Slowly and by almost imperceptible stages, spring had crept into summer and summer had crawled sluggishly into autumn. Rose color had turned to green, green to gold, and then all colors had faded to the uniform gray of November. To Beatrix it seemed that nature’s change typified that of her life; to Thayer and Arlt the rose color and the gold were still glowing. For the time being, the problems of their professional lives were absorbing them both, to the exclusion of more human interests. Such epochs are bound to come to every man. However broad and generous-minded he may be, there are hours when it seems to him that the rising of the sun and the going down of the same are functions of nature ordained merely for the sake of giving chronological record of his own professional advancement. November brought them both to this mood and, while it lasted, each found the other his only satisfactory companion.

To Thayer the summer had been a matter of personal mathematics, the solving of simultaneous personal equations. He had refused the Lorimers’ urgent invitation to join them at Monomoy. He had felt unequal to prolong the double strain he had endured, those last weeks in town before society broke up for the summer. It was almost unbearable to him to be within daily reach of Beatrix, to be forced to face her with the unvarying conventional smile of mere social acquaintance. It was infinitely worse to be forced to look on and watch the gradual wrecking of her hopes, to know that she was unhappy, discouraged and full of fear for the future, and to realize that another man was carelessly bringing upon her all this from which he would have given his own life to shield her. Yet bad and worse were subordinated to worst. The worst, the most unbearable phase of the whole situation lay in the knowledge, again and again brought to the proof, that he himself was the only living person who had the ability to hold Lorimer even approximately steady, that in a way the thread of his destiny was knotted together with that of Beatrix. He loved her absolutely, and the only proof of his love for her must lie in his strange power to make more tolerable for her the galling yoke of her marriage to another man.

Even in these few short months, it had become evident to the world that the yoke was a galling one. Beatrix wore it bravely, even haughtily. Nevertheless, it was chafing her until she was raw. Like a horse surprised by the discovery of its own power, from occasional friskiness, Lorimer was settling into a steadily increasing pace. During the months of probation, he had held himself fairly steady, rather than lose the chance of winning Beatrix for his wife. Now that she was won, he snapped the check he had put upon himself, and yielded to the acquired momentum gained during his self-imposed repression. By the time he came home from Europe, Bobby and Thayer both realized that something was amiss. By the first of June, it was an open secret that all was not well with Lorimer’s soul.

Lorimer still loved Beatrix with all the fervor of his nature. To him, she was the one and only woman in the world, someone to be caressed and indulged and played with, the comrade of his domestic hours. But, when the other mood was upon him, he acknowledged no right upon her part to offer advice or warning. He treated her as one treats a spoiled child, fondling her until her presence bored him or interfered with his other plans, then quietly setting her aside and going his own way alone. As far as any woman could have held him, Beatrix could have done so; but in Lorimer’s life feminine influence was finite. When he was moved to take the bits in his teeth, only a man, and but one man at that, was able to check him. That man was Cotton Mather Thayer.

On a few occasions, Beatrix had endeavored to hold her husband, not from temptation itself, but from the first steps towards it. She might as well have tried to bar the rising tide with a pint sieve. At such times, it seemed to her that Lorimer deliberately made up his mind to have a revel, that he set himself to work to carry out his desires to a satisfactory conclusion. These periods came at irregular intervals; but, all in all, the intervals were shortening and the revels were increasing. Beatrix learned their symptoms far too quickly; she learned to know the depression and irritability which greeted her every effort to rouse and to please him. It was at such times that Lorimer made bitter revolt against what he termed her narrowness and prejudice, or burst into occasional angry petulance, if she tried to urge him to cut loose from the club and from the constantly-growing influence of Lloyd Avalons who was discerning enough to discover that Lorimers appetite was a possible lever by which he himself might pry himself up into a more stable position in society. In this matter, however, Lloyd Avalons was not quite so unprincipled as he seemed. To his mind, there was nothing so very bad about a little matter of social intoxication. The evil of drink was an affair bounded by purely geographical lines, and he encouraged in Lorimer the very thing for which he would have been prompt to dismiss the man who cleaned the snow off his sidewalk.

Afterwards, when the depression had ended in the revel, when they both had ended in penitence, Lorimer temporarily came back again to the old ways. The caressing intonations returned to his voice, as he talked to Beatrix; his eyes followed her with loving pride, as she moved about the room; for days at a time he devoted himself to her wishes, serving her with a tireless chivalry which made her long to forget all that had gone before. However, Beatrix could not forget certain facts; certain episodes were so fixed in her memory that they seemed branded upon the very tissue of her life. In some respects, these intervening days were the hardest ones she had to bear. Lorimer seemed totally unable to grasp the fact that any permanent barrier was rising between them, that there was any real reason why they should not meet on precisely the old ground. To his mind, half an hour of impulsive penitence could wipe out half a night of deliberate sin, and Beatrix dared not explain to him that it was otherwise. Her hold over him, that hold which once she had deemed so strong, was growing slighter with every passing month. Any hasty or ill-considered word from her might have the effect of destroying it altogether. For the present, the most she could do, was to avoid antagonizing him; and even that was no easy task. She was quite unable to decide whether it took more self-control to accept in silence his petulance or his caresses. Meanwhile, she was thankful for the apparently growing friendship between Thayer and her husband. During late May and all of June, Thayer was with Lorimer almost daily, and Lorimer came nearest to his old, winning self on the days when he had been longest in company with Thayer.

With the general scattering of people which heralds the coming of summer, it seemed to Thayer that, for the time being, Lorimer’s danger was over, and it was with a sigh of utter relief that he saw Lorimer and Beatrix starting for Monomoy. Strong as he was, Thayer had felt the strain of the past six weeks; and it was good to hide himself with Arlt in a Canadian fishing village, dismiss his responsibilities to his neighbor, and give himself up to absolute idleness and much good music.

He had planned to spend August and September in Germany; but fate willed otherwise. Less than a week before he was to sail, he received a laconic epistle from Bobby Dane, dated at the hotel where he himself had spent the previous summer.

“DEAR THAYER, Wish you could come down here for August. Lorimer is raising the deuce, and I can’t do much with him. Besides, I am ordered back, next week. I suppose the devil needs my ministrations. I’ll see to one, if you’ll tackle the other.

Yours,
R. F. DANE.”

Thayer hesitated for three minutes. Then he wrote two telegrams. One was to the office of the steamship company. The other was to the hotel near Monomoy.

The reaction which followed, was a natural one. Late in September, Thayer returned to New York, preparatory to a concert tour through New England. Exhausted by the long strain of mastering both himself and Lorimer, he threw himself into his work with a feverish intensity which astounded Arlt and roused his audiences to the highest pitch of enthusiasm. Thayer took his new honors quietly, however. In his secret heart, he knew that this had been the simplest way to work off his stored-up emotions, and he reached New York, early in November, with a greater reputation and steadier nerves than he had even dared to hope.

The tour had been a prosperous one for Arlt, as well. Upon several occasions, he had met with marked favor, and the little touch of success had reacted upon his personality, rendering him more at ease, more masterful with his audience. To be popular, art must be modest; but woe betide it, if it be in the least deprecating! However, Arlt was learning to face his public with a fairly good grace, and his public showed itself willing to smile back at him in a thoroughly friendly fashion.

Arlt’s overture was to have its first hearing, the week before Thanksgiving. The matter had been arranged through the influence of his teacher, and Arlt had been invited to conduct the orchestra for the event. However, in spite of his added ease, Arlt had judged such an ordeal too great for his courage. Accordingly, the teacher and Thayer had taken council together, with the result that Thayer was engaged as soloist for the evening, and that Thayer insisted upon singing one group of songs with a piano accompaniment. To this minor detail, Arlt had been forced to submit, although he was shrewd enough to see that it was merely a ruse on the part of his teacher to bring him in person before his audience.

The arrangement of these details, the orchestral rehearsals of the overture and his own rehearsals with Arlt were engrossing Thayer completely. Heart and soul, he was working for the boy’s success, for he realized that into this simple overture Arlt had put the very best of himself, that the young composer’s happiness was bound up in the success or failure of his maiden effort. The creative power had come upon him; he had worked to the utmost limit with the material ready to his brain. Now he was waiting to have the world pass judgment whether his work was worth the doing, whether he should keep on, or turn his back upon his chosen path. Thayer’s own plans, too, were maturing. In the watching them develop, in the helping Arlt to pass the time of waiting, he almost succeeded in forgetting the Lorimers. Almost; but not quite. The forgetting was a little too intentional to be entirely complete. He met them rarely. Society had not yet organized its winter campaign, and it was still possible for a man to go his own individual way. Just now, Thayer’s own individual way led him almost daily in the direction of Washington Square.

He was in Arlt’s room, one evening, less than a week before the concert. He had been dining with Miss Gannion; but he had left her early, in order to impress upon Arlt that he must accept his bidding to the supper which the Lorimers were to give after the concert. The invitations had been noncommittal, and Arlt had announced his intention of declining his own, on the plea of being too tired with his overture to care to do anything more, that night. Miss Gannion had told Thayer what he already half suspected, that Beatrix was really giving this supper in Arlt’s honor and that it was to be the first large affair of the season, in the hope of focussing public attention upon the boy at the very moment of his having proved his real genius as composer. Thayer appreciated to the full the gracious kindliness of the plan, and he had excused himself to Miss Gannion and hurried away in search of Arlt, devoutly praying, as he went, that the note of regret might not be already on its way.

He was but just in time. The sealed note lay on the table, and Arlt was shrugging himself into his overcoat, when Thayer entered the room. Ten minutes later, they were still arguing the matter, when they heard an unfamiliar step coming up the stairs.

“Mr. Arlt?” A strange voice followed the knock.

Arlt opened the door hospitably. The dim light in the hallway showed him a figure known to every opera singer in America and half of Europe.

“Will you come in?” he asked, in some surprise.

“Is Mr. Thayer here?”

“I am.” Thayer stepped into the lighted doorway. “You wished me?”

“Yes. What is more, I need you. We know each other well by sight, so I suppose there is no call for us to waste time on introductions. Mr. Thayer, Principali, one of my best baritones, is ill and is forced to cancel his engagements. Will you take his place?”

Thayer meditated swiftly, during a moment of silence.

“What are the operas?”

“Wagner, Faust of course, and oh, the usual run of extras.”

“What reason have you to think that I am fitted for your vacancy?” Thayer asked directly.

The impresario smiled.

“Your old master in Berlin is one of my most intimate friends. He gave you a letter of introduction to me, I think?” The accent was interrogative, although it was plain that only one answer was expected.

“He did,” Thayer assented quietly.

“Yes, and I have been waiting for more than a year in the hope that you would present it. Since you will not come to me, I am at last driven to go in search of you.”

Thayer bowed gravely in recognition of the implied compliment. He realized that he was suddenly facing a question which might affect his whole after life, and he was too much in earnest to waste words on mere conventional phrases. He liked the old man, and he felt a swift, burning longing to accept his offer. It had come unsought, unexpected. Was not fate in it; and was not a man always justified in following out his fate? To accept it would be in a great measure to cut himself off from his present social life. An operatic engagement would engross him completely. All in all, it might be better so. And yet, there was something to be said upon the other side. Was he justified in working out his own professional salvation at the certain cost of the damnation of another soul? That was what it amounted to in the long run. If he went into opera, he must separate himself from all connection with Sidney Lorimer. He could not take the time to visit Lorimer’s world; it would be sure and swift destruction to Lorimer, if he were to set foot within the new world which Thayer was preparing to enter. Thayer realized that the horns of his dilemma were long and curving. The offer tempted him sorely; yet, for some unaccountable reason, he shrank from turning his back upon Lorimer. And, besides, if Beatrix

“How long would you need me?”

“The entire season.”

“How soon?”

“In Faust, on the tenth of next month.”

“In Faust?”

The impresario saw that Thayer was hesitating. The idea of Faust plainly attracted him, and the impresario hastily followed up the advantage.

“Yes, we want you for Valentine.”

“My favorite part,” Thayer said, half to himself.

The impresario smiled serenely. He felt no question now as to the outcome of his errand.

“Calve will sing Marguerite; it will be a good cast. After that, we shall need you, two or three times a week, and the salary ”

Impatiently Thayer brushed his words aside.

“How soon must you have my answer?”

“To-night.”

“Very well. Then, no.”

The impresario straightened up in his chair.

“Mr. Thayer!” he remonstrated.

“It is impossible for me to bind myself for an entire season, without more time to think the matter over,” Thayer said quietly.

“But it is important that I should know, in order to make my other arrangements.”

“Then you would better consider it settled in the negative,” Thayer returned.

The impresario wavered.

“How much time do you need?” he asked a little impatiently.

“I must have a week.”

“Impossible.”

“Very well, then. But I thank you for the honor you have done me in asking me to fill the place.”

Thayer rose with an air of decision, and the impresario could do nothing else than follow his example. At the door, he turned back.

“Mr. Thayer, there is no use in my trying to conceal the fact that I want you badly. If I will wait until a week from to-night, will you give me your answer then?”

“I will,” Thayer replied imperturbably.

“And sign the contracts on the spot?”

“I will,” Thayer repeated; “but remember this: in the meantime, I am binding myself to nothing. Good-night.”

He went down the stairs with the impresario. When he returned to Arlt’s room, a moment later, he took up the conversation at the precise point where they had dropped it; but, even in the dusky room, Arlt could see that Thayer’s eyes were blazing as he had never seen them till then. Not long afterwards, Thayer glanced down at his own strong, slim hand that rested on the table beside him. The fingers were moving restlessly and, on the back, the cords twitched a little now and then. Thayer watched it curiously for a moment. Then he clasped his hands on his knee and held them there, motionless.