THE DOOM THAT WAS HERS By R. E. MARSHALL (© by Short Btogy Pub, Co.) T WAS a night such dream of but seldom see. when’ glamor and romance and subtle mystery are in the air. A night for musie, for love legends, and tales of chivalry, when the nameless charm that lies in ancient ballads, in the sight of armor, or of castles scarred with the wars of kings long dead, when the power that arises like a perfume from these things is strong and harsh and commonplace realities fade away. A night beautiful fit should have been hallowed and noth- ing but beauty had power to stir abroad as poets A night S50 Under its eharm the high-railed gar- den and quiet streets of St. Louls square in Old New Orleans were a fit stage for a medieval drama or poet's dream come true, So great Is the transforming power of moonlight that buildings on either side of the square, once palaces for French and Spanish nobility, Italian tenements, took on something their former dignity and beauty. It wrapped them in a veil of silver and cast softly rounded shadows quivering half-lights on thelr and crumbling door posts; made even the and old shirts, hung about, suggest banners and tapestries flung ou or the now of and stained dish cloths to welcome some new prince stately from afar. It picked out the exquisite tracery of the iron railings, and glory around the head of his plunging iron horse, rising dark and still out of the fragrant tangle of pomegranate and oleander and starred jasmine, There out of embassy gleamed a Jackson on should have their graves facing the square, a or a proud Spanish dame, or a pale light-haired woman In whose veins there ran a drop of that blood which is a curse, forever setting her apart, too high for her mother's people, low for her fathet's, forever debarred by nature's inexorable law that pun Ishes through reversion to type. But there came none of these: came a woman, bent, come, in the tonsured perhaps, dral monk, cathe too there unevenly shrunk- Slowly and painfully she moved down the cathedral steps, the street, the Venetian burning yellowly, Into the lence of the square, She paused peering about, ing ne one threw strangely broken breath. Beling pomegranate gleaming and a bird sang exultingly back in the dim pierced In HACTOSS empty lamps, silver si between gee but back her vell indrawing her, with of flame-coloreq the hlossoms P swaved ar 1 banana fronds clapped softly mysterious reaches of the garden, curved flickering spots and spaces by ti light that, ns woman lifted he fl, fell startlin clear and her f It was lor twisted and ravaged and in places as i image Is across ace, white, not with the even but « halky, like of death, worn away worn away Xposure, the lonelines A magnolia petal detache fell she She followed by little fence, of which no saw, be taken away be sent to the island wit ut no one ahd glowly down the curving walk na over with oleanders that dropped waxy long, ever so slight fest if the she behind ched knew goon she and 1 ” ind nter of house the tnl inside one and h other leg would Ors came, she went arched their blossoms on her head and narrow, hinck shadows of le that formed into Innumer able crosses so that her way was paved with them. Presently the walk came out In a flood of light and there on a bench a man lay foce upwards, The quite suddenly perceived him and with a shuddering ery cowered back into the dark, peer. ing out as though fascinated by the gleeping face. A handsome face It was, though weak, older than its years and lined by hard living, With wide eyes in which pain and a dazed Joy fought for supremacy the woman watched him. Twenty years had passed since she had seen him; twenty years since the night when, dressing for her wedding with him, she had found a white spot on her atm and recognized the doom that was hers, Twenty years she had hidden away In the little house behind the tail green fence, nor heard a word nor seen a face from all her world, her gay French world she loveq so. No one knew who lived in the little house ; men said it was haunted, Strange noises were heard there: hurrying passers-by declared that the fig and myrtle tops above the fence stirred when the trees on the sidewalk were still; an old negress told In nerve- erinkling whispers Low once at early dawn aud once late at night she had seen a black-robed figure going sound- Jessly In the high gate. And so, as abou all things not understood, le. gendq grew, woven out of the faney of the superstitious, and wrapped the house In a vell of mystery and trag- ery that shut It from the outside world cast nves themselves asleep, woman, close, more securely than walls and iron-harred gates. stone fence, alone edy behind the tall green And as she stood there | twenty years with | as it were, strange waves of fate which wreck and save according to no man's plans, according to laws no man may under- stand, a flood of memories over- whelmed her, shook her body and soul, the surge of a love great enough to hide itself from the beloved, to sus- tain her through nights and days and years alone with the féar. A longing her lover cast up, possessed her to reach out her hand and touch him; touch the lock of halr gray but curling in the old way over the forehead: a long- ing to prove to herself that this time he was no dream, to melt away into the bitter loneliness of the [ittle house, a longing so potent that for a moment she forgot even the fear, forgot that her beauty had gone years and years that she was an outcast, a horror, a thing scarcely human in shape whose breath was pestilence and whose touch, contagion. ago, She pulled a rose, a sign In the old days: she would put it in his hand. He would wake and see it. Would know and understand? He might never know and even cast it away; but would know and it comfort In the long empty red rose, their he she would be a days behind the excluding She out hantl with the rose, the fingers were gone, the rotting upon the third and a bone projected frem the of ‘the fourth. He was homeless and penniless, asleep on a bench in a public park. He was her lover of old from whom she had. hid- den twenty years lest he find her and follow her as she knew he would dave done the fear. The moonlight fell ghastly white upon her hand and she drew it back into the shadow. She was a leper. She might give him even a The red of an un- heale