"But you would want this woman you--intend to get to be a suffragist, wouldn't you?"

"Not under any circ.u.mstances!"

"Still, your marriage is to be on an up-to-date common-sense, scientific basis: can it be unless you and your wife stand on equal terms?"

"I never saw such a girl to ask questions," Cosden protested almost petulantly. "You must have been going to woman's suffrage meetings all winter."

Merry laughed outright. Her triumph was too obvious not to be enjoyed; but she quickly checked herself.

"I have been very rude," she said contritely; "but what you said so completely destroys the vision which every girl has in her heart that I couldn't resist the temptation to tease you. No, Mr. Cosden; I'm not a suffragist, and I never attended a public meeting in my life. Mother thinks I'm too young to enter into such things; but I've read a good deal, and I can't see why, in this scientific age, men and women shouldn't stand side by side at the ballot-box as well as elsewhere. For myself, I'm not quite ready for it, but I admit that it is nothing but sentiment--a holding on to a bit of old-fashioned precedent if you like--which holds me back. It seems to mar that vision I just spoke of, Mr. Cosden, even as your ideas completely destroy it."

She was in earnest now, and the girlish, mischievous att.i.tude had completely vanished. Her grasp upon the tiller tightened, her eyes looked far ahead and Cosden knew that in this mood she would have welcomed a young typhoon--anything to struggle with, rather than the smooth lapping of the water against the sides of the boat as the light wind bore them tranquilly on toward their landing. Even to him, unaccustomed as he was to the finer sensibilities which expressed themselves in every feature of the girl's face, the surging thoughts which forced so tense a silence commanded silence in his own response.

It was the closest he had ever come into a woman's inner shrine, and instinctively he respected it.

It was her own movement--a brushing back of a strand of hair which the breeze had loosened and blown across her face--which finally broke the tension, but her eyes did not drop. Still looking far ahead of her she spoke again, but the words seemed addressed more to herself than to her companion.

"I can't bear to give that vision up," she said quietly, "and yet I never expect to see it realized."

"Tell me what it is," Cosden urged as she paused. "Visions aren't exactly in my line, but perhaps you can make me see this one."

"It's silly of me; you wouldn't be interested, of course."

"But I am," he insisted. "Please go on."

"Well," the girl said consciously, "since you have confided your creed to me, I'll tell you what my vision is,--but you mustn't laugh at it for it means a great deal to me."

"I promise--cross my heart," Cosden replied.

"In this vision each one of us atoms, man or woman, has a distinct individuality, and each atom is intended to express its own individuality alone and in its own way unless two atoms become joined together by laws of natural attraction. In that case these two continue on their way together, each strengthened by the combination, and thus enabled to express their joint individuality as neither could do alone.

But love must be the crucible, Mr Cosden. Common-sense won't merge them, science won't do it. The two atoms can't be made into one without the crucible."

They were almost at the "Princess" landing now, and Merry gave her full attention to her duties as skipper. As the boatman took possession, Cosden a.s.sisted her onto the landing and they walked slowly up the stone steps. At the top she turned to him suddenly, the brightest of smiles replacing her former seriousness. Cosden marveled at the rapidity with which her mood changed.

"That's my vision, Mr. Cosden," she said simply; "don't think it too foolish. I must have some guide just as you have your daily creed. I haven't confidence in myself, but I do believe in my subject, and you tell me that I have enthusiasm. Please let that atone."

"But that vision of yours--" Cosden demanded doubtfully. "You asked me if all men regard marriage as I do; let me ask you if all women have that vision, as you call it."

"I suppose they have. If not, why should they give up their independence?"

"I thought all women wanted to marry--"

"That is where _you_ are not up-to-date, Mr. Cosden," she laughed.

"Perhaps the woman you--intend to get has no vision; if so, it will be that much easier. But she must be poor, Mr. Cosden,--you really mustn't take advantage of her!"

XVII

Huntington pa.s.sed an uncomfortable half hour after watching Merry and Cosden start off on their sailing-trip, and he was glad to have Edith Stevens break in upon his unprofitable self-communion. Cosden had put into words a fact which until then Huntington had stubbornly refused to acknowledge: he had actually reached a point where he heartily disapproved of his friend. Connie had said it, and the realization that what he said was true shook the long-established friendship to the core.

As he a.n.a.lyzed the case Huntington found it difficult to explain why this complete change in conditions should suddenly have taken place.

Cosden was no different from what he had been during all these years of their intimacy. In fact, he knew no one among his friends who was so absolutely consistent in conducting his life in accord with principles established before their friendship began. Others had commented on Cosden's commercial instincts, and Huntington always defended him, yet now these same traits caused him to criticise his friend even more severely than those whose att.i.tude he had previously thought unwarranted.

The change, then, Huntington concluded was in himself rather than in Cosden; and from this point he tried to discover what that change really was. What had their relations been during these years? They had never come together in any business way, and Huntington now for the first time wondered why it would not have been natural for Cosden to turn over to his office some of his frequent cases in litigation. It had not previously occurred to him that he might have expected it, but now he wondered. This in itself was evidence that his friend did not consider him seriously in the practice of his profession. The real fact was that they had played together, and that their intimacy had stopped at that point. Huntington now recalled that in gratifying those characteristics which found enjoyment in music, art or literature he instinctively sought the companionship of other friends, and the same a.n.a.lysis revealed to him that Cosden had done likewise in turning to other and more kindred spirits in living that part of his life with which his friend had little sympathy. It had all happened so naturally that Huntington had never realized until now that in spite of their intimacy there was a side to each man's life into which the other never entered.

This was the explanation as Huntington thought it out, and the fact that it could be explained at all gave promise of readjustment. The present situation did not require any change in the relations of the two friends. It had been precipitated by the accidental pulling aside of a curtain which revealed a picture Huntington must always have known was there, but at which he had always steadfastly refused to look. The mistake came when Cosden insisted that he peer behind the curtain, and became intensified when he permitted himself to be drawn into that side of his friend's life in which he should have known he had no part. The friendship need be in no way affected: simply restore the old relations, use greater discretion in keeping them within the bounds which Nature had prescribed for them, and all would be as before.

Huntington abhorred an enigma because when once focused in his mind a mental impossibility was created to rid himself of it. He found it lurking behind his _Transcript_ in the evening, it tried to crystallize itself in the smoke of his last pipe before retiring, it flirted with him coyly over his coffee-cup the next morning. Until the figment became a reality and was dismissed it was a haunting menace to his peace of mind. Now that he had discovered an explanation of his disapproval of Connie and had found the antidote, that particular enigma was disposed of, and he should have been free to resume his normal state; but to his further discomfiture this was just what he found he could not do. He had cut off one of the Hydra's heads, but others remained which spat at him viciously.

Why was it that Cosden's att.i.tude caused him such peculiar annoyance at this particular time? Had he been entirely straightforward with his friend, had he been quite frank in answering Hamlen's question regarding Merry's resemblance to her mother? Huntington's disgust with himself at that first slip became intensified by its repet.i.tion. He recalled De Quincey's arraignment of the murderer on the ground that murder so dulls the sensibilities that it is an easy step from this to falsehood.

Huntington, with his Puritan ancestry, would have allowed himself to be torn by wild horses before he would deliberately tell an untruth, yet here, on two separate occasions, he had undeniably juggled with the facts.

When Cosden suggested that there might be some deeper reason for his objections he promptly and equivocably denied the implication that he had any interest in Merry beyond that of an older friend; yet he now knew that the denial was absolutely false. What he told Cosden was what ought to be the case rather than what the case really was. This was his secret, and he had protected it in the easiest way, which as usual was a cowardly subterfuge. The fact that he had made a misstatement or that he had a secret to conceal had come to him only during this period of self-communion since the little sloop sailed away, leaving him alone with his reflections. What he said to Cosden, that he was equally unsuited to Merry and that he was old enough to be her father, expressed the cold, hard facts; but he needed no second-sight to tell himself that during these days of companionship, such as he had never before known, the girl's sweet personality had penetrated the sham armor of the cynic, and that he was face to face with an emotion far deeper than any he had experienced from time to time in his library, in front of that table with its curious exhibits, with the stage-like accessories of the albatross-stem pipe and the flickering light from the burning logs. How tinsel-like it all seemed to him now, compared with this flesh-and-blood experience in the open air, with its glorious setting of the sea and the beautiful island foliage!

He had reached this point in his mental activities when he saw Miss Stevens approaching, and he greeted her cordially. Face to face with this latest revelation, he disliked his own company. His responsibilities, which had seemed terrifying to him so short a time before, now appeared insignificant compared with the new responsibility with which he had saddled himself. He thought little at this moment of the burdens imposed upon him by Mrs. Thatcher, by Cosden, or by Billy: he must now protect the girl against himself, and that would be the hardest task of all.

Edith Stevens, as well as Huntington, found herself without her usual occupation this morning. Cosden told her, the evening before, of his plan to take Merry sailing, so she reverted to her natural habit of late rising, from which she had temporarily reformed herself, knowing that Cosden always breakfasted early and was usually looking for companionship. Seeing Huntington absorbed in self-contemplation she gravitated in his direction.

"We've lost our little playmates, haven't we?" she said cheerfully, as he rose and pulled up another piazza chair for her. "Why isn't this a good time for our Society to go into executive session?"

"Capital!" Huntington a.s.sented, replying only to the second part of her question. "Is the secret-service department ready to make its report?"

"I've found the girl," she announced bluntly; "but I imagine you know already who she is."

"The girl Connie is going to marry?" Huntington simulated a proper att.i.tude of interrogation.

"The girl he thinks he wants to marry," she corrected.

"Oh! he only thinks so. That's it, is it?"

Edith raised her eyes from the toe of her buckskin shoe, which she had been poking vigorously with her sunshade, and smiled brightly.

"Yes," she said; "that's it."

"You speak with conviction."

"Well," Edith explained, "I know Mr. Cosden better now than when the Society last met. He wants to get married, and he thinks he has picked out the right girl, but--"

"But--what?"

"But--he hasn't; that's all." And again Edith smiled brightly into Huntington's face.

"Connie isn't in the habit of making mistakes; he usually gets what he goes after."