When it came time for Isabel to say good-night to her hostess Bennett was hovering near to offer his services in calling her car.
"Nothing like that for me! I brought walking shoes and shall foot it home, thank you. But—" she hesitated and said with mock gravity, "if you're not afraid of the night air or the excessive fatigue, you might take me home. That will add a mile to your prescription but you can ride back!"
The other guests had gone when she reappeared, wrapped in a long cloak and bearing a party-bag containing her slippers. She spoke of her plans for the summer with charming candor as they set off at a brisk pace. Little bits of autobiography she let fall interested him immensely. She was born in Wyoming, where her father had been a ranchman, and she had first known Mrs. Featherstone in college. She was enthusiastic about the summer camp; if it succeeded she meant to conduct an outdoor school for girls, moving it from Michigan to Florida with the changing seasons.
"People have been so kind to me! And I shall have a wonderful lot of girls—just think of it—one hundred dear young beings from all over the country. It's a big responsibility but that land of my grandfather's is a lovely site for the camp. It's on a bay, where the swimming will be perfectly safe, and there's a wonderful forest, with Indian trails that run back to Marquette's time. We shall have a doctor—a woman, of course—and two trained nurses and some splendid young women to act, as councilors."
There was no question of her making a success of it, he said, marveling at her vitality, her exuberance, the confidence with which she viewed the future.
"I wish you all good luck," he said when they reached the house of the friend she was visiting. "The camp will be a great success—I'm sure of that."
"Oh, it's a case of sink or swim—I've got to make it go!" she replied with her buoyant laugh. "If I don't succeed I can't emerge from the woods next fall and face my creditors!"
"There's the buried treasure; you mustn't neglect that! I'm greatly your debtor for all the interesting things you've told me. This has been the happiest evening I've spent since——"
"Since you began taking everything so hard? Please quit looking on your life as a burden; try to get some fun out of it!"
The door opened to the key she gave him and the light of the hall lamp fell upon her face and glinted her brown hair as she put out her hand.
"Don't forget me in the rush of things! And particularly don't forget that note of instructions. I'm counting on that!"
"Not really?" she exclaimed. "I was just in fun, you know."
"If I don't get it before I leave tomorrow evening, I shall be terribly disappointed. I shall take it as a sign that you don't think me worth bothering about!"
There was a pleading in his voice that held her for a moment; she surveyed him gravely, then answered lightly,
"Oh, very well! You shall have it, sir!"
II
Archie didn't know that the note caused Isabel a great deal of trouble. It was one thing to promise to tell a man who was all but a stranger just how to alter his way of life with a view to a happier existence, but to sit before a sheet of white paper and compose a letter on the subject was a very different matter, as Isabel's waste-paper basket could have testified. Her first experiments had been very serious, with urgent recommendations of hard physical labor; but this proved unsatisfactory. Then she attacked it from an ethical angle and suggested social service as a means of destroying the selfishness which she honestly believed to be one of his troubles.
She scribbled on a pad the titles of half a dozen hooks designed for weary and disconsolate souls, but they hardly touched his case and besides he had probably been deluged with just such literature. Moreover, she must write a note that would not require an answer; this she felt to be imperatively demanded by the circumstances. She thought Archibald Bennett a nice fellow and she was sorry for him, but no more and no less sorry than she would have been for any one else who failed to find the world a pleasant place to live in. Something a little cryptic, yet something that would discourage further confidences without wounding him—this would solve the problem—and she spent an hour turning over the pages of a book of quotations searching for some stirring epigrammatic utterance. The wise of all the ages seemed to have been strangely unmindful of the needs of neurasthenic young men, but finally she hit upon these lines and copied them in her best hand:—
| He either fears his fate too much, |
| Or his deserts are small, |
| That dares not put it to the touch |
| To gain or lose it all. |
She wondered who the Marquis of Montrose was who had lived in the seventeenth century and bequeathed this quatrain to posterity, but this didn't matter, and after reading the lines aloud several times she decided that they would serve her purpose admirably. If Mr. Bennett took them seriously, well enough; and if he didn't like them it made no difference as she would probably never meet him again.
She wrote on a calling card, "Best wishes and good luck," and put this inside the note sheet, and as the hour was late she despatched it to Mr. Bennett by special messenger.
The note reached Archie just as he was leaving his sister's house. When he was seated in the train he drew it out and inspected the envelope carefully, held it to the light and speculated fearfully as to the nature of its contents. His thoughts had played about Isabel Perry most of the day and he had listened to his sister's enthusiastic praise of her with an unusual attention that had not been lost upon Mrs. Featherstone. He had hoped for a long letter in the vein of the girl's chaffing humor, and the size of the missive was a distinct disappointment.
He opened it guardedly, and his face fell as he pondered the verse. It was a neat, well-bred slap at him as a man without initiative or courage. At the dinner table she had expressed much the same thought that was condensed in the verse, but the quotation, unrelieved by her smile, carried a sting. He read it over until the lines marched with a nimble step through his memory. There was something oddly haunting in them, and he experimented with a variety of emphases and pauses, particularly as to the last line, which he found might be read in a great number of ways. He decided finally that it was best interpreted by a little pause after "gain," with the remaining words vanishing in a despondent sigh. Perhaps this was the way Isabel Perry thought of him, as a loser in the game of life; but he experienced a pleasant tingle in the blood when he reflected that this may have been the wrong reading and very different from the sense she meant to convey. His spirits soared as he decided that the last line was intended to be read unbrokenly and that it constituted a challenge, flung at him with a toss of her head, a flash of the brown eyes.
This thought was wholly heartening and he dwelt upon it a long time. She must have thought him capable of deeds of high emprise or she would not have chosen this fragment as her last word to him. Her choice of a message implied a certain faith that he might, if he chose, break the shackles of fear and custom that bound him and do something that would lift him out of himself. The card with the good wishes gave a soothing, saving personal touch to the communication. She had drawn the pen across a Chicago street number and supplied no other address; but after a dark moment in which he accepted this as a delicate hint that the incident was closed, he concluded that very likely she had deleted the address hastily for the reason that she was to disappear into the woods for the summer. Still, she might have substituted the camp address and he fretted over this for an hour. She left him without excuse for a reply, and he gravely reflected that the Marquis of Montrose was the only person to