One of My Sons — By the Light of a Guttering Candle

BY THE LIGHT OF A GUTTERING CANDLE

My amazement was unaffected, and so overwhelming I hardly understood myself.

His wife, Mille-fleurs!

Alas, then, for Hope, who, in her unthinking if generous love for this man, was prepared for any other grief than this!

Yet why "alas"?

Had she not told me that her greatest wish, her supreme desire, was to see his character restored to its old standing in her eyes, and had he not at this moment cleared himself of the one sin her womanly heart would find it hardest to pardon?

The cry of "poor Hope!"

with which my heart was charged changed to "happy Hope," and my composure, which had been sadly shaken, was slowly returning, when the insoluable mystery of the situation absorbed me again, and I glanced at Mr. Gryce to see how he had been affected by Mr. Gillespie's announcement.

This aged detective, who, when I last looked his way, was standing alone in the doorway, now had Sweetwater at his side,--that agile young man having bounded into the room before the words which had made so great a change in the situation had fully left Mr. Gillespie's lips; and the contrast of expression as seen in the two faces was noticeable.

Sweetwater, young in experience, young in feeling, reflected in look and attitude the sensations of awakening sympathy and interest with which I own my own breast was full, while the older detective, with characteristic prudence, withheld his judgment, and, consequently, his sympathy, for the explanations which such an avowal from such a man certainly demanded.

Indeed, the situation might very naturally suggest to one so accustomed to the seamy side of human nature, that this sudden demise of an inconvenient witness chimed in too opportunely with the need of the man he had come there to arrest, for it to be viewed without suspicion.

There was, however, only a tinge of this feeling in his voice as he quietly remarked: "I thought you buried your _wife_ five years ago in Cornwall."

"And I thought so also," was Leighton Gillespie's quiet reply.

"For many, many wretched weeks and months I believed this in common with all my friends.

Then--but it is a long story, Mr. Gryce.

Do you require me to relate it now and _here_?"

The reverence with which he allowed his hand to touch rather than fall on the breast he had so carefully covered from our curious gaze spoke volumes.

At the sight of this simple action, both men bent their heads.

I doubt if he noticed it.

A stray lock which had escaped from the coverlet and now hung curling and glittering over the straw which protruded from the wretched pallet, had attracted his eye.

Lifting it with a lingering touch, he put it softly out of sight; then he quietly said: "I would like to have one fact made known to the public.

My father was ignorant to the last that it was a stranger and not my wife we buried in Cornwall.

There were reasons which made it difficult for me to tell him that Mrs. Gillespie still lived; and while I make no excuses for the silence I maintained towards him on this subject, I acknowledge that to it are due my present position and the misery I am now under of seeing the darling of my heart die in an attic where I would not house a dog."

The accents of heartfelt sorrow are not to be mistaken.

The air of severity with which Mr. Gryce had hitherto surveyed this supposed criminal softened into a look more in keeping with his native benevolence, but he had no reply ready, and the silence became painful.

Indeed, the situation was not an easy one for even so experienced a man as Mr. Gryce to handle, and, noting his embarrassment, I bounded into the room and took my place at his side, much as Sweetwater had done.

Mr. Gillespie scarcely remarked this new inroad upon his privacy.

He doubtless took me for another police-officer, and as such not to be noted or counted.

But the detectives showed some surprise at my intrusion, which seeing, I turned to Mr. Gryce and said: "If you will excuse my presumption I should like to speak to Mr. Gillespie."

The latter started, possibly at my tone, and, wheeling about, gazed at my bare head and drenched figure with sharp curiosity in which a growing recognition soon became visible.

I at once bowed.

"You remember me," I suggested.

"I am Mr. Outhwaite.

If you will pardon my method of entrance and the proof which it gives of my connection with these men, I should like to offer you my assistance at this crisis.

Mr. Gryce evidently wishes some conversation with you, which you rightly hesitate to accord him in a place made sacred by the presence of your dead wife.

If you will have confidence in me, I will watch this room while you go below.

No one shall approach the bed and no one shall enter the room, if Mr. Gryce will leave a guard at the door.

Will you accept this service?

It is sincerely tendered."

He stood perplexed, eyeing me with mingled doubt and astonishment;

then, turning with an inexpressible look of longing towards the one object of his care, he cried: "You do not understand or you would not ask me to leave her, not for a moment.

I have not had her so near me, so near my hand, so near my heart, these many minutes in years.

She cannot rise and run away from me now.

She does not even wish to.

This is a happiness to me you cannot appreciate, a happiness I cannot endure seeing cut short.

Leave me, then, I pray, and come again when she has been laid in her grave.

You will find me ready to receive you, ready to explain----" "You ask the impossible," interrupted Mr. Gryce.

"Some explanations will not bide the convenience of even so recent a mourner as yourself.

If you do not wish to be taken immediately from this place, you will make some few things clear to us.

What has this woman had to do with your father's death?"

"Nothing."

The fire with which Leighton Gillespie uttered this word made us both start.

Aghast at what struck me as a direct falsehood, I instinctively opened my lips.

But Mr. Gryce made me an imperceptible gesture, and I refrained from carrying out my inconsiderate impulse.

"I see," continued the unhappy man, "that suspicions which I had supposed confined to my brothers and myself have involved my innocent wife.

This is more than I can bear.

I will at once make known to you my miserable story."

Mr. Gryce drew up a chair and sat down.

As there was no other in the room we knew what that meant.

The damp air was beginning to tell upon the rheumatic old man.

Attention being thus called to the open window, Sweetwater moved over and closed it.

Never shall I forget the look which Leighton Gillespie cast towards the bed as that broken and ill-fitting sash came rattling down.

"See if the hall is clear," said Mr. Gryce.

The young detective crossed to the door.

As he opened it and looked out, a gust of noisy laughter rose from below, mingled with the shrill sound of a woman's singing, the same, doubtless, which we had previously heard in front.

These tones, heard amid brawl and shouting, seemed to pierce Mr. Gillespie to the heart.

Mr. Gryce, who saw everything, motioned to Sweetwater to close the door as he had the window.

Sweetwater complied by shutting himself out.

This was an act of self-denial which I felt called upon to emulate.

"Shall I join Mr. Sweetwater?"

I asked.

It was Mr. Gillespie who replied: "No. I wish more than one listener; let the lawyer stay."

I was only too happy to remain.

Wet as I was, I felt anxious to hear what this man so singled out by Hope had to say in explanation of his relations to the wretched woman he now acknowledged to be his wife.

He seemed in haste to make them.

"Seven years ago this fall," he began, "I met this woman, then a girl."

"Wait!"

put in Mr. Gryce; "there is a point which must first be settled."

And, advancing to the cot guarded so jealously by the man before him, he laid his hand upon the coverlet.

"You will allow me," he said firmly, as with a gentle enough touch he drew it softly aside.

"How came this woman--pardon me, how came Mrs. Gillespie to die thus suddenly?"

The unhappy husband, after his first recoil of outraged feeling, forced himself into a recognition of the detective's rights, and, with apparent resignation, rejoined: "I should have come to that in time.

She died, as you can readily perceive, from exposure.

Driven from Mother Merry's miserable quarters by some terror for which, perhaps, she had no name, she wandered in and out among the docks for two wretched days and nights, often dragging her feet through the ooze of the river, so that her garments were never dry and are not so yet.

At last she came here, where once before she had found shelter in a biting storm.

_Here!

_ But it is a better place than the wharves, and I am glad God guided her to even so poor a refuge.

She was raving with fever when she came straggling into the room below.

But after the warmth struck her and she had tasted something, she came to herself again, and then--and then she sent for me."

He paused.

I did not yet understand him or the circumstances which made this situation possible, but a strange reverence began to mingle with my wonder,--not for the man--I could not feel that yet; but for a love which could infuse such feeling into the lightest allusion he made to this beloved, if wretched waif.

"There was a doctor here when I came," he speedily continued.

"You can find him;--he will tell no different tale from mine--but no doctor could help her after those nights of bitter cold and exposure, and I paid him to leave me alone with her; and she died in my arms.

May I tell you why this was everything to me?

Why, the happiness of having received her last sigh is so great, that I have no room for resentment against you for this intrusion, and hardly feel the shame of being found in this place, with my dead darling lying in her miserable rags on this hideous pallet!"

"You may tell us," assented Mr. Gryce, replacing the coverlet over the face upon which was fast settling that look of peace which is Death's last gift to the living.

Mr. Gillespie's tone grew deeper; it could hardly have grown more tender or more solemn.

"I loved this woman.

She was young when I first saw her.

So was I. There were no haggard lines about her dancing eyes and laughing lips then.

She was a vision of--well, I will not say beauty; she was never beautiful--but of--I cannot tell you what; I can only say that my life began on that day, not to end till she died, a half-hour ago.

"I married her.

She was not a woman to take into my father's house;

perhaps not into any family circle.

The stage was her home, the stage from which I took her; but I did not know this; I simply knew that she was wild in spirit, and unused to household ways and social restrictions.

But had I understood her then as I do now, I doubt if I would have acted any differently.

I was headstrong in those days and quite reckless enough to grasp at what I felt to be my own, even if aware it would fall to nothing in my frenzied clutch.

"I took her into my father's family.

I took this wild bird out of its native air, and shut it up behind the strict bars of a conventional household.

One promise only I exacted from her as the price of this gracious act on my part.

She was never under any pretext, not even in the event of my death, to return to the stage.

Poor child!

she has kept that promise.

Perhaps it is all she has kept: kept it, though hungry; kept it when the wild craving for morphine tore at her breast and brain and she could have got the drug for one strain from her marvellous voice; kept it, though her veins burned with longing for the movement that was her life, and the weights on her tongue lay heavy on her heart, which beat truly only while she was dancing or singing.

It was her dancing and singing which had won my heart; or, rather, the woman when dancing and singing; yet I cut her off from these natural expressions of the turbulent joy springing from her exuberant nature, and expected her to be satisfied with my love and the routine of a well-regulated household.

This was my folly; a folly born of the delight I took in her simple presence.

I thought that she loved me as I did her, and found in love's madness the recompense for what she had laid aside.

But I had not read her nature.

No man could fill her heart as she filled mine.

She was a genius,--an untamable one,--and the restiveness of her temperament made demands which could only find relief in spontaneous song or rhythmic movement.

"My father, who loved quiet women--women like my mother, whose force lay hidden in such sweetness that she shines with almost a saint's glory in our memory--could not understand my wife's temperament; and, consequently, could not show even common patience towards her.

He was not harsh in his treatment of her, but he failed to give her credit for so much as wishing to conform to his ways and the habits of the people she must meet in our house.

When he came upon her, stealthily posing before our long mirror in the drawing-room, or caught floating down the stairs a faint echo of her magical voice in one of the tragic strains she best loved to sing, he showed such open shrinking and distaste that she flew for comfort to the one resource capable of undermining for me all hope of a better future.

I allude to her use of morphine.

"She had taken it before our marriage, but the fact was kept from me.

When I awoke to a realisation of the horror menacing my happiness, I devoted time, strength, and every means I then knew, to win her from this practice.

But I only partially succeeded.

She did not realise the harmfulness of this habit and could not be made to.

Eluding my vigilance, she resorted more and more to the drug I could never succeed in keeping out of her grasp, and it fell to me to stand in the breach thus made and keep the knowledge of this crowning humiliation from my father and brothers.

"Meanwhile my father, who was strictness itself in all matters of propriety, insisted upon her sitting opposite him at the table and comporting herself in every way as the lady of the house.

Just because he so dreaded comment and had so much pride in his own social standing and that of his sons, he kept her continually on view and carried her to parties and balls, thinking that his prestige would cause recognition to be given her by his friends.

And it did--but grudgingly!

Admired for what she was not, she was scorned for what she was.

I have seen her petted by some would-be society fine lady till my blood boiled, then marked the smile of supercilious sarcasm which would be thrown back upon her when her beautiful shoulders were turned.

Yet I had hopes, strong hopes of better days after the first strangeness of the new life should have worn away and her good impulses had had time to develop into motive powers for kind actions.

But it was not to be; never was to be.

The fiend whose power I had set myself to combat was far stronger than any force I could bring against him.

She grew worse--appeared once in public as she never before had appeared outside her own room, and my father, who was with her, never attempted to hold up his head again in his former unmoved fashion.

Claire, who came to us later, had no power to hold her mother back, and while she was still an infant, the inevitable occurred--my wife ran away from us.

"It was the first overwhelming shock my hitherto unfailing faith had had to sustain.

She had slipped away at nightfall without money and almost without farewell.

The merest note left on the piano in our little room on the third floor told me she had tried to be happy in a domestic life, but had failed; and begged me not to seek her, for she was stifling for air and freedom.

"And I have no doubt she was.

Seeing, since, where she has found pleasure, and under what conditions the old gay smile has revisited her lips, I have no doubt that the very luxury we prized was oppressive to her.

But then I only thought of the dangers and privations she must encounter away from my protection; and, confiding to no one the calamity which had befallen me, I rushed from the house and sought her in every place which suggested itself to me as a possible refuge.

It was a frenzied search, and ended in my coming upon her, ten days after her disappearance, in a plain but decent lodging-house.

Her money was gone, and she lay in that heavy sleep which has no such hallowing effect upon the beauty as this we look upon now.

"Some men's love would have sickened and failed them at this degrading sight.

But though a change took place in the feeling which had held me in an entranced state ever since my marriage, it was a change which deepened, rather than deadened, the affection with which I regarded her.

From a creature whose untold charm bewitched and bewildered me, she became to me a sacred charge for which I was responsible to God and man; and while she still lay there and I stood in a maze of misery before her, I vowed that, come what would, I would remain true to her and by means of this faith and through the unfailing patience it would call forth, make what effort I could to stay her on the brink of that precipice she seemed doomed to perish by.

"But I was to be tried in ways I had little foreseen.

She was glad to see me when she woke, and readily consented to return to her home and her child.

But in two months she was off again, and this time I did not find her so easily.

When I did, she was in such a hopeless condition of mental and moral degradation that I took her to a sanitarium, where I had every reason to expect that a proper secrecy would be maintained as to her real complaint and unhappy condition.

For my pride was still a torment to me, and an open rupture with my father too undesirable for me to risk a revelation of the true extent of the vagaries indulged in by his unwelcome daughter-in-law.

Her escapades, serious as they were, had affected him but little.

For I had so closely followed her in her sudden flittings that we were looked upon as having left home together on some hurried tour or at the call of some thoughtless impulse.

He had believed us out of town, while I was engaged in hunting the city through for her.

"But after a week spent in the sanitarium, I perceived by the looks I encountered, on every side, that my secret was discovered; and was thus in a measure prepared when the door of my room opened one day upon the stern figure of my father.

He had heard the true cause of my wife's condition, and a stormy scene was before me.

"It was then that I regretted that my early opportunities had been slighted, and that, instead of being independent of his bounty, I was not considered capable of earning my own living.

Had my home been one of my own making, I might have stood up and faced him at that hour with a resolution to hold by my wife, which in itself might have ensured his respect.

But I was tied hand and tongue by the realisation of all I owed him, was owing him, and was likely to owe him to the end of my days.

I was not master of my own life; how, then, could I propose to be the master of another's?

"My father, whose favourite I had never been, could not be expected to know what was passing in my heart; but he was not without a realisation of what he might find in the adjoining room, and, casting a glance that way, he asked coldly: "'Is she--Mrs. Gillespie--(he never called her by her given name) _awake_?'

"No question could have pierced my heart more poignantly.

It was not the hour for sleep, and the use of the word had intention in it.

But I subdued all signs of distress, and, calling her by name, bade her come out and greet father; after which I stood breathless, waiting for her appearance, conscious that it might be a smiling one, and equally that it might be--I dared not think what.

She was not always to be depended upon.

"She did not appear at once.

'Sit down, father,' I begged.

'She may be dressing.'

"And she was.

In a minute or two, as we stood watching, she threw open the door, and in an instant I saw that whatever hope I may have cherished of her creating a good impression in her partially recovered state, was an ill-founded one.

She was not in one of her depressed moods, but, what was worse, perhaps, in one of her ecstatic ones.

All her genius, and she had much, had taken fire under some impulse of her erratic brain, and she came into the room prepared to conquer in the only way she knew how.

Still young, still beautiful in her own way, which was that of no other woman, she glided into our presence in one rapturous whirl, a scarf floating from her neck, and a wreath of wild vine about her head.

I rushed to prevent her, but it was too late.

She _would_ dance, and she did, while my father, who had never seen her in this glowing state, drew me aside and watched with hard eyes, while she swayed and dipped and palpitated in what would have been a glorious ebullition of pure delight, had she not been my wife, and the man at my side as cold to her charm as the dew which stood out on my wretched forehead.

When I could bear no more, I flung my arms about her and she stopped, panting and frightened, like a bird caught in full flight.

'Sing,' I whispered to her; 'sing that air from _AEnone_'.

I thought the tragic pathos of her tones might make her dancing forgotten.

And they did in a way.

My father had never listened to any such dramatic rendering of a simple song before, and I saw that he was subdued by the feelings it awakened.

But I gathered no hope from this.

He had too little liking for public exhibitions of this kind on the part of women, for him to be affected long by any singing which was not that of the boudoir; and when, her first ebullition passed, she began to droop under the heavy reaction which inevitably followed these impulsive performances, I drew her into the other room, and shut the door.

Then I came back and faced him.

"He was standing in the window of the large but unlovely room, drumming restlessly on the panes before him.

As the light struck his head it brought to view the silver rapidly making its way through the dark locks he had been accustomed to pride himself upon, and a pang struck me at this sight, which made me quite dumb for the instant.

I

felt as if I, and not she, had been dancing over his heart.

Then my ever-present thought of the woman I had sworn to cherish returned and held me steady while he said: "'It is well that I have seen your wife once when the full spell was upon her.

Now I know what has come into the Gillespie family.

Leighton, do you love this woman?'

[Illustration: "SHE GLIDED INTO OUR PRESENCE IN ONE RAPTUROUS WHIRL"] "'Enough to bear your condemnation if you choose to condemn us,' I assured him.

"'Then take her away out of my sight and from the possible sight of my growing grandchild.

A dancing menad can be no mother to Claire.'

"'I will take her away,' I promised him.

'When this place has done all for her it can, I will carry her where she can offend no one but strangers.'

"'I would suggest an asylum,' he muttered.

It was the only unjust thing I ever knew him to propose.

"'She is not insane,' I objected.

"'She is not sane,' he rejoined.

'No opium-eater is.

But I will not force your conscience; only--let me never again see her in our home in Fifth Avenue.

_You_ will always be welcome.'

"I could not retort that I would enter no house from which she was thus peremptorily excluded.

The house in Fifth Avenue was my home, the home of my child; and about it clustered every dear association of my heart save those connected with my unhappy love.

"'A man who marries for a whim must expect unpleasant results,' my father resumed.

'You shall have what money you need for her establishment elsewhere; but this hemisphere is too narrow to harbour both her and myself.

Go to Europe, Leighton; there is more room there for your wife to dance in.'

"And I meant to follow this suggestion, but her health was not good enough for me to risk a voyage at this juncture, and we drifted West and put up at a place called Mountain Springs.

It was during our stay there, that, so far as the world is concerned, the story of my married life ended.

But for me it had only begun.

The facts regarding my wife and her connection with that great catastrophe which robbed more than one household of wife and mother differed much in reality from those reported to the world and accepted by my own family.

She did not perish in that wreck, though I thought she had, and mourned her loss for many months.

She had merely taken advantage of the circumstances to effect another escape.

How, I will endeavour to relate, hard as it is to disclose the failings of one so dear to me.

"My wife, whose natural longings had been modified rather than extinguished by her experiences at the sanitarium, soon awakened to the old sense of restraint and a desire to enjoy again the irresponsibilities of her early Bohemian life.

But having gained wisdom by her past experiences, she allowed no expression of her feelings to escape her; and, relying on the effect produced upon me by her apparent content, merely asked the privilege of enjoying the sports indulged in by the other boarders.

Fearing to cross her too much, I gave her all possible liberty, but when she begged to go on a certain excursion--the excursion which ended so disastrously for all concerned--I felt forced to refuse her, for I had made an arrangement that day which would prevent me from accompanying her.

However, after repeated solicitation, I yielded to her importunities and gave her my consent, at which she showed much joy, and lavished many expressions of fondness upon me.

Had my suspicions not been lulled by the undisturbed peacefulness of the last few months, these open demonstrations of affection might have occasioned me some alarm, for they were not without a suggestion of remorse.

But I mistrusted nothing; I was too happy, and when I parted from her it was with the full intention of sacrificing for her pleasure the first real business engagement I had ever entered upon.

But I did not carry out this impulse; I merely made arrangements for the train to stop for me at the little station on the mountains where my affairs led me.

But I did not confide this plan to her till I was upon the point of leaving.

Then I told her she might look for me on the train immediately after passing Buckley, and while I wondered at the way she received my words, I thought the embarrassment she showed was due to surprise.

Alas!

it sprang from much deeper sources.

She had planned to leave me again, this time forever; and, baffled as she thought in the attempt, she succumbed for a little while to despair.

Then her fertile brain suggested an expedient.

Two trains left Mountain Springs that morning, one north and one south.

She would take the southern train, and lest she should be prematurely discovered in her flight and so be followed before she had found a refuge, she prevailed upon a girl over whom she had some influence, to exchange garments with her and take her place among the excursionists.

She little dreamed what lay before those excursionists.

As little did I realise that it was in behalf of a stranger I entered upon that mad chase after the runaway cars I had seen slip from the engine and go crashing down towards the train on which I believed my wife to be.

I knew those cars to be loaded with dynamite, for it was in connection with this fact I had come to this place, and the thought that they were destined to prove the destruction of the life I so much prized maddened me to such an extent that it was a mere matter of instinct for me to leap upon the engine I saw bounding to her rescue.

Had time been given me to think, I might not have shown such temerity, for I knew nothing of a fireman's duties or what would be expected of me by the engineer.

But I did not pause to think; I only stood ready to hazard my life for the woman I loved,--the woman whom I believed to be on the train I even then could see advancing up the valley.

Of that ride, its swirl and whirlwind rush, I remember little; every thought, every fear, was engrossed in the one question, How were we to save that train?

But two methods suggested themselves to me in my ignorance and isolation from the brave engineer.

Either we must overtake the cars and by coupling to them stay their downward rush to the main track below--a trick I did not understand--or we must crush so fiercely into them as to explode the dynamite with which they were loaded before they had a chance to collide with the advancing train.

That the latter catastrophe did not happen was not owing to any precaution on my part, for I do not remember that I had the least dread of personal destruction.

As I have just said, my one thought, my only thought in that dizzy descent, was to save her.

And I failed to do it; or so I had reason to think.

As you remember, all our efforts were in vain; the unspeakable occurred, and wreck, death, and disaster met my eyes when, after a period of blank darkness, I rose from the ground where I had been hurled by the force of that dynamite explosion.

Amid this wreck, in face of this death, I plunged in my search for her, and, as I believed, found her.

A loving husband cannot be deceived in his wife's clothes, and the fragments I handled told their tale, as I thought, only too well.

But, as you now know, it was not my wife who wore these clothes, though we buried her as such, and I mourned my lost love as no one who has not fixed his whole heart upon one object can possibly understand.

"My father, whose relief at this release can be readily imagined, endeavoured to calm my grief, not by sympathy, for that he could not feel, but by an unvarying kindness which assured me that, now that this obstacle to a right understanding between us had been removed, I might hope for the establishment of more cordial relations between us.

I was older now, and he more considerate of my many uncongenial ways and habits; besides, Claire made a tender bond between us, and with one of her baby smiles healed many a breach that might otherwise have separated us.

"I began to be content, when, having some business in a strange quarter of the city, I chanced to walk down East Fourteenth Street.

It was a holiday of some kind and there had been a procession.

The stir in the streets was just what usually follows the breaking up of long lines of people.

But this did not disturb me.

Claire had been unusually engaging that morning, and I was just rejoicing in the memory of her innocent prattle, when the band in the far distance broke out into a merry strain, and I saw on the sidewalk before me a cluster of people separate into a sort of ring, in the middle of which a woman stood poised with swaying arms, so like the image that was day by day receding farther and farther into the deep recesses of my memory, that a species of faintness came over me and I drew back, sick and half-blinded, directly in the path of the people pressing in my rear.

This caused me to receive a push from behind which effectually roused me and gave me strength to look again at one who could recall my lost Mille-fleurs.

I expected--how could I expect anything else?

--to be met by a strange face and an unknown smile.

But it was _her_ face, _her_ smile; and the figure, clad in such clothes as I had never, even in my worst dreams, associated with the woman to whom I had given my name, was _hers_.

Had God made two such women?

Two with such eyes, such hair, such instincts, and such genius?

Was this a sister of Mille-fleurs; a twin of my lost darling, of whose existence I had never heard?

God grant not!

I had buried Mille-fleurs, and with her, memories which this creature would only bring back to the destruction of my peace.

I dared not give way for one instant to the thought that this likeness was anything but a passing illusion which the next moment would dispel.

I dared not for my life.

And yet I stood staring; hearing and not hearing the shouts of wild applause rising around me, and was looking, yes, looking directly into her eyes, when they suddenly turned my way in startled recognition.

It was Mille-fleurs!

Mille-fleurs!

The woman I had buried was a stranger, and she who was making pastime for the passing crowd was _my wife_!

"I made no scene.

I accepted the fact as we accept any unforeseen catastrophe that comes upon us unawares, tearing up our peaceful present and making a chaos of the future.

As she was still dancing, though fitfully and with curious breaks, I stopped her by my steady look and held her so, till the crowd had melted away sufficiently for me to take her by the hand and lead her under the cover of the first small shop we came to.

Then I questioned her closely, and, when I understood all, asked her if she would go with me and be clothed and fed.

She answered with a startled look.

'I cannot!'

she cried, and wearily drooped her head.

'I am not worthy.'

"God knows what passed through my mind then.

I stood there in the wretchedness of this low shop, beside a counter from which the smell of stale tobacco rose in nauseous fumes, together with the sickening smell of partially decayed fruits--a flower in my button-hole (put there by little Claire), and before me this woman, loved as few of earth's best and worthiest have been, telling me with trembling lips what explained her rags, the degradation which had fallen on her beauty, and the whole pitiable downfall of a womanhood which once struck my heart as ideal and worthy of a man's unselfish worship.

"Drawing the flower from my button-hole, I crushed it in my hand.

If I could have donned the clothes of some of the men lolling about us in greedy curiosity, I would have done so at that moment, if only the contrast between our outer selves might have been less apparent.

But this was impossible, and I could only stand in silence in face of this wreck of bygone delights, and in one moment and under the gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes peering from behind the counter and gaping in at the doorway, live down my bitter humiliation at this untoward resurrection of a love I had learned to rejoice in as buried.

For this was no wretched waif of the streets I could pity and leave.

This was my wife, the mother of my child; the woman whom I had once vowed to hold in honour to the end, and to succour, no matter what her need or to what degradation she might come.

Besides, there was an appeal in her drooping attitude and quivering mouth which touched my heart in spite of my judgment.

I felt her misery as I had never felt my own; a misery all the more pronounced because of the joy so openly preceding it; and, feeling a fresh thrill in the old cord of union that had made our hearts one, I quietly asked her if she had lost all love for me.

She gave me one quick look; and I saw her eye quicken as she softly faltered, 'No. Only,' she made haste to add, 'I cannot live in big houses under the eyes of people who think my ways odd and wrong.

If you take me back to him I cannot help going wrong again.

But I would like something pretty to wear and something good to eat.'

"I took her to an East Side hotel.

I bought her clothes and gave her food, over which she laughed like a child.

Then I told her what I meant to do for her.

I would buy her a home in a pretty country place, where she need not fear intruding eyes.

There she should live with some woman I could trust and who would be kind to her.

A piano, music, flowers, books--she should have all, and if, in the course of time, she came to wish it, I would bring our child to see her.

Did she think she could be contented in a home like this?

Wouldn't it be better than the cold and squalor of the streets and these wild dances before unsympathetic eyes?

"She answered with a burst of affection which was real enough at the time; then asked if I was going to let my father know she was living.

This brought to light the spectre which had stood over against us ever since I first recognised her as the woman I had sworn to love and cherish.