Charles Neville Buck

“ Every woman has something of restless yearning in her eyes at some time. To a woman with great charm and beauty the world sings a siren song. I saw this thing in your eyes—and soul. I saw it come and go—and I knew that you had won your fight, and won through to life's sweetest benison. You have love. These lives are ended, but yours is beginning." Then he, too, turned away, and only the girl and young man were left.
Mary's beautiful eyes were bright with tears, and, as she stood there slim and straight, her companion came close and his arm slipped about her. ”

“ Hamilton raised his hands warningly. "Don't throw yourself to the enemy, Paul. Don't make an irreconcilable breach between us. I don't find fault with your sympathy. I should hate you if you didn't feel it—but this man Edwardes is doomed. Nothing can save him. If heaven itself fought for him, I would make war on heaven, whoever attempts to thwart me—even if it be you, Paul, shall go with him to ruin. We won't talk of this again."
Mary Burton awoke one morning to see, through her window blinds, a mixture of snow and rain falling from low-hanging clouds; yet her lips parted in a smile. ”

“ Ham had shown his little store of greedily conned books and had bared to the gaze of the other his naked and scorching torture of ambition. The lad knew something of the men who had made themselves masters of the world and wished to know more. Edwardes had not even laughed when Ham declared with naïve conviction: "None of them men ever did anything I couldn't do, if I got the chance." It was impossible to laugh, though listening to such boundless egotism, in the face of so deep a sincerity and such an implicit self-belief as shone from those young eyes. ”

“ Yet she had been a memory that remained distinct through years in New York and Russia; a memory which his imagination had quickened into life. Of Hamilton's spectacular successes his world of banking and finance had given him cognizance, but only such interest as one accedes to matters of impersonal news.
So a curiosity had arisen in his mind to see this young woman to whom he had once played the fairy prince, and since he was a whimsical man, that curiosity had woven and twisted itself into a dream. A dream long entertained may become something more than a dream. ”

“ Then slowly there came over his own a glow of keen admiration.
He came over and bowed with almost courtly ceremony, then he laughed.
"Mary," he exclaimed, "we shall fight, you and I, but we shall reign together. By God, you are my sister! Not just by coincidence of birth, but by the deeper kinship of our two souls. Great heavens, girl, since I came here to fight and to win, I've been lonely. It's not egotism but truth that makes me say this. I have been a conqueror—and all conquerors are lonely. You are mistress here. Do as you wish." ”

“ Into her eyes came so splendid and serene a light that she seemed transfigured. "I am ready to hold loyalty above life itself. If Jefferson Edwardes goes to his execution, I shall go with him and I shall be prouder to share his ruin than any other man's victory. I have just promised to marry him...." Slowly she raised her hand and gazed at the engagement ring. The ghost of a smile trembled about her lips, though a sudden moisture dimmed her eyes. It was a mist of tenderness, not fear. "That promise was not given lightly," she added. "It outweighs even a Monte Cristo's arrogance." ”

“ When Paul Burton reached the street most of the private motors had been summoned and dispatched by the starter. He stood for a little while looking up at the stars and breathing deeply the grateful night air. The moon-mist made a shadowy lacework of the trees in the park, and the dark contours of the avenue's mansions were silhouetted beyond the lights of the Savoy and Netherland. The expenditure of so much of his emotional self always left him strangely restless, and made him crave a brief aftermath of solitude. So he sent his car away and turned down the avenue. ”

“ And now that I have seen you, how can I think of pearls?"
To hear words of love spoken in a wild onrush of feeling was no new experience to Mary Burton, yet it was as though she had never heard them before. In the past her ears had heard, but now her heart was listening, and her heart pounded in her breast as it drank in what the man said. He talked fast, with his eyes on her eyes, and his hands grasping her white shoulders. His heart, too, rather than his tongue, was speaking.
"You will read in every book," he declared, "that such things as this are impossible. ”

“ Had his road to artistic recognition lain along the broken trail of struggle, Paul would have fainted, undiscovered, by the wayside, but with every difficulty made smooth before his feet and every puddle carpeted by Hamilton's cloth of gold, he found himself the lionized pet of inner circles and the favorite of the elect.
Of these things Hamilton Burton was thinking as he left his door for the car that awaited him. From the start he had never deviated from his well-laid course of determination. Power was his goal and by power he meant no mean modicum, but limitless strength. ”

“ When I grow savage in mood—" his clear-eyed smile belied that state of mind—"I just run in here for a bit of bear-baiting—rather good sport—bear-baiting. This is a den of bears you know. Oh, yes, rather! They are all elderly bears, very crabbed and self-absorbed and very smart and immaculate—but bears none the less. Each has his particular chair, which to his own self-centered mind is his private pedestal. They sit here with their manicured hands resting idly on their robust, waistcoated tummies and stare out on the world like little clay gods." ”

“ They had lived day by day with Hamilton Burton until his death, and none of them had, in the shoulder-touch of life, ever suspected those deeper things of which now for the first time they heard. They were hearing it all from lips which were to them as the lips of a prophet. But the preacher was not through.
"And there was Paul. You all knew him and loved him. A nature was given him at birth almost too delicate for a world of hard affairs, but fragrant with a tenderness of love for his fellow-men. He was attuned to harmony and his heart was that of a troubadour. ”

“ Paul, too, stopped, and, looking up, was startled to behold features set in a rapt expression and dominated by eyes glowing with an inward ardor.
"Listen to me, Paul," began Ham in a voice which carried an electric thrill into the dreamy soul of the listener. "You love music and you live in a place where they don't know the difference between Tannhäuser and a tom-tom. Mary would like to be pretty and she lives in a place where if she was as beautiful as Cinderella, nobody but a bunch of hill-bullies would ever see her. ”

“ The threat of tomorrow's wrath would not have troubled him.
When Mary Burton, changed into bedroom attire, had dismissed her maid for the night, she still moved about with a restlessness which did not at once yield to the composure needed for the rigid self-analysis upon which she was resolved. She stood before the mirror and looked gravely into the glass.
With the lustrous masses of hair falling braided over her shoulders and the new glow of discovery in her eyes she might have been a girl just budding into womanhood. ”

“ Jefferson Edwardes smiled in the dark, but spoke gravely.
"You call yourself an artificial little flirt. You haven't flirted with me. Why?"
"With you I have talked ten minutes." She laughed suddenly as though at some absurd thought. "Besides, did any woman ever flirt with you? Can one lie to eyes that see through one?"
"My eyes do see something," he said. "They see that you have never had a chance to be your real self. You have been surrounded by flatterers and sycophants, when you needed sincere and truthful friends." ”

“ In her fancy the fingers with their wealth of rings were again red with the drudgery of the washtub and the head she caressed was the head of a little boy, who, because he was delicate and shrinking, found a greater delight here at her knee than in the rougher companionship of playmates. Paul spoke softly.
"Ham"—it had been a long time since he had used that abbreviated name. Perhaps he, too, had slipped back into the past—"Ham will get well—and work more miracles, mother. He won't surrender even to death. His spirit, and his star, will bring him through." ”

“ Hamilton Burton's smile died and his face grew for a moment solicitous as he read his father's troubled eyes. Old Thomas Burton was shaven and manicured and betailored into a model of well-nourished—possibly over-nourished—senectitude. His mustaches and beard were waxed and pointed. Once he had deplored the necessity and trouble of the Sabbath shave—and his hair had known no law of shears or shampoo. In his lapel a gardenia was carefully placed so that it should not obscure the button which proclaimed him a Son of the American Revolution. ”

“ Yet there was to be said the most important thing of all, and the most trying.
"Paul," she began slowly, but in a voice of finality, "when you go back tomorrow, you mustn't come to see me again. At least not for a long while."
His face became a mask of tragic disappointment, and his voice was pleading.
"You are not going to reinstate your sentence of banishment, Marcia? You can't know what this evening has meant to me. A man must have in his life that comfort that only a woman like you can give. Surely you will give it." ”

“ From the violence of the gestures and the truculence of the voice whose words did not reach him, Hamilton Burton knew that it was an agitator whose burden was the hardness of the times and the inequality of living conditions. His lips shaped themselves for an instant into a smile of satirical amusement. One who held his fingers so constantly on the pulse of finance was not in ignorance of the feverish heat that burned through the nation's arteries. ”

“ He knew that in the old days Tom Burton's word had been a synonym for inflexible honesty; that it was as good as collateral at the bank.
Then, sitting at ease, the well-groomed old gentleman held his glass before him and gazed at the colors which the firelight wakened in its amber contents. His face wore the contentment of one whose mood has been artificially mellowed and whose thoughts are more glowing than reliable. He cleared his throat and began to speak importantly.
"My boy, a great idea has come to me—a splendid conception, I may say. ”

“ Loraine Haswell sighed—and masked a yawn behind a small uplifted hand. "I wonder," she mused as though to herself, yet quite loud enough to be heard, "why some men find it so hard to make money, and to others it seems so easy."
Len Haswell flushed brick red to his cheekbones. He bit his lip and forced himself to remain silent for a moment, then he spoke gently. "I'm sorry I am not as brilliant a financier as some others. Nature doesn't endow us all alike. A good many people would regard me as fairly successful, I dare say. ”

“ Her fortitude wavered momentarily as she looked at her watch—wavered, but held, and at last she found herself on the stage with no concise recollection of how she had reached it, beyond a shadowy memory of Smitherton's smiling face in the wings. The curtain rose, and the public—part of it was the rabble—fed its eyes on the beauty they had paid to see—the beauty of a fallen royalty.
There are times when vaudeville galleries are not excessively polite. This was such a time. For a few moments Mary Burton had the stage to herself, and her acting was in dumb-show. ”