life, and after all her
dreams. She sighed and cried in secret, writing Cowperwood a cautious
explanation and asking him to see her privately in New York when he
returned.

"Don't you think we had best go on a little while longer?" she
suggested to Berenice. "It just wrings my heart to think that you,
with your qualifications, should have to stoop to giving
dancing-lessons. We had better do almost anything for a while yet.
You can make a suitable marriage, and then everything will be all right
for you. It doesn't matter about me. I can live. But you--" Mrs.
Carter's strained eyes indicated the misery she felt. Berenice was
moved by this affection for her, which she knew to be genuine; but what
a fool her mother had been, what a weak reed, indeed, she was to lean
upon! Cowperwood, when he conferred with Mrs. Carter, insisted that
Berenice was quixotic, nervously awry, to wish to modify her state, to
eschew society and invalidate her wondrous charm by any sort of
professional life. By prearrangement with Mrs. Carter he hurried to
Pocono at a time when he knew that Berenice was there alone. Ever
since the Beales Chadsey incident she had been evading him.

When he arrived, as he did about one in the afternoon of a crisp
January day, there was snow on the ground, and the surrounding
landscape was bathed in a crystalline light that gave back to the eye
endless facets of luster--jewel beams that cut space with a flash. The
automobile had been introduced by now, and he rode in a touring-car of
eighty horse-power that gave back from its dark-brown, varnished
surface a lacquered light. In a great fur coat and cap of round, black
lamb's-wool he arrived at the door.

"Well, Bevy," he exclaimed, pretending not to know of Mrs. Carter's
absence, "how are you? How's your mother? Is she in?"

Berenice fixed him with her cool, steady-gazing eyes, as frank and
incisive as they were daring, and smiled him an equivocal welcome. She
wore a blue denim painter's apron, and a palette of many colors
glistened under her thumb. She was painting and thinking--thinking
being her special occupation these days, and her thoughts had been of
Braxmar, Cowperwood, Kilmer Duelma, a half-dozen others, as well as of
the stage, dancing, painting. Her life was in a melting-pot, as it
were, before her; again it was like a disarranged puzzle, the pieces of
which might be fitted together into some interesting picture if she
could but endure.

"Do