spook. It may change
its pose from time to time, or its drapery, but the setting
is to be always the same, and the people who take their
turns in seeing it are to be explicitly reassured, one after
another, that there's nothing in it, you know. The fun
will be in seeing how each one takes it, after they know
what it really is."

" Then you're going to give us a study of tempera-
ments."

" Yes," she assented. And after a moment, given to
letting the notion get quite home with her, she asked,
vividly, " Would you let me use it ?"

" The phrase ? Why, certainly. But wouldn't it be
rather too psychological? I think just Seeing Ghosts
would be better."

71

FENNEL AND KUE

"Better than Seeing Ghosts: A Study of Tempera-
ments 9 Perhaps it would. It would be simpler."

" And in this house you need all the simplicity you
can get," he suggested.

She smiled, intelligently but reticently. " My idea
is that every one somehow really believes in ghosts —
I know I do — and so fully expects to see one that any
sort of make-up will affect them for the moment just
as if they did see one. I thought — that perhaps — I
don't know how to say it without seeming to make
use of you — "

" Oh, do make use of me. Miss Shirley !"

" That you could give me some hints about the set-
ting, with your knowledge of the stage — " She stopped,
having rushed forward to that point, while he continued
to look steadily at her without answering her. She
faced him courageously, but not convincingly.

" Did you think that I was an actor ?" he asked,
finally.

" Mrs. Westangle seemed to think you were."

"But did you?"

" I'm sure I didn't mean — I beg your pardon — "

" It's all right. If I were an actor I shouldn't be
ashamed of it. But I was merely curious to know
whether you shared the prevalent superstition. I'm
afraid I can't help you from a knowledge of the stage,
but if I can be of use, from a sort of amateur interest
in psychology, with an affair like this I shall be only
too glad."

" Thank you," she said, somewhat faintly, with an
effect of dismay disproportionate to the occasion.

She sank into a chair before which she had been
standing, and she looked as if she were going to swoon.

He started towards her with an alarmed " Miss Shir-
ley!"

FENNEL AND RUE

She put out a hand weakly to stay him. " Don't !"
she entreated. " I'm a little — I shall be all right in
a moment,"

" Can't I get you something — call some one V

" Not for the world I" she commanded, and she
pulled herself together and stood up. " But I think I'll
stop for to-night. I'm glad my idea strikes you favor-
ably. It's merely — Oh, you found it, Mrs. Stager!"
She broke off to address the woman who had now come
back and was holding up the trailing breadths of the
electric-blue gauze. " Isn't it lovely ?" She gave herself
time to adore the drapery, with its changes of meteoric
lucence, before she rose and took it. She went with
it to the background in the library, where, against the
glass door of the cases, she involved herself in it and
stood shimmering. A thrill pierced to Verrian's heart ;
she was indeed wraithlike, so that he hated to have her
call, " How will that do ?"

Mrs. Stager modestly referred the question to him by
her silence. " I will answer for its doing, if it does
for the others as it's done for me."

She laughed. " And you doubly knew what it was.
Yes, I think it will go." She took another pose, and
then another. " What do you think of it, Mrs. Stager ?"
she called to the woman standing respectfully abeyant
at one side.

" It's awful. I don't know but I'll be afraid to go
to my room."

" Sit down, and I'll go to your room with you when
I'm through. I won't be long, now."

She tried different gauzes, which she had lying on
one of the chairs, and crowned herself with triumph
in the applauses of her two spectators, rejoicing with
a glee that Verrian found childlike and winning. " If
they're all like vou, it will be the greatest success I"

73

FENNEL AND KUE

" They'll all be like me, and more/' he said. " I'm
really very severe."

" Are you a severe person ?" she asked, coming for-
ward to him. " Ought people to be afraid of you ?"

" Yes, people with bad consciences. I'm rather afraid
of myself for that reason."

" Have you got a bad conscience ?" she asked, letting
her eyes rest on his.

" Yes. I can't make my conduct square with my
ideal of conduct."

" I know what that is !" she sighed. " Do you expect
to be punished for it ?"

" I expect to be got even with."

" Yes, one is. I've noticed that myself. But I
didn't suppose that actors — Oh, I forgot ! I beg your
pardon again, Mr. Yerrian. Oh — Good-night !" She
faced him evanescently in going out, with the woman
after her, but, whether she did so more in fear or more in
defiance, she left him standing motionless in his doubt,
and she did nothing to solve his doubt when she came
quickly back alone, before he was aware of having
moved, to say, " Mr. Yerrian, I want to — I have to —
tell you that — I didrit think you were the actor." Then
she was finally gone, and Yerrian had nothing for it
but to go up to his room with the book he found he had
in his hand and must have had there all the time.

If he had read it, the book would not have eased him
off to sleep, but he did not even try to read it. He had
no wish to sleep. The waking dream in which he lost
himself was more interesting than any vision of slumber
could have been, and he had no desire to end it. In
that he could still be talking with the girl whose mystery
appealed to him so pleasingly. It was none the less
pleasing because, at what might be called her first
blushes, she did not strike him as altogether ingenuous,

74

FENNEL AND RUE

but only able to discipline herself into a final sincerity
from a consciousness which had been taught wisdom by
experience.

She was still a scarcely recovered invalid, and it was
pathetic that she should be commencing the struggle
of life with strength so little proportioned to the de-
mand upon it ; and the calling she had taken up was of
a fantasticality in some aspects which was equally
pathetic. But all the undertakings of women, he mused,
were piteous, not only because women were unequal to
the struggle at the best, but because they were ham-
pered always with themselves, with their sex, their
femininity, and the necessity of getting it out of the
way before they could really begin to fight. Whatever
they attempted it must be in relation to the man's world
in which livings were made ; but the immemorial con-
ditions were almost wholly unchanged. A woman ap-
proached this world as a woman, with the inborn in-
stinct of tempting it as a woman, to win it to love her
and make her a wife and mother; and although she
might stoically overcome the temptation at last, it might
recur at any moment and overcome her. This was
perpetually weakening and imperilling her, and she
must feel it at the encounter with each man she met.
She must feel the tacit and even unconscious irony
of his attitude towards her in her enterprise, and the
finer her make the crueller and the more humiliating
and disheartening this must be.

Of course, this Miss Shirley felt Yerrian's irony,
which he had guarded from any expression with gen-
uine compassion for her. She must feel that to his
knowledge of life she and her experiment had an ab-
surdity which would not pass, whatever their success
might be. If she meant business, and business only,
they ought to have met as two men would have met, but

75

FENNEL AND RUE

he knew that they had not done so, and she must have
known it. All that was plain sailing enough, but be-
yond this lay a sea of conjecture in which he found him-
self without helm or compass. Why should she have
acted a fib about his being an actor, and why, after the
end, should she have added an end, in which she re-
turned to own that she had been fibbing ? For that was
what it came to ; and though Verrian tasted a delicious
pleasure in the womanish feat by which she overcame
her womanishness, he could not puzzle out her motive.
He was not sure that he wished to puzzle it out. To re-
main with illimitable guesses at his choice was more
agreeable, for the present at least, and he was not
aware of having lapsed from them when he woke so
late as to be one of the breakfasters whose plates were
kept for them after the others were gone.

XVI

It was the first time that Verrian had come down
late, and it was his novel experience to find himself in
charge of Mrs. Stager at breakfast, instead of the but-
ler and the butler's man, who had hitherto served him
at the earlier hour. There were others, somewhat re-
mote from him, at table, who were ending when he
was beginning, and when they had joked themselves out
of the room and away from Mrs. Stager's ministrations
he was left alone to her. He had instantly appreciated
a quality of motherliness in her attitude towards him,
and now he was sensible of a kindly intimacy to which
he rather helplessly addressed himself.

" Well, Mrs. Stager, did you see a ghost on your way
to bed?"

" I don't know as I really expected to," she said.
" Won't you have a few more of the buckwheats ?"

"Do you think I'd better? I believe I won't.
They're very tempting. Miss Shirley makes a very
good ghost," he suggested.

Mrs. Stager would not at first commit herself further
than to say in bringing him the butter, " She's just
up from a long fit of sickness." She impulsively
added, " She ain't hardly strong enough to be doing
what she is, I tell her."

" I understood she had been ill," Verrian said. " We
drove over from the station together, the other day."

" Yes," Mrs. Stager admitted. " Kind of a nervous
breakdown, I believe. But she's got an awful spirit.

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FENNEL AND RUE

Mrs. Westangle don't want her to do all she is do-
ing."

Verrian looked at her in surprise. He had not ex-
pected that of the india-rubber nature he had attributed
to Mrs. Westangle. In view of Mrs. Stager's privity to
the unimagined kindliness of his hostess, he relaxed
himself in a further interest in Miss Shirley, as if it
would now be safe. " She's done splendidly, so far,"
he said, meaning the girl. " I'm glad Mrs. Westangle
appreciates her work."

" I guess," Mrs. Stager said, " that if it hadn't
been for you at the snow-fight — She got back from
getting ready for it, that morning, almost down sick,
she was afraid so it was going to fail."

" I didn't do anything," Verrian said, putting the
praise from him.

Mrs. Stager lowered her voice in an octave of deeper
confidentiability. " You got the note ? I put it under,
and I didn't know."

" Oh yes,. I got it," Verrian said, sensible of a re-
lief, which he would not assign to any definite reason,
in knowing that Miss Shirley had not herself put it
under his door. But he now had to take up another
burden in the question whether Miss Shirley were of
an origin so much above that of her confidant that she
could have a patrician fearlessness in making use of
her, or were so near Mrs. Stager's level of life that she
would naturally turn to her for counsel and help. Miss
Shirley had the accent, the manners, and the frank
courage of a lady; but those things could be learned;
they were got up for the stage every day.

Verrian was roused from the muse he found he had
fallen into by hearing Mrs. Stager ask, " Won't you
have some more coffee ?"

" N'o, thank you," he said. And now he rose from the

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table, on which he dreamily dropped his napkin, and
got his hat and coat and went out for a walk. He had
not studied the art of fiction so long, in the many pri-
vate failures that had preceded his one public success,
without being made to observe that life sometimes dealt
in the accidents and coincidences which his criticism
condemned as too habitually the resource of the novelist.
Hitherto he had disdained them for this reason; but
since his serial story was off his hands, and he was
beginning to look about him for fresh material, he had
doubted more than once whether his severity was not
the effect of an unjustifiable prejudice.

It struck him now, in turning the corner of the wood-
lot above the meadow where the snow-battle had taken
place, and suddenly finding himself face to face with
Miss Shirley, that nature was in one of her uninventive
moods and was helping herself out from the old stock-
in-trade of fiction. All the same, he felt a glow of
pleasure, which was also a glow of pity ; for while Miss
Shirley looked, as always, interesting, she look tired,
too, with a sort of desperate air which did not otherwise
account for itself. She had given, at sight of him, a
little start, and a little " Oh !" dropped from her lips,
as if it had been jostled from them. She made haste
to go on, with something like the voluntary hardi-
ness of the courage that plucks "itself from the primary
emotion of fear, " You are going down to try the
skating?"

" Do I look it, without skates V

" You may be going to try the sliding," she returned.
" I'm afraid there won't be much of either for long.
This soft air is going to make havoc of my plans for
to-morrow."

" That's too bad of it. Why not hope for a hard
freeze to-night ? You might as well. The weather has

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FENNEL AND EUE

been known to change its mind. You might even change
your plans."

" 'No, I can't do that. I can't think of anything else.
It's to bridge over the day that's left before Seeing
Ghosts. If it does freeze, you'll come to Mrs. West-
angle's afternoon tea on the pond V

" I certainly shall. How is it to be worked ?"

" She's to have her table on a platform, with runners,
in a bower of evergreen boughs, and be pushed about,
and the people are to skate up for the tea. There are
to be tea and chocolate, and two girls to pour, just as in
real life. It isn't a very dazzling idea, but I thought it
might do; and Mrs. Westangle is so good-natured.
I^ow, if the thermometer will do its part !"

" I am sure it will," Verrian said, but a glance at
the gray sky did not confirm him in his prophetic
venture. The snow was sodden under foot; a breath
from the south stirred the pines to an seolian response
and moved the stiff, dry leaves of the scrub-oaks. A
sapsucker was marking an accurate circle of dots round
the throat of a tall young maple, and enjoying his work
in a low, guttural soliloquy, seemingly, yet, dismayingly,
suggestive of spring.

" It's lovely, anyway," she said, following his glance
with an upward turn of her face.

" Yes, it's beautiful. I think this sort of winter day
is about the best the whole year can do. But I will
sacrifice the chance of another like it to your skating-
tea. Miss Shirley."

He did not know why he should have made this speech
to her, but apparently she did, and she said, " You're
always coming to my help, Mr. Verrian."

" Don't mention it !"

" I won't, then," she said, with a smile that showed
her thin face at its thinnest and left her lip caught on

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FENNEL AND KUE

her teeth till she brought it down voluntarily. It was
a small but full lip and pretty, and this trick of it
had a fascination. She added, gravely, " I don't believe
you will like my ice-tea."

" I haven't any active hostility to it. You can't
always be striking twelve — twelve midnight — as you
will be in Seeing Ghosts, But your ice-tea will do
very well for striking five. I'm rather elaborate I"

" Not too elaborate to hide your real opinion. I won-
der what you do think of my own elaboration — I mean
of my scheme."

" Yes ?"

They had moved on, at his turning to walk with her,
so as not to keep her standing in the snow, and now she
said, looking over her shoulder at him, " I've decided
that it won't do to let the ghost have all the glory. I
don't think it will be fair to let the people merely be
scared, even when they've been warned that they're
to see a ghost and told it isn't real."

She seemed to refer the point to him, and he said,
provisionally, " I don't know what more they can
ask."

" They can ask questions. I'm going to let each per-
son speak to the ghost, if not scared dumb, and ask it
just what they please; and I'm going to answer their
questions if I can."

" Won't it be something of an intellectual strain ?"

*' Yes, it will. But it will be fun, too, a little, and
it will help the thing to go off. What do you think ?"

" I think it's fine. Are you going to give it out, so
that they can be studying up their questions ?"

" No, their questions have got to be impromptu. Or,
at least, the first one has. Of course, after the scheme
has once been given away, the ghost-seers will be more
or less prepared, and the gliost will have to stand it."

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" I think it's great. Are you going to let me have a
chance with a question ?"

" Are you going to see a ghost ?"

" To be sure I am. May I really ask it what I
please ?"

" If you're honest."

"Oh, I shall be honest— "

He stopped breathlessly, but she did not seem called
upon to supply any meaning for his abruptness. '^ I'm
awfully glad you like the idea," she said. " I have had
to think the whole thing out for myself, and I haven't
been quite certain that the question-asking wasn't rather
silly, or, at least, sillier than the rest. Thank you so
much, Mr. Verrian."

^' I've thought of my question," he began again, as
abruptly as he had stopped before. " May I ask it
now ?"

Cries of laughter came up from the meadow below,
and the voices seemed coming nearer.

" Oh, I mustn't be seen !" Miss Shirley lamented.
" Oh, dear ! If I'm seen the whole thing is given away.
What shall I do?" She whirled about and ran down
the road towards a path that entered the wood.

He ran after her. " My question is. May I come to
see you when you get back to town ?"

" Yes, certainly. But don't come now ! You mustn't
be seen with me ! I'm not supposed to be in the house
at all."

If Verrian's present mood had been more analytic,
it might have occurred to him that the . element of
mystery which Miss Shirley seemed to cherish in re-
gard to herself personally was something that she could
dramatically apply with peculiar advantage to the
phantasmal part she was to take in her projected en-
tertainment. But he was reduced from the exercise of

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his analytic powers to a passivity in wliich he was
chiefly conscious of her pathetic fascination. This
seemed to emanate from her frail prettiness no less
than from the sort of fearful daring with which she
was pushing her whole enterprise through; it came as
much from her undecided blondness — from her dust-
colored hair, for instance — as from the entreating look
of her pinched eyes, only just lighting their convalescent
fires, and from the weakness that showed, with the grace,
in her run through the wintry woods, where he watched
her till the underbrush thickened behind her and hid
her from him. Altogether his impression was very
complex, but he did not get so far even as the realiza-
tion of this, in his mental turmoil, as he turned with
a deep sigh and walked meditatively homeward through
the incipient thaw.

It did not rain at night, as it seemed so likely to do,
and by morning the cloudiness of the sky had so far
thinned that the sun looked mildly through it without
more than softening the frozen surface of the pond, so
that Mrs. Westangle's ice-tea (as everybody called it,
by a common inspiration, or by whatever circuitous
adoption of Verrian's phrase) came off with great suc-
cess. People from other houses were there, and they
all said that they wondered how she came to have such
a brilliant idea, and they kept her there till nearly
dark. Then the retarded rain began, in a fine drizzle,
and her house guests were forced homeward, but not
too soon to get a good, long rest before dressing for
dinner. She was praised for her understanding with
the weather, and for her meteorological forecast as much
as for her invention in imagining such a delightful and
original thing as an ice-tea, which no one else had ever
thought of. Some of the women appealed to Verrian
to say if he had ever heard of anything like it; and
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they felt that Mrs. Westangle was certainly arriving,
and by no beaten track.

None of the others put it in these terms, of course ;
it was merely a consensus of feeling with them, and
what was more articulate was dropped among the iro-
nies with which Miss Macroyd more confidentially cele-
brated the event. Out of hearing of the others, in slow^-
ly following them with Verrian, she recurred to their
talk. " Yes, it's only a question of money enough
for Newport, after this. She's chic now, and after a
season there she will be smart. But oh, dear! How
came she to be chic ? Can you imagine ?"

Verrian did not feel bound to a categorical answer,
and in his private reflections he dealt with another
question. This was how far Miss Shirley was culpable
in the fraud she was letting Mrs. Westangle practise
on her innocent guests. It was a distasteful question,
and he did not find it much more agreeable when it sub-
divided itself into the question of necessity on her part,
and of a not very clearly realized situation on Mrs.
Westangle's. The girl had a right to sell her ideas, and
perhaps the woman thought they were her o^vn when she
had paid for them. There could be that view of it all.
The furtive nature of Miss Shirley's presence in the
house might very well be a condition of that grand
event she was preparing. It was all very mysterious.

XVII

It rained throughout the evening, with a wailing of
the wind in the gables, and a weeping and a sobbing
of the water from the eaves that Mrs. Westangle's guests,
securely housed from the storm, made the most of for
weirdness. There had been a little dancing, which
gave way to so much sitting-out that the volunteer
music abruptly ceased as if in dudgeon, and there was
nothing left but weirdness to bring young hearts to-
gether. Weirdness can do a good deal with girls loung-
ing in low chairs, and young men on rugs round a
glowing hearth at their feet; and every one told some
strange thing that had happened at first hand, or second
or third hand, either to himself or herself, or to their
fathers or brothers or grandmothers or old servants.
They were stimulated in eking out these experiences not
only by the wildness of the rain without, but by the
mystery of being shut ofF from the library into the
drawing-room and hall while the preparations for the
following night were beginning. But weirdness is not
inexhaustible, even when shared on such propitious
terms between a group of young people rapidly ad-
vanced in intimacy by a week's stay under the same
roof, and at the first yawn a gay dispersion of the
votaries ended it all.

The yawn came from Bushwick, who boldly owned,
when his guilt was brought home to him, that he was
sleepy, and that as he expected to be scared out of a
year's gro^vth the next night, and not be able to sleep

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for a week afterwards, he was now going to bed. He
shook hands with Mrs. Westangle for good-night. The
latest to follow him was Yerrian, who, strangely alert,
and as far from drowsiness as he had ever known him-
self, was yet more roused by realizing that Mrs. West-
angle was not letting his hand go at' once, but, unless
it was mere absent-mindedness, was conveying through
it the wish to keep him. She fluttered a little more
closely up to him, and twittered out, " Miss Shirley
wants me to let you know that she has told me about
your coming together, and everything."

" Oh, I'm very glad," Yerrian said, not sure that it
was the right thing.

" I don't know why she feels so, but she has a right
to do as she pleases about it. She's not a guest."

" No," Yerrian assented.

" It happens very well, though, for the ghost-seeing
that people don't know she's here. After that I shall
tell them. In fact, she wants me to, for she must be
on the lookout for other engagements. I am going to
do everything I can for her, and if you hear of any-
thing— "

Yerrian bowed, with a sense of something offensive
in her words which he could not logically feel, since
it was a matter of business and was put squarely on
a business basis. " I should be very glad," he said, non-
committally.

" She was sure from the first," Mrs. Westangle went
on, as if there were some relation between the fact and
her request, " that you were not the actor. She knew
you were a writer."

" Oh, indeed !" Yerrian said.

" I thought that if you were writing for the news-
papers you might know how to help her — "

" I'm not a newspaper writer," Yerrian answered.

FENNEL AND KUE

with a resentment which she seemed to feel, for she said,
with a sort of apology in her tone :

" Oh ! Well, I don't suppose it matters. She doesn't
know I'm speaking to you about that ; it just came into
my head. I like to help in a worthy object, you know.
I hope you'll have a good night's rest."

She turned and looked round with the air of distrac-
tion which she had after speaking to any one, and which
Verrian fancied came as much from a paucity as from
a multiplicity of suggestion in her brain, and so left him
standing. But she came back to say, " Of course, it's
all between ourselves till after to-morrow night, Mr.
Verrian."

" Oh, certainly," he replied, and went vaguely off
in the direction of the billiard-room. It was light and
warm there, though the place was empty, and he de-
cided upon a cigar as a proximate or immediate solu-
tion. He sat smoking before the fire till the tobacco's
substance had half turned into a wraith of ash, and
not really thinking of anything very definitely, except
the question whether he should be able to sleep after
he went to bed, when he heard a creeping step on the
floor. He turned quickly, with a certain expectance in
his nerves, and saw nothing more ghostly than Bush-
wick standing at the corner of the table and apparently
hesitating how to speak to him.

He said, " Hello!" and at this Bushwick said:

"Look here!"

" Well ?" Verrian asked, looking at him.

" How does it happen you're up so late, after every-
body else is wrapped in slumber ?"

" I might ask the same of you."

" Well, I found I wasn't making it a case of sleep,
exactly, and so I got up."

" Well, I hadn't gone to bed for much the same

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reason. Why couldn't you sleep ? A real-estate broker
ought to have a clean conscience."

" So ought a publisher, for that matter. What do
you think of this ghost-dance, anyway?''

" It might be amusing — if it fails." Verrian was
tempted to add the condition by the opportunity for a
cynicism which he did not feel. It is one of the privi-
leges of youth to be cynical, whether or no.

Bushwick sat down before the fire and rubbed his
shins with his two hands unrestfully, drawing in a
long breath between his teeth. " These things get on
to my nerves sometimes. I shouldn't want the ghost-
dance to fail."

" On Mrs. Westangle's account ?"

" I guess Mrs. Westangle could stand it. Look here !"
It was rather a customary phrase of his, Yerrian noted.
As he now used it he looked alertly round at Verrian,
with his hands still on his shins. " What's the use of
our beating round the bush ?"

Verrian delayed his answer long enough to decide
against the aimless pun of asking, " What Bushwick ?"
and merely asked, ^' What bush ?"

" The bush where the milk in the cocoanut grows.
You don't pretend that you believe Mrs. Westangle has
been getting up all these fairy stunts ?"

Verrian returned to his cigar, from which the ashen
wraith dropped into his lap. " I guess you'll have to
be a little clearer." But as Bushwick continued silent-
ly looking at him, the thing could not be left at this
point, and he was obliged to ask of his own initiative,
'^ How much do you know ?"

Bushwick leaned back in his chair, with his eyes still
on Verrian's profile. " As much as Miss Macroyd could
tell me."

"Ah, I'm still in the dark," Verrian politely re-

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gretted, but not without a tacit wish to wring Miss
Macroyd's neck, which he would not have known how
to account for.

" Well, she says that Mrs. Westangle has a profes-
sional assistant who's doing the whole job for her, and
that she came down on the same train with herself and
you."

" Did she say that she grabbed the whole victoria for
herself and maid at the station?" Verrian demanded,
in a burst of rage, " and left us to get here the best
way we could?"

Bushwick grinned. " She supposed there were other
carriages, and when she found there weren't she hur-
ried the victoria back for you."

" You think she believes all that ? I'm glad she has
the decency to be ashamed of her behavior."

" I'm not defending her. Miss Macroyd knows how
to take care of herself."

The matter rather dropped for the moment, in which
Bushwick filled a pipe he took from his pocket and
lighted it. After the first few whifis he took it from
his mouth, and, with a droll look across at Verrian, said,
" Who was your fair friend ?"

If Verrian was going to talk of this thing, he was not
going to do it with the burden of any sort of reserve
or contrivance on his soul. " This afternoon ?" Bush-
wick nodded ; and Verrian added, " That was she." Then
he went on, wrathf ully : " She's a girl who has to make
her living, and she's doing it in a new way that she's
invented for herself. She has supposed that the stupid
rich, or the lazy rich, who want to entertain people
may be willing to pay for ideas, and she proposes to
supply the ideas for a money consideration. She's not
a guest in the house, and she won't take herself on a
society basis at all. I don't know what her history is,

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and I don't care. She's a lady by training, and, if she
had the accent, I should say she was from the South,
for she has the enterprise of the South that comes
ITorth and tries to make its living. It's all inex-
pressibly none of my business, but I happen to be
knowing to so much of the case, and if you're knowing
to anything else, Mr. Bushwick, I want you to get it
straight. That's why I'm talking of it, and not because
I think you've any right to know anything about it."

" Thank you," Bushwick returned, unruffled. " It's
about what Miss Macroyd told me. That's the reason
I don't want the ghost-dance to fail."

Verrian did not notice him. He found it more im-
portant to say : " She's so loyal to Mrs. Westangle that
she wouldn't have wished, in Mrs. Westangle's inter-
est, to have her presence, or her agency in what is going
on, known; but, of course, if Mrs. Westangle chooses
to tell it, that's her affair."

" She would have had to tell it, sooner or later, Mrs.
Westangle would ; and she only told it to Miss Macroyd
this afternoon on compulsion, after Miss Macroyd and
I had seen you in the wood-road, and Mrs. Westangle
had to account for the young lady's presence there in
your company. Then Miss Macroyd had to tell me;
but I assure you, my dear fellow, the matter hasn't
gone any further."

" Oh, it's quite indifferent to me," Verrian retorted.
" I'm nothing but a dispassionate witness of the situa-
tion."

" Of course," Bushwick assented, and then he added,
with a bonhomie really so amiable that a man with even
an unreasonable grudge could hardly resist it, " If
you call it dispassionate."

Verrian could not help laughing. " Well, passion-
ate, then. I don't know why it should be so confounded-

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Ij vexatious. But somehow I would have chosen Miss
Macroyd — Is she specially dear to you?"

"Not the least r

" I would have chosen her as the last person to have
the business, which is so inexpressibly none of my
business — "

" Or mine, as I think you remarked," Bushwick in-
terposed.

" Come out through," Verrian concluded, accepting
his interposition with a bow.

" I see what you mean," Bushwick said, after a
moment's thought. " But, really, I don't think it's likely
to go further. If you want to know, I believe Miss
Macroyd feels the distinction of being in the secret so
much that she'll prefer to hint round till Mrs. West-
angle gives the thing away. She had to tell me, be-
cause I was there with her when she saw you with the
young lady, to keep me from going with my curiosity
to you. Come, I do think she's honest about it."

" Don't you think they're rather more dangerous
when they're honest ?"

" Well, only when they're obliged to be. Cheer up !
I don't believe Miss Macroyd is one to spoil sport."

" Oh, I think I shall live through it," Verrian said,
rather stiffening again. But he relaxed, in rising from
his chair, and said, " Well, good-night, old fellow. I
believe I shall go to bed now."

" You won't wait for me till my pipe's out ?"

" No, I think not. I seem to be just making it, and
if I waited I might lose my grip." He offered Bush-
wick a friendly hand.

" Do you suppose it's been my soothing conversation ?
I'm like the actor that the doctor advised to go and
see himself act. I can't talk myself sleepy."

" You might try it," Verrian said, going out.
91

XVIII

The men who had talked of going away on Thursday
seemed to have found it practicable to stay. At any
rate, they were all there on the Saturday night for the
ghost-seeing, and, of course, none of the women had
gone. What was more remarkable, in a house rather
full of girls, nobody was sick; or, at least, everybody
was well enough to be at dinner, and, after dinner, at
the dance, which impatiently, if a little ironically,
preceded the supernatural part of the evening's amuse-
ment. It was the decorum of a woman who might have
been expected not to have it that Mrs. Westangle had
arranged that the evening's amusement should not pass
the bound between Saturday night and Sunday morn-
ing. The supper was to be later, but that was like other
eating and drinking on the Sabbath; and it was to be
a cold supper.

At half-past ten the dancing stopped in the foyer and
the drawing-room, and by eleven the guests were all
seated fronting the closed doors of the library. There
were not so many of them but that in the handsome
space there was interval enough to lend a desired dis-
tance to the apparitions; and when the doors were slid
aside it was applausively found that there was a veil
of gauze falling from the roof to the floor, which prom-
ised its aid in heightening the coming mystery. This
was again heightened by the universal ignorance as to
how the apparitions were to make their advents and
on what terms.

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It was with an access of a certain nervous anxiety that
Verrian found himself next Miss Macroyd, whose frank
good - fellowship first expressed itself in a pleasure at
the chance which he did not share, and then extended
to a confidential sympathy for the success of the enter-
prise which he did not believe she felt. She laughed,
but sotto voce, in bending her head close to his and
whispering, " I hope she'll be equal to her mise en scene.
It's really very nice. So simple." Besides the gauze
veil, there was no preparation except in the stretch of
black drapery which hid the book-shelves at the farther
wall of the library.

" Mrs. Westangie's note is always simplicity," Ver-
rian returned.

" Oh yes, indeed ! And you wish to keep up the West-
angle convention?"

" I don't see any reason for dropping it."

" Oh, none in the world," she mocked.

He determined to push her, since she had tried to
push him, and he asked, " What reason could there be ?"

" N'ow, Mr. Verrian, asking a woman for a reason !
I shall begin to think some one else wrote your book,
too ! Perhaps she'll take up supplying ideas to authors
as well as hostesses. Of course, I mean Mrs. West-
angle."

Verrian wished he had not tried to push Miss Mac-
royd, and he was still grinding his teeth in a vain
endeavor to get out some fit retort between them, when
he saw Bushwick shufiling to his feet, in the front row
of the spectators, and heard him beginning a sort of
speech.

" Ladies and gentlemen : Mrs. Westangle has chosen
me, because a real - estate broker is sometimes an
auctioneer, and may be supposed to have the gift of
oratory, to make known the conditions on which you

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may interview the ghosts which you are going to see.
Anybody may do it who will comply with the condi-
tions. In the first place, you have got to be serious, and
to think up something that you would really like to
know about your past, present, or future. Remember,
this is no joking matter, and the only difference between
the ghost that you will see here and a real materializa-
tion under professional auspices is that the ghost won't
charge you anything. Of course, if any lady or gentle-
man — especially lady — wishes to contribute to any
charitable object, after a satisfactory interview with the
ghost, a hat will be found at the hall-door for the pur-
pose, and Mrs. Westangle will choose the object: I have
put in a special plea for my own firm, at a season when
the real-estate business is not at its best." By this time
Bushwick had his audience laughing, perhaps the more
easily because they were all more or less in a hysterical
mood, which, whether we own it or not, is always in-
duced by an approximation to the supernatural. He
frowned and said, " 'No laughing !" and then they
laughed the more. When he had waited for them to be
quiet he went on gravely, " The conditions are simply
these: Each person who chooses may interview the
ghost, keeping a respectful distance, but not so far off
but that the ghost can distinctly hear a stage whisper.
The question put must be seriously meant, and it must
be the question which the questioner would prefer to
have answered above everything else at the time being.
Certain questions will be absolutely ruled out, such as,
' Does Maria love me V or, ^ Has Beuben ever been
engaged before V The laughter interrupted the speaker
again, and Verrian hung his head in rage and shame;
this stupid ass was spoiling the hope of anything
beautiful in the spectacle and turning it into a gross
burlesque. Somehow he felt that the girl who had in-

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FENNEL AND KUE

vented it had meant, in the last analysis, something
serious, and it was in her behalf that he would have
liked to choke Bushwick. All the time he believed that
Miss Macroyd, whose laugh sounded above the others,
was somehow enjoying his indignation and divining
its reason.

" Other questions, touching intemperance or divorce,
the questioner will feel must not be asked; though it
isn't necessary to more than suggest this, I hope; it
will be left entirely to the good taste and good feeling
of the — party. We all know what the temptations of
South Dakota and the rum fiend are, and that to err
is human, and forgive divine." He paused, having
failed to get a laugh, but got it by asking, confidentially,
" Where was I ? Oh !" — he caught himself up — " I re-
member. Those of you who are in the habit of seeing
ghosts need not be told that a ghost never speaks first ;
and those who have never met an apparition before,
but are in the habit of going to the theatre, will recall
the fact that in W. Shakespeare's beautiful play of
' Hamlet ' the play could not have gone on after the first
scene if Horatio had not spoken to the ghost of Hamlet's
father and taken the chances of being snubbed. Here
there are no chances of that kind ; the chances are that
you'll wish the ghost had not been entreated: I think
that is the phrase."

In the laugh that followed a girl on Miss Macroyd's
other hand audibly asked her, " Oh, isn't he too funny ?"

" Delicious !" Miss Macroyd agreed. Verrian felt
she said it to vex him,.

" Now, there's just one other point," Bushwick re-
sumed, " and then I have done. Only one question can
be allowed to each person, but if the questioner is a
lady she can ask a question and a half, provided she
is not satisfied with the answer. In this case, however,

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FENNEL AND RUE

she will only get half an answer. Now I have done,
and if my arguments have convinced any one within the
sound of my voice that our ghost really means busi-
ness, I shall feel fully repaid for the pains and expense
of getting up these few impromptu remarks, to which
I have endeavored to give a humorous character, in
order that you may all laugh your laugh out, and no
unseemly mirth may interrupt the subsequent pro-
ceedings. We will now have a little music, and those
who can recall my words will be allowed to sing them."

In the giggling and chatter which ensued the chords
softly played passed into ears that might as well have
been deaf ; but at last there was a general quiescence of
expectation, in which every one's eyes were strained to
pierce through the gauze curtain to the sombre drapery
beyond. The wait was so long that the tension relaxed
and a whispering began, and.Verrian felt a sickness of
pity for the girl who was probably going to make a fail-
ure of it. He asked himself what could have happened
to her. Had she lost courage ? Or had her physical
strength, not yet fully renewed, given way under the
stress? Or had she, in sheer disgust for the turn the
affair had been given by that brute Bushwick, thrown
up the whole business ? He looked round for Mrs. West-
angle ; she was not there ; he conjectured — he could only
conjecture — that she was absent conferring with Miss
Shirley and trying to save the day.

A long, deeply sighed " Oh-h-h-h !" shuddering from
many lips made him turn abruptly, and he saw, glim-
mering against the pall at the bottom of the darkened
library, a figure vaguely white, in which he recognized
a pose, a gesture familiar to him. For the others the
figure was It, but for him it was preciously She. It
was she, and she was going to carry it through ; she was
going to triumph, and not fail. A lump came into his

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FENNEL AND KUE

throat, and a mist blurred his eyes, which, when it
cleared again, left him staring at nothing.

A girFs young voice uttered the common feeling,
"Why, is that aU?"

" It is, till some one asks the ghost a question ; then
it will reappear," Bushwick rose to say. " Will Miss
Andrews kindly step forward and ask the question near-
est her heart ?"

" Oh no !" the girl answered, with a sincerity that
left no one quite free to laugh.

" Some other lady, then ?" Bushwick suggested. N"©
one moved, and he added, " This is a difficulty which
had been foreseen. Some gentleman will step forward
and put the question next his heart." Again no one
offered to go forward, and there was some muted laugh-
ter, which Bushwick checked. " This difficulty had
been foreseen, too. I see that I shall have to make the
first move, and all that I shall require of the audience
is that I shall not be supposed to be in collusion with the
illusion. I hope that after my experience, whatever
it is, some young woman of courage will follow."

He passed into the foyer, and from that came into
the library, where he showed against the dark back-
ground in an attitude of entreaty slightly burlesqued.
The ghost reappeared.

" Shall I marry the woman I am thinking of ?" he
asked.

The phantom seemed to hesitate; it wavered like a
pale reflection cast against the pall. Then, in the tones
which Verrian knew, the answer came;

" Ask her. She will tell you."

The phantom had scored a hit, and the applause
was silenced with difficulty; but Verrian felt that Miss
Shirley had lost ground. It could not have been for
the easy cleverness of such a retort that she had planned

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FENNEL AND KUE

the affair. Yet, why not ? He was taking it too seri-
ously. It was merely business with her.

" And I haven't even the right to half a question
more!" Bushwick lamented, in a dramatized dejection,
and crossed slowly back from the library to his place.

" Why, haven't you got enough ?" one of the men
asked, amidst the gay clamor of the women.

The ghost was gone again, and its evanescence was
discussed with ready wonder. Another of the men went
round to tempt his fate, and the phantom suddenly re-
appeared so near him that he got a laugh by his start
of dismay. " I forgot what I was going to ask, he
faltered.

" I know what it was," the apparition answered.
" You had better sell."

" But they say it will go to a hundred !" the man
protested.

" 'No back - talk, Rogers !" Bushwick interposed.
" That was the understanding.

" But we didn't understand," one of the girls said,
coming to the rescue, ^^ that the ghost was going to
answer questions that were not asked. That would give
us all away."

" Then the only thing is for you to go and ask before
it gets a chance to answer," Bushwick said.

" Well, I will," the girl returned. And she swept
round into the library, where she encountered the phan-
tom with a little whoop as it started into sight before
her. " I'm not going to be scared out of it !" she said,
defiantly. " It's simply this : Did the person I sus-
pect really take the ring ?"

The answer came, " Look on the floor under your
dressing-table !"

" Well, if I find it there," the girl addressed the com-
pany, " I'm a spiritualist from this time forth." And

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FENNEL AND EUE

she came back to her place, where she remained for
some time explaining to those near how she had lately
lost her ring and suspected her maid, whom she had dis-
missed.

Upon the whole, the effect was serious. The women,
having once started, needed no more urging. One after
another they confronted and questioned the oracle with
increasing sincerity.

Miss Macroyd asked Verrian, " Hadn't you better
take your chance and stop this flow of fatuity, Mr.
Verrian ?"

" I'm afraid I should be fatuous, too," he said. " But
you?"

" Oh, thank you, I don't believe in ghosts, though this
seems to be a very pretty one — very graceful, I mean.
I suppose a graceful woman would be graceful even
when a disembodied spirit. I should think she would
be getting a little tried with all this questioning; but
perhaps we're only reading the fatigue into her. The
ghost may be merely overdone."

" It might easily be that," Verrian assented.

" Oh, may I ask it something now ?" a girl's voice
appealed to Bushwick. It was the voice of that Miss
Andrews who had spoken first, and first refused to
question the ghost. She was the youngest of Mrs.
Westangle's guests, and Verrian had liked her, with a
sense of something precious in the prolongation of a
child's unconsciousness into the consciousness of girl-
hood which he found in her. She was always likelier
than not to say the thing she thought and felt, whether
it was silly and absurd, or whether, as also happened,
there was a touch of inspired significance in it, as there
is apt to be in the talk of children. She was laughed
at, but she was liked, and the freshness of her soul was
pleasant to the girls who were putting on the world
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FENNEL AND KUE

as hard as they could. She could be trusted to do and
say the unexpected. But she was considered a little
morbid, and certainly she had an exaltation of the
nerves that was at times almost beyond her control.

" Oh, dear !" Miss Macroyd whispered. " What is
that strange simpleton going to do, I wonder ?"

Verrian did not feel obliged to answer a ques-
tion not addressed to him, but he, too, wondered and
doubted.

The girl, having got her courage together, fluttered
with it from her place round to the ghost's in a haste
that expressed a fear that it might escape her if she
delayed to put it to the test. The phantom was al-
ready there, as if it had waited her in the curiosity that
followed her. They were taking each other seriously,
the girl and the ghost, and if the ghost had been a
veridical phantom, in which she could have believed
with her whole soul, the girl could not have entreated
it more earnestly, more simply.

She bent forward, in her slim, tall figure, with her
hands outstretched, and with her tender voice breaking
at times in her entreaty. " Oh, I don't know how to
begin," she said, quite as if she and the phantom were
alone together, and she had forgotten its supernatural
awfulness in a sense of its human quality. " But you
will understand, won't you! You'll think it very
strange, and it is very unlike the others; but if I'm
going to be serious — "

The white figure stood motionless; but Verrian in-
terpreted its quiet as a kindly intelligence, and the girl
made a fresh start in a note a little more piteous than
before. " It's about the — the truth. Do you think if
sometimes we don't tell it exactly, but we wish we had
very, very much, it will come round somehow the same
as if we had told it?"

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YEBBIAN ROSE AWKWARDLY AND STOOD A LONG MOMENT BEFORE
nis CnATR"

FENNEL AND RUE

" I don't understand," the phantom answered. " Say
it again — or differently."

" Can our repentance undo it, or make the falsehood
over into the truth?"

" Never !" the ghost answered, with a passion that
thrilled to Verrian's heart.

" Oh, dear !" the girl said ; and then, as if she had
been going to continue, she stopped.

" You've still got your half-question, Miss Andrews,"
Bushwick interposed.

" Even if we didn't mean it to deceive harmfully ?"
the girl pursued. " If it was just on impulse, some-
thing we couldn't seem to help, and we didn't see it in its
true light at the time — "

The ghost made no answer. It stood motionless.

" It is offended," Bushwick said, without knowing the
Shakespearian words. " You've asked it three times
half a question. Miss Andrews. N"ow, Mr. Verrian, it's
your turn. You can ask it just one-quarter of a ques-
tion. Miss Andrews has used up the rest of your share."

Verrian rose awksvardly and stood a long moment
before his chair. Then he dropped back again, saying,
dryly, " I don't think I want to ask it anything."

The phantom sank straight down as if sinking through
the floor, but lay there like a white shawl trailed along
the bottom of the dark curtain.

" And is that all ?" Miss Macroyd asked Verrian.
" I was just getting up my courage to go forward. But
now, I suppose — "

" Oh, dear !" Miss Andrews called out. " Perhaps
it's fainted. Hadn't we better — "

There were formless cries from the women, and the
men made a crooked rush forward, in which Verrian
did not join. He remained where he had risen, with
Miss Macroyd beside him.

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FENNEL AND RUE

" Perhaps it's only a coup de theatre !" she said, with
her laugh. " Better wait."

Bushwick was gathering the prostrate figure up.
" She has fainted !" he called. " Get some water, some-
body!"

XIX

The early Monday morning train which brought
Verrian up to town was so very early that he could
sit down to breakfast with his mother only a little
later than their usual hour.

She had called joyfully to him from her room, when
she heard the rattling of his key as he let himself into
the apartment, and, after an exchange of greetings,
shouted back and forth before they saw each other, they
could come at once to the history of his absence over
their coffee. " You must have had a very good time, to
stay so long. After you wrote that you would not be
back Thursday, I expected it w^ould be Saturday till I
got your telegram. But I'm glad you stayed. You cer-
tainly needed the rest."

" Yes, if those things are ever a rest." He looked
down at his cup while he stirred the coffee in it, and
she studied his attitude, since she could not see his
face fully, for the secret of any vital change that might
have come upon him. It could be that in the interval
since she had seen him he had seen the woman who
was to take him from her. She was always preparing
herself for that, knowing that it must comie almost as
certainly as death, and knowing that with all her prepa-
ration she should not be ready for it. " IVe got rather
a long story to tell you and rather a strange story," he
said, lifting his head and looking round, but not so
impersonally that his mother did not know well enough
to say to the Swedish serving-woman :

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" You needn't stay, Margit. I'll give Mr. Philip
his breakfast. Well !" she added, when they were alone.

" Well," he returned, with a smile that she knew
he was forcing, " I have seen the girl that wrote that
letter."

" N'ot Jerusha Brown ?"

" 'Not Jerusha Brown, but the girl all the same."

" !Now go on, Philip, and don't miss a single word !"
she commanded him, with an imperious breathlessness.
" You know I won't hurry you or interrupt you, but
you must — ^you really must — tell me everything. Don't
leave out the slightest detail."

" I won't," he said. But she was aware, from time
to time, that she was keeping her word better than he
was keeping his, in his account of meeting Miss Shir-
ley and all the following events.

" You can imagine," he said, " what a sensation the
swooning made, and the commotion that followed it."

" Yes, I can imagine that," she answered. But she
was yet so faithful that she would not ask him to go on.

He continued, unasked, " I don't know just how,
now, to account for its coming into my head that it was
Miss Andrews who was my unknown correspondent.
I suppose I've always unconsciously expected to meet
that girl, and Miss Andrews's hypothetical case was
psychologically so parallel — "

"Yes, yes!"

" And I've sometimes been afraid that I judged it
too harshly — that it was a mere girlish freak without
any sort of serious import."

" I was sometimes afraid so, Philip. But — "

" And I don't believe now that the hypothetical case
brought any intolerable stress of conscience upon Miss
Shirley, or that she fainted from any cause but ex-
haustion from the general ordeal. She was still weak

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from the sickness she had been through — too weak to
bear the strain of the work she had taken up. Of
course, the catastrophe gave the whole surface situa-
tion away, and I must say that those rather banal young
people behaved very humanely about it. There was
nothing but interest of the nicest kind, and, if she is
going on with her career, it will be easy enough for
her to find engagements after this."

" Why shouldn't she go on V his mother asked, with
a suspicion which she kept well out of sight.

" Well, as well as she could explain afterwards, the
catastrophe took her work out of the category of busi-
ness and made her acceptance in it a matter of senti-
ment."

" She explained it to you herself ?"

" Yes, the general sympathy had penetrated to Mrs.
Westangle, though I don't say that she had been more
than negatively indifferent to Miss Shirley's claim on
her before. As it was, she sent for me to her room the
next morning, and I found Miss Shirley alone there.
She said Mrs. Westangle would be down in a mo-
ment."

Now, indeed, Mrs. Yerrian could not govern herself
from saying, " I don't like it, Philip."

" I knew you wouldn't. It was what I said to my-
self at the time. You were so present with me that
I seemed to have you there chaperoning the interview."
His mother shrugged, and he went on : " She said she
wished to tell me something first, and then she said,
^ I want to do it while I have the courage, if it's cour-
age; perhaps it's just desperation. I am Jerusha
Brown.' "

His mother began, " But you said — " and then stop-
ped herself.

" I know that I said she wasn't, but she explained,
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FENNEL AND RUE

while I sat there rather mum, that there was really an-
other girl, and that the other girl's name was really
Jerusha BroAvn. She was the daughter of the post-
master in the village where Miss Shirley was passing
the summer. In fact. Miss Shirley was boarding in
the postmaster's family, and the girls had become very
friendly. They were reading my story together,
and talking about it, and trying to guess how it
would come out, just as the letter said, and they simul-
taneously hit upon the notion of writing to me. It
seemed to them that it would be a good joke — I'm not
defending it, mother, and I must say Miss Shirley
didn't defend it, either — to work upon my feelings in
the way they tried, and they didn't realize what they
had done till Armiger's letter came. It almost drove
them wild, she said ; but they had a lucid interval, and
they took the letter to the girl's father and told him
what they had done. He was awfully severe with them
for their foolishness, and said they must write to
Armiger at once and confess the fact. Then they said
they had written already, and showed him the second
letter, and explained they had decided to let Miss Brown
write it in her person alone for the reason she gave in it.
But Miss Shirley told him she was ready to take her
full share of the blame, and, if anything came of it,
she authorized him to put the wJiole blame on her."

Verrian made a pause which his mother took for in-
vitation or permission to ask, " And was he satisfied
with that ?"

" I don't know. I wasn't, and it's only just to Miss
Shirley to say that she wasn't, either. She didn't try
to justify it to me; she merely said she was so fright-
ened that she couldn't have done anything. She may
have realized more than the Brown girl what they had
done."

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" The postmaster, did he regard it as anything worse
than foolishness?''

" I don't believe he did. At any rate, he was satis-
fied with what his daughter had done in owning up."

" Well, I always liked that girl's letter. And did
they show him your letter ?"

" It seems that they did."

" And what did he say about that ?"

" I suppose, what I deserved. Miss Shirley wouldn't
say, explicitly. He wanted to answer it, but they
wouldn't let him. I don't know but I should feel bet-
ter if he had. I haven't been proud of that letter of
mine as time has gone on, mother; I think I behaved
very narrow-mindedly, very personally in it."

" You behaved justly."

" Justly ? I thought you had your doubts of that.
At any rate, I had when it came to hearing the girl
accusing herself as if she had been guilty of some
monstrous wickedness, and I realized that I had made
her feel so."

" She threw herself on your pity !"

" No, she didn't, mother. Don't make it impossible
for me to tell you just how it was."

"I won't. Goon."

" I don't say she was manly about it ; that couldn't
be, but she was certainly not throwing herself on my
pity, unless — unless — "

"What?"

" Unless you call it so for her to say that she wanted
to own up to me, because she could have no rest till she
had done so ; she couldn't put it behind her till she had
acknowledged it; she couldn't work; she couldn't get
well."

He saw his mother trying to consider it fairly, and
in response he renewed his own resolution not to make

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FENNEL AND RUE

himself the girl's advocate with her, but to continue the
dispassionate historian of the case. At the same time
his memory was filled with the vision of how she had
done and said the things he was telling, with what
pathos, with what grace, with what beauty in her ap-
peal. He saw the tears that came into her eyes at
times and that she indignantly repressed as she hur-
ried on in the confession which she was voluntarily
making, for there was no outward stress upon her to
say anything. He felt again the charm of the situa-
tion, the sort of warmth and intimacy, but he resolved
not to let that feeling offset the impartiality of his
story.

" 'No, I don't say she threw herself on your mercy,''
his mother said, finally. " She needn't have told you
anything."

" Except for the reason she gave — ^that she couldn't
make a start for herself till she had done so. And
she has got her own way to make; she is poor. Of
course, you may say her motive was an obsession, and
not a reason."

" There's reality in it, whatever it is ; it's a genuine
motive," Mrs. Verrian conceded.

" I think so," Yerrian said, in a voice which he tried
to keep from sounding too grateful.

Apparently his mother did not find it so. She asked,
" What had been the matter with her, did she say ?"

" In her long sickness ? Oh ! A nervous fever of
some sort."

" From worrying about that experience ?"

Verrian reluctantly admitted, " She said it made her
want to die. I don't suppose we can quite realize — "

" We needn't believe everything she said to realize
that she suffered. But girls exaggerate their sufferings.
I suppose you told her not to think of it any more ?"

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FENNEL AND RUE

Verrian gave an odd laugh. " Well, not uncondi-
tionally. I tried to give her my point of view. And
I stipulated that she should tell Jerusha Brown all about
it, and keep her from having a nervous fever, too."

" That was right. You must see that even cowardice
couldn't excuse her selfishness in letting that girl take
all the chances."

" And I'm afraid I was not very unselfish myself in
my stipulations," Verrian said, with another laugh. " I
think that I wanted to stand well with the postmaster."

There was a note of cynical ease in this which Mrs.
Verrian found morally some octaves lower than the
pitch of her son's habitual seriousness in what con-
cerned himself, but she could not make it a censure to
him. " And you were able to reassure her, so that she
needn't think of it any more ?"

" What would you have wished me to do ?" he re-
turned, dryly. " Don't you think she had suffered
enough ?"

" Oh, in this sort of thing it doesn't seem the ques-
tion of suffering. If there's wrong done the penalty
doesn't right it."

The notion struck Verrian's artistic sense. " That's
true. That would make the donnee of a strong story.
Or a play. It's a drama of fate. It's Greek. But I
thought we lived under another dispensation."

" Will she try to get more of the kind of thing she
was doing for Mrs. Westangle at once? Or has she
some people?"

" No ; only friends, as I understand."

" Where is she from ? Up country ?"

" No, she's from the South."

" I don't like Southerners !"

" I know you don't, mother. But you must honor
the way they work and get on when they come North

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FENNEL AND KUE

and begin doing for themselves. Besides, Miss Shirley's
family went South after the war — "

" Oh, not even a real Southerner !"

"Mother!"

" I know ! I'm not fair. I ought to beg her pardon.
And I ought to be glad it's all over. Shall you see
her again ?"

" It might happen. But I don't know how or when.
We parted friends, but we parted strangers, so far as
any prevision of the future is concerned," Verrian said.

His mother drew a long breath, which she tried to
render inaudible. " And the girl that asked her the
strange questions, did you see her again ?"

" Oh yes. She had a curious fascination. I should
like to tell you about her. Do you think there's such
a thing as a girl's being too innocent ?"

" It isn't so common as not being innocent enough."

"But it's more difficult?"

" I hope you'll never find it so, my son," Mrs. Ver-
rian said. And for the first time she was intentionally
personal. " Go on."

" About Miss Andrews ?"

" Whichever you please."

" She waylaid me in the afternoon, as I was coming
home from a walk, and wanted to talk with me about
Miss Shirley."

" I suppose Miss Shirley was the day's heroine after
what had happened ?"

" The half-day's, or quarter-day's heroine, perhaps.
She left on the church train for town yesterday morn-
ing soon after I saw her. Miss Andrews seemed to
think I was an authority on the subject, and she ap-
proached me with a large-eyed awe that was very amus-
ing, though it was affecting, too. I suppose that girls
must have many worships for other girls before they

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FENNEL AND RUE

have any worship for a man. This girl couldn't sepa-
rate Miss Shirley, on the lookout for another engage-
ment, from the psychical part she had played. She
raved about her; she thought she was beautiful, and
she wanted to know all about her and how she could
help her. Miss Andrews's parents are rich but respect-
able, I understand, and she's an only child. I came
in for a share of her awe ; she had found out that I was
not only not Verrian the actor, but an author of the
same name, and she had read my story with passionate
interest, but apparently in that unliterary way of many
people without noticing who wrote it; she seemed to
have thought it was Harding Davis or Henry James;
she wasn't clear which. But it was a good deal to have
had her read it at all in that house ; I don't believe any-
body else had, except Miss Shirley and Miss Mac-
royd."

Mrs. Verrian deferred a matter that would ordinarily
have interested her supremely to an immediate curiosity.
" And how came she to think you would know so much
about Miss Shirley ?"

Verrian frowned. " I think from Miss Macroyd.
Miss Macroyd seems to have taken a grandmotherly con-
cern in my affairs through the whole week. Perhaps
she resented having behaved so piggishly at the station
the day we came, and meant to take it out of Miss
Shirley and myself. She had seen us together in the
woods, one day, and she must have told it about. Mrs.
Westangle wouldn't have spoken of us together, because
she never speaks of anything unless it is going to count ;
and there was no one else who knew of our acquaint-
ance."

" Why, my son, if you went walking in the woods
with the girl, any one might have seen you."

" I didn't. It was quite by accident that we met
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FENNEL AND EUE

there. Miss Shirley was anxious to keep her presence
in the house a secret from everybody."

Mrs. Verrian would not take any but the open way
with this. She would not deal indirectly with it, or
in any wise covertly or surreptitiously. " It seems to
me that Miss Shirley has rather a fondness for secrecy,"
she said.

*^ I think she has," Verrian admitted. " Though, in
this case, it was essential to the success of her final
scheme. But she is a curious study. I suppose that
timidity is at the bottom of all fondness for secrecy,
isn't it ?"

" I don't know. She doesn't seem to be timid in
everything."

" Say it out, mother !" Verrian challenged her with
a smile. " You're not timid, anywaj !"

" She had the courage to join in that letter, but not
the courage to own her part in it. She was brave enough
to confess that she had been sick of a nervous fever
from the answer you wrote to the Brown girl, but she
wouldn't have been brave enough to confess anything at
all if she had believed she would be physically or moral-
ly strong enough to keep it."

" Perhaps nobody — nobody but you, mother — is
brave in the right time and place."

She knew that this was not meant in irony. " I am
glad you say that, Philip."

" It's only your due. But aren't you a little too hard
upon cowards, at times ? For the sort of person she is,
if you infer the sort from the worst appearance she
has made in the whole business, I think she has done
pretty well."

" Why had she left the Brown girl to take all your
resentment alone for the last six or eight months ?"

" She may have thought that she was getting her share
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i^ENNEL AND KUE

of the punishment in the fever my resentment brought
on?"

" Philip, do you really believe that her fever, if she
had one, came from that ?"

" I think she believes it, and there's no doubt but she
was badly scared."

" Oh, there's no doubt of that !"

" But come, mother, why should we take her at the
worst? Of course, she has a complex nature. I see
that as clearly as you do. I don't believe we look at
her diversely, in the smallest particular. But why
shouldn't a complex nature be credited with the same
impulses towards the truth as a single nature? Why
shouldn't we allow that Miss Shirley had the same wish
to set herself right with me as Miss Andrews would
have had in her place ?"

" I dare say she wished to set herself right with you,
but not from the same wish that Miss Andrews would
have had. Miss Andrews would not have wished you
to know the truth for her own sake. Her motive would
have been direct — straight."

" Yes ; and we will describe her as a straight line,
and Miss Shirley as a waving line. Why shouldn't the
waving line, at its highest points, touch the same alti-
tude as the straight line ?"

" It wouldn't touch it all the time, and in character,
or nature, as you call it, that is the great thing. It's
at the lowest points that the waving line is dangerous."

" Well, I don't deny that. But I'm anxious to be
just to a person who hasn't experienced a great deal of
mercy for what, after all, wasn't such a very heinous
thing as I used to think it. You must allow that she
wasn't obliged to tell me anything about herself."

" Yes, she was, Philip. As I said before, she hadn't
the physical or moral strength to keep it from you when

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FENNEL AND EUE

she was brought face to face with you. Besides — "
Mrs. Verrian hesitated.

" Out with it, mother ! We, at least, won't have any
concealments."

" She may have thought she could clinch it in that
way."

"Clinch what?"

" You know. Is she pretty ?"

" She's — interesting."

" That can always be managed. Is she tall ?"

" No, I think she's rather out of style there ; she's
rather petite.^^

" And what's her face like ?"

" Well, she has no particular complexion, but it's not
thick. Her eyes are the best of her, though there isn't
much of them. They're the * waters on a starry night '
sort, very sweet and glimmering. She has a kind of
ground-colored hair and a nice little chin. Her mouth
helps her eyes out ; it looks best when she speaks ; it's
pathetic in the play of the lips."

" I see," Mrs. Verrian said.

XX

The following week Verrian and his mother were
at a show of paintings, in the gallery at the rear of a
dealer's shop, and while they were bending together
to look at a picture he heard himself called to in a
girlish voice, " Oh, Mr. Verrian !" as if his being there
was the greatest wonder in the world.

His mother and he lifted themselves to encounter a
tall, slim girl, who was stretching her hand towards him,
and who now cried out, joyously, " Oh, Mr. Verrian,
I thought it must be you, but I was afraid it wasn't as
soon as I spoke. Oh, I'm so glad to see you; I want
so much to have you know my mother — Mr. Verrian,"
she said, presenting him.

" And I you mine," Verrian responded, in a violent
ellipse, and introduced his own mother, who took in
the fact of Miss Andrews's tall thinness, topped with
a wide, white hat and waving white plumes, and her
little face, irregular and somewhat gaunt, but with a
charm in the lips and eyes which took the elder woman's
heart with pathos. She made talk with Mrs. Andrews,
who affected one as having the materials of social
severity in her costume and manner.

" Oh, I didn't believe I should ever see you again,"
the girl broke out impulsively upon Verrian. " Oh, I
wanted to ask you so about Miss Shirley. Have you
seen her since you got back ?"

" ]N'o," Verrian said, " I haven't seen her."

" Oh, I thought perhaps you had. I've been to the
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FENNEL AND KUE

address that Mrs. Westangle gave me, but she isn't there
any more ; she's gone up into Harlem somewhere, and
I haven't been able to call again. Oh, I do feel so
anxious about her. Oh, I do hope she isn't ill. Do
you think she is ?"

" I don't believe so," Verrian began. But she swept
over his prostrate remark.

" Oh, Mr. Verrian, don't you think she's wonderful ?
I've been telling mother about it, and I don't feel at
all the way she does. Do you ?"

"How does she feel? I must know that before I
say."

" Why, of course ! I hadn't told you ! She thinks
it was a make-up between Miss Shirley and that Mr.
Bushwick. But I say it couldn't have been. Do you
think it could ?"

Verrian found the suggestion so distasteful, for a
reason which he did not quite seize himself, that he
answered, resentfully, " It could have been, but I don't
think it was."

" I will tell her what you say. Oh, may I tell her
what you say?"

" I don't see why you shouldn't. It isn't very im-
portant, either way, is it ?"

" Oh, don't you think so ? N'ot if it involved pre-
tending what wasn't true ?"

She bent towards him in such anxious demand that
he could not help smiling.

" The whole thing was a pretence, wasn't it ?" he
suggested.

" Yes, but that would have been a pretence that we
didn't know of."

" It would be incriminating to that extent, certainly,"
Verrian owned, ironically. He found the question of
Miss Shirley's blame for the collusion as distasteful as

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FENNEL AND RUE

the supposition of the collusion, but there was a fascina-
tion in the innocence before him, and he could not help
playing with it.

Sometimes Miss Andrews apparently knew that he
was playing with her innocence, and sometimes she did
not. But in either case she seemed to like being his
jest, from which she snatched a fearful joy. She was
willing to prolong the experience, and she drifted with
him from picture to picture, and kept the talk recur-
rently to Miss Shirley and the phenomena of Seeing
Ghosts.

Her mother and Mrs. Verrian evidently got on to-
gether better than either of them at first expected.
When it came to their parting, through Mrs. Andrews's
saying that she must be going, she shook hands with
Mrs. Verrian and said to Philip, " I am so glad to have
met you, Mr. Verrian. Will you come and see us ?"

" Yes, thank you," he answered, taking the hand she
now offered him, and then taking Miss Andrews's hand,
while the girl's eyes glowed with pleasure. " I shall
be very glad."

" Oh, shall you ?" she said, with her transparent sin-
cerity. " And you won't forget Thursdays 1 But any
day at five we have tea."

" Thank you," Verrian said. I might forget the
Thursdays, but I couldn't forget all the days of the
week."

Miss Andrews laughed and blushed at once. " Then
we shall expect you every day."

" Well, every day but Thursday," he promised.

When the mother and daughter had gone Mrs. Ver-
rian said, " She is a great admirer of yours, Philip.
She's read your story, and I suspect she wants an op-
portunity to talk with you about it."

" You mean Mrs. Andrews ?"
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FENNEL AND RUE

" Yes. I suppose the daugliter hasn't waited for an
opportunity. The mother had read that publisher's
paragraph about your invalid, and wanted to know if
you had ever heard from her again. Women are per-
sonal in their literary interests."

Philip asked, in dismay, " You didn't give it away
did you, mother ?"

" Certainly not, my dear. You have brought me up
too carefully."

" Of course. I didn't imagine you had."

Then, as they could not pretend to look at the pict-
ures any longer, they went away, too. Their issue into
the open air seemed fraught with novel emotion for
Mrs. Verrian. " Well, now," she said, " I have seen
the woman I would be willing my son should marry."

" Child, you mean," Philip said, not pretending that
he did not know she meant Miss Andrews.

" That girl," his mother returned, " is innocence it-
self. Oh, Philip, dear, do marry her !"

" Well, I don't know. If her mother is behaving as
sagely with her as you are with me the chances are that
she won't let me. Besides, I don't know that I want
to marry quite so much innocence."

" She is conscience incarnate," his mother uttered,
perfervidly. " You could put your very soul in her
keeping."

" Then you would be out of a job, mother."

" Oh, I am not worthy of the job, my dear. I have
always felt that. I am too complex, and sometimes I
can't see the right alone, as she could."

Philip was silent a moment while he lost the personal
point of view. " I suspect we don't see the right when
we see it alone. We ought to see the wrong, too."

" Ah, Philip, don't let your fancy go after that girl !"

" Miss Andrews ? I thought — "
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FENNEL AND KUE

" Don't you be complex, my dear. You know I mean
Miss Shirley. What has become of her, I wonder. I
heard Miss Andrews asking you."

" I wasn't able to tell her. Do you want me to try
telling you ?"

" I would rather you never could."

Philip laughed sardonically. " N'ow, I shall forget
Thursdays and all the other days, too. You are a very
unwise parent, mother."

They laughed with each other at each other, and
treated her enthusiasm for Miss Andrews as the joke
it partly was. Mrs. Verrian did not follow him up
about her idol, and a week or so later she was able to
aifect a decent surprise when he came in at the end of
an afternoon and declined the cup of tea she proposed
on the ground that he had been taking a cup of tea with
the Andrewses. " You have really been there ?"

" Didn't you expect me to keep my promise ?"

" But I was afraid I had put a stumbling-block in the
way."

" Oh, I found I could turn the consciousness you
created in me into literary material, and so I was rather
eager to go. I have got a point for my new story out
of it. I shall have my fellow suffer all I didn't suffer
in meeting the girl he knows his mother wants him to
marry. I got on very well with those ladies. Mrs.
Andrews is the mother of innocence, but she isn't in-
nocence. She managed to talk of my story without
asking about the person who wanted to anticipate the
conclusion. That was what you call complex. She was
insincere; it was the only thing she wanted to talk
about."

" I don't believe it, Philip. But what did Miss
Andrews talk about ?"

" Well, she is rather an optimistic conscience. She
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FENNEL AND RUE

talked about books and plays that some people do not
think are quite proper. I have a notion that, where the
point involved isn't a fact of her own experience, she
is not very severe about it. You think that would be
quite safe for me ?"

" Philip, I don't like your making fun of her !"

" Oh, she wasn't insipid ; she was only limpid. I
really like her, and, as for reverencing her, of course I
feel that in a way she is sacred." He added, after a
breath, " Too sacred. We none of us can expect to
marry Eve before the Fall now; perhaps we have got
over wanting to."

" You are very perverse, my dear. But you will get
over that."

" Don't take away my last defence, mother."

Verrian began to go rather regularly to the Andrews
house, or, at least, he was accused of doing it by Miss
Macroyd when, very irregularly, he went one day to
see her. " How did you know it ?" he asked.

" I didn't say I knew it. I only wished to know it.
Now I am satisfied. I met another friend of yours
on Sunday." She paused for him to ask who; but
he did not ask. " I see you are dying to know what
friend : Mr. Bushwick."

" Oh, he's a good-fellow. I wonder I don't run across
him."

" Perhaps that's because you never call on Miss Shir-
ley." Miss Macroyd waited for this to take effect, but
he kept a glacial surface towards her, and she went on :
" They were walking together in the park at noon. I
suppose they had been to church together."

Verrian manifested no more than a polite interest in
the fact. He managed so well that he confirmed Miss
Macroyd in a tacit conjecture. She went on: "Miss
Shirley was looking quite blooming — for her. But so

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PENNEL AND RUE

was he, for that matter. Why don't you ask if they in-
quired for you?"

" I thought you would tell me without."

" I will tell you if he did. He was very cordial in
his inquiries ; and I had to pretend, to gratify him, that
you were very well. I implied that you came here every
Tuesday, but your Thursdays were dedicated to Miss
Andrews."

" You are a clever woman, Miss Macroyd. I should
never have thought of so much to say on such an un-
interesting subject. And Miss Shirley showed no curi-
osity ?"

" Ah, she is a clever woman, too. She showed the
prettiest kind of curiosity — so perfectly managed. She
has a studio — I don't know just how she puts it to use
— ^with a painter girl in one of those studio apartment
houses on the West Side : The Veronese, I believe. You
must go and see her; I'll let you have next Tuesday
off ; Tuesday's her day, too."

" You are generosity itself. Miss Macroyd."

" Yes, there's nothing mean about me," she returned,
in slang rather older than she ordinarily used. " If
you're not here next Tuesday I shall know where you
are."

" Then I must take a good many Tuesdays off, un-
less I want to give myself away."

" Oh, don't do that, Mr. Verrian ! Please ! Or else
I can't let you have any Tuesday off."

XXI

Upon the whole, Verrian thought he would go to see
Miss Shirley the next Tuesday, but he did not say so
to Miss Macroyd. 'Now that he knew where the girl
was, all the peculiar interest she had inspired in him
renewed itself. It was so vivid that he could not pay
his usual Thursday call at Miss Andrews's, and it filled
his mind to the exclusion of the new story he had begun
to write. He loafed his mornings away at his club, and
he lunched there, leaving his mother to lunch alone,
and was dreamily preoccupied in the evenings which
he spent at home, sitting at his desk, with the paper
before him, unable to coax the thoughts from his brain
to its alluring blank, but restive under any attempts of
hers to talk with him.

In his desperation he would have gone to the theatre,
but the fact that the ass who rightfully called him-
self Verrian was playing at one of them blocked his
way, through his indignation, to all of them. By Sat-
urday afternoon the tedious time had to be done some-
thing with, and he decided to go and see what the ass
was like.

He went early, and found himself in the end seat of
a long row of many rows of women, who were prolong-
ing the time of keeping their hats on till custom obliged
them to take them off. He gave so much notice to the
woman next him as to see that she was deeply veiled as
well as widely hatted, and then he lapsed into a dreary
muse, which was broken by the first strains of the over-

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ture. Then he diverted himself by looking round at
all those ranks of women lifting their arms to take out
their hat-pins and dropping them to pin their hats to
the seat-backs in front of them, or to secure them some-
how in their laps. Upon the whole, he thought the
manoeuvre graceful and pleasing; he imagined a con-
solation in it for the women, who, if they were forced
by public opinion to put off their charming hats, would
know how charmingly they did it. Each turned a lit-
tle, either her body or her head, and looked in any case
out of the corner of her eyes; and he was phrasing it
all for a scene in his story, when he looked round at
his neighbor to see how she had managed, or was
managing, with her veil. At the same moment she
looked at him, and their eyes met.

"ilfr. Verrian!"

"Miss Shirley r

The stress of their voices fell upon different parts
of the sentences they uttered, but did not commit either
of them to a special role.

" How very strange we should meet here !" she said,
with pleasure in her voice. " Do you know, I have been
wanting to come all winter to see this man, on account
of his name ? And to think that I should meet the other
Mr. Verrian as soon as I yielded to the temptation."

" I have just yielded myself," Verrian said. " I
hope you don't feel punished for yielding."

" Oh, dear, no ! It seems a reward."

She did not say why it seemed so, and he suggested,
" The privilege of comparing the histrionic and the lit-
erary Verrian?"

^' Could there be any comparison ?" she came back,
gayiy.

" I don't know. I haven't seen the histrionic Verrian
yet."

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FENNEL AND RUE /

j
They were laughing when the curtain rose, and the
histrionic Verrian had his innings for a long, long first
act. When the curtain fell she turned to the literary
Verrian and said, " Well V

" He lasted a good while,'' Verrian returned.
" Yes. Didn't he ?" She looked at the little watch
in her wristlet. " A whole hour ! Do you know, Mr.
Verrian, I am going to seem very rude. I am going
to leave you to settle this question of superiority; I
know you'll be impartial. I have an appointment —
with the dressmaker, to be specific — at half-past four,
and it's half-past three now, and I couldn't well leave
in the middle of the next act. So I will say good-bye
now — "

" Don't !" he entreated. " I couldn't bear to be left
alone with this dreadful double of mine. Let me go
out with you."

" Can I accept such self-sacrifice ? Well !"
She had put on her hat and risen, and he now stepped
out of his place to let her pass and then followed her.
At the street entrance he suggested, " A hansom, or a
simple trolley ?"

" I don't know," she murmured, meditatively, looking
up the street as if that would settle it. " If it's only
half-past three now, I should have time to get home
more naturally."

" Oh ! And will you let me walk with you ?"
" Why, if you're going that way."
" I will say when I know which way it is."
They started on their walk so blithely that they did
not sadden in the retrospect of their joint experiences at
Mrs. Westangle's. By the time they reached the park
gate at Columbus Circle they had come so dictinctly
to the end of their retrospect that she made an offer of
letting him leave her, a very tacit offer, but unmistaka-

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FENNEL AND KUE

ble, if he chose to take it. He interpreted her hesita-
tion as he chose. " No," he said, " it won't be any
longer if we go up through the park."

She drew in her breath softly, smoothing down her
muff with her right hand while she kept her left in it.
" And it will certainly be pleasanter." When they
were well up the path, in that part of it where it de-
flects from the drive without approaching the street too
closely, and achieves something of seclusion, she said:
" Your speaking of him just now makes me want to
tell you something, Mr. Verrian. You would hear
of it very soon, anyway, and I feel that it is always best
to be very frank with you; but you'll regard it as a
secret till it comes out."

The currents that had been playing so warmly in
and out of Verrian's heart turned suddenly cold. He
said, with joyless mocking, " You know, I'm used to
keeping your secrets. I shall feel honored, I'm sure,
if you trust me with another."

" Yes," she returned, pathetically, " you have always
been faithful — even in your wounds." It was their joint
tribute to the painful past, and they had paid no other.
She was looking away from him, but he knew she was
aware of his hanging his head. " That's all over now,"
she uttered, passionately. " What I wanted to say — to
tell you — is that I am engaged to Mr. Bushwick."

He could have answered that she had no need to tell
him. The cold currents in and out of his heart stiffened
frozenly and ceased to flow; his heart itself stood still
for an eternal instant. It was in this instant that he
said, " He is a fine fellow." Afterwards, amid the
wild bounding of his recovered pulse, he could add,
" I congratulate him ; I congratulate you both."

" Thank you," she said. " No one knows as I do
how good he is — has been, all through." Probably she

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FENNEL AND KUE

had not meant to convey any reproach to Verrian by
Bushwick's praise, but he felt reproach in it. " It —
only happened last week. You do wish me happy, don't
you ? No one knows what a winter I have had till now.
Everything seeming to fail — "

She choked, and did not say more. He said, aimless-
ly, " I am sorry — "

" Let me sit down a moment," she begged. And she
dropped upon the bench at which she faltered, and
rested there, as if from the exhaustion of running.
When she could get her breath she began again : " There
is something else I want to tell you."

She stopped. And he asked, to prompt her, " Yes ?"

" Thank you," she answered, piteously. And she
added, with superficial inconsequence, " I shall always
think you were very cruel."

He did not pretend not to know what she meant, and
he said, " I shall always think so, too. I tried to re-
venge myself for the hurt your harmless hoax did my
vanity. Of course, I made believe at the time that I
was doing an act of justice, but I never was able to
brave it out afterwards."

" But you were — you were doing an act of justice.
I deserved what you said, but I didn't deserve what has
followed. I meant no harm — it was a silly prank, and
I have suffered for it as if it were a crime, and the
consequences are not ended yet. I should think that, if
there is a moral government of the universe, the Judge
of all the earth would know when to hold His hand.
And now the worst of it is to come yet." She caught
Verrian's arm, as if for help.

" Don't— don't !" he besought her. " What will peo-
ple think?"

" Yes, yes !" she owned, releasing him and "withdraw-
ing to the other end of the seat.

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FENNEL AND KUE

" But it almost drives me wild. ^\^at sliall I do ?
You ought to know. It is your fault. You have
frightened me out of daring to tell the truth."

Had he, indeed, done that? Verrian asked himself,
and it seemed to him that he had done something like it.
If it was so, he must help her over her fear now. He
answered, bluntly, harshly : " You must tell him all
about it — "

" But if he won't believe me ? Do you think he will
believe me ? Would you believe me ?"

" You have nothing to do with that. There is nothing
for you but to tell him the whole story. You mustn't
share such a secret with any one but your husband.
When you tell him it will cease to be my secret."

" Yes, yes."

" Well, then, you must tell him, unless — "

" Yes," she prompted.

Then they were both silent, looking intensely into
each other's eyes. In that moment all else of life
seemed to melt and swim away from Verrian and leave
him stranded upon an awful eminence confronting
her.

" Hello, hello !" a gay voice called, as if calling to
them both. " What are you two conspiring ?" Bush-
wick, as suddenly as if he had fallen from the sky or
started up from the earth, stood before them, and gave
a hand to each — ^his right to Verrian, his left to Miss
Shirley. " How are you, Verrian ? How are you. Miss
Shirley ?" He mocked her in the formality of his ad-
dress. " I've been shadowing you ever since you came
into the park, but I thought I wouldn't interrupt till
you seemed to have got through your conversation. May
I ask what it was all about ? It seemed very absorbing,
from a respectful distance."

" Very absorbing, indeed," Miss Shirley said, making
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FENNEL AND KUE

room for him between them. " Sit down and let me tell
you. You're to be a partner in the secret."

" Silent partner/' Bushwick suggested.

" I hope you'll always be silent/' the girl shared in
his drolling. She began and told the whole story to
the last detail, sparing neither herself nor Verrian,
who listened as if he were some one else not concerned,
and kept saying to himself, " What courage !" Bush-
wick listened as mutely, with a face that, to Verrian's
eye, seemed to harden from its light jocosity into a
severity he had not seen in it before. " It was some-
thing," she ended towards Bushwick, with a catch in her
breath, " that you had to know."

" Yes," he answered, tonelessly.

" And now — she attempted a little forlorn play-
fulness — " don't you think he gave me what I de-
served ?"

Bushwick rose up and took her hand under his arm,
keeping his left hand upon hers.

"He! Who?"

" Mr. Verrian."

" I don't know any Mr. Verrian. Come, you'll take
cold here."

He turned his back on Verrian, who fancied a tremor
in her hat, as if she would look round at him ; but then,
as if she divined Bushwick's intention, she did not look
round, and together they left him.

It was days before Verrian could confess himself
of the fact to his mother, who listened with the justice
instinctive in her. She still had not spoken when he
ended, and he said, " I have thought it all over, and
I feel that he did right. He did the only thing that
a man in love with her could do. And I don't wonder
he's in love with her. Yes " — he stayed his mother,
imperatively — " and such a man as he, though he

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FENNEL AND RUE

ground me in the dirt and stamped on me, I will say
it, is worthy of any woman. He can believe in a wom-
an, and that's the first thing that's needed to make a
woman like her, true. I don't envy his job." He
was speaking self-contradictorily, irrelevantly, illogical-
ly, as a man thinks. He went on in that way, getting
himself all out. " She isn't single-hearted, but she's
faithful. She'll never betray him — ^now. She's never
given him any reason to distrust her. She's the kind
that can keep on straight with any one she's begun
straight with. She told him all that before me be-
cause she wanted me to know — to realize — that she Jiad
told him. It took courage."

Mrs. Verrian had thought of generalizing, but she
seized a single point. " Perhaps not so much courage
as you think. You mustn't let such bravado impose
upon you, Philip. I've no doubt she knew her
ground."

" She took the chance of his casting her off."

" She knew he wouldn't. She knew him, and she
knew you. She knew that if he cast her off — "

" Mother ! Don't say it ! I can't bear it !"

His mother did not say it, or anything more, then.
Late at night she came to him. " Are you asleep,
Philip?"

"Asleep? ir

" I didn't suppose you were. But I have had a note
to-day which I must answer. Mrs. Andrews has asked
us to dinner on Saturday. Philip, if you could see
that sweet girl as I do, in all her goodness and sin-
cerity— "

" I think I do, mother. And I wouldn't be guilty
of her unhappiness for the world. You must decline."

" Well, perhaps you are right." Mrs. Verrian went
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PENNEL AND RUE

awaj, softly sighing. As she sealed her reply to Mrs.
Andrews, she sighed again, and made the reflection
which a mother seldom makes with regard to her son,
before his marriage, that men do not love women for
their goodness.

THE 'EKD

^i^l'f^f^^^'^.^^'^/ V ■^ >^ f i

Bc^iv,::-:--,:^,-

PS
2025

1908

Howells, William Dean
Fennel and rue

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UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

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