Part 5

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_ PART V

I

Little Albert's babyhood kept his mother a good deal at home--and by "home" I mean the house in which he had been born. His father's lessened interest in Europe (and his diminished deference for it) kept his mother at home completely--and by "home" I now mean the town in which Albert had been born. Father, mother, and offspring filled the big house as well as they could--the big, old house as it was sometimes called by those who cherished a chronology that was purely American; and Albert was more than a year and a half along in life before his grandmother came across to see him and to inspect the distant menage. She brought her water-waves and her sharpened critical sense, and went back leaving the impression that she was artificial and exacting.

"She missed her Paris," said Raymond, "and her drive in the Bois."

"H'm!" said I, recalling that the town's recent chief executive had pronounced us, not many years back, the equal of Paris in civic beauty.

"We have no Bois, as yet," he added, thoughtfully. "Do you think we ever shall have one?"

He was revolving the Bois, not as a definite tract of park land, but as a social institution.

"I think," said I, "that we had better be satisfied with developing according to our own nature and needs."

"Yes," he returned; "there was the Frenchman at the fox-hunt: 'No band, no promenade, no nossing.' Well, we must go on our own tack, as soon as we discover it."

It need not be imagined that his mother-in-law's look-in of a month made his wife more contented. She kept on wishing for her new friends in another quarter, and (more strongly) for the familiar scenes of the other side. Raymond did not wish the expense involved in either move. His affairs were now going but tolerably. So far as the bank was concerned--a bank that had once been almost a "family" institution--his influence was naught. He was only a stockholder, and a smaller stockholder than once. His interest, in any sense, was but a brief, periodical interest in dividends. These were coming with a commendable regularity still. His rentals came in fairly too; but most of them were now derived from properties on the edge of the business district--properties with no special future and likely only to hold their own however favorable general conditions might continue. Travel? No. A man travels best in his youth, when he is foot-free, care-free, fancy-free. Go traveling too late, or once too often, and there is a difference. The final checking-off of something one has "always meant to see" may result in the most ashen disappointment of all: even intuition, without the pains of actual experience, should suffice to warn. Besides, as Raymond said,--

"We've both had a good deal of it. Let's stay at home."

His wife cast about her. There is a mood in which a deprivation of high comedy may drive one to low-down farce. To-day people are even going farther. A worthy stage is dead, they say; and they patronize, somewhat willfully and contemptuously (or with a loose, slack tolerance that is worse), the moving pictures. Perhaps it was in some such mood that Raymond's wife took up with Mrs. Johnny McComas. They were but three streets apart. Mrs. McComas was lively, energetic, determined to drive on; and her ability to assimilate rapidly and light-handedly her growing opulence made it seem by no means a mere vulgar external adornment. She knew how to move among the remarkable furnishings with which she had surrounded herself in that old-new house, and how to make the momentum gained there serve her ends in the world outside.

"It will be a short life here," her husband had told her on their taking possession; "then, a quick sale--at a good figure--to some manufacturing concern, and on we go."

"If it's to be short, let's make it merry," she had rejoined; and nothing had been spared that could give liveliness to their stately old interiors, while those interiors lasted.

Mrs. Raymond Prince vaguely pronounced their house "amusing." It had, like Adele McComas herself, a provocative dash which fell in with her present mood, and it pleased her that its chatelaine was inclined to dress up to its wayward sofas and hangings. She even went with Mrs. Johnny on shopping tours and abetted her as her fancies, desires and expenditures ran riot. It was a mood of irresponsibility--almost of defiant irresponsibility.

Now was the nascent day of the country club. Several of these welcome institutions had lately set themselves up in a modest, tentative way. Acceptance was complete, and all they had to do was to grow. With one of these McComas cast his lot. At the start it was a simple enough affair; but Johnny must have sensed its potentialities and savored its affinities, its coming congruity with himself. It was to become, shortly, a club for the suddenly, violently rich, the flushed with dollars, the congested with prosperity--for newcomers who had met Success and beaten her at her own game. Stir on all hands, the reek of sudden felicity in the air. In later years people with access to better things of similar sort were known to become indignant when asked to associate themselves with it. "Why should I want to join that?" was the question they put. But it pleased Johnny McComas, both by its present manifestations and its latent possibilities. It was richly in unison with his own nature, and I believe he had a ravishing vision of its magnificent futurities.

Last year my wife and I were taken to a Sunday afternoon concert out there. We found a place of towers and arcades, of endless corridors planted with columns and numberless chairs in numberless varieties, of fountained courts, of ball-rooms, of concert-halls, of gay apparel and cool drinks. We heard of fairs, horse-shows, tournaments in golf and tennis. The restaurant, with its acre of tables, glassed and naperied; the ranges of telephone booths, all going it together; the cellars, a vast subterrene, with dusky avenues of lockers, each cluttered with beverages of individual predilection--though I suppose that, after all, they were a good deal alike....

Well, it was too much for us; and my Elsie, who is essentially the lady, if woman ever was, came away feeling a little dowdy and a good deal out of date.

At that earlier period, however, it was still simple; the germ was there, but the development of its possibilities had only begun. When Mrs. McComas invited Mrs. Prince to drive out with her and see some tennis, Mrs. Prince was quite ready to accept.

I do not know just what mode of locomotion they employed. It was in the early days of the automobile and Johnny McComas was one of the first men in town to have one. I recall, in fact, some of his initial experiences with it. On a Sunday afternoon I encountered him in one of these still relatively unstudied contraptions on a frequented driveway. Another man was sitting beside him patiently. The conveyance was making no progress at all. Fortunately it had stopped close enough to the curb not to interfere with the progress of other and more familiar equipages.

"We're stuck," said Johnny, jovially, as he caught sight of me. "Ran for three or four miles slick as a whistle--and look at us now!" It entertained him--a kink in a new toy. And he enjoyed the interest of the people collected about.

"You're gummed up, I expect," said I. In those days nobody knew much about the new creature and its habits, and one man's guess was as good as another's. Two or three bystanders eyed me deferentially, as a probable expert.

"Likely enough," he agreed--and that made me an expert beyond doubt. "But this will do for to-day. We've been here twenty minutes."

He had the car pushed to a near-by stable, amidst the mixed emotions of the little crowd, and next day he had it hauled home.

"You were right," he said, when I met him out again in it, a week later. "It was gummed up, so to speak; but it's working like a charm to-day. Get in and I'll take you a few miles. That other fellow got an awful grouch."

It may have been by this machine, or by some more familiar mode of locomotion, that the two women reached the country club and its tennis tournament. Gertrude Prince strolled through its grounds and galleries with the aloof and amused air of one touring through a foreign town--a town never seen before and likely to be left behind altogether within an hour or two. It was at once semi-smart and semi-simple. She took it lightly, even condescendingly; and when Johnny McComas himself appeared somewhat later and set them down at a little marble table near a fountain-jet and offered cocktails as a preliminary to a variety of sandwiches, she decided, after looking about and seeing a few other ladies with glasses before them on other little marble tables, to accept. It was a lark in some town of the provinces--Meaux or Melun; what difference did it make?

They formed a little group altogether to Johnny's liking. His wife was dressed dashingly; his wife's guest made a very fair second; he himself, although he never lifted a racquet, was in the tennis garb of that day.

"You both look ripping," he declared with hearty satisfaction. To look thus, before competing items in the throng, was the object of the place, the reason for its developing mise en scene.

Johnny himself looked ripping--cool, confident, content, and at the top of his days.

"It was amusing...." said Gertrude to me, with an upward inflection, a week later.

And she asked me for more about Johnny McComas.

II

If those were days when people began to combine for the pursuit of pleasure, they were also days when people began to gather at the call of public duty. If clubs were forming on the borders, other clubs, leagues, societies were forming nearer the centre--organizations to make effective the scattered good-will of the well-disposed and to gain some betterment in the local political life. To initiate and conduct such movements only a few were needed; but the many were expected to contribute, if not their zeal and their time, at least their dollars. It was patriotic righteousness made easy: a man had only to give his fifty dollars or his five hundred to feel, without further personal exertion, that he was a good citizen and was forwarding, as all good citizens should, a worthy cause. This way of doing it fell in wonderfully well with Raymond's temperament and abilities (or lack of them): the liberality of his contributions did not remain unknown, and he was sometimes held up as a favorable specimen of the American citizen.

Another movement was soon to engage his attention. If the prosperous were to have their playgrounds beyond the city's outskirts, the less prosperous should have theirs within the city's limits. The scheme of a system of small parks and playgrounds quite took Raymond's fancy. It contained, besides the idea of social amelioration, the even more grateful idea of municipal beautification. In time, indeed, might not this same notion, fortified by experience and given a wider application, end by redeeming the town not merely in spots but in its entirety?--a saved and graced whole, not only as to its heart, but as to its liberal and varied borders of water, woodland and prairie.

"I should be proud of that," said Raymond heartily. The name of such a city, following one's own name on any hotel-register, would indeed be a matter for pride.

He attended several of the early meetings that were designed to get some such project, in its simpler form, under way. He had friends among professional men in the arts, and some acquaintances among newly formed bodies of social workers. He was not slow in perceiving that the way was likely to be tedious and hard. It called for organization--the organization of hope, of patience, of hot, untiring zeal, of finesse against political chicane, of persistence in the face of indifference and selfishness. "It will take years of organized endeavor," he confessed. He recognized his own ineffectiveness beyond the narrow pale of hopeful suggestion, and wished that here too the giving of a substantial sum--a large penny-in-the-slot--might produce quick and facile results.

His wife, it is to be feared, looked upon these activities of his, however slight, with a lack-lustre eye. She knew nothing of local problems and local needs. She was conscious of a hortatory manner in small matters and of indifference, which she almost made neglect, in matters that appeared to her to be larger. If she asked for a fairer share in his evenings--he belonged to a literary club, a musical society, and so on--it was scant consolation to be told that he objected to some of her own activities and associations. He did not much care, for example, to have her "run" with the McComases and others of that type or to have her dawdle over glasses, tall, broad, or short, in places of general democratic assemblage; and he told her so. I believe it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under provocation, of mentioning her impressions. It was about here, I suspect, that he told her something of Johnny McComas and his origins--at least he once or twice spoke of Johnny with a certain sharp scorn to me. He assuredly spoke of other country clubs on the other side of town which were more desirable for her and equally accessible, save in the material sense of mere miles. Though he took no interest in athletics, nor even in the lighter out-of-door sports, he was willing to join one of those clubs, if it was required of him.

His reference to Johnny McComas was designed, no doubt, to repel her; but the effect, as became perfectly apparent, was quite the contrary. She was interested, even fascinated, by the rise of a man from so little to so much. She found words and words to express her admiration of Johnny's type, and when English words ran short she found words in French. He was gaillard; he had elan. What wasn't he? What hadn't he? Bits of bravado, I still incline to think.

No, the McComases were not to be left behind all of a sudden. One day she made another excursion to the outskirts with them; and she reported it to Raymond, with a little air of suppressed mockery, as a perfectly unobjectionable jaunt. She had gone with them to the cemetery. Johnny's mother had died the year before, and he had been putting up a monument in Roselands. This structure, it developed, was no mere memorial to an individual. It was a tall shaft, set in the middle of a large lot. I saw it later myself: a lavish erection (with all its accessory features taken into account)--one designed, as I felt, to show Johnny himself to posterity as an ancestor, as the founder of a family line. Assuredly his own name, aside from the tall obelisk itself, was the largest thing in view.

Raymond took this account of Johnny's latest phase with an admirable seriousness; he thought the better of him for it. He himself was inclined to divide human-kind into two classes, those who had cemetery-lots (with monuments), and those who had not. The latter, of course, are in a majority everywhere. One thinks of Naples and of the sad road that winds up past the Alhambra to--Well, yes; in a majority, of course; and inevitably so in a large town suddenly thrown together by a heaping up of fortuitous and miscellaneous elements. In later years, when things were going rather badly with Raymond, and when consideration seemed to fail, he could always comfort himself with thoughts of the Princes' own monument in that same cemetery. This was another tall shaft in a gray granite now no longer to be found, and had been set up by old Jehiel on the occasion of the reinterment of some infants by his first wife--a transaction carried out years before Raymond was born. Some of the dates on the base of the monument went back to the early thirties. Well, there it stood, with the subordinated headstones of Jehiel and old Beulah, of his own parents, and of the half-mythical babes who, if they had given nothing else to the world, had furnished a future nephew with a social perspective. Raymond, reconsidering Johnny's recent effort, now began to disparage that improvised background, and led his wife to view his own lot--theirs, hers--only a hundred yards from the other. But she could not respond to old Jehiel and Beulah--though she tried to be properly sympathetic over their son and his wife. Still less could she vitalize the infants who had encountered an epidemic on the prairie frontier and had succumbed more than three score years ago. If she thought of any child at all, she thought doubtless of little Albert (now romping about in his first tweed knickerbockers), who would not die for many years, perhaps, and who was like enough to be buried in quite another spot.

But I think she thought, most of all, of the manly, cheerful sorrow of Johnny McComas before the new monument in the other lot.

III

These were also days of panic. Banks went down and bank officials threw themselves after. The city was thrilled, even charmed, to find that its financial perturbations touched, however slightly, the nerves of London and Paris. I myself was in Algeria that winter: my Elsie and I had decided on three months along the Mediterranean. It was on the white, glaring walls of the casino at Biskra that the news was first bulletined for our eyes. It had a glare of its own, I assure you: for a few days we knew little enough how we ourselves might be standing.

I thought of the Mid-Continent, with its cumbersome counters and partitions done in walnut veneer and its old-fashioned pavement in squares of black and white. I thought too of Johnny McComas's new institution, with so many bright brass handrails and such a spread of tasteful mosaics underfoot. How had they fared? Well, they had fared quite differently. Why should a big, old bank go under, while a new, little bank continues to float. I cannot tell you. I was far away at the time. Perhaps I could not tell you even if I had been on the spot. And to other questions, more important still, I may be unable to give, when the pinch comes, a clearer answer. The Mid-Continent dashed, or drifted, into the rocky hands of a receiver; and McComas's bank, after a fortnight of wobbling, righted itself and kept on its way.

I saw Raymond again in March. The receivership was going on languidly. Prospects were bright for nobody.

"All this puts an end to one of my plans, anyhow," he said.

"What plan is that?" I asked.

I was reminded that these were also the days of a quickened interest in education. This interest was expressing itself in large new institutions, and these institutions were generously embodying themselves in solid stone--in mullions, groins, gargoyles, finials, and the whole volume of approved scholastic detail. Donors were grouping themselves in "halls" and dormitories round a certain inchoate campus, and were putting on the fronts of their buildings their own names, or the names of deceased husbands or wives, fathers or mothers--so many bids for a monumental immortality.

"I had hoped for a Prince Hall," said Raymond. And he explained that it would have been in memory of his parents.

I must pause for a moment on this matter. I do not believe that Raymond had ever thought, in seriousness, of any such gift. It must have been at best an errant fancy, and if concerned with commemorating anybody concerned with commemorating himself. But I will say this for him: he never was disposed to try getting things out of people, for he hated attempts at trickery almost as much as he detested the exercise of the shrewdness involved in bargaining and dickering. Per contra, he often showed himself not averse to giving things to other people; but the basis for that giving must be clearly understood all round. He would not compete; he would not struggle; he would not descend to a war of wits. His to bestow, from some serene height; his the role, in fact, of the kindly patron. Let but his own superiority be recognized--let him only be regarded as hors concours--and he would sometimes deign to do the most generous acts. These acts embraced, now and again, the entertainment of writers and artists, either at his home or elsewhere: his fellows--for he was a writer and an artist too. But it was all done with the understanding that there was a difference: he was a writer and an artist--but he was something more. Those who failed to feel the difference were not always bidden a second time.

And his fancy for patronage was developing just at a time when patronage was becoming more difficult, awkward, impracticable! But though "Prince Hall" never saw the light, other and humbler forms of patronage came to be accepted by him.

Toward the end of April Raymond and his wife joined one of the clubs which he had brought to her notice. Though in a formative stage, like others, it was good (we ourselves joined it some few years later); and she made it her concern, through the summer, to give it some of those shaping pats which--for a new club, as for a new vase--have the greater value the earlier they are bestowed. She was active about the place, and she became conspicuous.

It was soon seen that she was "gay"--or was inclined to be, under favoring conditions. The conditions were most favoring, it began to be felt, when her husband was not about. A good many thought him stiff, and a few who used obsolete dictionary words pronounced him proud--a term stately enough to constitute somehow a tribute, though a damnatory one. It was soon seen, too, that just as he irked her, so she disparaged him--an open road to others.

One day she gave a lunch at the club--places for a dozen. Johnny McComas appeared there for the first time. It was a plainer place than his own, but I credit him with perceiving that it was much more worth while. Adele McComas did not appear--for a good reason. Those obstreperous twins now had a little sister two weeks old. The wife was doubtless better at home, but was the husband better at the club? If I had been a member at that time, and present, I should have felt like following him to some corner of the veranda and saying: "Oh, come, now, Johnny, will this quite do?" Well, I know what his look would have been--it came later. He would have turned that wide, round face on me, with the curly hair about the temples which gave him somehow an expression of abiding youth and frankness; and he would have directed those hard, bright blue eyes of his to look straight ahead at me--eyes that seemed to hold back nothing, yet really told nothing at all; and would have disclaimed any wrong-doing or any intention of wrong-doing. And I should have felt myself a foolish meddler.

Well, the innocent informalities of the summer were resumed by the same set in town next winter. The memories and the methods of one season were tided over to another. Gertrude was still "gay"--perhaps gayer--and a little more openly impatient with her husband, and a little more openly disdainful of him. Young men swarmed and fluttered, and those who had "never tried it on" before seemed inclined to try it on now.

I take, on the whole, a tempered view--by which I mean, a favorable view--of our society and its moral tone. I am assured, and I believe from my own observations, that this is higher than in some other of our large cities. I dislike scandal, and I have no desire to bear tales. Either is far from being the object of these present pages. Nothing that I present need be taken as typical, as tyrannously representative.

Raymond criticized, expostulated. Friends began to come to him with impressions and reports. I--whether for good or ill--was not one of these. They named names--names which I shall not record here. But it was one of Raymond's own impressions, and a vivid one, which finally prompted him to make a move.

IV

January found the social life of the town in full swing. We had recovered from last year's financial jolt, and entertaining was constant. Raymond and his wife were invited out a good deal. He was bored by it all; but his wife remained interested and indefatigable. Finally came a dance at one of the great houses. Raymond rebelled, and refused point-blank to go: an evening in his library was his mood. His wife protested, cajoled, and he finally found a reason for giving in.

As I say, they were bidden to one of the great houses--one of the few that possessed an actual facade, a central court, and a big staircase: it had too its galleries of paintings and of Oriental curios before Oriental curios became too common. Its owner was also, with the rest, a musical amateur. He was a man of forty-five, and like Raymond had a wife too many years younger than himself for his own comfort. This lively lady lived on fiddles and horns--dancing was an inexhaustible pleasure. At her dancing-parties, of which she gave three or four a season, her husband would show himself below for a few moments for civility's sake, and then retire to a remote den on an upper floor, well shut out from the sounds of his wife's frivolous measures, but accessible to a few habitues of age and tastes approximating his own.

The question of music of another quality and to another purpose was in the air--it was a matter of endowing and housing an orchestra. Informal pour-parlers were under way in various quarters, and Raymond felt disposed, and even able, to contribute in a modest measure. It was his pride to have been asked, and it was his pride, despite untoward conditions, to put up a good front and do as much as he could. An hour's confab over cigarettes in that retired little den might clarify one atmosphere, if not another.

The court and its staircase were set with palms, as is the ineluctable wont on such occasions and for such places; and people, between the dances, or during them, were brushing the fronds aside as they thronged the galleries round the court to see the Barbizon masters then in vogue and the Chinese jades. As Raymond passed down the stairway, he met his wife coming up on the arm of Johnny McComas.

"She looked self-conscious," Raymond said to me, a few days after. I told him that he had seen only what he was expecting to see.

"And he looked too beastly self-satisfied." I told him that of late I had seldom seen Johnny look any other way.

"Where was his wife?" he asked. I told him she might easily be in the crowd on some other man's arm.

"Why were they there at all?" he demanded. And I did not tell him that probably they were there through his own wife's good offices.

That meeting on the stairs!--he made a grievance of it, an injury. The earlier meeting, with Johnny's own wife on his arm, had annoyed him as a general assertion of prosperity. This present meeting, with Raymond Prince's wife on Johnny's arm, exasperated him as a challenging assertion of power and predominance.

"I shall act," Raymond declared.

"Nothing rash," said I. "Nothing unconsidered, I hope."

"I shall act," he repeated. And he set his jaw more decisively than a strong man always finds necessary.

V

Raymond's mind was turning more and more to a set scene with McComas; some meeting between them was, to his notion, a scene a faire. It seemed demanded by a Gallic sense of form: it must be gone through with as a requisite to his role of offended husband.

One difficulty was that Raymond fluctuated daily, almost hourly, in his view of his wife--of the wife, I may say. To-day he took the old view: the wife was her husband's property and any attempt on her was a deadly injury to him. To-morrow he took the newer view: the wife was an individual human being and a free moral agent; therefore a lapse, while it meant disgrace for her, was, for him, but an affront which he must endure with dignified composure.

Meanwhile the pair saw little of each other, and Albert, puzzled, began to enter upon his opportunity (a wide and lingering one it became) for learning adjustment to awkward and disconcerting conditions.

Well, Raymond had his meeting. Imagine whether it was agreeable. Imagine whether it was agreeable to me, in whose office it was held. Raymond had the difficult part of one who must act because he has deliberately committed himself to action, yet has no sure ground to act upon, and therefore no line to take with real effect. It was here and now that McComas turned his round face foursquare to his uncertain accuser, and let loose a steady, unspeaking stare from those hard blue eyes, and declared that nothing had occurred upon which an accusation could justly be based. He was emphatic; and he was blunt; the son and grandson of a rustic.

Nothing, he said. Had there really been nothing? You are entitled to ask. And I might be inclined to answer, if I knew. I simply don't. I was in position to know something, to know much; but everything?--no.

Think, if you please, of the many domestic situations which must pass without the full light of detailed knowledge--knowledge that comes too late, or never comes at all. Consider the simple, willful girl who marries impulsively on the assumption that the new acquaintance is a bachelor. Cases have been known where it developed that he was not. Consider the phrase of the marriage service, "if any of you know just cause or impediment": who can declare that, in a given instance, some impediment, moral if not legal, might not be brought against either contracting party, however trustful the other? Consider the story of the anxious American mother who, alarmed by reports about a fascinating scoundrel under whom her daughter was studying music somewhere in mid-Europe, went abroad alone to investigate. Her letter to the awaiting father, back home, ran for page after page on non-essentials and dealt with the real point only in a brief, embarrassed, bewildered postscript of one line: "Oh, William, I don't know!" Neither do I "know." But my account of later events may help you to decide the question for yourselves.

Raymond had set his mind on a divorce. If grounds could not be found in one quarter, they must be found in another. If McComas, that prime figure, was unable to bring aid, then there must be cooeperation among the other and lesser figures. Raymond revived and reviewed the tales that had involved several younger men. The more he dwelt on them, the more inflamed he became, and the more certain that he had been wronged.

I did not accompany him through his proceedings--such advice as I had given him near the beginning was the advice simply of a friend. My own part of the great field of the law is a relatively unimpassioned one--office-work involving real-estate, conveyancing, loans, and the like. I suggested to Raymond the proper counsel for the particular case, and there, for a while, I left him.

His wife's parents came on from the East. The mother, after some years abroad, had lately resumed her domestic duties in the land of her birth. The father, who knew all of one subject, and nothing of any other, detached himself for a week or two from the one worthy interest in life and accompanied her. The "street" was still there when he returned. They seemed experienced and worldly-wise in their respective fields and their respective aspects, but they entered upon this new matter with a poor grace. Here was another mother who did not quite "know," and another father who waited, at a second remove, for definite knowledge that did not quite come. First there were maladroit attempts to bring a reconciliation; and afterwards, and more shrewdly, endeavors to gain as much as possible for their daughter from the wreck.

Raymond was determined to keep possession of Albert. Mrs. McComas, mother of three, stoutly declared that the mother should have her child. Other women said the same, and maintained the point regardless of the mother's course or conduct. Many women have said the same in many cases, and perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are completely right in the case of a boy of six, who surely needs a woman's care. But it is not difficult, even when material is more abundant than definite, to throw an atmosphere of dubiousness about a woman and to make it appear that she is not a "proper person...." So it appeared to the judge in this case, and so he ruled--with a shading, however. Albert might spend with his mother one month every summer--and some financial concession on Raymond's part helped make the time brief. However, she was to have nothing to say about Albert's mode of life through the rest of the year, and nothing (more specifically) about his education.

"That makes him mine," said Raymond.

And he set his lips firmly. He was one of those who set their lips firmly after the event is determined.

I do not know whether Raymond had any real affection for Albert. I do not know whether he realized what it was for a father to undertake, single handed, the charge of a boy of six. I think that what moved him chiefly was his determination to carry a point. However all this may be, I remember what he said as, after the decree, he walked out with Albert's hand in his.

"Well, it's over!"

Over!--as if a separation involving a child is ever "over"! _

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