CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The next morning Roger went before Anne awoke. In the afternoon a messenger brought a note asking to have his things sent to the office. At dusk the express came and Anne watched Roger's trunk down the stairs and the truck clang away over the grass-grown cobbles. When the last sound had died she went in, fed Rogie and let him kick for a while naked before the fire. When he crumpled in sleep upon the rug, Anne carried him to bed, to the crib back now beside the wide bed, hers alone. A little later she was asleep beside him.

The hours heaped themselves to days, the days dropped under their weight to nights. Each day was the same as another. Anne neither cried, regretted, nor rebelled. She did not even think. She seemed to be moving in a clear, white light that illuminated every cranny of the past, so that the shadows which had been her thoughts and reactions to Roger and the world, were now obliterated in this dazzling lucidity, a light so vivid and intense that nothing but itself existed, a wordless understanding and acceptance. Anne could not have said what it was she so clearly understood, but she moved in a petrifaction of calm. Her exhausted nerves were dead.

On the tenth day, Anne received a short note enclosing two-thirds of Roger's salary, with the receipt for the rent and the electric bill and asking her to make some arrangement for his seeing Rogie. On the third reading, the meaning penetrated and Anne faced the future.

The clear white light was gone. It was unclear and confused, filled with sudden, new needs and readjustments. Roger could not go on sending her so much of his salary. Nor did she wish to be dependent on him. If she gave nothing, she would take nothing for herself.

She would go back to work. She would have to sell her brain and obedience again to the highest bidder, give of her best, suit her hours to the order of another, give to the limit of her power, always conscious of others waiting to snatch this privilege from her. Outwardly her life would be the life before she met Roger. Inwardly it could never be that again. Rogie made it impossible. Neither girl nor wife, Anne faced the years. Only motherhood was left.

Hour after hour, Anne sat, tense and still, staring out across the garden, moving only to the need of Rogie. Unsuspected threads crossed and tangled her clearest purposes. She would go back again into the prison cell of some law office. She would begin again the deadening round that had once so disturbed Roger. Now it would not disturb him. From depths within, anger rose at the world, at life, at Roger. Into the pit of his belief he could throw all his own energy and hope, even the first loneliness,--if he felt any,--for past material comfort and little Rogie. She had no such pit. She would walk through the days, physically weary, empty of purpose except for Rogie. And he was so little, his demands for food and sleep and cleanliness, any kind woman could meet.

Anne sat until dawn, the darkness within as dense as the night without. Not until the first faint streaks of silver broke in the east did Anne see the thread of a path before her. She could not move on blindly into the future--a future like Hilda's Niche. To the limit of her power, she would straighten it, begin her new life with no thread running to the past. She would get a legal divorce, stipulate a small amount for Rogie's maintenance and fixed times and ways for Roger to see him.

Late that morning Anne went to a lawyer. As she moved across the outer office to the door marked private it gave her an extraordinary feeling of being two people, in two different spots at the same time--Anne Mitchell, private secretary, going to take dictation, and Anne Barton, wife of Roger Barton, mother of Roger Mitchell Barton, going to seek a divorce.

The lawyer Anne had selected because she had once written him a letter in a case John Lowell was handling, was an elderly man with sagging cheeks, passion-weary eyes, and a fastidious nicety of dress. Within the casque of his manner and clothes, the soul of man was rotted. His surprise at Anne's blond youth flashed for a second in his eyes, and then with lowered head, he listened with professional interest while she stated her wish briefly. When she had finished he looked up.

"Ah--incompatible, you say, quite incompatible. A great pity. Are you sure you've given the matter every possible consideration, Mrs. Barton?"

"Every possible consideration," Anne said sharply.

"Incompatible," he repeated, and his eyes stripped from the word every meaning but the connotation of physical repulsion. Anne's hands clenched and she wanted to run. But where? The world would give this same interpretation; under all the large vague terms with which people might cover them, this would be their thought. She turned her eyes quickly from the eyes moving with pretense of deep consideration over her flaming face and neck and body.

"Suppose you don't do anything definite for a time, Mrs. Barton. Nearly all young couples--ah--after the first two or three years--reach this point. It seems as if the first passion almost invariably runs its course in that time then--after a period of physical indifference--aversion often--if you have intellectual interests----"

Anne rose. "If you do not wish to take the case, please say so. I am not doing this hastily. I have thought it over very carefully."

"Ah--then there is perhaps nothing else to do," he said with a sudden change of tone. He was like a well-trained dog, refusing a bone until his master's permission allows him to snatch it. "You wish to institute proceedings directly, I suppose?"

"Yes. I would like you to act right away."

"Certainly. After all, Mrs. Barton, that is the brave thing to do--think, decide and act." His smile admitted Anne to the regions of masculine logic, uncluttered by the usual feminine sentimentality.

Ten minutes later, Anne was down again on the street. Dazed as if she had emerged into a strange world, she walked unseeing in the hurrying stream. She had done the one clear thing to do and yet she could not shake off the feeling that this act, instead of ending a situation, had created it. It had not existed until she had risen and spoken sharply to that vile old man. Until then she had been alone. Now she had admitted strangers. Before, her inner life had been her own; now, every one who heard of the Barton divorce would share it. They would surmise, and discuss, and nibble at her privacy.

Anne walked slowly along in the hot noon sunshine, up the hill to the cottage. This was changed, too. It was like a house, clean and straightened after a funeral, the flowers gone, the extra chairs removed. This was divorce of which one spoke so carelessly, this great emptiness to be filled with unglimpsed future. No one to consider now but herself. Every experience to be her own, unshared, unadjusted to another. It was like the clearness of a cold north wind that obliterates all softness, sharpens every outline. Clear, cold, stark, the future lay before her.

The next Thursday afternoon, as usual, a little before three, Anne let herself into the flat. At this hour, James was usually awake and Hilda busy warming the broth or malted milk he always took in the afternoon. But to-day, as Anne went up the stairs, she felt a thick silence envelop her, and before she had reached the top, she knew that they knew. For a moment she thought of slipping away. Then she went quietly on. They would have had to know soon. It did not matter.

In the kitchen, James Mitchell sat in his chair, the daily paper spread open on the reading rack. Hilda stood beside him. They might have been victims of Pompeii, stricken at their tasks. As Anne came quietly into the room and stood inside the door, Hilda turned frightened eyes upon her.

"What is it," she whispered piteously, "what is it, Annie? It isn't true?"

She pointed to the paper and Anne knew how they knew. The lawyer had indeed lost no time. Anne moved to the chair and took the paper.

"Anne vs. Roger Barton, incompatibility."

She laid the paper back on the rack. "Yes, it's true. Roger and I have separated."

The old man took the paper and tried to tear it, but it only rustled in his futile striving. He pulled at it and shook his head and then, with a supreme effort, tore it and rising a few inches in his chair, waved the torn pieces uncertainly.

"I--won't--have--it--do you--hear--you sha'n't--do--this." His thick muttering choked him and Hilda began to cry.

"Don't, papa, don't. It isn't good for you. Annie will explain."

The old man cried with her, at first helplessly like a child, then more violently. Anne took the torn paper from him and laid her hand on his shoulder.

"Be quiet, papa."

He shook her hold from him and again tried to speak. The contortion was terrible. Hilda put her arms about him, the effort strangled in a sob and Hilda held him close.

"There, there," she murmured, "don't cry, papa."

As she held him the sobs lessened. Anne stood looking at them, this extraordinary sight of her mother comforting her father, both of them locked together beyond her, opposing her; with every scrap of their strength clutching their own peace.

"Please," she began wearily, "stop this fuss. If you want to talk, I'll talk, but there's nothing to say. Roger and I don't agree. That's all. We'll both be freer to be ourselves, apart. That's all, really."

"Rub--bish," Hilda sputtered between her lessening sobs, but a little cheered at the familiar garb of a situation in words. Silence terrified Hilda. "Nonsense, Anne. Freer to be yourselves! Nobody expects to be free when they're married."

"Nobody--listens--to--me----" James began muttering again. "I--told--you--socialist--anarchist--nobody--in my own--house--I----"

"Don't, papa, don't get all stirred up again," Hilda patted his head soothingly. "You're getting along so nice and the doctor said----"

"To--hell--doctor," he spluttered, stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, and said in a quick, almost unintelligible rush, "I--won't--have it--disgrace--everybody--in--office--know----" his breath exhausted, he leaned back panting, and glared at Anne.

She returned his look quietly. In his rage and weakness he was not pitiful, only disgusting. Thin and gray and unshaven, he was like a mangy old dog, clinging to the dry bone of his respectability. Icy nausea swept Anne. The room began to move, to gyrate in mockery about her. She gripped the wall with her fingers, and the smooth coldness gave her strength.

"Listen, please, and then I don't want to talk about it any more." She knew that her words were audible because they were both looking at her, but her whole effort was concentrated in uttering them and she felt herself forming each syllable separately and throwing it at the two bewildered people before her. "We don't agree, and neither of us wishes to live like that; to hold each other, for what? I am economically independent. I can work. I don't have to stay for support. Roger will help with Rogie and we will go our own ways. We have grown apart spiritually----"

But the last word was too heavy a burden for Hilda's credulity. She went swiftly to Anne and would have put her arms about her, if Anne had not eluded.

"Don't, mamma. Please don't talk or ask me any questions. I am telling you exactly what it is."

"Anne Mitchell! Do you expect me to believe that? Grow apart spiritually! Anne--is there--don't be ashamed--to tell us--is there another woman?"

James Mitchell leaned avidly forward: "Old--sick--but--no man--deserts--my--daughter----"

Under cover of the hissing whisper, Hilda murmured rapidly, "Don't act hastily, Anne. All men----"

The muttering ceased, and Hilda broke off. But a faint shrug and an almost imperceptible nod toward the chair, spread before Anne's sickened sense, some long concealed, almost forgotten infidelity of the decaying old man in the chair.

"Stop. Both of you," she cried sharply. "There is no other woman. Roger has done nothing disgraceful. If you can't understand, I can't make you. We no longer love each other. Marriage is a free contract. It fitted one condition. It doesn't fit another. We've dissolved it."

The old man blinked and then turned piteously to Hilda. She went quickly to him. With her arms again about him, she flared at Anne.

"Anne Mitchell, you're doing a silly and wicked thing. You're--making--papa--miserable. You've no--right--in our old--age----"

James' fingers closed about hers. "Don't--cry--Hildy--children--ungrateful----"

And then, the walls began to dance about her, the two angry faces oscillated like grotesque masks, the floor was sinking under her. A great, peaceful darkness was coming towards her. At last she could let go, sink down into this soothing blackness. Anne swayed, clutched at the wall, and slid along its smoothness to the floor.

Twice she came to partial consciousness of a great bustle; some one was calling, footsteps rushed about, some one stepped over her and ran somewhere. Then she was being lifted and carried, and some one, not Hilda--it sounded like a faint, far echo of Charlotte Welles--said:

"There, she'll be all right now. Don't disturb her. Let her sleep as long as she can."

So dim that it was not clearly a thought at all, Anne was grateful for this suggestion. She heard the door to whatever place she was in close softly and footsteps recede.

When she woke she was in her own little room, the stars were shining and Belle was standing beside the bed. Anne tried to return the cheerful smile, but the effort did not get further than a slight motion of her lips.

"You poor little kid. Here, drink this." Belle held a glass to Anne's lips and supported her while she obeyed. "And then we'll talk. I wouldn't disturb you, but I have to get back on my case and we'll just settle one or two things first. No, I'm not going to talk about it. I don't want to know anything. But you're going away."

Anne gazed at her without interest.

"If you try to stick round here listening to moms' buzzing you'll have brain fever. But they'll buzz themselves out in a week and--" she was going to add, "be glad of it," but caught herself in time and said--"see the thing straight. Now, the only thing I want to know is whether you have any place you'd like to go. Several old patients have places here and there, inaccessible ranches and things, and I could fix up something. They're always inviting me but I'm not keen on solitude as you know." She chattered along, watching Anne with soft, loving eyes. The authority of her tone comforted Anne and she felt a little cheered.

"Of course, I'm not suggesting a high-class resort but somewhere you have never been, that's quiet."

Anne drew a deep sigh. Some new place where it was still!

"There are two places I can arrange for quickly and you can have your choice. One's down in Monterey County, on the coast, a ranch that hangs on a mountain side rising right out of the sea. It----"

Anne sat up. "No. No. Belle, not the sea." She looked past Belle, through the fog of the Bluff to the bar where the sea moaned its everlasting complaint. "I can't stand the sea, always moving and crying--never, never still. Oh," Anne shivered and Belle laid a large, cool hand on the hot little one gripping the comforter.

"All right, sisterkin. I get you. The sea is rather a fussy old party. Exit the sea."

Anne tried to smile. "It's--like the Social Revolution. It's been moaning away for centuries and it's just where it started."

A look of understanding crossed Belle's eyes and was gone before Anne looked up.

"Then the other's the thing you want. It's away up in the high Sierras. There's only an old couple as caretakers. You won't have to see much of them, but the old man--I saw him once--is as still as a tree. I should go crazy in two days but you'll love it."

High up in the mountains, higher and stiller even than the lake. And the old man like a tree. Anne's eyes filled with tears.

"But there's the cottage--all the things--I can't----"

"I'll fix that. I'll write to Roger; he'll have to know you're not there anyhow, and let him struggle with storage if he wants to."

"But--I can't stay away very long. I'm not going to take money from Roger--I'm going to work, I----"

Belle put both hands very gently on Anne's shoulder and forced her back on the pillows from which she had risen in nervous need to manage the details of her going.

"Sisterkin, you've passed out of your own authority now; you're in mine. You're going, and you're going to-morrow and you'll stay until you're well."

"I'm not sick."

"No? All right. But you will be if you don't do as you're told. Listen, kiddie. Is there any real reason why you can't go and go to-morrow?"

Anne shook her head. There was no reason beyond her own desire. There never would be any more. Anne tried to smile. She did not want to cry, not even before Belle.

"How long are you going to make me stay, nurse?"

"There, that's the way to behave. Stay? Until you want to come back. Until--you want noise, jangling cars and people rushing round and the whole silly mess."

"Then--I'll--never--come."

"Don't then." She smoothed the pillows, stroked back the hair from Anne's troubled eyes and smiled.

"You're--awfully--good to me, Belle."

"A perfect angel," Belle agreed, but her own eyes were not quite clear.

"I must have Rogie with me, Belle. Don't--try to manage me out of that."

"We'll settle everything in the morning. I'm not going to insist on anything against your will, kiddie. Don't worry. Only you must go to sleep now and do not think of a thing. You'll be all right after a good night's rest."

The peace of yielding settled upon Anne. Not to think of anything--to go to sleep--and to-morrow--the high, still mountains--and the old man--like--a--tree. Anne's eyes closed.

"I'll do--anything--you--say."

She was asleep before Belle had quite finished opening the window and arranging the blind so that it would not rattle if the wind came up.

Back beside the bed, Belle stood looking down at Anne.

"Poor little kid," she whispered, "poor little kid, she's rather like the sea herself--crying forever for something out of reach." She smoothed a fold in the sheet and added:

"Poor old Roger--he isn't half bad either."

CHAPTER THIRTY

Roger received Belle's note telling him that Anne had left town and asking him to make some arrangement about the cottage in the same mail that he received the legal notice of Anne's action. Both letters were on his desk when he came back to the loft after dinner to work as he had done every night since that sudden, quiet ending of everything between himself and Anne.

He opened Belle's first and read it slowly, surprise changing rapidly to anger.

Anne had gone away. Where, for how long, why, alone or with Rogie? Belle did not say. The few lines breathed possession of Anne, pushed him aside from all interest or concern in her movements.

Anne had left the cottage and gone away. He was to do what he liked with the place. Evidently the past with its memory was too distasteful to Anne. She was going to begin somewhere else. For a moment Roger felt a touch of the old anxiety, the need to look after Anne, manage and arrange for her; the feeling that she was too frail and fair to look out for herself, the feeling that had amused Anne so in the days of their engagement when, if she were a little late in meeting him, he was always afraid that something terrible had happened.

It passed and was gone, blotted in his clear understanding of how perfectly well Anne was able to look out for herself. That frail fairness, that delicate sensitiveness behind which she tripped with such deep assurance of herself, was almost a masque in the completeness with which it hid the real Anne. Life would present no problem that would trouble or perplex her. With the scalpel of her assurance she would delicately remove all emotion, all passion, all hot, human weakness, wrap it neatly in her own conceit, label it and forever after know exactly where she had put it.

Roger drew a sheet of paper to him and began writing to Belle. At least she had no right to withhold information of his son. But when he had written two angry pages he read them and tore them up. Finally in words, as blunt and straightforward as Belle, he demanded to know Rogie's whereabouts. When this was sealed and addressed, he pushed it aside to mail when he went out, and picked up the other letter.

He read it only this once and then it fluttered between his knees and lay upon the floor. His chin dropped to his breast, his lips closed in a hard line. Now that Anne had done this thing, his own surprise in not having thought of the possibility was lost in his understanding of how perfectly this action expressed Anne.

When two people loved, they came together in legal sanction.

When they no longer loved, they separated legally.

Anne would no more live apart without the ceremony of divorce than she would have lived with him without the ceremony of marriage.

Anne had tidied the situation.

She had instituted her action for divorce and gone away. She had put the little period of her standard to the past, blotted the paper and ordered it sent to him. It was almost like sending him a receipt for the old love, the months of bickering strain, itemized and receipted in full.

Roger made a strange little noise, a kind of choking grunt of amusement, anger and hurt. Across the loft Katya looked up. The clicking of her machine stopped suddenly. Over it she gazed at Roger with passionate longing, pain and anger and tenderness in her small brown eyes.

Roger was in trouble. He never sat so, his head bowed, his hands clenched like that. For days Katya had felt something in him that eluded her; something strange had entered their relationship, the old frankness was gone. It had gone from the night she counseled his leaving Anne, but they had not mentioned the subject again, and since then Katya had moved in an uncertainty of his motive that had been like a stone wall about her. At every move she had touched it and it had sent strange hopes and fears through her.

Now, she leaned across her machine, her lips parted. Something was forming from these days of uncertainty, coming toward her. Katya held her place before her machine by an effort that at last forced from her a low cry. At the sound, Roger turned slowly toward her, his own problem in his eyes. They looked so for a moment at each other, then Katya's hands trembled and she rose. His muscles had answered, but his real concern was far away. Her lips quivered.

"What is it?" she demanded angrily. "Why are you staring at me like that?"

Her voice drew Roger's consciousness. He shook his head as if physically throwing aside something that held him in its grip and said with pitiful assumption of his usual cheerfulness:

"Was I staring at you unpleasantly, Katya? I beg your pardon. I didn't mean to."

Katya came toward him. If she did not reach physical proximity, in a moment the old camaraderie would rise and shut off this thing Katya felt forming for the first time clearly between them. Coming to the window ledge, the same ledge on which she had counseled his leaving Anne, Katya lit a cigarette and said with forced calm:

"What's the matter? Can I help?"

"N-o--nothing's the matter. I----" Roger broke off.

"You're lying," Katya replied calmly. "Something has happened. Something--very--big to you."

For a second Roger stiffened in resentment of her assurance. It was like the first time he had ever seen her, when her certainty had annoyed him. Then the memory of all the past months of friendship and understanding, shamed the insincerity of denial. He picked the lawyer's letter from the floor and handed it to her. Katya read it and without the least change of expression returned it, but her whole squat body trembled violently and only by drawing deeply on the cigarette could she maintain an outward semblance of poise.

Roger sat fingering the letter. Now that he was sharing this with Katya, emotion was rapidly chilling to intellectual speculation. What would have happened between him and Anne if they had not done this thing? Would they really have adjusted in time? Would they have bickered to weariness and dropped at last from spiritual exhaustion to any compromise that held outward peace? Would he have fallen to the revolting relationship suggested by Katya?

Why had Katya said that? From her knowledge of him or from her own experience? She had spoken so earnestly, as if her certainty were a concrete thing she was thrusting into his keeping. It was no general warning gathered from vague reflection of life or observation. Katya knew--either herself or him to the deepest recesses.

What was the source of Katya's knowledge?

She was so wise and still and dark, like the night. Gazing at her now, Roger felt as if he were gazing into the well of human impulse, weakness and strength. In it lay understanding of the death of love between himself and Anne.

"What is it?" she demanded turning suddenly from the night outside.

"I was thinking of something you said to me and wondering why you said it."

"Yes. What was it I said?"

"You said that if I did not separate from Anne I would stay and----" It was difficult to say even to Katya and he stumbled, annoyed at the touch of scorn that came to Katya's eyes. It was like the first look she had ever given him,--the nice small boy who had called a silly meeting. "That there would be other children," he flung at her, "and that I would then see my duty clearer to stay. Did you mean that I was so bound in physical ties that I could not break them. Is that what you meant?"

Katya nodded. "If you hadn't separated, what else? If you had gone on living with her, you would have gone on 'loving.' Nothing else is possible. And because you are an idealist and must have harmony, you would have tied together the soul and body, because only so would you not have been ashamed before yourself. You would have done what many millions have done and will do till Time ends. You would have come to deny the existence of Love. You would have talked of the death of physical passion and the survival of something else, in the large vague words that dead souls use, like you talked of 'adjusting.' You would have stifled the body because you could not make it one with the soul. Or--you would have stifled the soul. With you I do not know--which it would have been I am not sure. But now your soul has a chance. Perhaps, some day, you will find another woman and then----"

"Never," Roger began vehemently, and stopped.

After all, who could say? He had not meant to marry until years later than he did. He had meant to go to many countries and do many things alone. He had not even thought of Anne in that way, half an hour before they stood alone among the dunes, and his need had shaped itself from the wind and fog.

"Perhaps," Katya said slowly, "it will be never. I am not sure. Perhaps you will never love. I do not know."

She was looking at him with faint bitterness and his interest in her certainty hardened to impatience. "Perhaps I won't," he said shortly, "since, according to you, so few people even know what it is. Why should I expect to be one of the chosen few?"

Katya looked away. "I don't know--perhaps because you need it?"

"Need what?" This was almost as tenuous as some of Anne's involved reactions. First Katya wanted him to be free for his soul, then she wanted this same soul meshed and tangled in an absorbing passion. Roger looked at her impatiently now, turned from him, again gazing out across the roofs. Then his impatience vanished as suddenly as it had come.

Katya looked tired to-night. Her eyes were red-rimmed as if she had not slept. Her thick lips held the cigarette uncertainly. Swarthy, squat and blunt, Katya's body conveyed a feeling of unsureness, as if she were trembling just beneath the surface. He had no right to intrude on her sympathy, but it was so easy to monopolize Katya's understanding. He laid his hand on her knee and started to feel the vibration of her body. She must be holding it in check by her supreme will.

"Never mind, Katya, let's not probe too deeply to-night."

But he knew that Katya did not hear. She was reading in places hidden from him, the answer to his own question.

"You need to love," she said slowly, as if she were translating from a foreign tongue, "because there is a chance that you are worth it. If you love you may be truly great. If you never love--you will go no higher than now--and--it will be all wasted," she ended in a whisper.

Roger felt that Katya was actually drawing a curtain back before him, a thick, black curtain that hid strange things he did not wish to see.

"Well, let's hope that whatever ought not to be wasted, won't be," he said with forced lightness.

"You--will--be afraid," Katya whispered and leaned so close that involuntarily Roger stepped back. At his motion, she laughed in scorn.

"Yes, that is what you will do when you see it coming. You will step back. You will run away. You will be afraid of love."

"Oh, no, I won't. Why should I be afraid?" With an uncertain smile Roger tried to turn the tide creeping from the pit that Katya had opened.

"Because it hurts." Katya shuddered so violently that Roger saw the heavy muscles of her shoulders and neck quiver. "It hurts more than any pain in all the world. It burns out everything in the world, in you, but itself. It takes your brain and your body and makes white ashes of them. It takes you, the individual, and melts you into the world. It is the volcano through which the highest force of spirit finds expression. There are not many volcanoes in the world or the earth would melt in flames. There are not many who can love or the race too would melt away. Through all the ages a few mountains above the level, flat earth. A few who can love, only a few. That is love. Would you run away?"

In spite of her body trembling as with cold, little beads of moisture stood on Katya's face. It was too fierce, too elemental, too naked. Roger looked away. A choking noise from Katya drew his eyes again. She was gazing at him now with anguish and hatred in her eyes. Roger stepped back. The blood flamed into his brain, then rushed away, leaving him cold and sick at the stark nakedness of Katya's revelation.

"Don't," he whispered, "don't."

Slowly the spark in Katya's eyes faded. She gazed at him blankly with the dead eyes of a statue. Then, with a quick shudder she came back to life.

"Never mind," she said in her husky whisper. "It isn't your fault."

"I--I never--dreamed--it isn't possible--you can't----"

"Oh, keep quiet. What does it matter? I don't mind your knowing. I didn't choose to love you. I don't respect you a great deal or admire you in many ways. You're so young, so undeveloped, like a baby. Stop staring like a frightened child. It doesn't matter, I tell you. It doesn't matter."

And, in spite of himself, Roger felt that it did not really matter so very much. Katya, the Russian Jewess, with her squat body, her strange foreign past, was a being of another world, as she stood there talking of volcanoes and white ashes and souls that melted in their own fire.

If she had been of his own race, his own age--but no woman of his age and race would have said those things, would have thought them, would have felt them. Disgust rose against his will, disgust seated deep in the past of his people, disgust of flagrant confession like this.

Katya smiled, a twisted smile of pity for the feeling in him. His lips moved to deny it, but against the penetration of Katya's knowledge, the falsehood died.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, and knew that it sounded like Anne regretting the pain and sorrow of the world.

"You needn't be. I'm not. Can't you stop staring and trying to pretend?"

"Yes," Roger snapped, angry now with her and with himself, "when you stop pretending too. You talk of melting fire and volcanoes and yet you say it doesn't matter. It must matter. It----"

"It doesn't matter--as you mean. You understand nothing at all. Will you please go away?"

Roger's head dropped and he turned from her.

Her whisper followed. "Please forget. You can if you try because it really doesn't matter--to you." The last words were so low and Roger already so far across the loft that he did not hear them. He went without looking back.

But as he walked slowly home, he knew that something within himself had gone forever. Never again would he be absolutely certain of any human being. Katya, the indefatigable worker, the passionless comrade, the clear thinker; Katya the unconfused, had tangled life and the threads that bound one to another beyond his power of ever straightening. Never again would he be able to say of any human being "I am sure of this. I am positive of that."

It was a warm night but Roger was cold and lit a fire. Before it he sat till dawn, moving only to reach for wood in the basket on the hearth.

Was Katya right? Would he run from love if it ever came to him, devastating burning passion in a body other than Katya's? Before such a love as this his love for Anne was the flickering of a tiny flame, as small, as pale as Anne's feeling for a world beyond the narrow limits of her own individual safety.

And Anne?

Again Roger lived that first hour on the Bluff, his own surprise and tenderness at Anne's kiss. The night on the lake when her lips had clung as hotly as his own.

What was he himself?

What was Anne?

To-night, in this whirlwind that was Katya, he felt strangely near to Anne. When at last he groped in the wood basket and found it empty, he rose and went to bed. The east was lighting. The bed was wide and chill, as if the little ghost of Anne were there beside him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Day after day Anne sat at rest in the vast silence. Far back in space and time she had waved a last good-bye up the black funnel of the staircase to Hilda, holding Rogie, for, in the end, Belle had prevailed and Anne had come alone. Trains and stages and the creaking wagon of old Timothy Potter had brought her from the world below and laid her in the heart of this little grassy meadow. Ringed by mountain peaks it lay, small and still, at the top of the world.

In the morning the sun rose with sudden gladness, not with the slow reluctance of the lowlands, but as if forced by its own energy and desire from the blackness of night. All day it poured its warmth into the meadow and when it went, yielding to night in a blaze of color; it called good-by in brilliant purple and crimson and went as gladly as it had come. In the afternoons a busy little wind came down from the snowy peaks, went its round of inspection over the lush green grass of the meadow, chatted with the little brook, whispered to the trees, saw all was well and slipped back again into the granite gorges. The stars came out, not with furious twinkling and effort to reach through to men so far below, but, with still gold, they moved forward into night.

It seemed to Anne that she made no definite motion of her own volition. The day came, lifted her into the perfect rhythm of its rotation, carried her through the clear warm morning, the still gold-filled afternoon, deposited her gently in the deep black peace of night.

This was the silence she had sought, the perfect peace. No artificial formula summoned it. No bodily posture propitiated it. It was there, deep, all pervading, everlasting, to one's need.

Perhaps, in incalculable space, other worlds were being made and destroyed. But this world was finished. In the marvelous perfection of its completion, the beginning was impossible to visualize, an ending inconceivable. No force could ever move again those granite peaks, melt the glacial ice, upheave the profound permanence of that tiny grassy meadow. It was done; perfectly done and left in peace.

Even old Timothy Potter and his wife were part of this profundity of accomplishment. They could never have been other than they were. Through the years of close companionship they had grown to look alike. It was impossible to imagine them ever having been younger, slimmer, more agile than they were. They must always have been together since the beginning of time, stout and quiet, with their understanding smile, their white hair, the little wrinkles of happiness about their kindly eyes.

As a separate human unit, apart from the spirit of the universe, she no longer existed. She was alone with old Timothy and Mary, his wife, at the very center of the all-living; so deep within the heart of Life that words were not needed. They communicated in silence like the earth and grass and trees. They were not bodies, opposed in their humanity to an exterior spirit without. They were part of the whole, as grass, the gnarled cedars growing in the clefts of the granite mountains, and the brook bubbling through the little meadow, were parts. Sitting in utter stillness Anne felt this engulfing Unity, drawing her gently down into the single purpose that ran through the granite mountains, the dancing brook, the rustling leaves, through her own body, and linked them all, each to the other.

Now, a poem of Wordsworth that she had thought silly and sentimental in the days of college extension, came back to her with new meaning, and often, sitting on the porch after the early supper, watching the day's gorgeous farewell to the granite peaks, Anne whispered slowly:

To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What Man has made of Man.

The rest of the stanzas she had forgotten, except the three final lines of all:

If such be Nature's Holy plan, Have I not reason to Lament What Man has made of Man?

Far off beyond distant Dana, rising in ice-capped majesty above the last range of mountains, hate and discord and confusion were positive qualities. Men struggled against each other, ideals clashed, faiths oppressed. Even love fought for its place and in the end surrendered. There was nothing sure, nothing positive, nothing motionless like this in its own perfection. It was all distorted, ugly and forever battling.

Sitting on the porch, after an early supper, watching the day's farewell to the granite peaks, Anne's eyes filled with tears. If only she had Rogie with her she would never leave this peace. The world beyond could fight its futile battles. If only Rogie were with her, nothing would be lacking. Undisturbed by the world's confusion, they would live out their lives, and sink, at last into the stillness of the earth.

What did it matter if they made no place for themselves among men; if no one ever heard of them; the ambitions of men were such pitiful things?

In the arrogance of his conceit, man had appropriated to himself the pinnacle of creation. In his fury of effort he rushed about over the surface of the great, still earth, erecting his little cities and civilizations, setting up his little philosophies for the guidance of others. His ideals, his religions, his pretentious systems of thought, so futilely abstruse and complicated, were like the rules and regulations for the guiding of traffic in public places: "Keep to the right"; "turn here"; "cross there"; vast in their pretension of public usefulness; needed because of the confusion created by himself. In the peace of the mountains his efforts had less cohesion, less purpose than the movements of the ants, running here and there, making long circuits about some tiny obstacle. So man made circuits through his own philosophies in a stupendous effort to reach the truth which he had lost in the involved processes of his own journey to it. Anne could almost see these myriads of tiny individuals rushing about over the surface of life, jostling, shouting, getting in each other's way, going down, being trampled, struggling to rise, each shouting his own foolish solution of the problem of life.

When Anne had been a month in the mountains she wrote to Belle asking her to find some way of sending Rogie. Belle wrote back promising to do so, even to bring him herself, if no other way opened, but the days slipped again to weeks and Rogie did not come.

Anne grew restless. The peace was disturbed now by this need. At the end of the second month she wrote more insistingly, but this time Belle did not answer.

The leaves began to fall. In the mornings the grass of the meadow was white with frost. The nights were clear, black and cold now with a kind of thrill in the coldness, as if the air were tingling with hidden excitement.

Anne's restlessness increased. Something was creeping upon the world from the places hidden beyond all puny human knowledge.

She no longer sat for hours on the porch, absorbed in the peaceful stillness, but moved about the house or went for long walks. In the evenings she sat with Mary and Timothy, and, although she rarely listened to the words, she liked to hear Timothy read from one of their few books. He read slowly with long pauses instead of comment. These pauses were like caves into which the old people went silently, hand in hand, to look for the deeper truths hidden in words. At the end of these pauses they smiled quietly at each other and the reading began again.

It was one evening in mid-September that a nervous motion of Anne's disturbed the reading and Timothy looked over the steel rim of his spectacles with kindly interest:

"You're worried."

"I'm sorry," Anne apologized. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I was thinking about something else."

Mary Potter leaned across the red-checked cloth and laid her hand on Anne's.

"You were thinking about the baby. Isn't your sister going to send him?"

"I don't know. I can't make it out and I feel so helpless. You won't be going down to Milton again for mail for weeks, will you?"

"I hadn't thought of going again this year," Timothy took off his glasses now and laid them on the closed book. "I don't usually go after the middle of September. Soon the road'll be closed even to Milton."

"Closed!"

"In a few weeks now the snow'll begin."

"Nobody can get in after the snow begins," the old woman explained.

"Nothing can get through!"

"Nothing gets through after the snow begins. Pretty soon it'll come and we'll be shut in tight till Spring."

Anne rose quickly. "Shut--in--tight till Spring!"

Timothy nodded and his eyes lit as if in welcome of the snow.

"Oh, it's wonderful then," he said softly. "You think it's quiet and peaceful now, but it ain't nothing to what it is then--between the storms. You'll love it, white and so still you can almost hear God movin' round. And then the storms." He rose, the first restless motion Anne had ever seen him make. "They're wonderful. Trees that have stood for centuries go crashing down. Mountain sides slip away." His eyes blazed as if he were watching the Creator at work. "When Spring comes, it's a new world. Me and Mary go round like children, don't we, mother, looking up things to see if they're there yet. Last Spring that little creek down there came a~bubbling up to look at us, just like a new baby, laughing and smiling through the snow. It weren't there the year before. A storm cut the channel and there it was dancing and laughing as if it had just been waiting to surprise us. Wasn't it, mother?"

The old woman nodded. "And do you remember that spruce we used to call 'The Hunchback?'" She turned to Anne. "It was so old and twisted and it never seemed happy, like other spruces; they're always so glad and straight. We used to wish a storm would take him, for his own sake, and one winter that gorge yonder opened and when Spring came, he was gone."

"Gone!" Under cover of the snow, cliffs slid away, gorges opened, century-old trees disappeared!

"Yes. Winter makes great changes up here in the mountains. Down in the cities you think winter is a time when everything stops and rests and nothing moves. But up here we see it moving. It's like watching God fix things up, cut out a bit here and there, tinker round making improvements. Nothing ain't ever fixed to stay forever. It stands to reason it can't be. There wouldn't be any life to things that's fixed like that. Things keep moving and changing. Why, that doesn't frighten you, does it?" he asked curiously at the look in Anne's eyes. "There ain't nothing to be afraid of, Mrs. Barton."

"I'm--not afraid," Anne whispered. "Only I--don't want it to change. I want it to stay like this--perfect always, quiet and still."

Timothy shook his head and smiled gently. "Oh, no, it wouldn't be good that way. You wait and see. You'll love it. Why, me and mother's often spoke about it--when we go, we'd like to be out in a big storm and just be swept down. Not be sick and helpless for a long time, just have God throw us in along of some change He's making and use us again in another way, wouldn't we, ma?"

The old woman nodded. "It would be a grand way to go. I suppose we'd get there in the end just the same, even if we was buried in one of them tight little city cemeteries under a marble slab like people put over the dead as if they wanted to keep them shut up in their little boxes forever; or even if we was burned like some people hold with, we'd get back into the earth somehow. But folks have their preference, and me and pa'd like to go, as he says, in some storm that'd sweep us out clean and sudden into the midst of things."

Into the midst of things!

For a few moments Anne stood motionless, her hands gripping the back of the chair, staring at the old people, who, lost in the coming of the snow, seemed already to have slipped away together--into the midst of things. Then, without a word, she went quickly out of the room and upstairs to her own.

It was very cold but she threw the window wide and leaned far out into the night.

In the full moonlight, the peak of Dana rose, the burnished helmet of a giant warrior leading the mountains into the coming battle. In the black secrecy of the granite gorges the courier wind ran swiftly with its orders. The trees took counsel together. Everything was whispering, moving, preparing. Nothing was motionless any longer in the security of its own permanence. Everything was awaiting now the fulfillment of the law beyond its power to anticipate, change, or deviate from its own purpose.

In a few weeks now the snow would come. Mountain sides would slip away. Giant trees go crashing down. New rivers open. God would tinker with the world! Make his changes, form it to his further plan.

Nothing was completed beyond change. Nothing was still. From rocks to man, the force moved, making, changing, destroying, recreating, fashioning to--what? Chaos or perfection.

There was no permanent silence and peace apart from motion, from the ever-changing march of the universe on--to what? A purpose hidden from finite sense. A scale so vast that its first note was lost in the birth of time, its last in infinity.

And she, deaf to this tremendous harmony, had stood scornful of all but the small, thin note of her own personal security! The chord of the world's pain, so clear to Roger and Black Tom, she had not heard. Of the perfect scale so clear to Charlotte Welles, she had not grasped a note. The joy of life that thrust through her mother's muddled thinking was a far sweeter note than her own blind assurance of superiority. Even the sensuous longing of Merle for physical beauty was a finer understanding of the purpose of life than her own.

The moon had moved on across the world, the little meadow lay in darkness, when Anne closed the window at last and went to bed.

A week later, the first snow fell. It came in the night and Anne waked to a white world so white and still that the very stillness throbbed with its own intensity. Anne stood for hours staring out at the snow-filled hollows. Under that thick white, perhaps change was already beginning, a little opening here, a little closing here, the small first notes of the great orchestra tuning for the vast symphony.

In the night the snow fell again, thicker, whiter, heavier.

Early in the morning Anne sought Mary Potter.

"I can get through, can't I? If I go at once?"

"Yes. But there won't be many days longer. The snow's going to be heavy this year. It's going to be a wild winter. Did you hear that crash last night? It was that cedar you say looks like an old woman with a basket. It snapped clear off like----"

"If I pack to-day, can Mr. Potter get me down to Miller's? The stage will take me to Raymond."

The old woman was making bread, her arms deep in the clinging dough. But as Anne spoke, she scraped the dough from them and came quietly round the table.

"You're going back and, do you know, I'm glad. We'll miss you. When we heard you was coming we were kind of upset only there didn't seem to be any good reason why you shouldn't. But now, we'll miss you. You fit in. I guess me and pa got to think we were the only people that like it quiet and I suppose there's lots--even down there." She always spoke so of the world beyond the mountains, "down there," with a nod and a little gesture out and downward.

"Yes. I think that they want quiet down there more than they want anything in the whole world. They look and look for it and--some find it. The world is getting noisier and faster, and yet there are more and more people looking for--Stillness." She smiled. "Churches even advertise it in the papers--half hours and quarter hours of Silence."

"Well! Down there they'd make a business out of most anything, wouldn't they? Advertising silence! Why, it's about the only thing everybody can have."

"Yes--but we don't find that out. We're all making such a noise looking for it."

Mary Potter wiped one hand on her apron and laid it on Anne's shoulder. "I guess you won't make much noise looking for it now, will you?"

"No--I don't--think I will. I'll try not to, anyhow."

"I'd like to have seen the baby. His picture's awful cute."

"He is cute. And as good as gold."

"Maybe you'll want to come back in the Spring and can bring him with you?"

Anne's lip trembled. "I'm never coming back again, Mrs. Potter, unless--I don't have to come."

The old woman did not answer for a moment and then she nodded. "I know. Well, I don't think, my dear, you'll ever have to come again. You--don't--lose it--once you really get it up here."

She patted Anne's shoulder, but Anne suddenly threw her arms round the other and kissed her. The old woman's eyes lit with pleasure. She said nothing. She rarely did when she understood.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

As she stepped from the train into the roar of the city, Anne straightened her shoulders and smiled:

"Perhaps I'll get to love the racket as much as Belle does."

She let herself into the flat and went noiselessly up the stairs to the hall. In the front room her father was talking to Rogie. She could not catch the words but she heard the baby's crow of delight and gripped the balustrade to keep from surprising the old man too suddenly.

The kitchen was empty but Hilda was on the porch picking dead leaves from a geranium. The kettle was boiling and a bottle of malted milk stood beside the inevitable wad of crochet on the table. Very softly Anne closed the door and waited. In another moment the kettle boiled over and Hilda turned. At the sight of Anne, she stepped back, stared, and then came with a little rush and took Anne in her arms. When she stood away at last, her eyes were full of happy tears, but she said gayly:

"I believe you just love to startle people nearly out of their skins. Well, you certainly did give me a turn. I suppose it was the dog that howled all night, but when I saw you there--for a minute--I almost thought----"

"It was my ghost. Moms Mitchell! You are superstitious."

"No, I'm not. Not a bit. I never held with those old sayings but it did give me a start." She still held Anne's hand and stroked it, reluctant to relinquish the comfort of reality.

"Do I look like a ghost?"

"You certainly do not. My, but you're a different girl altogether. Papa will be surprised."

Anne laughed. "If my appearance has the same effect on him as it had on you, you'd better prepare him. Did he hear the dog too?"

"Go on with you. I don't believe those things. No, I don't think he did. Papa sleeps fine now. He's better a lot too. He got down onto the landing yesterday and sat in the sun for an hour."

"Papa! Got down those stairs to the landing! He must be improved."

"He is," Hilda said with subdued pride. "Papa's changed in the last two months, Annie. He's different--in a great many ways. He's more like he was--at first--before you children were born. You won't know papa in some ways."

"Hardly, if he's like he was before I was born. Perhaps we'll have to be introduced."

Hilda smiled, but Anne saw under the amusement a kind of glad possession and knew that a new link had been forged between her father and mother. For an instant, loneliness touched her and she wondered what these months had done to Roger. She had changed. Her mother and father had changed. Had Roger changed too?

"I'm dying to see Rogie. Shall I go in or do you want to tell papa first?"

"I'll just give him a hint. You wait here. He always has his milk in the kitchen and I usually have tea with him. Good gracious, I forgot all about the tea."

"I'll make it. You run along and hint. If I don't see Rogie in a minute I'll be howling like that dog myself."

As she made the tea Anne's hands shook with excitement. It was all so strange, filled with a vibrant livingness it had never had before. In a few moments, she heard them coming along the hall, the tap of her father's canes, his shuffling step, Hilda's gleeful laugh, as they stopped just outside the kitchen door.

"No, I'm not joking, papa, we've got company to tea. I can't help it if you didn't hear them come. No, it's not Charlotte and I'm not going to tell you who it is."

"You can't fool me. When your eyes shine like that it's something good. Do you know, I wouldn't be surprised to see Annie come in most any day."

"Now--how--on earth--did you----"

James laughed. "We've been married more than thirty years and you never put one over on me yet."

He turned the knob and came shuffling into the kitchen. Hilda followed with Rogie. Anne had a passing flash of her father, thin and gray, but with a happy twinkle in his eyes; Hilda smiling behind him and Rogie clinging tightly to her neck, before her eyes filled with tears and they all blurred together.

Leaning unsteadily on one cane, James Mitchell put his arm round her.

"She tried to fool me, Annie, but I smelled the rat. I knew you'd get lonely and come running back when we didn't expect you."

Anne tried to smile. "But you did expect me. You're not surprised a bit." Over his shoulder she was watching Rogie in hungry fear that he was not going to recognize her. If Rogie cried and shrank away----But he didn't. He was only making quite sure before he gave a gurgle of delight and began wriggling in Hilda's grasp. James Mitchell's arm dropped and Anne was beside Hilda with Rogie tight in her hold.

"Grown some, hasn't he?" James demanded as he stumbled to the chair beside the stove. "Not bad nurses, the old folks, eh?"

"He's grown an inch," Anne declared, hugging him to her. "And my gracious, he's heavy!"

"Weighs a ton when he's been on the same spot in your lap ten minutes. Only he don't often stay ten minutes in the same spot. He's a lively youngster, Anne. Got a lot more pep than you ever had at his age. He must take after----" James broke off and looked at Hilda.

"Yes, he's more like Roger," Anne finished. There was no reason to avoid Roger's name.

There was a short silence, filled by her father sipping the malted milk and her mother pouring out the tea. Then Anne said:

"Has Roger seen him often?"

Hilda and James looked at each other in a new habit of consultation.

"No, dear. Belle thought it would be just as well to wait until you could arrange things as you wanted."

"I'm sorry. There's no reason he shouldn't see him. I never intended keeping him all to myself. He's Roger's, too."

Again Hilda and James consulted on a problem they had evidently discussed often. Their glances reached a decision and James said:

"Annie, do you suppose that things between you and Roger could be patched up? Me and mother have talked about it quite a lot. I don't hold with Roger--I never did," there was a touch of the old intolerance which a look from Hilda softened and James went on. "But he's young and there's this to be said for him--the rubbish he believes in is in the air. It's like an epidemic. But there's no reason he shouldn't outgrow it. You can do a lot."

Anne sat holding Rogie and fingering her teaspoon absently.

"I don't want him to outgrow it, papa. I don't want him to be anything but himself."

"No, of course you don't," Hilda broke in with the familiar manner of smoothing a family difference that had once annoyed Anne. But now it did not annoy her. She would have to face, once at least, this discussion of herself and Roger and she might as well do it now. Besides, it clarified her own thought to talk patiently in this way.

"Roger was one kind of person," she went on, "and I was another. Roger saw things--in--in sweeps while I saw them in spots."

The definition was exact to Anne but her father and mother looked bewildered.

"I mean that we really both want the same thing, only we wanted to get it differently. I think--it's harder for two people to agree in their methods--than in their aims. If Roger had been a Jew and I had been a Catholic----"

"Why, Anne!" Hilda was so horrified, that amusement touched Anne's very earnest wish to get this thing perfectly straight to them.

"I'm only supposing, moms, making the wildest example I can think of."

"Well, it's certainly wild enough."

"But, if we had been, it might have been easier than it was. I mean that--in some ways we would have been so very far apart that it would have been useless to try and meet in those ways at all. But Roger and I weren't far apart. We both wanted the same thing--a beautiful world, but we tried to find this beauty in different places and there are no different places. There's only one Beauty everywhere."

"What in the name of Heavens ARE you talking about, Annie?"

Anne began to feel a little helpless but persisted.

"I mean that nearly all the fuss and noise in the world comes from people quarreling about the way to get things, because, nearly everybody wants the same thing really when you get right down to it. They only quarrel about their own pet way of getting it. Roger thinks that if he can make the whole world happy in a lump, then every individual will be happy. And I thought that if every individual was happy then the whole world would be happy. We----"

"I don't know what you're trying to get at, Annie, and I don't believe you do yourself," her father interrupted, but so kindly that Anne forgave his not understanding. After all, she had not understood herself, before the mountains, and it was not clear in detail yet. "I suppose it's something very modern and educated. But common sense is a lot older than education and these up-to-date folderols. When a man and a woman's married they can't expect to agree about everything. Me and mamma never had scarce an idea in common, did we, ma?"

"No. We never agreed about things. I never knew any married folks that did. But it doesn't make much difference if you don't talk about them. As long as you keep still, things go pretty smooth. I guess our home was as comfortable as most homes."

"But I don't want it to be as comfortable as most homes. Most homes are terrible places and I want a real home or none at all."

"Well, I must say, I think there's something to be said for Roger," Hilda conceded. "Do you think a home all by yourself is going to be a 'real home'?"

Anne's throat tightened and she could not answer.

"That's all rubbish, Anne. Nothing we could say would have kept you from marrying him and I guess he was just the same as he is now. Besides, you'll find it's a different thing working now you've got Rogie than it was before when you were a girl."

"Let's not talk about it, mamma. I wouldn't live with Roger just to be supported, not if I had a dozen children."

"I wish to heaven you had, Anne; nothing else will ever get a mite of real common sense into your head. Oh, well, it's no good talking, I suppose. You can't put old heads on young shoulders."

Anne nibbled at her lip and said nothing. She and Hilda finished their tea and James his malted milk. When he had put aside the cup he turned to her again.

"You'll stay with us for a while, Annie?"

"No--I don't think I will, not more than a few days anyhow. I'm going to begin looking for a job to-morrow and I'm sure to find one within a day or two. Then I'll take rooms where Rogie can be looked after and moms will get a rest. It made an awful lot of extra work having him here all that time. He----"

"Now see here, Anne, you needn't use Rogie as an excuse. I don't need a rest and he hasn't been a bit of extra work. You always were an independent thing." Hilda's impatience ended in a laugh and James smiled with her.

"All right, we'll let it go at that. Anyhow, to-morrow morning at eight o'clock, off I go job-hunting."

Anne joined the laugh a little uncertainly. The new life was so very near.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

On the following Monday Anne found a position with a fruit commission house on Front Street. The salary was not quite what she had hoped, but the surroundings were so different from the office of Lowell & Morrison that she was glad to take it.

Here there were no soft rugs, no quietly closing doors, or smoothly running elevators; no suave and courtly men. Great drays rumbled through the street outside; loud-voiced men called orders in strange, foreign tongues. For the first hours of the morning the warehouse shook with the thud of huge crates being thrown from trucks, trundled through the cool darkness of the shed and piled high to the shadow of the roof. In the afternoon the rumble of the drays loading and unloading ceased; many of the men went home; the place was quiet. Anne could hear the whistle of the boats at the wharves, and on foggy days the wail of the fog sirens very near.

On Saturday afternoon the office closed at one o'clock and Anne spent until six looking for an apartment. At dusk she found what she thought would do. It was the upper floor of an old house on the edge of Russian Hill. The house was run down and rather dismal, but the rear windows looked out on a small garden, and from Anne's floor, a little triangle of the Bay was visible.

The landlady was a childless widow, a thin, saddened woman with soft brown eyes that had almost lost the trick of brightening. But when she heard about Rogie they lit gently and she suggested a sand-pile in one corner of the garden and a crib for his morning and afternoon nap in her own bedroom. Anne's first feeling, that there it would be almost impossible to forget the past, lessened, and she closed the arrangement, grateful for the garden, the glimpse of the Bay, and Mrs. Jeffries' pleasure in Rogie.

On Sunday there was a family dinner at the flat and afterwards Anne and Rogie and Belle came to the new home. Mrs. Jeffries had put some flowers on the ugly center table and covered the gas globe with orange crêpe paper.

"Oh," Anne gasped when she saw it, "I wish she hadn't done that."

"Never mind. Let it stay up for a day or two and then it can catch fire or destroy itself somehow," Belle advised.

Anne shook her head. "It doesn't matter really--and she might be hurt."

"Now, Anne, don't start in that way. You know it won't work. If this furnishing is her taste and she begins to 'take an interest' in you and tries 'to make you comfortable' you'll only blow up in the end. Take those orange shades down and tell her in the morning that you don't want anything added to your rooms. You needn't be sharp about it, but you can be firm."

Anne smiled with a wistfulness that escaped Belle, touring the room in inspection of the ugly steel engravings hung exactly in the center of each wall. The first hour in her new home, and already she knew that there would be many nights when she would be grateful for even the terrible green glass vase that held the flowers, if it meant any one's caring for her comfort.

"Don't worry, Belle. When this wall paper gets too much for my nerves I'll go down and sit awhile in 'the parlor.' You should see that."

"Worse?"

"Three horsehair chairs with red velvet trimmings; one rocker to match. An onyx and brass stand with a pink silk drape. A floor lamp with a red shade and a white marble mantel, over a grate that has never had a fire. Oh, yes--a 'good body-Brussels' rug, and the floor-border painted cherry!"

"Heavens! Well, you'll never have to sit in it. And that back room you're going to use for a sitting-room can be made cheerful in time with just a few softening things round. Besides, there's the fireplace. I've a good mind to light a fire, Anne, just to see how it looks. I believe I'd feel better about leaving you alone with this wall paper and that what-not if I got the effect of a fire."

"I'm not afraid of the what-not--wouldn't those ghastly statuettes in the Niche fit perfectly?--but I would rather like a fire. I wonder if Mrs. Jeffries could let us have a little wood."

"I'll ask her." In a moment Belle was back and while Anne undressed Rogie, lit a fire in the back room. When Anne heard the cheerful crackle, her eyes filled with tears but she brushed them angrily away.

"Now see here," she whispered brusquely to herself, "you're not going to get weepy, every time you look at the Bay or hear a fog-whistle or light an open fire."

"Are you coming, Anne? This kindling won't last forever." Belle had not lit the gas and the kindly darkness hid the brown and red wall paper and stiff chairs.

"It's not going to be bad, Belle. It's really wonderfully still, almost as still as the mountains. When the fog-whistles don't go, there'll be hardly a sound outside."

"Nor inside either. Does that women ever laugh, do you suppose?"

"I don't know. Mary Potter never really laughed outright. I think, perhaps, Mrs. Jeffries has only forgotten how."

Belle shrugged. "Well, I hope she'll remember again soon. If she doesn't, Rogie will forget too."

"Now, Belle, can you honestly imagine Rogie a solemn baby?"

"It does take some stretching of the imagination. But--when I look at this wall paper and those chairs I can imagine almost anything. I can even imagine Roger losing faith in----"

"Yes? Go on, Belle, don't be silly; as if Roger's name mustn't be mentioned. I--I don't feel that way at all. Besides, even if I did, I couldn't avoid Roger--because of Rogie. He has just as much right to him as I, and as soon as I feel a little more settled, I'm going to make some regular arrangement for his seeing him, having--him--part--of the time if he wants to."

Belle looked down at the small figure gazing earnestly into the fire and her hand moved toward her sister's shoulder, then drew back without touching.

"Yes, of course, he ought to see him if he wants to," she said in her brusque, impersonal way as if she were agreeing in some physician's instruction concerning a patient.

"I wish," Anne went on, "that Roger had been seeing him right along. I really don't understand, Belle, why you didn't let him. He must think it was my wish that he shouldn't and believe that I was being deliberately mean about it. He must think I am awfully narrow and ungenerous and--and vindictive and----'

"I don't know why he should think that. Naturally he would suppose that Rogie was with you. Besides, how did a poor blunderbuss like myself know what mood you would come back in? If I had let Roger make his own arrangements for seeing him I might have set up a precedent you wouldn't have wanted to keep. Then there was moms and papa. You've grown so calm and sure in the mountains, Anne, you don't realize that the rest of us are pretty jumpy yet. Moms ranted along for days after you'd gone. I don't know but what she might have refused to let Roger look at him even if he had come. Under the circumstances I did what seemed best. You know the family channels aren't the easiest to steer in safely."

Anne smiled. "No, I know they're not. And I didn't mean to be unfair, Belle. You've all been terribly dear to me. I don't believe I ever understood any of you--or--any one--else--before I went away."

Again Belle looked at her sharply, changed her mind about speaking, and put the last piece of kindling on the fire. Together they stood silently watching it flare, then crumble, char and drop to gray ash.

When the last faint glow had died from the embers, Anne brought Belle's things from the room where Rogie was now fast asleep. But even after they were on, Belle lingered as if reluctant to go.

"If there's anything you want, you'll let me know, won't you, kiddie?"

"Yes, I'll let you know, but there won't be anything, I'm sure. The hours at the office aren't bad at all and I believe Mrs. Jeffries will take wonderful care of Rogie. It's--a little strange now--but I'll get it homied up in time. I've got a few ideas about this room already."

"You can have anything of mine out of storage that you want. Do you remember that heavy tapestry stuff I had a mania for once? It didn't go in a small modern apartment, but it would be great with these high ceilings. You'll ask me, won't you?"

"Yes, I promise. But for the present I'll just go on like this till I get the feel of the place."

"Don't go on too long or you'll get to feel like the place. I know you, Anne, better than you know yourself."

Anne laughed. "You make me feel like a fly at the end of a microscope."

"Not a fly," Belle said with a pretense of serious consideration, "no, not a fly. A little moth with gold dust all over it, one of the shimmery kind that looks as if it were going to fall apart if you touched it."

"And never does, but crawls right alone even after it's burnt off its wings."

Anne realized the possible interpretation and flushed, but if Belle had caught this meaning, she said nothing, and a few minutes later went.

As Anne closed the door behind Belle, and came back again up the stairs alone, a little of the courage that she had sincerely felt her own while she and Belle stood before the fire died away. Again before the tiny heap of gray ashes, Anne forced down the tears with an effort. Was her new-found peace to be so easily disturbed? She had been back in the city only a little over a week, and already this going of Belle made her feel so terribly alone. Anne went to the window and opened it wide. Perhaps the touch of night would bring that throbbing, silent assurance of companionship. With her elbows on the sill Anne gazed to the triangle of twinkling lights at the base of the dark hills across the bay. Faintly the murmur of the city came to her, but her hands clenched and it took all her strength to keep back the tears.

She was a part of it. But such a little part.

"I won't be lonely," she whispered fiercely. "I won't. I WON'T."

But the resolution flitted away into the blackness and left Anne tense with her own vehemence. She closed the window quickly and went into the other room. Between the cool sheets she tried to relax, to immerse her body in the vast, eternal unity of all-living, but she was conscious only of the effort and after a while she gave up trying to relax and let her thought go where it would.

It went straight to Roger. What had these months done to Roger? They had done so much to her, it seemed impossible that Roger could be just the same. And yet, she hoped he was. The old Roger she felt now she understood. A new Roger might be very strange. At first the new relationship that had to be between them would be difficult, and, with another Roger, perhaps impossible.

No, Roger must be just the same, have the same sweeping enthusiasm, the same impatience, the same intolerance of prejudice not his own. Until she had gripped more firmly her own peace, she could risk no change in Roger. At last the tightness in her muscles eased and Anne fell asleep a little comforted in her decision to write to Roger before the end of the week.

But the end of the week came and went and Anne had not written. Every evening she had tried and in the morning destroyed the letter. Some were tinged with memory, the others almost belligerent in their indifferent brevity. The second week she did not even try but convinced herself that the mood would descend upon her suddenly and she would tell Roger of her return and suggest his coming to see Rogie with exactly the right degree of friendly interest.

But the mood did not come, although Anne waited for it, in the same bodily relaxation in which Charlotte Welles entered The Silence. By the beginning of the fourth week after her return, this need to communicate with Roger and the impossibility of doing it, was destroying her peace and absorbing every waking thought. That she managed to do her work well, was only because the old power of mechanical attention had returned. Often Anne read through the transcriptions of her employer's dictation and wondered at this subconscious power that permitted her to quote correctly prices and invoices, write intelligently of fruits and vegetables, while her whole consciousness was concerned in forming a letter to Roger.

Once she thought she saw Roger on the street, and, although she would have grasped eagerly this solution if it had occurred to her before, now she turned and went rapidly in the other direction. But no sooner had she lost the possibility--if it had been really Roger--than she wished with her whole heart that she had faced certainty. She began looking for him everywhere, hoping and then dreading to meet him. From walking in places where the possibility of meeting might occur, she swung to going and coming by circuitous ways, angry with herself for her own indecision, touched sometimes even to anger at Roger.

Finally, at the beginning of the fifth week, in exhaustion of her own irresolution, Anne wrote and without rereading or waiting for morning counsel, went out and dropped the note in the letter box. And then began a period of waiting that made the weeks preceding seem full of calm certainty. Now Anne was so sharply conscious of two selves within her, that, at times, she could almost visibly see them both. One went to and from work, wrote letters, cared for her rooms, attended to Rogie, talked quietly with Mrs. Jeffries. The other did nothing, nothing at all, except wait. This self emerged to control at the postman's coming in the morning; when she opened the door in the evening and looked first to the hat-stand to see if there was a letter; and at night when she lay in bed trying to find a reason for Roger's silence. For Roger did not answer.

The days filled to a week, two, three.

When, a few days before Christmas, Anne came home one night to find Mrs. Jeffries crying in the kitchen, her first reaction was almost relief that something had happened that would call upon her for some quality besides the petrifying patience of waiting in which she felt her brain rapidly numbing to a living death.

"What is it? What has happened?"

In the comfort of companionship, Mrs. Jeffries looked up from the table where she had been sitting in the dark, her head buried in her arms.

"My sister's dead. Little Lucy----"

Anne knelt and put her arm about the heaving shoulders. The older woman clung in a renewed passion of sobs and Anne held her quietly until they eased. At last Mrs. Jeffries looked up.

"There are three children, the youngest only five and John doesn't know what to do."

"You'll have to go to them?"

"Yes--I must go. John and Lucy adored each other--they were like lovers always. Poor--John--he's so lost--he doesn't seem able to grasp it. He says----" She reached to the letter lying as she had dropped it two hours before.

"Don't--don't, please, really, I'd rather not." Anne took the letter from her quickly and laid it back on the table.

Mrs. Jeffries shuddered. "They loved each other so. Why did she have to be taken? He and the children need her so. And she was so strong, stronger than I have ever been. Nobody needs me. But Lucy--one moment well and laughing--the next----"

In the cold darkness of the unlit kitchen Anne saw old Mary and Timothy smiling at each other as they pictured "going out sudden into the midst of things." She held the quivering form again until it quieted. Mrs. Jeffries wiped her eyes at last and tried to consider Anne.

"How will you manage? Can you get some one to look after Rogie? I may be away some time. I may bring the children back with me. I don't know. I feel as if everything has changed so; I'm bewildered."

"Don't think of me, I'll manage. Perhaps I can get Mrs. Horton, the woman I used to have, to come up until we see what we're going to do. But you mustn't think about me, or consider me at all. Promise that you won't. I wish I could do something."

"You are doing something. You always have ever since you came. You don't know what it's meant to have you and Rogie round though I haven't seen much of you. I believe I was freezing up clear through--until he came."

"I'm glad you've liked having us. It's meant a great deal to me to know some one was looking after Rogie as you have done."

Mrs. Jeffries put the letter away and rose wearily. Without having taken off her things, Anne went out again. In an hour she had arranged with Mrs. Horton.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Roger was in Los Angeles on a speaking trip when Anne's letter was forwarded to him from the office. He found it when he came back from one of the most successful meetings he had ever held. He had held his audience in his hands, moved them at his will. Enthusiasm had run high. He had thrilled with his own power, and then, depression had followed. It was so easy to move men with words. It was almost a trick, emphasis here, appeal to emotion there, a climax of enthusiasm malleable to his will.

After such a gathering men and women insisted on meeting him personally. He often left the halls with groups violently discussing his words. And so little resulted from this enthusiasm. An inclination strengthened here and there, a few teetering on the edge of belief converted. Sometimes a successful meeting such as this had been exhausted Roger more than any antagonistic opposition could have done.

To-night he was very tired. The ideal for which a few strove seemed so far away, so beyond those for whom he searched for it. He had left the hall instantly, escaping, as he rarely permitted himself to do, the urgent wish of strangers to meet him. Safe in his hotel room at last he had given the order not to be disturbed by any visitor or telephone call, and had begun indifferently looking over the forwarded mail, when he came unexpectedly on Anne's letter.

He looked at it for a moment curiously, as if it were something not intended for him. He turned it over and over, until a sudden eagerness to know of Anne and Rogie seized him and he tore the envelope open with quivering fingers. The note was brief, and, although Anne had intended it to be friendly, it seemed to Roger stiff and formal. He read it only once and then tore it across and dropped the pieces in the waste-basket with a touch of disappointment he refused to recognize. There was no reason Anne should write to him in another tone, and, after all, the important thing was that he could see Rogie. He had longed for this and resented Anne's monopoly of the boy, but now he knew that seeing Rogie rested alone with him he forgave Anne the bitterness he had felt. He sat down to answer instantly, but he, as Anne, found it difficult to write. Three drafts of a simple note he destroyed, and then suddenly pushed the pad from him. He would go. There was a train in an hour. He would be in the city in the morning, Sunday morning. He had another meeting on the following Monday to complete the itinerary, but when Roger visioned the empty Sunday between, he could not face it.

Half an hour later he had paid his bill and left the hotel. As the train pulled out of the station it began to rain sharp, slanting rain that lashed at the windows of his berth. But Roger, exhausted from the meeting and his own reaction to Anne's letter, slept almost instantly. Nor did he wake until the train clanged into the station. It was still raining, but less violently now. The sharp lashing had quieted to a steady fall. Roger had breakfast, went to the loft to see if there was an urgent matter for him, telephoned to Tom to send another speaker to Los Angeles in time for the Monday night meeting, and then went to the cottage.

It was still and clean and empty as he had left it. He made a fire, and, to persuade himself that he was in no haste, sat before it.

By night he would have seen Anne and Rogie. Whatever was to be the future relation between them would have been fixed. What did he want this relation to be? He felt no anger with Anne. She had been true to herself as he had been to himself. He felt no emotional eagerness to meet Anne, nor reluctance. His sharpest feeling was toward Rogie.

In the past Rogie had been a baby, the child of himself and Anne, not in any way distinct from them. But now that the convention of a home had been taken from Rogie--now that the accepted standard of father, mother, child under one roof had been taken from him, somehow Rogie had become a distinct personality. It was as if, in some strange way, the responsibility of being an individual, a separate social unit, had somehow descended upon the baby; so that now he was almost an adult in the separateness of his personality. Roger could not shake off a ridiculous feeling that he would almost meet Rogie as man to man.

It was after six before Roger climbed the hill, and, closing the old-fashioned garden gate quietly behind him, rang the bell.

At the sound of the bell pealing through the still house, Anne started, and then certainty gripped her beyond motion. Again the bell rang, this time less fiercely, as if eagerness in the ringer were passing. Anne hurried from the room, but at the foot of the stairs she paused, staring at the door, her heart thumping until she could scarcely breathe. It sounded again, this time a sad little clang of disappointment. Anne went slowly to the door and opened it. The cold wind and rain rushed in and then Roger was close to her in the hall; the door shut, and the smell of his damp clothes sharp in the air.

"I thought you must have left town," she said calmly.

"I have been away. I only just got back."

In the closing of the umbrella and the hanging up of his hat and overcoat they escaped a more intimate greeting. But now that the hat and coat were hung and the dripping umbrella safe in the stand, Anne faced the need to take Roger upstairs or into the gloomy parlor to the right. She hesitated.

Roger had come. In a moment, she would bring Rogie to him. The future would hold whatever was possible of friendship for them, or else she would be outside the union of Rogie and his father. Until she knew, she must keep her lonely rooms upstairs as a retreat untouched by Roger's presence. If the future was to hold nothing she did not want memory there. She led the way to the parlor and lit the light.

"I was just getting Rogie ready for bed, but he didn't want to go a bit. He's wide awake."

Roger felt the dismal chill of the room shutting down upon him and struggled against it in the first remark that came to him.

"I don't suppose he will remember me."

"Oh, yes, I think he will. I was afraid he wouldn't know me when I came back from the mountains, he took so long to size me up. But he did."

She pulled down the shades and moved to the door.

"I'll just dress him again; it won't take but a few minutes."

She had not taken Rogie with her then. He had been in the city all the time, guarded by the Mitchells. Roger frowned and began walking up and down the rather long room. At the farther end a narrow glass door, draped with an ugly curtain of monk's cloth, hid the garden beyond. When he reached it, Roger pulled the curtain aside and looked out into the dripping bushes. It was a neglected garden, not riotous with overgrown plants as the cottage garden, but a lank, weed-grown strip, long and narrow. Roger dropped the curtain quickly and, lighting a cigarette, began walking again.

As the ugliness of the room penetrated in detail, the red shaded lamp, the horsehair furniture, the onyx stand, gradually his anger at the Mitchells faded in wonder of Anne. Why had Anne come to live here; Anne, who hated ugly surroundings with physical passion? Was Anne so poor that she could find no better place, or had she changed? Did things like this no longer trouble Anne?

A door upstairs closed. Then the silence continued unbroken. Roger's nerves tightened. Why didn't Anne take him up to what was evidently her part of the house? He lit a cigarette and pulled deeply on it. The smell of the smoke drifted up to Anne. Her throat swelled and she braced her shoulders as she buttoned Rogie's rompers with trembling fingers.

Roger heard her coming and ground out the cigarette on the white mantelshelf. Anne was in the doorway, Rogie in her arms. Just as he had done with Anne, so now Rogie leaned away, frowning, before, with a plunge of delight, he almost threw himself from Anne's arms. Roger took him.

"Well, old chap, who is it? So you knew me, did you?"

Over the baby's head Roger smiled proudly at Anne, and Anne smiled back; for Rogie's hands were already clutching his father's hair as if, in this favorite game, he was making assurance doubly sure.

"You see, he did remember," Anne came nearer. "He really has a wonderful memory."

"I don't believe many his age would have remembered, do you?"

"No, I don't believe they would."

They laughed together. Then the memory of their intimacy, incarnate forever in Rogie, swept Anne, and she turned hastily away and sat down on the sofa. Still holding the child, Roger took the rocker.

Silence came between them. Each searched nervously for some spot in the present on which to meet. But the strangeness of seeing Anne and Rogie in these surroundings, his ignorance of all that had happened to them in the last months, wrapped Roger like a fog, through which he felt Anne receding from him.

But, for the first time, the room was not hideous to Anne. The damp smell of Roger's clothes, the lingering cigarette smoke, filled it with a throbbing vitality it had never had. She felt Roger's masculinity in the very air and it made the few small remarks she managed to catch from the whirling mass of feeling seem thin and artificial.

Roger tried to fill the silence with remarks to Rogie; by tickling him and riding him on his foot. For a while it succeeded. Then Rogie grew tired. His eyes filmed; he leaned more heavily on his father's shoulder.

Roger tried to keep him awake, but Rogie objected with impatient jerks, and Roger looked to Anne. In a few moments he would be asleep. Then he and Anne would be faced by the need to fill the silence or he would have to go.

"He's just about asleep. Perhaps I'd better carry him to bed. He must be awfully heavy for you."

"No, I'll take him. That's something no one seems to do just right. He wakes even if Mrs. Jeffries tries to carry him at this stage, and usually he's as good with her as with me."

She took Rogie from him and Roger watched her go, so small and fair herself. He heard her go slowly up the stairs, for Rogie was indeed a heavy weight for her slight arms.

Again it was still.

Anne put Rogie down, stayed a moment to make sure he would not wake, turned out the light and opened the window. Again the smell of smoke drifted to her and now she heard Roger's step walking up and down as he had used to walk in anger at Hilary Wainwright.

Up and down the long, narrow room Roger walked, trying to force the chaos of thought to ordered sequence by the rhythm of his step. He could not go back to the cottage which Anne had made beautiful and leave her and Rogie in this dismal place. No matter whether Anne had grown indifferent to her surroundings or not, he hated to think of his boy, even as a baby, absorbing impressions of that horsehair furniture and onyx stand. And in imagination he saw sharply Mrs. Jeffries, whom they represented, a dull, thin woman like the aunt who had brought him up. Anne hated to face new situations, and, if she had indeed persuaded herself that this was not so bad, she would go on living here year after year. Roger shuddered. What Anne chose to do was no longer his concern, although the old need to protect rose in him, untinged by any personal emotion, almost against his will. He wanted Anne to be happy and have the things she liked. But Rogie was very definitely his concern; not only his duty, but with the feel of the fat little body as vivid in his arms as when he had held him, Rogie was the deepest motive of his life.

He was just turning again at the far end of the room when Anne returned. He looked up quickly, still frowning over the problem, but said, with a strange, new hesitancy and unsureness:

"Anne, I don't like to think of you and Rogie living in this place. You ought to have the cottage. I only moved back because there seemed no reason not to."

Anne leaned against the onyx stand; she could get no farther, but her voice was steady and she even smiled slightly and looked in forced amusement about the room.

"It is pretty bad, isn't it? But I don't come in here often."

"Are your own any better?"

"Not exactly--in the furnishing, but the sitting-room looks over a garden and there's a little triangle of bay."

Roger locked about, trying to get clearer the location of the house.

"Darn little bay from any part of this house. Anne, won't you take the cottage? I have to be away a great deal now. It doesn't matter much where I live in between times."

"I--don't--see how I can quite--not yet, anyhow." By speaking so, very slowly in assumed consideration of this as a proposition, Anne succeeded in keeping her voice even. "I may get a raise after New Year's, although it's rather soon to expect one, but at present I couldn't pay the cottage rent and have Mrs. Horton too. This is ridiculously cheap and when Mrs. Jeffries is here she takes such care of Rogie."

"Isn't she here all the time?"

"Not at present. She had to go to a brother-in-law. Her sister died and left several children. She may bring them back with her."

"Will you go on just the same then?"

"I don't know. We didn't have time to discuss that. I suppose I can."

Again Roger walked the length of the room, past Anne, and back. When he came to the other end, as if only from this spot could he explain, he said sharply:

"Anne, I don't want it. I don't want any woman, no matter how kind she is, bringing Rogie up. Mrs. Horton didn't matter so much when he was quite little, but he's getting a regular boy now and--I don't want it."

This consideration was all for Rogie, but Anne felt as if some one very strong had picked her up and was carrying her easily.

"I would rather be with him all the time, too, but that's impossible."

"No, it isn't. Anne, I don't want you to work. It isn't necessary. No, don't interrupt, please. Listen. I can do it very well. I've been writing some on the side lately and I've got to be quite a speech-maker. You'd be surprised. Speech-making doesn't pay a great deal, but it's something. Please believe me, I can do it very well."

The floor swayed beneath Anne, but she held tight to the cold onyx and answered quietly:

"I'll have to have time to think about it, Roger. I--can't--decide right away now."

Roger shrugged impatiently. "You can if you try. What is there to prevent? I--" he hesitated--"I won't trouble you in any way. You will be exactly as free as you are now. Anne, if you won't do it for yourself, won't you do it for Rogie?"

"I--don't--know," Anne whispered, her strength almost gone.

Roger turned away. Again he felt himself tilting against the soft, unbendable obstinacy of one of Anne's principles.

"Well," he said at length, "will you agree to this? Will you move back to the cottage and let me pay the rent? Will you?" he repeated more gently when Anne did not answer.

To be back in the cottage in her three white-painted rooms with all the Bay and the hills and the sweet garden. Anne felt herself sinking down into a peace so thick and deep that she could scarcely bear to break it even by an answer. She nodded.

"When will you come? To-night?"

"To-night!"

"Why not? It's early. Have you much to pack?"

"No--only my clothes and Rogie's."

"You could do it, couldn't you?"

"Yes--I--could--do it. There's Mrs. Jeffries though----"

Roger felt as if Anne were opposing tiny twigs to this sweeping need of his to get them both out of that horrible house.

"Do you owe her any rent?"

"No. I just sent her a check for the coming month."

"Then there's no reason you can't. Besides, from what you say, she's not sure of her own plans. Perhaps she won't come back herself."

"I think she will. But she may not."

"Then it's settled, is it? I can get a taxi while you pack?"

"All right." The words quivered and dropped from Anne in a low whisper as if her last resistance had died. She hurried from the room and Roger went out to find a telephone and get the taxi.

Anne could never remember how she packed her trunk or dressed Rogie or when she turned to find Roger beside her telling her the taxi was waiting. She seemed to be escaping from some terrible catastrophe, her whole consciousness taken in the effort to get away. It was only when they were all together in the close intimacy of the cab that Anne realized what she had done.

In a few moments she and Roger and Rogie would be again in the cottage. Beyond that Anne could not think. Nor did her mind clear to any detail, even as she followed Roger, carrying Rogie up the long, familiar flight and into the living-room. He put Rogie on the couch, paid the driver and closed the door. Anne was shaking so she could scarcely stand.

"I'll make a fire. Everything is just the same, except the crib. I--I'll get that. It's in the attic."

Roger went into the kitchen and Anne heard him light the candle-lantern they had always kept for searching things stowed in the tiny loft they called the attic. Then he brought the step ladder and, taking out the small square of ceiling that made the attic entrance, clambered up. Anne's hands were stiff with cold. It seemed impossible that Roger should be doing these things exactly as he had done them ages upon ages ago in the past. Life was so different now that no motion in it could be quite the same. But it was exactly the same, even to Roger's throwing the unwanted things out of his way as he always did, because he was a bad packer and never knew exactly where he had put anything. At last he found it, and threw the mattress out through the opening, scrambling down with the framework. When he had put away the ladder and lantern and dusted his clothes, he brought the crib in.

"Shall I put it up in the bedroom?"

Anne was bent now above the opened trunk searching Rogie's night things which she had thrust hastily in among her own clothes in the rush of packing.

"Yes," she whispered, without looking up, feigning this need not to wake Rogie, already restless from the unusual confusion about him.

When she had found the things she carried Rogie to the fire, undressed him, slipped on the tiny pajamas, and, holding him close, listened with every nerve to Roger moving about in the next room. In a few moments now Rogie would be in his own crib, in the old room. What would Roger do?

At last Roger came from the bedroom.

"I've put it up but I didn't make it--I don't know just how you do it. The blankets and things are all on the bed--I'm sure they're all there."

Anne rose and moved to lay Rogie on the couch while she made up the crib, but Roger held out his arms and Anne laid the baby in them. Very gently Roger sat down in Anne's place and she went in to make the crib. But the blood beat so behind her eyes and her hands trembled so violently that she scarcely knew what she did.

Roger stared across his son's head into the flames, conscious of the new disorder of the room, the opened trunk, Rogie's tiny garments lying on the hearthrug, Anne in the next room.

The past, the present, the future tangled before him, a mass of paths leading in all directions; quagmires of misunderstanding, blind alleys of separate interests, smooth, pleasant spots of memories long past. Here a path to the night by the lake when Anne's lips had clung as eagerly as his own; there the blank wall of the lacquer screen and the desert spots of Anne's carping criticism. Here the path of his deepest faith and belief broke short above the chasm of Anne's indifference. The world was indifferent too. But the world's indifference he could escape in the comradeship of others who believed with him; in solitary hours when, physically rested, his own faith always rose again clear and strong. With the narrowness and indifference of strangers he did not have to rise up and lie down, eat, sleep and be patient.

Then suddenly the past and present divided, and in the space between Roger saw a future, the future Katya had pictured--a devastating passion that would destroy him--or remake life. Roger felt as if a fiery wind were suddenly blowing upon him, and his hold on Rogie tightened. He did not want life broken or remade. He wanted to work on as he was working, accomplish more and more, mold Rogie to the ideal he had once shaped for himself, but which he sometimes felt now was very high and far away. He would get only a little way to it and die. But Rogie might reach and pass it.

The door opened and Anne came in. Quietly Roger handed the baby to her, and she went back again into the bedroom. Roger got up and stood leaning against the mantelshelf.

Had Anne really changed?

Had he?

From the maze of separate interests and ideals could they find one tiny path back to the old dreams? Could they cut a new one to a shared future? Would his arms ever again seek Anne hungrily of their own will? Would hers close about him and hold him fiercely as they had held him by the lake? Was need like this ever reborn?

What was Anne doing in the other room? Why didn't she come back?

She came at last, softly closing the door behind her. At the other end of the hearth she too stood leaning against the mantelshelf, staring down into the fire, as conscious of the familiar room and Roger leaning so close beside her as Roger of her.

What was Roger going to do? What did he expect of her? In a moment would he take his things and go, as many guests had gone after a pleasant evening in those far gone days? Would she lock the door and put out the lights after Roger, as Roger had done after those other guests whose going had meant nothing at all?

Why did Roger stand there staring into the fire? Was he waiting for her to speak?

Without changing her position Anne looked to him. He seemed suddenly, in her absence with Rogie, to have grown strangely weary. His face, turned in profile, looked thinner, sharper, and a little drawn about the corners of the eyes and lips. His shoulders sagged as they only did when he was very tired. When he had grown suddenly tired like this it had always rested him to lie on the couch and have her stroke his head quietly in one long, sweeping gesture from forehead to neck. Anne felt the outline of his head now beneath her hand, and the dry crispness of his hair as if it were actually beneath her touch. She looked quickly back into the fire.

The rain began again and Roger threw another log on the fire. The acacia lashed its long, thin arms and the rising wind cried over the hill. Anne felt Roger's look on her and very slowly her own rose to meet it.

"Shall we try again, Anne?"

"Y-e-s," Anne whispered, and her eyes filled with tears.

Roger drew her gently to him. There was no passion of possession in his hold, but deep tenderness and protection,

"I think it will be all right this time, Princess."

Anne stood close.

"Are you quite sure, Roger, that you want it so?"

"Yes. For myself I am quite sure. And you?"

"I'm--sure--too."

They stood so for a moment, then Roger drew her gently nearer.

Would they ever find it now, that everlasting, undestroyable love that they had missed? Over Anne's fair head, Roger gazed wistfully into the fire.