Sanctuary

which reduced Denis’s mourning to a mere tribute of respect—since it would have been a mockery to deplore the disappearance of any one who had left behind him such an unsavory wake as poor Arthur. Kate did not quite know what had happened: her father was as firmly convinced as Mrs. Peyton that young girls should not be admitted to any open discussion of life. She could only gather, from the silences and evasions amid which she moved, that a woman had turned up—a woman who was of course “dreadful,” and whose dreadfulness appeared to include a sort of shadowy claim upon Arthur. But the claim, whatever it was, had been promptly discredited. The whole question had vanished and the woman with it. The blinds were drawn again on the ugly side of things, and life was resumed on the usual assumption that no such side existed. Kate knew only that a darkness had crossed her sky and left it as unclouded as before.

Was it, perhaps, she now asked herself, the very lifting of the cloud—remote, unthreatening as it had been— which gave such new serenity to her heaven? It was horrible to think that one’s deepest security was a mere sense of escape—that happiness was no more than a reprieve. The perversity of such ideas was emphasized by Peyton’s approach. He had the gift of restoring things to their normal relations, of carrying one over the chasms of life through the closed tunnel of an incurious cheerfulness. All that was restless and questioning in the girl subsided in his presence, and she was content to take her love as a gift of grace, which began just where the office of reason ended. She was more than ever, to-day, in this mood of charmed surrender. More than ever he seemed the keynote of the accord between herself and life, the centre of a delightful complicity in every surrounding circumstance. One could not look at him without seeing that there was always a fair wind in his sails.

It was carrying him toward her, as usual, at a quick confident pace, which nevertheless lagged a little, she noticed, as he emerged from the beech-grove and struck across the lawn. He walked as though he were tired. She had meant to wait for him on the terrace, held in check by her usual inclination to linger on the threshold of her pleasures; but now something drew her toward him, and she went quickly down the steps and across the lawn.

“Denis, you look tired. I was afraid something had happened.”

She had slipped her hand through his arm, and as they moved forward she glanced up at him, struck not so much by any new look in his face as by the fact that her approach had made no change in it.

“I am rather tired.—Is your father in?”

“Papa?” She looked up in surprise. “He went to town yesterday. Don’t you remember?”

“Of course—I’d forgotten. You’re alone, then?” She dropped his arm and stood before him. He was very pale now, with the furrowed look of extreme physical weariness.

“Denis—are you ill? Has anything happened?”

He forced a smile. “Yes—but you needn’t look so frightened.”

She drew a deep breath of reassurance. He was safe, after all! And all else, for a moment, seemed to swing below the rim of her world.

“Your mother—?” she then said, with a fresh start of fear.

“It’s not my mother.” They had reached the terrace, and he moved toward the house. “Let us go indoors. There’s such a beastly glare out here.”

He seemed to find relief in the cool obscurity of the drawing-room, where, after the brightness of the afternoon light, their faces were almost indistinguishable to each other. She sat down, and he moved a few paces away. Before the writing-table he paused to look at the neatly sorted heaps of wedding-cards.

“They are to be sent out tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

He turned back and stood before her.

“It’s about the woman,” he began abruptly—“the woman who pretended to be Arthur’s wife.”

Kate started as at the clutch of an unacknowledged fear.

“She was his wife, then?”

Peyton made an impatient movement of negation. “If she was, why didn’t she prove it? She hadn’t a shred of evidence. The courts rejected her appeal.”

“Well, then—?”

“Well, she’s dead.” He paused, and the next words came with difficulty. “She and the child.”

“The child? There was a child?”

“Yes.”

Kate started up and then sank down. These were not things about which young girls were told. The confused sense of horror had been nothing to this first sharp edge of fact.

“And both are dead?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know? My father said she had gone away—gone back to the West—”

“So we thought. But this morning we found her.”

“Found her?”

He motioned toward the window. “Out there—in the lake.”

“Both?”

“Both.”

She drooped before him shudderingly, her eyes hidden, as though to exclude the vision. “She had drowned herself?”