He relaxed from his dignity sufficiently to let his hand rest on hers, which he patted gently. "I've been madam's servant--and my boy's."

"I shall never think of you as a servant--never."

The frosty color rose into his cheeks. "Then madam'll do me a great wrong."

"To me you're so much higher than a servant----"

"Madam'll find that there ain't nothink 'igher than a servant. There's a lot about service in the pypers nowadyes, crackin' it up, like; but n.o.body don't seem to remember that servants knows more about that than what other people do, and servants don't remember it theirselves. So long as I can serve madam, just as I've served my boy----"

"Oh, but, Steptoe, I shall have gone to the bad."

"That'd be all the syme to me, madam. At my time o' life I don't see no difference between them as 'as gone to the bad and them as 'as gone to the good, as you might sye. I only sees--people."

Left alone Letty went back to the fire, and stood gazing down at it, her foot on the fender. So it was the end. Even Steptoe said so. In a sense she was relieved.

She was relieved at the prospect of being freed from her daily torture. The little mermaid walking on blades in the palace of the prince, and forever dumb, had known bliss, but bliss so akin to anguish that her heart was consumed by it. The very fact that the prince himself suffered from the indefinable misery which her presence seemed to bring made escape the more enticing.

She was so buried in this reflection as to have heard no sound in the house, when Steptoe announced in his stately voice: "Miss Barbara Walbrook." Having parted from this lady half an hour earlier Letty turned in some surprise.

"I've come back again," was the explanation, sent down the long room.

"Don't let William bring in tea," the imperious voice commanded Steptoe. "We wish to be alone." There was the same abruptness as she halted within two or three feet of where Letty stood, supporting herself with a hand on the edge of the mantelpiece. "I've come back to tell you something. I made up my mind to it all at once--after I left you a few minutes ago. Now that I've done it I feel easier."

Letty didn't know which was uppermost in her mind, curiosity or fear.

"What--what is it?" she asked, trembling.

"I've given up the fight. I'm out of it."

Letty crept forward. "You've--you've done _what_?"

"I told you in the Park that one or the other of us would have to withdraw----"

"One or the other of--of _us_?"

"Exactly and I've done it."

With horror in her face and eyes Letty crept nearer still. "But--but I don't understand."

"Oh, yes, you do. How can you help understanding. You must have seen all along that----"

"Not that--that you were--the other girl. Oh, not that!"

"Yes, that; of course; why not?"

"Because--because I--I couldn't bear it."

"You can bear it if I can, can't you--if I've had to bear it all these weeks and months."

"Yes, but that's--" she covered her face with her hands--"that's what makes it so terrible."

"Of course it makes it terrible; but it isn't as terrible now as it was--to you anyhow."

"But why do you withdraw when--when you love him--and he loves you----?"

"I do it because I want to throw all the cards on the table. It's what my common sense has been telling me to do all along, only I've never worked round to it till we had our talk this afternoon. Now I see----"

"What do you see, Miss Walbrook?"

"I see that we've got to give him a clean sheet, or he'll never know where he is. He can't decide between us because he's in an impossible position. We'll have to set him absolutely free, so that he may begin again. I'll do it on my side. You can do--what you like."

She went as abruptly as she came, leaving Letty clearer than ever as to her new course.

By midnight she was ready. In the back spare room she waited only to be sure that all in the house were asleep.

She had heard Allerton come in about half past nine, and the whispering of voices told that Steptoe was making his explanations, that she was out of sorts, had dined in her room, and begged not to be disturbed. At about half past ten she heard the prince go upstairs to his own room, though she fancied that outside her door he had paused for a second to listen. That was the culminating minute of her self-repression. Once it was over, and he had gone on his way, she knew the rest would be easier.

By midnight she had only to wait quietly. In the old gray rag and the battered black hat she surveyed herself without emotion. Since making her last attempt to escape her relation to all these things had changed. They had become less significant, less important. The emblems of the higher life which in the previous autumn she had buried with ritual and regret she now packed away in the closet, with hardly a second thought. The old gray rag which had then seemed the livery of a degraded life was now no more than the resumption of her reality.

"I'll go as I came," she had been saying to herself, all the evening.

"I know he'd like me to take the things he's given me; but I'd rather be just what I was."

If there was any ritual in what she had done since Miss Walbrook had left her it was in the putting away of small things by which she didn't want to be haunted.

"I couldn't do it with this on," she said of the plain gold band on her finger, to which, as a symbol of marriage, she had never attached significance in any case.

She took it off, therefore, and laid it on the dressing table.

"I couldn't do it with this in my pocket," she said of the purse containing a few dollars, with which Steptoe had kept her supplied.

This too she laid on the dressing table, becoming as penniless as when Judson Flack had put her out of doors. Somehow, to be penniless seemed to her an element in her new task, and an excuse for it.

Since Allerton had never made her a present there was nothing of this kind to discard. It had been part of his non-committal, impersonal att.i.tude toward her that he had never given her a concrete sign that she meant anything to him whatever. He had thanked her on occasions for the comforting quality he found in her presence. He had, in so many words, recognized the fact that when he got into a tantrum of nerves she could bring him out of it as no one else had ever done. He had also imparted to her the discovery that in reading to her, and trying to show her the point of view of a life superior to her own, he had for the first time in his life done something for someone else; but he had never gone beyond all this or allowed her to think that his heart was not given to "the girl he was engaged to." In that at least he had been loyal to the mysterious princess, as the little mermaid could not but see.

She was not consciously denuded, as she would have felt herself six months earlier. As to that she was not thinking anything at all. Her motive, in setting free the prince from the "drag" on him which she now recognized herself to be, filled all her mental horizons. So dominated was she by this overwhelming impulse as to have no thought even for self-pity.

When a clock somewhere struck one she took it as the summons. From the dressing-table she picked up the scrawl in Steptoe's hand, giving the name of Miss Henrietta Towell, at an address at Red Point, L. I. She knew Red Point, on the tip of Long Island, as a distant, partially developed suburb of Brooklyn. In the previous year she had gone with a half dozen other girl "supes" from the Excelsior Studio to "blow in" a quarter looking at the ocean steamers pa.s.sing in and out. She had no intention of intruding on Miss Towell, but she couldn't hurt Steptoe's feelings by leaving the address behind her.

For the same reason she took the silver thimble which stood on the sc.r.a.p of paper. On its rim she read the inscription, "H.T. from H.S."

but she made no attempt to unravel the romance behind it. She merely slipped the scrawl and the thimble into the pocket of her jacket, and stood up.

She took no farewells. To do so would have unnerved her. On the landing outside her door she listened for a possible sound of the prince's breathing, but the house was still. In the lower hall she resisted the impulse to slip into the library and kiss the place where she had kissed his feet on the memorable morning when her hand had been on his brow. "That won't help me any," were the prosaic words with which she put the suggestion away from her. If the little mermaid was to leap over the ship's side and dissolve into foam the best thing she could do was to leap.

The door no longer held secrets. She had locked it and unlocked it a thousand times. Feeling for the chain in the darkness she slipped it out of its socket; she drew back the bolt; she turned the key. Her fingers found the two little bra.s.s k.n.o.bs, pressing this one that way, and that one this way. The door rolled softly as she turned the handle.

Over the threshold she pa.s.sed into a world of silence, darkness, electricity, and stars. She closed the door noiselessly. She went down the steps.

Chapter XXI