



Produced by David Garcia, Sam W. and the Online Distributed
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                 THE HOUSE OF
                  FULFILMENT

            By GEORGE MADDEN MARTIN

              AUTHOR OF EMMY LOU


                [Illustration]


                   NEW YORK
            McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
                     MCMIV



             _Copyright, 1904, by_
            McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

          Published, September, 1904

               Second Impression


   Copyright, 1904, by The S. S. McClure Co.




[Illustration: "WHAT IS YOUR NAME, DEAR?"]




To A. R. M.




CONTENTS


                                PAGE
    PART ONE                       1
      CHAPTER ONE                  3
      CHAPTER TWO                 18
      CHAPTER THREE               27
      CHAPTER FOUR                35
      CHAPTER FIVE                53
      CHAPTER SIX                 65
      CHAPTER SEVEN               78

    PART TWO                      85
      CHAPTER ONE                 87
      CHAPTER TWO                106
      CHAPTER THREE              115
      CHAPTER FOUR               147
      CHAPTER FIVE               163
      CHAPTER SIX                173
      CHAPTER SEVEN              187
      CHAPTER EIGHT              207

    PART THREE                   227
      CHAPTER ONE                229
      CHAPTER TWO                244
      CHAPTER THREE              261
      CHAPTER FOUR               278
      CHAPTER FIVE               286
      CHAPTER SIX                297
      CHAPTER SEVEN              304
      CHAPTER EIGHT              321
      CHAPTER NINE               328
      CHAPTER TEN                337
      CHAPTER ELEVEN             341
      CHAPTER TWELVE             350
      CHAPTER THIRTEEN           354
      CHAPTER FOURTEEN           368




PART ONE


    "Love is enough: ho ye who seek saving,
    Go no further: come hither: there have been who have found it,
    And these know the House of Fulfilment of craving;
    These know the Cup with the roses around it;
    These know the World's Wound and the balm that hath bound it."
                                        WILLIAM MORRIS.

      --"Elements, breeds, adjustments...
    A new race dominating previous ones."
                                        WALT WHITMAN.




CHAPTER ONE


Harriet Blair was seventeen when she went with her father and mother
and her brother Austen to New Orleans, to the marriage of an older
brother, Alexander, the father's business representative at that
place. It was characteristic of the Blairs that they declined the
hospitality of the bride's family, and from the hotel attended,
punctiliously and formally, the occasions for which they had come. It
takes ease to accept hospitality.

Alexander Blair, the father, banker and capitalist, of Vermont stock,
now the richest man in Louisville, was of a stern ruggedness
unsoftened by a long and successful career in the South, while his
wife, the daughter of a Scotch schoolmaster settled in Pennsylvania,
was the possessor of a thrifty closeness and strong, practical sense.

Alexander, their oldest son, a man of thirty, to whose wedding they
had come, was what was natural to expect, a literal, shrewd man, with
a strong sense of duty as he saw it. His long, clean-shaven upper lip,
above a beard, looked slightly grim, and his straight-gazing,
blue-grey eyes were stern.

The second son, Austen, was clean-featured, handsome and blond, but he
was also, by report, the shrewd and promising son of his father, even
as his brother was reported before him.

Harriet, the daughter, was a silent, cold-looking girl, who wrapped
herself in reserve as a cover for self-consciousness but, observing
closely, thought to her own conclusions. She had a disillusioning way
of baring facts in these communings, which showed life to her very
honestly but without romance or glamour.

At the wedding, sitting in her white dress by her father and mother in
the flower-bedecked parlours of the Randolphs, Harriet looked at her
brother, standing by the girl of seventeen whom he had just married,
and saw things much as they were. In Molly, the bride of an hour, with
her child's face and red-brown hair and shadowy lashes, she saw a
descendant of pleasure-loving, ease-taking Southerners. Molly's
father, from what Austen had said, was the dispenser of a lavish and
improvident hospitality and a genial dweller on the edge of
bankruptcy, while the mother, a belle of the '40's, some one had told
the Blairs, seemed just the woman to marry her only child to a man
opposed to her people in creed, politics and habits--which in 1860
meant something--but son of one of the richest men in the South.

Harriet ate her supper close by her father and mother. She did not
know how to mix with these gay, incidental Southerners, and sitting
there, went on with her communings. She could explain it on the
Randolph side, but why Alexander was marrying Molly she could not
understand. Shy and self-conscious, she knew vaguely of a thing called
love. She had met it in her reading rather than seen its acting forces
anywhere about her. To be sure, her brother Austen had been engaged to
a Miss Ransome of Woodford County, a fashionable Kentucky beauty. The
Blairs were a narrowly religious people. Harriet, a school-girl then,
had stood at the window of the stately new stone house in Louisville
which the Blairs called home, and, watching the fashionable world flow
in and out of the high old brick cottage across the street, where Miss
Ransome spent much time with a great-aunt, had wondered.

But love