A woman of honor

Contents

A DUET BY WAY OF OVERTURE THE DISTURBING ELEMENT

AN INITIAL INDISCRETION .

THE OLD LEAVEN WORKS

Chapter I. A Duet By Way Of Overture

HE soft warm sunshine of the spring afternoon filtered through blue window shades, and filled the studio with a tender twilight. It was a long and lofty room, the walls of dark wood and the ceiling covered with cloudy dim frescoes. The heavy portiéres were of dull Eastern reds and browns; and from the brass rod serving as railing to the gallery which ran the whole length of the room depended deep-dyed curtains. All the light that entered the room came from the three windows above this gallery, and of two of these only the arched tops were visible over the high-hung draperies. The centre window was at the top of the little flight of stairs, and from this one an azure radiance streamed down upon the rug spread in the middle of the waxed floor, where Jack Carnegie stood by his easel, trifling with his new picture, with Cecil Kent at his side silently contemplating Lear and Cordelia with a coldly critical eye,

‘¢ Well?” said Carnegie, laying down his brush and looking for spots of varnish on his purple velvet jacket.

‘¢ Well! ’’ said Kent, in the non-committal tone that always exasperated his friend. ‘

‘¢ Damnable, I suppose?”’

‘*No,’’ replied Kent: ° fair.’’

Kent never drawled ; he spoke with singular clearness and precision; but there was a deliberation in his pauses and a certain cold evenness in his enunciation which made people think that he drawled. He spoke little, but his speech went a great way.

Jack Carnegie sometimes drawled and sometimes rattled. He rattled now.

‘*Chiar’oscuro all wrong —light bad — drawing defective, eh? I’m no painter, am I?”

‘¢No,’’ Kent said placidly ; ‘‘ but you’re not half a bad critic.”’

Carnegie changed his tactics.

*¢ Seriously, Cecil, how is it?”’

Kent’s cold voice suddenly became frank and hearty, as he replied, — ,

‘¢ Tt is a good piece of work, old fellow.”

He clapped an approving palm on his friend’s shoulder. Carnegie’s handsome young face beamed with delight. He stroked his moustache and ran his hand through his curly hair. He was proud of Cecil Kent’s good opinion; and he had reason to be. But he felt that, although he was pleased, he must not forget to be cynical; for he was quite an accomplished cynic.

A DUET BY WAY OF OVERTURE. 3

There was an undertone of grateful complacency in his voice; but he only said, —

‘¢ Lear is a good subject for a fellow who is strong on beards — beards and character, and that sort of thing. But what a precious old ass he was, to treat that nice girl in that absurd style! Do you know, I’ve got more or less of an idea, since I’ve been studying him up, that Lear was an old fraud ? ”

Kent laughed.

‘¢ Tf you look at him from a realistic standpoint, perhaps he 7s rather an absurdity — trotting around the country and conversing with thunderstorms.”’

‘¢T’m speaking seriously, though. I don’t quite

see the grandeur in his character.”’ » * Well, he certainly might have talked less and done more. But I say, Jack, where did you get your Cordelia? Mists no model. Face seems familiar to me, too.’

‘“No,”’ replied Carnegie, feablate for nothing in his color-box; ‘‘she was a—a sort of — er— inspiration.”

Kent looked long and hard at the sweet face on the canvas. Carnegie had painted a new Cordelia. It was not the regulation blonde woman, with a great deal of hair and no glimmer of expression. This girl had dusky hair drawn close about her fine head, and the brown eyes looked up from the dying man’s face as though they had gazed until another glance would bring tears, and in them was something more than a child’s love or a woman’s tenderness; there was the light of the courage that bears, and the devotion that sacrifices self.

Poor Jack Carnegie was no great painter, and his friend knew it. He would have been a great painter had he conceived that face. He understood his business, though, and Kent could have sworn, as he looked, that the artist had merely put on canvas something that was set before him. Perhaps he did not even know how well he had done that ; or, knowing so much, did not know how much it was to do.

Kent knew also what woman’s face Carnegie had copied. He had the technical knowledge to see through the artist’s flimsy efforts at disguise. Indeed, there is nothing unusual in a man’s choosing his model from among his friends. What more natural than that a young lady should sit to Mr. John Carnegie, or lend him her photograph, in the cause of art? Nor was it strange that Mr. John Carnegie, being an artist, and therefore vain, should hesitate to acknowledge his obligations to nature. It was not consideration of these points that brought the look of perplexity to Kent’s hard features. This face in the picture was for any one’s painting ; but where and when had the face thus revealed the woman’s soul to John Carnegie? Kent frowned as he turned away from the easel.

‘¢ Have you been making any calls lately? ”

There had been a pause ; but somehow this question seemed to spring out of the query Kent had put before. Carnegie evidently felt this, for he answered

A DUET BY WAY OF OVERTURE. 5 with an affectation of formality that was more snappish than jocose, —

‘¢ T don’t go into ‘ society,’ Mr. Kent.”

‘¢ The fact,’’ said Kent quietly, ‘‘ is self-evident, Mr. Carnegie.”

When Kent chose to be sarcastic or cynical, Carnegie felt himself a mere amateur at the business. He now leaped from cynicism to extravagance.

‘¢' You mean that I’m a boor,”’ he said, marching excitedly up and down the room, while Kent, seated in an easy-chair, followed him with calm eyes. ‘¢ Well, ’d rather be a boor than a humbug. See here, Kent, you know the hollowness and worthlessness of this ‘ society’ just as well as I do. You don’t believe that this world is all sweetness and light, any more than I do. You are just as much of a sceptic as I am.”

‘Tam. Why not?”

Kent always treated these misanthropic outbursts of his friend with a chilly yet amused contempt.

‘¢ Why not? Because you bow down to the god of ‘society,’ knowing him to be a miserable old fetich. You see all the nonsense of conventionality, and yet you’re always ready to go in for it.”’

eam, Why not?” .Then Kent rose, and spoke with more warmth, while he slowly walked to the picture on the easel and looked at it once more with unsatisfied eyes. ‘‘If I doubt all the world, why make an exception in my own case as the one genuine individual in a universe of shams? Besides, I'm not cut out for a picturesque cynic. IfI werea romantic Apollo, with a poetic eye and classic features, I should have my little love affair, retire from the world, and pose as an interesting hermit with a blighted heart and a purple velvet jacket.”

Carnegie moved uneasily. '

‘¢ Oh, I dare say you’ve forgotten the love affair,” Kent went on, ‘‘and replaced the heart by this time.”

Carnegie did not answer. He affected to be busy in arranging the contents of a huge antique chest of drawers, and he made much rattling among ivory chessmen and little clay lamps and old paperweights and other trifles. Kent said no more; but lit a cigarette and smoked peacefully, staring at Cordelia on the canvas.

This had for a long time been a sore point between the two friends, this question of their widely differing attitude to what Jack Carnegie sometimes pronounced with a slangy irreverence, ‘‘ sassiety.” Yet each man looked at the institution after his own natural way, and it would have been fairly impossible to bring them together by any force of argument or gentle persuasion. ‘Their positions in life were absolutely opposed to each other. Jack Carnegie was a plutocrat in distress. Cecil Kent was a Bohemian in good luck.

This is speaking broadly. Jack Carnegie’s distress was for hundreds of thousands of dollars ; Cecil Kent’s luck was to be measured by tens of thousands. Both were of nearly the same class; aristocrats, so far as Americans can trouble them-

A DUET BY WAY OF OVERTURE. q selves to belong to any special class. They both had grandfathers, local habitations and names of some value when they were born. But Cecil Kent, when no more than a boy, had to forget his grandfather, change his home, and make a name for himself in a small new world where money is good only for what it will buy, and where birth does nothing whatever for a man, save to give him breath.

In that hard school he had prospered, after a fashion, and, at the end of fifteen years of hard work, he had shown that he could make a decent living, and earn the respect of his fellow-craftsmen, when a series of deaths set in in the old Kent family, and his grandfather’s estate came back to Cecil Charles Van Wart Kent, and he found himself in possession of the old Kent homestead, up the Hudson, and the old Kent acres, many and well-farmed, and the revenues therefrom accruing and to accrue. He was not, perhaps, a rich man; but he was a man well off in a most substantial way, and he had much more money than he cared to spend.

For the change in his fortunes made little change in his way of life. He gave up editorial writing on his newspaper, ceased to work at night, thereby getting a little color into his sallow cheeks, and dropped into the place of the ‘‘man who did the art,’ when that man went West to ‘‘run’’ a mining paper in Denver. In his new position he found room for the ambition half-stifled by years of potboiling drudgery. He showed himself more than a man who could ‘‘do’’ such art-writing as must be done in New York; he was an art-critic, who suddenly became a most important man in his employers’ eyes when they found him a valued contributor to the great magazines, and a correspondent of the foreign art journals. But, for the rest, he was the same quiet, steady, plodding professional newspaper man who had earned his forty or fifty dollars a week in the city room or the editorial department for ten years and more.

This was Kent’s professional life, which he kept very much to himself, rightly considering that he alone was deeply interested in it. His social life had always been the same, excepting in the days when he had not money enough to buy a dress-coat, or, if the dress-coat were once bought, to keep it out of passive employment as a collateral security for forced loans. In those days he wore a sack-coat, and left his work only to drink beer in the queer boarding-houses or shabby ‘‘ furnished rooms” where his good friends and co-laborers lived. When he could do better, he divided his leisure fairly between these good friends and those less sincere acquaintances who asked him to their houses because he was ‘‘a Kent,’’ and because they dealt socially with the other Kents who could brave it out with purple and fine linen, and solid silver and dusty wine-cellar bins.

He did not flatter those people; he did not seek them out; he only went where he was asked, and made himself agreeable in his negative and taciturn way. If they had questioned him where his heart

A DUET BY WAY OF OVERTURE. 9 was, he would have told them that the poor beer drunk with clever and warm-hearted men and women was sweeter to his taste than all the old family sherry that was ever set on solid mahogany for rich noodles to wax garrulous over. But society never put this question to him; never suspecting that this world contained anything better than it had to offer the poor fellow who was entertained because his grandfather had entertained others.

And if, in his own dear Bohemia, they asked Kent why he bothered himself with dinners and parties and receptions, he told them that he did it ‘* to keep his hair short ;’’ and the subtle significance of his answer was well understood.

Altogether, Cecil Kent was a queer character, and nobody quite understood him. Whereas Jack Carnegie was a simpler study.

He was born rich, and he had lived extravagantly and happily until, in the same year, he lost his lady-love and his fortune. His lady-love took a fancy to another man, and his father speculated in stocks, lost his own money, and blew out his brains rather than touch the money he held in trust; an act of self-denial for which the world gave his memory no credit whatever.

These things — and, it is only fair to say, the last most of all—made Jack Carnegie a cynic. He also became a professional artist. He had been an amateur daubster of great fame, and when he found himself lovelorn and moneyless, he set him down to work to learn his art in an honest fashion, and succeeded as he deserved. In five years he had made himself well known as a ‘‘ rising young artist ;” he was a popular painter, and he made money. He lost no time in showing society that he scorned it, lest it might steal a march on him and scorn him ; and society, being scorned, at once became subservient and obsequious, and rushed to his handsome studio, and bought his pictures. This enabled him to make the studio more handsome, and to set a higher price on the pictures, and to indulge more freely than ever in lofty sarcasm; and, in short, he had a very good time of it, for a man to whom Fate had been unkind.

But he never quite got over the fact that Cecil Kent, his best friend, his chum, his side-partner, refused to take his own picturesquely gloomy view of life, and insisted upon wearing the patent-leather shoes of conventionality on his way through the world.

Kent usually listened to Jack’s extravagant deliverances with great patience and good-nature ; but occasionally, as in this instance, he hit back with a few amiably sarcastic remarks said in a bitter way.

The silence in the great room was broken by a faint knock at the door.

‘¢ What’s that?’ inquired Kent, for Carnegie was still arranging statuettes and brass candiesticks on his shelves, and putting bits of pottery in new positions, unheeding the noise at his portal.

‘¢Oh,’? he answered carelessly, ‘‘ it’s only some premature nuisance, too early for the reception, Don’t let it in.”

A DUET BY WAY OF OVERTURE. 11

‘¢Recepticn! Is there a reception here to-day?”

‘¢Of course. It’s the regular day? Didn’t you know that we have Fridays in this building?”

‘‘T have a dim remembrance of fighting crowds here last year. Perhaps I’d better retreat before the irruption of Goths and Vandals. Do you expect any one in particular?”

‘« No-o-o,’’ drawled Jack, in a somewhat constrained manner: ‘* Bob Swift, of course.”’

“That goes without saying,” Kent laughed: ‘he’s in the wake of every petticoat except his wife’s.”

Bob Swift’s wife was the young woman who had . jilted Carnegie five years before. But, as Kent had said, the lost heart had been replaced once or twice since then ; and the love affair was so thoroughly forgotten that Carnegie was neither glad nor sorry, but simply indifferent, when he saw the girl who had thrown him over learning in lonely bitterness of heart to repent the folly of marrying a man who made it the object of his life to cut other men out.

** Y wish Swift wouldn’t select my studio for his flirtation-ground,’’ observed the artist carelessly : ‘but Pil bet he’ll be on hand with the most conspicuous girl he can find in the city of New York. Then, of course, we'll have old Krauss, to tell me that a ‘shendleman frient’ of his wants to buy a ‘leedle bickshur,’ and he had thought of ‘ dot leedle drifle’ of mine. And Mrs. Smith promised to look in —”

Kent gave something like a groan. Mrs. Smith was a rich, young and showy widow, who did not like the name her husband had left her — in the first place, because it seemed incongruous with the ruling passion of her life, which she always declared was the love of plot, mystery and intrigue, and in the second place, because she preferred the name of Kent.

‘¢ Yes, Mrs. Smith,’’ Carnegie went on, ‘‘ and the Belchers, and the Reynoldses, and the McGilligaskie girls, and — oh, yes — Miss Ruthven.”

His voice had dropped throughout his speech, which ended in an unnaturally careless and scarcely audible drawl.

But Kent heard what he said.

‘¢ Oh,” he repeated dryly, ‘‘ Miss Ruthven.”

‘¢ Ya-as,’’ assented Jack from the depths of a huge cabinet; ‘‘ well, good-by, old fellow! ”’

‘¢ Eh?” inquired Kent, who had sat down again.

*¢ Oh, I beg your pardon,”’ and Carnegie turne from the cabinet; ‘‘ I thought you were going. ”

Kent was again staring at the picture.

‘* That’s a fine Cordelia,” he said, and looked hard at his friend.

Chapter II. The Disturbing Element

ARNEGIE made no response. There are mo- G) ments of constraint between friends the awkwardness of which increases in direct ratio to the warmth of the friendship. Here was a suspicion of secrecy, of unavowed purposes, between these two men. Had they been mere acquaintances it would have been of no moment whatever. There was nothing tangible in the way of a grievance; it was only the fact that such a suspicion was an abnormal thing in their relations that made every trifle big with possibilities of serious trouble.

There was nothing for Carnegie to do but to repress a slight feeling of annoyance, and to turn the subject as delicately as he might. Fortunately, both men had plenty of tact; and that valuable possession had not rusted since they had been in Bohemia.

‘¢ How do you like the detail of the thing?” he asked ; ‘‘ just observe the way I get my Fool in the shadow there, for a sort of a— a — subdued element in the picture.”

“¢ It’s a good idea.”

‘¢ And I tried to make something of the Fool, too— although he is so subordinate. Character in that face, eh?”

‘¢ Lots. Whose character?”

Carnegie smiled.

‘¢ Why, Cadougan Megilp’s, of course.”

‘¢ What, that queer model of yours? Have you engaged him permanently?”

‘¢T have. He is now my model, and valet, and handy man in general.’’

‘¢ By the way, where did he get that name of his? Did he ‘ absorb’ it, like the rest of his art?”

‘s No, his name was McGowan ; but he never liked it, and one night when old Rogers — he’s the man who goes in for stained-glass saints —old Rogers came home one night in a fine state of old mellow medizval intoxication, and broke a bottle of beer over his head, just as you might across the bow of a ship, and christened him Megilp, and he clung to the name, and it has clung to him.”

This formal conversation was Be wearisome. Kent sought a diversion.

‘¢Where is he? Trot him out, can’t you, Jack, and show him up before the people come?” *

‘¢ Certainly, ’”’ replied his friend ; and called, ‘‘Mecilp! Megilp!”

There was no answer.

‘¢T’m sure the beggar’s up there in the gallery. He sleeps there, and he sleeps most of the time.— Megilp!”

There was no sound from the gallery. Carnegie looked puzzled, and then his face cleared.

‘¢ Oh, he’s the Fool at present. He doesn’t recognize his own identity when he is in the service of art. — Hither, sweet Fool!”

They heard high above them the creaking of a truckle-bed, a loud masculine yawn, and then a tall thin man appeared at the head of the staircase and looked down at them.

He was in his shirt-sleeves, but his legs were clad, not in. trousers, but in the parti-colored trunks and hose of the Fool.

‘¢ He'll keep that trash on,” muttered Carnegie, ‘¢ until I make him take it off.”

Megilp came slowly down the stairs, looking halfawake.

‘¢ Megilp!” said his master, sharply.

‘¢ Nuncle!” returned the conscientious impersonator of the Fool; and then he remembered himself, and added, ‘‘ Sir?”

‘¢ Megilp, I think you have played the Fool long enough. Art is an absorbing mistress; but she sometimes absorbs too much of your important personality. Now, if you can remember who you are, you will oblige me by putting this room to rights before the people come ; and then you will return to the garments of civilization, and appear clothed and in your right mind.”

‘* Yes, nuncle —sir!” said the obedient Megilp.

Then he found a feather-duster. and set about brushing the powdery deposit from such articles as his profane hands were permitted to touch. Kent began to ‘‘ interview’ him in journalistic fashion.

‘¢Mr. Carnegie has just completed a very fine picture, Megilp.”

‘‘T think we have made a success, sir,” replied Megilp, dusting busily; ‘‘ I think, indeed, that we have surpassed ourself. When I first began to get into the Fool, sir, to absorb him as it were, I had my doubts about the success of the impersonation. But it took, sir, it took. In the language of a kindred art, I became inoculated with the Fool.”

‘¢ T suppose your collaboration counts for a great deal in the success of Mr. Carnegie’s pictures, doesn’t tae

‘¢That’s not for me to say, sir,’ was the modest reply; ‘‘ but I may safely say that I am thus far important; the picture ain’t no good without me.”

‘¢ Now, Kent,” Carnegie interposed, ‘‘ you’ve set that fellow off, and there’ll be no stopping him.”

Megilp turned a look of wounded pride on the speaker.

‘¢ As I remarked before, sir, it is not for me to say ; but —-”? and he dropped his voice to a confidential tone and addressed Kent: ‘‘I leave it to you, sir, which has the reel art onto his shoulders — me, who have to get up the character all solid -and lifelike, or him, who has just to paint what I give him.”

‘¢ We'll admit that the credit belongs to you, Mr. Megilp. And of course you have had a good deal of experience in this line?”

‘‘My experience as a model, sir, ranges away over twenty years. Ihave sot for Huntington, sir, and Weir, and Lootz, and all them old-timers. But they hadn’t raised the model business to the dignity of an art. That’s come up of late years entirely. That was done by the German school — them beery, palette-knife, bitumen-sloshers from Munich. They daub, mebbe, but they’re big artists.”

‘You must be a walking compendium of American art, Mr. Megilp.”

‘¢ Mr. Kent,” said the queer man, solemnly pausing in his work and crossing his gaudily attired legs as he leaned against a table and spoke with impressively uplifted forefinger, ‘‘ I have stood and sot, sir, stood and sot for American art from the ‘ Irish Emigrant’ to ‘ Judas Iscariot.’ You remember our ‘Trish Emigrant’ ” — and with a wave of his hand he included Mr. Carnegie in the partnership — * in the Academy of ’72 —‘ I’m sittin’ on the stoile, Mary !’”

Here he paused to throw his leg over a chair, dropping into a posture that suggested a man seated ona stile. ‘There was actually a faint touch of Irish brogue in his voice as he said proudly, —

‘¢ It was a fine piece of work —knee-breeches and ribbed stockings, with a plush waistcoat, and a pipe stuck in my hat—a felt hat. That picture was an eight-hundred-dollarer, and it was only twelve-bynine. ”

‘¢ T saw it,’’ said Kent.

*¢ Oh, but you didn’t see my ‘Judas Iscariot,’ ” the model went on, waxing enthusiastic; ‘‘ they wasted that on some scratch exhibition out in Cincinnati. I could show you ‘ Judas Iscariot’ now if I had the beard —andthe remorse. Remorse ain’t to be worked up on short notice. It requires concentration.”’

The man’s quaint chatter had put the two friends at their ease. Carnegie laughed outright when Kent gravely asked, —

‘‘Tf I may be allowed to pry into the hallowed secrets of your art, Mr. Megilp, what do you regard as your masterpiece ?”’

Megilp never dreamed that any one was making fun of him. He bent a serious brow on the consideration of this question.

‘¢ Well, sir,” he said at last, dubiously, ‘‘ I once throwed myself on a ‘ Bohemian Beggar ;’ but most connysoors give the pam to my ‘ Bedouin Chief’ — there is more action into it. ‘’Tis false, ’tis false, my Arab steed; I fling them back their go-hold!’” and with an expression of unspeakable scorn on his face, Mr. Megilp flung away an imaginary purse and grasped the crupper of an imaginary mount.

Even Kent’s grave features relaxed. Megilp came | to himself. He looked a trifle hurt and annoyed, but he had the air of a man who has long been accustomed to receiving ridicule with the calm and dignified contempt of unperturbed self-confidence ; and perhaps he forbore to express his sense of wrong, from a knowledge that it might spoil a rare chance to talk. Next to his art, Megilp prided himself upon his conversation.

‘¢In my softer moments,”’ he went on, with a pleasant melancholy in his tone, ‘‘I have even done a little in the feminine line. I have posed for a‘ Gitana.’ My ‘ Gitana’ was a reminiscence.”

‘¢ She was a fluke, you mean,” put in Carnegie.

‘¢ She was a reminiscence,” repeated Megilp ; *‘ in my early youth I was attached to a Gitana. She was attached to an J-talian. He was attached to a hand-organ. I disputed her affections with the minstrel. Hence the present want of balance about my nose”’— and he pointed toa slight deflection in the true line of that organ. ‘‘ He was the only J-talian I ever knew who could box. He boxed with his foot.”’

Megilp sighed over the memory; and Carnegie advanced and stopped any further exhibition of his peculiarities.

‘¢ Look here! I shall want you to get all these ‘Lear’ traps out of the way. Iam going to begin something new to-morrow. Oh, it’s a beastly thing,” Carnegie continued, in explanation to Kent; ‘‘a commission from Chicago. By Jove, Cecil, they want me to paint an ‘ Assassination of Julius Cesar’ — I swear they do. Ifit ever gets back to New York it will ruin me; but it’s got tobe done. Chicago taste I don’t admire, but Chicago shekels speak eloquently; and ’m going in for Julius Cesar to-morrow morning.’

‘¢ Am I to absorb Ceesar, sir?’ inquired Megilp.

‘¢T shall want you for the slaughter.”

‘*¢T hope,” ventured Kent, ‘‘ that you will absorb to your own satisfaction — and Ceesar’s.”’

Megilp retired slowly and grandly to his gallery, after Carnegie had given him a great brown paper parcel of Roman robes, hired from the nearest costumer.

When he was gone there was once more an awkward pause. Both Kent and Carnegie felt that there - was need of an explanation, a clearing-up between them —a need all the more pressing that it could not well be defined. In another moment, perhaps, one or the other would have spoken, had not a knock been heard at the door —a knock, this time, that had an assured force about it that spoke of a wellaccredited visitor.

‘¢ Come in! ’’ Carnegie shouted.

The door opened, and Cordelia stood on the threshold.

‘¢Mr. Ruthven —”’ said Carnegie.

‘¢ Miss Ruthven —” said Kent.

‘¢We’re early, but I felt—-ah— sure you’d admit us,” remarked Mr. Ruthven, tripping in after his daughter, and looking the most faultless middleaged gentleman who ever honored art with his patronage. His dress was neat with a beautiful masculine neatness ; his thin gray whiskers were even and smoothly combed; there was a refined repose upon his delicate features ; from his perfectly fitting gaiters to his perfectly parted hair, there was no spot or space amiss on him. If it had been Mr. Ruthven’s whole aim and object in life to disarm all possible criticism of his personal appearance, he could not have made a better effect in his externals than he did make. And everybody knew that he kept the inside of the cup and platter correspondingly clean. They were empty perhaps, but that was quite another matter. So long as the literal injunetion is obeyed, why should society trouble itself about spiritual responsibilities? Mr. Ruthven was rich ; Mr. Ruthven was well-born; Mr. Ruthven was a great patron of art. If any one said that Mr. Ruthven’s wife had died of a heart broken by his polite neglect — why, society shrugged its charitable shoulders, and wondered how people could disseminate scandal in that cruel and wholly unnecessary way.

‘¢ Yes,” repeated Mr. Ruthven — he had a trick of repeating his sentences; ‘‘ we felt sure you’d admit us.”’