"No--I haven't seen that most sightly cold lady to-day--more's the pity!"

She breathed one quick little sigh--it seemed to him strangely like a sigh of relief.

"I knew you couldn't have been." She laughed a little laugh of secrets.

"I was only wondering foolish wonders--you know how Gratchers must be humoured right up to the very moment you puff them away with the deadly laugh."

Together they went in. Bernal stopped to talk with Aunt Bell, who was pa.s.sing through the hall as they entered; while Nancy, with the manner of one not to be deflected from some set purpose, made straight for Allan's study.

In answer to her ominously crisp little knock, she heard his "Come!" and opened the door.

He sat facing her at his desk, swinging idly from side to side in the revolving chair, through the small s.p.a.ce the desk permitted. Upon the blotter before him she saw that he had been drawing interminable squares, oblongs, triangles and circles, joining them to one another in aimless, wandering sequence--his sign of a perturbed mind.

He glanced up with a look of waiting defiance which she knew but masked all his familiar artillery.

Instantly she determined to give him no opportunity to use this. She would end matters with a rush. He was awaiting her attack. She would make none.

"I think there is nothing to say," she began quickly. "I could utter certain words, but they would mean one thing to me and other things to you--there is no real communication possible between us. Only remember that this--to-day--matters little--I had already resolved that sooner or later I must go. This only makes it necessary to go at once."

She turned to the door which she had held ajar. At her words he sat forward in his chair, the yellow stars blazing in his eyes. But the opening was not the one he had counted upon, and before he could alter his speech to fit it, or could do more than raise a hand to detain her, she had gone.

He sat back in his chair, calculating how to meet this mood. Then the door resounded under a double knock and Bernal came in.

"Well, old boy, I'll be off to-night. The lawyer is done with me here and now I'll go to Edom and finish what's to be done there. Then in a few days I'll be out of this machine and back to the ranche. You know I've decided that my message to the world would best take the substantial form of beef--a message which no one will esteem unpractical."

He paused, noting the other's general droop of gloom.

"But what's the trouble, old chap? You look done up!"

"Bernal--it's all because I am too good-hearted, too unsuspecting. Being slow to think evil of others, I foolishly a.s.sume that others will be equally charitable. And you don't know what women are--you don't know how the sentimental ones impose upon a man in my office. I give you my word of honour as a man--my word of _honour_, mind you!--there never has been a thing between us but the purest, the most elevated--the loftiest, most ideal--"

"Hold on, old chap--I shall have to take the car ahead, you know, if you won't let me on this one...."

"--as pure a woman as G.o.d ever made, while as for myself, I think my integrity of purpose and honesty of character, my sense of loyalty should be sufficiently known--"

"Say, old boy--" Bernal's face had lighted with a sudden flash of insight--"is it--I don't wish to be indiscreet--but is it anything about Mrs. Wyeth?"

"Then you _do_ know?"

"Nothing, except that Nance met me at the door just now and puzzled me a bit by her very curious manner of asking if I had been at the Wyeth's this afternoon."

"_What_?" The other turned upon him, his eyes again blazing with the yellow points, his whole figure alert. "She asked you _that--Really_?"

"To be sure!"

"And you said--"

"'No'--of course--and she mumbled something about having been foolish to think I could have been. You know, old man, Nance was troubled. I could see that."

His brother was now pacing the floor, his head bent from the beautifully squared shoulders, his face the face of a mind working busily.

"An idiot I was--she didn't know me--I had only to--"

Bernal interrupted.

"Are you talking to yourself, or to me?"

The rector of St. Antipas turned at one end of his walk.

"To both of us, brother. I tell you there has been nothing between us--never anything except the most flawless idealism. I admit that at the moment Nancy observed us the circ.u.mstances were unluckily such that an excitable, morbidly suspicious woman might have misconstrued them. I will even admit that a woman of judicial mind and of unhurried judgments might not unreasonably have been puzzled, but I would tear my heart open to the world this minute--'Oh, be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny!'"

"If I follow you, old chap, Nancy observed some scene this afternoon in which it occurred to her that I might have been an actor." There was quick pain, a sinking in his heart.

"She had reason to know it was one of us--and if I had denied it was I--"

"I _see_--why didn't you?"

"I thought she must surely have seen me--and besides"--his voice softened with affection--"do you think, old chap, I would have shifted a misunderstanding like that on to _your_ shoulders. Thank G.o.d, I am not yet reduced to shirking the penalties of my own blameless acts, even when they will be cruelly misconstrued."

"But you should have done so--It would mean nothing to me, and everything to you--to that poor girl--poor Nance--always so helpless and wondering and so pathetically ready to _believe_! She didn't deserve that you take it upon yourself, Allan!"

"No--no, don't urge! I may have made mistakes, though I will say that few men of my--well, my attractions! Why not say it bluntly?--few men of my attractions, placed as I have been, would have made so few--but I shall never be found shirking their consequences--it is not in my nature, thank G.o.d, to let another bear the burden--I can always be a man!--"

"But, old boy--you must think of poor Nancy--not of me!" Again he felt the hurt of her suspicion.

"True--compa.s.sion requires that I think of her rather than of my own pride--and I have--but, you see, it's too late. I committed myself before I knew she didn't _know_!"

"Let her believe it is still a mistake--"

"No, no--it would be trickery--and it's impracticable--I as good as confessed to her, you see--unless"--he brightened here and stopped in his walk--"unless she could be made to believe that I meant to shield you!"

"That's it! Really, you are an executor, Allan! Now we'll put the poor girl easy in her mind again. I'll tell her you did it to shield me. You know it's important--what Nancy thinks of you, old chap--she's your wife--and--it doesn't matter a bit how meanly--she thinks of me--of course not. I dare say it will be better for me if she _does_ think meanly of me--I'll tell her at once--what was it I did?"

"No--no--she wouldn't believe you now. I dislike to say this, Bernal, but Nancy is not always so trusting as a good woman should be--she has a habit of wondering--but--mind you, I could only consent to this for the sake of her peace of mind--"

"I understand perfectly, old chap--it will help the peace of mind of all of us, I begin to see--hers and mine--and yours."

"Well, then, if she can be made to suspect this other aspect of the affair without being told directly--ah!--here's a way. Turn that messenger-call. Now listen--I will have a note sent here addressed to you by a certain woman. It will be handed to Nancy to give to you. She will observe the writing--and she will recognise it,--she knows it. You will have been anxious about this note--expecting it--inquiring for it, you know. Get your dinner now, then stay in your room so the maid won't see you when the note comes--she will have to ask Nance where you are--"

At dinner, which Bernal had presently with Aunt Bell and two empty seats, his companion regaled him with comments upon the development of the religious instinct in mankind, reminding him that should he ever aspire to a cult of his own he would find Boston a more fertile field than New York.

"They're so much broader there, you know," she began. "Really, they'll believe anything if you manage your effects artistically. And that is the trouble with you, Bernal. You appeal too little to the imagination.

You must not only have a novelty to preach nowadays, but you must preach it in a spectacular manner. Now, that a.s.sertion of yours that we are all equally selfish is novel and rather interesting--I've tried to think of some one's doing some act to make himself unhappy and I find I can't.

And your suggestion of Judas Iscariot and Mr. Spencer as the sole inmates of h.e.l.l is not without a certain piquancy. But, my dear boy, you need a stage-manager. Let your hair grow, wear a red robe, do healing--"

He laughed protestingly. "Oh, I'm not a prophet, Aunt Bell--I've learned that."

"But you could be, with proper managing. There's that perfectly stunning beginning with that wild healing-chap in the far West. As it is now, you make nothing of it--it might have happened to anybody and it never came to anything, except that you went off into the wilderness and stayed alone. You should tell how you fasted with him in a desert, and how he told you secrets and imparted his healing power to you. Then get the reporters about you and talk queerly so that they can make a good story of it. Also live on rice and speak with an accent--_any_ kind of accent would make you more interesting, Bernal. Then preach your message, and I'd guarantee you a following of thousands in New York in a month. Of course they'd leave you for the next fellow that came along with a key to the book of Revelations, or a new diet or something, but you'd keep them a while."