"You mustn't pity me too much. I--I was very happy. I was very happy until I knew about--my little son. It was then that I realized the awful sin I had committed. It was then I knew the cruel wrong I had done to that unborn life. I--I think I was nearly distracted when it all came upon me." Her voice had risen. It was almost strident with emotion. "For weeks I thought and thought what I could do to remedy my wrong, and at last I took my courage in both hands. I told Leo, and--and asked him to marry me--for the child's sake."

"For the child's sake?"

The admission which the words implied filled the simple Monica with something like panic.

"You see, Leo never loved me as I loved him."

"Oh, Elsie, Elsie!"

"Yes, dear, I forced myself upon him."

The tragedy of her sister's life had almost overwhelmed the girl. The whole pitiful story wrung her heart with its pathos, its shame. Her sister. Her beautiful, clever sister. Oh, it was too, too dreadful.

After a while Elsie roused herself again. There was a lot yet to be said, and she knew her time was short.

"I am all to blame. You mustn't blame Leo," she said earnestly. "He was a good man to me. I know you think he has deserted me. But he hasn't.

That is not him. He promised to marry me, and, had I lived, he would have kept that promise. We were coming down country for that purpose."

She paused. "Then something happened which made it necessary for him to go on ahead. That's how I came to make the journey with the Indian.

It--it couldn't be helped. You--you mustn't blame Leo. He will be looking for me. Is very likely looking for me now. But it is too late.

That is why I want you to promise me something."

Monica waited. She could find nothing to say. She was learning another of the bitter lessons which life has to teach when the book is once opened. Presently the other went on--

"You see, neither of us can now remedy the wrong I have done my little son. As I said, it is too late. I shall be gone before Leo can marry me." The big eyes became eager. They looked up with piteous straining into the gentle face before them. "Do you see? Oh, Mon, do you understand? My boy--our boy has no father; and very, very soon will have no mother. Oh, Mon, what can I do, what can I say? Can--can you help me?"

But Monica was gazing helplessly before her. The warmth of her love for her erring sister was no less. But she was thinking, thinking, striving with all her might to seek a solution to the painful tangle of her poor sister's life.

"I--I--can't---- Tell me, Elsie--tell me anything I can do for him. I don't seem able to think for myself," she cried hopelessly at last.

Something of Monica's difficulty seemed to communicate itself to the other. Her brows drew together in perplexity.

"It is so hard," she said suddenly. "I have thought and thought, and I can only see one possible hope--only one. That hope is--you."

"How? Oh, Elsie, tell me how. What can I do?"

With a sudden effort the mother propped herself up with her elbows behind her. Her dying eyes were burning bright with feverish light. All the hope of her poor dying soul looked up into her sister's face as her final appeal rushed to her lips.

"How? Why, why, by taking him as your own son. How? Oh, Mon, his own mother is taken from him. Then give him another. Make him your own child--whose father is dead. It would be easy for you. You married young, and your--your husband died--died at sea. He will never know differently. No one will question it. Oh, my dear, don't you see? Bring him up as your own child, born in wedlock, and never let him know his mother's shame. Promise me, your sacred promise to a dying woman, that he shall never know, through you, his mother's shame, and his own disgrace. Promise it to me, Mon, it is the only thing that can give me peace now. Forget everything I have told you. Forget the disgrace I have brought on you. Forget everything except--except only your promise. Promise! Promise!"

Her fingers tightened almost painfully upon Monica's hand. She was laboring under a fierce emotion, almost sufficient to bring on a collapse. The feverish eyes were bloodshot, and a hectic flush burned on her thin cheeks.

The impulse of the moment was upon Monica, and she leaned forward. Her other hand was tenderly raised to the woman's moist brow, in a loving, soothing manner.

"I promise, dear; I promise on my sacred word that what you ask me shall be done. Henceforth he shall be my son. Nor shall he ever know through me the cruel wrong the world has done to you. I promise you, Elsie, dear, freely, freely. And all my life I will strive to keep the real truth of his birth from him."

"Thank G.o.d!"

The reaction was terrible. The dying woman fell back on her pillows, and her features suddenly became so ghastly that Monica sprang from her seat in wild alarm. She ran to the door to summon the nurse. But the voice from the bed stayed her.

"No, Mon, not yet." Then the dying woman added with an irresistible appeal, "Give me my boy, for--for a few minutes. After that----"

Monica ran to obey with an only too thankful heart. But her instinct warned her that the end was not far off. She laid the sleeping child tenderly by its mother's side, and placed her thin arm gently under its shoulders. She felt maybe she was doing wrong, but--poor Elsie.

Elsie's eyes thanked her, but her voice remained silent. And for a long while there was an unbroken quiet in the room.

Monica moved to the window and stood with her back turned to the bed.

Somehow she felt that these moments were too sacred for another's eyes to witness. Slowly fresh tears gathered in her eyes, tears of sympathy and love, and one by one they rolled unheeded, slowly down her cheeks.

And as they fell the last moments of her sister's life ebbed peacefully away.

CHAPTER XI

TWO STRANGERS IN SAN SABATANO

Monica's life suddenly became filled to overflowing. She was no longer a child, but a woman of a maturity that was almost absurd in one so young. The happy, irresponsible girlhood she had so long enjoyed in her mother's modest uptown apartment had quite gone. Whatever the future might hold of happiness for her, certainly freedom from the more serious cares of life would never again be hers.

Five years ago she and her mother had bade Elsie good-bye in the same humble apartment, when the elder girl had left San Sabatano to go on the stage in New York. Monica was twelve then. Twelve; and her young eyes and younger mind were filled with a boundless envy and admiration for the beautiful sister who was to bask in the wonderful limelight of the stage, and wear clothes far beyond the beauty of all dreams; and jewels--jewels, whose splendor was incomparable to the beauty of her lovely, lovely Elsie. Had she only known it she was very near the truth when she thought of the jewels her sister would wear.

Her mother was one of those quietly good women who contrive to inspire their children with something of their own qualities by example rather than precept. Neither Elsie nor Monica ever knew what it was to receive one of those harsh reprimands so common among mothers of less understanding, of less ability. Her children must grow up guided rather than driven. All their lives this had been her method. Therefore it came as a terrible shock to her when the more wayward of the two, perhaps, in a sense, the bolder spirit of the two, suddenly announced her intention of leaving the sheltering dovecote, where money was never very plentiful, to earn her living in the flamboyant world of the stage.

True to her methods, and with, perhaps, a deeper understanding of her child, and the uselessness of refusal, the mother's permission was not long withheld. It was a reluctant enough permission, but given without any outward sign of the disapproval she really felt. Moreover, she was convinced of the rightness of her att.i.tude. The girl, she knew, would live her life as she understood it. Her only duty remaining, therefore, was to equip her with all the knowledge of the world that lay within her simple range of understanding. For the rest the child's fate was in the lap of the G.o.ds.

But she never seemed to quite get over the parting. For a long time she bore up with great fort.i.tude, and her devotion to Monica became a wonderful thing. It was almost as if she feared that she, too, her one remaining child, might be taken from her, and swallowed up by the hungry maw of the outside world.

She heard regularly from Elsie for some time. Elsie was getting on quite well. Then letters became less frequent. And, finally, about the time that Elsie met Leo, they ceased altogether. It was then that the signs of break-up began to show in the patient woman at home.

She had died quietly and quickly of heart failure just a year ago.

Monica's grief was profound. But she was too young for any lasting effect to remain with her. She lived on in the apartment without any thought of leaving it. The whole thing seemed the most natural in the world to her. Her mother's solicitor wrote her, and offered her a home with his family, but, with prompt decision, she refused it. She told him that if her mother's affairs permitted it, she would rather remain in San Sabatano, where she had all her girlhood's friends, than break new ground among strangers. Her mother's affairs yielded her the barest living, so she remained, determined to make a way for herself in the world, her own world, as other girls of her acquaintance had done.

Now she had reached the second, and, in many ways, the greater change in her life. Where, before, only her childish affections had been bruised and crushed at her mother's death, now she realized that she had all too suddenly pa.s.sed from the sunlit paths of innocent childhood, to the harsher road down which all the world was journeying; struggling, jostling, each striving to seize for themselves the easier, the pleasanter paths along which to make the journey of life.

But the change in her was subtle. There was no outward effect, there was no disturbing of the wholesome, happy nature that was the very essence of her being. The change was in an added knowledge, a quickening of naturally alert faculties. She realized that some strange force had suddenly plunged her into the midst of a life which demanded quick thought and swift action, so that her pulses might be kept beating in perfect time to the pace at which life sped on about her.

She realized that she had suddenly become one of life's workers, and that grave responsibility was already knocking at her door. From the very beginning she accepted the new conditions gladly. She felt an added zest to the fact of living. The old days of dreaming were gone.

Every moment of her waking hours was filled with thought, keen, practical thought; and the demand thus made on her found her ready and able. There was no fl.u.s.ter, no confusion of any sort. Her healthy brain was quick and incisive, characteristics quite unsuspected even by herself. Not only was this so, but, with the added pressure, there came a quiet desire to test her newly discovered powers to the uttermost.

There were other changes, too, changes of almost equal importance. She found herself witnessing the progress of affairs about her with an entirely new understanding of them. All her understanding of the precepts of her youth received revision; a revision which was inspired by the story her sister had told her on her deathbed. The shock at first had been a little overwhelming, but, young as she was, her ready brain quickly a.s.similated the facts, and set itself to the task of readjusting its focus.

There was no bitterness, no horror at her discoveries. She simply realized that here was a small slice of life cut out by the same ruthless knife which no doubt served hundreds of similar purposes among the rest of mankind. Who was she to criticize, who was she to condemn?

Her knowledge was all to come, and maybe, as she went on, she would discover that such tragedies were part of the real life which up to now had been entirely hidden from her.

She had no blame for her dead sister. Her memory was as sacred to her as if she had lived the most perfect life of purity under the social laws governing man's relationship to woman. Her love once given was not a thing to be promptly rescinded by the failure of its idol. The idol might fall, and become besmirched in the unsuspected mire, but her frank, kindly hands were ready to set it up again and again, and perhaps in time her broader knowledge would teach her how to secure it from further disaster.

Perhaps the first real warning of the change in her came at the moment she considered her sister's funeral. Here undoubtedly a shock was awaiting her, and, in a moment, there leaped into her focus a teeming picture of almost endless complications. Just for an instant all her nerves were set jangling, and an utter helplessness left her painfully distressed. Then the feeling as abruptly pa.s.sed, her mind cleared, and, one by one, she found herself reviewing each detail of the situation, and marking out the course she must adopt.