“Sunday best” laid away in the lavender and tissue of her secret self. As yet only her old Scotch nurse even suspected its existence and of all her little, subservient world, only that old Scotch nurse neither laughed at Helen’s dream friends—nor scoffed. In her sweet six years of life her father’s will and hers had never clashed. That, when the almost inevitable clash of child and parent, old and young, cautious experience and adventurous inexperience, came, Helen’s should prove the stronger will, and hers the victory, would have seemed absurd and incredible to all who knew them—to every one except the nurse.

Stephen and Hugh, in their different boyish ways, loved the girl-child, and wooed her.

She tolerated them both, patronized, tyrannized, and cared little for either.

Hugh was thick-set and had sweaty hands. Often he bored her.

Stephen’s odd face, already at fourteen corrugated by thought, ambition and strident personality painfully concealed, repelled her—even frightened her a little, a very little; for her cherished life and serene soul gave her little gift of fear.

Their wills clashed daily—but almost always over things about which she cared little or less than little, and did not trouble to be insistent. She yielded over such trifles—out of indifference and almost contemptuous good-nature sheerly. And the boy, “blind” here at least, misread it. But on one point Stephen never could prevail against her. She would neither renounce her invisible playmates nor even concede him that they were indeed “make-believe.”

Her will and Hugh’s never clashed. How could they? He had no will but hers.

Hugh was her slave.

Stephen, loving her as strongly and as hotly, sought to be her master. No conscious presumption this: it was his nature.

Deep Dale was all simmering blue and green to-day—with softening shadows and tones of gray; blue sky, green grass, trees green-leafed, gray-trunked—green paths, gray and green-walled, blue roofed, the early spring flowers (growing among the grasses but sparsely as yet, and being woven, too often broken-necked, into Hugh’s devoted jewelering) too tiny of modest bud and timid bloom to speck but most minutely the picture with lemon, violet or rose. The little girl’s wealth of red hair made the glory and the only emphatic color of the picture. Hugh’s hair was ash brown and dull—Stephen’s darker, growing to black—but as dull. Even the clothes of these three children painted in perfectly with the blue and green of this early May-day, Nature’s spring-song. The lads, not long out of mourning, were dressed in sober gray. Helen’s frocks came from Hanover Square, when they did not come from the Rue de Rivoli, and to-day her little frock of turquoise cashmere was embroidered and sashed with green as soft and tender as the pussy willows and their new baby leafage.

But the sun—a pale gray sun at best all day—was slipping down the sky’s blue skirt. Helen, tiring of her elvish play, or wholesomely hungry for “cambric” tea and buns, slid off the tree trunk, smiled back and waved her hand—to nothing, and turned towards the house. Hugh trotted after her, not sorry to suspend his trying toil, not sorry to approach cake and jam, but carrying his stickily woven tribute with him. But Stephen, enthralled, almost entranced, lay still, his fine chin cupped in his strong hand, his eyes—and his soul—watching a flock of birds flying nestward towards the night.

CHAPTER II

Richard Bransby had few friends because he tolerated few. Unloving towards most, rather than unlovable, his life and his personality cut deep, but in narrow channels. To him pictures were—canvas and paint, and a considerable item of expense; for he was too shrewd a business man to buy anything cheap or inferior. Knowing his own limitations as few men have the self-searching gift to do, he took no risks with his strenuously earned sovereigns, lavishly as he spent them. He spent magnificently, but he never misspent. He had too much respect to do that—respect for his money and for himself and for the honest, relentless industry with which that self had amassed that same money. He never selected the pictures for which he paid, nor even their frames. Latham did all that for him. Horace knew almost as much about pictures and music as he did about nerves, and could chat with as much suave authority about Tintoretto and Liszt, motif and chiaro-oscuro as he could about diphtheria or Bell’s palsy, and was as much at his old friend’s service in matters of art as in matters of cerebellum and aorta. Bransby cared nothing for horses, and liked dogs just “well enough”—out of doors. He was a book-worm—with one author, scarcely more. He was indifferent to his dinner, and he cared nothing at all for flowers. This last seems strange and contradictory, for the women he had loved had each been peculiarly flowerlike. But who shall attempt to gauge or plumb the contradictorinesses of human nature, or be newly surprised at them?

Richard Bransby had loved three women passionately, and had lost them all. He was no skeptic, but he was rebel. He could not, or he would not, forgive God their death, and he grudged the Heaven, to which he doubted not they had gone, their presence. Nothing could reconcile or console him—although two strong affections (and beside which he had no other) remained to him; and with them—and his books—he patched his life and kept his heart just alive.

He loved the great ship-building business he had created, and steered through many a financial tempest, around rocks of strikes and quicksands of competition, into an impregnably fortified harbor of millionairedom, with skill as devoted and as magnificent as the skill of a Drake or the devotion of a Scott, steering and nursing some great ship or tiny bark through the desperate straits of battle or the torture perils of polar ice floes.

And he loved Helen whom he had begotten—loved her tenderly for her own sweet, lovable sake, loved her more many times, and more quickly, for the sake of her mother.

He cared nothing for flowers, but he had recognized clearly how markedly the three women he had adored (for it had amounted to that) had resembled each a blossom. His mother had been like a “red, red rose that blooms in June”—a Jacqueminot or a Xavier Olibo. And it was from her he had inherited the vivid personality of his youth. She had died suddenly—when he had been in the City, chained even then to the great business he was creating—boy of twenty-three though he was—and his hot young heart was almost broken; but not quite, for Alice, his wife, had crept into it then, a graceful tea-rose-like creature, white, pink-flushed, head-heavy with perfume. Violet, his only sister, had been a pale, pretty thing, modest and sweet as the flower of her name. Helen he thought was like some rare orchid, with her elusive piquant features, her copper-red hair, her snow face, her curved crimson lips, her intangible, indescribable charm—irregular, baffling.

Alice had died at Helen’s birth, but he blamed God and turned from Him, blamed not or turned from the small plaintive destroyer who laughed and wailed in its unmothered cradle. The young wife’s death had unnerved, and had hardened him too. It injured him soul-side and body: and the hurt to his physical self threatened to be as lasting and the more baneful. A slight cardiac miscarriage caught young Dr. Latham’s trained eye on the very day of Alice Bransby’s death—and the disturbance it caused, controlled for six silent years by the one man’s will and the other man’s skill, had not disappeared or abated. Very