wo, and he remorsefully summoned a servant.
He gazed with bewilderment at the list of dinner dishes tended him;
bear's meat, he felt, canvas back duck or terrapin, was not a diet
proper to seven; but he solved the perplexity by ordering snipe, rolled
and sugared cakes filled with whipped cream and preserved strawberries,
and a deep apple pandowdy. After this, and a block of nougat, Eunice
discovered herself to be sleepy. As she lay with tossed arms and pale
streaming hair under the feather coverlet of a great hotel bed he saw
with a sharp uneasiness that, in a subtle but unmistakable accent, she
resembled her mother, Essie Scofield.

XIII

His thoughts darkened with the falling day; he supposed them to be
solely addressed to the problem of Eunice; but, in reality, they
constantly evaded his will, following countless trivialities, and
returned to his own, peculiar need. He made some small changes of dress
for the evening, replacing brown with glazed black boots, and struggled,
with one hand, through the ordeal of tying a formal neckcloth. He had
purposely left behind his negro servant as a possible source of
unguarded chatter. When Jasper Penny had finished he went in to Eunice
and found her awake. The new clothes lay in their open boxes; and,
lighting candles, he wondered if he had better have some one in to
assist her. "Can you fix yourself up in these?" he asked, indicating the
purchases.

"Oh, yes," she assured him gravely; "that is except the very backest
buttons." She stood by the folded piles of shirred muslin, the elaborate
velvets and silks and ribbons, obviously at a loss before such an
unparalleled choice; and he was once more disturbed by the attenuation
of her small body. But that could be soon remedied; she had suffered
other, far greater, irremedial, oppressions; her very birth had
confronted her, in the puritanical self-righteousness of his world, with
an almost insuperable barrier to happiness. Still back of that, even
before the birth of himself and Essie Scofield, back, back in the
unguessed past, Eunice had been shaped, condemned. Her fate had only
culminated in his own unbalanced passion, in a desire that had blinded
him like a flash of ignited powder, leaving him with a sense of utter
void, of inexplicable need. "For what?" he demanded unconsciously and
bitterly aloud.

Eunice, startled, dropped the garment in her hands. She gazed at him
with a shrinking dread. "Come," he told her gentl