Sanctuary | Page 2

the habitual wear of the human
countenance; and his estimate of life and of himself was necessarily
tinged by the cordial terms on which they had always met each other.
He had in fact found life, from the start, an uncommonly agreeable
business, culminating fitly enough in his engagement to the only girl he
had ever wished to marry, and the inheritance, from his unhappy

step-brother, of a fortune which agreeably widened his horizon. Such a
combination of circumstances might well justify a young man in
thinking himself of some account in the universe; and it seemed the
final touch of fitness that the mourning which Denis still wore for poor
Arthur should lend a new distinction to his somewhat florid good looks.
Kate Orme was not without an amused perception of her future
husband's point of view; but she could enter into it with the tolerance
which allows for the inconscient element in all our judgments. There
was, for instance, no one more sentimentally humane than Denis's
mother, the second Mrs. Peyton, a scented silvery person whose
lavender silks and neutral-tinted manner expressed a mind with its
blinds drawn down toward all the unpleasantness of life; yet it was
clear that Mrs. Peyton saw a "dispensation" in the fact that her step-son
had never married, and that his death had enabled Denis, at the right
moment, to step gracefully into affluence. Was it not, after all, a sign of
healthy-mindedness to take the gifts of the gods in this religious spirit,
discovering fresh evidence of "design" in what had once seemed the
sad fact of Arthur's inaccessibility to correction? Mrs. Peyton,
beautifully conscious of having done her "best" for Arthur, would have
thought it unchristian to repine at the providential failure of her efforts.
Denis's deductions were, of course, a little less direct than his mother's.
He had, besides, been fond of Arthur, and his efforts to keep the poor
fellow straight had been less didactic and more spontaneous. Their
result read itself, if not in any change in Arthur's character, at least in
the revised wording of his will; and Denis's moral sense was pleasantly
fortified by the discovery that it very substantially paid to be a good
fellow.
The sense of general providentialness on which Mrs. Peyton reposed
had in fact been confirmed by events 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