Waltz Into Darkness

WALTZ INTO DARKNESS

by Cornell Woolrich

Copyright 1947 by William Irish

Copyright renewed 1974 by Chase Manhattan Bank as Executor

All rights reserved.

If one should love you with real love

(Such things have been,

Things your fair face knows nothing of

It seems, Faustine) . . .

-- Swineburne

CHARACTERS THAT APPEAR IN THE STORY

Louis Durand, the man in New Orleans

Tom, who works for him

Aunt Sarah, Tom's sister

Julia Russell, the woman who comes from St. Louis to marry him

Allan Jardine, his business partner

Simms, a bank manager

Commissioner of Police of New Orleans

Bertha Russell, sister of the woman who comes to marry Durand

Walter Downs, a private investigator of St. Louis

Colonel Harry Worth, late of the Confederate Army

Bonny, who was once Julia

CHARACTER THAT DOES NOT APPEAR IN THE STORY

"Billy," a name on a burned scrap of letter, an unseen figure watching a window, a stealthy knocking at a door.

The soundless music starts. The dancing figures appear,

slowly draw together. The waltz begins.

1

The sun was bright, the sky was blue, the time was May; New Orleans was heaven, and heaven must have been only another New Orleans, it couldn't have been any better.

In his bachelor quarters on St. Charles Street, Louis Durand was getting dressed. Not for the first time that day, for the sun was already high and he'd been up and about for hours; but for the great event of that day. This wasn't just a day, this was the day of all days. A day that comes just once to a man, and now had come to him. It had come late, but it had come. It was now. It was today.

He wasn't young any more. Others didn't tell him this, he told himself this. He wasn't old, as men go. But for such a thing as this, he wasn't too young any more. Thirty-seven.

On the wall there was a calendar, the first four leaves peeled back to bare the fifth. At top, center, this was inscribed May. Then on each side of this, in slanted, shadow-casting, heavily curlicued numerals, the year-date was gratuitously given the beholder: 1880. Below, within their little boxed squares, the first nineteen numerals had been stroked off with lead pencil. About the twentieth, this time in red crayon, a heavy circle, a bull's-eye, had been traced. Around and around, as though it could not be emphasized enough. And from there on, the numbers were blank; in the future.

He had put on the shirt with starched ruffles that Maman Alphonsine had so lovingly laundered for him, every frill a work of art. It was fastened at the cuffs with garnet studs backed with silver. In the flowing ascot tie that spread downward fanwise from his chin was thrust the customary stickpin that no well-dressed man was ever without, in this case a crescent of diamond splinters tipped by a ruby chip at each end.

A ponderous gold fob hung from his waistcoat pocket on the right side. Linking this to the adjoining pocket on the left, bulky with a massive slab of watch, was a chain of thick gold links, conspicuous across his middle, and meant to be so. For what was a man without a watch? And what was a watch without there being an indication of one?

His flowing, generous shirt, above this tightly encompassing waistcoat, gave him a pouter-pigeon aspect. But there was enough pride in his chest right now to have done that unaided, anyway.

On the bureau, before which he stood using his hairbrush, lay a packet of letters and a daguerreotype.

He put down his brush, and, pausing for a moment in his preparations, took them up one by one and hurriedly glanced through each. The first bore the letter-head: "The Friendly Correspondence Society of St. Louis, Mo.--an Association for Ladies and Gentlemen of High Character," and began in a fine masculine hand:

Dear Sir:

In reply to your inquiry we are pleased to forward to you the

name and address of one of our members, and if you will address

yourself to her in person, we feel sure a mutually satisfactory

correspondence may be engaged upon--

The next was in an even finer hand, this time feminine: "My dear Mr. Durand:--" And signed: "Y'rs most sincerely, Miss 3. Russell."

The next: "Dear Mr. Durand: . . . Sincerely, Miss Julia Russell."

The next: "Dear Louis Durand: . . . Your sincere friend, Julia Russell."

And then: "Dear Louis: . . . Your sincere friend, Julia."

And then: "Dear Louis: . . . Your sincere Julia."

And then: "Louis, dear: . . . Your Julia."

And finally: "Louis, my beloved: . . . Your own impatient Julia."

There was a postscript to this one: "Will Wednesday never come? I count the hours for the boat to sail !"

He put them in order again, patted them tenderly, fondly, into symmetry. He put them into his inside coat pocket, the one that went over his heart.

He took up, now, the small stiff-backed daguerreotype and looked at it long and raptly. The subject was not young. She was not an old woman, certainly, but she was equally certainly no longer a girl. Her features were sharply indented with the approaching emphases of alteration. There was an incisiveness to the mouth that was not yet, but would be presently, sharpness. There was a keen appearance to the eyes that heralded the onset of sunken creases and constrictions about them. Not yet, but presently. The groundwork was being laid. There was a curvature to the nose that presently would become a hook. There was a prominence to the chin that presently would become a jutting-out.

She was not beautiful. She could be called attractive, for she was attractive to him, and attractiveness lies in the eyes of the beholder.

Her dark hair was gathered at the back of the head in a psycheknot, and a smattering of it, coaxed the other way, fell over her forehead in a fringe, as the fashion had been for some considerable time now. So long a time, in fact, that it was already unnoticeably ceasing to be the fashion.

The only article of apparel allowed to be visible by the limitations of the pose was a black velvet ribbon clasped tightly about her throat, for immediately below that the portrait ended in smouldering brown clouds of photographic nebulae.

So this was the bargain he had made with love, taking what he could get, in sudden desperate haste, for fear of getting nothing at all, of having waited too long, after waiting fifteen years, steadfastly turning his back on it.

That early love, that first love (that he had sworn would be the last) was only a shadowy memory now, a half-remembered name from the past. Marguerite; he could say it and it had no meaning now. As dry and flat as a flower pressed for years between the pages of a book.

A name from someone else's past, not even his. For every seven years we change completely, they say, and there is nothing left of what we were. And so twice over he had become somebody else since then.

Twice-removed he was now from the boy of twenty-two--called Louis Durand as he was, and that their only link--who had knocked upon the house door of his bride-to-be the night before their wedding, stars in his eyes, flowers in his hand. To stand there first with his summons unanswered. And then to see it swing slowly open and two men come out, bearing something dead on a covered litter.

"Stand back. Yellow jack."

He saw the ring on her finger, trailing the ground.

He didn't cry out. He made no sound. He reached down and placed his courtship flowers gently on the death-stretcher as it went by. Then he turned and went away.

Away from love, for fifteen years.

Marguerite, a name. That was all he had left.

He was faithful to that name until he died. For he died too, though more slowly than she had. The boy of twenty-two died into a young man of twenty-nine. Then he in turn was still faithful to the name his predecessor had been faithful to, until he too died. The young man of twenty-nine died into an older man of thirty-six.

And suddenly, one day, the cumulative loneliness of fifteen years, held back until now, overwhelmed him, all at one time, inundated him, and he turned this way and that, almost in panic.

Any love, from anywhere, on any terms. Quick, before it was too late t Only not to be alone any longer.

If he'd met someone in a restaurant just then--

Or even if he'd met someone passing on the street--

But he didn't.

His eye fell, instead, on an advertisement in a newspaper. A St. Louis advertisement in a New Orleans newspaper.

You cannot walk away from love.

His contemplation ended. The sound of carriage wheels stopping somewhere just outside caused him to insert the likeness into his money-fold, and pocket that. He went out to the second-story veranda and looked down. The sun suddenly whitened his back like flour as he leaned over the railing, pressing down the smouldering magenta bougainvillea that feathered its edges.

A colored man was coming into the inner courtyard or patio-well through the passageway from the street.

"What took you so long?" Durand called down to him. "Did you get my flowers?" The question was wholly rhetorical, for he could see the cone-shaped parcel, misty pink peering through its waxwrappings at the top.

"Sure enough did."

"Did you get me a coach?"

"It's here waiting for you now."

"I thought you'd never get hack," he went on. "You been gone all of--"

The Negro shook his head in philosophical good nature. "A man in love is a man in a hurry."

"Well, come on up, Tom," was the impatient suggestion. "Don't just stand down there all day."

Humorous grin still unbroken, Tom resumed his progress, passed from sight under the near side of the façade. Several moments later the outermost door of the apartment opened and he had entered behind the owner.

The latter turned, went over to him, seized the bouquet, and pared off its outer filmy trappings, with more nervous haste than painstaking care.

"You going give it to her, or you going tear it to pieces?" the colored man inquired drily.

"Well, I have to see, don't I? Do you think she'll like pink roses and sweet peas, Tom ?" There was a plaintive helplessness to the last part of the question, as when one grasps at straws.

"Don't all ladies ?"

"I don't know. The only girls I--" He didn't finish it.

"Oh, them," said Tom charitably. "The man said they do," he went on. "The man said that's what they all ask for." He fluffed the lace-paper collar encircling them with proprietary care, restoring its pertness.

Durand was hastily gathering together his remaining accoutrements, meanwhile, preparatory to departure.

"I want to go to the new house first," he said, on a somewhat breathless note.

"You was there only yesterday," Tom pointed out. "If you stay away only one day, you afraid it's going to fly away, I reckon."

"I know, but this is the last chance I'll have to make sure everything's-- Did you tell your sister? I want her to be there when we arrive."

"She'll be there."

Durand stopped with his hand to the doorknob, looked around in a comprehensive sweep, and suddenly the tempo of his departure had slackened to almost a full halt.

"This'll be the last time for this place, Tom."

"It was nice and quiet here, Mr. Lou," the servant admitted. "Anyway, the last few years, since you started getting older."

There was a renewed flurry of departure, as if brought on by this implicit warning of the flight of time. "You finish up the packing, see that my things get over there. Don't forget to give the keys back to Madame Tellier before you leave."

He stopped again, doorknob at a full turn now but door still not open.

"What's the matter, Mr. Lou?"

"I'm scared now. I'm afraid she--" He swallowed down his rigid ear-high collar, backed a hand to his brow to blot imperceptible moisture, "--won't like me."

"You look all right to me."

"It's all been by letters so far. It's easy in letters."

"You sent her your picture. She knows what you look like," Tom tried to encourage him.

"A picture is a picture. A live man is a live man."

Tom went over to him where he stood, dejectedly sidewise now to the door, dusted off his coat at the back of his shoulder. "You're not the best-looking man in N'Orleans. But you're not the worstlooking man in N'Orleans either."

"Oh, I don't mean that kind of looks. Our dispositions-"

"Your ages suit each other. You told her yours."

"I took a year off it. I said I was thirty-six. It sounded better."

"You can make her right comfortable, Mr. Lou."

Durand nodded with alacrity at this, as though for the first time he felt himself on safe ground. "She won't be poor."

"Then I wouldn't worry too much about it. When a man's in love, he looks for looks. When a lady's in love, 'scusing me, Mr. Lou, she looks to see how well-off she's going to be."

Durand brightened. "She won't have to scrimp." He raised his head suddenly, as at a new discovery. "Even if I'm not all she might hope for, she'll get used to me."

"You want to-just make sure?" Tom fumbled in his own clothing, yanked at a concealed string somewhere about his chest, produced a rather worn and limp rabbit's foot, a small gilt band encircling it as a mounting. He offered it to him.

"Oh, I don't believe in--" Durand protested sheepishly.

"They ain't a white man willing to say he do," Tom chuckled. "They ain't a white man don't, just the same. Put it in your pocket anyway. Can't do no harm."

Durand stuffed it away guiltily. He consulted his watch, closed it again with a resounding clap.

"I'm late! I don't want to miss the boat!" This time he flung the symbolic door wide and crossed the threshold of his bachelorhood.

"You got the better part of an hour before her stack even climb up in sight 'long the river, I reckon."

But Louis Durand, bridegroom-to-be, hadn't even waited. He was clattering down Madame Tellier's tile-faced stairs outside at a resounding gait. A moment later an excited hail came up through the window from the courtyard below.

Tom strolled to the second-story veranda.

"My hat! Throw it down." Durand was jumping up and down in impatience.

Tom threw it down and retired.

A second later there was another hail, even more agonized.

"My stick! Throw that down too."

That dropped, was seized deftly on the fly. A little puff of suncolored dust arose from Madame Tellier's none-too-immaculate flagstones.

Tom turned away, shaking his head resignedly.

"A man in love's a man in a hurry, sure enough."

2

The coach drove briskly down St. Louis Street. Durand sat straining forward on the edge of the seat, both hands topping his cane-head and the upper part of his body supported by it. Suddenly he leaned still further forward.

"That one," he exclaimed, pointing excitedly. "That one right there."

"The new one, cunnel ?" the coachman marveled admiringly.

"I'm building it myself," Durand let him know with an atavistic burst of boyish pride, sixteen years late. Then he qualified it, "T mean, they're doing it according to my plans. I told them how I wanted it."

The coachman scratched his head. A gesture not meant to indicate perplexity in this instance, but of being overwhelmed by such grandeur. "Sure is pretty," he said.

The house was two stories in height. It was of buff brick, with white trim about the windows and the doorway. It was not large, but it occupied an extremely advantageous position. It sat on a corner plot, so that it faced both ways at once, without obstruction. Moreover, the ground-plot itself extended beyond the house, if not lavishly at least amply, so that it touched none of its neighbors. There was room left for strips of sod in the front, and for a garden in the back.

It was not, of course, strictly presentable yet. There were several small messy piles of broken, discarded bricks left out before it, the sod was not in place, and the window glass was smirched with streaks of paint. But something almost reverent came into the man's face as he looked at it. His lips parted slightly and his eyes softened. He hadn't known there could be such a beautiful house. It was the most beautiful house he had ever seen. It was his.

A questioning flicker from the coachman's whip stirred him from his revery.

"You'll have to wait for me. I'm going down to meet the boat from here, later on."

"Yessuh, take your time, cunnel," the coachman grinned understandingly. "A man got to look at his house."

Durand didn't go inside immediately. Instead he prolonged the rapture he was deriving from this by first walking slowly and completely around the two outermost faces of the house. He tested a bit of foundation stone with his cane. He put out his hand and tried one of the shutters, swinging it out, then flattening it back again. He fastidiously speared a small, messy puff-ball of straw with his stick and transported it offside of the walk, leaving a trail of scattered Maments that was worse than the original offender.

He returned at last to the door, his head proudly high. There was a place indicated by pencil marks on the white-painted pinewood where a wrought-iron knocker was to be affixed, but this was not yet in position. He had chosen it himself, making a special trip to the foundry to do so. No effort too great, no detail too small.

Scorning to raise hand to the portal himself, possibly under the conviction that it was not fitting for a man to have to knock at the door of his own house, he tried the knob, found it unlocked, and entered. There was on the inside the distinctive and not unpleasant--and in this case enchanting--aroma a new house has, of freshly planed wood, the astringent turpentine in paint, window putty, and several other less identifiable ingredients.

A virginal staircase, its newly applied maple varnish protected by a strip of brown wrapping paper running down its center, rose at the back of the hall to the floor above. Turning aside, he entered a skeletal parlor, its western window casting squared puddles of gold light upon the floor.

As he stood and looked at it, the room changed. A thick-napped flowered carpet spread over its ascetic floor boards. The lurid red of lazy wood-flames peered forth, from the now-blank fireplace under the mantel. A rounded mirror glistened ghostly on the wall above it. A plush sofa, a plush chair, a parlor table, came to life where there was nothing standing now. On the table a lamp with a planet-like milky-white bowl topping its base began to glow softly, then stronger, and stronger. And with its aid, a dark-haired head appeared in one of the chairs, contentedly resting back against the white antimacassar that topped it. And on the table, under the kindly lamp, some sort of a workbasket. A sewing workbasket. A little vaguer than the other details, this.

Then a pail clanked somewhere upstairs, and a tide of effacement flowed across the room, the carpet thinned, the fire dimmed, the lamp went out and with it the dark-haired faceless head, and the room was just as gaunt as it had been before. Rolls of furled wallpaper, a bucket on a trestle, bare floor.

"Who's that down there ?" a woman's voice called hollowly through the empty spaces.

He came out into the hall at the foot of the stairs.

"Oh, it you, Mr. Lou. 'Bout ready for you now, I reckon."

The gnarled face of an elderly colored woman, topped by a dustkerchief tied bandana-style, was peering down over the upstairs guardrail.

"Where'd he go, this fellow down here?" he demanded testily. "He should be finishing."

"Went to get more paste, I 'spect. He be back."

"How is it up there?"

"Coming along."

He launched into an unexpected little run, that carried him at a sprightly pace up the stairs. "I want to see the bedroom, mainly," he announced, brushing by her.

"What bridegroom don't ?" she chuckled.

He stopped in the doorway, looked back at her rebukingly. "On account of the wallpaper," he took pains to qualify.

"You don't have to 'splain to me, Mr. Lou. I was in this world 'fore you was even born."

He went over to the wall, traced his fingers along it, as though the flowers were tactile, instead of just visual.

"It looks even better up, don't you think?"

"Right pretty," she agreed.

"It was the closest I could get. They had to send all the way to New York for it. See I asked her what her favorite kind was, without telling her why I wanted to know." He fumbled in his pocket, took out a letter, and scanned it carefully. He finally located the passage he wanted, underscored it with his finger. "--and for a bedroom I like pink, but not too bright a pink, with small blue flowers like forget-me-nots." He refolded the letter triumphantly, cocked his head at the walls.

Aunt Sarah was giving only' a perfunctory ear. "I got a passel of work to do yet. If you'll 'scuse me, Mr. Lou, I wish you'd get out the way. I got make this bed up first of all." She chuckled again.

"Why do you keep laughing all the time ?" he protested. "Don't you do that once she gets here."

"Shucks, no. I got better sense than that, Mr. Lou. Don't you fret your head about it."

He left the room, only to return to the doorway again a moment later. "Think you can get the downstairs curtains up before she gets here? Windows look mighty bare the way they are."

"Just you fetch her, and I have the house ready," the bustling old woman promised, casting up a billowing white sheet like a sail in the wind.

He left again. He came back once more, this time from mid-stairs.

"Oh, and it'd be nice if you could find some flowers, arrange them here and there. Maybe in the parlor, to greet her when she comes in."

She muttered something that sounded suspiciously like: "She ain't going have much time spend smelling flowers."

"What?" he caught her up, horrified.

She prudently refrained from repetition.

He departed once more. Once more he returned. This time all the way from the foot of the stairs.

"And be sure to leave all the lamps on when you go. I want the place bright and cheery when she first sees it."

"You keep peggin' at me every secon' like that," she chided, but without undue resentment, "and I won't git nothing done. Now go on, scat," she ordered, shaking her apron at him with contemptuous familiarity as though he were seven or seventeen, not thirty-seven. "Ain't nothing git in your way more than a man when he think he helping you fix up a place for somebody."

He gave her a rather hurt look, but he went below again. This time, at last, he didn't come back.

Yet when she descended herself, some full five minutes later, he was still there.

His back was to her. He stood before a table, simply because it happened to be there in the way. His hands were planted flat upon it at each side, and he was leaning slightly forward over it. As if peering intently into vistas of the future, that no one but he could see. As if in contemplation of some small-sized figure coming toward him through its rotary swirls, coming nearer, nearer, growing larger as it neared him, growing toward life-size--

He didn't hear Aunt Sarah come down. He only tore himself away from the entranced prospect, turned, at the first sound of her voice.

"You still here, Mr. Lou? I might have knowed it." She planted her arms akimbo, and surveyed him indulgently. "Just look at that. You sure happy, ain't you? I ain't never seen such a look on nobody's face before."

He sheepishly passed his hand across the lower part of his face, as if it were something external she had reference to. "Does it show that much ?" He looked around him uncertainly, as if he still couldn't fully believe that the surroundings were actually there as he saw them. "My own house--" he murmured half-audibly. "My own wife--"

"A man without a wife, 'he ain't a whole man at all, he's just a shadow walking around without no one to cast him."

His hand rose briefly to his shirt front, touched it questioningly, dropped again. "I keep hearing music. Is there a band playing on the streets somewhere around here ?"

"There's a band playing, sure enough," she confirmed, unsmiling. "A special kind of band, for just one person at a time to hear. For just one day. I heard it once. Today's your day for hearing it."

"I'd better be on my way!" He bolted for the door, flung it open, chased down the walk and gave a vault into the waiting carriage that rocked it on its springs.

"To the Canal Street Pier," he sighed with blissful anticipation, "to meet the boat from St. Louis."

3

The river was empty, the sky was clear. Both were mirrored in his anxious, waiting eyes. Then a little twirl of smudge appeared, no bigger than if stroked by a man-sized finger against the God-sized sky. It came from where there seemed to be no river, only an embankment; it seemed to hover over dry land, for it was around a turn the river made, before straightening to flow toward New Orleans and the pier. And those assembled on it.

He stood there waiting, others like himself about him. Some so close their elbows all but grazed him. Strangers, men he did not know, had never seen before, would never see again, drawn together for a moment by the arrival of a boat.

He had picked for his standing place a pilehead that protruded above the pier-deck; that was his marker, he stood close beside that, and wouldn't let others preempt it from him, knowing it would play its part in securing the craft. For a while he stood with one leg raised, foot planted squarely upon it. Then he leaned bodily forward over it in anticipation, both hands flattened on it. At one time, briefly, he even sat upon it, but got up again' fairly soon, as if with some idea that by remaining on his feet he would hasten the vessel's approach.

The smoke had climbed now, was high in the sky, like dingy black ostrich plumes massed together and struggling to escape from one another. Under its profusion a black that was solid substance, a slender cone, began to rise; a smokestack. Then a second.

"There she is," a roustabout shouted, and the needless, overdue declaration was immediately taken up and repeated by two or three of those about him.

"Yes sir, there she is," they echoed two or three times after him. "There she is, all right."

"There she is," Durand's heart told him softly. But it meant a different she.

The smokestack, like a blunted knife slicing through the earth, cleared the embankment and came out upon the open water bed. A tawny superstructure, that seemed to be indented with a myriad tiny niches in two long even rows, was beneath it, and beneath that, only a thin line at this distance, was the ungainly black hull. The paddles were going, slats turning over as they reached the top of the wheel and fell, shaking off spray into the turgid brown water below that they kept beating upon.

She made the turn and grew larger, prow forward. She was lifesized now, coursing down on the pier as if she meant to smash it asunder. A shrill falsetto wail, infinitely mournful, like the cry of a lost soul in torment, knifed from her, and a plume of white circled the smokestack and vanished to the rear. The City of New Orleans, out of St. Louis three days before, was back home again at its namesake-port, its mother-haven.

The sidewheels stopped, and it began to glide, like a paper boat, like a ghost over the water. It turned broadside to the pier, and ran along beside it, its speed seeming swifter now, that it was lengthwise, than it had been before, when it was coming head-on, though the reverse was the truth.

The notched indentations went by like a picket fence, then slower, slower; then stopped at last, then even reversed a little and seemed to lose ground. The water, caught between the hull and pier, went crazy with torment; squirmed and slashed and choked, trying to find its way out. Thinned at last to a crevicelike canal.

No more river, no more sky, nothing but towering superstructure blotting them both out. Someone idling against the upper deck rail waved desultorily. Not to Durand, for it was a man. Not to anyone else in particular, either, most likely. Just a friendly wave of arrival. One of them on the pier took it upon himself to answer it with a like wave, proxying for the rest.

A rope was thrown, and several of the small crowd stepped back to avoid being struck by it. Dockworkers came forward for their brief moment of glory, claimed the rope, deftly lashed it about the pile top directly before Durand. At the opposite end they were doing the same thing. She was in, she was fast.

A trestled gangway was rolled forward, a brief section of lowerdeck rail was detached, leaving an opening. The gap between was bridged. A ship's officer came down, almost before it was fixed in place, took up position close at hand below, to supervise the discharge. The passengers were funnelling along the deck from both directions into and down through the single-file descent-trough.

Durand moved up close beside it until he could rest his hand upon it, as if in mute claim; peered up anxiously into each imminent face as it coursed swiftly downward and past, only inches from his own.

The first passenger off was a man, striding, sample cases in both his hands, some business traveler in haste to leave. A woman next, more slowly, picking her way with care. Gray-haired and spectacled; not she. Another woman next. Not she again; her husband a step behind her, guiding her with hand to her elbow. An entire family next, in hierarchal order of importance.

Then more men, two or three of them in succession this time. Faces just pale ciphers to him, quickly passed over. Then a woman, and for a moment-- No, not she; different eyes, a different nose, a different face. A stranger's curt glance, meeting his, then quickly rebuffing it. Another man. Another woman. Red-haired and sandybrowed; not she.

A space then, a pause, a wait.

His heart took premature fright, then recovered. A tapping run along the deck planks, as some laggard made haste to overtake the others. A woman by the small, quick sound of her feet. A flounce of skirts, a face- Not she. A whiff of lilac water, a snub from eyes that had no concern for him, as his had for them, no quest in them, no knowledge. Not she.

And then no more. The gangplank empty. A lull, as when a thing is over.

He stared up, and his face died.

He was gripping the edges of the gangplank with both hands now. He released it at last, crossed around to the other side of it, accosted the officer loitering there, clutched at him anxiously by the sleeve. "No one else ?"

The officer turned and relayed the question upward toward the deck in booming hand-cupped shout. "Anyone else ?"

Another of the ship's company, perhaps the captain, came to the rail and peered down overside. "All ashore," he called down.

It was like a knell. Durand seemed to find himself alone, in a pool of sudden silence, following it; though all about him there was as much noise going on as ever. But for him, silence. Stunning finality.

"But there must be-- There has to--"

"No one else," the captain answered jocularly. "Come up and see for yourself."

Then he turned and left the rail.

Baggage was coming down now.

He waited, hoping against hope.

No one else. Only baggage, the inanimate dregs of the cargo. And at last not even that.

He turned aside at last and drifted back along the pier-length and off it to the solid ground beyond, and on a little while. His face stiffly averted, as if there were greater pain to be found on one side of him than on the other, though that was not true, it was equal all around.

And when he stopped, he didn't know it, nor why he had just when he did. Nor what reason he had for lingering on there at all. The boat had nothing for him, the river had nothing for him. There was nothing there for him. There or anywhere else, now.

Tears filled his eyes, and though there was no one near him, no one to notice, he slowly lowered his head to keep them from being detected.

He stood Thus, head lowered, somewhat like a muted mourner at a bier. A bier that no one but he could see.

The ground before his unseeing eyes was blank; biscuit-colored earth basking in the sun. As blank, perhaps, as his life would be from now on.

Then without a sound of approach, the rounded shadow of a small head advanced timorously across it; cast from somewhere behind him, rising upward from below. A neck, two shoulders, followed it. Then the graceful indentation of a waist. Then the whole pattern stopped flowing, stood still.

His dulled eyes took no note of the phenomenon. They were not seeing the ground, nor anything imprinted upon it; they were seeing the St. Louis Street house. They were saying farewell to it. He'd never enter it again, he'd never go back there. He'd turn it over to an agent, and have him sell--

There was the light touch of a hand upon his shoulder. No exacting weight, no compulsive stroke; velvety and gossamer as the alighting of a butterfly. The shadow on the ground had raised a shadow-arm to another shadow--his--linking them for a moment, then dropping it again.

His head came up slowly. Then equally slowly he turned it toward the side from which the touch had come.

A figure swept around before him, as on a turntable, pivoting to claim the center of his eyes; though it was he and not the background that had shifted.

It was diminutive, and yet so perfectly proportioned within its own lesser measurements that, but for the yardstick of comparison offered when the eye deliberately sought out others and placed them against it, it could have seemed of any height at all: of the grandeur of a classical statue or of the minuteness of an exquisite doll.

Her limpid brown eyes came up to the turn of Durand's shoulder. Her face held an exquisite beauty he had never before seen, the beauty of porcelain, but without its cold stillness, and a crumpled rose petal of a mouth.

She was no more than in her early twenties, and though her size might have lent her added youth, the illusion had very little to subtract from the reality. Her skin was that of a young girl, and her eyes were the innocent, trustful eyes of a child.

Tight-spun golden curls clung to her head like a field of daisies, rebelling all but successfully at the conventional coiffure she tried to impose upon them. They took to the ubiquitous psyche-knot at the back only with the aid of forceful pins, and at the front resisted the forehead-fringe altogether, fuming about' like topaz sea spray.

She held herself in that forward-inclination that was de rigueur, known as the "Grecian bend." Her dress was of the fashion as it then was, and had been for some years. Fitting tightly as a sheath fits a furled umbrella, it had a center panel, drawn and gathered toward the back to give the appearance of an apron or a bib superimposed upon the rest, and at the back puffed into a swollen protuberance of bows and folds, artfully sustained by a wired foundation; this was the stylish bustle, without which a woman's posterior would have appeared indecently sleek. As soon expose the insteps or--reckless thought 1--the ankles as allow the sitting-part to remain flat.

A small hat of heliotrope straw, as flat as and no bigger than a man's palm, perched atop the golden curls, roguishly trying to reach down toward one eyebrow, the left, without there being enough of it to do so and still stay atop her head.

Amethyst-splinters twinkled in the tiny holes pierced through the lobes of her miniature and completely uncovered ears, and a slender ribbon of heliotrope velvet girded her throat. A parasol of heliotrope organdy, of scarcely greater diameter than a soup plate and of the consistency of mist, hovered aloft at the end of an elongated stick, like an errant violet halo. Upon the ground to one side of her sat a small gilt birdcage, its-lower portion swathed in a flannel cloth, the dome left open to expose its flitting bright-yellow occupant.

He looked at her hand, he looked at his own shoulder, so unsure was he the touch had come from her; so unsure was he as to the reason for such a touch. Slowly his hat came off, was held at questioning height above his scalp.

The compressed mouth curved in winsome smile. "You don't know me, do you, Mr. Durand ?"

He shook his head slightly.

The smile notched a dimple; rose to her eyes. "I'm Julia, Louis. May I call you Louis?"

His hat fell from his fingers to the ground, and rolled once about, for the length of half its brim. He bent and retrieved it, but only with his arm and shoulder; his face never once quited hers, as though held to it by an unbreakable magnetic current.

"But no-- How can--?"

"Julia Russell," she insisted, still smiling.

"But no-- You can't--" he kept dismembering words.

Her brows arched. The smile expired compassionately. "It was unkind of me to do this, wasn't it?"

"But--the picture--dark hair--"

"That was my aunt's I sent instead." She shook her head in belated compunction. She lowered the parasol, closed it with a little plop. With the point of its stick she began to trace cabalistic designs in the dust. She dropped her eyes and watched what she was doing with an air of sadness. "Oh, I shouldn't have, I know that now. But at the time, it didn't seem to matter so much, we hadn't become serious yet. I thought it was just a correspondence. Then many times since, I wanted to send the right one in its place, to tell you-- And the longer I waited, the less courage I had. Fearing I'd--I'd lose you altogether in that way. It preyed on my mind more and more, and yet, the closer the time drew-- At the very last moment, I was already aboard the boat, and I wanted to turn around and go back. Bertha prevailed upon me to-to continue down here. My sister, you know."

"I know," he nodded, still dazed.

"The last thing she said to me, just before I left, was, 'He'll forgive you. He'll understand you meant no harm.' But during the entire trip down, how bitterly I repented my--my frivolity." Her head all but hung, and she caught at her mouth, gnawing at it with her small white teeth.

"I can't believe-I can't believe--" was all he could keep stammering.

She was an image of lovely penitence, tracing her parasol-stick about on the ground, shyly waiting for forgiveness.

"But so much younger--" he marveled. "So much lovelier even than--"

"That too entered into it," she murmured. "So many men become smitten with just a pretty face. I wanted our feeling to go deeper than that. To last longer. To be more secure. I wanted you to care for me, if you did care, because of--well, the things I wrote you, the sort of mind I displayed, the sort of person I really was, rather than because of a flibbertigibbet's photograph. I thought perhaps if I gave myself every possible disadvantage at the beginning, of appearance and age and so forth, then there would be that much less danger later, of its being just a passing fancy. In other words, I put the obstacles at the beginning, rather than have them at the end."

How sensible she was, he discovered to himself, how level-minded, in addition to all her external attractions. Why, there were the components here of a paragon.

"How many times I tried to write you the truth, you'll never know," she went on contritely. "And each time my courage would fail. I was afraid I would only succeed in alienating you entirely, from a person who, by her own admission, had been guilty of falsehood. I couldn't trust such a thing to cold paper" She gestured charmingly with one hand. "And now you see me, and now you know. The worst."

"The worst," he protested strenuously. "But you," he went on after a moment, still amazed, "but you, knowing all along what I did not know until now, that I was so much--well, considerably, older than you. And yet--"

She dropped her eyes, as if in additional confession. "Perhaps that may have been one of your principal attractions, who knows? I have, since as far back as I can remember, been capable of--shall I say, romantic feelings, the proper degree of emotion or admiration--only toward men older than myself. Boys of my own age have never interested me. I don't know what to attribute it to. All the women in my family have been like that. My mother was married at fifteen, and my father was at the time well over forty. The mere fact that you were thirty-six, was what first--" With maidenly seemliness, she forebore to finish it.

He kept devouring her with his eyes, still incredulous.

"Are you disappointed ?" she asked timidly.

"How can you ask that?" he exclaimed.

"Am I forgiven ?" was the next faltering question.

"It was a lovely deception," he said with warmth of feeling. "I don't think there's been a lovelier one ever committed."

He smiled, and her smile, still somewhat abashed, answered his own.

"But now I will have to get used to you all over again. Grow to know you all over again. That was a false start," he said cheerfully.

She turned her head aside and mutely half-hid it against her own shoulder. And yet even this gesture, which might have seemed maudlin or revoltingly saccharine in others, she managed to carry off successfully, making it appear no more than a playful parody while at the same time deftly conveying its original intent of rebuked coyness.

He grinned.

She turned her face toward him again. "Are your plans, your, er, intentions, altered?"

"Are yours?"

"I'm here,"she said with the utmost simplicity, grave now.

He studied her a moment longer, absorbing her charm. Then suddenly, with new-found daring, he came to a decision. "Would it make you feel better, would it ease your mind of any lingering discomfort," he blurted out, "if I were to make a confession to you on my own part?"

"You ?" she said surprised.

"I--I no more told you the entire truth than you told me," he rushed on.

"But--but I see you quite as you said you were, quite as your picture described you--"

"It isn't that, it's something else. I too perhaps felt just as you did, that I wanted you to like me, to accept my offer, solely on the strength of the sort of man I was in myself. For myself alone, in other words."

"But I see that, and I do," she said blankly. "I don't understand."

"You will in a moment," he promised her, almost eagerly. "Now I must confess to you that I'm not a clerk in a coffee-import house."

Her face betrayed no sign other than politely interested incomprehension.

"That I haven't a thousand dollars put aside, to--to start us off."

No sign. No sign of crestf all or of frustrated avarice. He was watching her intently. A slow smile of indulgence, of absolution granted, overspread her features before he had spoken next. Well before he had spoken next. He gave it time.

"No, I own a coffee-import house, instead."

No sign. Only that slightly forced smile, such as women give in listening to details of a man's business, when it doesn't interest them in the slightest but they are trying to be polite.

"No, I have closer to a hundred thousand dollars."

He waited for her to say something. She didn't. She, on the contrary, seemed to be waiting for him to continue. As if the subject had been so arid, and barren of import, to her, that she did not realize the climax had already been reached.

"Well, that's my confession," he said somewhat lamely.

"Oh," she said, as if brought up short. "Oh, was that it? You mean--" She fluttered her hand with vague helplessness. "--about your business, and money matters--" She brought two fingers to her mouth, and crossed it with their tips. Stifling a yawn that, without the gesture of concealment, he would not have detected in the first place. "There are two things I have no head for," she admitted. "One is politics, the other is business, money matters."

"But you do forgive me?" he persisted. Conscious at the same time of a fierce inward joy, that was almost exultation; as when one has encountered a perfection of attitude, at long last, and almost by chance, that was scarcely to be hoped for.

She laughed outright this time, with a glint of mischief, as if he were giving her more credit than was due her. "If you must be forgiven, you're forgiven," she relented. "But since I paid no attention whatever to the passages in your letters that dealt with that, in the first place, why, you're asking forgiveness for a fault I was not aware, until now, of your having committed. Take it, then, though I'm not sure what it's for."

He stared at her with a new intentness, that went deeper than before; as if finding her as utterly charming within as she was at first sight without.

Their shadows were growing longer, and they were all but alone now on the pier. He glanced around him as if reluctantly awakening to their surroundings. "It's getting late, and I'm keeping you standing here," he said in a reminder that was more dutiful than honest, for it might mean their separation, for all he knew.

"You make me forget the time," she admitted, her eyes never leaving his face. "Is that a bad omen or a good? You even make me forget my predicament: half ashore and half still on the boat. I must soon become the one or the other."

"That's soon taken care of," he said, leaning forward eagerly, "if I have your own consent."

"Isn't yours necessary too ?" she said archly.

"It's given, it's given." 'He was almost breathless with haste to convince her.

She was in no hurry, now that he was. "I don't know," she said, lifting the point of her parasol, then dropping it again, then lifting it once more, in an uncertainty that he found excruciating. "If you had not seemed satisfied, if you had looked askance at the deceiver that you found me to be, I intended going back onto the boat and remaining aboard till she set out on the return trip to St. Louis. Don't you think that might still be the wiser--"

"No, don't say that," he urged, alarmed. "Satisfied? I'm the happiest man in New Orleans this evening--I'm the luckiest man in this town--"

She was not, it seemed, to be swayed so easily. "There is still time. Better now than later. Are you quite sure you wouldn't rather have me do that? I won't say a word, I won't complain. I'll understand your feelings perfectly--"

He was gripped by a sudden new fear of losing her. She, whom he hadn't had at all until scarcely half an hour ago.

"But those aren't my feelings! I beg you to believe me! My feelings are quite the opposite. What can I do to convince you? Do you want more time? Is it you? Is that what you are trying to say to me ?" he insisted with growing anxiety.

She held him for a moment with her eyes, and they were kindly and candid and even, one might have said, somewhat tender. Then she shook her head, very slightly it is true, 'but with all the firmness of intention that a man might have given the gesture (if he could read it right), and not a girl's facile undependable negation.

"My mind has been made up," she told him, slowly and simply, "since I first stepped onto the boat at St. Louis. Since your letter of proposal came, as a matter of fact, and I wrote you my answer. And I do not lightly undo my mind, once it has been made up. You will find that once you know me better." Then she qualified it: "If you do," and let that find him out with a little unwelcome stab, as it promptly did.

"I'll let this be my answer, then," he said with tremulous impatience. "Here it is." He opened his cardcase, took out the daguerrotype, the one of the other, older woman--her aunt's-minced it with energetic fingers, then let it fall in trifling pieces downward all over the ground. Then showed her both his hands, empty.

"My mind is made up too."

She smiled her acceptance. "Then--?"

"Then let's be on our way. They're waiting for us at the church the past quarter-hour or more. We've delayed here too long."

He tilted his arm akimbo, offered it to her with a smile and a gallant inclination from the waist, that were perhaps, on the surface, meant to appear as badinage, merely a bantering parody, but were in reality more sincerely intended.

"Miss Julia?" he invited.

This was the moment of ultimate romance, its quintessence. The betrothal.

She shifted her parasol to the opposite shoulder. Her hand curled about his arm like a friendly sun-warmed tendril. She gathered up the bottom of her skirt to reticent walking-level.

"Mr. Durand," she accepted, addressing him by surname only, in keeping with the seemly propriety of the still-unmarried young woman that made her drop her eyes fetchingly at the same time.

4

The interior of the Dryades German Methodist Church at sundown. Fulminating orange haze from without blurring its leaded windows into swollen shapelessness; its arched apse disappearing upward into cobwebby blue twilight. Grave, peaceful, empty but for five persons.

Five persons gathered in a solemn little conclave about the pulpit. Four facing it, the fifth occupying it. Four silent, the fifth speaking low. The first two of the four, side by side; the second two flanking them. Outside, barely audible, as if filtered through a heavy screen, the sounds of the city, muffled, dreamy, faraway. The occasional clop of a horse's hoof on cobbles, the creaking protest of a sharply curving wheel, the voice of an itinerant hawker crying his wares, the bark of a dog.

Inside, stately phrases of the marriage service, echoing serenely in the spacious stillness. The Reverend Edward A. Clay the officiant, Louis Durand and Julia Russell the principals. Allan Jardine and Sophie Tadoussac, housekeeper to the Reverend Clay, the witnesses.

"And do you, Julia Russell, take this man, Louis Durand, to be your lawful wedded husband--

"To cleave to, forsaking all others--

"To love, honor and obey--

"For better or for worse--

"For richer or for poorer--

"In sickness and in health--

"Until death do ye part?"

Silence.

Then like a tiny bell, no bigger than a thimble in all the vastness of that church, but clear and silver-pure--

"I do."

"Now the ring, please. Place it upon the bride's finger."

Durand reaches behind him. Jardine produces it, puts it in his blindly questing hand. Durand brings it to the tapered point of her finger.

There is a momentary awkwardness. Her finger measurement was taken by a string, knotted at the proper place and sent enclosed in a letter. But there must have been an error, either in the knotting or on the jeweler's part. It balks, won't go on.

He tried a second, a third time, clasping her hand tighter. Still it resists.

Quickly she flicks her finger past her lips, returns it to him, edge moistened. The ring goes on, ebbs down it now to base.

"I now pronounce you man and wife."

Then, with a professional smile to encourage the age-old shyness of lovers when on public view, for the greater the secret love, the greater the public shyness: "You may kiss the bride."

Their faces turn slowly toward one another. Their eyes meet. Their heads draw together. The lips of Louis Durand blend with those of Julia, his wife, in sacramental pledge.

5

Antoine's, rushing all alight toward its nightly rendezvous with midnight;' glittering, glowing, mirrored; crowded with celebrants, singing with laughter, sizzling with champagne; sparkling with half -athousand jeweled gas flames all over its ceilings and walls, in bowers of crystal; the gayest and best-known restaurant on this side of the ocean; the soul of Paris springing enchanted from the Delta mud.

The wedding table stretched lengthwise along one entire side of it, the guests occupying one side only, so that the outer side might be left clear for their view of the rest of the room--and the rest of the room's view of them.

It was by now eleven and after, a disheveled mass of tortured napkins, sprawled flowers, glassware tinged with repeated refills of red wines and white; champagne and kirsch and little upright thimbles of benedictine for the ladies, no two alike at the same level of consumption. And in the center, dominating the table, a miracle of a cake, snow-white, sugar-spun, rising tier upon tier; badly eaten away by erosion now, so that one entire side was gone. But atop its highest pinnacle, still preserved intact, a little bride and groom in doll form, he in a thumbnail suit of black broadcloth, she with a wisp of tulle streaming from her head.

And opposite them, the two originals, in life-size; sitting shoulder pressed to shoulder, hands secretively clasped below the table, listening to some long-winded speech of eulogy. His head still held upright in polite pretense at attention; her head nestled dreamy-eyed against his shoulder.

He was in suitable evening garb now, and a quick trip to a dressshop (first at her mention, but then at his insistence) before coming on here had changed her from her costume of arrival to a glorious creation of shimmering white satin, gardenias in her hair and at her throat. On the third finger of her left hand the new gold weddingband; on the fourth, a solitaire diamond, a husband's wedding gift to his wife, token of an engagement contract fulifiled rather than of one entered into before the event.

And her eyes, like any new wearer's, stray over and over to these new adornments. But whether they go more often to the third finger or to the fourth, who is to detect and who is to say?

Flowers, wine, friendly laughing faces, toasts and wishes of wellbeing. The beginning of two lives. Or rather, the ending of two, the beginning of one.

"Shall we slip away now ?" he whispers to her. "It's getting on to twelve."

"Yes. One more dance together first. Ask them to play again. And then we'll lose ourselves, without coming back to the table."

"As soon as Allan finishes speaking," he assents. "If he's ever going to."

Allan Jardine, his business partner, has become so involved in the mazes of a congratulatory speech that he cannot seem to find his way out of it again. It has been going on for ten minutes; ten minutes that seem like forty.

Jardine's wife, sitting beside him, and present only because of an unguessed but very strenuous domestic tug-of-war, has a dour, disapproving look on her face. Disapproving something, but doing her best to seem amiable, for the sake of her own husband's business interests. Disapproving the good looks of the bride, or her youth, or perhaps the unorthodox circumstances of the preceding courtship. Or perhaps the fact that Durand has married at all, after having waited so many years already, without waiting a few years more for her own underage daughter to grow up. A favorite project which even her own husband has had no inkling of so far. And now will never have.

Durand took out a small card, wrote on it "Play another waltz." Then he folded a currency note around it, motioned to a waiter, handed it to him to be taken to the musicians.

Jardine's wife was surreptitiously tugging at the hem of his coat now, to get him to bring his oration to a conclusion.

"Allan," she hissed. "Enough is enough. This is a wedding-supper, not a rally."

"I'm nearly through," he promised in an aside.

"You're through now," was the edict, delivered with a guillotinelike sweep of her hand.

"And so I give you the two newest apprentices to this great and happy profession of marriage. Julia (May I?" with a bow toward her) "and Louis."

Glasses went up, down again. Jardine at last sat down, mopping his brow. His wife, for her part, fanned herself by hand, holding her mouth open as she did so, as if to get rid of a bad taste.

A chord of music sounded.

Durand and Julia rose; their alacrity would have been highly uncomplimentary if it had not been so understandable.

"Excuse us, we want to dance this together."

And Durand solemnly winked at Jardine, to show him that he must not expect to see them back at their places again.

A fact which Jardine immediately imparted to his wife behind the back of his hand the moment they had left the table. Whereupon she seemed to disapprove that, too, in addition to everything else that she already disapproved about this affair, and took a prudish, astringent sip from her wineglass with a puckered mouth.

The bows of the violinists all rose together, fell together, and they swept into the waltz from Romeo and Juliet.

They stood facing one another for a moment, he and she, in the usual formal preliminary. Then she bent to pick up the loop of her furbelowed dress, he opened his arms, and she stepped into his embrace.

The waltz began, the swiftest of all paired dances. Around and around and around, then reversing, and around and around once more, the new way. The tables and the faces swept around them, as if they were standing still in the middle of a whirlpool, and the gaslights flashed by on the walls and ceilings like comets.

She held her neck arched, her head slightly back, looking straight upward into his eyes, as if to say "I am in your hands. Do with me as you will. Where you go, I will go. Where you turn, I will follow."

"Are you happy, Julia?"

"Doesn't my face tell you ?"

"Do you regret coming down to New Orleans now?"

"Is there any other place but New Orleans now ?" she asked with charming intensity.

Around and around and around; alone together, though there was a flurry of other skirts all around them.

"Our life together is going to be like this waltz, Julia. As sleek, as smooth, as harmonious. Never a wrong turn, never a jarring note. Together as close as this. One mind, one heart, one body."

"A waltz for life," she whispered raptly. "A waltz with wings. A waltz never ending. A waltz in the sunlight, a waltz in azure, in gold--and in spotless white."

She closed her eyes, as if in ecstasy.

"Here's the side way out. And no one's watching."

They came to a deft, toe-gliding halt, such as skaters use. They separated, and gave a quick look over at the oblivious wedding party table, half-screened from them by the dancers in between. Then he guided her before him, around palms, and a bronze statuette of a nymph, and a fluted column, out of the main dining room and into a scullery passage, redolent of steamy food and loud with unseen voices somewhere near at hand. She giggled as a small cat, coming their way, stopped to eye them amazed.

He took her by the hand now, and took the lead, and drew her after him, on quick-running joyous little steps, out to an outside alleyway that ran beside the building. And from here they emerged to the street at last. He threw up his arm at a carriage, and a moment later was sitting beside her in it, his arm protectively about her.

"St. Louis Street," he ordered proudly. "I'll show you where to stop."

And as the bells of St. Louis Cathedral near by began their slow tolling of midnight, Louis Durand and his bride drove rapidly away toward their new home.

6

The house was empty, waiting. Waiting to begin its history, which, for a house, is that of its occupants. Oil lamps had been left lighted, one to a room, by someone, most likely Aunt Sarah, before leaving, their little beaded flames, safe within glass chimneys, winking just high enough to disperse the darkness and cast an amber glow. The same blend of wood shavings, paint, and putty, spiced with a dash of floor varnish, was still in evidence, but to a far lesser degree now, for carpets had been laid over the raw floors, drapes hung athwart the window casings.

Someone had brought flowers into the parlor, not costly store flowers but wildflowers, cheery, colorful, winning nonetheless; a generous spray of them smothering a widemouthed bowl set on the parlor center table, with spears of pussywillow sticking out all over like the quills of a hedgehog's back.

A clock had even been wound up and started on its course, a new clock on the mantelpiece, imported from France, its face set in a block of green onyx, a little bronze cupid with moth wings clambering up a chain of bronze roses at each side of its centerpiece. Its diligent, newly practised ticking added a note of reassuring, homely tranquility to what otherwise would have been a stony-cold silence.

Everything was ready, all that was lacking were the dwellers.

A house, waiting for a man and his wife to come and claim it.

The resonant, cuplike sound of a horse's hoofs drew near in the stillness outside, came to a halt on a double down-beat. Axles creaked with a shift of weight, then settled again. A human tongue clucked professionally, then the hoofs recommenced, thinned away into silence once more.

There was a slight scrape of leather on paving stone, a mischievous little whisper, like a secret told by one foot to another.

A moment afterward a key turned in the outside of the door.

They stood there revealed in the opening, Durand and she. Limned amber by the light before them in the house, framed by a panel of night sky sanded with stars behind them and over their heads. They were motionless, as oblivious of what lay before them as of what lay behind them. Face turned to meet face, his arms about her, her hands on his shoulders.

Nothing moved, neither they nor the stars at their back nor the open-doored house waiting to receive them. It was one of those moments never to be captured again. The kiss at the threshold of marriage.

It ended. A moment cannot last beyond itself. They stirred at last and drew apart, and he said softly: "Welcome to your new home, Mrs. Durand. May you find as much happiness here as you bring to it."

"Thank you," she murmured, eyes downcast. for a second. "And may you as well."

He lifted her bodily in his arms. She came clear of the ground with a little foamy rustle of skirt bottoms. Moving sideward so that his shoulder might ward off the loose-swinging door, he carried her over the sill and in. Then dipped again and set her back on her feet, in a little froth of lacy hems.

He stepped aside, closed the door, and bolted it.

She was looking around, standing in one place but moving her body in a half-circle from there, to take in everything.

"Like it?" he asked.

He went to a lamp, turned the little wheel, heightening its flame to a yellow stalagmite. Then to another, and another, wherever they had been left. The walls brightened from dull ivory to purest white. The newness of everything became doubly conspicuous.

"Like it?" he beamed, as though the reward for it all lay in hearing her say that.

Her hands were clasped, and elevated upward to height of her face; held that way in a sort of stylized rhapsody.

"Oh, Louis," she breathed. "It's ideal. It's exquisite."

"It's yours," he said, and the way he dropped his voice showed the gratitude he felt at her appreciation.

She moved her hands out to one side of her face now, still clasped, and nestled her cheek against them slantwise. Then across to the other side, and repeated it there.

"Oh, Louis," was all she seemed capable of saying. "Oh, Louis."

They moved around then on a brief tour, from room to room, and he showed her the parlor, the dining room, the others. And for each room she had an expiring "Oh, Louis," until at last, it seemed, breath had left her altogether, and she could only sigh "Oh."

They came back to the hall at last, and he said somewhat diffidently that he would lock up.

"Will you be able to find our room ?" he added, as she turned toward the stairs. "Or shall I come up with you?"

She dropped her eyes for a moment before his. "I think I shall know it," she said chastely.

He placed one of the smaller lamps in her hands. "Better take this with you to make sure. She probably left lights up there, but she may not have."

With the light brought close to her like that, raying upward into her face from the glowing core held at about the height of her heart, there was to him something madonna-like about her countenance. She was like some inexpressibly beautiful image in an old cathedral of Europe come to life before the eyes of a single devotee, rewarded for his faith. A miracle of love.

She rose a step. She rose another. An angel leaving the earthly plane, but turned backward in regretful farewell.

His hand even went out slightly, as if to trace her outline against the air on which he beheld it, and thus prolong her presence.

"Goodbye for a little while," he murmured softly.

"For a little while," she breathed.

Then she turned. The spell was broken. She was just a woman in an evening gown, going up a stair.

The graceful back-draperies of the most beautiful costume-style in a hundred years gently undulated with her climb. Her free hand trailed the banister.

"Keep an eye out for the wallpaper," he said. "That will tell you."

She turned inquiringly, with a look of incomprehension. "How's that?"

"I meant, you'll know it by the wallpaper, when you come to it."

"Oh," she said docilely, but as though she still didn't fully understand.

She reached the top of the stairs and went over their lip, shrinking down toward the floor now as she went on, until her shoulders, then her head, were gone. The ceiling-halo cast by her lamp receded past his ken, down that same illusory incline.

He went into the parlor, first, and then the other downstairs rooms, latching each window that had not already been latched, trying those that had, flinging out the drapes and drawing them sleekly together over each one. Night air was bad, the whole world knew that; it was best kept out of a sleeping house. Then at last blotting out each welcoming lamp, room by room.

In the kitchen Sarah had left a bunch of fine green grapes set out on a platter, as another token of welcome to the two of them. He plucked one off and put it in his mouth, with a half-smile for her thoughtfulness, then put out the light in there too.

The last lamp of all went out, and he moved slowly up the ghoststairs in the dark, that was already a familiar dark to him though he'd been in this house less than half an hour. The dark of a man's own home is never strange and never fearful.

He found his way toward their own door, in the equal darkness of the upper hall, but guided now by the thread of light stretched taut across its sill.

He stopped a moment, and he stood there.

Then he knocked, in a sort of playful formality.

She must have sensed his mood, by the tenor of the knock alone. There was an answering playful note in her own voice.

"Who knocks ?" she inquired with mock gravity.

"Your husband."

"Oh? What does he say ?"

"'May I come in?'"

"Tell him he may."

"Who is it invites me to ?"

The answer was almost inaudible, but low-voiced as it was, it reached his heart.

"Your wife."

7

Arriving home from his office--this was about a week later, ten days at most--he hastened up the stairs to greet her, not having found her in any of the lower-floor rooms when he entered. He was cushioning his tread, to surprise her, to come up unexpectedly behind her and cover her eyes, have her guess who it was. Though how could she fail to know it was he, for who else should it be? But homecoming was still an exquisite novelty, it had to be decked out with all these flourishes and fancies; though it was repeated daily, it still held all the delightful anticipation of a first meeting, each time.

The door of their room was open and she was seated in there, docilely enough, in a fan-backed chair, only the top of her head visible above it, for she was looking away from the entrance. He stood for a moment at the threshold, still undiscovered, caressing her with his eyes. As he watched he could see her hand move, limply turning over the page of some book that was occupying her.

He started over toward her, intent now on bending suddenly down over the back of the chair and pressing his lips to the top of her head, coppery-gilt in the waning sunlight. But as he advanced, and as her hidden form slowly came into view, lengthening into perspective with his own approach, something he saw made him stop again, amazed, almost incredulous.

He changed his purpose now. Moved openly, in a wide circle about the chair, to take it in from the side, and stopped at last before it, with a sort of pained puzzlement discernable on his face.

She had looked up at discovery of him, closed her book with a little throaty exclamation of pleasure.

"Here you are, dear? I didn't hear you come in below."

"Julia," he said, in a tone of blank incomprehension.

"What is it?"

He described her form with a sketchy lengthwise gesture of his hand, and still she didn't understand. He had to put it into words.

"Why, the way you're sitting--"

Her legs were crossed, as only men crossed theirs. One knee reared atop the other in unashamed prominence, the shank of her leg boldly thrust forth, the suspended foot had even been swinging a little, though that had stopped now.

The sheath of her skirt veiled the full rakishness of the position, but shadowy outlines and indentations outlined it only too distinctly even so.

She had been caught in a very real grossness, not to be understood by any later standard of manners, but only when set against its own contemporary code of universal conduct. For a woman to sit like that would have drawn stares anywhere, then, even ostracism and a request that she leave forthwith. No woman, not even the flightiest, sat but with the knees both level and the feet both flat upon the floor, though one might be drawn back behind the other for added grace. Immorality lies not in the nature of an act itself, but in the universality of the accepted tenet which it flouts. Thus a trifling variation of posture can be more shocking, to one era of strictlymaintained behavior, than a very real transgression would be to another and more lax one. The one cannot understand the other, and finds it only a laughable prissiness. Which it was not at the time.

Durand was no more prudish than the next, but he saw something which he had never seen any other woman do. Not even the "young ladies" of Madame Rachel's "Academy," when he visited there during his bachelor days. And this was the wife under his own roof.

"Do you sit that way at other times too ?" he queried uneasily.

Subtly, with a sort of dissembling stealth, the offending knees uncoupled, the projecting leg descended beside its mate. Almost without the alteration being detected, she was once more sitting as all ladies sat. Even alone, even before only their own husbands.

"No," she protested virtuously, tipping horrified palms. "Of course not. How should I? I--I was alone in the room, and it must have come about without my thinking."

"But think if it should come about, some time, without your thinking, where others could see you."

"It shan't," she promised, tipping horrified palms at the very thought. "For it never did before, and it never will again."

She dismissed the subject by elevating her face toward him expectantly.

"You haven't kissed me yet."

The incident died out in his eyes, to match its extinction in his mind, in the finding of her lips with his.

8

Rosy-cheeked, dewy-eyed, winsome in the early morning sunlight, in a dressing sack of warm yellow whose hue matched the sunny glow falling about her. she quickly forestalled Aunt Sarah, took the coffee urn from her band, insisting as she did every day on pouring his cupful herself.

He smiled, flattered, as he did every day when this same thing happened.

Next she took up the small silver tongs, fastened them on a lump of twinkling sugar, carefully carried it past the rim of his cup, and holding it low so that it might not splash, released it.

He beamed.

"So much the sweeter," he murmured confidentially.

She gave her fingertips a brisk little brushing-together, though they had not as a matter of fact touched anything at first hand, placed a kiss at the side of his head, hurried around to her side of the table, and seated herself with a crisp little rustling.

It was like a little girl, he couldn't help thinking, pressing a little boy into playing at house with her. You be the papa, and I'll be the mamma.

Settled in her own chair, she raised her cup, eyes smiling at him to the last over its very rim, until she must drop them to make sure of fitting it exactly to her still incredibly, always incredibly, tiny mouth.

"This is really excellent coffee," she remarked, after a sip.

"It's some of our own. One of the better grades, from the warehouse. I have a small sackful sent home every now and again for Aunt Sarah's use."

"I don't know what I should do without it. It is so invigorating, of a chilly morning. There is nothing I am quite so fond of."

"You mean since you have begun to sample Aunt Sarah's?"

"No, always. All my life I--"

She stopped, seeing him look at her with a sort of sudden, arrested attention. It was like a stone cast into the bubbling conversation, and sinking heavily to the bottom, stilling it.

There was some sort of contagion passed between them. Impossible to give it a name. She seemed to take it from him, seeing it appear on his face, and her own became strained and watthful. It was unease, a sudden chilling of assurance. It was the unpleasant sensation, or feeling of loss, that a worthless iron washer might convey, suddenly detected in a palmful of golden disks.

"But--" he said at last, and didn't go on.

"Yes?" She said with an effort. "Were you going to say something?" And the turn of one hand appeared over the edge of the table before her, almost as if in a bracing motion.

"No, I--" Then he gave himself the lie, went on to say it anyway. "But in your letter once you said the opposite. Telling me how you went down to a cup of tea in the morning. Nothing but tea would do. You could not abide coffee. 'Heavy, inky drink.' I can still remember your very words."

She lifted her cup again, took a sip. She was unable therefore to speak again until she had removed it out of the way.

"True," she said, speaking rather fast to make up for the restriction, once it had been removed. "But that was because of my sister."

"But your preferences are your own, how could your sister affect them ?"

"I was in her house," she explained. "She was the one liked tea, I coffee. But out of consideration for her, in order not to be the means of causing her to drink something she did not like, I pretended I liked it too. I put it in my letter because I sometimes showed her my letters to you before I sent them, and I did not want her to discover my little deception."

"Oh," he grinned, almost with a breath of relief.

She began to laugh. She laughed almost too loudly for the small cause she had. As if in release of stress.

"I wish you could have seen your face just then," she told him. "I didn't know what ailed you for a moment."

She went on laughing.

He laughed with her.

They laughed together, in a burst of fatuous bridal merriment.

Aunt Sarah, coming into the room, joined their laughter, knowing as little as either of them what it was about.

9

Her complexion was a source of considerable wonderment to him. It seemed capable of the most rapid and unpredictable changes, al-. most within the twinkling of an eye. These flushes and pallors, if such they were, did not actually occur before his eyes, but within such short spans of time that, for all practical purposes, it amounted to the same thing.

They were not blushes in the ordinary sense, for they did not diminish again within a few moments of their onset, as those would have; once the change had occurred, once her coloring had heightened, it remained that way for hours after, with no immediate counteralteration ensuing.

It was most noticeable in the mornings. On first opening the shutters and turning to behold her, her coloring would be almost camelia-like. And yet, but a few moments later, as she followed in his wake down the stairs and rejoined him at the table, there would be the fresh hue of primroses, of pink carnations, in her cheeks, to set off the blue of her eyes all the more, the gold of her hair, to make her a vision of such loveliness that to look at her was almost past endurance.

In a theatre one night (they were seated in a box) the same transfiguration occurred, between two of the acts of the play, but on this occasion he ascribed it to illness, though if it were, she would not admit it to him. They had arrived late and had therefore entered in the darkness, or at least dimness relieved only by the stage lights. When the gas jets flared high, however, between the acts, she discovered (and seemed quite concerned by it, why lie could not make out) that their loge was lined with a tufted damask of a particularly virulent apple-green shade. This, in conjunction with the blazing gas beating full upon her face, gave her a bilious, verdant look.

Many eyes (as always whenever she appeared anywhere with him) were turned upward upon her from the audience, both men and women alike, and more than one pair of opera glasses were centered upon her, as custom allowed them to be.

She shifted about impatiently in her chair for a moment or two, then suddenly rose and, touching him briefly on the wrist, excused herself. "Are you ill ?" he asked, rising in the attempt to follow her, but she had already gone.

She returned before the lights had had time to be lowered again, and she was like a different person. The macabre tinge was gone from her countenance; her cheeks now burned with an apricot glow that fought through and mastered the combined efforts of the gaslights and the box-lining and made her beauty emerge triumphant.

The number of pairs of opera glasses tilted her way immediately doubled. Some unaccompanied men even half rose from their seats. A sibilant freshet of admiring comment could be sensed, rather than heard, running through the audience.

"What was it?" he asked anxiously. "Were you unwell? Something at supper, perhaps--?"

"I never felt better in my life!" she said confidently. She sat now, secure, at ease, and just before the lights went down again for the following act, turned to him with a smile, brushed a little nonexistent speck from his shoulder, as if proudly to show the whole world with whom she was, to whom she belonged.

One morning, however, his concern got the better of him. He rose from the table they were seated at, breakfasting, went over to her, and tested her forehead with the back of his hand.

"What do you do that for ?" she asked, with unmarred composure, but casting her eyes upward to take in his overhanging hand.

"I wanted to see if you had a temperature."

The feel of her skin, however, was perfectly cool and normal. He returned to his chair.

"I am a little anxious about you, Julia. I'm wondering if I should not have a doctor examine you, just to ease my mind. I have heard of certain--" he hesitated, in order not to alarm her unduly, "--certain ailments of the lung that have no other indication, at an early stage, than these--er--intermittent flushes and high colorings that mount to the cheeks--"

He thought he saw her lips quiver treacherously, but they formed nothing but a small smile of reassurance.

"Oh no, I am in perfectly good health."

"You are as white as a ghost, at times. Then at others- A few moments ago, in our room, you were unduly pale. And now your cheeks are like apples."

She turned her fork over, then turned it back again the way it had been.

"It is the cold water, perhaps," she said. "I apply it to my face with strong pats, and that brings out the color. So you need not worry any longer, there's really nothing to be alarmed at."

"Oh," he exclaimed, vastly relieved. "Is that all that causes it? Who would have believed--!"

He turned his head suddenly. Aunt Sarah was standing there motionless, a plate she had forgotten to deliver held in her hand. Her eyes stared at Julia's face with a narrow-lidded scrutiny.

He thought, understandingly, that she too must feel concern for the state of her young mistress' health, just as he had, to fix upon her such a speculative stare of secretive appraisal.

10

Comfortably engrossed in his newspaper, he was vaguely aware of Aunt Sarah somewhere at his back, engaged in a household task known as "wiping." This consisted in running a dustcloth over certain surfaces (when they were equal to or lower than her own height) and flicking it at others (when they were higher). Presently he heard her come to a halt and cluck her tongue enticingly, and surmised by that she must have at last reached the point at which Julia's canary, Dicky Bird, hung suspended in its gilt cage from a bracket protruding close beside the window.

"How my pretty ?" she wheedled. "Hunh? Tell Aunt Sarah. How my pretty bird?"

There was a feeble monosyllabic twit from the bird, no more.

"You can do better than that. Come on now, perk up. Lemme hear you sing."

There was a second faltering twit, little better than a squeak.

The old woman gingerly thrust her finger through, apparently with the idea of gently stroking its tiny feathers.

As though that slight impetus were all that were needed, the little yellow tenant promptly fell to the floor of the cage. He huddled there inert, head down, apparently unable to regain the perch he had just lost. He blinked repeatedly, otherwise gave no sign of life.

Aunt Sarah became vociferously alarmed. "Mr. Lou!" she brayed. "Come here, sir! Something the matter with Miss Julia's little old bird. See you can find out what ails her."

Durand, who had been watching her over his shoulder for several minutes past, promptly discarded his newspaper, got up and went over.

By the time he had reached her, Aunt Sarah had already opened the cage wicket, reached a hand in with elephantine caution, and brought the bird out. It made no attempt to flutter, lay there almost inanimately.

They both bent their heads over it, with an intentness that, unintentionally, had a touch of the ludicrous to it.

"Why, it starving. Why, 'pears like it ain't had nothing to eat in days. Nothing left of it under its feathers at all. Feel here. Look at that. Seed dish plumb empty. No water neither."

It continued to blink up at them, apparently clinging to its life by a thread.

"Come to think of it, I ain't heard it singing in two, three days now. Not singing right, anyhow."

Durant, reminded by her remark, now recalled that he hadn't either.

"Miss Julia's going to have a fit," the old lady predicted, with an ominous headshake.

"But who's been feeding it, you or she?"

She gave him a look of blank bewilderment. "Why, I--I 'spected she was. She never said nothing to me. She never told me to. It b'long to her, I thought maybe she don't want nobody but herself to feed it."

"She must have thought you were," he frowned, puzzled. "But funny she didn't ask if you were. I'll hold it in my hand. Go get it some water."

They had it back in the cage, somewhat revived, and were still busy watching it, when Julia came into the room, the long-winded toilette that had been occupying her, apparently at last concluded.

She came toward him, tilted up her face, and kissed him dutifully. "I'm going shopping, Lou dear. Can you spare me for an hour or so?" Then without waiting for the permission, she went on toward the op.. posite door.

"Oh, by the way, Julia--" he had to call after her, to halt her.

She stopped and turned, sweetly patient. "Yes, dear ?"

"We found Dicky Bird nearly dead just now, Aunt Sarah and I."

He thought that would bring her back toward the cage at least, if only for a brief glance. She remained where she was, apparently begrudging the delay, though brooking it for his sake.

"He going to be all right, honey," Aunt Sarah quickly interjected. "They ain't nothing, man or beast or bird, Aunt Sarah can't nurse back to health. You just watch, he going to be all right."

"Is he ?" she said somewhat shortly. There was almost a quirk of annoyance expressed in the way she said it, but that of course, he told himself, was wholly imaginary on his part.

She began to mould her glove to her hand with an air of hauteur. Unnoticeably the subject had changed. "I do hope I don't have a hard time finding a carriage. Always, just when you want them, there's not one to be had--"

Aunt Sarah, among other harmless idiosyncrasies, had a habit of being behindhand in changing subjects, of dwelling on a subject, once current, for several minutes after everyone else had quitted it.

"He be singing again just as good as ever in a day or two, honey."

Julia's eyes gave a flick of impatience. "Sometimes that singing of his can be too much of a good thing," she said tartly. "It's been a blessed relief to--" She moistened her lips correctively, turned her attention to Durand again. "There's a hat I saw in Ottley's window I simply must have. I hope somebody hasn't already taken it away from there. May I?"

He glowed at this flattering deference of seeking his permission. "Of course! Have it by all means, bless your heart."

She gave a gay little flounce toward the door, swept it open. "Ta ta, lovey mine." She blew him a kiss, up the tilted flat of her hand and over the top of it, from the open doorway.

The door closed, and the room dimmed again somewhat.

Aunt Sarah was still standing beside the cage. "I sure enough 'spected she'd come over and take a look at him," she said perplexedly. "Reckon she ain't so fond of him no more."

"She must be. She brought him all the way down from St. Louis with her," Durand answered inattentively, eyes buried in his newspaper once more.

"Maybe she done change, don't care 'bout him no more."

This monologue was for her own benefit, however, not her employer's. He just happened to be there to overhear it.

She left the room.

A moment passed. Several, in fact. Durand's attention remained focused on the printed sheet before him.

Then suddenly he stopped reading.

His eyes left the paper abruptly, stared over its top.

Not at anything in particular, just in abstract thought.

11

Her trunk was recalled to his mind one day by the very act of his own sitting on it. It was no longer recognizable at sight for a trunk, it had a gaily printed slip cover over it to disguise it, and stood there over against the wall.

It was a Sunday, and though they did not go to church, they never failed, in common with all other good citizens, to dress up in their Sunday finest and take their Sunday morning promenade; to see and be seen, to bow and nod and perhaps exchange a few amiable words with this one and that of their acquaintances in passing. It was an established custom, the Sunday morning promenade, in all the cities of the land.

He was waiting for her to be ready, and he had sat down upon this nondescript surface without looking to see what it was, satisfied merely that it was level and firm enough to take him.

She was slowed, at the last moment, by difficulties.

"I wore this last week, remember? They'll see it again."

She discarded it.

"And this--I don't know about this--" She curled her lip slightly. "I'm not very taken with it."

She discarded it as well.

"That looks attractive," he offered cheerfully, pointing at random.

She shrugged off his ignorance. "But this is a weekday dress, not a Sunday one."

He wondered privately, and with a soundless little chuckle, how one told the first from the second, but refrained from asking her.

She sat down now, still further delaying their Start. "I don't know what I'll do. I haven't a thing fit to be seen in." This, taken in conjunction with the fact that the room was already littered with dresses, struck him as so funny that he could no longer control himself, but burst out laughing, and as he did so, swung his arm down against the surface he was sitting on, in a clap of emphasis. He felt, through the covering, the unmistakable shape of a pear-shaped metal trunk lock. And at that moment, he first realized it was her trunk he was sitting upon. The one she had brought from St. Louis. She had never, it suddenly struck him as well, opened it since her arrival.

"What about this?" he asked. And stood up and stripped the cover off. The initialled "J.R.," just below the lock in blood-red paint, stood out conspicuously. "Haven't you anything in here? I should think you would, a trunk this size." And meaning only to be helpful to her, pasted his hand against the top of it in indication.

She was suddenly looking, with an almost taut scrutiny, at one of the dresses, holding it upraised before her. As closely, as arrestedly, as if she were nearsighted or were seeking to find some microscopic flaw in its texture.

"Oh no," she said. "Nothing. Only rags."

"How is it I've never seen you open it? You never have, have you?"

She continued to peer at this thing in her hands. "No," she said. "I never have."

"I should imagine you would unpack. You intend to stay, don't you?" He was trying to be humorous, nothing more.

She didn't answer this time. She blinked her eyes, at the second of the two phrases, but it might have had nothing to do with that; it might simply have occurred simultaneously to it.

"Why not?" he persisted. "Why haven't you?" But with no intent whatever, simply to have an answer.

This time she took note of the question. "I--I can't," she said, somewhat unsurely.

She seemed to intend no further explanation, at least unsolicited, so he asked her: "Why?"

She waited a moment. "It's the--key. It's--ah, missing. I haven't got it. I lost it on the boat."

She had come over to the trunk while she was speaking, and was rather hastily trying to rearrange the slip cover over it, almost as if nettled because it had been disarrayed. Though this might have been an illusion due simply to the nervous quickness of her hands.

"Why didn't you tell me ?" he protested heartily, thinking merely he was doing her a service. "I'll have a locksmith come in and make you a new one. It won't take any time at all. Wait a minute, let me look at it--"

He drew the slip cover partly back again, while she almost seemed to be trying to hold it in place in opposition. Again the vivid "J.R." peered forth, but only momentarily.

He thumbed the pear-shaped brass plaque. "That should be easy enough. It's a fairly simple type of lock."

The slip cover, in her hands, swept across it like a curtain a moment later, blotting out lock and initials alike.

"I'll go out and fetch one in right now," he offered, and started forthwith for the door. "He can take the impression, and have the job done by the time we return from our--"

"You can't," she called after him with unexpected harshness of voice, that might simply have been due to the fact of her having to raise it slightly to reach him.

"Why not ?" he asked, and stopped where he was.

She let her breath out audibly. "It's Sunday."

He turned in the doorway and came slowly back again, frustrated. "That's true," he admitted. "I forgot."

"I did too, for a moment," she said. And again exhaled deeply. In a way that, though it was probably no more than an expression of annoyance at the delay, might almost have been mistaken for unutterable relief, so misleadingly like it did it sound.

12

The rite of the bath was in progress, or at least in preparation, somewhere in the background. He could tell by the sounds reaching him, though he was removed from any actual view of what was going on, being two rooms away, in the sitting room attached to their bedroom, engrossed in his newspaper. He could hear buckets of hot water, brought up in relays from the top of the kitchen stove downstairs by Aunt Sarah, being emptied into the tub with a hollow drumlike sound. Then a great stirring-up, so that it would blend properly with the cold water allowed to flow into it in its natural state from the tap. Then the testing, which was done with one carefully pointed foot, and usually followed by abrupt withdrawals and squeals of "Too cold!" or "Too hot!" as well as loud contradictions on the part of the assistant, Aunt Sarah: "No it ain't! Don't be such a baby ! Leave it in a minute, how you going to tell, you snatch it back like that? Your husban's sitting right out there; ain't you ashamed to have him know what a scairdy-cat you is ?"

"Well, he doesn't have to get in it, I do," came the plaintive answer.

Over and above this watery commotion, and cued by its semimusical tone, the canary, Dicky Bird, was singing jauntily, from the room midway between, the bedroom.

Aunt Sarah passed through the room where he sat, an empty waterbucket in each hand.

"She sure a pretty little thing," she commented. "White as milk and soft as honey. Got a fo'm like--unh-umh !"

His face suddenly suffused with color. It took quite some time for the heightened tide to descend again. He pretended the remark had not been addressed to himself, took no note of it.

She went down the stairs.

The canary's bravura efforts rose to a triumphant, sustained, almost earsplitting trill, then suddenly broke off short. That had been, even he had to admit to himself, quite a considerable amount of noise for so small a bird to emit, just then.

A strange, almost complete silence had succeeded it.

Then the rolling, somehow-undulating sound usually produced by total immersion in a body of water.

After that only an occasional watery ripple.

Aunt Sarah returned, stopped en route to shake out and inspect a fleecy towel, also warmed by courtesy of the kitchen stove, that she was taking in with her. She went on into the bedroom.

"Hullo there," he heard her say, from in there. "How my bird? How my yallo baby ?" Suddenly her voice deepened to strident urgency. "Mr. Lou! Mr. Lou !"

He went in running.

"He dead."

"He can't be. He was singing only a minute ago."

"He dead, I tell you! Look here, see for yourself--" She had removed him from the cage, was holding him pillowed on the palm of her hand.

"Maybe he needs water and seed again, like that last--" But the two receptacles were filled; Aunt Sarah had made that her responsibility ever since then.

"It ain't that."

She gave the edge of her hand a slight dip.

Something dropped over the edge of it, hung there suspended, while the body of the bird remained in position.

"His neck's done been broken."

"Maybe he fell off the perch--" Durand tried to suggest inanely, for lack of any other explanation that came to mind.

She scowled at him belligerently.

"They don't fall! What they got wings for?"

He repeated: "But he was singing only a few minutes ago--"

"What he was a few minutes ago and what he is now is two different things!"

"--and no one's been in here. No one but you and Miss Julia--"

In the silence, and incredibly, Julia could be heard in the adjoining bathroom, lightly whistling a bar or two to herself.

Then, as though belatedly realizing how unladylike she was guilty of being, she checked herself, and the water gave a playful little splash for finale.

13

It was quite by chance that he happened to go through the street in which his former lodgings were. He had no concern with them, would have passed them by with no more than a glance of fond recollection; his errand and his destination lay elsewhere entirely, and it only happened that this was the shortest way to it.

And it was equally by chance that Madame Tellier, his erstwhile landlady, happened to come out and stand for a moment in the entrance just as he was in the act of walking by.

She greeted him effusively, with shrieks of delight that could be heard for doors away in either direction, flung her arms about him like a second mother, asked about his health, his happiness, his enjoyment of married life.

"Oh, but we miss you, Louis! Your old rooms are rented again--to a pair of cold Northerners (I charge them double)--but it's not the same." She creased her rather large nose distastefully. Suddenly she was all alight again, gave her fingers a crackling snap of selfreminder. "I just remembered! I have a letter waiting for you. It's been here several days now, and I haven't seen Tom since it came, to ask where your new address is, or I would have forwarded it. He still comes around now and then to work for me, you know. Wait here, I'll bring it out to you."

She patted him three times in rapid succession on the chest, as if cajoling him to stand patiently as he was for a moment, turned and whisked inside.

He had, he only now recalled rather ruefully, completely overlooked having his mailing address changed from here, his old quarters, to the new house on St. Louis Street, when he made the move. Not that it was vitally important; his business mail all continued to go to the office, as it always had, and of personal correspondence he had never had a great deal, only his courtship letters with Julia, now brought to a happy termination. He would stop by the post office, on his way home, and file the new delivery instructions, if only for the sake of an occasional stray missive such as this.

Meanwhile she had come back with it. "Here ! Isn't it good you just happened to come by this way?"

He gave the inscription a brief glance, simply to confirm it, as he took it from her. "Mr. Louis Durand," in spidery penmanship; the three capitals, M, L, and D, standing out in black enlargement, the minuscule letters too finely traced and too diminished in size to make for legibility. However, it was his own name, there could be no mistaking that, so he questioned it no further; thrust it carelessly into the side pocket of his coat for later reference and promptly forgot about it.

Their leavetaking was as exclamatory and enthusiastic as their greeting had been. She kissed him on the forehead in a sort of maternal benediction, waved him steadily on his way for a distance of the first three or four succeeding house-lengths, even touched her apron to the corner of her eye before at last turning to go inside. She wept easily, this Madame Tellier; wept with only a single glassful of wine, or at sight of any once-familiar face. Even those she had once ruthlessly evicted for non-payment of rent.

He accomplished his errand, he returned to his office, he absorbed himself once more in the daily routine of his work.

He discovered the letter a second time only within the last quarter of an hour before leaving to go home, and as equally by accident as it had been thrust upon him in the first place by happening to thrust his hand blindly into his pocket, in search of a pocket handkerchief.

Reminded of its presence, he rested himself for a moment by taking it out, tearing it open, and leaning back to read it. No sooner had his eyes fallen on the introductory words than he stopped again, puzzled.

"My own dearest Julia :"

It was for her, not himself.

He turned to the envelope again, looked at it more closely than he had on the street in presence of Madame Tellier. He saw then what had misled him. The little curl, following the "Mr." so tiny as almost to escape detection, was meant for an "s."

He went back to the paper once more; turned this over, glanced at the bottom of its reverse side.

"Your ever-loving and distressed Bertha."

It was from her sister, in St. Louis.

"Distressed." The word seemed to cast itself up at him, like a barbed fishhook, catch onto and strain at his attention. He could not pry it off again.

He did not intend to read any further. It was her letter, after all.

Somehow the opening words held him trapped, he could not stop once they had seized his eyes with their meaning.

My own dearest Julia:

I cannot understand why you treat me thus. Surely I deserve

better than this of you. It is three weeks now since you have left

me, and in all that time not a word from you. Not so much as the

briefest line, to tell me of your safe arrival, whether you met Mr.

Durand, whether the marriage has taken place or not. Julia, you

were never like this before. What am I to think? Can you not

imagine the distracted state of mind this leaves me in--

14

He waited until after they were through their supper to speak of it, and then only in the mildest, least reproachful way.

He took it out and gave it to her, after they had entered the sitting room from the dining room, and settled themselves there, she across the lamplit table from him. "This came for you today. I opened it by mistake, not noticing. I hope you'll forgive me."

She took the whole envelope first, and studied it a second, this way and that. "Who's it from ?" she said.

"Can't you tell?"

Just as he was about to wonder why the script in itself did not tell her that, she had already withdrawn its contents and opened them, and murmured "Oh," so the question never had a chance to form itself in his mind. But whether the "Oh" meant recognition of its sender or merely recognition of the nature of the letter, or even something else quite different, there was no way for him to distinguish.

She read it rather quickly, even hurriedly, her head moving with each line, then back again, in continuous serried little twitchings. Then reached the bottom and had done.

He thought he saw remorse on her face, in its sudden, still abstraction, that held for a moment after.

"She says--" She half-tendered it to him. "Did you read it?"

"Yes, I did," he said, slightly uncomfortable.

She put it back in the envelope, gave the latter two taps where its seam was broken.

He looked at her fondly, to soften the insistence of his appeal. "Write to her, Julia," he urged. "That is not like you at all."

"I will," she promised contritely. "Oh, I will, Louis, without fail." And twisted her hands a little, about themselves, and looked down at them as she did so.

"But why didn't you before now?" he continued gently. "I never asked you, because I felt sure you had."

"Oh, so much has happened--I meant to, time and again I meant to, and each time there was something to take my mind off it. You see, Louis, this has been the beginning of a whole new life for me, these past few weeks, and everything seemed to come at one time--"

"I know," he said. "But you will write?" And he took up and lost himself in his newspaper.

"The very first thing," she vowed.

Half an hour went by. She was, now, turning the leaves of a heavy ornamental album, regaling herself with the copperplate engravings, snubbing the text.

He watched her covertly from under lowered lids a moment. Presently he cleared his throat as a reminder.

She took no notice, went ahead, with childlike engrossment.

"You said you would write to your sister."

She looked slightly disconcerted. "I know. But must it be right tonight? Why won't tomorrow do as well ?"

"Don't you want to write to her?"

"Of course I do, how can you ask that? But why must it be this instant? Will tomorrow make such a difference ?"

He put his newspaper aside. "A great deal in time of arrival, I'm afraid. If you write it now, it can go off in the early morning post. If you wait until tomorrow, it will be held over a full day longer; she will have that much more anxiety to endure."

He rose, closed the album for her, since she gave no signs of intending to do this herself. Then he stopped momentarily, looked at her searchingly to ask: "There's no ill-feeling between you, is there? Some quarrel just before you left that you haven't told me about?" And before she could speak, if she had meant to, put the answer in her mouth. "She doesn't write as though there had been."

The lines of her throat, extended for an instant, dropped back again, as if he'd aborted what she'd been about to say.

"How you talk," she murmured. "We're devoted to one another."

"Well, then, come. Why be stubborn? There's no time like the present. And you have nothing to occupy yourself with, that I can see." He took her by both hands and had to draw her to her feet. And though she made no active sign of resistance, he could feel the weight of her body against the direction of his pull.

He had to go to the desk and lower the writing-slab. He had to draw out a sheet of fresh notepaper from .the rack, and put it in place for her, slightly tilted of corner.

He had to go back and bring her over, from where she stood, by the hand. Then even when he had her seated, he had to dip the pen and place it in her very fingers. He gave her head a pat. "You are like a stubborn child that doesn't want to do its lessons," he told her humorously.

She tried to smile, but the effect was dubious at best.

"Let me see her letter a moment," she said at last.

He went back to the table, brought it to her. But she seemed only to glance at the very top line of the page, almost as if referring to the mode of address in order to be able to duplicate it. Though he told himself this thought on his part must be purely fanciful. Many people had to have the physical sight of a letter before them to be able to answer it satisfactorily; she might be one of those.

Then turning from it immediately after that one quick look, she wrote on her own blank sheet, "My own dear Bertha :" He could see it form, from over her shoulder. Beyond that she seemed to have no further use for the original, edged it slightly aside and didn't concern herself with it any further.

He let her be. He returned to his own chair, took up his newspaper once more. But the stream of her thoughts did not seem to flow easily. He would hear the scratch of her pen for a few words, then it would stop, die away, there would be a long wait. Then it would scratch for a few jerky words more, then die away again. He glanced over at her once just in time to see her clap her hand harassedly to her forehead and hold it there briefly.

At length he heard her give a great sigh, but one more of shortpatienced aversion continuing even after a task has been completed than of relief at its conclusion, and the scratching of the pen had stopped for good. She flung it down, as if annoyed.

"I've done. Do you want to read it?"

"No," he said, "it's between sister and sister, not for a husband to read."

"Very well," she said negligently. She passed her pink tongue around the gummed edge of the envelope, sealed it in. She stood it upright against the inside of the desk, prepared to close the slab over it. "I'll have Aunt Sarah post it for me in the morning."

He had reached for it and picked it up before her hands could forestall him, though they both flew out toward it just a moment too late. She hadn't expected him to be standing there behind her.

He slid it into his inside breast pocket, buttoned his coat over it. "I can do it for you myself," he said. "I leave the house earlier. It'll be that much sooner on its way."

He saw a startled expression, almost of trapped fear, cause her eyes to dodge cornerwise for an instant, but then they evened again so quickly he told himself he must have been mistaken, he must not have seen it at all.

When next he looked she was stroking the edge of her fingers with a bit of chamois penwiper, against potential rather than actual spots, however, and that seemed to be her sole remaining concern at the moment, though she puckered her brows pensively over the task.

15

The next morning, he thought she never had looked lovelier, and never had been more loving. All her past gracious endearment was as a coldness compared to the warmth of her consideration now.

She was in lilac watered silk, which had a rippling sheen running down it from whichever side you looked at it. It sighed as she walked, as if itself overcome by her loveliness. She did not stay at table as on other days, she accompanied him to the front door to see him off, her arm linked to his waist, his arm to hers. And as the slanting morning sunlight caught her in its glint, then released her, then caught her again a step further on, playing its mottled game with her all along the hall, he thought he had never seen such a vision of angelic beauty, and was almost awed to think it was his, walking here in his house, here at his side. Had she asked him to lie down and die for her then and there, he would have been glad to do it, and glad of her having asked it, as well.

They stopped. She raised her face from the side of his arm, she took up his hat, she stroked it of dust, she handed it to him.

They kissed.

She prepared his coat, held it spread, helped him on with it.

They kissed.

He opened the door in readiness to go.

They kissed.

She sighed. "I hate to see you go. And now I'll be all alone the rest of the livelong day."

"What will you do with yourself?" he asked in compunction, with the sudden--and only mometary--realization of a male that she too had a day to get through somehow, that she continued to go on during his absence. "Go shopping, I suppose," he suggested indulgently.

Her face brightened for a moment, as though he had read her heart. "Yes-!" Then it dimmed again. "No--" she said, forlorn. Instantly his attention was held fast. "Why not? What's the matter?"

"Oh, nothing--" She turned her head away, she didn't want to tell him.

He took the point of her chin and turned it back again. "Julia, I want to know. Tell me. What is it?" He touched her shoulder.

She tried to smile, wanly. Her eyes looked out the door.

He had to guess finally.

"Is it money ?"

He guessed right.

Not an eyelash moved, but somehow she told him. Certainly not with her tongue.

He gasped, half in laughter. "Oh, my poor foolish littieJulia--I" Instantly his coat flew open, his hand reached within. "Why, you only have to ask, don't you know that--?"

This time there could be no mistaking the answer. "No--! No--! No!" She was almost vehement about it, albeit in a pouty, petulant child's sort of way. She even tapped her toe for emphasis. "I don't like to ask for it. It isn't nice. I don't care if you are my own husband. It still isn't nice. I was brought up that way, I can't change."

He was smiling at her. He found her adorable. But still he didn't understand her, which was no detraction to the first two factors. "Then what do you want?"

She gave him a typically feminine answer. "I don't know." And raised her eyes thoughtfully, as if trying to scan the problem in her own mind, find a solution somehow.

"But you do want to go shopping, don't you? I can see you do by your look. And yet you don't want me to give you the money for it."

"Isn't there some other way?" she appealed to him helplessly, as if willing to extricate herself from her own scruples, if only she could be shown how without foregoing them.

"I could slip it under your plate, unasked, for you to find at breakfast," he smirked.

She saw no humor in the suggestion, shook her head absently, still busy pondering the problem, finger to tooth edge. Suddenly she brightened, looked at him. "Couldn't I have a little account of my own--? Like you have, only-- Oh, just a little one, tiny--small--"

Then she decided against that, before he could leap to give his consent, as he had been about to.

"No, that'd be too much bother, just for hats and gloves and things--" About to fall into disheartened perplexity again, she recovered, once more lighted up as a new variant occurred to her. "Or better still, couldn't I just share yours with you?" She spread out her hands in triumphant discovery. "That'd be simpler yet. Just call it ours instead. It's there already."

He crouched his shoulders down low. He slapped his thigh sharply. "By George ! Will that make you happy? Is that all it will take? God bless your trusting little heart I We'll do it!"

She flew into his arms like a shot, with a squeal for a firing-report. "Oh, Lou, I'll feel so big, so important! Can I, really? And can I even write my own checks, like you do?"

To love someone, is to give, and to want to give more still, no questions asked. To stop and think, then that is not to love, any more.

"Your own checks, in your own handwriting, in your own purse. I'll meet you at the bank at eleven. Will that time suit you?"

She only pressed her cheek to his.

"Will you know how to find it?"

She only pressed her cheek to his again, around on the other side of his face.

She allowed him to precede her there, as was her womanly prerogative. But once he had arrived, she kept him waiting no more than the fractional part of a minute. In fact so precipitately did she enter, on his very heels, that it could almost have been thought she had been waiting at some nearby vantage point simply to allow him first entry before starting forward in turn.

She accosted him before he had little more than cleared the vestibuk.

"Louis," she said, placing her hand confidentially atop his wrist to detain him a moment, and drawing him a step aside, "I have been thinking about this since you left the house. I am not sure I--I want you to do this after all. You may think me one of these presuming wives who-- Had we not better let things be as they are-- ?"

He patted her arresting wrist. "Not another word, Julia," he said with fine masculine authority. "I want it so."

He was now sure that the idea was his own, had been from its very inception.

She deferred to his dictate as it was a wife's place to do, with a seemly little obeisance of her head. She linked her arm in his and accompanied him with slow-moving elegance across the bank floor toward its farther end, where the bank manager had emerged and stood waiting to greet them with courtly consideration behind a low wooden partition banister set with amphora-shaped uprights erected three-square about his private office door. He was a moonfaced gentleman, the roundness of his face emphasized by the circular fringe of carefully waved iron-gray whiskers that surrounded it, the lips and sides of the cheeks clean-shaven. The gold chain across his plaid vest front must have been composed of the thickest links in all New Orleans, a veritable anchor.

Even he, the establishment's head, visibly swelled like a pouterpigeon at sight of Julia advancing toward him. The pride she afforded Durand, in escorting her, in itself, would have made the entire proceeding worth while had there been no other reason.

She had donned, for this unwonted invasion of the precincts of commerce and finance, azure crinoline, that filled the arid air with whispers, midget pink velvet buttons in symmetrical rows studding its jerking, pink ruching sprouting at her throat and wrists; a crushed bonnet of azure velvet low over one eye like a tinted compress to relieve a headache, ribbons of pink tying it under her chin, a dwarf veil sprinkled with pink dots like confetti hanging only as low as the underlashes of her eyes. Her steps were as tiny and tapping as though she were on stilts, and her spine was held in the forwardcurved bow of the Grecian bend almost to a point where it defied Nature's plan that the human figure hold itself upright on the hip sockets, without falling over forward out of sheer unbalance.

Never had a bustle floated so airily, swaying so languorously, over a bank floor before. Her passage created a sensation behind the tellers' cagelike windows lining both sides of the way. Pair upon pair of eyes beneath their green eyeshades were lifted from dry, stuffy figures and accounts to gaze dreamily after her. The personnel of banking establishments at that time was exclusively male, the clientele almost equally so. Though a discreetly curtained-off little nook, as rigidly segregated as a harem anteroom, bearing over it the placard "Ladies' Window," was reserved for the use of the occasional females (widows and the like) who were forced to come in person to see to their money matters, having no one else to attend to these grubby transactions for them. At least they were spared the ignominy of having to rub elbows with men in the line, or stand exposed to all eyes while money was publicly handed to them. They could curtain themselves off and be dealt with by a special teller reserved for their use alone, and always a good deal gentler and older than the rest.

There was no definite stigma attached to banks, for women; unlike saloons, and certain types of theatrical performance where tights were worn, and almost all forms of athletic contest, such as boxing matches and ball games. It was just that they were to be spared the soilage implicit in the handling of money, which was still largely a masculine commodity and therefore an indelicate one for them.

Durand and his breath-taking (but properly escorted) wife stopped before the whiskered bank manager, and he swung open a little hinged gate in the banister-rail for their passage.

Durand said, "May I present Mr. Simms to you, my dear? A good friend of mine."

Mr. Simms said with a gallant inclination, "I am inclined to doubt that, or you would not have delayed this for so long."

She cast her eyes fetchingly at him, certainly not in flirtation, for that would have been discreditable to Durand, but at least in a sort of beguiling playfulness.

"I am surprised," she said, and allowed that to stand alone, the better to make her point with what followed.

"How so?" Simms asked uncertainly.

She gave the compliment to Durand, to be passed on by him, instead of directly, face to face. "I had thought until now all bank managers were old and rather forbidding looking."

Mr. Simms' vest buttons had never had a greater strain put upon them, not even after Sunday meals.

She said next, looking about her with ingenuous interest, "I have never been in a bank before. What a superb marble floor."

"We are rather proud of that," Mr. Simms conceded.

They entered the office. They seated themselves, Mr. Simms seeing to her chair himself.

They chatted for several moments on a purely social plane, business still having the grace to conceal itself behind a preliminary screen of sociability, even where men alone were involved. (Always providing they were of an equal level.) To come too bluntly to the point without a little pleasant garnishing first was considered bad mannered. But year by year the garnishing was growing less.

At last Durand remarked, "Well, we mustn't take too much of Mr. Simms' time, I know he's a busy man."

The point had now arrived.

"In what way can I be of service to you?" Simms inquired.

"I should like to arrange," said Durand, "for my wife to have full use of my account here, along with myself."

"Oh, really," she murmured disclaimingly, upping one hand. "He insists--"

"Quite simple," said Simms. "We merely change the account from a single one, as it now stands, to a joint account, to be participated in by both." He sought out papers on his desk, selected two. "And to do that all I have to do is ask you both for your signatures, just once each. You on this authorization form. And you, my dear, on this blank form card, just as a record of your signature, so that it will be known to us and we may honor it."

Durand was already signing, forehead inclined.

Simms edged forward another paper tentatively, asked him: "Did you wish this on both accounts, the savings as well as the checking, or merely the one?"

"It may as well be both alike, and have done with it, while we're about it," Durand answered unhesitatingly. He wasn't a grudging gift-giver, and any other answer, it seemed to him, would have been an ungracious one.

"Lou," she protested, but he silenced her with his hand.

Simms was already offering her the inked pen for her convenience. She hesitated, which at least robbed the act of seemingly undue precipitation. "How shall I sign? Do I use my own Christian name, or--?"

"Perhaps your full marriage name might be best. 'Mrs. Louis Durand.' And then you'll remember to repeat that exactly each time you draw a check."

"I shall try," she said obediently.

He blotted solicitously for her.

"Is that all ?" she asked, wide-eyed.

"That's quite all there is to it, my dear."

"Oh, that wasn't so bad, was it ?" She looked about her in delighted relief, almost like a child who has been dreading a visit to the dentist only to find nothing painful has befallen her.

The two men exchanged a look of condescending masculine superiority, in the face of such inexperience. Their instincts made them like women to be that way.

Simms saw them off from the door of his office with an amount of protocol equal to that with which he had greeted them.

Again the bustle floated in such airy elegance above that workaday bank floor as bustle never had before. Save this same one on its way in. Again the sentimental calflike eyes of cooped-up clerks and tellers and accountants rose from their work to follow her in escapist longings, and an unheard sigh of romantic dejection seemed to go up from all of them alike. It was like the sheen of a rainbow trailing its way through a murky bog, presently to fade out. But while it passed, it was a lovely thing.

"He was nice, wasn't he ?" she confided to Durand.

"Not a bad sort," he agreed with more masculine restraint.

"May I ask him to dinner ?" she suggested deferentially.

He turned and called back, "Mrs. Durand would like you to dine with us soon. I'll send you a note."

Simms bowed elaborately, from where he stood, with unconcealed gratification.

He stood for several moments after they had gone out into the street, thoughtfully cajoling his own whiskers and envying Durand for having such a paragon of a wife.

16

The letter was on his desk when he returned to the office from his noonday meal. It must have come in late, therefore, been delayed somehow in delivery, for the rest of his mail for that day had already been on hand awaiting his attention when he first came in at nine.

It was already well on toward three by now. The noonday meal of a typical New Orleans businessman, then, was no hurried snack snatched on the run, there then back again. It was a leisurely affair with due regard for the amenities. He went to his favorite restaurant. He seated himself in state. He ordered with care and amplitude. Friends and acquaintances were greeted, or often joined him at table. Business was discussed, sometimes even transacted. He lingered over his coffee, his cigar, his brandy. Finally, in his own good time, refreshed, restored, ready for the second half of the day's efforts, he went back to his place of work. It was a process that consumed anywhere from two to three hours.

Thus it was midafternoon before, returning to his desk, he found the letter there lying on his blotting-pad.

Twice he started to open it, and twice was interrupted. He took it up, finally, and prepared to spare it a moment of his full attention.

The postmark was St. Louis again. Whether spurred by that or not, he recognized the handwriting, from the time before. From her sister again.

But this time there could be no mistake. It was addressed to him directly. Intentionally so. "Louis Durand, Esq." To be delivered here, at his place of business.

He slit it along the top with a letter opener and plucked it out of its covering, puzzled. He swung himself sideward in his chair and gave it his attention.

If dried ink on paper can be said to scream, it screamed up at him.

Mr. Durand!

I can stand this no longer! I demand that you give me an

explanation! I demand that you give me word of my sister without

delay!

I am writing to you direct as a last resource. If you do not

inform me immediately of my sister's whereabouts, satisfy me that

she is safe and sound, and have her communicate with me herself at

once to confirm this, and to enlighten me as to the cause of this

strange silence, I shall go to the police and seek redress of them.

I have in my hand a letter, in answer to the one I last sent

her, purporting to be from her, and signed by her name. It is not

from my sister. It is written by someone else. It is in the

handwriting of a stranger,--an unknown person--

17

How long he sat and stared at it he did not know. Time lost its meaning. Reading over and over the same words. "The handwriting of an unknown person. Of an unknown person. An unknown person." Until they became like a whirring buzz saw slashing his brain in two.

Then suddenly hypnosis ended, panic began. He flung himself out of his swivel-backed chair, so that it fell over behind him with a loud clatter. He crushed the letter into his pocket, in such stabbing haste as if it were living fire and burned his fingers at touch.

He ran for the door, forgetting his hat. Then ran back for it, then ran for the door a second time. In it he collided with his office boy, drawn to the entryway just then by the sound the chair had made. He flung him almost bodily aside, gripping him by both shoulders at once; fled on, calling back "Tell Jardine to take over, I've gone home for the day!"

In the street, he slashed his upraised arm every which way at once, before, behind him, sideward, like a man combatting unseen gnats, hoping to draw a coach out of the surrounding emptiness. And when at last he had, after a moment that seemed an hour of agonized waiting, he had run along beside it, was in before it had stopped; standing upright in the middle of it like a latter-day charioteer, leaning over the driver's shoulder in the crazed intensity of giving him the address.

"St. Louis Street, and quickly! I must get there without delay!"

The wheel spokes blurred into solid disks of motion, New Orleans' streets began to stream backward around him, quivering, like scenes pictured on running water.

He struck his own flank, as if he were the horse. "Quicker, coachman! Will you never get there ?"

"We're practically flying now, sir. We apt to run down somebody."

"Then run down somebody and be damned! Only get me there!"

He jumped from the carriage as he had entered it, slapped coins from his backward-reaching palm into the driver's forward-reaching one, ran for his own door as if he meant to hurl himself bodily against it and crash it down.

Aunt Sarah opened it with surprising immediacy. She must have been right there in the front hall, on the other side of it.

"Is she in ?" he flung into her face. "Is she here in the house ?"

"Who ?" She drew back, frightened by the violence of the question. But then answered it, for it could refer to only one person. "Miss Julia? She been gone all afternoon. She tole me she going shopping. she be back in no time. That was 'bout one o'clock, I reckon. She ain't come back since."

"My God!" he intoned dismally. "I was afraid of that. Damn that letter for not coming an hour earlier!"

Then he saw that a young girl was huddled there waiting on a backless seat against the wall. Frugally dressed, a large boxed parcel held in her lap. She was shrinking timidly back, her wan face coloring painfully as a result of the recent expletive he had used.

"Who's this ?" he demanded, lowering his voice.

"Young lady from the dressmaker's, sent over to have Miss Julia try on a dress they making for her. She say she tole her to be here at three. She been waiting a couple hours now."

Then she didn't intend to remain away today, in the ordinary course of events, flashed through his mind. And her doing so now proves-- "When was this appointment made?" he challenged the girl, causing her to cower still further.

"Some--some days ago," she faltered. "I believe last week, sir."

He ran up the stairs full tilt, oblivious of appearances, hearing behind him Aunt Sarah's tactful whisper, "You better go now, honey. Some kind of trouble coming up; you call back some other day."

He stood there in their bedroom, breathing hard from the violence of his ascent but otherwise immobile for a moment, looking about in mute helplessness. His eye fell on the trunk. The trunk that had never been opened. Draped deceptively, but he knew it now, since that Sunday, for what it was. He wrenched off the slip cover, and the initials came to view again. "J.R.," in paint the color of fresh blood.

He turned, bolted out again, ran down the stairs once more. Only part of the way this time, stopping halfway to the bottom.

The young apprentice was at the door now, in the act of departing; turning over to Aunt Sarah the boxed parcel. "Tell Mrs. Durand I'm--I'm sorry to have misunderstood, and I'll come back tomorrow afternoon at the same time, if that's convenient."

"Run out and fetch me a locksmith!" he called out from midstairs, shattering their low-voiced parting interview like an explosive shell. The timid emissary whisked from sight, and Aunt Sarah tried to close the door on her with one hand and at the same time come away from it in fulfilment of his order.

Then he changed his mind again before she could carry out the errand. "No, wait! That would take too long. Bring me a hammer and a chisel. Have we those?"

"I reckon so." She scurried for the back.

When she'd handed them to him, he sped upward from sight again. He dropped to his knees, launched himself at the trunk with vicious energy, his mouth a white scar; he inserted the chisel in the crevice about the lock, began to pound at it mercilessly. In a moment or two the lock had sprung open, dangled there half-severed from its recent mounting.

The fall of the hammer and chisel made a dull dank in the new stillness of the room, like a funereal knell.

He plucked down the side-latchpieces, unbuckled the ancient leather strap that had bound it about the middle, rose and heaved as he rose, and the slightly domed lid came up and swung rearward with a shudder.

There was an exhalation of mothballs, as if an active breath had blown in his' face.

It was the trunk of a neat, a fastidious, a prissy person. Symmetrical stacks of belongings, each one not so much as a hairsbreadth out of line and the crevices between artfully stopped with handkerchiefs and such slighter articles, so that the various mounds could not become displaced in transit.

The top tray held only intimate undergarments, of both day- and night-wear; all of them utilitarian rather than beautiful. Yellow flannel nightrobes, flannel petticoats, thick woollen articles of covering with drawstrings whose nature he did not try to discover.

In a moment his hands had ravaged it beyond recognition.

He shifted the upper section aside, and found neatly spread layers of dresses beneath that. Of a more sober nature than any she had bought since coming here; browns and grays, with prim little rounded white collars, black alpacas, an occasional staid plaid of dark blue or green, no brighter hue.

He picked the topmost one out at random, then added a second one.

He stood there, full length like that, between them, helplessly holding one up in each hand, looking from one to the other.

Suddenly his gaze caught his own reflection, in the full-length mirrored panel facing her wardrobe door. He stepped out more fully from behind the trunk, looked again. Something struck his eye as being wrong. He couldn't tell what it was.

He drew a step back with the two trophies, to gain added perspective. Then suddenly, at the shift, it exploded into recognition. There was too much of each dress. He was holding his hands, the hands that held them, at his own shoulder level. They fell away straight to the floor, and, touching it, even folded over in excess.

In memory he saw her stand beside him again, in the mirror. She appeared there for a moment, in brief recapture. The top of her head just rising over the turn of his shoulder: when her hair was up.

He dropped the two wraithlike rags, almost in fright. Stepped to the wardrobe, flung both panels of it wide, with two hands at once. Empty; a naked wooden bar running barren across its upper part. A little puff of ghostly violet scent, and that was all.

This discovery was anticlimactic to the one that had just preceded it, somehow. His real fright lay in the dresses that were here, and not the dresses that were gone.

He ran out again to the stairs, and bending to be seen from below, called to Aunt Sarah, until she had come running in renewed terror. "Yes sir! Yes sir!"

"That girl. What did she leave here? Was that something of Mrs. Durand's?"

"New dress they running up for her."

"Bring it here. Hand it up to me, quick!"

He ran back to the room with it, burst the cardboard open, rifled it out. Gay, sprightly; heliotrope ribbons at its waist. His eye took no note of that.

He retrieved the one from the trunk he had dropped to the floor. He flattened it on the bed, smoothing it out like a paper pattern, spreading the sleeves, drawing down the skirt to its full length.

Then he superimposed the new one, the one just delivered, atop it. Then stood back and looked, already knowing.

At no point did the one match the other. The sleeves were longer, by a full cuff-length. The bosom was fuller, spilling out in an excess curve at either side when rendered two dimensional. The waist was almost half again as wide. The wearer of the one could not have entered the other. And most glaring of all the skirt of one reached in a wide band of continuation far below, broad inches below, where the other had ended.

There was only one length for all skirts, even he knew that; floorlength. There was no such thing as a skirt other than floor-length. Any variation in length was not due to fashion, it was due to the height of the wearer.

And in this undersized, topmost one there still twinkled the pins of her living measurements as he had known her, taken from her very body less than a week ago, waiting for the final sewing.

The clothes from St. Louis--

The color slowly drained from his face, and there was a strange sort of fear in his heart that he'd never known before. He'd already known when he came into this house, a while ago; but now, in this moment, he'd proved it, and there was no longer any escaping from the proof.

The clothes from St. Louis were the clothes of someone else.

18

It was dark now, the town had dropped into night. The town, the world, his mind, were hanging suspended in bottomless night. It was dark outside in the streets and it was dark in here in the room where he stood.

There was no eye to pierce the darkness where he stood; he was alone, unseen, unguessed-at. He was something motionless standing within a black-lined box. And if it breathed, that was a secret between God and itself. That, and the pain he felt in breathing, and a few other things.

Then at last pale light approached, rising from below, ascending the stairs outside. As it rose, it strengthened, until at last its focus came into view: a lighted lamp dancing restlessly from a wire hoop, held by Aunt Sarah as she climbed toward the upper floor. It paled her figure into a ghost. A ghost with a dark face, but with a sifting of flour outlining its seams.

She came up to the level at last, and turned toward his room; the lamp exploded into a permanent dazzle that filled the doorway, burgeoning in and finding him out.

She halted there and looked at him.

He was standing, utterly, devastatingly motionless. The light fell upon the pile of dresses strewed on the bed, tumbled to the floor. It flushed color into them as it revealed them, like a syringe filled with dye. Blue, green, maroon, dusty pink, they became. It flushed color into him too, the colors a waxen image has, dressed to the last detail like a live man. So clever it could almost fool you; the way those things are supposed to do in waxworks. Verisimilitude without animation.

He was like one struck dead. Upright on his feet, but dead. He could see her, for his eyes were on her face; gravely gazing on her face, that part of the body which the eye habitually seeks when it looks on someone. He could hear her, for when she whispered halffrightenedly: "Mr. Lou, what is it? What is it, Mr. Lou?"; he answered her, he spoke, his voice came.

"She's not coming back," he whispered in return.

"You been in here all this time like this, without a light ?"

"She's not coming back."

"How much longer I'm going to have to wait for supper? I can't keep that chicken much more."

"She's not coming back."

"Mr. Lou, you're not hearing me, you're not heeding."

That was all he could keep saying. "She's not coming back." All the thousands of words were forgotten, the thousands it had taken him fifteen years to learn, and only four remained of his whole mother tongue: "She's not coming back."

She ventured into the room, bringing the lamp with her, and the light eddied and fluxed, before it had settled again. She set it down upon the table. She wrung her hands, and knotted parts of her dress in them, as if not knowing what to do with them.

At last she took a small part of her own skirt and wiped sadly at the edge of the table with it, from old habit, as if thinking she were dusting it. That was the only help she could give him, the only ease she could bring him: to dust an edge of the table in his room. But pity takes many forms, and it has no need of words.

And it was as though she had brought warmth into the room; warmth at least sufficient to thaw him, to melt the glacial casque that held him rigid. Just by being there, another human being, near him.

Then slowly he started to come back to life. The dead started to come back to life. It wasn't pleasurable to watch. Rebirth after death. The death of the heart.

Death-throes in reverse. Coming after the terminal blow, not before. When the heart dies, it should stay dead. It should be given the coup de grace, struck still once and for all, not allowed to agonize.

His knees broke their locked rigidity, and he dropped down at half-height beside the bed. His arms reached out across it, clawing in torment.

And one of the dresses stirred, as if under its own impulse,; rippled in serpentine haste across the bed top, and was sucked up into the maelstrom of his grief; his head falling prone upon it, his face burrowing into it in ghastly parody of kisses once given, that could never be given again, for there was no one there to give them to. Only the empty cocoon he pleaded with now.

"Julia. Julia. Be merciful."

The old woman's hand started toward his palsied shoulder in solace, then held itself suspended barely clear of touch.

"Hush, Mr. Lou," she said with guttural intensity. "Hush, poor man."

She raised her outstretched hand then, held it poised at greater height, up over his oblivious, gnawing head.

"May the Lawd have mercy on you. May He take pity on you. You weeping, but you ain't got nothing to weep for. You mourning, but you mourning for something you never had."

He rolled his head sideward, and looked up at her with sudden frightened intentness.

As if kindled into anger now by sight of his wasted grief, as if vindictive with long-delayed revelation, she went to the bureau that bad been Julia's. She threw open a drawer of it with such righteous violence that the whole cabinet shook and quivered.

She plunged her hand in, unerringly striking toward a hiding place she knew of from some past discovery. Then held it toward him in speechless portent. Within it was rimmed a dusty cake, a pastille, of cheek rouge.

She threw it down, anathema.

Again her hand burrowed into secretive recesses of the drawer. She held up, this time, a cluster of slender, spindly cigars.

She showed him, flung them from her.

Her hands went up overhead, quivered there aloft, vibrant with doom and malediction, calling the blind skies to witness.

She intoned in a blood-curdling voice, like some Old Testament prophetess calling down apocalyptic judgment.

"They's been a bad woman living in your house! They's been a stranger sleeping in your bed!"

19

Hatless, coatless, hair awry, just as the discovery had found him in his room moments before, he was running like someone demented through the quiet, night-lidded streets now, unable to find a coach and too crazed to stand still and wait for one in any one given place. Onward, ever onward, toward an address that had fortuitously recurred to him just now, when he needed it most. The house of the banker Simms, halfway across New 'Orleans. He would have run the whole distance on foot, to get there, if necessary.

But luckily, as he came to a four-way crossing, a gaslit post brooding over it in sulphurio yellow-green, he spied a carriage just ahead, returning idle from some recent hire, screaming after it and without waiting for it to come back and get him, ran down the roadway after it full tilt; floundered into it and choked out Simms' address.

At the banker's house he rang the bell like fury.

A colored servant led him in, showing an offended mien at his impetuosity.

"He's at supper, sir," she said disapprovingly. "If you'll have the patience to seat yourself just a few minutes and wait till he gets through--"

"No matter," he panted. "This can't wait! Ask him to come out here a moment--"

The banker came out into the hall, brow beetling with annoyance, still chewing food and with a napkin still trussed about his collar. When he saw who it was his face cleared.

"Mr. Durand!" he said heartily. "What brings you here at such an hour? Will you come in and join us at table?" Then noting his distracted appearance more closely as he came nearer, "You're all upset-- What's the matter, man? Bring him some brandy, Becky. A chair--"

Durand swept a curt hand offside in refusal of the offered restoratives. "My money--" he gasped out.

"What is it, Mr. Durand? What of your money?"

"Is it there--? Has it been touched--? When you closed at three, what was my balance on your ledgers-?"

"I don't understand you, Mr. Durand. No one can touch your money. It's safeguarded. No one but yourself and your wife-"

He caught an inkling of something from the agonized expression that had flitted across Durand's face just then.

"You mean--?" he breathed, appalled.

"I have to know-- Now, tonight-- For the love of God, Mr. Simms, do something for me, help me-- Don't keep me waiting like this-"

The banker wrenched off his napkin, cast it from him, in sign his meal was ended for that evening at least. "My chief teller," he said in quick-formed decision. "My chief teller would know. That would be quicker than going tO the bank; we'd have to open up and go over the day's transactions-"

"Where can I find him?" Durand was already on his way toward the door and out again.

"No, no, I'll go with you. Wait for me just a second--" Simms hurriedly snatched at his hat and a silken throat muffler. "What is it, what has happened, Mr. Durand?"

"I'm afraid to say, until I find out," Durand said desolately. "I'm afraid even to think--"

Simms had to stop first and secure his teller's home address; then they hurriedly left, climbed back into the same carriage that had brought Durand, and were driven to a frugal little squeezed-in house on Dumaine Street.

Simms got out, deterred Durand with a kindly intended gesture of his hand, evidently hoping to spare him as much as possible.

"Suppose you wait here. I'll go in and talk to him."

He went inside to be gone perhaps ten minutes at the most. To Durand it seemed he had been left out there the whole night.

At last the door opened and Simms had reappeared. Durand leaped, as though a spring had been released, to meet him, trying to read his face for the tidings as he went toward him. It looked none too sanguine.

"What is it? For God's sake, tell me!"

"Steady, Mr. Durand, steady." Simms put a supporting arm about him just below the turn of the shoulders. "You had thirty thousand, fifty-one dollars, forty cents in your check-cashing account and twenty thousand and ten in your savings account this morning when we opened for business--"

"I know that! I know that already! That isn't what I want to know--"

The teller had followed Simms out. The manager gestured to him surreptitiously, handing over to him the unwelcome responsibility of answering the question.

"Your wife appeared at five minutes of three to make a lastminute withdrawal," the teller said.

"Your balance at closing-time was fifty-one dollars, forty cents in the one account, ten dollars in the other. To have closed them both out entirely, your own signature would have been necessary."

20

The room was a still life. It might have been something painted on a canvas, that was then stood upright to dry; life-size, identical to life in every shading and every trifling detail, yet an artful simulation and not the original itself.

A window haloed by setting sunlight, as if there were a brush fire burning just outside of it, kindling, with its glare, the ceiling and the opposite wall. The carpeting on the floor undulant and ridged in places, as if misplaced by someone's lurching footsteps, or even an actual bodily fall or two, and then allowed to remain that way thereafter. A dark stain, crab-shaped, marring it in one spot, as if a considerable quantity of some heavy-bodied liquid had been overturned upon it.

Dank bed, that had once made a bridegroom blush; that would have made any fastidious person blush now, looking as if it had been untended for days. Graying linen receding from its skeleton on one side, overhanging it to trail the floor on the other. A single shoe, man's shoe, abandoned there beside it; as though the original impulse that had caused it to be removed, or else had caused its mate to be donned, had ebbed and faded before it could be carried to completion.

Forget-me-nots on pink wallpaper; wallpaper that had come from New York, wallpaper that had been asked for in a letter; "not too pink." There was a place where the plaster backing showed through in rabid scars; as if someone had taken a pair of shears and gouged at them in a rage, trying to obliterate as many as possible.

In the center of the still life a table. And on the table three immobile things. A reeking tumbler, mucous with endless refilling, and a bottle of brandy, and an inert head, crown-side up, matted hair bristling from it. Its nerveless body on an off-balance chair at tableside, one hand gripping the neck of the bottle in relentless possessiveness.

A tap at the door, but with no accompanying sound of approach, as though someone had been standing there for a long time, listening, trying to gain courage.

No answer, nothing moved.

Again a tap. A voice added to it this time.

"Mr. Lou. Mr. Lou, turn the key."

No answer. The head rolled a little, exposing a jawline pricked with bluish hair follicles.

Once more a tap.

"Mr. Lou, turn the key. It's been two days now."

The head broke contact with the table top, elevated itself a little, eyes still closed. "What are days ?" it said blurredly. "I've forgotten. Oh--those things that come between the nights. Those empty things."

The knob on the door turned sterilely. "Lemme in. Lemme just fraishen up your bed."

"It's just for me alone now. Let it be."

"Don't you want a light, at least? It getting dark. Lemme change the lamp in there for you."

"What can it show me? What's there to see? There's only me in here now. Me, and--"

He tilted the brandy bottle over the tumbler. Nothing came out. He held it perpendicular. Nothing still.

He rose from his chair, swung the bottle back to launch it at the wall. Then he stayed his arm, lowered it, shuffled to the door on one shoe, turned the key at last.