E

VERY Saturday night, since the play at the Imperial had opened, a great brown limousine waited at the stage-door for Julie Poindexter.

She appeared only in the first act of the play, so twenty minutes to ten invariably found her waving a smiling if mute farewell to her fellow actors in the company who were not released until the final curtain.

Bending her tall slim figure ever so slightly, she passed under the low stage-door. Once outside, she handed her week-end case to a footman and allowed herself to be settled by him in the deep upholstery of the

car.

As they sped swiftly out Seventh Avenue to the Park, the smile, which had appeared to light Julie's blue eyes when she left the theater, went out like a candle in the wind. It was only a mechanical smile at best, assumed in response to the insinuations of the "Company," which put its own construction on her week-end visits to Westchester. Partly because their innuendoes hit so wide of the mark, and partly from bravado, Julie let them think what their fancies dictated. She even enjoyed them in a negative sort of way. In her somber, disheartened mood, the suggestion of sin was a

welcome color note, like a little red feather in a black hat.

Leaning against the cushions, she surrendered herself to a devastating sense of futility that had been haunting her for days. Born in the theater, she had not succeeded in proving herself a credit to it. In spite of a generous equipment of beauty and distinction, she had not succeeded in making good, although her mother, at forty-five was still holding an enviable place in the hearts of her audiences in two countries.

A suspicion, like a gray mist, darkened Julie's spirits further: could it be lack of talent that was holding her back, giving her a sense of failure? And was it that fear, weighing on her spirit, that seized her each night when she made her entrance on the stage? She wondered. With a feeling of desolation, she explored her mood to its furthest, gloomiest corners.

She had been playing the same small part for three months. It was only a "bit," but it was a good "bit"; effective enough for her to have received offers from other managements in recognition of her work—if it impressed them favorably. Obviously it hadn't. She was twentyfour-not too young to be well started on the actress's brief career of stardom. She had heard that

managers thought her pretty, and as "smart as paint," but something was lacking or she would have received better parts. The old stage-manager told her she hadn't "heart"-the ability to make an audience feel; to make them suffer and laugh by turns, as her mother could.

She realized that her mother's art had matured in the rich experiences of her life, given her perhaps the human touch. It was Julie's relationship to one of those experiencesa major one-which was responsible for her week-end visits to the octogenarian and millionaire, Henry Seymour Seaton, in his great house in Westchester. Grandpère she called him, but he was not her grandfather, not by blood, only by a tie lately renewed, that had become nearly atrophied from lack of use.

It dated back to 1906, when Julie's mother, a lovely Irish actress, widowed at twenty-six, with Julie a child of five, had met and married Mr. Seaton's son Henry, an especially useless member of society and points north, south, east and west. He was not an ornament to the Seaton family, but the marriage was a blow all the same. They swallowed it as best they could.

For five years of her childhood, Julie had lived in the great Seaton houses and been "pals" with the old Master of them. He had always liked her. Her four feet of slender brown impudence had appealed to him, and the blazing lack of fear in her blue eyes, when she occasionally faced his disapproval, challenged him.

After five years Henry Seaton, Jr. passed on.

As Julie recalled her impressions of that time, grown dim on the

palimpsest of later days, she decided that her mother must have been unduly hard, perhaps mistaken in her attitude toward the old man. It was his family, the other Seatons, sisters and brother-dull, moneyworshippers-who had made her mother's position intolerable after her stepfather's death, not the old man. She was inclined to think that the family had persuaded old Mr. Seaton to make conditions, to exact a prescribed order of behavior for his son's widow, calculated to make her life among them seem intolerable. There was a scene, Julie remembered plainly, acted in her mother's best tragic manner; after which the actress departed, with her child who was no kin of theirs, and shook the dust of the Seaton domain from her small pretty feet.

After that she had "trouped" it very happily for ten years, with Julie in her dressing-room, and now Julie was working too.

At the present moment her mother was in London, playing. But it was not in answer to any suggestion of hers that Julie had sought out the old man-the Grandpère of her childhood. Instinct-benevolent on her part-seemed to tell her that old Mr. Seaton, inevitably nearing the end of his long span of life, must be destitute of any colorful human contacts; that from life and color and the beauty of life he must necessarily be cut off. She knew he had his great art collection, his gallery of famous paintings; they represented beauty, of course. He understood and appreciated them. But that was not enough. She seemed to see him solitary in the great house, except for the servants. He would be

wheeled into the dim gallery and sit awhile before his famous Gainsborough. In his utter loneliness he would offer her a mute appeal, but no answering warmth would come from the exquisite, rose-cheeked lady on the canvas. He owned her, but she had no obligations to fulfil. The little Greuze that hung below her on the same wall was infinitely human in comparison, but even the glow of color that bathed her flesh tones, could be nothing but paint and canvas to a lonely old gentleman.

Julie had never regretted seeking him out, answering the silent summons to visit him in her spare hours.

In her rather haphazard way of living, those hours were strange but rather grateful interludes. Old Mr. Seaton's life hung by a thread, but it was a smart, well-groomed, even dapper thread. There were no visible signs of illness in the house. He suffered from a chronic complaint of the heart that was apt to take him at any moment, awake or sleeping. The least irritation, an annoying circumstance, might bring an attack of pain, and it was known to the household that anything in the nature of a shock would inevitably be fatal. Mr. Seaton's life, in consequence, was preserved only because and by means of the most exquisite care. He moved about in a wheeled chair, but much of his time he spent in his library; a small, gray figure valeted to a degree, a dandy, with his "imperial" trimmed to the point of tradition. His keen blue eyes gave the lie to his age; his hair, still plentiful, was white and silky, and his sight and hearing were those of a man twenty years his junior.

But old Mr. Seaton was bored.

The quiet, nearly motionless life he led was killing him, he told Julie. His sisters were good souls, but dull. He would not permit one of them, or his young brother of seventy, to live in the house to be near in the event of his passing on. Consequently, the arrival of Julie on the scene, induced a feeling of hostility on the part of the family that she was entirely aware of and correspondingly indifferent to. She knew the two old-maid sisters hovered about talking with the housekeeper and the butler. They never showed themselves above the first floor except at certain intervals when they knew their presence would be tolerated in the library. To do them justice, it was not their brother's money they sought. They had plenty of their own, though Julie entertained a suspicion that they would prefer the Seaton millions to remain in the family. What made her really shiver was their coldblooded anticipation of Grandpère's going their gruesome preparedness

like hawks who gather at the approach of death.

They disliked Julie, as they had disliked her mother before her; but they were bound to be civil while their brother lived. She knew they disapproved of her smart clothes and general air of frivolity which especially delighted the old man.

She always tried to be her prettiest for him, the poor old dear who never saw a woman who was fit to look at. He had even noticed the red heels on the gold slippers she had worn at dinner one Sunday night with a lacquer-red dress! Disapproval of that dress smoldered in the eyes of the old Seaton sisters who "happened in for a moment"-so they said.

The added fact of seeing their brother wearing a dinner-jacket for the first time in two years did not add to their geniality.

It was, Julie thought, as though they expected Grandpère to go into mourning for himself.

But while Mr. Seaton was the soul of equanimity, he knew his physical condition, and he made a real concession to it. He sent for his only son, Seymour, the younger brother of Julie's step-father, who lived in who lived in Italy with his family. Seymour had started for America at his father's summons, but had been taken off the steamer on a stretcher and sent to a hospital with typhoid fever.

The knowledge of his son's illness had been kept from Mr. Seaton, and now Seymour was out of danger, but it had been an anxious time. Julie shared the anxiety with the family; the first emotion she had ever shared with them, or they with her.

Perhaps, lulled by her thoughts, she slept a little, snuggled down in the deep cushions of the car. It seemed an incredibly short ride, as she looked back on it. They seemed hardly to have left the theater before she realized that the car was stopping gently before Seaton House, which stood like a medieval castle on a bluff, far above the reservoir.

23

The quiet ceremony of the servants ushered her into the dark, raftered hall. The housekeeper, a pleasant Swedish woman, waited to welcome her, and take her things. Grandpère would be up in the library-the evenings were his best times-he never failed to wait for Julie.

"How is Mr. Seaton, to-night,

Annie?" She drew off her gloves and slipped them into her pocket.

"Very good to-night, Miss Julie! He's looking forward to seeing you all day-but something's happened-"

"Not to Grandpère?"

The housekeeper shook her head. "Not to him. It's Mr. Seymourthey'll tell you—they're all here." She broke off and took Julie's hat with hands that shook slightly, for all they looked so capable.

Julie turned apprehensively. From the small reception-room on the right, three tall figures and one short one emerged. Mr. Seaton's sisters, Miss Carlotta and Miss Miriam, gaunt and sallow with the straight and straggling hair of respectability— black mixed with gray in one, dull red equally mixed with gray in the other; and their brother Howard, a male edition of the two women, negative in the extreme; but in the fourth, a cheerful and rotund little man, she recognized the family physician, Dr. Turnbull.

The four advanced on Julie in close formation, as she stood in the hall with her vanity-case in one hand and a lip-stick in the other, poised for immediate action.

Her first impression of their coming was an unusual one: the air of hostility which these people, with the exception of the doctor, maintained toward her, was unaccountably lacking. Even the scarlet presence of the lip-stick failed to inspire the usual glares of disapproval. There was something strange, unfamiliar in the air; it puzzled her.

"Good evening, Julia." They had always called her Julia. She greeted