CHAPTER I - MISS BELINDA HAS A QUESTION TO DECIDE.

“I pray you in your letters,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.” ­OTHELLO.

Miss Belinda sitting before her bedroom fire on a certain windy night in January, presented a picture of the most profound thought.  A year had elapsed since, with heavy heart and moistened eye, she had bidden good-bye to the child of her care, and beheld her drift away with her new friend into a strange and untried life.  And now a letter had come from that friend, in which with the truest appreciation for the feelings of herself and sister, he requested their final permission to adopt Paula as his own child and the future occupant of his house and heart.

Yes, after a year of increased comfort, Mrs. Sylvester, who would never have consented to receive as her own any child demanding care or attention, had decided it was quite a different matter to give place and position to a lovely girl already grown, whose beauty was sufficiently pronounced to do credit to the family while at the same time it was of a character to heighten by contrast her own very manifest attractions.  So the letter, destined to create such a disturbance in the stern and powerful mind of Miss Belinda, had been written and dispatched.

And indeed it was matter for the gravest reflection.  To accede to this important request was to yield up all control over the dear young girl whose affection had constituted the brightness of this somewhat disappointed life, while to refuse an offer made with such evident love and anxiety, was to bring a pang of regret to a heart she hesitated to wound.  The question of advantage which might have swayed others in their decision, did not in the least affect Miss Belinda.  Now that Paula had seen the world and gained an insight into certain studies beyond the reach of her own attainments, any wishes in which she might have indulged on that score were satisfied, and mere wealth with its concomitant of luxuriant living, she regarded with distrust, and rather in the light of a stumbling-block to the great and grand end of all existence.

Suddenly with that energy which characterized all her movements, she rose from her seat, and first casting a look of somewhat cautious inquiry at the recumbent figure of her sister, asleep in the heavy old fashioned bed that occupied one corner of the room, she proceeded to a bureau drawer and took out a small box which she unlocked on the table.  It was full of letters; those same honest epistles, which, as empowered by Mr. Sylvester, she had requested Paula to send her from week to week.  Some of them were a year old, but she read them all carefully through, while the clock ticked on the shelf and the wind soughed in the chimney.  Certain passages she marked, and when she had finished the pile, she took up the letters again and re-read those passages.  They were necessarily desultory in their character, but they all had, in her mind at least, a bearing upon the question on hand, and as such, I give them to my readers.

“O aunty, I have made a friend, a sweet girl friend who I have reason to hope will henceforth be to me as my other eye and hand.  Her name is Stuyvesant ­a name by the way that always calls up a certain complacent smile on Cousin Ona’s countenance ­and she is the daughter of one of the directors of Mr. Sylvester’s bank.  I met her in a rather curious way.  For some reason Ona had expressed a wish for me to ride horseback.  She is rather too large for the exercise herself, but thought it looked well, she said, to see a lady and groom ride from the front of the house; moreover it would keep me in color by establishing my health.  So Mr. Sylvester who denies her nothing, promised us horses and the groom, and as a preparation for acquitting myself with credit, has sent me to one of the finest riding academies in the city.  It was here I met Miss Stuyvesant.  She is a small interesting-looking girl whose chief beauty lies in her expression which is certainly very charming.  I was conscious of a calm and satisfied feeling the moment I saw her.  Her eyes which are raised with a certain appeal to your face, are blue, while her lips that break into smiles only at rare moments, are rosy and delicately curved.  In her riding-habit she looks like a child, but when dressed for the street she surprises you with the reserved and womanly air with which she carries her proud head.  Altogether she is a sweet study to me, alluring me with her glance yet awing me by her dainty ladyhood, a ladyhood too unconscious to be affected and yet so completely a part of her whole delicate being, that you could as soon dissociate the bloom from the rose, as the air of highborn reserve, from this sweet scion of one of New York’s oldest families.

“I was mounting my horse when our eyes first met, and I never shall forget her look of delighted surprise.  Did she recognize in me the friend I now hope to become?  Later we were introduced by Mr. Sylvester who had been so kind as to accompany me that day.  The way in which he said to her, ‘This is Paula,’ proved that I was no new topic of conversation between them, and indeed she afterwards explained to me that she had been forewarned of my arrival during an afternoon call at his house.  There was in this first interview none of the unnecessary gush which you have so often reprobated as childish; indeed Miss Stuyvesant is not a person with whom one would presume to be familiar, nor was it till we had met several times that any acknowledgement was made of the mutual interest with which we found ourselves inspired.  Cousin Ona to whom I had naturally spoken of the little lady, wished me to cultivate her acquaintance more assiduously, but I knew that if I had excited in her the same interest she had awakened in me, this would not be necessary; our friendship would grow of itself and blossom without any hot-house forcing.  And so it did.  One day she came to the riding-school with her eyes like stars and her cheeks like the oleanders in your sitting-room.  Her brightness was so contagious, I stepped up to her.  But she greeted me with almost formal reserve, and mounting her horse, proceeded to engage in her usual exercise.  I was not hurt; I recognized the presence of some thought or feeling which made a barrier around her sensitive nature, and duly respected it.  Mounting my own horse, I rode around the ring which is the somewhat limited field of my present equestrian efforts, and waited.  For I knew from the looks which she cast me every now and then, that the flower of our friendship was outgrowing its sheath and would soon burst into the bud of perfect understanding.  At the end of the lesson we approached each other.  I do not know how it was done, but we walked home together, or rather I accompanied her to the stoop of her house, and before we parted we had exchanged those words which give emphasis to a sentiment long cherished but now for the first time avowed.  Miss Stuyvesant and I are friends, and I feel as though a new stream of enjoyment had opened in my breast.

“The fact that I still call her by this formal title instead of her very pretty name of Cicely, proves the nature of the respect she inspires even in the breasts of her girlish associates.”

“Why is it that I frequently hesitate as I go up the stairs and look about me with a vague feeling of apprehension?  The bronze figure of Luxury that adorns the landing, wears no semblance of terror to the wildest imagination, and yet I often find myself seized by an inexplicable shudder as I hurry past it; and once I actually looked behind me with the same sensation as if some one had plucked me by the sleeve.

“It is a folly; for recording which, I make my excuses.”

“Cousin Ona has decided that I must never wear colors.  ’Soft grays, my dear, dead blacks and opaque whites are all that you need to bring out the fine contrast of your hair and complexion; the least hint of blue or pink would destroy it.’  So she says and so I must believe, for who else has made such a study of the all important subject of dress.  Behold me, then, arrayed for my first reception in a colorless robe of rich silk to which Ona after long consideration allowed me to add some ornaments of plain gold with which Mr. Sylvester has kindly presented me.  But I think more of the people I am going to meet than of anything else, though I enjoy the home-feeling which a pretty dress gives me, as well as a violet does its bright blue coat.”

“I have heard a great preacher!  What shall I say?  At first it seems as if nothing could express my joy and satisfaction.  The sapling that is shaken to its root by the winds of heaven, keeps silence I imagine.  But O Aunty, if my smallness makes me quake, it also makes me feel.  What gates of thought have been opened to me!  What shining tracks of inquiry pointed out!  I feel as if I had been shown a path where angels walked.  Can it be that such words have been uttered every week of my life and I in ignorance of them?  It is like the revelation of the ocean to unaccustomed eyes.  Henceforth small things must seem like pebble stones above which stretch innumerable heavenly vistas.  It is not so much that new things have been revealed to me as that old things have been made strangely eloquent.  The voice of a daisy on the hill side, the breath of thunder in the mountain gorges, the blossoming of a child’s smile under its mother’s eye, the fact that golden portals are opened in every life for the coming and going of the messengers of God, all have been made real to me, real as the voice of the Saviour to his disciples as they walked in the fields or started back awe-stricken from the stupendous vision of the cross.  It is a solemn thing to see one’s humble thoughts caught by the imagination of a great mind and carried on and up into regions you never realized existed.

“I was so burdened with joy that I could not forbear asking Mr. Sylvester if he did not feel as if the whole face of the world had changed since we entered those holy doors.  He did not respond with the glad ‘Yes’ for which I hoped, and though his smile was very kind, I could not help wondering what it was that sometimes fell between us like a veil.”

“O Aunty, how my heart does yearn towards Mr. Sylvester at times!  As I see him sitting with clouded brow in the midst of so much that ought to charm and enliven him, I ask myself if the advantages of wealth compensate for all this care and anxiety.  But I notice he is much more cheerful now than when I first came.  Ona says he is in danger of losing the air of melancholy reserve which made him look so distinguished, but I think we can spare a little of such doubtful distinguishment for the sake of the smiles with which he now and then indulges us.”

“I feel as if a hand had gripped my throat.  Cousin Ona spoke to Mr. Sylvester this morning in a way that made my very heart stand still.  And yet it was only a simple, ‘Follow your own judgment, Mr. Sylvester.’  But how she said it!  Do these languid women carry venom in their tongues?  I had always thought she was of too easy a disposition to feel anger or display it; but the spring of a serpent is all the deadlier for his long silent basking in the sun.  O pardon me for making such a frightful allusion.  But if you had seen her and heard Mr. Sylvester’s sigh as he turned and left the room!”

“Mr. Bertram Sylvester has awakened my deepest interest.  His uncle has told me his story, which alone of all the things I have heard in this house, I do not feel at liberty to repeat, and it has aroused in me strange thoughts and very peculiar emotions.  He is devoted to some one we do not know, and the idea surrounds him in my eyes with a sort of halo that you would perhaps call fanciful, but which I am nevertheless bound to reverence.  He does not know that I am acquainted with his story.  I wish he did and would let me speak the words that rise to my lips whenever I see him or hear him play.”

“There are moments when I long to flee back to Grotewell.  It is when Cousin Ona comes in from shopping with a dozen packages to be opened and commented upon, or when Mrs. Fitzgerald has been here or some other of her ultra-fashionable acquaintances.  The atmosphere of the house for hours after either of the above occurrences is too heavy for breathing.  I have to go away and clear my brain by a brisk walk or a look into Knoedler’s or Schaus’.”

“The panel where Cousin Ona’s picture used to hang, has been filled by one of Meissonier’s most interesting studies; and though I never thought Mr. Sylvester particularly fond of the French style of art, he seems very well satisfied with the result.  I cannot understand how Cousin Ona can regard the misfortune to her portrait so calmly.  I think it would break my heart to see a husband look with complacency on any picture, no matter how exquisite, that took the place of my own, especially if like her’s, it was painted in my bridal days.  I sometimes wonder if those days are as sacred to the memory of husband and wife as I have always imagined them to be.”

“Why does Cousin Ona never speak of Grotewell, and why, if by chance I mention the name, does she drop her eyes and a shadow cross the countenance of Mr. Sylvester?”

“There is a word Mr. Sylvester uses in the most curious way; it is fuss.  He calls everything a fuss that while insignificant in size or character has power either to irritate or please.  A fly is a fuss; so is a dimple in a girl’s cheek or a figure that goes wrong in accounts.  I have even heard him call a child, ‘That dear little fuss.’  Bertram unconsciously imitates his uncle in this peculiar mannerism and is often heard alluding to this or that as a fuss of fusses.  Indeed they say this use of the word is a peculiarity of the Sylvester family.”

“I think from the way Mr. Sylvester spoke yesterday, that he must have experienced some dreadful trouble in his life.  We were walking in the wards of a hospital ­that is, Miss Stuyvesant, Mr. Sylvester and myself ­when some one near us gave utterance to the trite expression, ’O it will heal, but the scar will always remain.’  ’That is a common saying,’ remarked Mr. Sylvester, ’but how true a one no one realizes but he who carries the scar.’”

“It may be imagination or simply the effect of increased appreciation on my part, but it does seem as if Miss Stuyvesant grew lovelier and more companionable each time that I meet her.  She makes me think of a temple in which a holy lamp is burning.  Her very silences are eloquent, and yet she is never distraite but always cheerful and frequently the brightest of the company.  But it is a brightness without glitter, a gentle lustre that delights you but never astonishes.  I meet many sweet girls in the so-called heartless circles of society, but none like her.  She is my white lily on which a moonbeam rests.”

“This house contains a mystery, as Ona is pleased to designate the room at the top of the house to which Mr. Sylvester withdraws when he desires to be alone.  And indeed it is a sort of Bluebeard’s chamber, in that he keeps it rigidly under lock and key, allowing no one to enter it, not even his wife.  The servants declare that no one but himself has ever crossed its threshold, but I can scarcely believe that.  Ona has not, but there must surely be some trusty person to whom he allots the care of its furniture.  Am I only proving myself to be a true member of my sex when I allow that I cannot hinder my own curiosity from hovering about a spot so religiously guarded?  Yet what should we see if its doors were thrown open?  A study surrounded with books it displeases him to see misplaced, or a luxurious apartment fitted with every appointment necessary to rest and comfort him when he comes home tired from business.”

“I never saw Mr. Sylvester angry till to-day.  By some inadvertence he went down town without locking the door of his private room, and though he returned immediately upon missing the key from his pocket, he was barely in time to prevent Cousin Ona from invading the spot he has always kept so sacred from intrusion.  I was not present and of course did not hear what was said, but I caught a glimpse of his face as he left the house, and found it quite sufficient to assure me of his dissatisfaction.  As for Ona, she declares he pulled her back as if she had been daring the plague.  ’I do not expect to find five beautiful wives hanging up there by their necks,’ concluded she with a forced laugh, ’but I shall yet see the interior of that room, if only to establish my prerogative as the mistress of this house.’

“I do not now feel as if I wished to see it.”

“There is one thing that strikes me as peculiar in Miss Stuyvesant, and that is, that as much pleasure as she seems to take in my society when we meet, she never comes to see me in Mr. Sylvester’s house.  For a long time I wondered over this but said nothing, but one day upon receiving a second invitation to visit her, I mentioned the fact as delicately as I could, and was quite distressed to observe how seriously she took the rebuke, if rebuke it could be called.  ‘I cannot explain myself,’ she murmured in some embarrassment; ’but Mr. Sylvester’s house is closed against me.  You must not ask me to seek you there or expect me to do myself the pleasure of attending Mrs. Sylvester’s receptions.  I cannot.  Is that enough for me to say to my dearest friend?’ I hardly knew what to reply, but finally ventured to inquire if she was restrained by any fact that would make it undignified in me to seek her society and enjoy the pleasures she is continually offering me.  And she answered with such a cheerful negative I was quite reassured.  And so the matter is settled.  Our friendship is to be emancipated from the bonds of etiquette and I am to enjoy her company whenever I can.  To-morrow we are going to take our first ride in the park.  The horses have been bought, and much to Cousin Ona’s satisfaction, the groom has been hired.”

“I was told something the other day, of a nature so unpleasant that I should not think of repeating it, if you had not expressly commanded me to confide to you everything that for any reason produced an effect upon me in my new home.  My informant was Sarah, the somewhat gossiping woman whom Ona has about her as seamstress and maid.  She said ­and she had spoken before I could prevent her ­that the way Mrs. Sylvester took on about her mourning at the time of little Geraldine’s death was enough to wear out the patience of Job.  She even went so far as to tell the dressmaker that if she could not have her dress made to suit her she would not put on mourning at all!  Aunty, can you wonder that Mr. Sylvester looks so bitterly sombre whenever mention is made of his child?  He loved it, and its own mother could worry over the fit of a dress while his bereaved heart was breaking!  I confess I can never feel the same indulgence towards what I considered the idiosyncrasies of a fashionable beauty again.  Her smooth white skin makes me tremble; it has never flushed with delight over the innocent smiles of her firstborn.”

“Mr. Sylvester is very polite to Cousin Ona and seems to yield to her wishes in everything.  But if I were she I think my heart would break over that very politeness.  But then she is one who demands formality even from the persons of her household.  I have never seen him stoop for a kiss or beheld her even so much as lay her hand on his shoulder.  But I have observed him wait on her at moments when he was pale from weariness and she flushed with long twilight reclinings before her sleepy boudoir fire.”

“There are times when I would not exchange my present opportunities for any others which might be afforded me.  General ­ dined here to-day, and what a vision of a great struggle was raised up before me by his few simple words in regard to Gettysburg.  I did not know which to admire most, the military bearing and vivid conversation of the great soldier, or the ease and dignity with which Mr. Sylvester met his remarks and answered each glowing sentence.  General ­ spoke a few words to me.  How gentle these lion-like men can be when they stoop their tall heads to address little children or young women!”

“What a noble-hearted man Mr. Sylvester is!  Mr. Turner in speaking of him the other night, declared there is no one in his congregation who in a quiet way does so much for the poor.  ’He is especially interested in young men,’ said he, ’and will leave his own affairs at any time to aid or advise them.’  I knew Mr. Sylvester was kind, but Mr. Turner’s enthusiasm was uncommon.  He evidently admires Mr. Sylvester as much as every one else loves him.  And he is not alone in this.  Almost every day I hear some remark made of a nature complimentary to my benefactor’s character or ability.  Even Mr. Stuyvesant who so seldom appears to notice us girls, once interrupted a conversation between Cicely and myself to inquire if Mr. Sylvester was quite well.  ’I thought he looked pale to-day,’ remarked he, in his dry but not unkindly way, and then added, ‘He must not get sick; he is too valuable to us.’  This was a great deal for Mr. Stuyvesant to say, and it caused a visible gratification to Mr. Sylvester when I related it to him in the evening.  ‘I had rather satisfy that man than any other I know,’ declared he.  ’He is of the stern old-fashioned sort, and it is an honor to any one to merit his approval.  I did not tell him that I had also heard Mr. Stuyvesant observe in a conversation with some business friend of his, that Edward Sylvester was the only speculator he knew in whom he felt implicit confidence.  Somehow it always gives me an uncomfortable feeling to hear Mr. Sylvester alluded to as a speculator.  Besides since he has entered the Bank, he has I am told, entirely restricted himself to what are called legitimate operations.”

“Mr. Sylvester came home with a dreadful look on his face to-day.  We were standing in the hall at the time the door opened, and he went by us without a nod, almost as if he did not see us.  Even Ona was startled and stood gazing after him with an anxiety such as I had never observed in her before, while I was conscious of that sick feeling I have sometimes experienced when he came upon me suddenly from his small room above, or paused in the midst of the gayest talk, to ask me some question that was wholly irrelevant and most frequently sad.

“‘He has met with some heavy loss,’ murmured his wife, glancing down the handsome parlors with a look such as a mother might bestow upon the face of a sick child.  But I was sure she had not sounded his trouble, and in my impetuosity was about to fly to his side when we saw him pause before the image of Luxury that stands on the stair, look at it for a moment with a strange intentness, then suddenly and with a gesture of irrepressible passion, lift his arm as if he would fell it from its place.  The action was so startling, Ona clutched my sleeve in terror, but he passed on and in another moment we heard him shut the door of his room.

“Would he be down to dinner? that was the next question.  Ona thought not; I did not dare to think.  Nevertheless it was a great relief to me when I saw him enter the dining-room with that set immovable look he sometimes wears when Ona begins one of her long and rambling streams of fashionable gossip.  ‘It is nothing,’ flashed from his wife’s eyes to mine, and she lapsed at once into her most graceful self, but she nevertheless hastened her meal and I was quite prepared to observe her follow him, as with the polite excuse of weariness, he left the table before desert.  I could not hear what she asked him, but his answer came distinctly to my ears from the midst of the library to which they had withdrawn.  ’It is nothing in which you have an interest, Ona.  Thank heaven you do not always know the price with which the splendors you so love are bought.’  And she did not cry out, ’O never pay such a price for any joy of mine!  Sooner than cost you so dear I would live on crusts and dwell in a garret.’  No, she kept silence, and when in a few minutes later I joined her in the library, it was to find on her usually placid lips, a thin cool smile that struck like ice to my heart, and made it impossible for me to speak.

“But the hardest trial of the day was to hear Mr. Sylvester come in at eleven o’clock ­he went out again immediately after dinner ­and go up stairs without giving me my usual good-night.  It was such a grief to me I could not keep still, but hurried to the foot of the stairs in the hopes he would yet remember me and come back.  But instead of that, he no sooner saw me than he threw out his hand almost as if he would push me back, and hastened on up the whole winding flight till he reached the refuge of that mysterious room of his at the top of the house.

“I could not go back to Ona after that ­she had been to make a call somewhere with a young gentleman friend of hers; ­yes on this very night had been to make a call ­but I took advantage of the late hour to retire to my own room where for a long time I lay awake listening for his descending step and seeing, as in a vision, the startling picture of his lifted arm raised against the unconscious piece of bronze on the stair.  Henceforth that statue will possess for me a still more dreadful significance.”

“It is the twenty-fifth of February.  Why should I feel as if I must be sure of the exact date before I slept?”

The next extract followed close on this and was the last which Miss Belinda read.

“Mr. Sylvester seems to have recovered from his late anxiety.  He does not shrink from me any more with that half bitter, half sad expression that has so long troubled and bewildered me, but draws me to his side and sits listening to my talk until I feel as if I were really of some comfort to this great and able man.  Ona does not notice the change; she is all absorbed in preparing for the visit to Washington, which Mr. Sylvester has promised her.”

Miss Belinda calmly folded up the letters and locked them again in the little mahogany box, after which she covered up the embers and quietly went to bed.  But next morning a letter was despatched to Mr. Sylvester which ran thus: 

     “DEAR MR. SYLVESTER: 

“For the present at least you may keep Paula with you.  But I am not ready to say that I think it would be for her best good to be received and acknowledged as your daughter ­yet.  Hoping you will appreciate the motives that actuate this decision,

     “I remain, respectfully yours,

     “BELINDA ANN WALTON.”

CHAPTER II - AN ADVENTURE ­OR SOMETHING MORE.

    “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
     But to be young was very heaven.” ­WORDSWORTH.

     Oph. ­What means this, my lord?

     Ham. ­Marry, this is the miching mallecho; it means
     mischief.”

      ­HAMLET.

A ride in the Central Park is an every-day matter to most people.  It signifies an indolent bowling over a smooth road all alive with the glitter of passing équipages, waving ribbons and fluttering plumes, and brightened now and then by the sight of a well known face amid the general rush of old and young, plain and handsome, sad and gay countenances that flash by you in one long and brilliant procession.

But to Paula and her friend Miss Stuyvesant starting out in the early freshness of a fair April morning, it meant new life, reawakening joy, the sparkle of young leaves just loosed from the bonds of winter, the sweetness and promise of spring airs, and all the budding glory of a new year with its summer of countless roses and its autumn of incalculable glories.  Not the twitter of a bird was lost to them, not the smile of an opening flower, not the welcome of a waving branch.  Youth, joy, and innocence lived in their hearts and showed them nothing in the mirror of nature that was not equally young, joyous and innocent.  Then they were alone, or sufficiently so.  The stray wanderers whom they met sitting under the flowering trees, were equally with themselves lovers of nature or they would not be seated in converse with it at this early hour; while the laugh of little children startled from their play by the prance of their high-stepping horses, was only another expression of the sweet but unexpressed delight that breathed in all the radiant atmosphere.

“We are two birds who have escaped thralldom and are taking our first flight into our natural ether,” cried Miss Stuyvesant gaily.

“We are two pioneers lit by the spirit of adventure, who have left the cosy hearth of wintry-fires to explore the domains of the frost king, and lo, we have come upon a Paradise of bloom and color!” responded the ringing voice of Paula.

“I feel as if I could mount that little white cloud we see over there,” continued Cicely with a quick lively wave of her whip.  “I wonder how Dandy would enjoy an empyrean journey?”

“From the haughty bend of his neck I should say he was quite satisfied with his present condition.  But perhaps his chief pride is due to the mistress he carries.”

“Are you attempting to vie with Mr. Williams, Paula?”

Mr. Williams was the meek-eyed, fair complexioned gentleman, whose predilection for compliment was just then a subject of talk in fashionable circles.

“Only so far as my admiration goes of the most charming lady I see this morning.  But who is this?”

Miss Stuyvesant looked up.  “Ah, that is some one with whom there is very little danger of your falling in love.”

Paula blushed.  The gentleman approaching them upon horseback was conspicuous for long side whiskers of a decidedly auburn tinge.

“His name is ­” But she had not time to finish, for the gentleman with a glance of astonished delight at Paula, bowed to the speaker with a liveliness and grace that demanded some recognition.

Instantly he drew rein.  “Do I behold Miss Stuyvesant among the nymphs!” cried he, in those ringing pleasant tones that at once predispose you towards their possessor.

“If you allude to my friend Miss Fairchild, you certainly do, Mr. Ensign,” the wicked little lady rejoined with a waiving of her usual ceremony that astonished Paula.

Mr. Ensign bestowed upon them his most courtly bow, but the flush that mounted to his brow ­making his face one red, as certain of his friends were malicious enough to observe on similar occasions ­indicated that he had been taken a little more at his word than perhaps suited even one of his easy and proverbially careless temperament.  “Miss Fairchild will understand that I am not a Harvey Williams ­at least before an introduction,” said he with something like seriousness.

But at this allusion to the gentleman whose name had been upon their lips but a moment before, both ladies laughed outright.

“I have just been accused of attempting the rôle of that gentleman myself,” exclaimed Paula.  “If the fresh morning air will persist in painting such roses on ladies’ cheeks,” continued she, with a loving look at her pretty companion “what can one be expected to do?”

“Admire,” quoth the red bannered cavalier with a glance, however, at the beautiful speaker instead of the demure little Cicely at her side.

Miss Stuyvesant perceived this look and a curious smile disturbed the corners of her rosy lips.  “What a fortunate man to be able to do the right thing at the right time,” laughed she, gaily touching up her horse that was beginning to show symptoms of restlessness.

“If Miss Stuyvesant will put that in the future tense and then assure us she has been among the prophets, I should be singularly obliged,” said he with a touch of his hat and a smiling look at Paula that was at once manly and gentle, careless and yet respectful.

“Ah, life is too bright for prophesies this morning.  The moment is enough.”

“Is it Miss Fairchild?” queried Mr. Ensign looking back over his shoulder.

She turned just a bit of her cheek towards him.  “What Miss Stuyvesant declares to be true, that am I bound to believe,” said she, and with the least little ripple of a laugh, rode on.

“It is a pity you have such a dislike for whiskers,” Cicely presently remarked with an air of great gravity.

Paula gave a start and cast a glance of reproach at her companion.  “I did not notice his whiskers after the first word or two,” said she, fixing her eyes on a turn of the road before them.  “Such cheerfulness is infectious.  I was merry before, but now I feel as if I had been bathed in sunshine.”

Cicely’s eyes flashed wide with surprise and her face grew serious in earnest.  “Mr. Ensign is a delightful companion,” observed she; “a room is always brighter for his entrance; and with all that, he is the only young man I know, who having come into a large fortune, feels any of the responsibilities of his position.  The sunshine is the result of a good heart and pure living, and that is what makes it infectious, I suppose.”

“Let us canter,” said Paula.  And so the glad young things swept on, life breaking in bubbles around them and rippling away into unfathomable wells of feeling in one of their pure hearts at least.  Suddenly a hand seemed to swoop from heaven and dash them both back in dismay.  They had reached one of those places where the foot path crosses the equestrian and they had run over and thrown down a little child.

“O heaven!” cried Paula leaping from her horse, “I had rather been killed myself.”  The groom rode up and she bent anxiously over the child.

It was a boy of some seven or eight years, whose misfortune ­he was lame, as the little crutch fallen at his side sufficiently denoted ­made appear much younger.  He had been struck on his arm and was moaning with pain, but did not seem to be otherwise hurt.  “Are you alone?” cried Paula, lifting his head on her arm and glancing hurriedly about.

The little fellow raised his heavy lids and for a moment stared into her face with eyes so deeply blue and beautiful they almost startled her, then with an effort pointed down the path, saying,

“Dad’s over there in the long tunnel talking to some one.  Tell him I got hurt.  I want Dad.”

She gently lifted him to his feet and led him out of the road into the apparently deserted path where she made him sit down.  “I am going to find his father,” said Paula to Cicely, “I will be back in a moment.”

“But wait; you shall not go alone,” authoritatively exclaimed that little damsel, leaping in her turn to the ground.  “Where does he say his father is?”

“In the tunnel, by which I suppose he means that long passage under the bridge over there.”

Holding up the skirts of their riding-habits in their trembling right hands, they hurried forward.  Suddenly they both paused.  A woman had crossed their path; a woman whom to look at but once was to remember with ghastly shrinking for a lifetime.  She was wrapped in a long and ragged cloak, and her eyes, startling in their blackness, were fixed upon the pain-drawn countenance of the poor little hurt boy behind them, with a gleam whose feverish hatred and deep malignant enjoyment of his very evident sufferings, was like a revelation from the lowest pit to the two innocent-minded girls hastening forward on their errand of mercy.

“Is he much hurt?” gasped the woman in an ineffectual effort to conceal the evil nature of her interest.  “Do you think he will die?” with a shrill lingering emphasis on the last word as if she longed to roll it like a sweet morsel under her tongue.

“Who are you?” asked Cicely, shrinking to one side with dilated eyes fixed on the woman’s hardened countenance and the white, too white hand with which she had pointed as she spoke of the child.

“Are you his mother?” queried Paula, paling at the thought but keeping her ground with an air of unconscious authority.

“His mother!” shrieked the woman, hugging herself in her long cloak and laughing with fiendish sarcasm:  “I look like his mother, don’t I?  His eyes ­did you notice his eyes? they are just like mine, aren’t they? and his body, poor weazen little thing, looks as if it had drawn sustenance from mine, don’t it?  His mother!  O heaven!”

Nothing like the suppressed force of this invocation seething as it was with the worst passions of a depraved human nature, had ever startled those ears before.  Clasping Cicely by the hand, she called out to the groom behind them, “Guard that child as you would your life!” and then flashing upon the wretched creature before her with all the force of her aroused nature, she exclaimed, “If you are not his mother, move aside and let us pass, we are in search of assistance.”

For an instant the woman stood awe-struck before this vision of maidenly beauty and indignation, then she laughed and cried out with shrill emphasis: 

“When next you look like that, go to your mirror, and when you see the image it reflects, say to yourself, ’So once looked the woman who defied me in the Park!’”

With a quick shudder and a feeling as if the noisome cloak of this degraded being had somehow been dropped upon her own fair and spotless shoulders, Paula clasped the hand of Cicely more tightly in her own, and rushed with her down the steps that led into the underground passage towards which they had been directed.

There were but two persons in it when they entered.  A short thickset man and another man of a slighter and more gentlemanly build.  They were engaged in talking, and the latter was bringing down his right hand upon the palm of his left with a gesture almost foreign in its expressive energy.

“I tell you,” declared he, with a voice that while low, reverberated through the hollow vault above him with strange intensity, “I tell you I’ve got my grip on a certain rich man in this city, and if you will only wait, you shall see strange things.  I don’t know his name and I don’t know his face, but I do know what he has done, and a thousand dollars down couldn’t buy the knowledge of me.”

“But if you don’t know his name and don’t know his face, how in the name of all that’s mischievous are you going to know your man?”

“Leave that to me!  If I once meet him and hear him talk, one more rich man goes down and one more poor devil goes up, or I’ve not the wit that starvation usually teaches.”

The nature of these sentences together with the various manifestations of interest with which they were received, had for a moment deterred the two girls in their hurried advance, but now they put away every thought save that of the poor little creature awaiting his Dad, and lifting up her voice, Paula said,

“Are either of you the father of a little lame lad ­”

Instantly and before she could conclude, the taller of the two, who had also been the chief speaker in the above conversation, turned, and she saw his hand begrimed though it was with dirt and dark with many a disgraceful trick, go to his heart in a gesture too natural to be anything but involuntary.

“Is he hurt?” gasped he, but in how different a tone from that of the woman who had used the same words a few minutes before.  Then seeing that the persons who addressed him were ladies and one of them at least a very beautiful one, took off his hat with an easy action, that together with what they had heard, proved him to be one of that most dangerous class among us, a gentleman who has gone thoroughly and irretrievably to the bad.

“I am afraid he is, sir,” said Paula.  “He was attempting to cross the road, and a horse advancing hurriedly, struck him.”  She had not courage to say her horse in face of the white and trembling dismay that seized him at these words.

“Where is he?” cried he.  “Where’s my poor boy?” And he bounded up the steps, his hat still in his hand, his long unkempt locks flying, and his whole form expressive of the utmost alarm.

“Down by the carriage road,” called out Paula, finding it impossible for them to keep up with such haste.

“But is he much injured?” cried a smooth voice at their side.

They turned; it was the short thickset man who had been the other’s companion in the conversation above recorded.

“We trust not,” answered Cicely; “his arm received the blow, and he suffers very much, but we hope it is not serious;” and they hurried on.

They found the father seated on the grass holding the little fellow in his arms.  The look on his once handsome but now thoroughly corrupt and dissipated face, made their hearts melt within them.  However wicked he might be ­and that sly treacherous eye, that false impudent lip, that settling of the whole face into the mould which Vice applies to all her votaries, left no doubt of his complete depravity ­he dearly loved his child, and love, no matter how it is expressed, or in what garb it appears, is a sacred and beautiful thing, and ennobles for the time being any creature who displays it.

“’Twas a hard knock up, Dad,” came from the white lips of the child as he felt his father’s trembling hand feel up and down his arm, “but I guess the ‘little fellar’ can stand it.”  “Little feller” was evidently the name by which his father was accustomed to address him.

“There are no bones broken,” said the father.  “To be lame and maimed too would be ­”

He did not finish, for a delicately gloved hand was here laid on his sleeve, and a gentle voice whispered, “Money cannot pay for an injury like that, but please accept this;” and Paula thrust a purse into his hand.

He clutched it eagerly, but at her next request that he should tell her where he lived that they might inquire after the boy, he shook his head with a return of his old emphasis.

“The haunts of bats and jackals are not for ladies.”  Then as he caught sight of her pitiful face bending in farewell over the little urchin, some remembrance perhaps of the days when he had a right to stoop to the ear of beautiful women and walk unrebuked at their side, returned to him from the past, and respectfully lowering his voice, he asked her name.

She gave it and he seemed to lay it away in his mind; then as the ladies turned to remount their horses, rose and began carrying the little fellow off.  As he vanished in the turn of the path that led towards the main entrance, they perceived a tall dark figure arise from a seat in the distance and stand looking after him, with a leer on its face and a malicious hugging of itself in a long black cloak, that proclaimed her to be the same ominous being who had before so grievously startled them.

CHAPTER III - THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES.

    “And my imaginations are as foul
    As Vulcan’s smithy.”

     ­HAMLET.

    “Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once;
    And He that might the vantage best have took
    Found out the remedy.”

     ­MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

Mrs. Sylvester reclining on the palest of blue couches, in the slanting sunlight of an April afternoon, is a study for a painter.  Not that such inspiring loveliness breathed from her person, conspicuous as it was for its rich and indolent grace, but because in every attitude of her large and well formed limbs, in every raise of the thick white lids from eyes whose natural brightness was obscured by the mist of aimless fancies, she presented such an embodiment of luxurious ease, one might almost imagine they were gazing upon the favorite Sultana of some eastern court, or, to be for once poetical as the subject demands, a full blown Egyptian lotos floating in hushed enjoyment on the placid waters of its native stream.  Indeed for all the blonde character of her beauty, there was certainly something oriental about the physique of this favored child of fortune.  Had the tint of her skin been richened to a magnolia bloom instead of reminding you of that description accorded to the complexion of one of Napoleon’s sisters, that it looked like white satin seen through pink glass, she would have passed in any Eastern market, for a rare specimen of Circassian beauty.

But Mr. Sylvester coming home fatigued and harassed, cared little for Circassian beauties or Oriental odalisques.  It was a welcome that he desired, and such refreshment as a quick eye and ready hand can bestow when guided by a tender and loving heart; or so thought the watchful Paula as she glided from her room at the sound of his step in the hall, and met him coming weary and disheartened from the side of Ona’s couch.  The sight of her revived him at once.

“Well, little one, what have you been doing to-day?”

Instantly a shade fell over her countenance.  “I hardly know how to tell you.  It has been a day of great experiences to me.  I am literally shaken with them.  I have been wanting to talk to Ona about what I have seen and heard, but thought I had best wait till you came home, for I could not repeat the story twice.”

“What! you look pale.  Nothing has happened to frighten you I hope,” exclaimed he, leading her back to Ona’s side, who stirred a little, and presently deigned to take an upright position.

“I do not know if it is fear or horror,” cried Paula, shuddering; “I have seen a fearful woman ­But first I ought to tell you that I took a ride with Miss Stuyvesant in the Park this morning ­”

“Yes, and persisted in going for that lady on horseback instead of sending the groom after her, and all starting from the front of our house,” murmured Mrs. Sylvester with lazy chagrin.

Paula smiled, but otherwise took no notice of this standing topic of disagreement.

“It was a beautiful day,” she proceeded, “and we enjoyed it very much, but we were so unfortunate as to run over a little boy, at that place where the equestrian road crosses the foot path; a lame child, Mr. Sylvester, who could not get out of our way; poor too, with a ragged jacket on which seemed to make it all the worse.”

Ona gave a shrug with her white shoulders, that seemed to question this.  “Did you injure him very much?” queried she, with a show of interest; not sufficient however to impair her curiosity as to the cut of one of her nails.

“I cannot say; his little arm was struck, and when I went to pick him up, he lay back in my lap and moaned till I thought my heart would break.  But that was not the worst that happened.  As we went hurrying up the walk to find the child’s father, we were met by a woman wrapped in a black cloak whose long and greasy folds seemed like the symbol of her own untold depravity.  Her glance as she encountered the child writhing in pain at my feet, made my heart stand still.  It was more than malignant, it was actually fiendish.  ‘Is he hurt?’ she asked, and it seemed as if she gloated over the question; she evidently longed to hear that he was, longed to be told that he would die; and when I inquired if she was his mother, she broke into a string of laughter, that seemed to darken the daylight.  ‘His mother!  O yes, we look alike, don’t we!’ she exclaimed, pointing with a mocking gesture frightful to see, first at his eyes which were very blue and beautiful, and then at her own which were dark as evil thoughts could make them.  I never saw anything so dreadful.  Malignancy! and towards a little lame child! what could be more horrible!”

Mr. Sylvester and his wife exchanged looks, then the former asked, “Did she follow you, Paula?”

“No; after telling me that I ­But I cannot repeat what she said,” exclaimed the young girl with a quick shudder.  “Since I came home,” she musingly continued, “I have looked and looked at my face in the glass, but I cannot believe that what she declared is true.  There is no similarity between us, could never have been any:  I will not have it that she ever saw in all the days of her life such a picture as that in her glass.”  And with a sudden gesture Paula started up and pointed to herself as she stood reflected in one of the tall mirrors with which Ona’s boudoir abounded.

“And did she dare to make any comparison between you and her own degraded self?” exclaimed Mr. Sylvester, with a glance at the exquisite vision of pure girlhood thus doubly presented to his notice.

“Yes, what I am, she was once, or so she said.  And it may be true.  I have never suffered sorrow or experienced wrong, and cannot measure their power to carve the human face with such lines as I beheld on that woman’s countenance to-day.  But do not let us talk of her any more.  She left us at last, and we found the child’s father.  Mr. Sylvester,” she suddenly asked, “are there to be found in this city, men occupying honorable positions and as such highly esteemed, who like Damocles of old, may be said to sit under the constant terror of a falling sword in the shape of some possible disclosure, that if made, would ruin their position before the world forever?”

Mr. Sylvester started as if he had been shot.  “Paula!” cried he, and instantly was silent again.  He did not look at his wife, but if he had, he would have perceived that even her fair skin was capable of blanching to a yet more startling whiteness, and that her sleepy eyes could flash open with something like expression in their lazy depths.

“I mean,” dreamily continued Paula, absorbed in her own remembrance, “that if what we overheard said by the father of that child to-day is true, some one of our prominent men, whose life is not all it appears, is standing on the verge of possible exposure and shame; that a hound is on his track in the form of a starving man; and that sooner or later he will have to pay the price of an unprincipled creature’s silence, or fall into public discredit like some others of whom we have lately read.”  Then as silence filled the room, she added, “It makes me tremble to think that a man of means and seeming honor should be placed in such a position, but worse still that we may know such a one and be ignorant of his misery and his shame.”

“It is getting time for me to dress,” murmured Ona, sinking back on her pillow and speaking in her most languid tone of voice.  “Could you not hasten your story a little Paula?”

But Mr. Sylvester with a hurried glance at the closing eyes of his wife, requested on the contrary that she would explain herself more definitely.  “Ona will pardon the delay,” said he, with a set, strained politeness that called up the least little quiver of suppressed sarcasm about the rosy infantile lips that he evidently did not consider it worth his while to notice.

“But that is all,” said Paula.  However she repeated as nearly as she could just what the boy’s father had said.  At the conclusion Mr. Sylvester rose.

“What kind of a looking man was he?” said that gentleman as he crossed to the window.

“Well, as nearly as I can describe, he was tall, dark and seedy, with a shock of black hair and a pair of black whiskers that floated on the wind as he walked.  He was evidently of the order of decayed gentleman, and his manner of talking, especially in the profuse use he made of his arms and hands, was decidedly foreign.  Yet his speech was pure and without accent.”

Mr. Sylvester’s face as he asked the next question was comparatively cheerful.  “Was the other man with whom he was talking, as dark and foreign as himself?”

“O no, he was round and jovial, a little too insinuating perhaps, in his way of speaking to ladies, but otherwise a a well enough appearing man.”

Mr. Sylvester bowed and looked at his watch. (Why do gentlemen always consult their watches even in the face of the clock?) “Ona, you are right,” said he, “it is time you were dressing for dinner.”  And concluding with a word or two of sympathy as to the peculiar nature of Paula’s adventures as he called them, he hastened from the room and proceeded to his little refuge above.

“He has not asked me what became of the child,” thought Paula, with a certain pang of surprise.  “I expected him to say, ’Shall we not try and see the little fellow, Paula?’ if only to allow me to explain that the child’s father would not tell me where they lived.  But the later affair has evidently put the child out of his head.  And indeed it is only natural that a business man should be more interested in such a fact as I have related, than in the sprained arm of a wretched creature’s ‘little feller.’” And she turned to assist Ona, who had arisen from her couch and was now absorbed in the intricacies of an uncommonly elaborate toilet.

“Those men did not mention any names?” suddenly queried that lady, looking with an expression of careful anxiety, at the twist of her back hair, in the small hand-mirror she held over her shoulder.

“No,” said Paula, dropping a red rose into the blonde locks she was so carefully arranging.  “He expressly said he did not know the name of the person to whom he alluded.  It was a strange conversation for me to overhear, was it not?” she remarked, happy to have interested her cousin in anything out of the domains of fashion.

“I don’t know ­certainly ­of course ­” returned Mrs. Sylvester with some incoherence.  “Do you think red looks as well with this black as the lavender would do?” she rambled on in her lightest tone, pulling out a box of feathers.

Paula gave her a little wistful glance of disappointment and decided in favor of the lavender.

“I am bound to look well to-night if I never do so again,” said Ona.  They were all going to a public reception at which a foreign lord was expected to be present.  “How fortunate I am to have a perfect little hairdresser in my own family, without being obliged to send for some gossipy, fussy old Madame with her stories of how such and such a one looked when dressed for the Grand Duke’s ball, or how Mrs. So and So always gave her more than her price because she rolled up puffs so exquisitely.”  And stopping to aid the deft girl in substituting the lavender feather for the red rose in her hair ­she forgot to ask any more questions.

“Ona,” remarked her husband, coming into the room on his way down to dinner ­Mrs. Sylvester never dined when she was going to any grand entertainment; it made her look flushed she said ­“I am not in the habit of troubling you about your family matters, but have you heard from your father of late?”

Mrs. Sylvester turned from her jewel-casket and calmly surveyed his face.  It was fixed and formal, the face he turned to his servants and sometimes ­to his wife.  “No,” said she, with a light little gesture as though she were speaking of the most trivial matter.  “In one respect at least, papa is like an angel, his visits are few and far between.”

Mr. Sylvester’s eye-brows drew heavily together.  For a man with a smile of strange sweetness, he could sometimes look very forbidding. “When was he here last?” he inquired in a tone more commanding than he knew.

She did not appear to resent it.  “Let me see,” mused she.  “When was it I lost my diamond ear-ring?  O I remember, it was on the eve of New Year’s day a year ago; I recollect because I had to wear pearls with my garnet brocade,” she pettishly sighed.  “And papa came the next week, after you had given me the money for a new pair.  I have reason to remember that, for not a dollar did he leave me.”

“Ona!” exclaimed her husband, shrinking back in uncontrollable surprise, while his eyes flashed inquiringly to her ears in which two noble diamonds were brilliantly shining.

“O,” she cried, just raising one snowy hand to those sparkling ornaments, while a faint blush, the existence of which he had sometimes doubted, swept over her careless face.  “I was enabled to procure them in time; but for a whole two months I had to go without diamonds.”  She did not say that she had bartered her wedding jewels to make up the sum she needed, but he may have understood that without being told.

“And that is the last time you have seen him?” He held her eyes with his, she could not look away.

“The very last, sir; strange to say.”

His glance shifted from her face and he turned with a bow towards the door.

“May I ask,” she slowly inquired as he moved across the floor, “what is the reason of this sudden interest in poor papa?”

“Certainly,” said he, pausing and looking back, not without some emotion of pity in his glance.  “I am sometimes struck with a sense of the duty I owe you, in helping you to bear the burden of certain secret responsibilities which I fear may sometimes prove too heavy for you.”

She gave a little rippling laugh that only sounded hollow to the image listening in the glass.  “You choose strange times in which to be struck,” said she, holding up two dresses for his inspection, with a lift of her brows evidently meant as an inquiry as to which he thought the most becoming.

“Conscience is the chooser, not I,” declared he, for once allowing himself to ignore the weighty question of dress thus propounded.

His wife gave a little toss of her head and he left the room.

“I should like Edward very much,” murmured she in a burst of confidence to her own reflection in the glass, “if only he would not bother himself so much about that same disagreeable conscience.”

“You look unhappy,” said Mr. Sylvester to Paula as they came from the dining-room.  “Have the adventures of the day made such an impression upon you that you will not be able to enjoy the evening’s festivities?”

She lifted her face and the quick smile came.

“I do not like to see your brow so clouded,” continued he, smoothing his own to meet her searching eye.  “Smiles should sit on the lips of youth, or else why are they so rosy.”

“Would you have me smile in face of my first glimpse of wickedness,” asked she, but in a gentle tone that robbed her words of half their reproach.  “You must remember that I have had but little experience with the world.  I have lived all my life in a town of wholesome virtues, and while here I have been kept from contact with anything low or base.  I have never known vice, and now all in a moment I feel as if I have been bathed in it.”

He took her by the hand and drew her gently towards him.  “Does your whole being recoil so from evil, my Paula?  What will you do in this wicked world?  What will you say to the sinner when you meet him ­as you must?”

“I don’t know; it’s a problem I have never been brought to consider.  I feel as if launched on a dismal sea for which I have neither chart nor compass.  Life was so joyous to me this morning ­” a flush swept over her cheek but he did not notice it ­“I held, or seemed to hold, a cup of white wine in my hand, but suddenly as I looked at it, it turned black and ­”

Ah, the outreach, the dismal breaking away of thought into the unfathomable, that lies in the pause of an and!

“And do you refuse to drink a cup across which has fallen a shadow,” murmured Mr. Sylvester, his eyes fixed on her face, “the inevitable shadow of that great mass of human frailty and woe which has been accumulating from the foundation of the world?”

“No, no, I cannot, and retain my humanity.  If there is such evil in the world, its pressure must drive it across the path of innocence.”

“And you accept the cup?”

“I must; but oh, my vanished beliefs!  This morning the wine of my life was pure and white, now it is black and befouled.  What will make it clean again?”

With a sigh Mr. Sylvester dropped her hand and turned towards the mantle-piece.  It was April as I have said, and there was no fire in the grate, but he posed his foot on the fender and looked sadly down at the empty hearthstone.

“Paula,” said he after a space of pregnant silence, “it had to come.  The veil of the temple must be rent in every life.  Evil is too near us all for us to tread long upon the flowers without starting up the adders that hide beneath them.  You had to have your first look into the cells of darkness, and perhaps it is best you had it here and now.  The deeps are for men’s eyes as well as the starry heavens.”

“Yes, yes.”

“There are some persons,” he went on slowly, “you know them, who tread the ways of life with their eyelids closed to everything but the strip of velvet lawn on which they choose to walk.  Earth’s sighs and deep-drawn groans are nothing to them.  The world may swing on in its way to perdition; so long as their pathway feels soft, they neither heed nor care.  But you do not desire to be one of these, Paula!  With your great soul and your strong heart, you would not ask to sit in a flowery maze, while the rest of the world went sliding on and down into wells of destruction, you might have made pools of healing by the touch of your womanly sympathy.”

“No, no.”

“I cannot tell you, I dare not tell you,” he went on in a strange pleading voice that tore at the very roots of her heart, and rung in her memory forever, “what evil underlies the whole strata of life!  At home and abroad, on our hearthstones and within our offices, the mocking devil sits.  You can scarcely walk a block, my little one, without encountering a man or brushing against the dress of a woman across whose soul the black shadow lies heavier than any words of his or hers could tell.  What the man you saw to-day, said of one unhappy being in this city, is true, God help us all, of many.  Dark spots are easier acquired than blotted out, my Paula.  In business as in society, one needs to carry the white shield of a noble purpose or a self-forgetting love, to escape the dripping of the deadly upas tree that branches above all humanity.  I have walked its ways, my darling, and I know of what I speak.  Your white robe is spotless but ­”

“O there is where the pain comes in,” she cried; “there, just there, is where the dagger strikes.  She says she was once like me.  O, could any temptation, any suffering, any wrong or misfortune that might befall me, ever bring me to where she is!  If it could ­”

“Paula!” This time his voice came authoritatively.  “You are making too much of a frenzied woman’s impulsive exclamation.  To her darkened and despairing eyes any young woman of a similar style of beauty would have called forth the same remark.  It was a sign that she was not entirely given up to evil, that she could remember her youth.  Instead of feeling contaminated by her words, you ought to feel, that unconsciously to yourself, your fresh young countenance with its innocent eyes did an angel’s work to-day.  They made her recall what she was in the days of her own innocence; and who can tell what may follow such a recollection.”

“O Mr. Sylvester,” said she, “you fill me with shame.  If I could think that ­”

“You can, nothing appeals to the heart of crime like the glance of perfect innocence.  If evil walks the world, God’s ministers walk it also, and none can tell in what glance of the eye or what touch of the hand, that ministry will speak.”

It was her turn now to take his hand in hers.  “O how good, how thoughtful you are; you have comforted me and you have taught me.  I thank you very much.”

With a look she did not perceive, he drew his hand away.  “I am glad I have helped you, Paula; there is but one thing more to say, and this I would emphasize with every saddened look you have ever met in all your life.  Great sins make great sufferers.  Side by side came the two dreadful powers of vice and retribution into the world, and side by side will they keep till they sink at last into the awful deeps of the bottomless pit.  When you turn your back on a man who has committed a crime, one more door shuts in his darkened spirit.”

The tears were falling from Paula’s eyes now.  He looked at them with strange wistfulness and involuntarily his hand rose to her head, smoothing her locks with fatherly touches.  “Do not think,” said he, “that I would lessen by a hair’s breadth your hatred of evil.  I can more easily bear to see the shadow upon your cup of joy than upon the banner of truth you carry.  These eyes must lose none of their inner light in glancing compassionately on your fellow-men.  Only remember that divinity itself has stooped to rescue, and let the thought make your contact with weary, wicked-hearted humanity a little less trying and a little more hopeful to you.  And now, my dear, that is enough of serious talk for to-day.  We are bound for a reception, you know, and it is time we were dressing.  Do you want me to tell you a secret?” asked he in a light mysterious tone, as he saw her eyes still filling.

She glanced up with sudden interest.

“I know it is treason,” resumed he, “I am fully aware of the grave nature of my offence; but Paula I hate all public receptions, and shall only be able to enjoy myself to-night just so much as I see that you are doing so.  Life has its dark portals and its bright ones.  This is one that you must enter with your most brilliant smiles.”

“And they shall not be lacking,” said she.  “When a treasure-box of thought is given us, we do not open it and scatter its contents abroad, but lay it away where the heart keeps its secrets, to be opened in the hush of night when we are alone with our own souls and God.”

He smiled and she moved towards the door.  “None the less do we carry with us wherever we go, the remembrance of our hidden treasure,” she smilingly added, looking back upon him from the stair.

And again as upon the first night of her entrance into the house, did he stand below and watch her as she softly went up, her lovely face flashing one moment against the dark background of the luxurious bronze, towering from the platform behind, then glowing with faint and fainter lustre, as the distance widened between them and she vanished in the regions above.

She did not see the toss of his arm with which he threw off the burden that rested upon his soul.

CHAPTER IV - GRAVE AND GAY.

     “No scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope.”

      ­SHERIDAN.

     “Stands Scotland where it did?”

      ­MACBETH.

“Who is that talking with Miss Stuyvesant?” asked Mr. Sylvester, approaching his wife during one of the lulls that will fall at times upon vast assemblies.

Mrs. Sylvester followed the direction of his glance and immediately responded, “O that is Mr. Ensign, one of the best partis of the season.  He evidently knows where to pay his court.”

“I inquired because he has just requested me to honor him with a formal introduction to Paula.”

“Indeed! then oblige him by all means; it would be a great match for her.  To say nothing of his wealth, he is haut ton, and his red whiskers will not look badly beside Paula’s dark hair.”

Mr. Sylvester frowned, then sighed, but in a few minutes Paula observed him approaching with Mr. Ensign.  At once her hitherto pale cheek flushed, but the young gentleman did not seem to object to that, and after the formal introduction which he had sought was over, he exclaimed in his own bright ringing tones,

“The fates have surely forgotten their usual rôle of unpropitiousness.  I did not dare hope to meet you here to-night, Miss Fairchild.  Was the ride all that your fancy painted?”

“O,” said she, speaking very low and glancing around, “do not allude to it here.  We had an adventure shortly after you parted from us.”

“An adventure! and no cavalier at your side!  If I could but have known!  Was it so serious?” he inquired in a moment, seeing her look grave.

“Ask Miss Stuyvesant;” said she.  “I cannot talk about it any more to-night.  Besides the music carries off one’s thoughts.  It is like a joyous breeze that whirls away the thistle-down whether it will or no.”

He gave her a short quick look grave enough in its way, but responded with his usual graceful humor, “The thistle-down is too vicious a sprite to be beguiled away so easily.  If I were to give my opinion on the subject, I should say there was method in its madness.  If you have been brought up in the country, as I suspect from your remark, you must know that the white floating ball is not as harmless as it would lead you to imagine.  It is a meddlesome nobody, that’s what it is, and like some country gossips I know, launches forth from a pure love of mischief to establish his prickers in his neighbor’s field.”

“His! I thought it must be feminine at least to fulfill the conditions you mention.  A male gossip, O fie!  I shall never have patience with a thistle-ball after this.”

“Well,” laughed he, “I did start with the intention of making it feminine, but I caught a glimpse of your eyes and lost my courage.  I did what I could,” added he with a mirthful glance.

“So do the thistles,” cried she.  Then while both voices joined in a merry laugh, she continued, “But where have we strayed?  For a moment it seemed as if we were on the hills at Grotewell; I could almost see the blue sky.”

“And I,” said he, with his eyes on her face.

“I am sure the brooks bubbled.”

“I distinctly heard a bird singing.”

“It was a whippowill.”

“But my name is Clarence?”

And here both being young and without a care in the world, they laughed again.  And the crowded perfumed room seemed to freshen as with a whiff of mountain air.

“You love the country, Miss Fairchild?”

“Yes;” and her smile was the reflection of the summer-lands that arose before her at the word.  “With the right side of my heart do I love the spot where nature speaks and man is dumb.”

“And with the left?”

“I love the place where great men congregate to face their destiny and control it.”

“The latter is the deeper love,” said he.

She nodded her head and then said, “I need both to make me happy.  Sometimes as I walk these city streets, I feel as if my very longing to escape to the heart of the hills, would carry me there.  I remember when I was a child, I was one day running through a meadow, when suddenly a whole flock of birds flew up from the grass and surrounded my head.  I was not sure but what I should be caught up and carried away by the force of their flight; and when they rose to mid heaven, something in my breast seemed to follow them.  So it is often with me here, only that it is the rush of my thoughts that threatens such a Hegira.  Yet if I were to be transported to my native hills, I know I should long to be back again.”

“The mountain lassie has wandered into the courts of the king.  The perfume of palaces is not easily forgotten.”

Her eye turned towards Mr. Sylvester standing near them upright and firm, talking to a group of attentive gentlemen every one of whom boasted a name of more than local celebrity.  “Without a royal heart to govern, there would be no palace;” said she, and blushed under a sudden sense of the possible interpretation he might give to her words, till the rose in her hand looked pallid.

But he had followed her glance and understood her better than she thought.  “And Mr. Sylvester has such a heart, so a hundred good fellows have told me.  You are fortunate to see the city from the loop-hole of such a home as his.”

“It is more than a loop-hole,” said she.

“Of that I shall never be satisfied till I see it?”

And being content with the look he received, he took her on his arm and led her into the midst of the dancers.

Meanwhile in a certain corner not far off, two gentlemen were talking.

“Sylvester shows off well to-night.”

“He always does.  With such a figure as that, a man needs but to enter a room to make himself felt.  But then he’s a good talker too.  Ever heard him speak?”

“No.”

“Fine voice, true snap, right ring.  Great favorite at elections.  The fact is, Sylvester is a remarkable man.”

“Hum, ha, so I should judge.”

“And so fortunate!  He has never been known to run foul in a great operation.  Put your money in his hand and whew! ­your fortune is as good as made.”

The other, a rich man, connected heavily with the mining business in Colorado, smiled with that bland overflow of the whole countenance which is sometimes seen in large men of great self-importance.

“It’s a pity he’s gone out of Wall Street,” continued his companion.  “The younger fry feel now something like a flock of sheep that has lost its bell-wether.”

“They straggle ­eh?” returned his portly friend with an increase of his smile that was not altogether pleasant.  “So Sylvester has left Wall Street?”

“He closed his last enterprise two weeks before accepting the Presidency of the Madison Bank.  Stuyvesant is down on speculation, and well ­It looks better you know; the Madison Bank is an old institution, and Sylvester is ambitious.  There’ll be no reckless handling of funds there.”

“No!” What was there in that no that made the other look up?  “I’m not acquainted with Sylvester myself.  Has he much family?”

“A wife ­there she is, that handsome woman talking with Ditman, ­and a daughter, niece or somebody who just now is setting all our young scapegraces by the ears.  You can see her if you just crane your neck a little.”

“Humph, ha, very pretty, very pretty.  How much do you suppose Mrs. Sylvester is worth as she stands, diamonds you know, and all that?”

“Well I should say some where near ten thousand; that sprig in her hair cost a clean five.”

“So, so.  They live in a handsome house I suppose?”

“A regular palace, corner of Fifth Avenue and ­”

“All his?”

“Nobody’s else I reckon.”

“Sports horses and carriage I suppose?”

“Of course.”

“Yacht, opera box?”

“No reason why he shouldn’t.”

“What is his salary?”

“A nominal sum, five or ten thousand perhaps.”

“Owns good share of the bank’s stock I presume?”

“Enough to control it.”

“Below par though?”

“A trifle, going up, however.”

“And don’t speculate?”

The way this man drawled his words was excessively disagreeable.

“Not that any one knows of.  He’s made his fortune and now asks only to enjoy it.”

The man from the West strutted back and looked at his companion knowingly.  “What do you think of my judgment, Stadler?”

“None better this side of the Pacific.”

“Pretty good at spying out cracks, eh?”

“I wouldn’t like to undertake the puttying up that would deceive you.”

“Humph!  Well then, mark this.  In two months from to-day you will see Mr. Sylvester rent his house and go south for his health, or the pretty one over there will marry one of the scapegraces you mention, who will lend the man who don’t engage in any further ventures, more than one or two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Ha, you know something.”

“I own mines in Colorado and I have my points.”

“And Mr. Sylvester?”

“Will find them too sharp for him.”

And having made his joke, he yielded to the other’s apparent restlessness, and they sauntered off.

They did not observe a pale, demure, little lady that sat near them abstractedly nodding her dainty head to the remarks of a pale-whiskered youth at her side, nor notice the emotion with which she suddenly rose at their departure and dismissed her chattering companion on some impromptu errand.  It was only one of the ordinary group of dancers, a pretty, plainly dressed girl, but her name was Stuyvesant.

Rising with a decision that gave a very attractive color to her cheeks, she hastily looked around.  A trio of young gentlemen started towards her but she gave them no encouragement; her eye had detected Mr. Sylvester’s tall figure a few feet off and it was to him she desired to speak.  But at her first movement in his direction, her glance encountered another face, and like a stream that melts into a rushing torrent, her purpose seemed to vanish, leaving her quivering with a new emotion of so vivid a character she involuntarily looked about her for a refuge.

But in another instant her eyes had again sought the countenance that had so moved her, and finding it bent upon her own, faltered a little and unconsciously allowed the lilies she was carrying to drop from her hand.  Before she realized her loss, the face before her had vanished, and with it something of her hesitation and alarm.

With a hasty action she drew near Mr. Sylvester.  “Will you lend me your arm for a minute?” she asked, with her usual appealing look rendered doubly forcible by the experience of a moment before.

“Miss Stuyvesant!  I am happy to see you.”

Never had his face looked more cheerful she thought, never had his smile struck her more pleasantly.

“A little talk with a little girl will not hinder you too much, will it?” she queried, glancing at the group of gentlemen that had shrunk back at her approach.

“Do you call that hindrance which relieves one from listening to quotations of bank stock at an evening reception?”

She shook her head with a confused movement, and led him up before a stand of flowering exotics.

“I want to tell you something,” she said eagerly but with a marked timidity also, the tall form beside her looked so imposing for all its encouraging bend.  “I beg your pardon if I am doing wrong, but papa regards you with such esteem and ­Mr. Sylvester do you know a man by the name of Stadler?”

Astonished at such a question from lips so young and dainty, he turned and surveyed her for a moment with quick surprise.  Something in her aspect struck him.  He answered at once and without circumlocution.  “Yes, if you refer to that spry keen-faced man, just entering the supper-room.”

“Do you know his companion?” she proceeded; “the portly, highly pompous-looking gentleman with the gold eye-glasses?  Look quickly.”

“No.”  There was an uneasiness in his tone however that struck her painfully.

“He is a stranger in town; has not the honor of your acquaintance he says, but from the questions he asked, I judge he has a great interest in your affairs.  He spoke of being connected with mines in Colorado.  I was sitting behind a curtain and overheard what was said.”

Mr. Sylvester turned pale and regarded her attentively.  “Might I be so bold,” he inquired after a moment, “as to ask you what that was?”

“Yes, sir, certainly, but it is even harder for me to repeat than it was for me to hear.  He inquired about your domestic concerns, your home and your income,” she murmured blushing; “and then said, in what I thought was a somewhat exulting tone, that in two months or so we should see you go South for your health or ­Is not that enough for me to tell you, Mr. Sylvester?”

He gave her a short stare, opened his lips as if to speak, then turned abruptly aside and began picking mechanically at the blossoms before him.

“I, of course, do not know what men mean when they talk of possessing points.  But the leer and side glance which accompanies such talk, have a universal language we all understand, and I felt that I must warn you of that man’s malice if only because papa regards you so highly.”

He shrank as if touched on a sore place, but bowed and answered the wistful appeal of her glance with a shadow of his usual smile, then he turned, and looking towards the door through which the two men had disappeared, made a movement as if he would follow.  But remembering himself, escorted her to a seat, saying as he did so: 

“You are very kind, Miss Stuyvesant; please say nothing of this to Paula.”

She bowed and a flitting smile crossed her upturned countenance.  “I am not much of a gossip, Mr. Sylvester, or I should have been tempted to have carried my information to my father instead of to you.”

He understood the implied promise in this remark and gave the hand on his arm a quick pressure, before relinquishing her to the care of the pale-complexioned youth who by this time had returned to her side.

In another moment Paula came up on the arm of a black-whiskered gentleman all shirt front and eye-glasses.  “O Cicely,” she cried, (she called Miss Stuyvesant, Cicely now) “is it not a delightful evening?”

“Are you enjoying yourself so much?” inquired that somewhat agitated little lady, with a glance at the countenance of her friend’s attendant.

“I fear it would scarcely seem consistent in me now to say no,” returned the radiant girl, with a laughing glance towards the same gentleman.

But when they were alone, the gentleman having departed on some of the innumerable errands with which ladies seem to delight in afflicting their attendant cavaliers at balls or receptions, she atoned for that glance by remarking,

“I do not find the average partner that falls to one’s lot in such receptions all that fancy paints.”  And then finding she had repeated a phrase of Mr. Ensign’s, blushed, though no one stood near her but Cicely.

“Fancy’s brush would need to be dipped in but two colors to present to our eye the mass of them,” was Cicely’s laughing reply.  “A streak of black for the coat, and a daub of white for the shirt front. Voila tout.”

“With perhaps a dash of red in some cases,” murmured a voice over their shoulders.

They turned with hurried blushes.  “Ah, Mr. Ensign,” quoth Cicely in unabashed gaiety, “we reserve red for the exceptions.  We did not intend to include our acknowledged friends in our somewhat sweeping assertion.”

“Ah, I see, the black streak and the white daub are a symbol of, ’Er ­Miss Stuyvesant ­very warm this evening!  Have an ice, do. I always have an ice after dancing; so refreshing, you know.’”

The manner in which he imitated the usual languid drawl of certain of the young scapegraces heretofore mentioned, was irresistible.  Paula forgot her confusion in her mirth.

“You are blessed with a capacity for playing both roles, I perceive,” cried Cicely with unusual abandon.  “Well, it is convenient, there is nothing like scope.”

“Unless it is hope,” whispered Mr. Ensign so low that only Paula could hear.

“But I warn you,” continued Cicely, with a sweet soft laugh that seemed to carry her heart far out into the passing throng, “that we have no fondness for the model beau of the period.  A dish of milk makes a very good supper but it looks decidedly pale on the dinner table.”

“Yes,” said Paula, eying the various young men that filed up and down before them, some pale, some dark, some handsome, some plain, but all smiling and dapper, if not debonair, “some men could be endured if only they were not men.”

Mr. Ensign gave her a quick look, and while he laughed at the paradox, straightened himself like one who could be a man if the occasion called.  She saw the action and blushed.

But their conversation was soon interrupted.  Mr. Sylvester was seen returning from the supper-room, looking decidedly anxious, and while Paula was ignorant of what had transpired to annoy him, her ready spirit caught the alarm, and she was about to rush up to him and address him, when one of the waiters approached, and murmuring a few words she did not hear, handed him a card upon which she descried nothing but a simple circle.  Instantly a change crossed his already agitated countenance, and advancing to the ladies with a word or two that while seemingly cheerful, struck Paula as somewhat forced, excused himself with the information that a business friend had been so inconsiderate as to importune him for an interview in the hall.  And with just a nod towards Mr. Ensign, who had drawn back at his advance, left them and disappeared in the crowd about the door.

“I do not like these interruptions from business friends in a time of pleasure,” cried Paula, looking after him with anxious eyes.  “Did you notice how agitated he seemed, Cicely?  And half an hour ago he was the picture of calm enjoyment.”

“Business is beyond our comprehension, Paula,” returned her friend evasively.  “It is something like a neuralgic twinge, it takes a man when he least expects it.  Have you told Mr. Ensign of our adventure?”

“No, but I informed Mr. Sylvester, and he said such good, true words to me, Cicely.  I can never forget them.”

“And I told papa; but he only frowned and made some observation about the degeneracy of the times, and the number of scamps thrown to the top by the modern methods of acquiring instantaneous fortunes.”

“Your papa is sometimes hard, is he not, Cicely?”

With a flush Miss Stuyvesant allowed her eye to rest for a moment on the crowd shifting before her.  “He was dug from a quarry of granite, Paula.  He is both hard and substantial; capable of being hewn but not of being moulded.  Of such stuff are formed monuments of enduring beauty and solidity.  You must do papa justice.”

“I do, but I sometimes have a feeling as if the granite column would fall and crush me, Cicely.”

“You, Paula?”

Before she could again reply, Mr. Sylvester returned.  His face was still pale, but it had acquired an expression of rigidity even more alarming to Paula than its previous aspect of forced merriment.  Lifting her by the hand, he drew her apart.

“I shall have to leave you somewhat abruptly,” said he.  “An important matter demands my instant attention.  Bertram is somewhere here, and will see that you and Ona arrive home in safety.  You won’t allow your enjoyment to be clouded by my hasty departure, will you?”

“Not if it will make you anxious.  But I would rather go home with you now.  I am sure Cousin Ona would be willing.”

“But I am not going home at present,” said he; and she ventured upon no further remonstrance.

But her enjoyment was clouded; the sight of suffering or anxiety on that face was more than she could bear; and ere long she said good-night to Cicely, and accepting the arm of Mr. Ensign, who was never very far from her side, proceeded to search for her cousin.

She found her standing in the midst of an admiring throng to whom her diamonds, if not her smiles, were an object of undoubted interest.  She was in the full tide of one of her longest and most widely rambling speeches, and to Paula, with that stir of anxiety at her breast, was an image of self-satisfied complacency from which she was fain to drop her eyes.

“Mrs. Sylvester shares the honors with her husband,” remarked Mr. Ensign as they drew near.

“But not the trials, or the pain, or the care?” was Paula’s inward comment.

Mrs. Sylvester was not easily wooed away from a circle in which she found herself creating such an impression, but at length she yielded to Paula’s importunities, and consented to accept young Mr. Sylvester’s attendance to their home.  The next thing was to find Bertram.  Mr. Ensign engaged to do this.  Leaving Paula with her cousin, who may or may not have been pleased at this sudden addition to her circle, he sought for the young man who as Mr. Mandeville was not unknown to any of the fashionable men and women of the day.  It was no easy task, nor did he find him readily, but at last he came upon him leaning out of a window and gazing at a white lily which he held in his hand.  Without preamble, Mr. Ensign made known his errand, and Bertram at once prepared to accompany him back to the ladies.

“By Jove!  I didn’t know the fellow was so handsome!” thought the former, and frowned he hardly knew why.  Bertram was not handsome, but then Clarence Ensign was plain, which Bertram certainly was not.

It was to Mr. Ensign’s face however that Paula’s eyes turned as the two came up, and he with the ready vivacity of his natural temperament observed it, and took courage.

“I shall soon wish to measure that loop-hole of which I have spoken,” said he.

And the soft look in her large dark eye as she responded, “It is always open to friends,” filled up the measure of his cup of happiness; a cup which unlike hers, had not been darkened that day by the falling of earth’s most dismal shadows.

CHAPTER V - IN THE NIGHT WATCHES.

     “Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?”

      ­HEN.  IV.

     “What doth gravity out of his bed at midnight?”

      ­HEN.  IV.

“It has been the most delightful evening I have ever passed,” said Mrs. Sylvester, as she threw aside her rich white mantle in her ample boudoir.  “Sarah, two loops on that dolman to-morrow; do you hear?  I thought my arms would freeze.  Such an elegant gentleman as the Count de Frassac is!  He absolutely went wild over you, Paula, but not understanding a word of English ­O there, if that horrid little wretch didn’t drop his spoon on my dress after all!  He swore it never touched a thread of it, but just look at that spot, right in the middle of a pleating too.  Paula, your opinion in regard to the lavendar was correct.  I heard Mrs. Forsyth Jones whisper behind my back that lavendar always made blondes look fade.  Of course I needed no further evidence to convince me that I had entirely succeeded in eclipsing her pale-faced daughter.  Her daughter!” and the lazy gurgle echoed softly through the room, “As if every white-haired girl in the city considered herself entitled to be called a blonde!” She stopped to listen, examining herself in the glass near by.  “I thought I heard Edward.  It was very provoking in him to leave us in the cavalier manner in which he did.  I was just going to introduce him to the count, not that he would have esteemed it much of an honor, Edward I mean, but when one has a good-looking husband ­Sarah, that curtain over there hangs crooked, pull it straight this instant.  Did you try the oysters, Paula?  They were perfection, I shall have to dismiss Lorenzo without ceremony and procure me a cook that can make an oyster fricassee.  By the way did you notice ­” and so on and on for five minutes additional.  Presently she burst forth with ­“I do believe I know what it is to be thoroughly satisfied at last.  The consideration which one receives as the wife of the president of the Madison bank is certainly very gratifying.  If I had known I would feel such a change in the social atmosphere, I would have advocated Edward’s dropping speculation long ago.  Beauty and wealth may help one up the social ladder, but only a settled position such as he has now obtained, can carry you safely over the top.  I feel at last as if we had reached the pinnacle of my ambition and had seen the ladder by which we mounted thrown down behind us.  If I get my costume from Worth in time, I shall give a German next month.”

Paula from her stand at the door ­for some minutes she had been endeavoring to escape to her room ­surveyed her cousin in wonder.  She had never seen her look as she did at that moment.  Any one who speaks from the heart, acquires a certain eloquence, and Ona for once was speaking from her heart.  The unwonted emotion made her cheeks burn, and even her diamonds, ten thousand dollars worth as we have heard declared, were less brilliant than her eyes.  Paula left her station on the door-sill and glided rapidly back to her side.  “O Ona,” said she, “if you would only look like that when ­” she paused, what right had she to venture upon giving lessons to her benefactor.

“When what?” inquired the other, subsiding at once into her naturally languid manner.  Then with a total forgetfulness of the momentary curiosity that had prompted the question, held out her head to the attendant Sarah, with a command to be relieved of her ornaments.  Paula sighed and hastened to her room.  She could not bring herself to mention her anxiety in regard to the still absent master of the house, to this lazily-smiling thoroughly satisfied woman.

But none the less did she herself sit up in the moonlight, listening with bended head for the sound of his step on the walk beneath.  She could not sleep while he was absent; and yet the thoughts that disturbed her and kept her from her virgin pillow could not have been entirely for him, or why those wandering smiles that ever and anon passed flitting over her cheek, awakening the dimples that slumbered there, until she looked more like a dreamy picture of delight than a wakeful vision of apprehension.  Not entirely for him ­yet when somewhere towards three o’clock, she heard the long delayed step upon the stoop, she started up with eager eyes and a nervous gesture that sufficiently betrayed how intense was her interest in her benefactor’s welfare and happiness.  “If he goes to Ona’s room it is all right,” thought she; “but if he keeps on upstairs, I shall know that something is wrong and that he needs a comforter.”

He did not stop at Ona’s room; and struck with alarm, Paula opened wide her door and was about to step out to meet him, when she caught a sight of his face, and started back.  Here was no anxiety, that she could palliate!  The very fact that he did not observe her slight form standing before him in the brilliant moonlight, proved that a woman’s look or touch was not what he was in search of; and shrinking sensitively to one side, she sat down on the edge of her dainty bed, dropping her cheek into her hand with a weary troubled gesture from which all the delight had fled and only the apprehension remained.  Suddenly she started alertly up; he was coming down again, this time with a gliding muffled tread.  Sliding past her door, he descended to the floor below.  She could hear the one weak stair in the heavy staircase creak, and ­What! he has passed Ona’s room, passed the bronze figure of Luxury on the platform beneath, is on his way to the front door, has opened it, shut it softly behind him and gone out again into the blank midnight streets.  What did it mean?  For a moment she thought she would run down and awaken Ona, but an involuntary remembrance of how those lazy eyes would open, stare peevishly and then shut again, stopped her on the threshold of her door; and sitting down again upon the side of her bed, she waited, this time with opened eyes eagerly staring before her, and quivering form that started at each and every sound that disturbed the silence of the great echoing house.  At six o’clock she again rose; he had just re-entered and this time he stopped at Ona’s room.

CHAPTER VI - A DAY AT THE BANK.

    “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
    Rough-hew them how we will.”

     ­HAMLET.

There are days when the whole world seems to smile upon one without stint or reservation.  Bertram Sylvester wending his way to the bank on the morning following the reception, was a cheerful sight to behold.  Youth, health, hope spake in every lineament of his face and brightened every glance of his wide-awake eye.  His new life was pleasant to him.  Bach, Beethoven and Chopin were scarcely regretted now by the ambitious assistant cashier of the Madison Bank, with a friend in each of its directors and a something more than that in the popular president himself.  Besides he had developed a talent for the business and was in the confidence of the cashier, a somewhat sickly man who more than once had found himself compelled to rely upon the rapidly maturing judgment of his young associate, in matters oftentimes of the utmost importance.  The manner in which Bertram found himself able to respond to these various calls, convinced him that he had been correct in his opinion of his own nature, when he informed his uncle that music was his pleasure rather than his necessity.

Entering the building by way of Pearl Street, he was about to open the door leading into the bank proper, when he heard a little piping voice at his side, and turning, confronted the janitor’s baby daughter.  She was a sweet and interesting child, and with his usual good nature Bertram at once stopped to give her a kiss.

“I likes you,” prattled she as he put her down again after lifting her up high over his head, “but I likes de oder one best.”

“I hope the other one duly appreciates your preference,” laughed he, and was again on the point of entering the bank when he felt or thought he felt a hand laid on his arm.  It was the janitor himself this time, a worthy man, greatly trusted in the bank, but possessed of such an extraordinary peculiarity in the way of a pair of protruding eyes, that his appearance was always attended by a shock.

“Well, Hopgood, what is it?” cried Bertram, in his cheery tone.

The janitor drew back and mercifully shifted his gaze from the young man’s face.  “Nothing sir; did I stop you?  Beg pardon,” he continued, half stammering, “I’m dreadful awkward sometimes.”  And with a nod he sidled off towards his little one whom he confusedly took up in his arms.

Now Bertram was sure the man had touched him and that, too, with a very eager hand, but being late that morning and consequently in somewhat of a hurry, he did not stop to pursue the matter.  Hastening into the Bank, he assisted the teller in opening the safe, that being his especial duty, and was taking out such papers as he himself required, when he was surprised to catch another sight of those same extraordinary organs of which I have just spoken, peering upon him from the door by which he had previously entered.  They vanished as soon as he encountered them, but more than once during the morning he perceived them looking upon him from various quarters of the bank, till he felt himself growing seriously annoyed, and sending for the man, asked him what he meant by this unusual surveillance.  The janitor seemed troubled, flushed painfully and fixed his eyes in manifest anxiety on the cashier who, engaged in some search of his own, was just handling over the tin boxes that lined the vault before them.  Not till he had seen him shove them back into their place and leave the spot, did he venture upon his reply.  “I’m sure, sir, I’m very sorry if I have annoyed you, but do you think Mr. Sylvester will be down at the usual hour?”

“I know of no reason why he should not,” returned Bertram.

“I have something to say to him when he comes in,” stammered the man, evidently taken aback by Bertram’s look of surprise.  “Will you be kind enough to ring the bell the first moment he seems to be at leisure?  I don’t know as it is a matter of any importance but ­” He stopped, evidently putting a curb upon himself.  “Can I rely on you, sir?”

“Yes, certainly, I will tell my uncle when he comes in that you want to speak to him.  He will doubtless send for you at once.”

The man looked embarrassed.  “Excuse me, sir, but that’s just what I’d rather you wouldn’t do.  Mr. Sylvester is always very busy and he might think I wished to annoy him about some matters of my own, sir, as indeed I have not been above doing at odd times.  If you would ring when he comes in, that is all I ask.”

Bertram thought this a strange request, but seeing the man so anxious, gave the required promise, and the janitor hurried off.  “Curious!” muttered Bertram.  “Can anything be wrong?” And he glanced about him with some curiosity as he went to his desk.  But every one was at his post as usual and the countenances of all were equally undisturbed.

It was a busy morning and in the rush of various matters Bertram forgot the entire occurrence.  But it was presently recalled to him by hearing some one remark, “Mr. Sylvester is late to-day,” and looking up from some papers he was considering, he found it was a full hour after the time at which his uncle was in the habit of appearing.  Just then he caught still another sight of the protruding eyes of Hopgood staring in upon him from the half-opened door at the end of the bank.

“The fellow’s getting impatient,” thought he, and experienced a vague feeling of uneasiness.

Another half hour passed.  “What can have detained Mr. Sylvester?” cried Mr. Wheelock the cashier, hastily approaching Bertram.

“There is to be an important meeting of the Directors to-day, and some of the gentlemen are already coming in.  Mr. Sylvester is not accustomed to keep us waiting.”

“I don’t know, I am sure,” returned Bertram, remembering with an accession of uneasiness, the abruptness with which his uncle had left the entertainment the evening before.

“Shall I telegraph to the house?”

“No, that is not necessary.  Besides Folger says he passed him on Broadway this morning.”

“Going down street with a valise in his hand,” that gentlemen quietly put in.  Folger was the teller.  “He was looking very pale and didn’t see me when I nodded.”

“What time was that?” asked Bertram.

“About twelve; when I went out to lunch.”

A quick gasp sounded at their side, followed by a hurried cough.  Turning, Bertram encountered for the fifth time the eyes of Hopgood.  He had entered unperceived by the small door that separated the inner inclosure from the outer, and was now standing very close to them, eying with side-long looks the safe at their back, the faces of the gentleman speaking, yes, and even the countenances of the clerks, as they bent busily over their books.

“Did you ring, sir?” asked he, catching Bertram’s look of displeasure.

“No.”

The man seemed to feel the rebuke implied in this short response, and ambled softly away.  But in another moment he was stopped by Bertram.

“What is the matter with you to-day, Hopgood?  Can you have anything of real importance on your mind; anything connected with my uncle?”

The janitor started, and looked almost frightened.  “Be careful what you say,” whispered he; then with a keen look at Mr. Wheelock just then on the point of entering the directors’ room, he was turning to escape by the little door just mentioned, when it opened and Mr. Stuyvesant came in.  With a look almost of terror the janitor recoiled, throwing himself as it were between the latter and the door of the safe; but recovering himself, surveyed the keen quiet visage of the veteran banker with a rolling of his great eyes absolutely painful to behold.  Mr. Stuyvesant, who was somewhat absorbed in thought, did not appear to notice the agitation he had caused, and with just a hurried nod followed Mr. Wheelock into the Directors’ room.  Instantly the janitor drew himself up with an air of relief, and shortly glancing at the clock which lacked a few minutes yet of the time fixed for the meeting, slided hastily away from Bertram’s detaining hand, and disappeared in the crowd without.  In another moment Bertram saw him standing at the outer door, looking anxiously up and down the street.

“Something is wrong,” murmured Bertram.  “What?” And for a moment he felt half tempted to return Mr. Stuyvesant’s friendly bow with a few words expressive of his uneasiness, but the emphasis with which Hopgood had murmured the words, “Be careful what you say,” unconsciously deterred him, and concealing his nervousness as best he might, he entered the Directors’ office.

It was now time for the meeting to open, and the gentlemen were all seated around the low green baize table that occupied the centre of the room.  Impatience was written on all their countenances.  Mr. Stuyvesant especially was looking at the heavy gold watch in his hand, with a frown on his deeply wrinkled brow that did not add to its expression of benevolence.  The empty seat at the head of the table stared upon Bertram uncompromisingly.

“My wife gives a reception to-day,” ventured one gentleman to his neighbor.

“And I have an engagement at five that won’t bear postponement.”

“Sylvester has always been on hand before.”

“We can’t proceed without him,” was the reply.

Mr. Wheelock looked thoughtful.

With a nod of his head towards such gentlemen as met his eye, Bertram hastened to a little cupboard devoted to the use of himself and uncle.  Opening it, he looked within, took down a coat he saw hanging before him, and unconsciously uttered an exclamation.  It was a dress-coat such as had been worn by Mr. Sylvester the evening before.

“What does this mean!  My uncle has been here!” were the words that sprang to his lips; but he subdued his impulse to speak, and hastily hanging up the coat, relocked the door.  Proceeding at once to the outer room, he asked two or three of the clerks if they were sure Mr. Sylvester had not been in during the day.  But they all returned an unequivocal “no,” and that too with a certain stare of surprise that at once convinced him he was betraying his agitation too plainly.

“I will telegraph whether Wheelock considers it necessary or not,” thought he, and was moving to summon a messenger boy when he caught sight of Hopgood slowly making his way in from the street.  He was very pale and walked with his eyes fixed on the ground, ominously shaking his great head in a way that bespoke an inner struggle of no ordinary nature.  Bertram at once sauntered out to meet him.

“Hopgood,” said he, “your evident anxiety is infectious.  What has happened to make my uncle’s detention a matter of such apparent import?  If you do not wish to confide in me, his nephew almost his son, speak to Mr. Wheelock or to one of the directors, but don’t keep anything to yourself which concerns his welfare or ­What are you looking at?”

The man was gazing as if fascinated at the keys in Bertram’s hand.

“Nothing sir, nothing.  You must not detain me; I have nothing to say.  I will wait ten minutes,” he muttered to himself, glancing again at the clock.  Suddenly he saw the various directors come filing out of the inner room, and darted for the second time from Bertram’s detaining hand.

“I hope nothing has happened to Mr. Sylvester,” exclaimed one gentleman to another as they filed by.

“If he were given to a loose ends’ sort of business it would be another thing.”

“He looked exceedingly well at the reception last night,” exclaimed another; “but in these days ­”

Suddenly there was a hush.  A telegraph boy had just entered the door and was asking for Mr. Bertram Sylvester.

“Here I am,” said Bertram, hastily taking the envelope presented him.  Slightly turning his back, he opened it.  Instantly his face grew white as chalk.

“Gentlemen,” said he, “you will have to excuse my uncle to-day; a great misfortune has occurred to him.”  Then with a slow and horror-stricken movement, he looked about him and exclaimed, “Mrs. Sylvester is dead.”

A confused murmur at once arose, followed by a hurried rush; but of all the faces that flocked out of the bank, none wore such a look of blank and helpless astonishment as that of Hopgood the janitor, as with bulging eyes and nervously working hands, he slowly wended his way to the foot of the stairs and there sat down gazing into vacancy.

CHAPTER VII - THE DREGS IN THE CUP.

“O eloquent, just and mightie death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised:  thou hast drawn together all the farre stretched greatnesses; all the pride, crueltie and ambition of man and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet.”

      ­SIR WALTER RALEIGH.

Bertram’s hurried ring at his uncle’s door was answered by Samuel the butler.

“What is this I hear?” cried the young man, entering with considerable agitation, “Mrs. Sylvester dead?”

“Yes sir,” returned the old and trusty servant, with something like a sob in his voice.  “She went out riding this morning behind a pair of borrowed horses ­and being unused to Michael’s way of driving, they ran away and she was thrown from the carriage and instantly killed.”

“And Miss Fairchild?”

“She didn’t go with her.  Mrs. Sylvester was alone.”

“Horrible, horrible!  Where is my uncle, can I see him?”

“I don’t know, sir,” the man returned with a strange look of anxiety.  “Mr. Sylvester is feeling very bad, sir.  He has shut himself up in his room and none of his servants dare disturb him, sir.”

“I should, however, like him to know I am here.  In what room shall I find him?”

“In the little one, sir, at the top of the house.  It has a curious lock on the door; you will know it by that.”

“Very well.  Please be in the hall when I come down; I may want to give you some orders.”

The old servant bowed and Bertram hastened with hushed steps to ascend the stairs.  At the first platform he paused.  What is there in a house of death, of sudden death especially, that draws a veil of spectral unreality over each familiar object!  Behind that door now inexorably closed before him, lay without doubt the shrouded form of her who but a few short hours before, had dazzled the eyes of men and made envious the hearts of women with her imposing beauty!  No such quiet then reigned over the spot filled by her presence.  As the vision of a dream returns, he saw her again in all her splendor.  Never a brow in all the great hall shone more brightly beneath its sparkling diamonds; never a lip in the whole vast throng curled with more self-complacent pride, or melted into a more alluring smile, than that of her who now lay here, a marble image beneath the eye of day.  It was as if a flowery field had split beneath the dancing foot of some laughing siren.  One moment your gaze is upon the swaying voluptuous form, the half-shut beguiling eye, the white out-reaching arms upon whose satin surface a thousand loves seem perching; the next you stare horror-stricken upon the closing jaws of an awful pit, with the flash of something bright in your eyes, and the sense of a hideous noiseless rush in which earth and heaven appear to join, sink and be swallowed!  Bertram felt his heart grow sick.  Moving on, he passed the bronze image of Luxury lying half asleep on its bed of crumpled roses.  Hideous mockery!  What has luxury to do with death?  She who was luxury itself has vanished from these halls.  Shall the mute bronze go on smiling over its wine cup while she who was its prototype is carried by without a smile on the lips once so vermeil with pride and tropical languors!

Arrived at the top of the house, Bertram knocked at the door with the strange lock, and uttering his own name, asked if there was anything he could do here or elsewhere to show his sympathy and desire to be of use in this great and sudden bereavement.  There was no immediate reply and he began to fear he would be obliged to retire without seeing his uncle, when the door was slowly opened and Mr. Sylvester came out.  Instantly Bertram understood the anxiety of the servant.  Not only did Mr. Sylvester’s countenance exhibit the usual traces of grief and horror incident to a sudden and awful calamity, but there were visible upon it the tokens of another and still more unfathomable emotion, a wild and paralyzed look that altered the very contour of his features, and made his face almost like that of a stranger.

“Uncle, what is it?” sprang involuntarily to his lips.  But Mr. Sylvester betraying by a sudden backward movement an instinctive desire to escape scrutiny, he bethought himself, and with hasty utterance offered some words of consolation that sounded strangely hollow and superficial in that dim and silent corridor.  “Is there nothing I can do for you?” he finally asked.

“Everything is being done,” exclaimed his uncle in a strained and altered voice; “Robert is here.”  And a silence fell over the hall, that Bertram dared not break.

“I have help for everything but ­” He did not say what, it seemed as if something rose up in his throat that choked him.

“Bertram,” said he at last in a more natural tone, “come with me.”

He led him into an adjoining room and shut the door.  It was a room from which the sunshine had not been excluded and it seemed as if they could both breathe more easily.

“Sit down,” said his uncle, pointing to a chair.  The young man did so, but Mr. Sylvester remained standing.  Then without preamble, “Have you seen her?”

There was no grief in the question, only a quiet respect.  Death clothes the most volatile with a garment of awe.  Bertram slowly shook his head.  “No,” said he, “I came at once up stairs.”

“There is no mark on her white body, save the least little discolored dent here,” continued his uncle, pointing calmly to his temple.  “She had one moment of fear while the horses ran, and then ­” He gave a quick shudder and advancing towards Bertram, laid his hand on his nephew’s shoulder in such a way as to prevent him from turning his head.  “Bertram,” said he, “I have no son.  If I were to call upon you to perform a son’s work for me; to obey and ask no questions, would you comply?”

“Can you ask?” sprang from the young man’s lips; “you know that you have only to command for me to be proud to obey.  Anything you can require will find me ready.”

The hand on his shoulder weighed heavier.  “It seems a strange time to talk about business, Bertram, but necessity knows no law.  There is a matter in which you can afford me great assistance if you will undertake to do immediately what I ask.”

“Can you doubt ­”

“Hush, it is this.  On this paper you will find a name; below it a number of addresses.  They are all of places down town and some of them not very reputable I fear.  What I desire is for you to seek out the man whose name you here see, going to these very places after him, beginning with the first, and continuing down the list until you find him.  When you come upon him, he will ask you for a card.  Give him one on which you will scrawl before his eyes, a circle, so.  It is a token which he should instantly understand.  If he does, address him with freedom and tell him that your employer ­you need make use of no names ­re-demands the papers made over to him this morning.  If he manifests surprise or is seen to hesitate, tell him your orders are imperative.  If he declares ruin will follow, inform him that you are not to be frightened by words; that your employer is as fully aware of the position of affairs as he.  Whatever he says, bring the papers.”

Bertram nodded his head and endeavored to rise, but his uncle’s hand rested upon him too heavily.

“He is a small man; you need have no dread of him physically.  The sooner you find him and acquit yourself of your task, the better I shall be pleased.”  And then the hand lifted.

On his way down stairs Bertram encountered Paula.  She was standing in the hall and accosted him with a very trembling tone in her voice.  All her questions were in regard to Mr. Sylvester.

“Have you seen him?” she asked.  “Does he speak ­say anything?  No one has heard him utter a word since he came in from down town and saw her lying there.”

“Yes, certainly; he spoke to me; he has been giving me some commissions to perform.  I am on my way now to attend to them.”

She drew a deep breath.  “O!” she cried, “would that he had a son, a daughter, a child, some one!”

This exclamation following what had taken place above struck Bertram forcibly.  “He has a son in me, Paula.  Love as well as duty binds me to him.  All that a child could do will I perform with pleasure.  You can trust me for that.”

She threw him a glance of searching inquiry.  “His need is greater than it seems,” whispered she.  “He was deeply troubled before this terrible accident occurred.  I am afraid the arrow is poisoned that has made this dreadful wound.  I cannot explain myself,” she went on hurriedly, “but if you indeed regard him as a father, be ready with any comfort, any help, that affection can bestow, or his necessities require.  Let me feel that he has near him some stay that will not yield to pressure.”

There was so much passion in this appeal that Bertram involuntarily bowed his head.  “He has two friends,” said he, “and here is my hand that I will never forsake him.”

“I do not need to offer mine,” she returned, “He is great and good enough to do without my assistance.”  But nevertheless she gave her hand to Bertram and with a glow of her lip and eye that made her beauty, supreme at all times, something almost supernatural in its character.

“I dared not tell him,” she whispered to herself as the front door closed with the dull slow thud proper to a house of mourning.  “I dare not tell any one, but ­”

What lay beyond that but?

When Mr. Sylvester came in at six o’clock in the morning, Paula had risen from the bed on which she had been sitting, but not to make preparation for rest, for she could not rest.  The vague shadow of some surrounding evil or threatened catastrophe was upon her, and though she forced herself to change her dress for a warmer and more suitable one, she did not otherwise break her vigil, though the necessity for it seemed to be at an end.  It was a midwinter morning and the sun had not yet risen, so being chilly as well as restless, she began to pace the floor, stopping now and then to glance out of the window, in the hopes of detecting some signs of awakening day in the blank and solemn east.  Suddenly as she was thus consulting the horizon, a light flashed up from below, and looking down upon the face of the extension that ran along at right angles to her window, she perceived that the shades were up in Mrs. Sylvester’s boudoir.  They had doubtless been left so the evening before, and Mr. Sylvester upon turning up the gas had failed to observe the fact.  Instantly she felt her heart stand still, for the house being wide and the extension narrow, all that went on in that boudoir, or at least in that portion of it which Mr. Sylvester at present occupied, was easily observable from the window at which she stood; and that something was going on of a serious and important nature, was sufficiently evident from the expression of Mr. Sylvester’s countenance.  He was standing with his face bent towards some one seated out of sight, his wife undoubtedly, though what could have called her from her dreams ­and was busily engaged in talking.  The subject whatever it was, absorbed him completely.  If Paula had allowed herself the thought, she would have described him as pleading and that with no ordinary vehemence.  But suddenly while she gazed half fascinated and but little realizing what she was doing, he started back and a fierce change swept over his face, a certain incredulity, that presently gave way to a glance of horror and repugnance, which the quick action of his out-thrown palm sufficiently emphasized.  He was pushing something from him, but what?  A suggestion or a remembrance?  It was impossible to determine.

The countenance of Mrs. Sylvester who that moment appeared in sight sailing across the floor in her azure wrapper, offered but little assistance in the way of explanation.  Immovable under most circumstances, it was simply at this juncture a trifle more calm and cold than usual, presenting to Paula’s mind the thought of a white and icy barrier, against which the most glowing of arrows must fall chilled and powerless.

“O for a woman’s soul to inform that breast if but for a moment!” cried Paula, lost in the passion of this scene, while so little understanding its import.  When as if in mockery to this invocation, the haughty form upon which she was gazing started rigidly erect, while the lip acquired a scorn and the eye a menace that betrayed the serpent ever in hiding under this white rose.

Paula could look no longer.  This last revelation had awakened her to the fact that she was gazing upon a scene sacred to the husband and wife engaged in it.  With a sense of shame she rushed to the bed and threw herself upon it, but the vision of what she had beheld would not leave her so easily.  Like letters of fire upon a black ground, the panorama of looks and gestures to which she had just been witness, floated before her mind’s eye, awakening a train of thought so intense that she did not know which was worse, to be there in the awful dawn dreaming over this episode of the night, or to rise and face again the reality.  The fascination which all forbidden sights insensibly exert over the minds of the best of us, finally prevailed, and she slowly crept to the window to catch a parting glimpse of Mr. Sylvester’s tall form hurrying blindly from the boudoir followed by his wife’s cold glance.  The next minute the exposed condition of the room seemed to catch that lady’s attention, and with an anxious look into the dull gray morn, Mrs. Sylvester drew down the shades, and the episode was over.

Or so Paula thought; but when she was returning up stairs after her solitary breakfast ­Mrs. Sylvester was too tired and Mr. Sylvester too much engaged to eat, as the attentive Samuel informed her ­the door of Ona’s room swung ajar, and she distinctly heard her give utterance to the following exclamation: 

“What! give up this elegant home, my horses and carriage, the friends I have had such difficulty in obtaining, and the position which I was born to adorn?  I had rather die!” And Paula feeling as if she had received the key to the enigma of the last night’s unaccountable manifestations, was about to rush away to her own apartment, when the door swayed open again and she heard his voice respond with hard and bitter emphasis,

“And it might be better that you should.  But since you will probably live, let it be according to your mind.  I have not the courage ­”

There the door swung to.

An hour from that Mr. Sylvester left the house with a small valise in his hand, and Mrs. Sylvester dressed in her showiest costume, entered her carriage for an early shopping excursion.

And so when Paula whispered to herself, “I did not dare to tell him; I did not dare to tell any one, but ­” she thought of those terrible words, “Die?  It might be better, perhaps, that you should!” and then remembered the ghastly look of immeasurable horror with which a few hours later, he staggered away from that awful burden, whose rigid lines would never again melt into mocking curves, and to whom the morning’s wide soaring hopes, high reaching ambitions and boundless luxuries were now no more than the shadows of a vanished world; life, love, longing, with all their demands, having dwindled to a noisome rest between four close planks, with darkness for its present portion and beyond ­what?

CHAPTER VIII - DEPARTURE.

    “Forever and forever, farewell Cassius. 
    If we do meet again, why we shall smile;
    If not, why then, this parting was well made.”

     ­JULIUS Cæsar.

Samuel had received his orders to admit Mr. Bertram Sylvester to his uncle’s room, at whatever hour of the day or night he chose to make his appearance.  But evening wore away and finally the night, before his well-known face was seen at the door.  Proceeding at once to the apartment occupied by Mr. Sylvester, he anxiously knocked.  The door was opened immediately.

“Ah, Bertram, I have been expecting you all night.”  And from the haggard appearance of both men, it was evident that neither of them had slept.

“I have sat down but twice since I left you, and then only in conveyances.  I have been obliged to go to Brooklyn, to ­”

“But you have found him?”

“Yes, I found him.”

His uncle glanced inquiringly at his hands; they were empty.

“I shall have to sit down,” said Bertram; his brow was very gloomy, his words came hesitatingly.  “I had rather have knocked my head against the wall, than have disappointed you,” he murmured after a moment’s pause.  “But when I did find him, it was too late.”

“Too late!” The tone in which this simple phrase was uttered was indescribable.  Bertram slowly nodded his head.

“He had already disposed of all the papers, and favorably,” he said.

“But ­”

“And not only that,” pursued Bertram.  “He had issued orders by telegraph, that it was impossible to countermand.  It was at the Forty Second Street depot I found him at last.  He was just on the point of starting for the west.”

“And has he gone?”

“Yes sir.”

Mr. Sylvester walked slowly to the window.  It was raining drearily without, but he did not notice the falling drops or raise his eyes to the leaden skies.

“Did you meet any one?” he asked at length.  “Any one that you know, I mean, or who knows you?”

“No one but Mr. Stuyvesant.”

“Mr. Stuyvesant!”

“Yes sir,” returned Bertram, dropping his eyes before his uncle’s astonished glance.  “I was coming out of a house in Broad Street when he passed by and saw me, or at least I believed he saw me.  There is no mistaking him, sir, for any one else; besides it is a custom of his I am told, to saunter through the down town streets after the warehouses are all closed for the night.  He enjoys the quiet I suppose, finds food for reflection in the sleeping aspect of our great city.”  There was gloom in Bertram’s tone; his uncle looked at him curiously.

“What house was it from which you were coming when he passed you?”

“A building where Tueller and Co. do business, shady operators in paper, as you know.”

“And you believed he recognized you?”

“I cannot be sure, sir.  It was dark, but I thought I saw him look at me and give a slight start.”

Ah, how desolate sounds the drip, drip of a ceaseless rain, when conversation languishes and the ear has time to listen!

“I will explain to Mr. Stuyvesant when I see him, that you were in search of a man with whom I had pressing business,” observed Mr. Sylvester at last.

“No,” murmured Bertram with effort, “it might emphasize the occurrence in his mind; let the matter drop where it is.”

There was another silence, during which the drip of the rain on the window-ledge struck on the young man’s ears like the premonitory thud of falling earth upon a coffin-lid.  At length his uncle turned and advanced rapidly towards him.

“Bertram,” said he, “you have done me a favor for which I thank you.  What you have learned in the course of its accomplishment I cannot tell.  Enough perhaps to make you understand why I warned you from the dangerous path of speculation, and set your feet in a way that if adhered to with steadfast purpose, ought to lead you at last to a safe and honorable prosperity.  Now ­No, Bertram,” he bitterly interrupted himself as the other opened his lips, “I am in need of no especial commiseration, my affairs seem bound to prosper whether I will or not ­now I have one more commission to give you.  Miss Fairchild ­” his voice quavered and he leaned heavily on the chair near which he was standing.  “Have you seen her, Bertram?  Is the poor child quite prostrated?  Has this frightful occurrence made her ill, or does she bear up with fortitude under the shock of this sudden calamity?”

“She is not ill, but her suffering is undoubted.  If you could see her and say a few words to relieve her anxiety in regard to yourself, I think it would greatly comfort her.  Her main thought seems to be for you, sir.”

Mr. Sylvester frowned, raised his hand with a repelling gesture, and hastily opened his lips.  Bertram thought he was about to utter some passionate phrase.  But instead of that he merely remarked, “I am sorry I cannot see her, but it is quite impossible.  You must stand between me and this poor child, Bertram.  Tell her I send her my love; tell her that I am quite well; anything to solace her and make these dark days less dreary.  If she wants a friend with her, let a messenger be sent for whomever she desires.  I place no restrictions upon anything you choose to do for her comfort or happiness, but let me be spared the sight of any other face than yours until this is all over.  After the funeral ­it nay sound ungracious, but I am far from feeling so ­I shall wish to be left alone for awhile.  If she can be made to understand this ­”

“I think her instincts, sir, have already led her to divine your wishes.  If I am not mistaken, she is even now making preparations to return to her relatives.”

Mr. Sylvester gave a start.  “What, so soon!” he murmured, and the sadness of his tone smote Bertram to the heart.  But in another moment he recovered himself and shortly exclaimed, “Well! well! that is as it should be.  You will watch over her Bertram, and see that she is kindly cared for.  It would be a grief to me to have her go away with any more than the necessary regret at losing one who was always kind to her.”

“I will look after her as after a sister,” returned Bertram.  “She shall miss no attention which I can supply.”

With a look Mr. Sylvester expressed his thanks.  Then while Bertram again attempted to speak, he gave him a cordial pressure of the hand, and withdrew once more to his favorite spot.

And the rain beat, beat, and it sounded more and more like the droppings of earth upon a nailed down coffin-lid.

The funeral was a large one.  The largest some said that had ever been seen in that quarter of the city.  If Mrs. Sylvester’s position had not been what it was, the sudden and awful nature of her death, would have been sufficient to draw together a large crowd.  Among those who thus endeavored to show their respect was Miss Stuyvesant.

“I could not join you here in your pleasures,” she whispered to Paula in the short interview they had upstairs, preparatory to the services, “but I cannot keep away in the dark hours!” And from her look and the clasp of her hand, Paula gained fresh courage to endure the slow pressure of anxiety and grief with which she was secretly burdened.

Moreover she had the pleasure of introducing her beloved friend to Mr. Bertram Sylvester, a pleasure which she had long promised herself whenever the opportunity should arrive, as Miss Stuyvesant was somewhat of an enthusiast as regards music.  She did not notice particularly then, but she remembered afterwards, with what a blushing cheek and beautiful glance the dainty young girl received his bow, and responded to his few respectful words of pleasure at meeting the daughter of a man whom he had learned to regard with so much respect.

Mr. Sylvester was in a room by himself.  The few glimpses obtained of him by his friends, convinced them all, that this trouble touched him more deeply than those who knew his wife intimately could have supposed.  Yet he was calm, and already wore that fixed look of rigidity which was henceforth to distinguish the expression of his fine and noble features.

In the ride to Greenwood he spoke little.  Paula who sat in the carriage with him did not receive a word, though now and then his eye wandered towards her with an expression that drove the blood to her heart, and made the whole day one awful memory of incomprehensible agony and dim but terrible forebodings.  The ways of the human soul, in its crises of grief or remorse were so new to her.  She had passed her life beside rippling streams and in peaceful meadows, and now all at once, with shadow on shadow, the dark pictures of life settled down before her, and she could not walk without stumbling upon jagged rocks, deep yawning chasms and caves of impenetrable gloom.

The sight of the grave appalled her.  To lay in such a bed as that, the fair and delicate head that had often found the downy pillows of its azure couch too hard for its languid pressure.  To hide in such a dismal, deep, dark gap, a form so white and but a little while before, so imposing in its splendor and so commanding in its requirements.  The thought of heaven brought no comfort.  The beauty they had known lay here; soulless, inert, rigid and responseless, but here.  It was gifted with no wings with which to rise.  It owned no attachment to higher spheres.  Death had scattered the leaves of this white rose, but from all the boundless mirror of the outspread heavens, no recovered semblance of its perfected beauty, looked forth to solace Paula or assuage the misery of her glance into this gloomy pit.  Ah, Ona, the social ladder reaches high, but it does not scale the regions where your poor soul could find comfort now.

Bertram saw the white look on Paula’s face and silently offered his arm.  But there are moments when no mortal help can aid us; instants when the soul stands as solitary in the universe, as the ship-wrecked mariner on a narrow strip of rock in a boundless sea.  Life may touch, but eternity enfolds us; we are single before God and as such must stand or fall.

Upon their return to the house, Mr. Sylvester withdrew with a few intimate friends to his room, and Paula, lonely beyond expression, went to her own empty apartment to finish packing her trunks and answer such notes as had arrived during her absence.  For attention from outsiders was only too obtrusive.  Many whom she had never met save in the most formal intercourse, flooded her now with expressions of condolence, which if they had not been all upon one pattern and that the most conventional, might have afforded her some relief.  Two or three of the notes were precious to her and these she stowed safely away, one contained a deliberate offer of marriage from a wealthy old stock-broker; this she as deliberately burned after she had written a proper refusal.  “He thinks I have no home,” she murmured.

And had she?  As she paced through the silent halls and elaborately furnished rooms on her way to her solitary dinner, she asked herself if any place would ever seem like home after this.  Not that she was infatuated by its elegance.  The lofty walls might dwindle, the gorgeous furniture grow dim, the works of beauty disappear, the whole towering structure contract to the dimensions of a simple cottage or what was worse, a seedy down-town house, if only the something would remain, the something that made return to Grotewell seem like the bending back of a towering stalk to the ground from which it had taken its root.  “If?” she cried ­and stopped there, her heart swelling she knew not why.  Then again, “I thought I had found a father!” Then after a longer pause, a wild uncontrollable; “Bless! bless! bless!” which seemed to re-echo in the room long after her lingering step had left it.

“Will he let me go without a word?”

It was early morning and the time had come for Paula’s departure.  She was standing on the threshold of her room, her hands clasped, her eyes roving up and down the empty halls.  “Will he let me go without a word?”

“O Miss Paula, what do you think?” cried Sarah, creeping slowly towards her from the spectral recesses of a dim corner.  “Jane says Mr. Sylvester was up all last night too.  She heard him go down stairs about midnight and he went through all the rooms like a gliding spectre and into her room too!” she fearfully whispered; “and what he did there no one knows, but when he came out he locked the door, and this morning the cook heard him give orders to Samuel to have the trunks that were ready in Mrs. Sylvester’s room taken away.  O Miss, do you think he can be going to give all those beautiful things to you?”

Paula recoiled in horror.  “Sarah!” said she, and could say no more.  The vision of that tall form gliding through the desolate house at midnight, bending over the soulless finery of his dead wife, perhaps stowing it away in boxes, came with too powerful a suggestion to her mind.

“Shure, I thought you would be pleased,” murmured the girl and disappeared again into one of the dim recesses.

“Will he let me go without a word?”

“Miss Paula, Mr. Bertram Sylvester is waiting at the door in a carriage,” came in low respectful tones to her ears, and Samuel’s face full of regret appeared at the top of the stairs.

“I am coming,” murmured the sad-hearted girl, and with a sob which she could not control, she took her last look of the pretty pink chamber in which she had dreamed so many dreams of youthful delight, and perhaps of youthful sorrow also, and slowly descended the stairs.  Suddenly as she was passing a door on the second floor, she heard a low deep cry.

“Paula!”

She stopped and her hand went to her heart, the reaction was so sudden.  “Yes,” she murmured, standing still with great heart-beats of joy, or was it pain?

The door slowly opened.  “Did you think I could let you go without a blessing, my Paula, my little one!” came in those deep heart-tones which always made her tears start.  And Mr. Sylvester stepped out of the shadows beyond and stood in the shadows at her side.

“I did not know,” she murmured.  “I am so young, so feeble, such a mote in this great atmosphere of anguish.  I longed to see you, to say good-bye, to thank you, but ­” tears stopped her words; this was a parting that rent her leader heart.

Mr. Sylvester watched her and his deep chest rose spasmodically.  “Paula,” said he, and there was a depth in his tone even she had never heard before, “are these tears for me?”

With a strong effort she controlled herself, looked up and faintly smiled.  “I am an orphan,” she gently murmured; “you have been kind and tender to me beyond words; I have let myself love you as a father.”

A spasm crossed his features, the hand he had lifted to lay upon her head fell at his side, he surveyed her with eyes whose despairing fondness told her that her love had been more than met by this desolate childless man.  But he did not reply as seemed natural, “Be to me then as a child.  I can offer you no mother to guide or watch over you, but one parent is better than none.  Henceforth you shall be known as my daughter.”  Instead of that he shook his head mournfully, yearningly but irrevocably, and said, “To be your father would have been a dear position to occupy.  I have sometimes hoped that I might be so blessed as to call it mine, but that is all past now.  Your father I can never be.  But I can bless you,” he murmured brokenly, “not as I did that day in your aunt’s little cottage, but silently and from afar as God always meant you should be blessed by me.  Good-bye, Paula.”

Then all the deeps in her great nature broke up.  She did not weep, but she looked at him with her large dark eyes and the cry in them smote his heart.  With a struggle that blanched his face, he kept his arms at his side, but his lips worked in agony, and he slowly murmured, “If after a time your heart loves me like this, and you are willing to bear shadow as well as sunshine with me, come back with your aunt and sit at my hearthstone, not as my child but as a dear and honored guest.  I will try and be worthy ­” He paused, “Will you come, Paula?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Not soon, not now,” he murmured, “God will show you when.”

And with nothing but a look, without having touched her or so much as brushed her garments with his, he retired again into his room.

CHAPTER XI - HOPGOOD.

     “Give it an understanding but no tongue.”

      ­HAMLET.

Hopgood was a man who could keep a secret, but who made so much ado in the process that he reminded one of the placard found posted up somewhere out west which reads, “A treasure of gold concealed here; don’t dig!” Or so his wife used to say, and she ought to know, for she had lived with him five years, three of which he had spent in the detective service.

“If he would only trust the wife of his bosom with whatever he’s got on his mind, instead of ambling around the building with his eyes rolling about like peas in a caldron of boiling water, one might manage to take some comfort in life, and not hurt anybody either.  For two days now, ever since the wife of Mr. Sylvester died and Mr. Sylvester has been away from the bank, he’s acted just like a lunatic.  Not that that has anything to do with his gettin up of nights and roamin down five pair of stairs to see if the watchman is up to his duty, or with his askin a dozen times a day if I remembers how Mr. Sylvester found him and me, well nigh starvin in Broad Street, and gave him the good word which got him into this place?  O no!  O no, of course not!  But something has, and while he persists in shutting out from his breast the woman he swore to love, honor, and cherish, that woman is not bound to bear the trials of life with patience.  Every time he jumps out of his chair at the sound of Mr. Sylvester’s name, and some one is always mentionin’ it, I plumps me down on mine with an expression of my views regarding a kitchen stove that does all its drawin’ when the oven’s empty.”

So spake Mrs. Hopgood to her special crony and constant visitor, Mrs. Kirkshaw of Water Street, pursing up a mouth that might have been good-natured if she had ever given it an opportunity.  But Mrs. Kirkshaw who passed for a gossip with her neighbors, was a philosopher in the retirement of the domestic circle and did not believe in the blow for blow system.

“La!” quoth she, with a smoothing out of her apron suggestive of her employment as laundress, “show a dog that you want his bone and you’ll never get it.  Husbands is like that very stove you’ve been a slanderin of.  Rattle on coal when the fire’s low and you put it out entirely; but be a bit patient and drop it on piece by piece, coaxing-like, and you’ll have a hot stove afore you know it.”

Which suggestion struck Mrs. Hopgood like a revelation, and for a day and night she resorted to the coaxing system; the result of which was to send Mr. Hopgood out of the room to sit on the stairs in mortal terror, lest his good nature should get the better of his discretion.  His little daughter, Constantia Maria ­so named and so called from two grandmothers, equally exacting in their claims and equally impecunious as regards their resources ­was his sole solace in this long vigil.  Her pretty innocent prattle scarcely disturbed his meditation, while it soothed his nerves, and with no one by but this unsuspecting child, he could roll his great eyes to his heart’s content without fear of her descrying anything in them, but the love with which her own little heart abounded.

On the morning after the funeral, however, Constantia Maria was restored to his wife’s arms on the plea that she did not seem quite well, and Hopgood went out and sat alone.  In a few minutes, however, he returned, and ambling restlessly up and down the room, stopped before his persistently smiling wife and said somewhat tremulously: 

“If Mr. Sylvester takes a notion to come up and see Constantia Maria to-day, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to finish your ironing or whatever else it is you may have to do.  I’ve noticed he seems a little shy with the child when you are around.”

“Shy with the child when I am around! well I do declare!” exclaimed she, forgetting her late rôle in her somewhat natural indignation.  “And what have I ever done to frighten Mr. Sylvester?  Nothing but putting on of a clean apron, when he comes in and a dustin’ of the best chair for his use.  It’s a trick of yours to get a chance of speakin’ to him alone, and I’ll not put up with it.  As if it wasn’t bad enough to have a kettle with the nozzle dangling, without living with a man who has a secret he won’t share with his own wife and the mother of his innocent babe.”

With a start the worthy man stared at her till he grew red in the face, probably with the effort of keeping his eyes steady for so long a time.  “Who told you I had a secret?” said he.

“Who told me?” and then she laughed, though in a somewhat hysterical way, and sat down in the middle of the floor and shook and shook again.  “Hear the man!” she cried.  And she told him the story of the placard out west and then asked him, “if he thought she didn’t remember how he used to act when he was a chasin’ up of a thief in the days when he was on the police force.”

“But,” he cried, quite as pale now as he had been florid the moment before, “I’m not in the police force now and you are acting quite silly and I’ve no patience with you.”  And he was making for the door, presumably to sit upon the stairs, when with a late repentance she seized him by the arm and said: 

“La now,” an expression she had caught from Mrs. Kirkshaw, “I didn’t mean nothin’ by my talk.  Come back, John; Constantia Maria is not well, and if Mr. Sylvester comes up to see her, I’ll just slip out and leave you alone.”

And upon that he told her she was a good wife and that if he had any secret from her it was only because he was a poor man.  “Honesty and prudence are all the treasures I possess to keep us three from starving.  Shall I part with either of them just to satisfy your curiosity?” and being a good woman at heart, she said “no,” though she secretly concluded that prudence in his case involved trust in one’s wife first, and disbelief in the rest of the world afterward; and took her future resolutions accordingly.

“Well, Hopgood, you look anxious; do you want to speak to me?”

The janitor eyed the changed and melancholy face of his patron, with an expression in which real sympathy for his trouble, struggled with the respectful awe which Mr. Sylvester’s presence was calculated to inspire.

“If you please,” said he, speaking very low, for more or less of the bank employees were moving busily to and fro, “Constantia Maria is not well and she has been asking all day for the dear man, as she insists upon calling you, sir, with many apologies for the freedom.”

Mr. Sylvester smiled with a faint far-away look in his dark eye that made Hopgood stare uneasily out of the window.  “Sick! why then I must go up and see her,” he returned in a matter-of-fact way that proved his visits in that direction were of no uncommon occurrence.  “A moment more and I shall be at liberty.”

Hopgood bowed and renewed his stare out of the window, with an intensity happily spared from serious consequences to the passers-by, by the merciful celerity with which Mr. Sylvester procured his overcoat, put such papers in his pocket as he required, and joined him.

“Constantia Maria, here is Mr. Sylvester come to see you.”

It was a pleasure to observe how the little thing brightened in her mother’s arms, where but a moment before she had lain quite pale and still, and slipping to the ground rushed up to meet the embrace of this stern and melancholy-faced man.  “I am so glad you have come,” she cried over and over again; and her little arms went round his neck, and her soft cheek nestled against his, with a content that made the mother’s eyes sparkle with pleasure, as obedient to her promise, she quietly left the room.

And Mr. Sylvester?  If any one had seen the abandon with which he yielded to her caresses and returned them, he would have understood why this child should have loved him with such extraordinary affection.  He kissed her forehead, he kissed her cheek, and seemed never weary of smoothing down her bright and silky curls.  She reminded him of Geraldine.  She had the same blue eyes and caressing ways.  From the day he had come upon his old friend Hopgood in a condition of necessity almost of want, this blue-eyed baby had held its small sceptre over his lonely heart, and unbeknown to the rest of the world, had solaced many a spare five minutes with her innocent prattle.  The Hopgoods understood the cause of his predilection and were silent.  It was the one thing Mrs. Hopgood never alluded to in her gossips with Mrs. Kirkshaw.  But to-day the attentions of Mr. Sylvester to the little one seemed to make the janitor restless.  He walked up and down the narrow room uneasily surveying the pair out of the corner of his great glassy eyes, till even Mr. Sylvester noticed his unusual manner and put the child down, observing with a sigh, “You think she is not well enough for any excitement?”

“No sir, it is not that,” returned the other uneasily, with a hasty look around him.  “The fact is, I have something to say to you, sir, about ­a discovery ­I made the other day.”  His words came very slowly, and he looked down with great embarrassment.

Mr. Sylvester frowned slightly, and drew himself up to the full height of his very imposing figure.  “A discovery,” repeated he, “when?”

“The day you paid that early visit to the bank, sir, the day Mrs. Sylvester died.”

The frown on Mr. Sylvester’s brow grew deeper.  “The day ­” he began, and stopped.

“Excuse me, sir,” exclaimed Hopgood with a burst.  “I ought not to have mentioned it, but you asked me when, and I ­”

“What was this discovery?” inquired his superior, imperatively.

“Nothing much,” murmured the other now all in a cold sweat.  “But I felt as if I ought to tell you.  You have been my benefactor, sir, I can never forget what you have done for me and mine.  If I saw death or bereavement between me and any favor I could do for you, sir, I would not hesitate to risk them.  I am no talker, sir, but I am true and I am grateful.”  He stopped, choked, and his eyes rolled frightfully.  Mr. Sylvester looked at him, grew a trifle pale, and put the little child away that was nestling up against his knee.

“You have not told me what you have discovered,” said he.

“Well, sir, only this.”  And he took from his pocket a small roll of paper which he unfolded and held out in his hand.  It contained a gold tooth-pick somewhat bent and distorted.

A flush dark and ominous crept over Mr. Sylvester’s cheek.  He glanced sternly at the trembling janitor, and uttered a short, “Well?”

“I found it on the floor of the bank just after you went out the other morning,” the other pursued well-nigh inaudibly.  “It was lying near the safe.  As it was not there when you went in, I took it for granted it was yours.  Am I right, sir?”

The anxious tone in which this last question was uttered, the studied way in which the janitor kept his eyes upon the floor could not have been unnoticed by Mr. Sylvester, but he simply said,

“I have lost mine, that may very possibly be it.”

The janitor held it towards him; his eyes did not leave the floor.  “The responsibility of my position here is sometimes felt by me to be very heavy,” muttered the man in a low, unmodulated tone.  It was his duty in those days previous to the Manhattan Bank robbery, to open the vault in the morning, procure the books that were needed, and lay them about on the various desks in readiness for the clerks upon their arrival.  He had also the charge of the boxes of the various customers of the bank who chose to entrust their valuables to its safe keeping; which boxes were kept, together with the books, in that portion of the vault to which he had access.  “I should regret my comfortable situation here, but if it was necessary, I would go without a murmur, trusting that God would take care of my poor little lamb.”

“Hopgood, what do you mean?” asked Mr. Sylvester somewhat sternly.  “Who talks about dismissing you?”

“No one,” responded the other, turning aside to attend to some trivial matter.  “But if ever you think a younger or a fresher man would be preferable in my place, do not hesitate to make the change your own necessities or that of the Bank may seem to require.”

Mr. Sylvester’s eye which was fixed upon the janitor’s face, slowly darkened.

“There is something underlying all this,” said he, “what is it?”

At once and as if he had taken his resolution, the janitor turned.  “I beg your pardon,” said he, “I ought to have told you in the first place.  When I opened the vaults as usual on the morning of which I speak, I found the boxes displaced; that was nothing if you had been to them, sir; but what did alarm me and make me feel as if I had held my position too long was to find that one of them was unlocked.”

Mr. Sylvester fell back a step.

“It was Mr. Stuyvesant’s box, sir, and I remember distinctly seeing him lock it the previous afternoon before putting it back on the shelf.”

The arms which Mr. Sylvester had crossed upon his breast tightened spasmodically.  “And it has been in that condition ever since?” asked he.

The janitor shook his head.  “No,” said he, taking his little girl up in his arms, possibly to hide his countenance.  “As you did not come down again on that day, I took the liberty of locking it with a key of my own when I went to put away the books and shut the vault for the night.”  And he quietly buried his face in his baby’s floating curls, who feeling his cheek against her own put up her hand and stroked it lovingly, crying in her caressing infantile tones,

“Poor papa! poor tired papa.”

Mr. Sylvester’s stern brow contracted painfully.  The look with which his eye sought the sky without, would have made Paula’s young heart ache.  Taking the child from her father’s clasp, he laid her on the bed.  When he again confronted the janitor his face was like a mask.

“Hopgood,” said he, “you are an honest man and a faithful one; I appreciate your worth and have had confidence in your judgment.  Whom have you told of this occurrence beside myself?”

“No one, sir.”

“Another question; if Mr. Stuyvesant had required his box that day and had found it in the condition you describe, what would you have replied to his inquiries?”

The janitor colored to the roots of his hair in an agony of shame Mr. Sylvester may or may not have appreciated, but replied with the straightforward earnestness of a man driven to bay, “I should have been obliged to tell him the truth sir; that whereas I had no personal knowledge of any one but myself, having been to the vaults since the evening before, I was called upon early that morning to open the outside door to you, sir, and that you came into the bank,” (he did not say looking very pale, agitated and unnatural, but he could not help remembering it) “and finding no one on duty but myself, ­the watchman having gone up stairs to take his usual cup of coffee before going home for the day ­you sent me out of the room on an errand, which delayed me some little time, and that when I came back I found you gone, and every thing as I had left it except that small pick lying on the floor.”

The last words were nearly inaudible but they must have been heard by Mr. Sylvester, for immediately upon their utterance, the hand which unconsciously had kept its hold upon the tooth-pick, opened and with an uncontrollable gesture flung the miserable tell-tale into the stove near by.

“Hopgood,” said the stately gentleman, coming nearer and holding him with his eyes till the poor man turned pale and cold as a stone, “has Mr. Stuyvesant had occasion to open his box since you locked it?”

“Yes sir, he called for it yesterday afternoon.”

“And who gave it to him?”

“I sir.”

“Did he appear to miss anything from it?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you believe, Hopgood, that there was anything missing from it?”

The janitor shrank like a man subjected to the torture.  He fixed his glance on Mr. Sylvester’s face and his own gradually lightened.

“No sir!” said he at last, with a gasp that made the little one lift her curly head from her pillow and shake it with a slow and wistful motion strange to see in a child of only two years.

The proud man bowed, not with the severity however that might have been expected; indeed his manner was strangely shadowed, and though his lip betrayed no uneasiness and his eye neither faltered or fell, there was a vague expression of awe upon his countenance, which it would take more than the simple understanding of the worthy but not over subtle man before him, to detect much less to comprehend.

“You may be sure that Mr. Stuyvesant will never complain of any one having tampered with his effects while you are the guardian of the vaults,” exclaimed Mr. Sylvester in clear ringing tones.  “As for his box being open, it is right that I should explain that it was the result of a mistake.  I had occasion to go to a box of my own in a hurry that morning, and misled by the darkness and my own nervousness perhaps, took up his instead of my own.  Not till I had opened it ­with the tooth-pick, Hopgood, for I had been to a reception and did not have my keys with me ­did I notice my mistake.  I had intended to explain the matter to Mr. Stuyvesant, but you know what happened that day, and since then I have thought nothing of it.”

The janitor’s face cleared to its natural expression.  “You are very kind, sir, to explain yourself to me,” said he; “it was not necessary.”  But his lightened face spoke volumes.  “I have been on the police force and I know how to hold my tongue when it is my duty, but it is very hard work when the duty is on the other side.  Have you any commands for me?”

Mr. Sylvester shook his head, and his eye roamed over the humble furniture and scanty comforts of this poor man’s domicile.  Hopgood thought he might be going to offer him some gift or guerdon, and in a low distressed tone spoke up: 

“I shall not try to ask your pardon, sir, for anything I have said.  Honesty that is afraid to show itself, is no honesty for me.  I could not meet your eye, knowing that I was aware of any circumstance of which you supposed me ignorant.  What I know, you must know, as long as I remain in the position you were once kind enough to procure for me.  And now that is all I believe, sir.”

Mr. Sylvester dropped his eyes from the bare walls over which they had been restlessly wandering, and fixed them for a passing moment on the countenance of the man before him.  Then with a grave action he lifted his hat from his head, and bowed with the deference he might have shown to one of his proudest colleagues, and without another look or word, quietly left the room.

Hopgood in his surprise stared after him somewhat awe-struck.  But when the door had quite closed, he caught up his child almost passionately in his arms, and crushing her against his breast, asked, while his eye roamed round the humble room that in its warmth and comfort was a palace to him, “Will he take the first opportunity to have me dismissed, or will his heart forgive the expression of my momentary doubts, for the sake of this poor wee one that he so tenderly fancies?”

The question did not answer itself, and indeed it was one to which time alone could reply.