"I say, I don't want to be impertinent, you know." Thayre bent forward and spoke earnestly. "There are things a man doesn't like to have put up to him. But you aren't letting this knock you off your line, are you?

You aren't going to let it bowl you over?"

Again the tall man shook his head. "No, I'm quite all right," he said.

"I'm going fairly straight--so far."

Late that night a wet snow was falling and Madison square was almost deserted. Here and there in the Metropolitan and Flatiron buildings shone an isolated and belated window light. At the Garden a Wild West show with rings and side performances had long ago disgorged its crowds and quieted its pandemonium of brass bands. Len Haswell had been walking with the aimlessness of insomnia, and asking himself over and over one question: "What changed it all?" In answer he accused himself and argued the case for the woman without whom he was too lonely to go home and face an empty house.

It was after one o'clock and the saloon doors were barred, but as he passed a small place not far from the square, he saw a side door flap, and he entered it. It was an unprepossessing door, outwardly labeled, "ladies' entrance."

Haswell called for whiskey, and was served by a waiter in a spotted apron, whose dank hair fell over a sallow and oily face. Save for himself, there were only four other customers. In a corner partition a slovenly woman in bedraggled finery berated the man who sat with bloated eyes across from her. The waiter looked on sardonically. At another table were two derelicts from one of the Garden side shows. A truculent and beady-eyed dwarf whose face hardly showed above the boards was brow-beating a cringing giant of unbelievable immensity. "You crabbed my act, you big stiff," shrilled the midget truculently--and his huge vis-a-vis fell into a volume of excuse and apology.

Haswell set down his glass half-empty. "No good," he muttered as he rose and went out again into the streets. "One can't be alone." Yet he felt very much alone.

In these days Paul Burton found his thoughts turning often to Marcia Terroll and himself becoming more dependent on her companionship. In her sunny courage and sparkle of repartee he found a tonic exhilaration for his own jaded spirits and an antidote for growing morbidness. He knew that her daily rounds of the managers' offices were fruitless, and that she walked long distances to save nickels, and in his man's ignorance he marveled because her white gloves were always spotless and her appearance unmarked by poverty. With more money than he could use, his impulse clamored to volunteer assistance--and his judgment forbade the liberty. These days of growing intimacy were troubled days for him, too.

Loraine Haswell was away and her letters kept him reminded that the purpose of her exile was ridding herself of those encumbrances which stood between them. Yet in her absence, there was also the absence of her personal fascination, the daily renewal of her hold on his senses, and, strangely enough, he began to feel that instead of having barriers swept from the path of his love, he was being bound to a future marred by intervals of clouded misgiving.

The thought of Mary also brought him distress. There was no policy of ostrich-blind self-comfort by which he could escape from the realization that he was indirectly a party in responsibility for the destructive menace that hung over her happiness. His few attempts to discuss the subject with Hamilton had not been hopeful or pleasant, and he could not doubt that Edwardes would ultimately be swept into a chaos of ruin because he had opposed the irresistible onrush of his brother's power.

He sought to persuade himself of Hamilton's infallible wisdom and Mary's folly of infatuation, but the only certain conviction was that of a bruised and heavy heart in his own breast. Paul was pitiably weak, but, also, he was sensitively tender. Love he gave and commanded with the uncalculating quality of a child.

To Marcia he had not confided any word of his status with Mrs. Haswell, but her quick intuition told her he was deeply troubled--and her quicker sympathy responded. Sometimes Paul longed to see Loraine, but after each visit to the tiny apartment where Marcia Terroll and a girl who drew fashion illustrations had set up their household gods, the vision of his far-away Cleopatra grew a shade dimmer and a trifle more impersonal.

Bit by bit he had pieced together a few sketchy fragments of Miss Terroll's biography, just enough to make the wish for fuller knowledge tantalizing. That was her maiden name, also used as a stage name, but she had been married when just out of Wellesley. She spoke little of that episode. Her girlhood was a pleasanter theme and its environment had been that of his own world--full of the gaiety and sunshine that is girlhood's inalienable right. All these scraps of personal history filtered into their conversation; rather as incidentals than as direct information. This young woman was not of the type that gratuitously relates a life-story. That she had been left resourceless with a young daughter and had fought the world unaided and unembittered, herself retaining the seeming of a child, Paul now knew, but he knew all too little to satisfy his interest. She had been secretary in a business house and an interpreter of German and Spanish. Now she was the only actress he knew--untypical and unemployed.

Paul felt that in the presence of her superior mind and larger education he ought to be abashed, yet he was not, because when she laughed it was with the merriment of a gay child and when she was serious she was sweetly grave. Sometimes he played for her and sometimes she sang for him, and both did what they did so well that the critic in the other found no disappointment.

Unpremeditatedly and very naturally they had struck the basis of a dependable comradeship. She saw the occasional flash of genius in his musical creativeness and his need of practical attributes. To him she was something of a mystery. To her, save for his well-kept secret of loving Loraine, he was an easily read human document. She told him of her broader experiences, always tinging them with a delicious humor in the recital, which twisted into comedy what might have been related as little tragedies, and because she had seen so much of life, where he had seen so little, she was willing to recognize his lovable qualities and overlook his weaknesses.

But just as Paul did not talk much to her of his own affairs and the people of his set, so he did not talk with them of her.

At first she had interested him as an experiment; then as affording the possibility for a new type of adventure in friendship, and when he came to know her in that degree which represented their present association, he ceased to ask why she interested him, and only knew that she did.

Of late she had been unusually gay because of revival of hope. A part which she knew she could play had been half-promised her which would bring Broadway recognition and the chance to be judged on her merits.

More than that it would mean the possibility of bringing her small daughter back from the relatives who were playing parents in these days of uncertainty.

CHAPTER XXI

One gray and penetrating afternoon laid its depressing fingers on Paul Burton's heart with a heavier touch than usual. Even Hamilton was wearing a frowning and unsympathetic brow these days, and when the musician saw Mary, despite the inflexible courage of her eyes, there was something in them that hurt him to the quick. He knew and shared his mother's grief, but could not bear the trace of unshed tears in her voice. So, seeking asylum from the anxious ghosts that stalked between the walls of his house, he made his way down-town and rang the bell on Marcia Terroll's door. There are women men go to in triumph and women they go to when hurt. Often they are not the same women. It was a raw, bleak afternoon of disheartening drizzle and a reek of fog which veiled the tops of the taller buildings. As he waited for an answer to his ring, he could hear the fog-horn voice groaning over river and bay as though some huge monster were troubled in its sleep.

Then Marcia opened the door and as he made his way along the four-foot hall to the small living-room he discovered that she, too, was pale and distraite.

"What is it?" he demanded with that sympathy which always lay close to the surface of his nature. To his astonishment, the girl whose courage and composure had become the reliance of his own weakness dropped on the disguised cot and buried her face in her hands while her slim figure shook to her sobbing, among the cushions.

Paul stood embarrassed and perplexed. Then, moved by impulse, he crossed to the lounge and his hand fell with a gently caressing touch upon her arm. "Why, little girl," he remonstrated softly, "where is your gay bravery--what has happened?"

She sat up then and almost impatiently shook his hand away. After that she rose to her feet.

"That's just it," she declared, and for the first time in their acquaintanceship her eyes shone with an angry gleam, which quickly faded again into distress. Her tear-stained face confronted him accusingly "Everybody talks about my intelligence--and my courage. That's not what I want. I'm just human and I want a human chance."

"What sort of chance?" he asked in that vague distress which confuses a man and makes him stupid, at sight of a woman's tears.

She lifted her head defiantly. "A chance to work and live and be happy," she told him vehemently. "A chance to support my child and myself. They all praise me, but no one will hire me. I'm tired of fighting--unspeakably tired." Once more her face went into the support of the two small hands and her body shook.

"But your part in the new piece--don't you get it?" he questioned.

"They gave it to another woman," she told him faintly between her fingers. "A woman who--who is the friend of the author."

Heretofore Paul had always felt a half-submerged diffidence with Marcia, such a partially acknowledged deference as one accords to another who has drunk deeper of life and more extensively built wisdom from experience. With her his easy pose of acknowledged genius that passed current in the drawing-rooms lost its assurance, and with her he was at his best because most natural. But this was a new Marcia, a Marcia whose delicate, childlike face was stamped with grief; a child in distress and a child who needed comforting. Just as once before, when there was no escape, Paul had fought the Marquess kid and had been astonished at the ease of battle, so now an impulse seized him and he found himself acting without premeditation. He was the man looking on at the tears of a woman, and a woman whose laughter had often been his comfort.

Instinctively he folded her in his arms and kissed the soft hair which was all that showed itself of the bowed head and hidden face.

Now when for the first time he held her close to him he felt a tremor of sobs run through the slender figure. His pulses heightened their tempo as he became conscious of the soft palpitation of her shoulders and bosom.

Sympathy, he thought, actuated him. He took the averted face between his hands and raised it gently, but with a strong pressure until the tear-stained eyes were looking into his own.

Her lips were very petal-like and her eyes were very dewy and on each cheek bloomed a spot of color heightened by the pallor of the moment.

Paul Burton at the instant forgot Loraine Haswell, the prize of his brother's grand larceny for his pleasure, forgot that this woman was no more than his Platonic friend and remembered only that her chin rested in his hand and that his arm encircled her, as he bent his head and pressed his lips against the mouth that trembled.

He did not think of the demonstration as necessarily loverlike. His nature was instinctive, not analytical, but suddenly there swept into the utterly lonely and battle-weary eyes of the woman, who was _not_ a child, a smile of happiness and comfort which parted her lips, so that her face reminded him of sudden sunshine flashing into rainbow hope through an April shower. He could feel the heart fluttering wildly in her breast, and at once he knew that to her his kiss had meant an avowal of love--that in her code there was no place for light or unmeaning caresses.

He rose and his face paled. The indecisiveness which never dared to grasp the thistle firmly was troubling him with a new dilemma. Yet something in Marcia Terroll made a call upon him which no other woman had yet made--the call to be honest at all cost.

With his averted face toward the window, in a forced and level voice, not daring to meet her eyes, he told her almost all there was to tell about Loraine Haswell. The new spark of manhood she had awakened in him made him silent on one point. He said nothing of his own doubts; his own wonder whether after all he loved or wanted Loraine. Just now he fancied he wanted Marcia Terroll.

When the recital reached its end he stood for a space gazing into the fog which seemed an emblem of his own life. He was waiting for her to speak, but the silence remained unbroken. At last he turned and saw her sitting there no longer tearful, only a little stunned.

"I couldn't lie to you," he protested in a hurried utterance as he came over and knelt on the floor at her side. "Not to you.... Of course, you know that I love you very dearly as a man loves his rarest friends....

You know what our comradeship means to me--"

With an impulsive forward sweep of her hands she interrupted him and her voice was burdened with deep pain and heart-ache.

"Don't!" she pleaded, and the monosyllable was like a cry. "Oh, don't!"

Then after a little while she went on slowly: "You are a romanticist, Paul, and a dreamer. Some day you will wake up. We all do."

"It was better to tell you, dear, wasn't it? It would have been unfair--"

She bowed her head wearily as though realizing the futility of expecting him to understand. "Yes, I suppose so, only--"

He waited a moment, then prompted:

"Only what?"