Clara had brought Miss Dunbar back and established her in her own house near Weir, under the care of a deaf widowed aunt. Dunbar Place was a stately colonial house, set in a large demesne, and all Kent County waited breathless to know what revelations the heiress would make to it, in the way of equi-pages, marqueterie furniture, or Paris gowns.
Mrs. Waldeaux found Lucy one day, a month after her arrival, seated at her sewing on the broad, rose-covered piazza, looking as if she never had left it.
"Have you come to stay now, my dear," she said, "or will Prince Wolfburgh----""Oh, that is an old story," interrupted Clara. "Lucy handed the little prince over to Jean Hassard, who married him after he had a long fight with her father about her dot. He won the dot, but Count Odo is now the head of the house. Jean, I hear, is in Munich fighting her way up among the Herrschaft.""Jean has good fighting qualities," Lucy said. "She will win.""I had a letter from her to-day," said Miss Vance.
"Here it is. She says, `I mean to rebuild the Schloss, and I have put a stop to the soap-boiling business. Iwill have no fumes of scorching fat in our ancestral halls. Four of the princesses live with us here in the flat. Gussy Carson from Pond City is staying with me now. We have an American tea every Wednesday. Gus receives with me.'""Poor princesses!" said Lucy.
Miss Vance folded the letter with a complacent nod. "Iam glad that Jean is settled so satisfactorily," she said. "As for Lucy----"No one answered. Lucy threaded her needle.
"I start next week to Chicago, did you know, Frances?
The Bixbys--two orphan heiresses--wish me to take them to Australia, coming back by India. And I suppose," she said, rising impatiently, "if I were to stay away forty years I should find Lucy when I came back, with white hair maybe, but sitting calmly sewing, not caring whether there was a man in the world or not!"Lucy laughed, but did not even blush.
Mrs. Waldeaux presently said good-by, and Clara went home with her to spend the night. Lucy was left alone upon the piazza. It was there that George Waldeaux saw her again.
This had been the hardest day of his life. He rose that morning telling himself with an oath that he would earn the money to buy his own food or never eat again. His mother had sent him a cheque by post. He tore it up and went out of his cheap lodging-house without breakfast.
There was a queer change in him--a sudden lofty independence--a sudden loathing of himself. He knew now that it was not in him to do good work in the world, but at least he would pay his own way. He had been a mass of vanity and now he was so mean in his own eyes that he shrank from the passers-by. Perhaps the long strain had damaged the gray matter of the brain, or some nervous centre--I do not know what change a physician would have found in him, but the man was changed.
A clerk was needed in a provision shop on Green Street. George placed himself in the line of dirty, squalid applicants. The day was hot, the air of the shop was foul with the smells of rotting meat and vegetables.
He felt himself stagger against a stall. He seemed to be asleep, but he heard the butchers laughing. They called him a drunken tramp, and then he was hurled out on the muddy pavement.
"Too much whiskey for this time o' day!" a policeman said, hauling him to his feet.
"Move along, young man!"
Whiskey? That was what he wanted. He turned into a shop and bought a dram with his last pennies. It made him comfortable for a few hours, then he began to cry and swear. George Waldeaux had never been drunk in his life.
The ascetic, stainless priest in him stood off and looked at this dog of the gutter with his obscene talk, and then came defeat of soul and body.
"I give up!" he said quietly. "I'll never try again."He wandered unconsciously to the ferry and, having his yearly book of tickets in his pocket, took the train for home from force of habit. He left the cars at a station several miles from Weir, and wandered across the country. Just at sundown, covered with mud and weak from hunger and drunkenness, he crossed the lawn before Lucy's house and, looking up, saw her.
