The Ordeal | Page 2

with which Briscoe had risen to
receive him, when, unannounced, he appeared in the doorway as
abruptly as if he had fallen from the clouds. As it was, the brief
colloquy on the business interests that had brought him hither was
almost concluded before the problem of his host's manner began to
intrude on Bayne's consciousness. Briscoe's broad, florid, genial
countenance expressed an unaccountable disquietude; a flush had
mounted to his forehead, which was elongated by his premature
baldness; he was pulling nervously at his long dark mustache, which
matched in tint the silky fringe of hair encircling his polished crown;
his eyes, round and brown, and glossy as a chestnut, wandered
inattentively. He did not contend on small points of feasibility,
according to his wont--for he was of an argumentative habit of mind--in
fact, his acquiescence in every detail proposed was so complete and so
unexpected that Bayne, with half his urgency unsaid, came to the end
of his proposition with as precipitate an effect as if he had stumbled

upon it in the dark.
"Well, that's agreed, is it? Easily settled! I really need not have
come--though"--with a complaisant after-thought--"it is a pleasure to
look in on you in your woodland haunts."
Briscoe suddenly leaned forward from his easy chair and laid his hand
on his cousin's knee.
"Julian," he said anxiously, "I hate to tell you--but my wife has got that
woman here."
Bayne stared, blankly unresponsive. "What woman?" he asked
wonderingly.
"Mrs. Royston, you know--Lillian Marable, that was."
Bayne looked as if suddenly checked in headlong speed--startled,
almost stunned. The blood rushed in a tumultuous flood to his thin
cheeks, then receded, leaving his face mottled red and white. His
steel-gray eyes suddenly glowed like hot metal. There was a moment of
tense silence; then he said, his voice steady and controlled, his manner
stiff but not without dignity, "Pray do not allow that to discompose you.
She is nothing to me."
"I know--I know, of course. I would not have mentioned it, but I feared
an unexpected meeting might embarrass you, here in this seclusion
where you cannot avoid each other."
"You need not have troubled yourself," Bayne protested, looking
fixedly at his cigar as he touched off the long ash with a delicate fillip.
There was a great contrast in the aspect of the two, which accorded
with their obvious differences of mind and temperament. Briscoe, a
man of wealth and leisure, portly and rubicund, was in hunting togs,
with gaiters, knickers, jacket, and negligee shirt, while Bayne, with no
trace of the disorder incident to a long journey by primitive methods of
transportation, was as elaborately groomed and as accurately costumed

in his trig, dark brown, business suit as if he had just stepped from the
elevator of the sky-scraper where his offices as a broker were located.
His manner distinctly intimated that the subject was dismissed, but
Briscoe, who had as kindly a heart as ever beat, was nothing of a
diplomat. He set forth heavily to justify himself.
"You see--knowing that you were once in love with her----"
"Oh, no, my dear fellow," Bayne hastily interrupted; "I never loved her.
I loved only my own dream of one fair woman. It did not come true,
that's all."
Briscoe seemed somewhat reassured, but in the pervasive awkwardness
of his plight as host of both parties he could not quit the subject. "Just
so," he acquiesced gladly; "a mere dream--and a dream can make no
sensible man unhappy."
Bayne laughed with a tense note of satire. "Well, the awakening was a
rude jar, I must confess."
For it had been no ordinary termination of an unhappy love affair. It
befell within a fortnight of the date set for the prospective marriage. All
the details of publicity were complete: the cards were out; the "society
columns" of the local journals had revelled in the plans of the event; the
gold and silver shower of the bridal presents was raining down. The
determining cause of the catastrophe was never quite clear to the
community--whether a lover's quarrel with disproportionate
consequences, by reason of the marplot activities of a mercenary
relative of the lady's, advocating the interests of a sudden opportunity
of greater wealth and station; or her foolish revenge for a fancied slight;
or simply her sheer inconstancy in a change of mind and heart. At all
events, without a word of warning, Julian Bayne, five years before, had
the unique experience of reading in a morning paper the notice of the
marriage of his promised bride to another man, and of sustaining with
what grace he might the rôle of a jilted lover amidst the ruins of his
nuptial preparations.
In the estimation of the judicious, he had made a happy escape, for the

cruelty involved in