Grit Lawless

F.E. Mills Young

"Grit Lawless"

Chapter One.

“This job has grown. There has got to be a fourth in it, and the fourth must be a man.—You understand?”

The speaker, who was known as the Colonel, took the cigar he was smoking from his mouth the better to emphasise his words, and looked gravely into the serious faces of his audience. It comprised a man of middle-age, bearded, secretive, calculating; and one other. The other was little more than a boy. By profession he was a mining engineer, by disposition a scamp, ready to plunge into any undertaking that promised adventure. The boy’s head was bandaged where recently it had been broken for him, and he sat very quiet and silent, which was unusual; as the Colonel was wont to remark, he frequently talked too much. But he was not proud of his broken head and its consequences, so he held his peace.

“Do either of you know of a man likely to suit? He must be possessed of a good nerve and a none too tender conscience. He’ll have to put himself outside the law—the business is outside the law. And he must be a man we can trust.”

The Colonel looked sharply from one to the other of his listeners, but neither answered. The young engineer was sulkily examining his finger-nails, displaying the same air of detachment that he had shown throughout. He had received so severe a reprimand over the affair of his broken head that he had felt strongly tempted to sever his connection with the Colonel. Only that spirit of adventure that had led him into it, and an unnatural greed of gain, prevented him from cutting the concern.

“I want a man with grit,” the Colonel said slowly. “There must be plenty such men in Africa, if I could only put my hand on one.”

As he paused the older man looked up suddenly. Something in the Colonel’s speech had jerked into his mind a name he had almost forgotten.

“I knew a man once,” he said, and hesitated because he was not quite sure whether his knowledge of the man justified a recommendation. The acquaintance had been of the slightest; his opinion of his character was based more upon hearsay than deduction, but he believed it was not at fault.

“Well?”

The Colonel threw in the interjection with sharp impatience, and the other added briefly:

“He might not be sufficiently discreet. I know little of him... I did him a service once.”

“What are his qualifications for this job?” the Colonel asked, passing over the half-implied doubt as to discretion. “Let us get hold of facts; we can deal with surmises later.”

“Your saying you wanted a man with grit brought him to my mind,—that’s what the fellows called him—Grit. And, upon my word! though I suppose I’ve heard his real name, I can remember him by no other. Nobody ever called him anything else. He was a lean chap, with an ugly scar down one side of his face. I met him first up in Rhodesia. He was mining then. But I saw him recently in Cape Town.”

“How did he earn the name of Grit?” the Colonel inquired, showing an increasing interest; and the boy left off biting his nails and looked up with a half-resentful scowl, as if jealous of the unknown man’s qualifications for a mission he knew his chief would not entrust to him.

“I don’t know whether he earned it on a particular occasion, or if it was only a general recognition of the chap’s pluck. They said of him at the mines that he was a man who did not know fear.”

“Pshaw?” The Colonel struck the arm of his chair impatiently with his open palm, and jerked one knee over the other. “I thought you had found me my man,” he said irritably, “a man with coolness and nerve. I don’t want any braggart with a school-boy hero reputation. Tell me something he has done beside boast of his courage.”

The other man smiled. He rolled a cigarette and stuck it between his teeth. Then he struck a match and lighted it.

“I can’t tell you much,” he said. “I know little of him, but I never heard him boast. He was a reserved fellow with a sort of hard recklessness of manner that gave one the impression that life hadn’t used him well. I remember one night, some fellows, in illustration of his almost incredible lack of any sense of fear, telling a yarn of how during one of the punitive expeditions after some native rising—he was in the Cape Police then, or some force, I don’t remember the details rightly—several of the boys surrounded a hut in which six of the rebellious ringleaders were hiding. They wanted to take the blacks alive and not lose any of their own men over the business. Grit originated a plan, which they carried out, very successfully too, foolhardy though the undertaking seemed. He climbed on a comrade’s shoulders, dropped through a hole in the grass roof right into the midst of them, and he kept those six armed niggers at bay, fighting with a naked sword and his back against the mud wall. And when the other chaps rushed in they declare he was smiling quietly and seemed to be enjoying himself. He never bragged about it, and he never turned a hair. He simply hadn’t felt fear.”

“Then there was no particular credit due to him.”

“Exactly. Nevertheless, it proves the possession of nerve.”

“Oh, dash it all!” the boy, who was called Hayhurst, exclaimed suddenly. “Give the fellow his deserts. It was a damned plucky thing to do.”

The Colonel smiled drily.

“It’s the kind of hare-brained escapade that appeals to youth.”

“Call it hare-brained, if you like. How would you have got at them, sir?” Hayhurst asked brusquely, resenting the other’s speech.

“In exactly the same manner, if I could have found anyone fool enough to volunteer.”

He pitched the end of his cigar out through the open window and sat up straighter.

“Do you think you could find your man, Simmonds?” he asked. “And if you found him could you persuade him to come and see me here? It would be safer than my going to him. He had better come at night so as to avoid detection. We don’t want him to be spotted as in with us at all. If he isn’t marked he stands a better chance of success.”

“I can find him, right enough,” the other answered.

“Then do so with as little delay as possible. You needn’t mention what the job is he will be wanted for, but let him know that however valuable his time is it will be paid for well, and give him thoroughly to understand the necessity for secrecy.”

The man addressed as Simmonds nodded without speaking; and the boy, muttering something about a headache, got up, and with a brief good-night passed out through the French window, and swinging himself off the stoep was swallowed immediately in the heavy blackness without. The two men smoked in silence while they listened to the crunching of his footsteps on the gravel path, until the sound died away in the distance and only the stirring of the trees as the fitful wind swept through their branches broke the silence of the night. Then Simmonds looked round sharply at the man who sat near the opening, his strong brows drawn together in a frown of balked annoyance, his eyes still turned in the direction whence Hayhurst had disappeared.

“What on earth induced you to enlist that young fool?” he asked.

The heavy brows contracted yet more fiercely as their owner answered, without moving his position:

“Not such a fool as you fancy. And his youth is—or rather, was—an advantage; it put others off their guard. He was smart enough in getting on to the right trail.”

“And then bungled the business, and gave away the whole show.”

“Many an older man,” the Colonel answered tersely, “has been outwitted by a woman.”

He mixed himself a whisky and soda, and talked of other matters until, close upon midnight, Simmonds took his leave.

“Better send your man to me, not bring him,” the Colonel said as he was departing,—“safer. And be careful not to mention what I am likely to want of him. I prefer to judge a man for myself before engaging his services.”

Then he wished his companion good-night, and held a lamp for him to light him to the gate.

A few nights later the man whom other men called Grit, the man who was credited with being entirely devoid of fear, presented himself at the bungalow that the Colonel had rented furnished during the owner’s temporary absence in England. The bungalow was on the outskirts of Cape Town, and the Colonel had chosen it for its proximity to the city and its lonely situation. It stood back from the road in an ill-kept, overgrown garden that was a wilderness of trees and vine-tangled shrubs and palms. Tall straggling gum trees, with their bare untidy trunks and ill-shaped limbs, towered above the one-storied building and shaded the Dutch stoep built on to the front of the house. Oleanders, pink and white, grew to an immense height, lending their fragrance to the heavily perfumed air, rich with the mingled scents of nicotine and gardenia, and the strong cloying sweetness of the orange tree, the dark green of its foliage starred with the matchless beauty of its blossoms. Date and other palms, the prickly cactus and aloe, grew in a wild confusion; and enclosing the whole, undipped, neglected, yet glorious in their disorder, were tall hedges of the blue plumbago, whose pale flowers swept the ground.

The Colonel was seated on the stoep when his visitor arrived. He was alone, and thinking about the man though he was not expecting him. The stranger advanced rapidly, with a trained regular step that caught the listener’s attention. Instinctively he sat up straighter, and peered forward into the darkness, curious to behold who it was who approached along the winding path from the gate. When the new-comer stepped into the patch of light below the stoep he recognised him for the man Simmonds had spoken of by the scar on the left side of his face.

He mounted the steps and came on to the stoep, a tall spare man with muscles of iron, the set of whose shoulders suggested, as his footstep had, a military training. He was fair, with a long lightish moustache, a face that was tanned almost copper-coloured, and a pair of dark grey eyes. The eyes were the keenest and the most sombre the Colonel ever remembered to have seen. They were extraordinarily expressive, and yet bafflingly reticent. A woman would have called them beautiful. They conveyed so much of sex, pride, power, of cool aloofness, and at the same time of an almost startling concentration, that their gaze was somewhat disconcerting. The Colonel when he encountered them fully for the first time was conscious of their influence; for quite ten seconds he looked steadily into their inscrutable depths without speaking. Then he tilted the shade of the reading lamp at his elbow the better to see his man, and, perfectly understanding the reason of his action, the stranger advanced a few paces and stood where the light fell more directly on his face.

“I don’t know whether Simmonds prepared you for my visit,” he said; “but I am here in accordance with your wish.”

“Thank you. I am obliged to you for your prompt response.”

The Colonel had risen. He led the way into the house through the open window at his back, and carefully closed the window behind his visitor.

“I am fond of trees,” he remarked, “but I distrust them. I prefer to hold this interview between walls. We have no occasion to fear the keyholes, for there is not a soul besides ourselves beneath this roof.”

He turned up the lamp as he spoke, and again peered closely at the stranger. By the brighter light in the room he observed the disfiguring scar more clearly. It ran a deep seam slantwise down the lower half of the face. At some time or other a bayonet had slashed the man’s cheek open and laid the jawbone bare.

“You’ve been in the Service?” he said.

“Yes.”

The answer, brief, uncommunicative, almost curt, told the Colonel among other things that this man with the ugly scar and the strange unfathomable eyes would brook no catechism in regard to his private affairs. If he wanted his services, he must be prepared to take him on trust. He stared once again into the grey eyes and sat down.

“Take a seat,” he said. Then with a motion of his hand to the decanter of whisky that stood on the table between them: “Do you drink?”

The stern mouth behind the heavy moustache relaxed slightly; its owner realised that a negative answer would have been welcomed by his host, who, though he drank himself in moderation, preferred in the present business the services of an abstainer.

“On occasions—yes,” he replied as he sat down.

The Colonel pushed the decanter towards him and a glass.

“Help yourself,” he said briefly; and the stranger deliberately half filled the glass with spirit and added a dash of soda. His host watched him curiously, and, reversing the quantities, mixed himself a glass.

“The business for which I shall require you, if we come to an understanding,” he began, with a formality and stiffness which he had not displayed before, “needs absolute discretion as well as coolness and courage. I do not doubt for a moment,” he added hastily, meeting the piercing gaze of the grey eyes, “that your discretion is equal to your courage. I have heard tales of the latter. They tell me fear is unknown to you. I have heard your courage spoken of in terms of the highest admiration.”

The grey eyes smiled suddenly.

“I’ve heard a lot about that too,” their owner said. “It’s mostly from youngsters, though.”

“My informant was no youngster.”

“Ah! you mean Simmonds. His knowledge isn’t first hand. He’s been listening to the youngsters probably. It doesn’t amount to much, a reputation like that.”

The Colonel sat back in his chair and sipped his whisky meditatively.

“You disclaim then the reputation you have gained?” he said.

The other shrugged his shoulders indifferently.

“Does any man actually deserve the admiration accorded him?—or the discredit? Such things have their fashion.”

“Then, you would not, perhaps, describe yourself as absolutely fearless?”

The man flushed darkly, hesitated for an instant, and then touched the scar on his face deliberately.

“That marks a moment of absolute terror,” he said quietly. “Thank God! the fear of being a coward made me receive it in the face instead of the back. Courage is only a matter of control. The hero differs from the coward by the smallest accident of temperament. If self-control were appreciated rightly and made a particular part of the education of the race, the term coward would be seldom applied, and then only to the person it fitted.”

The Colonel leant forward suddenly, resting his arms on the table, his glance still searching the thin, inscrutable face that puzzled and yet attracted him.

“It is men like you we want... Why did you leave the Service?” he asked abruptly.

His hearer stiffened visibly.

“Need we go into that?” he said.

“Not if you prefer to keep your own counsel.”

There was a barely perceptible pause. The younger man broke it.

“My objection to speak has probably led you to a fairly correct inference,” he said. “I was cashiered from the Army. But for which stroke of fortune I should not now be offering my services to you.”

He lifted his glass, put it to his lips, and draining the contents, set it down again empty.

The Colonel remained silent, regarding him with freshly awakened distrust. By his own showing the man was an adventurer. Despite his first prejudice in his favour he began to wonder whether after all it were wise to place confidence in him. He knew nothing of him. There was to his credit merely a few garnished tales of daring which, either from modesty or a knowledge of their exaggeration, he had himself practically disclaimed,—and to his discredit the ugly truth he had just heard from his own lips. He sat up suddenly. In the piercing eyes that met his own steadily he perceived the flicker of a smile.

“You haven’t committed yourself, sir. There is time to draw back.”

But at the half-mocking speech, the almost insolent challenge of the tone, the doubt in the Colonel’s mind suddenly vanished. What if the man were an adventurer? Were not his services required for an adventurous undertaking? The balance sheet of his past life was no concern of his. He wanted courage, daring, and intelligence; he was prepared to pay for them; and he believed that the man before him possessed these qualifications.

“You are not the first man who has gone under who in happier circumstances would have been a credit to the Service,” he said gravely, and having said it dismissed the subject almost it seemed with relief. It did not do to be over particular in regard to a man’s past with great odds at stake.

“I have mentioned what the business I wished to see you about demands of the man who undertakes it,” he added, without pausing, “but I have said nothing about the business itself as yet. Briefly, it is the recovery of certain letters and incriminating papers—some of them, I believe, forgeries—that are being now used for the purposes of blackmail.”

“Half a moment, please. Is this a personal matter, or are you merely negotiating for someone else?”

“It is not a personal matter. It affects someone of greater importance. I have been sent out here to get hold of those papers at any cost. We have offered a big sum down for them, but the rogues who hold them won’t part. Their game is to keep on squeezing. They believe they have an inexhaustible mine.”

“From what you tell me I should say their belief was justified. Since they won’t sell, how do you purpose getting hold of the papers?”

“We must take a leaf from their book and steal them back.”

There was a momentary silence during which the grey eyes looked straight into the brown eyes with a hard, unflinching gaze.

“And that’s where I come in,” he said, completing the Colonel’s sentence.

The Colonel nodded.

“That’s where you come in—if you do come in, that is... There is a certain danger attaching to the enterprise, but that I needn’t mention to you. You will have determined men to deal with, and, unfortunately, men who are in a sense prepared. The plan has been attempted already—and bungled.”

“I should like,” Grit interposed, “to hear about that, if you please.”

The Colonel briefly narrated the story of young Hayhurst’s successful tracing of the incriminating papers, of how he managed to get hold of them, and how he lost them again through blabbing of the affair to a woman.

“That woman is in it, take my word for it,” the Colonel said.

“What’s her name?” inquired the man who had listened quietly to the recital without once interrupting or even moving his position. At the abrupt question the Colonel looked across at him sharply. He had purposely omitted the mention of any names; he intended to secure his man before going into particulars; but now that the question was put to him point blank he felt that he had not sufficient reason for withholding the information.

“Her name is Lawless—Mrs Lawless, living at Rondebosch.—You know her?” he asked, seeing the unmistakable start his companion gave on hearing the name.

“Know her!—Yes, I suppose I do.”

The Colonel did not appear greatly surprised.

“It’s likely you would. She is somewhat notorious, I believe.”

“In what way?”

“Oh! nothing actually against her that I know of. A beautiful woman living alone, and much admired. ... Rumour has it that she’s a widow, and again has it that she is not. I’ve got beyond the age when a man troubles to find out.”

“What causes you to imagine she is in with the other side?” inquired his hearer, a shade of impatience in his tone.

“The boy—”

“Hayhurst?”

“Yes. Hayhurst declares that she induced him to go home with her, that she pumped him, and then signalled to a man who must have been hiding on the stoep, and who sprang in through the window behind him and knocked him senseless with a blow over the head. When he came to himself he was lying in the gutter near his lodging and the papers were gone. My God!” wound up the speaker savagely, “to know that that young fool had in his possession what I’ve been months scheming to get hold of, and lets a woman Delilah him out of his prize! I could cheerfully have slain him when he brought the tale of his failure to me.”

“Lucky for him it was not to me he brought it,” the other said grimly; “I should probably have done it. You don’t reckon yourself over credulous, I suppose, in accepting his tale as it stands?”

“No. I might have questioned it; but it seems probable enough in face of the fact that the fellow who holds the papers has been paying marked attention to Mrs Lawless for some time, and she certainly does not discourage him. Cape Town couples their names together, I believe. One can credit anything about a woman who will listen to the suit of a rogue like that,—a damned swindler, with a reputation for being bigamously married already in another country!”

“His name?” the man with the scar asked sharply, leaning half-way across the table.

“Van Bleit.”

Grit sat up.

“God! man, I know him intimately. We were in Rhodesia together.” He laughed harshly. “It is to him I owe the nickname that has stuck closer than my own. The former acquaintance may prove helpful.”

The Colonel peered at him closely.

“You have just reminded me that the nickname is all I know you by,” he said. “Simmonds could not recall your rightful title.”

“He is not singular in that respect,” was the curt response. “My name is Lawless.”

The Colonel stared at him blankly, his jaw fallen.

“Lawless!” he repeated, and for the life of him he could not prevent the sudden freeze in his manner. It even occurred to him at the moment that he was the victim of a trick. If so, he had walked into the trap fairly easily.

“It is a somewhat uncommon name,” he added. “Are you by any chance related to the lady of whom we have been speaking?”

The man he addressed returned his suspicious scrutiny with careless indifference.

“By marriage only,” he answered briefly.

The Colonel was only partially relieved.

“I have confided in you so much, Mr Lawless,” he said, “that you will readily understand how unwelcome this intelligence is. Had I known of the connection sooner I should have hesitated to speak so freely of a matter that is as a sacred trust to me—”

“You need not let what you have just learnt trouble you, sir,” the other returned carelessly. “Nothing that you have told me so far would be news to the other side. As for the connection!”—he flicked his fingers scornfully,—“it need weigh with you no more than that... The lady disapproves of me. We have not met for years.”

“Perhaps, though, since a connection of yours is mixed up in this affair you might not care to go on with it...”

“It makes no difference,” Lawless answered.

The Colonel reached across the table.

“You are throwing in your lot with me?” he asked quickly.

The other’s hand met his.

“I’ll get those papers back for you, or I’ll kill your man,” he said.

Chapter Two.

It was late afternoon. The sun hung low in the blue sky and shot its beams between the palm slits, making a brilliant tracery on the smooth paths where it pierced a passage between the branches of the mimosa trees, yellow with their golden balls. The chirrup of a cricket was the only sound that broke the quivering silence, save when every now and again the warm wind swept lazily through the gum trees and made music with their leaves.

Looking out upon the sultry stillness of the garden, her pose stiller even than the almost motionless trees, with tense features, and eyes that were stirred with emotion, as the eyes of one who looks back upon the past from the stage of the present, seeing things with the broadened vision of experience, stood the woman of whom the Colonel had spoken in his interview with Lawless. She was tall and dark and splendid, with large brown eyes flecked with a lighter shade as though they held imprisoned sunbeams in their pellucid depths. Her rich dark hair waved back from a low brow that was like ivory in its smooth whiteness, and in the thin lips, scarlet as the flower of the pomegranate, showed her only touch of colour. She wore a white dress of some Indian embroidery, and the plain gold band of her wedding-ring comprised her sole ornament.

A clock inside the room chimed the half-hour, and scarcely had the sound died away into silence when the door behind her opened and a native servant showed a visitor into the room. Mrs Lawless turned slowly round, and with a hesitating, reluctant step moved forward a few paces and then stood still, her arms hanging motionless at her sides, her lips slightly parted, perhaps in a greeting that never passed them, for she did not speak when she met the straight gaze of the visitor’s keen eyes, and looked into the scarred yet still handsome face of the man she had not seen for eight years. He had halted just inside the doorway, and he remained where he was, staring at her, the light falling direct upon his face. The scar showed livid. She gazed at it with fascinated eyes. She had not seen it before.

“It was good of you to consent to see me,” he said with grave politeness. “I would not have troubled you with a visit had it not been important. But what I have to say to you could not be written in a letter.”

“I quite understand,” she answered quietly. “Won’t you sit down?”

And in this commonplace manner passed a moment that marked a crisis in two lives.

He waited until she was seated, then he crossed to the window and stood with his back to the sunlit scene.

“I’d rather stand, thank you.”

He looked at her uncertainly, looked at the handsome furnishing of the room and frowned. Where had she got her wealth from, this woman whom he had always understood to be poor?

“I did not know,” he said slowly, bringing his gaze back to her face, “that you were in South Africa until a few weeks ago. It was a surprise to me. I trust you do not consider it intrusive that I took early advantage of the knowledge to solicit an interview. I would not have done so in ordinary circumstances, but it is a peculiar coincidence that you and I should be mixed up in the same shady concern. I want you to believe,” he added earnestly, “that I had no knowledge of your part in the business of which I am here to speak until after I had volunteered my services. What part you actually played in it I am hoping you will confide in me, and not consider that I am guilty of an impertinence in seeming to interfere in what you do.”

“Oh no!” she answered gently, in her rich, deep voice, and added: “I expect it is the affair of that poor boy and the letters you have come to speak about. I always felt that I should hear of it again.”

He confirmed her surmise.

“You are suspected,” he said in conclusion, “of having assisted in their recapture.”

She sat forward on the low sofa upon which she had taken her seat, and, gripping the cushions tightly, questioned him with her eyes.

“Suspected by whom?—You?”

“That question is unnecessary, surely,” he replied coldly. “Had I suspected such a thing I should not be here. It is because I want to hit the next man who breathes such a slander that I desire to have from your own lips an explanation of that night’s work. Will you tell me all you know of the affair? It may be a help to me in tracing those letters.”

“What have the letters to do with you?” she asked.

“That’s easily answered,” he replied. “I am a soldier of fortune; my hand and brain go to the highest bidder. Personally, I am not interested in this matter—or rather, I was not interested; it has now become a matter of life or death to me. I am pledged to recover those letters,—and I mean to do it.”

She released her grip of the sofa cushion, folded her hands loosely in her lap, and looked calmly into his sombre eyes. He thought as he watched her that she was the most alluringly beautiful woman he had ever seen.

“I did not know,” she said slowly, halting between the words. “I haven’t been out very long—barely six months; and I had not heard—anything... I will tell you all I know about the letters, though I don’t quite understand their importance. It’s a case of blackmail, of course—at least, I gathered from Mr Hayhurst that they were being held for blackmail. He had succeeded in getting hold of them. The boy drinks too much, and when he has been drinking he talks. I met him at a friend’s house, and he was talking, boasting of his achievement. He had these most important papers on his person at the time, and was inflated with success, I suppose—and too much wine. I persuaded him to come home with me; and in the carriage he told me so much about the letters that on arriving here I asked him to show me the packet. I intended to induce him to leave it with me until he was sober and more discreet.”

“That was very unwise,” her hearer interrupted. “He would probably have gone away and blabbed further, with the result that this house would have been broken into during the night. It was a risky thing to do.”

“Perhaps you are right,” she said. “But I doubt whether I should have succeeded in persuading him. I think I only roused his suspicions as to the honesty of my intentions. And in any case I should not have been allowed to keep them, for he had evidently been shadowed without knowing it. While I talked with him in this room I fancied I heard a sound on the stoep. The window was open. I walked over to it to look out, but before I could reach it, or realise quite what was happening, a man sprang past me into the room. He struck the poor drunken boy one blow over the head with a stout short stick he carried that stunned him, and I—I was paralysed with terror. I neither moved nor made any sound, until I saw the man coming towards me, and then I suppose I fainted; for I remember nothing more until I came to my senses later and found myself alone.”

“And you never communicated with the police?” he said quickly.

“I sent for the police the following day,” she explained; “but before the inspector arrived I received a message from Tom Hayhurst asking me not to move in the matter.”

She got up and walked with a certain restrained excitement in her movements to the mantel, where she stood, tall and graceful and outwardly composed, with one arm on the high shelf, her face turned away from him.

“There is danger in this undertaking,” she said. “I don’t like it. Why should a man risk his life to do another man—a stranger—a service?”

“You forget the reward,” he said cynically. “The pay is high.”

“The reward would be no compensation to a man for the loss of his life.”

He laughed bitterly.

“We have only to die once, and no amount of prudence will release us from the obligation.”

She faced round quickly.

“The men who hold those letters in their possession are desperate,” she said.

“So am I,” he answered carelessly. “It’s the same on both sides, I imagine—merely a matter of gain.”

“It doesn’t only amount to that with you,” she exclaimed sharply, and her eyes darkened in her pale face.

“No. There are other considerations; but it is not necessary to go into them.”

His tone was quietly aloof; it almost seemed that he would remind her his doings were no concern of hers. She withdrew within herself; and for the space of a few seconds there was silence between them. He broke it.

“You did not tell me who the man was who entered your house that night,” he said.

“He was a stranger to me,” she replied. “I had not, to my knowledge, seen him before.”

“It was not Van Bleit?”

“No.” She met his eyes steadily. “Why should you suppose it might be?”

“I would warn you against him,” he said curtly, “if I might presume to give you advice.”

“Thank you,” she answered coldly. “I do not think I stand in need of advice. And your warning is quite unnecessary.”

He drew himself up stiffly as a man might who realises a rebuff.

“I beg your pardon,” he said.

He looked at her fixedly in the pause that followed his brief apology, and his eyes were hard.

“I have heard what I came to hear. It won’t be of great service to me, but I scarcely expected to learn more, and I am obliged to you for receiving me. I will now relieve you of the embarrassment of my presence.” He bowed to her with formal politeness. “Good afternoon,” he said. “With your permission, I will leave by the window. I see a path which leads direct to the gate.”

He turned his back towards her and stepped through the aperture on to the stoep. She followed him with her eyes, those beautiful sun-flecked eyes shadowed with the stirring of memory; but she made no move to detain him. Not until after he had left her did she remember that she had said no word in parting. She had simply let him go in silence out of her sight—out of her life. He had come into her life that afternoon, a spectre of the past, and, like a spectre, he had vanished, leaving only another memory to add to those that already disturbed her peace.

She stood quite motionless, gazing, not out through the window whence he had disappeared, but at the place where he had stood, and as she gazed it was suddenly borne in upon her that an opportunity had come to her with the presence of this man, and she had missed it. She had travelled nearly six thousand miles for this,—to realise when it was too late that she had missed her opportunity. It happens thus frequently: we refuse to grasp the event when it entails the smallest sacrifice of self. Could she have humbled her pride sufficiently, she might have had this man’s destiny in her hands and have fashioned it to brave issues.

She moved forward deliberately and took her stand where he had taken his, with her back to the glowing garden. Save where his foot had pressed the carpet, he had touched nothing; he had not so much as rested a hand against the window frame. She could have wished that he had touched things so that she might touch them also, and imagine in so doing that she drew near to him. Despite the firmness of her nature, despite the ugly facts of the man’s past that were well known to her, she could not crush the love of him out of her heart. The woman never learns to hate the man who has once brought romance into her life. That he had brought romance into the lives of other women this woman who stood in the opening with her hands locked together knew. The knowledge was torture to her. It wrung her anew each time her thoughts dwelt on it, and they dwelt on it often. Even now, while she stood there with the remembrance of their recent interview vividly impressed on her mind, the sight of the scarred face photographed on her brain with a distinctness that was almost as though she had his image still before her eyes, the old gripping, agonising jealousy, the wounded self-esteem, were tearing her heart as with searing pincers.

This man, who had brought her romance, had come to her with a gift in either hand. While one gift was goodly, the other had been evil; and the evil had spoilt both.

Chapter Three.

Mrs Lawless was dining out. She had become the fashion in Cape Town; no function was complete without her. Hostesses who wished to attract those they could never hope to capture of themselves knew that by adding Mrs Lawless to their list they could command the most exclusive. Mrs Lawless had a friend at Government House. A cousin of hers was aide-de-camp to the Governor. In addition she was wealthy, with an intellect above the average, and a beauty that was quite remarkable. The last qualification was sufficient for the male population of Cape Town. It rallied round her like the swarm round the queen bee, and those women who wished to be well considered of their males rallied round her also, and in submitting to an obligation were forced to acknowledge that her charm was undeniable. Though she had many male admirers she made more feminine friends. She did not seek popularity with her own sex from any sense of diplomacy, but because she liked, and got on better with, women. While the men considered her cold, the women found her peculiarly sympathetic.

She had made one close friend in this new country, which was to her still so strange, so alien; so careless and pleasure-seeking in its social life, so keenly self-seeking in its business methods, and withal so vivid and picturesque and stirring. This friend, brilliant in political and literary circles, and connected with one of the oldest families in the Colony, was of Dutch extraction. She had married an Englishman, named Smythe; an alliance that had uprooted an old and bitter racial prejudice, not only on her side, but on her husband’s. Smythe, the erstwhile rabid anti-Boer, had been heard warmly supporting universal tolerance.

“After all,” he would blandly assert, “it is only one world, and one mother for the whole of us. There are bound to be factions in a very large family. But one needn’t carry things to extremes.”

His theory, however, did not include the natives.

“A nigger’s a nigger,” he answered, when approached on this point. “He’s not a human being; he’s a link,—the one that wasn’t lost. If any man chooses to call him a brother he’s at liberty to do so. Personally, I’d as soon fraternise with a chimpanzee.”

There was one Dutchman, however, whom the tolerant Smythe could not swallow, and that was his wife’s cousin, Van Bleit. It seemed as though all his former dislike for the entire race had been concentrated into hatred of this one man. He made no attempt to conquer this aversion, because he knew it was something beyond his control, but he did his best to hide it from his wife, whose fondness for, and admiration of, her cousin was a never-ending source of wonder to him.

Van Bleit had a confident, masterful manner that won him an easy way to the hearts of certain women. By nature he was a bully: a few of the women who had fallen prey to the roystering charm of his personality had found this out. But they invariably made the discovery too late; Van Bleit squeezed his victims dry before he revealed his less amiable side. It was usually in making the discovery that they had been drained that they discovered the other thing. If Van Bleit knew how to overcome feminine reluctance with a masterful manner, he also knew how to shout down feminine recrimination. In cases where shouting alone would not avail, he showed no hesitation whatever in having resource to physical force. The woman who pitted her strength against his came off worse than the victim who suffered in silence, knowing her case to be beyond hope of redress.

Van Bleit had carried on most of his intrigues in Europe. Because Europe, on account of the suicide of an inconsiderate widow who had really cared for him, had become for a time inconvenient as a place of residence, he had brought his handsome body and his evil mind back to the land of his birth; and was now pursuing with greater zest than he had pursued any of his former conquests the beautiful and wealthy woman who was his cousin’s particular friend. And Mrs Smythe, with the best intention in the world, took every opportunity of throwing them together.

It was at the Smythes’ house that Mrs Lawless was dining on the evening of the day that Lawless called upon her. Van Bleit was there also. He was her dinner partner. It was not a large gathering. Of the half-dozen guests only one was a stranger to Mrs Lawless, a tall, military-looking man, with iron-grey hair, and an awkward habit of hunching his shoulders which gave them the appearance of being round. After dinner, the hostess, at his request, introduced him; and Mrs Lawless, as she acknowledged the presentation and met the intent gaze of the unsmiling eyes, wondered why the name should be familiar while the owner was quite unknown. Then in a flash she remembered where she had heard it before; young Hayhurst had talked of Colonel Grey in his drunken confidence on the night that the papers had been lost. She understood why he had wished to be introduced; he was curious to discover for himself something of the woman whom he believed to be his enemy.

He was summing her up even while he looked at her; and he was forced to acknowledge with considerable impatience that he too was influenced like any young hotheaded fool by her wonderful fairness and the beauty of her candid eyes. His summary was surely at fault, since, despite the proof against her, he felt that here was a woman to be trusted, a woman who would be loyal to her friends and just to her enemies. He squared his shoulders as though conscious of the awkward hunching habit, and said in his harsh voice:

“I am glad to meet you, Mrs Lawless. I have recently had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a kinsman of yours.”

He observed the quick suspicion of the look that flashed from her eyes, the sudden reserve that masked her features, changing their smiling indifference to a cold displeasure, and he remembered a sentence that Lawless had uttered which the change in her manner corroborated: “The lady disapproves of me.” Good taste should have prohibited his touching on the subject, but in the game he was playing he set all laws at defiance and pushed forward with but the one aim in view.

“A kinsman—of mine!” she echoed, and the soft contralto voice was a little unsteady. He watched her curiously.

“Someone of the same name,” he added.

“Oh! someone of the same name... That’s rather a broad claim to kinship.”

The change in her tone was unmistakable. Her manner became more guarded, more studiously careless, but the face exposed to the merciless raking of his gaze wore a faintly distressed flush.

“He claimed kinship with you,” he insisted, smiling pleasantly at her, while he pulled at his iron-grey moustache with a large, well-shaped hand. “I can’t help feeling he was justified even on the most slender grounds. He was related to you by marriage, so he said.”

She looked at him inquiringly.

“By marriage only,” he added, unconsciously quoting Lawless.

“Yes!”

Her composure had reasserted itself. The man who watched her felt puzzled to understand what there had been in his tactless speech to cause her embarrassment, what there was in his further speech to relieve the strain. Her disapproval of the man must be fairly deep-rooted when an indirect mention of him caused her distress. She turned the tables while he was thus wondering, and roused dark doubts and anxious suspicions in his own breast as to the honesty of purpose of the reckless adventurer in whom he had confided an important trust.

“You speak of Mr Lawless,” she said quietly. “He called upon me to-day.”

“Indeed?”

The Colonel’s eyes snapped. He hunched his shoulders, and jerked his big head forward and peered hard at her. Intuition told her what he was thinking. He feared treachery. Distrust grew in him, distrust of the man for whose services he was paying,—the man who was connected by marriage with this woman who had tricked a drunken boy and robbed him; who was on visiting terms with her, though he had emphatically stated that the connection counted for nothing,—the man who was a friend and comrade of the scoundrel Van Bleit,—the man who was cashiered from the Army for a reason the Colonel had yet to find out. And he intended to find out. He had already started inquiries.

She looked back at him steadily, and her slightly raised eyebrows betokened a faint curiosity. She was fencing with him. They were fighting a duel with wit for their weapons; and if the first advantage had been on his side, the second and greater advantage was to her. The knowledge annoyed him.

“Mr Lawless is to be doubly congratulated,” he said drily. “Many men would envy him his reputation, all men would envy him the privilege of calling himself your kinsman.”

She smiled faintly.

“That is flattery, Colonel Grey,” she answered. “But tell me why men should envy him his reputation. I was not aware that it justified envy.”

“Is there nothing enviable in a reputation for valour?” he asked.

She turned deathly white, and her eyes glittered angrily in her tense face.

“If I do not misunderstand you,” she replied, “that is the meanest speech man ever made.”

He looked, as he felt, wholly nonplussed. There was to come a day when he better understood her then incomprehensible indignation, when he not only understood but sympathised with it; but at the time he was entirely baffled. He could only feel astonishment at her outbreak.

“I fear you do misunderstand me,” he said. “There was nothing unworthy in the speech. I merely conceded to a brave man a brave man’s due. I have heard many tales of his courage. Men call him Grit who remember him by no other name. If there is truth in hearsay, he has earned the nickname.”

His manner was sufficiently earnest to convince her of his sincerity. The swift anger died out of her eyes, leaving them softly pensive, and wistful, like the eyes of a woman who meets Hope on the road of Disillusion, and being unprepared for the meeting, is inclined to doubt that it is Hope that she encounters.

“Grit!” she repeated softly. And added: “I have not been out here long, and I have heard nothing of Mr Lawless for years... I have not heard the nickname before, but—I like it... Why do men call him Grit?”

“Because,” he answered quietly, “they credit him with being without fear. They tell tales of his courage—or, rather, less of his courage than of his absolute fearlessness. He is a man to whom fear is unknown... That is the popular belief.”

“And you do not share it?”

He was not altogether prepared for the question. She sprang it upon him suddenly, as if something in his manner challenged her to the inquiry.

“I have his word for it that he has known terror,” he answered quietly, after a brief hesitation.

“That does not disprove his courage,” she said quickly.

“No,” he allowed. “Courage is fear overcome.”

There was another and longer pause. He ended it with the reluctant admission:

“I am inclined to believe myself that Grit Lawless has earned his nickname.”

“You give your meed of praise grudgingly,” she said. But she smiled while she spoke, and the Colonel was dazzled, as many men had been dazzled before him, by the extraordinary seductiveness of her smile.

It was not until he was back in his bungalow going over the interview, and that part of their talk that had related to Lawless, that it occurred to him her manner had been rather that of a person jealous for a friend’s reputation than of a woman who disapproved of, and disowned, a kinsman. And his old suspicion of her, and of the man whom he had trusted in a difficult and dangerous enterprise, returned with renewed force. It struck him as a highly suspicious circumstance that while Lawless was on visiting terms with the woman he should have given him to understand that the relationship between them was the reverse of friendly. He would have liked to question Lawless on the subject; but it had been agreed between them for the greater success of their plans that it was safer to hold no intercourse. If either wished to communicate with the other it was left to his discretion to select a trustworthy messenger. The occasion scarcely justified, in the Colonel’s opinion, so extreme a measure. If he had enlisted the services of a traitor, it was but another false move of the many that had been made. Trickery could only be mated by trickery. He must keep his own counsel and watch the game...

He remembered, thinking quietly over the evening’s entertainment, how Van Bleit had come forward while he was talking with Mrs Lawless, and ignoring him with pointed insolence, had offered her his arm and led her away on some pretext or another. She had glanced back over her shoulder and given him another of her wonderful dazzling smiles as she left him; and he had uttered the wish then, which now in the lonely silence of his own quarters he repeated:

“I would to God that woman were on our side!”

Chapter Four.

Lawless meanwhile had renewed his acquaintance with Van Bleit. On leaving Mrs Lawless’ residence he had driven as he had come back to Cape Town, and, dismounting from the taxi outside his hotel, was in the act of paying the driver when Van Bleit passed him with the stream of business men homeward bound while he stood upon the kerb feeling for the change. But that scar on Lawless’ face was unmistakable, and Van Bleit, arrested by it, paused in his rapid march and glanced inquiringly at him. Then he came back and waited until Lawless had paid and dismissed his driver.

When the tall, spare man with the ugly scar faced round, it was to find the broad figure of Van Bleit blocking his passage. He held out his hand as carelessly as though they had met the day before.

“God, man!” said Van Bleit sharply. “Where have you sprang from? It’s a matter of nearly five years since we met, I believe, if one bothered to calculate; and it seems almost a lifetime. It takes me back into the past to see you. What are you doing here?”

“Damned if I know,” Lawless answered laconically.

Van Bleit laughed.

“Grit, you haven’t altered,” he said.

He scrutinised the thin, handsome face intently. Then he looked from the man to the hotel before which the latter had alighted.

“Stopping here?” he asked.

Lawless nodded, and Van Bleit’s manner warmed.

“I’ve made lots of inquiries about you, but could never learn anything,” he said. “I feared you had gone under, but,” with a glance at the hotel front, “this scarcely looks like it.”

“On the contrary,” Lawless answered, “I’m on top at present. I’ve been under and afloat several times since last we met.”

“You struck it rich at the mines, I suppose?”

Lawless laughed unexpectedly.

“Yes,” he lied. “I struck it rich at the mines. Any man might who wasn’t a fool.”

Van Bleit looked cunningly intelligent.

“True,” he answered. “If a man wants to get there in Africa it don’t do for him to be squeamish. You didn’t earn your nickname, Grit, in being over soft.”

At the mention of his nickname, Lawless looked fierce.

“Damn you!” he said irritably. “If I remember rightly I owe that to you. It sticks closer than my own. That nickname has landed me in for many a ridiculous adventure. Men seem to imagine that I’m a survival of the mediaeval desperado; and I am offered any shady undertaking that entails the slightest risk.”

“They pay best, those undertakings,” Van Bleit responded drily; and Lawless, regretting the speech as soon as it was made, answered indifferently:

“Very likely. But a man doesn’t sweep sewers when he has his pockets lined.”

He advanced towards his hotel. Van Bleit walked beside him, and together they passed from the glare of the pavement into the shaded coolness of the vestibule.

“Come and drink to the good old times,” he said,—“and to many more good times ahead.”

He led the way into the lounge. When they were seated, with drinks on a table in front of them, he asked:

“What are you doing to-night? If you’ve nothing more amusing on hand, will you dine with me?”

“If you care to repeat the invitation on some future occasion, you will see how readily I shall respond,” Van Bleit answered. “But this evening I am dining at my cousin’s. I don’t know if that kind of thing amuses you,” he added, after a moment’s reflection, “but, if it does, I am confident my cousin would be delighted to welcome a friend of mine. Get into your togs, and I’ll pick you up on my way. It’s at the Smythes’. Smythe himself is a beastly prig, but my cousin is a good sort; and she gets hold of the right people, and gives one the right things to eat. What do you say?”

“Not for me,” Lawless answered. “I’m not long returned to civilisation. I’ll look on at the game for a while. You go and eat your dinner, and make yourself agreeable—I trust both the meal and the company will come up to expectation—and give me to-morrow evening.”

“Good!”

Van Bleit hesitated, looked at Lawless uncertainly, looked about him, changed colour; then looked at Lawless again.

“The company for me to-night will consist of one,” he jerked out in a burst of half-eager, half-reluctant confidence.

His listener smiled unsympathetically.

“The one and only She of the moment; eh?”

“Man, you wouldn’t say that if you could see her,” Van Bleit returned, his manner unusually earnest. “She is the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“That’s a tall order,” Lawless replied drily. “If my memory serve me, you have happened across perfection a few times in your career.”

“Never before,” Van Bleit asserted. “My God, Lawless—”

He broke off abruptly, and stared at the other curiously, his mouth agape.

“I had forgotten... it’s the same name,” he said. “Are you by any chance related to Mrs Lawless?—at present living at Rondebosch.”

“We are connected by marriage,” Lawless answered. He removed the cigar from his mouth and trimmed the ash deliberately. “If you want to stand high in the lady’s good graces, you will be well advised not to mention my name. We do speak when accident throws us together, but I believe I state the bare truth when I say that the fact of our paths seldom crossing gives mutual satisfaction.”

“Yes! In-laws don’t always hit it, of course. I never got on with my brother-in-law. I was glad when the beast died. Still, I regret the breach in this instance; the relationship might have served me, I’m going in to win. Grit. You give me your good wishes, I hope?”

“In consideration of what I have told you, I wonder what my good wishes are worth?” Lawless returned. “But I’ll give you a bit of good advice. The lady is puritanical, unpleasantly so. You will never win her favour in the character in which I have known you. Are you going in for reform?”

“I’ll go in for anything,” Van Bleit answered promptly; “but I’ll get my own way.” He leant forward and laid a hand on the other’s shoulder. “And when I’ve got it,” he said boastfully, “there’ll be other changes... We’ll close all family dissensions—my friends will be my wife’s. She’ll soon see things from my view.”

Lawless looked carelessly amused.

“Two people may use the same pair of binoculars,” he remarked, “but they almost invariably alter the focus. I never attempted the absurdity of trying to make a woman see through my long-distance lens. Their horizon is generally contracted, and few see beyond that restricted line of their imagination. With your experience, Karl, I should have imagined you had long ago discovered that woman, while appearing the most pliable of substances, is as difficult to bend as wrought iron.”

Van Bleit smiled unpleasantly.

“When I can’t bend a thing, I break it,” he answered.

Lawless regretted when it was too late that he had refused Van Bleit’s invitation to dine at his cousin’s. He might have got some amusement out of the evening, and the closer he shadowed the Dutchman the better for the success of his undertaking. He decided that in future he would avail himself of such a chance as Van Bleit’s offer had promised; by his refusal he had sacrificed a move in the game. That in going to the Smythes’ he would perforce meet Mrs Lawless did not weigh with him: there was as much space between four walls as in the universe if one person did not desire to be brought into contact with another. And he had no intention of inflicting himself upon her. He knew her opinion of him; it was not sufficiently complimentary to cause him to seek her society. Nevertheless he experienced some curiosity to again encounter this woman whose hard purity made her so severe a judge in human affairs,—to measure weapons with her once more. There came to him sometimes in the lonely watches of the night the belief that one day, despite past failures, he would pit his strength against hers successfully. He never attempted to determine the line his conduct should take in the case of victory; it sufficed for him that the moment should fashion the event. But with the passing years that dream of his triumph steadily receded. He had even given up the expectation of seeing her again... And now he had met her... He had spoken with her... And their sympathies were as widely divergent as ever they had been...

He got up and paced the room restlessly for some time. His thoughts worried him so that inaction became unbearable. He left the hotel, and wandered forth into the city in search of such diversion as it could provide. But his mind still worked round the recent extraordinary events, of which the interview of the afternoon had not been the least surprising; and almost insensibly his footsteps turned in the direction of the Smythes’ house. For two hours he patrolled the roadway for the purpose of getting a glimpse of the face he had seen so nearly only that afternoon.

When eventually Mrs Lawless came forth she was attended by Van Bleit, who saw her into her motor, and closing the door on her, leant upon it confidentially while he made some low-toned remark to her where she sat inside in the dark. Lawless was too far off to hear their voices, but he judged fairly well from the pantomime what was taking place, and he saw by the street light the admiration in Van Bleit’s face. His own face, when presently the motor passed him, was as expressionless as a mask. The woman seated inside did not see him. She was sitting very straight and motionless. The smile had faded from the beautiful lips, and her eyes looked sad. Then the motor flashed out of sight, and the man was left standing stiffly in the shadowy roadway like a sentinel on guard.

The moon shone out suddenly through a rift in the heavy clouds, throwing the tall figure into strong relief, and revealing his face distinctly, stern and set, the scar on his cheek showing livid in the silvery light. As though the unexpected brilliance disturbed him, he altered his rigid attitude abruptly, swung round, and started to walk. He walked rapidly, unconscious of his surroundings in the turmoil of his thoughts. By a process of introspection his mind worked back continually. He regarded himself in a detached, impartial light, as if it were a stranger upon whom he looked, a stranger whose actions he was called upon to criticise and pass judgment upon. Not until that night had he ever considered his actions in a condemnatory light. Life was only a chance... Things had just happened... That had been his philosophy. And he had acted upon it until the thing happened that meant the finish of his career in the Army. He had finished himself socially shortly after that event.

His dismissal from the Service had cut him deeply, and he had bitterly resented it. He had enemies. That was what he had asserted at the time, what he still believed. The other affair he treated as a midsummer-night’s madness, and spoke of as such. He refused to consider it more seriously. But the midsummer-night’s madness had been responsible for more than the wrecking of his career. And it was of that he was thinking chiefly as he walked along the warm, dusty road between the motionless trees that lined the pathway and cast long black distorted shadows upon the ground. He had not called it a midsummer’s madness always; he had thought of it—ay, and spoken of it—once as Love. And he had believed the world well lost at the time. But that form of madness is transitory. He had come out of the sickness extraordinarily sane,—scarcely penitential, but with a proper appreciation of the truth of certain lines that came to his sobered senses unbidden, yet with an appropriateness that suggested some occult influence, probably conscience, working upon his mind:

“If a man would give all the substance of his house for love,
He would be utterly despised.”

In a sense, he had done that; and he had won the despite such conduct merited. He had been mad. He said it again to himself, muttering the words under his breath. Then he smiled grimly at the thought behind the words. Poor creature of circumstance! To be cured of one form of madness only to develop another!

The ever-revolving wheel of fate turned relentlessly, now bearing him, a mere puppet, upward, now downward in its revolutions. The wheel had been turning steadily downward for a long while now. He wondered whether, when it began to rise again, it would still bear him with it, or whether before that time it would have broken him utterly and left him in the uttermost depths.

Chapter Five.

For eight years Lawless had led an adventurous life, consorting chiefly with men who, like himself, were outside the pale of society. He had earned a livelihood how he could, sometimes working for his bread with his hands, at others fairly affluent; but improvident always, giving away recklessly in his prosperous days what later he knew he would need for himself. It was during one of his poorer periods that he had happened across Simmonds, the man who had since introduced him to Colonel Grey, and so helped him towards a good thing when his fortunes chanced to be at a particularly low ebb. The tide had turned with surprising swiftness.

He found it a little difficult at first to realise this unexpected change of fortune, even more difficult to adapt himself to it. Doubtless it was the influence of Van Bleit that eventually drew him from his misanthropic habits and plunged him, somewhat reluctantly, into the vortex of Cape Town society. The Smythes and Van Bleit introduced him everywhere. Lawless had no record at the Cape. He became known as a man of means, and it was rumoured that his family held a good position in England. The fact that he was connected by marriage with the beautiful Mrs Lawless added to his popularity; and the vague information, given by a would-be know-all, that he had once been in the Army and had left under a cloud was discredited by the civilian population. But the men in the Service, especially the man at Government House who was a relation of Mrs Lawless, remembered certain things; the years that had rolled by since Lawless’ disgrace were not so many as to have put the affair so entirely out of mind that by a little hard thinking the reason of his dismissal could not be recalled. It was a reason for which few men have any sympathy. But, perhaps because it is not the custom in the Service for one man to give another away, perhaps, too, because this particular man was connected, however remotely, with the most beautiful woman in Cape Town, those who remembered the facts held their peace, and the discreditable whisper died from sheer atrophy.

A certain section of Cape Town society took Lawless up. Among men he was very popular, and the women decided that he was extraordinarily fascinating, if a trifle too reserved. He was a man with very little small talk. Where he recognised a sympathetic personality he left trivialities alone and plunged straightway into the depths. Every emotion he betrayed or called forth was of the most profound. Young girls found him irresistible, but, fortunately for them, he had no taste for anything but a matured intellect. He admired youth externally, but he avoided intercourse with it.

One exception he made in favour of a girl he first saw in a railway carriage while he was returning from Symons Bay to Cape Town in the heat of a late afternoon. The girl was travelling with her mother and sister, and Lawless would scarcely have noticed her but for the persistence of her gaze, which, without her volition, remained unwaveringly fixed upon the scar on his face. His attention was attracted towards her long before she realised that she was observed. He saw her eyes riveted on the scar, and watched her, carelessly at first, but with increasing interest as he marked the effect of his disfigurement upon her. She stared at the long deep seam with wide, surprised eyes; then, her imaginative mind conjuring up a battle-field with all the paraphernalia of war, she pictured the moment when that swift relentless slash of the bayonet had been given and received; and he saw the big eyes darken, and an almost imperceptible shudder shake her slender frame. His own eyes twinkled humorously, and, drawn perhaps by their magnetism, the girlish gaze lifted unexpectedly and met his. If he thought to see her betray a swift confusion, he was disappointed. Apparently it was the most natural thing in the world that this man should be staring into her eyes, and that she should return his stare, not boldly, nor with any thought of intercourse, but with a degree of reverence such as a young girl feels for a brave man.

The rest of the journey was a duel of looks.

When he got out at the terminus, Lawless stood on the platform and waited until the girl and her party alighted. He gave no outward sign of recognition when she passed him, lifting her eyes gravely for a moment to his face; but the inscrutable grey eyes conveyed far more of meaning than the mere raising of his hat could possibly have done, or even a furtive attempt at speech. The girl went home with her mind full of him. She made a hero of him in her thoughts. Always she pictured him in the forefront of the battle; she saw him dashing forward against great odds, to be cut down even while he led his men to victory, waving them forward over his fallen body. She invested him with all the attributes which a youthful feminine mind conceives befitting a god of war.

A few weeks later he met her at a ball. He was introduced to her at her request. He had attended the dance more to please Van Bleit than himself, and was standing, a little out of it, near the doorway when one of the committee came up to him with the announcement that he wished to introduce him to Miss Weeber.

Lawless followed him indifferently. When he discovered that Miss Weeber was the girl of the train, the indifference gave place to a satisfaction that not even the girlish admission that she had solicited the introduction could damp. He was extraordinarily pleased.

“I knew we should meet some time,” he said. “It was written... But I never pictured it like this. I have imagined you in an unconventional setting with the veld for a background... illimitable space—a selfish picture—with only you—and me...”

“And we meet in the heart of a crowd,” she said, and smiled. She liked the imaginative picture that he drew.

“Things are always different in life,” he replied, “from what we would have. But I’ll not quarrel with the occasion; we will make the most of it. Will you let me see your card?”

She handed it to him.

“It is almost empty,” she explained. “We have only just arrived.”

“That,” he replied gravely, “is fortunate for me. I claim every waltz you have left.”

“Oh no?” she returned quickly. “I couldn’t allow that.”

“Then every other one,” he said; and duly initialled the dances and returned her her programme.

The quiet mastery of his manner, the assumption that what pleased him would be equally agreeable to her, robbed her of the power to protest. She was glad and yet discomfited at the number of dances he had claimed; and she scribbled subsequent partners’ names on the card herself, not choosing that others should see those frequently recurring initials. She was also a little apprehensive of what her mother would think if she noticed, as she could scarcely fail to do, how often she danced with the same man. But she would not have forgone one of those dances whatever the penalty.

Lawless had acted on an impulse in initialling her programme as he had done—a recurrence, even though slight, of the old midsummer madness. She attracted him. She was not exactly pretty, but there was the charm of youth in her favour, and an inexplicable something about her that piqued his curiosity. Also the very obvious fact that she took a romantic interest in him because of an old wound considerably amused him. It was so distinctly feminine. How shall a world in which the mothers of the nations love nothing better than the clash of arms enjoy universal peace?

He recognised that the scar was the fundamental attraction. But for it she would probably never have noticed him; because of it she singled him out from among his fellows, and through it he lived daily in her memory, figuring as greater than the race generally—a modern Achilles with the vulnerable spot in the face. The thing became an obsession. Lawless was conscious even while he danced with her of the fascination the scar held for her; her eyes seldom strayed from it, and between the dances, when he led her to the more secluded places for sitting out, she leant back in her seat and watched it with undiminished interest, while he fanned her and cynically wondered what she would make of the tale if he told her the history of the scar...

Before the evening was very far advanced he did tell her its history—with reservations. She asked for it, a little diffidently, a little apologetically, but, as he felt, with an irresistible curiosity there was no subduing.

“I want to know so badly,” she said, colouring brightly. “I’ve wondered about it ever since I saw you first... You must think it very rude of me. ... Of course you’ve noticed me staring. It’s abominable, but I can’t help it. It’s such a grim souvenir—and splendid too in its way. I’ve wanted to ask you about it a dozen times this evening, and I’ve been afraid of annoying you. And yet, why should curiosity annoy when it isn’t unkind? ... I wish you’d tell me... Will you?”

“Better curb your curiosity. You will be disillusioned otherwise,” he replied. “It was about the most unromantic moment in my life when I received that.”

“Your life must have been very full of adventure,” she answered with simple and unconscious flattery.

He smiled grimly.

“It hasn’t lacked experience of sorts,” he admitted.

She looked up into his face, and her eyes were wonderfully soft, and big with admiration. He was tempted to stoop and kiss the fresh, young, slightly parted lips. He wondered whether she would resent it if he did. But the inclination that moved him to take the liberty was hardly strong enough to cause him to put it into effect.

“Won’t you let me judge?” she asked presently.

“Judge what?” he said. He had forgotten for the moment the drift of the conversation; his mind was intent upon her. Then he saw her eyes fasten on the scar again, and, remembering her curiosity, laughed. “Oh, that! ... I was forgetting... There isn’t much to tell, as a matter of fact. It represents one lurid moment, and then a blank... I received that slash over the jaw from one of my own Tommies—we were fighting on opposite sides at the time... The only satisfaction I got out of it was when later I learnt that the man next me had settled the reckoning for me.”

“Oh!” the girl whispered, and her soft eyes hardened. Behind the hardness there lurked conflicting emotions of pity and horror. Naked fact seemed so much grimmer, so much more significant of the hatred and the actuality of war than her heroic imagining. She had drawn for herself a splendid elaborated picture of dash and courage and the glory of battle, and in a few words he had blotted her picture from the canvas and set up in its place the rugged and brutal reality. But the reality, though it hurt, was far more impressive, than her carefully stage-managed adaptation.

“He deserved death,” she said. “How dastardly to attempt to kill his own officer! ... A deserter, too!”

“No, not a deserter,” he contradicted quietly.

“But you said he was fighting on the opposite side!” She looked up at him suddenly. “Was it during the Boer war?”

“Yes.”

He played with her fan, which he was holding, opening and closing it absently, bringing the sticks together with a little click. Then abruptly he shut it with a snap and laid it back in her lap.

“There are necessarily two sides to every question, and generally much to be said on both,” he remarked in his sharp, incisive manner. “The man who was fighting on the Boers’ side had been dismissed the Service, and I suppose, having the killing lust in him, he gave his services where they were appreciated.”

“That’s treachery,” she said.

He smiled at her cynically.

“I’d like your definition of treachery... I imagine you hold the popular exaggerated ideal of man’s duty to the State. Fine thinking is all very well in theory, but put it to the test, and where are you? ... This world is built for the practical, not for the sentimentalist. A thousand years hence we may be sufficiently civilised to make the ideal life possible. Then we shall be satisfied to recognise one another’s good qualities, instead of overlooking them in the eagerness of our eternal search after the bad. But that will entail social and political revolution—and the abolition of war.”

“You say that!” she cried, catching on to the part of his speech which she understood.—“You!—a soldier!”

“My only right to the title now is that of soldier of fortune,” he replied.

She looked a little surprised.

“Of course I knew you had left the Army,” she said. “But once a soldier always a soldier.”

“On the principle that the leopard cannot change his spots!”

“I’ve only heard that applied to vicious tendencies,” she said.

“Very true,” he returned with a harshness of tone and manner that she was puzzled to account for. “There is never any hope for the damned in this world... When a man has been evil we see to it that we keep him so.”

Had it been possible for him to displease her, he knew that he would have done so then. As it was, his sentiments disappointed her. She could not understand, and therefore had no sympathy with, a cynical outlook on life. And he was lacking in self-appreciation. She was a type of womanhood who enjoys a heroic pose,—a type that is unconsciously responsible for the braggart and the egotist. He was perfectly aware that he might have made a fine story out of the scar that appealed to her so powerfully, that he could have posed as a very god in her eyes; but he was either lacking in conceit, or the desire to stand high in her regard was not sufficiently strong to incline him to be boastful. And the scar was one of the distinctions he was least proud of. It marked the most gallingly unsuccessful period in a life which, it seemed to him, had been one big futile promise. Few men had had better chances, fewer still had been hedged about as he had been by conflicting and destructive forces. His very temperament was opposed to a successful career. And yet he had all the gifts—and he knew it—that go towards the making of a successful man. He was bigger than the majority, a man who even as a failure was bound to make his mark. But a mental superiority only made him realise more certainly his inadequacy in other respects. He chafed at the knowledge of wasted powers, the perversion of ideas, and the lowering of talents to fit the altered conditions of his life. Some men adapt themselves to evil fortune, but to the man who realises his essential place in the scheme of things, to be forced to take a position on a lower plane is humiliating to the point of revolt. Time had accustomed Lawless to his downfall; but his resignation was no reconciled submission, it was at best acceptance of the irremediable.

The girl had risen at the conclusion of his trenchant speech, and stood, holding her fan loosely in both hands, looking up at him in the dim rosy glow of the Chinese lanterns. She wore white with a string of pearls round the slender throat. Lawless, looking down at her, observed how thin her shoulders were. The prettiest part of her neck was hidden—the concession to youthful modesty.

“The band is playing the next dance,” she said.

“Yes,” he answered. But he did not move at once. “You are dancing it, I suppose?”

She nodded. At the moment she wished that she had been less eager to fill her card. He was sitting out most of the dances. She had watched him hanging about doorways looking on with a slightly bored curiosity, and once or twice she had passed him on her partner’s arm seated alone on the stoep. His aloofness appealed to her imagination. Everything in connection with him interested her tremendously. She was even tempted to skip the next dance, and trust to her partner not finding her in this secluded and dimly lit place. It was not so much the knowledge that such conduct was unworthy, as the fear that he might think less highly of her, that kept her to her engagement.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shall look forward to our next waltz.”

She smiled up at him suddenly, and stooping deliberately he held her by both arms and kissed her on the lips.

It had been an impulse, not an irresistible impulse; he had made no effort at resistance. The red young lips appealed to him,—the girlish homage appealed to him. She was altogether fresh and delightful. And she did not resent his conduct. For a moment she drew back startled, a little confused, a little undecided as to what she ought to do; the next instant self-consciousness vanished; she was pathetically proud and pleased and grateful that this hero of her imagination should feel sufficiently kindly towards her to wish to kiss her. She remained quite quiet under his hands, blushing, with eyes downcast, and a little fleeting smile playing tenderly about her mouth. He removed his hands from her shoulders, and offered her his arm.

“Your partner will be getting perfectly rabid,” he said. “I suppose I must take you back now to the madding crowd, kind little friend...”

Afterwards he wondered at himself. The thing was absurd... A girl in her first season! It puzzled him to think what the attraction could be. She was not even especially good-looking. A starving man is no epicure, he told himself; and determined—but did not keep his resolve—to leave the thing alone.

Chapter Six.

The band was playing a barn dance when Lawless and his companion re-entered the ball-room, and most of the dancers had already taken the floor. A disconsolate-looking youth, who was wandering aimlessly round the room with his gaze continually on the exits, hurried towards them when they appeared in the doorway, and eagerly claimed his partner.

“I thought you had forgotten,” he said to her reproachfully, “that this was our dance.”

“Oh no!” she answered as she took his arm. “Only I didn’t hear the music quite at once.”

She let him lead her straightway among the throng of dancers, and was surprised to find how little the excitement of the exercise moved her, to whom dancing had once seemed an all-sufficient joy. Her partner’s rather commonplace, but heretofore entirely satisfying, conversation pleased her no more than the movement. That dance was altogether the dullest and most stupid affair in which she had taken part. Other dull dances were to follow. Throughout the evening she rather unfairly compared each of her partners with the man who was already enshrined in her heart and worshipped as a hero.

Lawless, having handed Miss Weeber over, retired to the stoep to smoke. Van Bleit was there, and several other men who possessed assertive thirsts and a settled belief in a reservation of strength. There was a small bar fixed up at one end of the stoep. Lawless made his way to it, and Van Bleit joined him, but refused to drink. He chaffed Lawless good-naturedly on his partiality.

“It’s most marked, old chap,” he said. “Why don’t you ring the changes? I overheard quite the best-looking girl in the room declare she was dying to dance with you, and I as good as promised to introduce you. She’s keeping the supper dance open.”

“Then you’d better book it yourself, Karl,” the other answered indifferently.

“I’m not booking anything,” Van Bleit replied with a quiet smile. “I’m reserving myself until She arrives.”

Lawless emptied his glass hastily and set it down.

“You don’t mean,” he said, moving away from the buffet, “that Mrs Lawless is coming to-night?”

“Why wouldn’t I mean that?” Van Bleit asked, looking at him curiously.

“It’s close on midnight, man. And... this kind of show...”

“She isn’t such a puritan as you imagine,” Van Bleit rejoined.—“I ought to know something about that by now... And she promised me she would come to-night. There was something—some rotten music she was going to hear first with the Smythes. Then they were coming on here.”

He pitched away his cigar and twirled the ends of his big moustache into fine points curving upward, which gave him, he imagined, a distinguished and military appearance. He was well enough to look upon without going to this excess of trouble.

“She’s not keen on dancing,” he added complacently; “but I’ve had her out on the floor once or twice. Her waltzing! ... it isn’t dancing... it’s a poem. And the satisfaction of her nearness! ... Just to hold her in one’s arms! ... Oh Lord! Lawless, if you only knew what it felt like! But you’re too damned self-contained to understand. You simply sneer till I want to hit the look off your face. I wonder whether any woman ever warmed your fish-blood, and set your pulses beating a fraction of a second quicker!”

“You seem to forget my violent partiality of this evening,” Lawless returned sarcastically.

“Pshaw! It’s no bread-and-butter miss who’ll set your veins on fire.” And then, the man having a kink in his nature which made him peculiarly evil, he added: “It’s quite a safe game, though. There are no interfering male relations. The mother is the widow of a wool-merchant. They’re not well off; and she’d welcome a wealthy son-in-law. Incidentally, there is no reason why a man shouldn’t amuse himself.”

“I will make the mother’s acquaintance to-night,” Lawless answered, and struck a match and lighted himself a cigarette. Van Bleit was sucking cachous for the sweetening of his breath. The smell of musk irritated Lawless’ nostrils. “It takes some living up to,” he observed drily.

“What does?”

“Being enamoured of a goddess.”

“Oh?” Van Bleit laughed sheepishly.

“In these days, when most women smoke themselves, I should consider such precaution unnecessary.”

“Women appreciate it,” Van Bleit responded. “It’s a tribute of masculine homage.”

“One of those tributes,” Lawless answered, “that cost so little either in the way of self-sacrifice or money that men don’t mind offering them. But love asks bigger things. That’s where the majority of us jib. Love is over exacting; we quarrel with it on account of its demands... I suppose where a man’s love was big enough to understand, it would be equal to removing mountains and draining the ocean... In lesser cases it contents itself with sucking sweets.”

“You are trying to make out that you know something about it, I suppose?” Van Bleit said, slightly nettled.

Lawless laughed.

“I should never attempt the moving of mountains,” he replied.

Mrs Lawless arrived during the extras that followed immediately upon the supper dance. The ball-room was empty, save for a few couples, mostly young enthusiasts who preferred to make the most of their opportunity when the floor was not so crowded, and to sup later when the refreshment-room too had thinned, and the faithful Van Bleit. He insisted upon taking her in to supper. She had come with the Smythes; and she turned to Mrs Smythe at the mention of supper and lifted protesting shoulders.

“One cannot keep on eating,” she said.

“Karl can,” Mrs Smythe responded.

“I’m famished,” he said. “I’ve been waiting until you arrived. In fairness to me you must come and see me through.”

Smythe pointed to the revolving couples.

“We shan’t get seats,” he said; “they’re crowded out, you see.”

“Oh! I’ll find room. There isn’t such a crush as all that.”

“Well, you can take the ladies. There’s a limit to human endurance... a drink will satisfy me.”

“We shall have to go,” Mrs Smythe said, slipping a gloved hand within Mrs Lawless’ arm. “When I have determined people to deal with I never argue. It is so much less trouble to give in.”

Van Bleit conducted his party to the supper-room, and found seats for three at a table near the door.

“What a pity Theo didn’t come,” Mrs Smythe remarked, with a glance at the vacant chair on her right.

She looked round the crowded room and nodded to several acquaintances. There was a confusion of sound that yet was not noisy,—the hum of talk and laughter, the frequent popping of champagne corks, a soft continuous rustle of movement, and the clatter of knives and forks. She glanced smilingly across Van Bleit, who was trying to catch the attention of a waiter, to where Mrs Lawless sat, leaning forward looking away from her towards the next table.

“Zoë, the sight of all these people feeding makes me hungry,” she said.

“Of course you’re hungry,” Van Bleit responded. “You can’t sit up all night on nothing.”

But Mrs Lawless apparently did not hear. She was gazing with unconscious intensity at a man at the table on the opposite side of the opening. He had his face towards her; but he had seen her entry, and, having watched her while he could do so unobserved, he now gave his undivided attention to the girl beside him.

Mrs Lawless regarded the girl with critical interest. There was nothing especially remarkable about her in any way. She was young and fresh-looking, and wore a simple white frock, and a pearl necklace the beads of which were of a size to open up doubts as to their genuineness in an inquiring mind. Mrs Lawless did not question the pearls; she accepted them, as she accepted the peerless youth of the wearer, as parts of a whole the effect of which was pleasing.

She turned in response to a question of Van Bleit’s as to what she would eat, and answered carelessly:

“Oh! anything.”

He ordered for the three of them, and then sat back in his seat and surveyed the scene at his leisure. He saw Lawless at the table opposite with the girl he had danced with most of the evening; but he made no reference to him. He acknowledged the acquaintance before Mrs Lawless, but, remembering what Lawless had told him concerning her disapproval of himself, he never admitted intimacy for fear of prejudicing his cause. Mrs Smythe, on the other hand, made no concealment of her liking for her friend’s discredited kinsman. She did not often speak of him to Mrs Lawless, recognising that the subject was rather more painful than the ordinary family dispute, but nothing would have given her greater pleasure than to assist towards a reconciliation between them. With that end in view she had given Lawless an open invitation to her house, thinking that perhaps if occasionally brought together by chance they might eventually, if only for the sake of appearance, smooth over their differences and close the breach. Continued feud was the invariable result of an exaggerated sense of dignity on both sides, and it was old-fashioned. But Lawless very seldom availed himself of her kindness, and had managed his few visits so far when Mrs Lawless had not been present. She more than suspected design in this, and it helped to strengthen her belief that the estrangement had originated with him, and that he was responsible for its continuation.

“You don’t like that chicken,” Van Bleit remarked abruptly to Mrs Lawless, observing that she was only trifling with the food upon her plate. “Let me send it away and get you something else.”

“Please, don’t,” she remonstrated. “I’ve already dined. I’m just keeping you in countenance.”

“But that’s rotten for you,” he expostulated. “If I had really thought it would bore you, I wouldn’t have brought you here. Drink some more champagne then, if you won’t eat.”

“I’m not in the least bored,” she replied, flashing a brilliant smile at him. “To eat is not my sole source of amusement. There is plenty to interest me here for an hour, if you are inclined to stay that time.”

“I’m not,” he returned. “I’m longing to try the floor. I’ve not danced yet... I’ve been waiting. You’ll give me the first waltz after supper?”

She met his bold, eager gaze pensively, her splendid dreamy eyes expressing a slight hesitation.

“You know I don’t care for dancing,” she said.

“Yes, I know. But... just one waltz!” He leaned nearer to her. “You won’t disappoint me? ... I have waited through the entire evening for this.”

She smiled at the extravagance, but faintly, and looked away across the crowded room with its numberless small tables, and the gay, careless, laughing company that filled them.

“Oh! if you make so much of it!” she said.

Mrs Smythe, who was also gazing about her with more interest in the company than in the supper, here interposed with the irrelevant remark:

“I think Colonel Grey is the most distinguished-looking man I know.”

Van Bleit grunted.

“Oh! I know you don’t like him, Karl... It’s obvious that the antipathy is mutual. But that doesn’t make him any the less interesting from a woman’s point of view. What do you think, Zoë?”

“I think he is exactly what you describe him.”

Mrs Smythe looked at her in surprise. It was not the words, but the manner in which they were delivered, that arrested her attention.

“You don’t like him either,” she said.

Mrs Lawless smiled.

“He doesn’t like me,” she corrected. “And though I find that attitude interesting, it does not encourage affection on my side.”

“Impossible!” Van Bleit exclaimed incredulously. “Dear lady, you must be mistaken. I haven’t much of an opinion of him, but he can’t be such an unappreciative hog.”

The man referred to had risen, and, with his supper companion, now prepared to leave the room. They were not the first to make a move; the tables had thinned considerably since the entry of Van Bleit’s party. He paused for a second by Mrs Smythe’s chair and spoke to her, and bowed to Mrs Lawless. He did not see Van Bleit. Neither did he see Lawless. When he passed his table his head was turned towards his companion and he was deep in conversation with her.

Van Bleit watched him curiously, and the finely pointed ends of his moustache lifted slightly as the lips beneath it smiled.

“He rather overdoes it,” he murmured.

“Overdoes what?” his cousin questioned.

Van Bleit looked at her. He had not, as a matter of fact, intended the remark to be heard.

“His diplomacy.”

“You are pleased to be cryptic,” Mrs Smythe returned.

He suddenly laughed.

“I must have made my meaning very obscure when you’re not on it,” he said. “I was merely criticising the fellow’s habit of ignoring the people it doesn’t suit him to see. But come... Shall we go? You are neither of you eating, and I don’t care to feed alone.”

Lawless rose when they did, and, with his partner on his arm, followed them to the ball-room. The band was playing an extra, a waltz. He passed his arm around his companion’s waist and joined the throng of dancers, whose numbers momentarily increased as the supper-room emptied itself of diners.

Van Bleit was waltzing with Mrs Lawless. He had persuaded her to try the floor when it was not so crowded; but before the dance was far advanced the room had filled surprisingly, and dancing became difficult. A slight block occurred in one corner, and Van Bleit found himself held up temporarily with his partner, so closely wedged that he had much ado to keep the crowd from pressing on her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “When we get out of this we’ll find a seat somewhere outside.”

Mrs Lawless did not answer him. She was conscious of an arm pressing against her shoulder, pressing hard, and, looking up, met fully the keen grey piercing eyes of the man whom before that night she had not seen since the afternoon when he had called upon her at her house in Rondebosch. The arm, the shoulder of which pressed her shoulder, belonged to him. It encircled the girl who had sat beside him during supper, the girl in the white frock with the string of pearls about her neck. She leant against him, laughing, flushed, and happy, her eager eyes alight with excitement. It was all enjoyment to her; the crush with that strong arm to shield her was part of the fun.

Mrs Lawless scarcely noticed the girl; she looked above her, and for a long moment gazed back into the sombre dominating eyes, the owner of which surveyed her as he might have surveyed a stranger, with an intense yet aloof curiosity. In the quiet, steady, concentrated look he bent upon her, and in his grave, unsmiling face, there was an amount of interest, even of admiration, but no outward sign of recognition. The initiative, Mrs Lawless realised, was with her. She smiled faintly, a smile that was half-diffident, half-wistful; and then suddenly the crowd swayed, parted, and moved forward again; and Van Bleit steered his partner between the revolving couples to the nearest exit.

“What a beastly squeeze,” he said, when they emerged into the fresh air. “I’m afraid you will blame me for letting you in for that.”

Mrs Lawless sat down on a settee on the stoep. She was flushed and a little breathless; but it was not owing to the crush in the ball-room; she had been so well guarded that she had scarcely felt the inconvenience of the crowd. She looked at Van Bleit, and there was a gleam that was almost triumphant in her eyes.

“I’m not blaming you... As an experience, I enjoyed it,” she said, and laughed.

She put up a hand to her shoulder. She could still feel the impression of a man’s sleeve against her flesh. It had pressed hard. The man had stood like a rock, immovable and as firm; there had been no give in the shoulder that had, as it were, set itself against hers. In all probability, she decided, there was a red mark upon her arm. If Van Bleit had not been present she would have made an examination.

“I wish you would go and find me a wrap,” she asked him suddenly. “I brought one with me. It isn’t altogether wise to sit here without after getting so hot dancing.”

And when he had gone she moved deliberately into the brighter light that streamed forth through the open doorway of the ball-room, and pulling her sleeve aside examined the arm. The mark she had expected to discover was there, a faint pink stain upon the whiteness of the soft flesh. She lowered the sleeve over it gently, and her face quivered. And yet it was only a small matter that could not have caused her the least pain.

“I trust you were not hurt a while since?” a voice addressed her curtly from the doorway, and lifting her eyes for the second time that night, they encountered the keen gaze of the man who was responsible for the injury. She flushed quickly.

“No,” she answered, and hesitated, confused and obviously nervous.

He stepped out on to the stoep.

“Where’s your partner?” he asked abruptly.

She explained, and he turned and walked beside her away from the bright light and the sight and sound of the dancers. His own partner had been compelled to retire to the dressing-room to have some damage to her frock repaired. She would not be back to finish the dance, which was practically finished then; the music was getting faster and faster, and so were the hurrying feet.

“Do you care to sit down?” he asked, pausing before a couple of low chairs arranged in a sheltered corner of the less-frequented side of the stoep. She seated herself in one, and he took up a position behind the second, leaning forward with his arms on the back of it.

“Shall I stay... until Van Bleit returns?” he asked.

“Please do.”

She clutched at the arm of her chair, grasping it firmly. There were so many things she wanted to say to this man, and time was so short; at any moment they might be interrupted... The precious moments were slipping away... And he gave her so little help. His manner was so curt as to be almost repellent.

“Do you think it necessary,” she asked, “that when we meet it should be as strangers—almost enemies?”

“Aren’t we that?” he said. “I understood that I represented both to you.”

She was silent because his last words had recalled a hard thing she had once in the years gone by written to him in an hour of wounded anger: “I do not know you... I think I have never known you. You are a stranger to me, and, I see now, my greatest enemy...”

“It is for you,” he added, filling in the pause, “to determine our future relations... I am a little surprised that you should meet me as you have done. And I’m not sure that it wouldn’t have been happier for both if you had acted differently... The fires of yesterday are ashes on the hearth of to-day... I don’t know how it is with you, but the sight of greying embers chills me.”

She sat leaning forward, her eyes fixed unseeingly straight before her as though they sought to pierce the blackness that lay beyond the stoep. Some of the pain and bitterness that was in her heart shone through them, so that they looked tortured in the soft glow of the artificial lights. She gripped the arm of her chair more tightly, and, still staring into the darkness, said tonelessly:

“With women it is not usual to leave ashes lying on the hearth.”

“You sweep them up and throw them away,” he answered. “It is wiser so... One forgets.”

“Some do,” she rejoined slowly. “And others—collect their ashes carefully and kindle them anew.”

He looked at her closely.

“Foolish and futile,” he said. “Ashes can never give forth the glow and the heat of unspoilt fuel. A thing that is dead has served its end. It should then be applied to other uses; for it is impossible that it should ever again serve its original purpose.”

“If that is your philosophy,” she began.

“It is,” he interrupted shortly.

“Then with you the ashes remain ashes to despoil the hearth of to-day!”

“I brush them out of sight,” he returned lightly. “I have lived so long now amid the dust of such memories that I have learnt to turn my back upon the muddle till it no longer inconveniences me...” He smiled cynically, and added: “There was room for a retort there. You might have flung out at me that I have always shown a propensity for turning my back.”

She winced. His speech cut her more than he would have believed any words of his could wound her. It was with great difficulty that she kept back the tears.

“That wasn’t worthy of you,” she said.

He reddened suddenly.

“I beg your pardon... It was an ill-considered remark. But it’s one of the memories that sticks closest... The dust of it lies thick upon everything and clouds the rest of life.”

She sat back in the depths of her chair and turned her white face up to his; a great sadness and a great yearning showed in the beautiful eyes.

“I think you make too much of it,” she said... “The accident of a moment!”

“An accident that ruined my career,” he returned with great bitterness.

“Not ruined it,” she expostulated,—“checked it. You could have made a name and a place for yourself in spite of it.”

“And I didn’t.”

“And you have not,” she corrected,—“yet.”

He laughed abruptly.

“Think of the time that has been wasted,” he said. “You might have said all this to me years ago. I don’t say it would have made any difference... unless it were to keep green some corner of my heart. But encouragement to be efficacious should be given when life is hardest, not when one has learnt to adapt it to one’s needs. But it’s generous of you to offer even a belated encouragement. I don’t wish to appear ungrateful. It’s more than I have deserved—or, indeed, expected of you.”

She stretched out a hand and laid it on his arm.

“Don’t be bitter, Hugh... We both have made mistakes.”

He looked down at the white glove that rested on his sleeve, and his lips tightened. The arm inside the sleeve was tense. There was no more response than if she had touched instead the stuffed arm of the chair.

“Perhaps,” he allowed. “But we won’t add to our mistakes by growing sentimental.”

She removed her hand without speaking, and sat silent with strained face, curiously still and composed. He watched her in his aloof fashion. If he felt any interest in her beyond the ordinary interest that a man experiences in a beautiful woman, he concealed it admirably. He betrayed not the slightest regret when Van Bleit came hurrying up to them with a light wrap over his arm. He had had some difficulty in finding it. Mrs Smythe eventually assisted in the search. He was voluble and apologetic. He shot a suspicious glance at Lawless, standing at the back of the chair in the same position, leaning forward with his arms on the top of it, and then turned again to the quiet figure of the woman who had not spoken after the first smiling word of thanks.

“You moved,” he said. “I looked for you where I left you, but the seat was unoccupied.”

“It was quieter here,” she explained. She rose and stood while Van Bleit put the wrap around her shoulders, and, with an exaggerated air of devotion, drew it close about her throat. Lawless bowed to her and moved away, making a slow progress along the stoep against the stream of dancers, pouring forth from the ball-room in quest of air.

“Gods!” he mused, avoiding the stream mechanically while seeming not to see it. “What a queer trick of fate! What has brought her out here, I wonder? ... That’s what I should like to get at... What has brought her out here?”

When in the early hours of the morning Mrs Lawless appeared on the pavement on Van Bleit’s arm, Lawless was standing on the kerb beside the waiting motor in the act of lighting a cigar. He tossed away the match, and opened the door for her. Then he raised his hat, and turning silently, disappeared into the blackness beyond the lights of the car. She turned her head to look after him; but the darkness had swallowed the tall figure, and the throbbing of the engine drowned the sound of his rapidly retreating steps.

Chapter Seven.

Colonel Grey sat alone on his stoep in the darkness and listened, as once before he had listened, to the quick, measured step of the man whose claim upon his consideration had rested solely on a reputation for valour.

The Colonel had believed strongly hitherto in his own discernment. Now he doubted, not only his judgment in human affairs, but his qualification for the responsible mission he had undertaken to carry successfully through. Twice he had been mistaken in the persons he had employed. He had paid off the one a month before, and had satisfied himself that the boy had taken his passage to Durban, and gone aboard with his broken head still encased in bandages, and with more money in his pockets than was good for him. The other case could not be disposed of in the same manner. In so far as their dealings together went, the man had given no cause either for satisfaction or complaint. Up to the present nothing definite had been accomplished. Colonel Grey doubted that anything would be accomplished. He mistrusted his man—the man whose reputation for courage he now knew to be spurious,—who was further accredited with being a traitor. The thing stuck in the Colonel’s mind and inflamed it. In a quiet, controlled way he was furious that he should have been led into having anything to do with the scoundrel. He was impatient to face him, to confound him with the knowledge of his disgrace. He wondered whether the fellow would try to bluff it, or if he would cave in...

And then the man he was thinking about arrived, and stepping up to the stoep with his firm, decided tread, stood before him, as he had stood on the night of their first meeting, looking at him inquiringly with those strangely penetrating, inscrutable grey eyes.

“You sent for me,” he said briefly, and waited to learn the reason of the summons.

The other man rose without speaking, and led the way into the house, closing the French windows behind them as he had done before.

“You are sure you were not followed?” he asked, as he drew a chair out from the table and seated himself.

“I think not. I saw no one.”

“Ah! ... I fancied I heard footsteps in the road.”

“You have good ears,” Lawless answered. “I heard nothing, and I was on the alert.”

Colonel Grey regarded him attentively. It was an extraordinary thing, but the sight of the purposeful face, with the steady eyes, and the deep, slanting scar, was strangely reassuring. Unaccountably, he felt his resentment dying. Against his reason, against his volition, he had a liking for the man. In face of his liking the charges against him seemed monstrous. It was almost incredible that he should have been cashiered from the Army for cowardice—“misbehaviour in the Field in the face of the enemy,” that was the wording of the indictment. He had received the information from an unquestionable source. Through the same channel he had learnt that subsequently, under another name, he had taken up arms against his country. The first was a grave enough offence in the Colonel’s opinion, the second was unpardonable.

“Have you no news for me?” he asked abruptly, sitting very straight in his chair, his brows drawn fiercely together while he watched his companion from under them with a curiously intent gaze. “It is many weeks since we met.”

Lawless leant back negligently, his knees crossed, one arm, with the hand lying loosely open, resting on the table. At his last remark he looked over at the speaker in his quick, direct way, and said:

“I supposed that was why you had summoned me. You’ve been wondering what I have been doing with your time and your money... Well, not much... I’ve learnt one thing, that Van Bleit carries the papers on his person for their greater safety, and a loaded revolver for his own. Apart from that we are not more forward.”

“You’ve no plan for getting the packet from him?”

“Not so far. The fellow does not give me a chance. If I spent forty-eight hours beneath the same roof with him, I’d manage it... Of course, I could get hold of what you want at any time if I chose to kill the brute; but I’ve a strong disinclination to swing for him.”

“Yes.” Colonel Grey looked thoughtful. “That wouldn’t do,” he said. “No! ... We don’t want murder done... Risky... And awkward too... afterwards... too many questions asked.”

There was silence between them for a space. Inside the room a death-watch ticked loudly against the wainscot, and without a large white moth beat with futile insistence upon the window-pane in its endeavours to reach the light. The noise of its soft body thudding against the glass drew Colonel Grey’s attention to the fact that the blinds were not drawn. He rose promptly and lowered them.

“Quite unnecessary,” Lawless observed. “I saw to it when I took this seat that no one, unless he stood on the stoep and stared deliberately in at the window, could see me sitting here.”

The Colonel wheeled round and faced him.

“Your forethought is quite extraordinary,” he said, “for a novice at the game.”

The other laughed carelessly.

“During an adventurous life,” he replied, “I’ve had rogues to deal with before.”

The speech, as the Colonel heard it, was almost a challenge. His mind reverted to the serious indictment against this man who sat there so coolly, with the half-derisive smile lingering on the thin, handsome face; and the fierce feeling of indignation against him surged up afresh. He walked deliberately back to his seat and sat down.

“Yours has certainly been no ordinary career,” he said bluntly. “For the honour of my countrymen, I’m glad to think that is so... You will be less surprised at my taking this tone when I tell you that I have received information concerning you of a very unsatisfactory nature. Subsequent to our first meeting I instituted inquiries relative to certain matters we touched upon at that interview. The reply to those inquiries reached me by last mail.”

“Yes.” Lawless did not change his lounging attitude, but his face hardened perceptibly, and his voice rang like steel. “After our talk I supposed you would,” he said. “The only thing that surprised me was that you didn’t pursue your inquiries before making arrangements with me.”

“That was where I made my mistake,” the Colonel replied stiffly.

“And how do you purpose rectifying that? ... Do you think that the charges against me, as you have heard them, unfit me for the dirty work you have given me to do? I’ve had some strange billets in my time, and this, in my opinion, is the least honourable of all. A case of blackmail that can’t be entrusted to the proper authorities is a precious shady business.”

“There are reasons,” the Colonel began, and stopped suddenly. Why should he attempt explanations? Whatever the business, the employment was worthy the man.

“Well, no matter!” Lawless said. “Let that pass. But I should like to hear what you have against me... When it is one’s misfortune to only win notoriety through misdeeds it is interesting to know the limit of such publicity... What part of my record have you?”

“I have no interest in your affairs, Mr Lawless, beyond your one-time connection with the Army,” Colonel Grey answered quietly. “When you informed me you had been cashiered, I was curious to know the reason. I am now in possession of the details, and the further discreditable information that you sold your sword arm to the enemies of your country... Have you anything to say to that charge?”

“Nothing... Your information is quite correct.”

“Then, sir, I will tell you to your face you are a damned traitor.”

The Colonel was leaning forward in his excitement, his arm stretched out along the table. The man he addressed, and thus deliberately insulted, drew himself up straighter, his face set and stern, a cold glint in the steel-grey eyes that narrowed dangerously as they met the other’s angry gaze.

“I can excuse your heat, sir,” he replied with amazing control, “in consideration of your ignorance of the circumstances. Had things been otherwise, and it had been my privilege to criticise another’s disgrace, I should probably have made use of the same forcible language that you give utterance to... When we have been through the mire we recognise a different quality in the mud. Men have been reduced to the ranks for the misdemeanour for which I was dismissed the Service... Had I been reduced to the ranks I should have made a good soldier. My punishment, I contend, was unjust.”

“By which specious reasoning, I presume, you excuse the crime of treachery, and seek to justify a spirit of revenge?—or gain, was it?”

Lawless frowned.

“I make no excuses,” he returned curtly. “I don’t recognise that my actions need condoning. And I did not join the Boers’ side with thought either of revenge or gain...”

He halted abruptly, and, for the first time taking his eyes off the other’s face, stared hard at the unshaded lamp.

“It appears,” the Colonel interposed drily, “that you were actuated by blind impulse.”

Lawless drummed on the table with his fingers and said nothing. He felt strangely annoyed. And yet he had known positively that the facts must come to this man’s knowledge before long. In the circumstances it was little likely that he would make no inquiries concerning one he had employed in a secret and confidential matter. That he regretted his haste in having employed him was obvious. It was the term traitor that stuck in the Colonel’s gorge. He found it particularly distasteful to hold further intercourse with one so steeped in dishonour.

“Perhaps it would be as well to bury the past,” he said with an effort after a while. “In the lives of many men there are matters which it is not profitable to discuss. I can only add that I wish I had known of this before.”

Lawless got upon his feet, and stood stiffly upright, his face grim, and colourless under the sunburn, like the face of a man whose blood is at white heat with hardly repressed passion.

“Am I to understand that you dispense with my services?” he asked curtly.

Colonel Grey was somewhat slow in replying. Discretion weighed in the balance against a strong personal objection to working with the man, and won.

“I don’t know as to that,” he replied at last uncertainly. “We’ve gone so far... You have a dangerous knowledge... I prefer to have you on our side.”

“I see.” Lawless’ manner was icy. “Then, you mean me to go on with the job?”

“Yes, I think so... Yes! ... I do.”

“You don’t ask me whether I am satisfied to go on with it.”

His hearer’s eyebrows went up with a jerk.

“Why shouldn’t you?” he asked, surprised. “You’re well paid.”

“True! The pay’s good. It would be absurd to throw away good money for a scruple...”

“I was under the impression that you had buried your scruples,” the other answered, and was amazed at the sudden passion that blazed in the sombre eyes.

“Never in my life before have I permitted a man to insult me as you have insulted me,” was the angry reply. “I’ve swallowed as much as I intend to swallow... Whatever you have learnt concerning my past does not invest you with the right of insulting me.”

“Your complaint is quite reasonable,” Colonel Grey returned with a certain quiet dignity that partially disarmed the other’s math. “I have allowed my feelings to lead me away. I regret it. Will you please be seated, Mr Lawless? There are one or two things which I wish to say to you, if you are satisfied to go on with this business.”

He paused deliberately; and, after a moment’s hesitation, Lawless sat down.

“In the first place,” he added, when Lawless was again occupying the chair from which he had risen, “I think we should have a time limit for the carrying out of this enterprise. Is that agreeable to you?”

“Perfectly,” came the brief response.

“Then, suppose we say six months... How does that strike you?”

“It’s fair enough.”

“You haven’t any suggestion of your own to make on that head?”

“None... Only I shall get the papers before six months are up.”

“You are very confident,” the Colonel said.

Lawless looked thoughtful.

“I take a peculiar personal interest in this affair,” he said. “If I did not I should not go on with it... I told you I would get those papers for you, or kill your man... I mean to do one or the other—or both.”

Colonel Grey scrutinised him earnestly. His lips parted as though he would say something, and then shut with a snap on the unspoken words. Lawless sat up suddenly.

“There isn’t any use in your seeing me,” he said. “Give me my head, the funds to go on with for a few months, and then leave the matter in my hands. You shall have those papers... It’s not that I take a particular interest in them, or in your client, but it pleases me to do this thing. When I make up my mind to carry a thing through I do it. You may call that tall talking—but it amounts simply to this, that I hold life cheaply; the only law I recognise is the unwritten law. I’ve lived among the social outcasts—I’m one of them, and so, perhaps, I am well suited to carry through a matter that is outside the law. You don’t trust me... Because of what you have heard you doubt even that I have the courage which this affair may demand. It’s natural that you should doubt. But if you can bring yourself to accept my word, this matter is safe in my hands.”

There was a long silence. Then the Colonel spoke abruptly, and, as it sounded, greatly against his inclination. But in spite of himself, in spite of all the evidence against him, he liked and trusted this man. Perhaps the fact that he had not attempted to explain, or to excuse an inexcusable crime, prejudiced him favourably.

“I do accept your word,” he said bluntly. “I confess I have entertained misgivings... That is hardly surprising, I think, considering how much is at stake. But I’ll take your word, Mr Lawless... And I accept your conditions. When you have anything of importance to communicate you will let me hear from you...”

When Lawless got back to his hotel that night he was astonished to find a visitor waiting for him—a woman. She had been shown into a private room. The hour was unusual, so were the circumstances; but the management had no wish to offend so good a client as Lawless; therefore the lady was, after a little difficulty, admitted; and Lawless on his return was discreetly informed of her presence. He received the information in silence, betraying none of the astonishment that moved him, which was considerable. He could not for the life of him imagine who the lady could be.

He was no wiser on entering the room where she was. She was a tall woman of commanding presence, very fashionably dressed—almost too fashionably to suggest a perfect taste. There was—Lawless was quick to observe it—the unmistakable stamp of the demi-mondaine about her. She looked round as he entered and closed the door behind him, and then very slowly got up from the sofa on which she had been seated. Her movements were extraordinarily languid for a woman of such splendid physique, and less graceful than deliberately sensuous, Lawless decided. Something about the woman stirred a chord of memory in his mind, as he stood critically surveying her with a look of cool inquiry in his eyes. The figure was vaguely familiar. The face he could not see; she was so heavily veiled that he could only trace a shadowy outline of her features.

“This is an unexpected honour,” he said, with ironical politeness. “May I ask to what I am indebted, and to whom, for this amazing condescension?”

She held out a pair of well-gloved hands towards him.

“You have forgotten... so soon?” she said in a low voice, the deep tones of which sounded nervously tremulous.

“I’ve a memory no longer and no shorter than most men’s,” he retorted, not touching the outstretched hands. “If you’d raise your veil...”

She put up one hand to the dense folds that concealed her face, but she did not lift them. She waited, looking at him through their disfiguring thickness with wide, smiling, observant eyes.

“And this is your welcome after all this while! ... your welcome to me! ... No wonder those tiresome people downstairs were so reluctant to admit me! ... I only got round them by telling them I was your wife.”

“The devil you did!” ejaculated Lawless.

He did not speak loudly His voice had dropped to a low note of caution. He approached nearer. Astonishment had driven the irony out of his eyes, and left in its stead an expression of strong curiosity.

“Oh, Hughie!” she said reproachfully... “To think that you could forget...”

Lawless seized her by the arm. Then quickly, almost roughly, he lifted the disguising veil and stared hard into the handsome, painted face, with the smiling vermilion lips, and the mocking eyes.

“Oh, Lord!” he exclaimed, and fell back a step or two in sheer amazement.

The woman laughed suddenly.

“I thought I should surprise you, Hughie,” she said.

Chapter Eight.

It is a generally accepted fact that the social life of the Colonies is less conventional than the social life of England. It is broader in outlook, wider in sympathy, not less critical, perhaps, but certainly more understanding. This is to be accounted for by the continual inpouring of fresh blood, the infusion of fresh ideas. The Colonies adapt themselves more readily to change than the older civilisation; they represent a younger, more vigorous generation, and, if behind the mother country in many respects, are ahead of her in others of quite vital importance. But though life in South Africa is unconventional, strenuous, and—as is inevitable in a land that attracts to its shores the more ardent and adventurous spirits—more impulsive, more passionate and unrestrained, it has its fixed code of morality, and the man or woman who defies its laws must be prepared to accept the reward of ostracism.

Lawless’ sudden leap to popularity suffered an equally sudden rebound when it became apparent how utterly contemptuous he was of public opinion, as it concerned his private life. His life became an open scandal. The woman who had visited him at his hotel late one night was installed in rooms that he had taken for her, and regularly every day he visited her, and frequently took her driving in the public thoroughfares. The women of his acquaintance cut him, and not a few of the men. His behaviour was too flagrant to be passed over. Van Bleit alone was interested and sympathetic. He coveted an introduction to his friend’s handsome inamorata, and on occasions when he deemed it quite safe put himself deliberately in the way. But Lawless was blind to these devices. He cared neither for the disapproval of the many, nor for Van Bleit’s furtive approbation. He was entirely indifferent to outside criticism. It pleased him to do this thing, and he did it. Society had not treated him so well as to give it a right to be exacting; and, in any case, he had no intention of considering it in this or any other matter.

There were two women in Cape Town who were most unhappily affected by this sordid intrigue, Mrs Lawless, and the girl who had made a hero of the man, and who worshipped him with the extravagance of a youthful, unsophisticated mind. For a long while Julie Weeber refused to admit that there was anything unusual in Lawless’ friendship with the handsome demi-mondaine; but in her heart she was jealous of the friendship, and when she saw them together she hated the woman with the complacently smiling, painted lips, and the mocking eyes. Her distress was primarily due to the knowledge that by his actions he was separating himself from her. She would have condoned anything for the gratification of seeing and talking with him occasionally. But intercourse was out of the question; not only did her mother assert that she would neither receive him in future nor permit her daughters to acknowledge him, but Lawless himself held aloof. Once when she passed him in the street driving with the woman, although she knew he had seen her, he deliberately turned his face aside. It wounded the girl deeply.

“Why should he treat me like that?” she asked herself passionately... “It isn’t fair to me.”

She encountered him again a few days later. He was alone, walking towards the city. Julie had been to see a friend some distance out, and was cycling homeward when she overtook him. It was evening. The sun had dipped below the horizon; where it had disappeared the sky still glowed with changing colours that paled perceptibly before the oncome of precipitate night which in Africa follows rapidly on the path of the vanished day. A shaft of the fading colour in the sky glanced earthwards and glowed in Julie Weeber’s cheeks when she recognised the solitary pedestrian striding along the middle of the road. She slackened speed as she drew near to him, and glanced swiftly about her. No one was in sight, not even a Kaffir; though had a crowd been there to witness her actions she would probably have behaved in exactly the same way. She pedalled her machine alongside the tall, familiar figure, and slipped to the ground. Lawless glanced round. He looked surprised, he also looked—Julie observed it—pleased.

“How do you do?” she said, deliberately holding out her hand. “Isn’t it a beautiful evening?”

He smiled involuntarily at this determined effort at conversation, and answered that such was his opinion also.

“Are you walking into town?” she asked. “I am, too.”

“You mean, you are riding,” he corrected.

“I’m not,” the girl returned imperturbably. “I hate cycling against the wind. I only stuck to my machine because it’s lonely walking by oneself.”

“In that case,” he said, stepping behind her and relieving her of the charge of the cycle, “you must let me wheel this.”

Julie walked along beside him for a few yards without speaking. Then abruptly she turned her face towards him. He was looking down at the machine, a very old one with well-worn tyres and rusty handlebars of a pattern quite out of date. His face was grave and somewhat preoccupied.

“You cut me the other day in Adderly Street,” she said bluntly... “You saw me...”

“Yes,” he admitted.

It did not seem to occur to him to turn the speech aside. During their brief, but rapid, acquaintance they had always been extraordinarily frank with one another.

“Why did you?” she asked almost fiercely. “It wasn’t kind.”

“In that I differ from you,” he replied. “It was the only kind act I have ever performed towards you.”

A pained flush leapt to her cheeks. She looked away from him down the dusty road, along a vista of flowering gum trees, with eyes that were clouded and misty and rebellious, and a mind that for all its youthfulness dimly discerned his meaning.

“I thought we were—friends,” she said falteringly.

And then he made use of one of the remarks that were responsible for the development of her understanding.

“There is no such thing as friendship between the sexes.”

The flush in her cheeks deepened. There was a strained air of embarrassment about her, noticeable even in her walk.

“And so... you don’t wish to know me?” she said with an effort.

“My dear child!” He looked at her earnestly. “It’s not a matter in which I am entitled to consider my wishes.”

“And what of mine?” she asked in a low voice that was tremulous, as though the speaker were on the verge of tears.

He looked down awkwardly, and fidgeted with the handle of the brake.

“I don’t consider that I am entitled to consult your wishes either,” he replied. “My friendship, according to the accepted standard, is neither good nor safe for you... Haven’t you been so informed?”

“Yes,” she answered, and added sullenly: “I don’t care... I want your friendship more than I want anything. It has meant so much to me... And I miss... things so. You never come to the house now... You never go anywhere.”

“No,” he returned briefly.

There was silence between them for a while. Then suddenly Julie put out a hand and touched his hand where it hung at his side.

“You won’t—cut me again?” she pleaded.

“No,” he answered as briefly as before, but in a kinder tone with a ring of determination in it that carried conviction.

“I want to see you sometimes,” she said... “to talk with you sometimes. I know that I’m not intellectual, that I’m undeveloped and silly, and altogether too young to be companionable to you; but you have taken pleasure in my society—you have,” she exclaimed with vehemence, “haven’t you?”

“Yes,” he acknowledged, “I have... I do. And it’s just because of that I deem it best to let the thing end.”

“Oh no!” she cried quickly... “No!”

“When you talk like that,” he said, smiling at her pleasantly, “you convince me that my judgment is right... Oh! don’t worry,” he added in response to a quick gesture of protest; “I’m not going to rely on anything so stodgy. I’m going to follow inclination. Remain my dear little friend... If there is no great good to you in it, there shall be no great harm in it either... And, in any case, it won’t matter much... I am going away shortly.”

“Going away!” she echoed blankly. “Leaving Cape Town, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

She turned to him with a swift abandonment that proved how strong was the influence he already exerted over her, and with white face, and distressful, tear-filled eyes, cried out—

“Oh! don’t go! don’t go! ... Or—couldn’t you—take me with you?”

He came to an abrupt standstill, and leaning towards her, with his hand resting on the saddle of the cycle, looked steadily into the shamed, young, piteous face. His look brought the colour flaming back into the white cheeks.

“Ah! now you think me unwomanly,” she said, and her voice shook pitifully... “You won’t like me any more...”

“My dear!” he replied, “you are talking nonsense.”

Her head drooped lower and lower like a flower that is beaten down in a storm. She stared down at the strong, sunburnt hand gripping the saddle, and the slow tears overflowed and fell, big, shining drops, into the dust of the road. She made no effort to stay them or to wipe them away; and the man, watching her with his keen, observant eyes, was stirred with an unwonted sense of compassion, and a swift self-hatred because of what he had in idle selfishness done.

“If you knew me for what I am,” he said gravely, “you would not honour me with your friendship. I’m not the hero your fancy has painted. A man rates himself at a higher valuation usually than his deserts, but as high as I can place the standard it leaves me still unworthy of your regard.”

“And you don’t feel... contempt for me?” she faltered.

“No... The only contempt I feel is for myself.” He held out his hand to her. “We are coming to the more frequented part,” he said. “I would prefer that you mounted and rode into town.”

She gave him her hand shyly, but still she hesitated.

“You promise not to withdraw your friendship?” she pleaded. “I—I don’t know what I should do if—if you wouldn’t let me be—just a friend.”

Her eyes as well as her voice implored him; they dragged a reluctant consent from his lips. When she had mounted and cycled out of his sight, turning at the bend of the road to wave him a last farewell, he regretted that he had allowed his better judgment to be overruled by her girlish pleading. Public opinion was right in this instance; there was danger in the friendship. There had been danger for the girl from the beginning; since intercourse in the future could only be by stealth that danger was considerably increased. The secret friendship of a young girl for a man of notorious character must be disastrous in its results even if the man act towards her honourably according to his lights.

When Lawless reached his hotel he found two letters waiting for him in the rack. He carried them to his room. The first, so ill-written as to be scarcely legible, was signed “Tottie.” The writer stated that she was bored to death, and commanded him to come round and amuse her. The second was also in the nature of a command. It was very short—only one line.

“Will you come to see me?—Zoë.”

He read the second note twice, and then remained for a long while motionless with the letter in his hand, staring at the big, firm characters thoughtfully, his brows puckered in a heavy frown. Why had she written to him? ... Why should she wish to see him, when all self-respecting women held their skirts aside? ... The frown deepened. He was baffled by the very simplicity of the brief message, the meaning of which was so purely conjectural and obscure. He read the note for the third time, seeking enlightenment from a greater familiarity with the words. But the purpose of the message still eluded him. He could not imagine what was in the writer’s mind to move her to pen such a note. It was inconsistent with her attitude in the past. He felt strangely irritated, even suspicious, as he stared at the sheet of paper in his hand. It was a little late in the day for her to think of starting an “influence.”

He seated himself at a writing-table in a corner of the room and answered the note. His reply was laconic in its brevity. “No,” he wrote, and signed it simply, “H.L.” Then he addressed it and slipped it into the pocket of his coat with the idea of posting it himself. She would probably expect him that evening, he decided, and smiled ironically, thinking of the writer of the other letter, who was also expecting him, and whom he had no intention to disappoint. In the morning she would receive the answer to her note; then she would understand.

But the answer was not posted. Lawless was delayed as he was leaving the hotel; when later he set forth his mood had changed, and he tore the reply he had written into fragments and scattered them on the pavement, to be further scattered by the boisterous wind that swept them into corners, only to dislodge them and scatter them anew. A few of the fragments fluttered under his feet as he strode along. He trod them heavily underfoot and walked on. Would she conclude from his silence that he would obey the summons? ... He was not quite sure whether by his action in destroying his answer he meant to accede to her wish, or simply to ignore it. A strong curiosity as to her reason for wishing to see him strove against his disinclination to comply with the request. Finally he decided to leave the matter in abeyance. If the humour took him he would go to her the following day. But the humour did not take him. The next day came and passed, and the note remained in his pocket still unanswered.

Mrs Lawless waited at home each day in the hope of his coming, and denied herself to other visitors. On the third day she made an exception in favour of Mrs Smythe.

“I came to inquire if you were ill,” Mrs Smythe exclaimed as she entered the drawing-room. “You were not at the Frenches’ the other evening, and we missed you yesterday at the Admiral’s At Home. You aren’t ill, Zoë... I don’t think I ever saw you look better.”

She surveyed her friend critically. There was no indication of ill-health in the dark splendour of Zoë Lawless’ face, nor in the graceful, beautiful body, but in the sun-flecked eyes was a hint of sadness which Mrs Smythe detected.

“You are tired,” she said.

“No.” Mrs Lawless drew her to the sofa and sat down beside her... “At least not physically tired,” she added... “I’m feeling old. I’m thirty-three to-day, Kate.” She lifted the dark hair at her temples. “Grey hairs there already, plenty of them. I spent some time this morning pulling them out, until it occurred to me as rather trivial... and futile, too. It’s like stripping the red leaves from the trees in autumn in a poor pretence that the summer is not past... It only advances winter.”

“My dear girl!” Mrs Smythe said briskly, “when you are sixty-three you will be privileged to talk like that... Don’t say too much about your age; I’m thirty-five.”

Zoë laughed, and as suddenly grew grave again.

“With you age doesn’t signify,” she said. “You’ve had your years, and lived them, and each one has brought its past year’s satisfaction; but with me there has been waste.” She leant back against the cushions, with one arm flung out over the head of the sofa. “The years that the locusts have eaten!” ... she murmured... “It’s when you have let the locusts eat into the precious years that you feel the bitterness of the loss of the golden hours. If I’d had my golden hours—if I’d enjoyed them, I shouldn’t feel sorrowful at the coming of silver hairs. Youth that is wasted is like a day when the sunshine has been obscured by clouds. Towards evening the clouds pass, and the sun shines forth, perhaps, for a few minutes before it sets. But the clouds have spoilt the morning and rendered the tardy radiance ineffectual... The time has passed.”

“Your philosophy would be less painful if it were not so incontrovertible,” Mrs Smythe returned quietly. “But if there has been waste, Zoë, isn’t it adding to it to spend the hours mourning over those already gone? It would be far more sensible if you were to get out of that ridiculously becoming tea-gown and come out driving with me. I’m not surprised at your depression if you have spent the last few days dwelling on uncomfortable things.”

Mrs Lawless smiled faintly.

“It’s not so bad as that,” she answered. “I’m a creature of moods. Had you called yesterday you would have found me quite cheerful.”

“Then I’m glad that my visit has fitted in with the heavier mood. Cheerfulness needs no distraction. Change your gown, Zoë, and come out with me.”

Mrs Lawless shook her head in response to her friend’s inquiring look. Her fingers were playing absently with one of the heavy tassels of a sofa cushion, twisting and pulling at it, and entwining themselves with the silky strands. She looked down at the tassel pensively, and at the busy fingers fidgeting with it continually as though their purposeless occupation held an interest for her.

“Thank you for suggesting it,” she said slowly. “I would have been glad to go; but I am expecting Mr Lawless.”

Mrs Smythe stared at her. Amazement bereft her of her customary tact.

“Expecting him! ... this afternoon?... Why, my dear, I passed him driving with—”

She came to an abrupt halt, and gazed at her quiet companion with dismayed and apologetic eyes.

“His mistress,” Zoë finished for her, looking up. “You needn’t mind saying it... I have accustomed myself to the idea. He may not come this afternoon, of course... But—I think I prefer to stay at home.”

Mrs Smythe was silent for a while.

“I never was so disappointed in anyone in my life as I am in him,” she remarked at length.

Zoë’s big eyes showed a faint surprise.

“No!” she said.

“Aren’t you disappointed in him?” Mrs Smythe asked wonderingly.

“Oh! I don’t know...” She sat up suddenly. “I try not to think of it,” she said... “It’s another instance of waste... waste and failure. All the years I’ve known him—”

She looked at the other woman, and her eyes softened. “Perhaps if he had felt the influence of a good woman he might have made a better thing of life.”

Chapter Nine.

Mrs Lawless stood on the stoep in the fading light and watched her friend drive away. In the east the intense blue of the sky had deepened to purple, and here and there a pale star lay, like a jewel in its azure setting, ready to adorn the sombre robes of night. The light breeze had dropped at sundown. There was no stir, no movement anywhere, no sound to awake the stillness. The strong scent of many flowers perfumed the languid, sensuous air which as yet gave no sign of the near approach of winter... if there can be any winter in a land where there is always sunshine, where the trees never bare their branches, and the flowers are ever in bloom.

She leaned her arms on the broad rail, and stared unseeingly before her through the foliage of the mimosa trees into the blue distance. The expression of her face was troubled, and a gleam of resentment shone in the proud eyes. So her summons was to be disregarded! His mistress claimed all his leisure, and he had no time to spare for anyone else. She had waited in three days in the hope that he would come, had spent three lonely evenings so that if he chose to call on her at night he would find her ready to receive him. And he had neither come nor sent a message. She had almost ceased to expect him, had almost ceased to wish to see him. The mood that had moved her to write to him had passed. She felt cold now, and indifferent; and the futility of the task she had thought to undertake struck her in a new and more forcible light. Was it worth it? ... Was she not wasting time that might be more profitably employed? ... Was she not harrowing her feelings to no purpose?

She went indoors and sat down at the piano and played to herself. She was a brilliant pianist, and it was a custom of long standing to soothe herself with music when her mind was disturbed. It was in her sad moments—occasionally also in her moods of anger—that she oftenest played.

The light outside faded; it grew dark in the room. A native entered, lighted the shaded lamps, and noiselessly retired. Zoë Lawless played on. She did not hear the ring at the bell that followed shortly on the servant’s exit; she was not aware that anyone had come until the door was thrown open by the same quiet servitor, who ushered in Mr Lawless, and then again retired and closed the door behind him.

Mrs Lawless turned slowly on the stool, and then stood up. She gave the visitor no greeting, and, beyond a slight bow, he made no move to greet her either. But he looked at her curiously as she stood facing him, and she observed with failing courage that his eyes were stern and hard.

“I had almost given up expecting you,” she said.

“You sent for me,” he answered curtly... “Whenever you send for me I will come.”

She regarded him long and earnestly. There was that in his speech which, despite the harshness of his manner, inclined her towards a softer mood. She no longer saw the picture which Mrs Smythe had unconsciously drawn for her of him driving with his mistress, instead she recognised a man whom life had dealt hardly with accepting obligations which another man in similar circumstances would have ignored.

“Thank you,” she said at last gently, and with a faintly wondering hesitation. “I did not know... I—felt scarcely justified in writing my request... But,”—she put self-consciousness behind her, and spoke from her heart simply, and with great earnestness—“I could not look on in silence while you deliberately spoilt your life. You were making your way in Cape Town... You could, if you chose, make it anywhere. But you are so indifferent to the world’s opinion.”

“I have never found the world’s opinion especially intelligent,” he answered bluntly. “If it were worth studying, I might study it.”

“Is it not, rather,” she returned unexpectedly, “that you are over prone to yield to the influence of the hour? ... The opinion of others has never counted for much with you.”

“You are mistaken,” he said. “It is the opinion of others that has made me what I am. In the past I have been far too susceptible of public criticism. Had I been as indifferent as you imagine I should not be the failure that you see to-day.”

She threw out a protesting hand.

“You always speak as though there was nothing ahead, as though you had shuttered all the exits of the soul... When you talk like that I feel that I cannot breathe.”

“It’s only a first impression,” he answered sarcastically; “respiration becomes easier when you grow accustomed to the shutters... There is nothing ahead. I reconciled myself to the want of outlook years ago; now I adapt,—not myself to circumstances, but circumstances to suit me. It’s astonishing how one can bend events to one’s service. The doing so contrives to add a peculiar satisfaction of its own. I don’t wish you to suppose that I’ve been sitting all these years with my head between my hands—the image is depressing. My hands have been otherwise employed. I’ve had them on the throat of life, and when it has used me spitefully I’ve pressed it hard in return. I’ve had some bad knocks, I admit; but, believe me, I’m not beaten yet. And the bruises have healed. The marks may be apparent, but there is no soreness... And those blows served a purpose too. They confirmed me in a resolve I made more than eight years ago,—to live my life independently of my fellows,—to enjoy such pleasures as the moment offered,—to deny myself no single desire that I had the means of gratifying. I have not gone back on that through all these years.”

“Not a very lofty resolve,” she said, as she sank into a chair.

“No... Not from your point of view... I suppose not.”

“And from your point of view?” she asked.

He laughed.

“You forget the shutters,” he said. “My view is enclosed. I am unable to gaze up at the heights.”

“You could open the shutters if you would,” she said in a voice that was only a little louder than a whisper.

“Perhaps I don’t wish to,” he answered.

He moved nearer to her. He did not sit down, but he leant with his arms on the back of a chair, looking at her, as he had leant the night of the ball when they had talked together on the stoep.

“I’m satisfied with things as they are,” he said. “I’ve got used to the rough and tumble of my lot. And I’ve become so thoroughly saturated with the belief that it is no concern of anyone’s what I do that it’s very unlikely I will submit to interference. I’m behaving quite abominably, I know,” he added, in response to the quick, pained flush that warmed the pallor of her skin from the smooth brow to the slender white column of her throat; “but it would be a satisfaction to me if you would only realise that I’m not worth your distress. I understand what your idea is—most good women fall into the same error. But when a man has no desire to be influenced it is waste of time to attempt it.”

Her glance fell under his direct, steady look, and the embarrassed colour that had flamed into her cheeks retreated and left them whiter than before. She put up a hand for a second as if to screen her eyes from the light, and he knew that she was pressing back the starting tears.

“I know,” she said very low, and without looking at him, “that I’ve no right to interfere. But whatever you say,—whatever you think, we can none of us act independently of our fellows. When we do wrong we are bound to hurt someone—as well as ourselves.”

There was a brief silence during which both still figures remained so rigidly quiet that the subdued ticking of the dresden clock on the mantelpiece sounded intrusively loud in the stillness. Then Lawless moved abruptly.

“You mean,” he said, “that I am hurting you.”

“Yes... You are hurting me.”

He straightened himself and walked away to the window, where he stood looking out at the quiet night. A young moon shone like a white curved flame in the purple dome, casting its pure reflection on the misty beauty of the garden that, like a picture painted without colour, lay motionless under the starry heavens,—patches of black shadow, and splashes of white where the pale flowers showed in clusters in the uncertain light.

“I never thought of it touching you,” he said after a pause. “I suppose... the scandal—”

“Oh! the scandal!” She looked up with a quick resentment in her eyes. “Can’t you get deeper than just the part that shows?”

“In this instance,” he returned quite quietly, “it’s the part that shows which matters—only the part that shows. If I were doing this thing secretly I should be reckoned decent living, and be well considered of my fellows. And it would never have offended your susceptibilities, nor disgusted other women whose feelings I have not a jot of respect for. You simply wouldn’t have known... It appears to me that it is the part that shows which means everything.”

She answered nothing. She sat still, watching him, with her fine eyes clouded and disapproving, and her lips closed in a thin, determined line of scarlet that looked the more brilliant because of the set whiteness of her face. He swung round suddenly and faced her.

“I might have anticipated this,” he said. “But, oddly enough, I never took you into consideration. After all, you’ve a right to complain... The same name! ... Yes, it’s awkward—very... and unpleasant.”

He crossed the room and stood in front of her chair, looking down at her with an almost hostile expression in his sombre eyes.

“In your opinion,” he asked, a hard resentment in his voice, “is there any reason why I should especially consider you?”

She looked back at him steadily. “Have I not already acknowledged that my interference is unjustifiable?”

“True!” he allowed, and thought for a moment.

“One condition alone would give you any right to take exception at anything I do,” he added—“and that is such an unlikely condition that we need not reckon it in... But, however dead I may be to all sense of honour and decency, I have still sufficient perception to realise that the situation is—uncomfortable for you. It shall cease to annoy you. I leave Cape Town this week.”

The expression of glad hopefulness that had momentarily lighted her eyes died out as suddenly as it had kindled. She understood him perfectly. Because this thing was humiliating to her he was going to remove it from her path. That much he would concede—and that was all.

“You are going away?” she said in a low voice, leaning towards him.—“And you will take your mistress with you?”

“And I take my mistress with me,” he answered firmly... “Yes.”

She winced. He was standing so close to her chair that she could not rise without touching him. She sat farther back, and leant her dark head against the cushions as a woman who is weary might do. This was but another of the many bitter moments she had endured on his account. An icy coldness crept over her and seemed to grip her heart. She had battled with her pride so fiercely and persistently, setting up an ideal of duty to be followed despite every difficulty, with this man’s salvation as its ultimate aim; and at the very outset she owned herself defeated. She could not plead with him; a certain intolerant hardness in her nature awoke and set a seal on her lips. If he was so lost to all fine thinking, to all sense of decent living and restraint, let him go with this woman who was a fitting companion for the ill-spent hours. She would not undertake so futile a mission as to attempt to dissuade him.

“If that is final,” she remarked at last, “there is nothing more to be said.”

“It is final,” he answered.

He moved away. She did not rise, but she turned her head and looked after him, the proud eyes darkened with trouble that was not caused only by distress at what he purposed doing, but by her lack of power to hold him back.

At the door he paused, and glanced quickly in her direction.

“This interview has been unsatisfactory,” he said abruptly. “I have disappointed you. I regret it, because on a former occasion when I solicited an interview you were more considerate. If you didn’t send for me solely with a view to improving my morals, but were content to accept me as I am, the result might be more satisfactory for both of us. Good-night.”

He went out and shut the door sharply behind him, and Mrs Lawless, sitting still where he had left her, listened to the bang of the hall door, and to the crunching of his steps upon the gravelled path as he walked past the drawing-room windows to the gate. She heard the gate open and swing to after him, and then followed silence—silence so profound, so prolonged, that to the woman seated alone in the quiet room it was an immense relief when presently the sound of a concertina floated in through the open windows from the direction of the servants’ quarters. The sound broke the tension. She moved slightly, and her eyes lost their fixed expression. She plucked at a soft fold of the silken tea-gown with nervous fingers, and listened absently to the strains that drifted towards her on the evening air. A Kaffir was singing in a rich, deep voice to his own untaught accompaniment.

“All de world am sad an’ dreary everywhere I roam.”

The haunting, familiar air with its tender pathos, its hopelessness, its strange beauty, moved her to an extraordinary degree, perhaps because she was so deeply moved already. A sob caught her throat, and the unaccustomed tears started to her eyes for the second time that evening. As before, she put up a hand to press them back, but they pushed their way under her lids and between the restraining fingers, and coursed rapidly down her cheeks...

“Oh! darkies, how my heart grows weary!”

The sob was louder this time...

“Oh! darkies, how my heart grows weary!”

Swiftly she turned and buried her face in the cushion of the chair and wept unrestrainedly.

Chapter Ten.

Lawless made hasty preparations for leaving Cape Town. He did not give up his room at the hotel. When a man is spending other people’s money there is no particular need for him to study economy. His headquarters were at Cape Town—he was merely taking a holiday while he matured his plans. On the day before he left he lunched with Van Bleit at the latter’s invitation. Van Bleit was openly admiring, and not a little envious.

“Going on your honeymoon,” he murmured, growing maudlin over his wine. “You lucky devil! But the luck was always with you, Grit.”

“It depends on what one reckons luck,” was the dry response.

“That’s just like you favoured chaps—always grudging in your thanks. You expect the world to come to heel, and it usually does.”

“Yes; and yaps at your trouser hems until it frays them. I’ve been out at elbow and empty in pocket... If that’s luck I don’t appreciate it. I’ve no desire to have the world at my heels, with its sneaking hands dipping into my pockets, and its servile lips smiling while its teeth worry holes in my clothes. I like to face the enemy and have my foot on it.”

“You, to talk of the world as your enemy! Why, man alive, it gives you all you ask for.”

Lawless looked gloomy enough for a wealthy and successful lover. The other’s envying admiration gave him no pleasure. He took up his glass and drained it. Both men had been drinking freely, but both were well seasoned, and, save for their flushed faces, there was no outward sign of the quantity of wine they had imbibed.

“I wish to God,” Van Bleit said, “that I were as successful in my wooing as you. Give me your secret, Grit... I believe it’s that damned scar on your jaw that helps you with the women—that, and a certain dash you have.”

“Oh! call it swagger,” growled Lawless.

“No,—damn you!—I would if I could; but it’s not that. All things considered, you’re a fairly modest beast.”

“I’ve not had so much to make me vain as you imagine,” Lawless answered, and added curtly: “Look here, Karl, if you don’t wish to be offensive, give over personalities. I’m sick of myself.”

Van Bleit looked slightly annoyed.

“You’re so devilishly unsympathetic,” he complained sulkily. “I notice you take no interest in another man’s affairs... You never trouble to inquire how my suit prospers.”

Lawless made no immediate response. He took a cigar from a case of Van Bleit’s that lay open on the table, snipped the end deliberately, and proceeded to light it. When he had had two or three whiffs at it, he took it from his mouth, leant forward with his elbows on the table and looked squarely at his host.

“I don’t need to inquire,” he said. “I’ve been observing... You are making no headway at all.”

“That’s true enough,” Van Bleit replied, reddening. “Though, dash it all! you needn’t be quite so brutally frank. I’m not making headway. Sometimes I fancy I have gone back a few paces. At one time she liked me—I’ll swear she did. She used to appear glad to see me. That was before you turned up.”

He paused, and eyed Lawless for a moment suspiciously. The alteration in Mrs Lawless’ manner and the advent of Lawless on the scene being contemporaneous roused a sudden doubt in his mind.

“You’ve not been giving me away?” he asked... “You haven’t told her of any of our little sprees? If I thought you’d made mischief! ... I’ve noticed you talking with her, though you as good as told me she’d sooner talk with the devil.”

Lawless puffed away at his cigar indifferently.

“My good fellow,” he said, “she has not the faintest idea that you are a friend of mine. And we do not discuss sprees, or anything of that nature. The only topic she ever gets on with me is that of my morals, which ever since I have known her have caused her distress and annoyance. It is a topic which you may easily imagine holds no interest for me.”

Van Bleit looked only half convinced.

“I’d let a woman like that talk to me about anything,” he returned. “I’d let her try her hand at reforming me—I would reform for her sake.”

“You might—for a month or so... yes.”

“Oh, go to blazes!” ejaculated Van Bleit irritably. “You don’t believe in anything.”

“I don’t believe in a nimbus for you, Karl, old man,” Lawless replied with unruffled serenity. “All the same, I’m glad to see you in earnest for once. When a man is in downright earnest he generally wins.”

He smoked for a few moments in silence.

“Have you put your luck to the test yet?” he asked, trimming the ash of his cigar with careful deliberation.

“No.”

Van Bleit drummed on the table, and stared moodily at the cloth.

“She never gives me a chance,” he said. “She’s cleverer than any woman I ever knew at putting one off. She makes a man realise that if he persists in coming to his point he’ll get the wrong answer, and, of course, when a fellow’s in earnest he isn’t going to risk that.”

“Naturally.”

There was silence for a few seconds. Then Lawless spoke again.

“You might win if you’d try the right tactics,” he said. “But I know that it’s no use advising a man in love... You simply wouldn’t take the advice.”

“Well, let’s hear it, anyway,” Van Bleit said churlishly, still drumming on the tablecloth with his big, coarse fingers. “If I think it’s worth anything, I’ll follow it, I daresay.”

“Keep away from her for a time.”

Van Bleit looked up at him sharply.

“You say that!” he cried... “You!—just off on a honeymoon of your own! What would you reply if a man advised you to chuck it?”

“If you were off on your honeymoon,” Lawless returned calmly, “my advice would be unnecessary.”

“But why,” Van Bleit persisted, “should I keep out of her way? What purpose could it possibly serve? ... It would give others a chance, that’s all.”

“She would probably miss you,” Lawless answered. “When she realised that, she would want you; and when you returned you would be sure of your welcome... You needn’t scowl. You asked for the advice. I didn’t suppose you would take it, and I shan’t feel offended if you don’t.”

“I don’t believe in the efficacy of that plan,” Van Bleit said shortly.

“A man in love wouldn’t,” Lawless returned indifferently. “The moth has to make for the light.”

“Well, but—”

Van Bleit appeared to be wavering. He stared hard at the inscrutable face opposite, trying to gauge the purpose of the carelessly given advice that accorded so ill with his own inclinations. But he could make nothing of it. The man baffled him as he baffled many another. Although he had given the advice, it seemed to be a matter of supreme indifference to him whether it were acted upon or not.

“I’ve a great belief in your knowledge of women,” he said slowly.

Lawless smiled.

“It’s faith in my disinterestedness you lack,” he threw in, and Van Bleit did not deny it.

“You’ve never been keen on it, somehow,” he observed. “I noticed that when I first told you about it... Seems as though you couldn’t get out of the manger. I suppose it is human nature that a man should object to seeing another fellow’s success in the case of a beautiful woman, even though he knows himself out of the running.”

Lawless leant back in his seat and puffed a number of blue rings into the air.

“You may know a lot about human nature, Karl,” he said presently, “you’re very human yourself—but you don’t know me. If I’ve been somewhat unsympathetic over this affair it’s because I happen to know something of both of you. I realised that you were serious, but I never imagined you stood anything of a chance... It wasn’t until I saw you together that it occurred to me that, if your chance was not great, she certainly liked you. She is not prodigal of her favour, so I think you have grounds to feel flattered. But women, when they grow accustomed to having a man at their beck and call, are inclined to take it rather as a matter of course. Relegate him to a distance, and they appreciate a service they have not realised until they are called upon to do without it. That’s my experience... But go your own way, old man, and if you find your tactics fail then follow mine.”

Lawless left Cape Town that night. He did not go alone, a fact that transpired very quickly, and caused consternation in more breasts than one. Colonel Grey was beside himself with fury. The man was an adventurer of the worst kind. He was living riotously on the money that was allowed him for a definite purpose, and that purpose, which was hazardous and dangerous and highly important, was being neglected while he amused himself after his own loose fashion with the funds that should only have been applied to one end.

The Colonel summoned Simmonds to a consultation, and told him in the plainest language what he thought of the man he had recommended.

“I did not recommend him,” Simmonds returned. “I told you I knew very little about him. His noted pluck was the only qualification I gave you.”

The Colonel stared at him.

“True!” he muttered. “His courage! ... Yes! I accepted that without proof. And when I saw the man I accepted him. This is where it leaves me.”

He looked at the other for a while without speaking, thinking deeply. This man—the traitor, the coward, the licentious liver—was in his pay for a term of six months. He had agreed to that, knowing what he did of the man’s past life. He had believed in him. The strong, virile personality had been strangely convincing, all the more so in view of the fact that he had made no attempt to vindicate himself, nor sought to explain away facts. There had been something almost attractive in the curt directness of speech and manner that had seemed to repudiate the necessity for self-justification. That he had allowed himself to be deceived in this matter was entirely his own fault. It was only consistent with his record that the man should misuse the funds entrusted to him. And there was no redress possible because of the secret nature of the undertaking.

“It’s a bad business,” he said at last—“the worst bungle that has been made so far. The fellow is entirely unprincipled. A man of that unscrupulous order is capable of turning the knowledge he has acquired to his own account. I feel now that I shall never see those letters.”

Simmonds did not feel particularly sanguine either. But he sought to encourage his chief.

“In a case where a man is governed by his passions, you can’t tell,” he said. “This escapade is possibly merely an interlude. He’ll come up to the mark later.”

His hearer did not look reassured.

“It’s somewhat of a coincidence,” he added, after a moment’s reflection, “that a woman has stepped in in two instances to the frustrating of your plans.”

Colonel Grey glanced up sharply.

“The other affair was a matter of outwitting,” he said. “This is different altogether. We’ve put ourselves in the power of a rogue, and we shall have to pay for it—dearly.”

“Yes.”

Simmonds looked at the other inquiringly. The Colonel was staring hard at the light that stood on the table between them, swiftly revolving, in a mind much given to scheming of late, plan after plan which, after a brief consideration, he put successively on one side as ineffectual or unfeasible. While he thought he smoked in a state of inward fume, oblivious of his companion altogether. It was very evident that the last check had hit him hard. He saw no opening for his next move.

“There is one thing fairly certain,” he remarked at length, “we shall have to pull this off without assistance. Van Bleit knows we are both his enemies; we must fight openly. We can’t trust this matter to other hands.”

“I agree with you there,” Simmonds answered. “You might keep all the rogues in the Colony. It’s the soft sort of billet they would tumble to promptly. And there’s no possible guarantee of good faith—save their word.”

“Their word!” Colonel Grey repeated sourly. “Lawless passed me his word—and I accepted it.”

He thought for a moment.

“One piece of information he gave me which may prove of service,” he said, suddenly looking up. “Van Bleit carries the letters on his person—and a loaded revolver. I’m not scared of revolvers. I’d like to see this one of Van Bleit’s at close range—here, in this room.”

“You’ve got a plan?” said Simmonds interrogatively.

“Not much of one... It may not work. We must get him here, if possible... You must see him... Ask him to come here to treat with me... Tell him I’ve a new proposal to make. Then, when we’ve got him, we’ll lock the door; and if there should be any firing, no one will be any the wiser—unless someone gets hurt.”

“He won’t come,” Simmonds answered confidently.

“He’s slim, is Van Bleit, and a coward—of the bullying sort. He’ll scent danger.”

“We can but try it,” Colonel Grey said. And added grimly: “If we once get him inside this room he doesn’t leave it until we get those letters.”

Simmonds smiled drily.

“If I know anything of the man,” he said, “he’ll not bring them with him. He may carry them around as a rule, but he isn’t at all likely to march into the enemy’s camp with them. You forget Denzil’s in this. He will leave the letters with him.”

“He may do.”

The Colonel spoke with a slight irritation, the result of discouragement. He had been many months striving to get hold of these papers, and he was no nearer success than when he first landed in Cape Town. The rogue he had to deal with was insatiable, unprincipled, and unrelenting. He had attempted in the first instance straightforward methods; but Van Bleit, being possessed of a crooked mind, was suspicious of straightforward dealings, and he had been forced to resort to more subtle and underhand means. It was, he felt sure, by no open and honest device that he would prevail against him—if, indeed, he ever prevailed. To-night, baffled and disheartened, he believed that he would be forced to throw down the cards and acknowledge himself beaten.

“I’d give five years of my life,” he said—“and my years are not so many now that I can spare them—to best that scoundrel. To think that a contemptible hound like that should have the power to intimidate anyone with a Damocles’ sword in the form of a packet of damning letters! The law of the land ought to permit one to shoot blackmailers on sight.”

“I rather fancy the law—out here, anyway—would bring it in manslaughter,” Simmonds replied coolly. He knocked the ash out of his pipe. “Then, I understand you wish me to try to induce him to come here?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

The Colonel was still meditating on the unsatisfactoriness of the law.

“I’d bring it in justifiable homicide,” he said at last.

Chapter Eleven.

Poor little Julie Weeber was having a bad time of it.

She was, to the scornful surprise of her family, which was neither sympathetic nor particularly wise in its mode of condemnation, grieving for a man who was utterly worthless. Her sister declared that she was wanting in proper pride, and her mother regarded her as a silly, sentimental child, and refused to consider the trouble seriously. So Julie nursed her heart-hunger in silence, and the round, young face grew thinner, the laughter died out of her eyes, and her lips lost the humorous twist that had made her many admirers want to kiss them. It was but a pale reflection of the old Julie they met at dances and parties, a Julie who would not flirt with them, and whose once ready repartee failed her utterly and left her with curiously little to say. She had been good sport once, and the youths with whom she had been popular found it difficult to realise the change. When they discovered that the change was enduring and not merely a passing mood, they deserted her for more amusing company, and Julie found herself neglected with a programme half filled at dances, and only one staunch ally to depend upon for an escort. The ally was Teddy Bolitho, whose great ambition was to earn a sufficient income on which to set up housekeeping, and to win Julie’s consent to become mistress of his home. But the ambition was distant of fulfilment. Young Bolitho had as much as he could do to pay his modest way.

Julie liked Teddy Bolitho. Before the advent of Lawless she had liked him better than any man she had ever met. Bolitho had stood aside when the older man claimed her attention. It had been a blow for him, but he had taken it pluckily with his back against the wall. He had quickly recognised that he stood no chance against Lawless, who had everything in his favour so far as outward seeming went, and despite his successful rivalry, he entertained a half-reluctant liking for the man. It was not surprising that Julie should find him fascinating; and it would be a very much better match for her, he had decided, judging—as Julie’s mother had judged when she encouraged Lawless to visit at the house—by externals.

And then had arisen the scandal concerning Lawless, and his subsequent disappearance; and Bolitho had quietly stepped out from the background, and taken his place again quite naturally at Julie’s side. She accepted his action without comment. He was the only one in her world who understood. She felt instinctively that he did understand, that she could count on his sympathy, though neither by word nor sign did he allude to what was past; and she repaid him in the trust and regard of an earnest friendship, which is the next best thing to love. But an earnest friendship is not what a man covets from the girl who holds his heart. Bolitho was acquiring patience in the hard school of necessity; nevertheless, there were times when his spirit chafed sorely, times when he felt thoroughly disheartened and discouraged; despite the happy optimism of his nature, the outlook was not promising.

“I don’t know why you bother about me,” she said to him one evening at a dance, when he came upon her sitting out in a corner by herself. He had only just arrived, having been detained at the store, where they were short-handed through the illness of a clerk. He had looked for Julie as soon as he entered the room, and caught sight of her in her corner looking wretched and forlorn. At her speech he sat down beside her, and, with a smile, possessed himself of her programme.

“It’s curious that I should, isn’t it?” he said. “But I’ve always been in the habit of pleasing myself. What are you going to give me, Julie?”

“Oh! anything you like,” she answered dispiritedly. “You’ll find any amount of blanks. I have spent most of the time so far adorning the walls.”

He looked at her steadily.

“You do it very prettily,” he answered.

“Thank you, Teddy.”

She moved a little closer to him, and her face brightened.

“I don’t mind now you’ve come,” she said. “But I was feeling—hurt before. I’ve seen girls sitting out often—the dull ones, and I’ve felt, not so much sorry for them, as surprised that they couldn’t get partners. Now I know what it feels like.” Her eyes flashed with sudden anger. “It’s beastly, the selfishness of people,” she said with a note of disgust in her tones. “So long as you are amusing, or interesting, or pretty, you are wanted and sought after... you’re popular; but lose your looks, or, worse still, your gift of amusing others, and you might as well be buried for all the attention you get... You simply don’t exist. The amusing person can always command friends, but the poor dull person who most needs friendship is invariably shunned... Now I’m being bitter and hateful, and, perhaps, even you—But I know you are not like that... It was horrid of me to have said that. I’m often horrid now, Teddy. I get more horrid every day.”

“Look here,” he returned quickly, “I’m not dancing with anyone—most of the girls have filled their cards by now. Every dance that you have open we’ll have, or sit out, together, and those that you’re fixed up for I’ll dance with anyone I can discover who is sitting out. We’ll square matters that way.”

“Oh, Teddy! you are a good sort,” she said.

She watched him while he marked his programme, comparing it with hers. He had reddened slightly at her words of approbation, but by the time he had finished pencilling his programme his embarrassment had vanished, and he returned her card with his usual cheerful smile.

“I’ve stolen all the blanks,” he said. “You don’t mind—if it’s remarked?”

“No... I don’t care,” she answered stubbornly.

He rose and offered her his arm.

“We won’t sit here inhaling the dust they’re kicking up,” he said. “There are one or two jolly little retreats, Julie, where we can talk at our ease.”

She laughed.

“You always had a genius for discovery,” she returned. As she took the proffered arm she gave it a little grateful squeeze. “Oh! I’m so glad to get out of this room.”

Outside the ball-room they came face to face with Mrs Lawless and Van Bleit. There was a block at the entrance. Many couples were leaving the room, and new-comers pressed forward, and for several minutes people were forcibly restrained in the narrow passage.

Mrs Lawless looked searchingly into the young face, as she recognised the girl who had been Lawless’ partner in the dance when they had been held up by the crowd as they were now. It was obvious that the girl also recognised her. The older woman smiled.

“It seems fated that we should meet in a crush,” she said in her peculiarly soothing voice. “On the last occasion we both were slightly damaged. May we have better luck this time.”

Julie smiled back at her and flushed warmly. She felt strangely shy in the presence of this beautiful, composed woman, with the sweet voice and easy manner, and the so distressingly familiar name. But the owner of the familiar name looked gracious, and—Julie could not but notice it—sad, despite the ready smile. The girlish heart went out to her unquestioningly, recognising instinctively a common bond. She did not know why the lovely sun-flecked eyes held shadows, she only saw that the shadows were there, and felt drawn towards their owner in consequence. Her shyness left her suddenly. She drew her hand from Teddy Bolitho’s arm, and shielded the other woman’s body with two young, vigorous arms.

“You shall not be damaged this time,” she said, and laughed.

Mrs Lawless laughed with her.

“What a valiant champion you make,” she said. “Trust a woman to protect a woman in any serious crisis.”

And then the press suddenly ceased. Julie’s arms fell to her side, and with a further smile of friendship and understanding, Mrs Lawless passed on with her companion.

“Who is that girl?” she inquired as they passed through into the ball-room.

She was not dancing. She had merely come for an hour to look on; and she chose a seat not too far away from the exit, so that she could make her escape without inconvenience as soon as she desired. Van Bleit sat down beside her, and, following his customary tactics, sought by his impressive manner to draw attention to themselves. He was usually a daring wooer, but Mrs Lawless so baffled him that he was forced to resort to more insidious methods.

“The girl who embraced you? ... That’s Miss Julie Weeber... Quite a nice little thing. Not exactly in your set, you know.”

She regarded him strangely.

“And the boy she was with?”

Van Bleit laughed.

“Oh! that’s Bolitho, her faithful squire. He’s clerk in a wool-store. Miss Weeber has slighted him of late, but he’s in favour again apparently. She’d be well advised to stick to him.”

“I like the look of him,” said Mrs Lawless slowly, “and I like her. I shall cultivate the acquaintance. If I were to remain so long, couldn’t you manage that we sat together at supper?”

Van Bleit would have contrived anything to have kept her longer at the dance. When she left it would be for home, he knew; and it was never permitted him to accompany her on the homeward drive. He had several times suggested doing so, but he had always met with the same pleasant but firm refusal.

It was a surprise for Julie to find herself tête-à-tête with the beautiful Mrs Lawless at supper. Van Bleit so managed matters that it appeared wholly accidental when he and his companion took the vacant seats opposite herself and young Bolitho, and he exerted himself to an unusual degree to make the meal a success. Julie was astonished at the fun she was getting out of the evening.

“Why, I’m really enjoying myself,” she remarked naïvely in a pause between the laughter. “And I had feared it was going to be such a slow affair.”

“At your age,” Mrs Lawless answered, “no dance should prove slow.”

“That depends,” retorted Julie. “But, of course, you’ve never experienced the pain of sitting out.”

“I usually sit out,” Mrs Lawless answered. “I am no dancer. But there is pleasure in watching others enjoy themselves.”

“Oh yes!” Julie replied. “Anyone could enjoy that when the sitting out wasn’t compulsory.”

“I see.” Mrs Lawless laughed. “A little discipline of that nature isn’t exactly harmful,” she said.

Julie laughed too.

“I always hated discipline,” she said.

“I can’t understand any girl sitting out,” Van Bleit interposed. “That men can’t find partners is common enough. There are plenty of fellows supporting the door-posts to-night.”

“Yes; but they want amusing,” Julie returned brightly. “They won’t give their services for nothing.”

“There is something very decadent in the sound of that,” Mrs Lawless remarked.

Before rising, she leaned across the table and addressed herself directly to the girl.

“Do you ever get as far as Rondebosch?” she asked.

“I get farther than that,” Julie answered. “I cycle, you know.”

“Then, take pity on my loneliness. I am an Englishwoman, unused to the Colony. Will you ride out to see me some day?”

“Of course I will... Any time you wish.”

“Come to-morrow... I will be at home to no one else...”

“Lucky little girl!” murmured Van Bleit, as he escorted Mrs Lawless from the supper-room. “She enjoys a privilege that many would envy her... You never ask me to visit you...”

She looked at him steadily.

“Perhaps some day I shall do that,” she answered, and smiled at him, a smile so kind and gentle that it set Van Bleit’s heart beating high with expectation, and a hope he did not often dare to indulge.

When he had assisted her into her motor and shut the door upon her, he took the hand she extended to him and raised it to his lips. The car drove off and left him standing in the roadway, looking after it with a complacent smile widening the corners of his sensual mouth. Truly he had a way with women! He had never known any woman who could stand out against him for long.

As he turned and started to walk in the opposite direction from that taken by the car, a figure loomed suddenly out of the darkness and, with a word of greeting, came to a halt in front of him. Van Bleit recognised the sallow, bearded face, the darkness notwithstanding, and instinctively his right hand went to his breast pocket in a manner that brought a smile to the lips of the man who had accosted him. Recovering himself almost immediately, he feigned to be searching for his cigar-case, which eventually he produced, and leisurely proceeded to abstract a cigar therefrom. While thus employed, he replied to the brief salutation of the new-comer with the sarcastic observation:

“Still taking an interest in my movements, Mr Simmonds? I thought your gang had tired of me.”

“You pay yourself a poor compliment, Mr Van Bleit,” was the dry response. “The Colonel seems keener on your society just now than on any other. He’d like to see you. I’ve been hanging about outside this social ballet for some time with the express object of telling you so.”

“A dull amusement,” Van Bleit returned, lighting his cigar, “which you might have spared yourself. Colonel Grey and I have given free vent to our opinions of one another sufficiently often to obviate the necessity of a repetition of our views. Mine have undergone no change—I doubt that his have.”

“I doubt it too,” Simmonds replied. “But this matter he has in mind has no bearing on his personal feelings. He has had a letter recalling him to England.”

“I’m glad of that at least,” said Van Bleit.

“There were other matters contained in the letter besides his recall which concern you,” Simmonds added. “He wishes to see you on the subject.”

“You may tell him from me,” Van Bleit answered rudely, “that his postal communications, as his movements, have not the slightest interest for me.”

He started to walk again. Simmonds, wholly unmoved, walked beside him.

“You speak without knowledge, Mr Van Bleit,” he said. “The instructions contained in this imperative and important letter concern you very particularly. Colonel Grey has a further proposal to lay before you, which you will be well advised to consider. Failing a satisfactory issue to these final negotiations, he is instructed to place the matter in the hands of the police and return to England.”

Van Bleit, his assurance notwithstanding, was taken aback. He had not foreseen this move, and was totally unprepared for it. It was merely bluff, he told himself, and really believed it was so; but at the back of the belief lurked the fear that his victim might have grown reckless, and, with the courage that is sometimes born of despair, be prepared to face the worst.

“Faugh!” he exclaimed impatiently. “That’s an old dodge.” But his voice had lost its confidence and resumed its natural bullying tones. “Go and tell your chief to do his worst, and be damned to him!”

“Go and tell him yourself,” returned Simmonds. “You could at least then hear what he has to say.”

“And how do I know you are not up to some treachery?” demanded Van Bleit, his suspicions at once on the alert.

“I suppose it is natural you should judge other men by your own standard,” Simmonds answered indifferently. “If you are afraid we may arrange a trap, why not go and see him to-night when he is unprepared for your visit?”

“What makes you so confident we should find him at home?” Van Bleit asked quickly.

“Because, until I set out to look for you, I was seated on his stoep with him, smoking.”

”—And discussing me?”

“And discussing the letter and its conditions as they concerned you—yes.”

“He keeps late hours if he is out of bed when we get there,” Van Bleit remarked. “It’s after midnight.”

Simmonds, who had been instructed to fetch Van Bleit to the bungalow that night if possible, with difficulty repressed a smile.

“I imagine he does keep late hours,” he said. “The only occasions I have surprised him in bed have been in the daytime. But if he were abed I don’t doubt he would see you. Nevertheless, if you prefer some other time, I am sure it will be equally convenient to him.”

“And if I refuse to go at all?”

“Then, I expect he will drop down on you. You see his instructions are imperative. He has no voice in the matter.”

Van Bleit swung round suddenly and stared in the other’s face.

“It’s a game of bluff you’re playing,” he said. “I don’t trust you. I’ll go with you to-night—yes. I’ll hear the proposal this precious letter contains. But, remember, I’m armed, and I shan’t hesitate to use my weapon if I see the slightest occasion.”

“You may reassure yourself. Great as you know our interest in you to be,” Simmonds replied imperturbably, “I don’t suppose either of us covets the distinction of hanging for you.”

Chapter Twelve.

Karl Van Bleit was neither popular nor especially respected among his fellows, nevertheless a sensation that had in it something of consternation supervened when the news burst like a bomb over Cape Town that he had been arrested on a charge of murder. His connection with the Smythes added considerably to the interest, and lent a social importance to the affair. Speculation was rife concerning the crime, the details of which were tardy in forthcoming; only the barest facts were known, and these were sufficiently unusual to strain public curiosity to the utmost. A sense of mystery enveloped the affair: the lonely bungalow; the hour; the unexplained connection between the three men, who had met by arrangement seemingly, for what reason had not transpired; the shooting affray, in which one man, Simmonds, had been killed; and finally the arrest of Van Bleit, who had on leaving the bungalow walked into town and given himself up to the authorities.

The whole business was, in the opinion of Theodore Smythe, worthy the shady character of his wife’s undesirable connection. Out of a feeling of delicacy he kept the verbal expression of his views from her. He did his utmost to console her; for she was not only inexpressibly shocked, but acutely alive to the danger of Van Bleit’s position. He even promised to secure for his defence the best services that money could procure. But he entertained no great belief that Karl would get out of the present mess. He had been extraordinarily lucky hitherto through a career of suspected crime; nothing beyond suspicion had clung to him; but it seemed as though this time at least the law had got its iron grip on him and would not be likely to let go. Putting his wife’s feelings out of the question, Smythe had a distinct dislike to the idea of a connection of his own suffering the penalty of the law.

“It’s such a beastly low-down, undignified position,” he complained.

Mrs Lawless read the news while she lingered over her breakfast. The midnight tragedy had already been seized upon to fill a column of the daily paper. Her face turned paler as she read, and the hand that held the newspaper was not quite steady. When she had read to the last line she laid the paper down beside her plate and sat staring out at the sunshine with wide startled eyes... Murder! ... There was something terrible in the mere sight of the word in print—something horribly revolting. Could it be possible that this man with whom she had talked so often, who had touched her with his hands, was guilty of this foul crime? She shivered at the mere remembrance that only the night before he had held her hand and touched it with his lips. He had parted from her and had gone straightway and done this thing... What violent deeds men who engage in desperate ventures will commit!

She rose from the table, and leaving her unfinished breakfast, went out into the garden. The news had shocked her. She looked like a woman who is frightened and at the same time infinitely relieved. As she paced up and down beneath the trees that cast their pleasant shade upon the path, one thought kept beating upon her brain with an insistence that drove out every other thought and lulled a long-endured pain at her heart like some blessed anodyne. She smiled as she looked up into the green tracery above her head.

“If she by her evil influence over him has saved him from danger,” her thought ran, “then I am grateful to her for coming into his life.”

And so she put behind her her jealousy of the woman who for the present dominated Lawless’ life.

Later in the morning Mrs Lawless ordered the car and drove into Cape Town to call on her friend.

She found Mrs Smythe reclining on a cane lounge on the stoep, a book beside her, which she was not reading, and the morning paper open at the page with the gruesome headline lying in her lap. She looked round as Zoë Lawless mounted the steps, and seeing who it was, got up and went to meet her.

“Oh! how good of you to come,” she said. “I have been thinking of you... Zoë, isn’t it awful? ... I can’t believe it. I can scarcely realise it yet.”

Tears rose in her eyes, already spoiled with futile weeping for a man so little worthy of her grief. She dabbed at them ineffectually with a wet handkerchief, and added with unconscious absurdity:

“Karl couldn’t have done it... He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Mrs Lawless put her hands upon her shoulders, and bending from her superior height, kissed the tremulous mouth.

“Poor Kate!” she said, and led her gently back to her seat.

“I feel,” said Mrs Smythe plaintively, “as though he were dead already... as though he, and not the other man, had met with a violent end. Oh! surely he will be able to explain... They were two to one... What could they have wanted with him? And why were they armed? Men who are peaceable citizens don’t carry firearms. Karl must have distrusted them to take a revolver with him... And yet, Colonel Grey—”

She broke off suddenly, and added in a voice of puzzled questioning:

“Zoë, you never liked Colonel Grey!”

Mrs Lawless leant back in a chair, her chin tilted slightly upward, gazing into the remote blueness of the sky. The flicker of a smile shone in the dark eyes, but the gravity of her features remained otherwise unchanged.

“That isn’t quite a correct statement,” she said. “As I told you before, it is Colonel Grey who doesn’t like me.”

Mrs Smythe regarded her doubtfully.

“I thought you were joking when you said that,” she replied. “If you really believe it, I think you are mistaken. He has often spoken of you, and it seemed to me that he greatly admires you. It is a strange thing to say in face of what has happened, but I always felt he was a man to be trusted.”

“You can’t be certain,” replied Zoë, “that your first impression of him is wrong. Quarrels between men—even violent quarrels—don’t necessarily make them rogues. I feel the same about him. I think he is an eminently trustworthy person.”

“But,” objected Mrs Smythe, “there is this affair with Karl... Karl always disliked him—he was rude to him once in this house. He made me angry, I remember, poor fellow!”

She sighed and again dabbed at her eyes with her ruined pocket-handkerchief.

“We’ve been more like brother and sister than cousins,” she explained apologetically. “He has confided his troubles to me since he was a boy, and now in this great trouble I can’t even help.”

She did not think it necessary to explain that in those early days, when he was an impecunious young man and she a good-looking girl with a larger dowry than most girls, he had expended much time and eloquence in endeavouring to persuade her to accept his name in exchange for her fortune. She had believed then in the honesty of his professions of love, though she had felt too sisterly towards him to yield to his wishes; and it had been her one desire ever since her own happy marriage to see him happily married also. In Mrs Lawless she believed she had found a worthy mate for him.

“Zoë,” she exclaimed suddenly, turning appealingly towards her friend, “you won’t let this shocking affair prejudice you against the poor boy! He may be able to justify himself. I can’t believe that there isn’t some explanation. It seems a horrible gigantic mistake... You won’t be prejudiced, will you?” she pleaded.

“I am not prejudiced, Kate,” the other answered.

There was in the steady voice, in the expression of the composed face, so little encouragement to be read that Mrs Smythe for the first time entertained serious doubts of Karl’s success. She had imagined that his suit was prospering satisfactorily; now, like a further darkening of the already dark cloud that depressed her spirit, it was borne in upon her consciousness that Zoë Lawless did not love him. She could not love him and remain so entirely unmoved in face of the awful fate that overshadowed him.

“Of course,” she went on, still more dejectedly, for her heart was sorely troubled, “no woman cares to have her name mixed up in a scandal like this. It would be only a great love that could live through such an ordeal. I suppose I’m foolish, Zoë, but I had hoped—”

She paused, unable to complete the sentence, and surveyed the dark glowing beauty of her silent companion with added distress in her eyes.

“Oh, Zoë!” she burst out impulsively. “He thinks the world of you... There’s a new quality comes into his voice whenever he speaks of you. You are the sunshine of the land to him—it’s his own phrase. If he thought he stood no chance of winning you, I don’t believe he would attempt to defend himself against this awful charge—I truly don’t.”

A wave of colour swept over Zoë Lawless’ face, but beyond the swift blush she showed no sign of embarrassment.

“My dear,” she said, “you are mistaken—utterly mistaken.”

“How can I be mistaken, Zoë, when I had it from his own lips? He would never forgive me for telling you... And, indeed, I ought to have held my peace. He could tell you so much more convincingly himself. I’m a fool to have spoken... It’s the wrong time to speak of such things. But my mind’s so full of him, poor boy!”

Mrs Lawless got up, and stooping over her chair kissed her affectionately.

“Don’t worry. You have done no harm,” she said. “If anyone could plead for him it would be you, you kind, dear soul. You make me feel—” She hesitated, and straightening herself stood slowly upright, looking gravely into the lifted face,—“mean,” she added, after a pause.

She clasped her hands behind her, and turning her back to the puzzled, questioning, tear-swollen eyes that stared up at her in helpless wonderment, gazed out upon the view. Through a break in the trees the great square rock that is Table Mountain showed in the clear atmosphere so surprisingly near that it seemed as though it formed a boundary to the garden. The sunlight lay warmly on its rugged prominences leaving the clefts and crannies in its grey sides cold and dark and secretive, the lurking-places of mystery and shadows, hiding ever from the light like the evil thoughts of a man’s mind. Zoë Lawless gazed at the mountain, looking blue in the brilliant sunshine, and her eyes were clouded as the dark clefts in its sides. She was ashamed of the part she had deliberately played, ashamed above all of having deceived this woman who was her friend.

“I’m wondering what you are thinking of me,” she said quickly. “And it hurts. I care... so much. You tempt me to tell you things—things that I keep double-locked in my heart—in order to justify myself.”

She turned round suddenly, frowning, and tapped her foot impatiently on the stone floor of the stoep.

“Merely to justify myself!” she repeated... “Was ever a more paltry reason given than that? Shall I tell you, Kate? ... Shall I show you the wound in my breast... the ugly, raw, unhealing wound that I am for ever tearing open with my own hand? I would tell you what I would not tell another human being sooner than you should think ill of me.”

“If that is your only reason for giving me your confidence, there is no need,” the other answered. “It’s just because I think so highly of you, Zoë, that I feel the disappointment so keenly. But perhaps it’s as well that you don’t care, because... in the event of...”

Here she broke down completely, her thoughts so charged with gruesome possibilities that Mrs Lawless’ efforts at reassurance were futile. It was impossible, she declared, to accept comfort with the idea of the hangman’s rope ever present in her mind.

“I’m waiting for Theo to come up from town,” she said tearfully. “He’s gone to interview lawyers and barristers, and anyone who is likely to be able to help. Thank Heaven the assizes are on this month! I don’t know how I should bear a longer suspense.”

Mr Smythe reached home as Mrs Lawless was driving away. She stopped the car when she saw him, and he got out of the taxi he had driven up from town in and went to speak to her.

“You’ve been with Kate,” he said. “I’m glad of that. She’s horribly cut up, poor girl! It’s a bad business... very. Looks black for Karl.”

“You think,”—Mrs Lawless shivered involuntarily—“that he won’t be able to clear himself?”

At sight of the shiver and her white face he remembered her friendly relations with Van Bleit, and hesitated to give free expression to his thoughts.

“Oh! I don’t know,” he said... “You see, we know so little. The only thing that is positive is that he killed the man... He admits it. But men have done that before, you know, and haven’t swung for it. We won’t look on the worst side until we’ve got to.”

She realised that his desire was to spare her feelings, and a soft blush mantled her cheeks at the knowledge of what he was thinking.

“I’m not Kate,” she said quietly. “I wish you wouldn’t hold out hopes you don’t in the least entertain. You are afraid the case will go against him... Why don’t you say so frankly?”

“Because,” he answered jerkily, “I’ve got no grounds for supposing anything of the sort. But I’ve been interviewing men this morning whose business it is to see the more serious side, and it doesn’t tend to reassure one. Don’t let that worry you, though, Mrs Lawless; we are going to do the best we can for him.”

Again the swift rush of embarrassed colour warmed her face. The tell-tale crimson strengthened his misapprehension. He fell to wondering what women saw in Van Bleit that won their liking. His wife’s partiality for her cousin was the greatest unsolved puzzle of his life.

“We’ll do our best,” he repeated, wishful to allay her anxiety. “If it wasn’t for Grey... It’ll be rather like two dogs worrying over a bone. It will be interesting to see who wins. The odds are against us... But we’ll do our best.”

That phrase rang in Zoë Lawless’ ears like a refrain as she drove on... “We’ll do our best.” ... So Theodore Smythe, as well as his wife, imagined that Karl Van Bleit’s danger mattered to her. He had sought to hearten her with encouraging words; the very pressure of his hand when he bade her good-bye had conveyed a silent kindly sympathy, and his smile was meant to be reassuring. Apart from the shock the news had occasioned her, Van Bleit’s danger concerned her no more than the danger of the man in the street. Yet she by her actions had led these people to the inference they had drawn.

She frowned as the car spun along the dusty road, under the huge straggling trees that lined it on either side, and waved their long gaunt arms musically in the wind. It troubled her to remember now, in face of all that had happened, that she had stooped to such deception, even though her motive had not been entirely unworthy. She had taken advantage of Van Bleit’s attitude towards herself, had sought deliberately—as some women seek from motives of vanity—to attain an influence over him, and she had succeeded so far beyond her expectation. Her object had been to get possession of the letters that men were risking and sacrificing their lives to obtain. She had meant to destroy the letters had they come into her possession, and so put it out of the power of any man to turn them to his own use. In the accomplishment of this her one hope had been to save from danger the man who had so recklessly, for a sordid compensation, undertaken their recovery. Van Bleit’s feelings, as also to what extent she would have to lower her pride in the pursuance of her project, had scarcely been taken into consideration. All that had seemed up to now beside the main issue. But now things had undergone a change, and the man for whose sake she had been willing to sacrifice her own prejudices, had gone out of her life, slaying by his own act all possible hope of intercourse between them in the future...

She leant back in her seat, and closed her eyes to the sunshine, the garish, laughing, intrusive sunshine that seemed to mock her pain. She was mourning for him, setting up a headstone to him in her memory; for he was as dead to her as though Van Bleit’s bullet after effecting its deed of violence had sped through the darkness and spent itself in his heart. And upon the headstone she inscribed the one word “Waste.”

Chapter Thirteen.

Mrs Lawless was like a sick woman whose illness increased as the day advanced. She had recognised the finality of things on the night when Lawless walked out of her presence—out of her house, to return to the woman with whose lot he had thrown in his own. It was another of the mad, reckless acts that had governed his undisciplined nature. But to-day, with her mind disturbed with thoughts of death and deeds of violence, the memory of how she had let him go without exerting every effort to persuade him to reconsider his decision troubled her greatly. Why had she not humbled her pride and pleaded with him? ... Why had she let the thought that it would be derogatory to her dignity deter her from freely avowing her love for him? ... Might not the strength of her love have stood between him and this evil? ... She felt as though hers had been the hand to thrust him forth into the darkness for the second time. Once before, in the years that were gone, she had thrust him forth; and in the empty years that had succeeded she had learnt bitterly to regret the hard unforgivingness of that act. Her one cry then had been: “I didn’t understand... Oh! if only I could have the chance again.” The opportunity had been given her, and she had failed to recognise it. “He was so cold,” she excused herself. “I was afraid of him.” And then: “I could not have prevented him from doing what he had made up his mind to do... My power over him is dead...”

In that knowledge lay the bitterness of the sting...

In the afternoon, according to her promise, Julie Weeber arrived. She was somewhat diffident of intruding, uncertain how Mrs Lawless felt the news of Van Bleit’s arrest. Julie shared the popular belief that it would be a grievous shock to the woman whose name had been bandied about in connection with his for months. To make sure, she inquired of the native who opened the door to her whether Mrs Lawless were receiving.

“I would come another day, if it were more convenient,” she said.

“Missis is expecting you,” he answered, and showed her into the drawing-room.

Zoë Lawless was seated in a low chair near one of the windows, with her hands lying idly in her lap. She was very pale. Julie decided that she looked ill, and imagined that she understood the reason of her pallor.

“I came,” she explained, “because I said I would. But if you’d rather have me some other day, I’ll go away again.”

“I’d rather that you stayed,” Mrs Lawless answered, rising and shaking hands. “You see, I’m lonely. Why should you condemn me to my own society to-day?”

“I thought perhaps—”

Julie stammered and came upon an awkward pause, whereupon Mrs Lawless went quickly to her assistance.

“I know,” she said. “This shocking news is all so fresh. But, obviously, I cannot assist my friends by becoming a recluse, can I? We won’t speak of the subject, if you don’t mind. It is sufficiently painful to make the discussion of it depressing. My sympathy with Mrs Smythe is great. She is very fond of her cousin, and feels this deeply. And I am very fond of her... Sit here—will you?—with your back to the light. It’s more restful.”

Julie sat down wondering. She was beginning to reconstruct her ideas. There was nothing in Mrs Lawless’ manner to bear out the supposition that she was in love with Van Bleit. She did not suspect that Mrs Lawless was intentionally correcting her error, nor did she guess how her assumption of the truth of the common report embarrassed her hostess. This ugly misapprehension had struck at her on three separate occasions that day. It was strange that she had not realised before the construction that might be put on her friendship with Van Bleit. She wondered whether Lawless had shared the same belief. And then she remembered how in her first interview with him he had warned her against the man. Why, if he was so entirely indifferent, need he have concerned himself about her acquaintance?

She looked up suddenly and surprised Julie’s inquisitive eyes studying her intently. The girl smiled.

“It’s awfully sweet of you to have asked me to come and see you,” she said. “I’ve wanted to know you—oh! for ever so long.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know—unless it is because you are so beautiful. Women do admire other women whatever’s said to the contrary. I’ve watched you motoring past our house... I saw you pass this morning.”

She did not add that she had thought how sad she looked.

“Yes,” Mrs Lawless answered. “I went to see Mrs Smythe. If my thoughts had not been so occupied with other matters I would have stopped and driven you out with me then. It’s rather selfish to let you cycle out here when I have a car.”

“Oh no!” Julie contradicted eagerly. “I make nothing of this journey.”

“Nevertheless, I shall drive you next time. I want you to come out often. You play tennis, of course? There is a beautiful lawn there—wasting... Nobody plays on it.”

She pointed through the window to a stretch of green sward which the Hottentot gardener kept surreptitiously watered during the dry season, so that whatever else suffered from the long droughts the grass was always green.

“I should like that,” Julie said. “Do you play?”

“Not much. I’m a lazy person. But I have thought I should like to get a few young people out for a game occasionally. I enjoy looking on. If you would bring Mr Bolitho, I could manage to make up the numbers.”

Julie did not answer immediately. She sat looking out into the garden with heightened colour and vaguely perplexed eyes. She wondered why Mrs Lawless should have singled out Teddy Bolitho from the host of young men who would all have been willing to come. She wished that she had mentioned any name rather than his.

“You don’t like my plan?” Mrs Lawless said quietly.

Julie looked up.

“Yes... Yes, I do,” she said. “I was only—thinking. Of course Teddy Bolitho would come—anybody would, if you asked them. And it’s heavenly playing on a grass court; there are so few in the Colony. It’ll spoil it, though.”

“I would rather it were spoilt with use than wasted,” Mrs Lawless said... “We waste so much.”

She had risen, and now, moving nearer to the girl, she laid a strong, well-shaped hand upon her shoulder.

“Don’t you make waste too,” she added gently. “I did when I was young... and it leaves me full of vain regrets. Some people think that youth is the best gift of the gods: but it is far from a perfect gift; for the proper appreciation of it is withheld. It is only when the gift is withdrawn that we realise all that it meant. If one could have one’s youth a second time, one would get the full value of the hours. You’ve got it now—that priceless gift; and you are inclined to be careless of it.”

“I wonder why you say this to me?” Julie murmured.

“Because I’ve been looking on. You say you have observed me... Interest is usually mutual. I have certainly felt interested in you.”

Julie coloured awkwardly, and looked down. She wondered whether Mrs Lawless had observed her friendship for the man whose name was the same as her own, and if she disapproved of it.

“I don’t think it altogether depends on oneself what one makes of one’s youth,” she said.

“There is much to be said for that argument,” Mrs Lawless answered. “But I could wish you had not found it out so soon.”

Julie looked up quickly.

“You mustn’t pity me,” she said. “I wouldn’t retrace one step of the past... It’s the future I would alter, if I could.”

“And how can you tell,” Mrs Lawless inquired, “what the future holds?”

The girl smiled drearily.

“I know very well what it doesn’t hold,” she answered. “That’s as far as I care to go.”

And then suddenly her wandering gaze fell on a photograph that stood in a silver frame on the piano, and she became silent, regarding it with an intensity that drew Mrs Lawless’ eyes to the object that excited her interest.

“You recognise it?” she said, and there was a quality in her voice such as Julie had never heard in any voice before. “That was taken before—he left the Army.”

It was a portrait of Lawless in regimentals, younger and handsomer than the man Julie knew; but there was lacking in the younger face something which the older face possessed. Julie could not determine what that something was.

“Yes, I recognise it... But I miss—the scar,” she said.

She blushed violently. It was the scar that had appealed so strongly to her youthful imagination. And then, raising her glance furtively to see whether her embarrassment were observed, she was profoundly disconcerted at the sight of the tears that were standing in the other woman’s eyes. Mrs Lawless moved away.

“I don’t know,” she said, “why I put that portrait there to-day... There’s a connection, I suppose, between it and one’s wasted youth. The portrait stands for waste... It is the sight of it that has set me thinking back.”

She crossed to the piano and lifted the frame as though her purpose were to remove it. Then, changing her mind, she set it again in its place, and came slowly back.

“I wonder what you think of my getting you here and depressing you with my reminiscences,” she said in a lighter tone. “It wasn’t my intention. I suppose it’s due to reaction following the shock of recent events. We’ll flee from gloomy subjects, shall we? ... Come out with me. I want to show you my garden...”

Whether it was owing to Mrs Lawless’ display of emotion, or the unexpected sight of the photograph in her room, or to both reasons combined, added to the strange new quality in her voice when she spoke of the portrait’s original, Julie conceived the idea that she too loved this man with the dominating personality,—the strangely aloof manner,—the air of quiet detachment that made him at once a figure attractive and unapproachable, so that women, while desirous of knowing him, hesitated to solicit an introduction. It was not strange that she should love him—that to Julie was a natural, almost an inevitable, consequence of knowing him—but it was incredible that he could remain indifferent to her regard. The only explanation she could arrive at was that he was ignorant of it. Julie understood at last the tragedy that occasionally looked out from Mrs Lawless’ beautiful eyes; and in her sympathy with her the pain at her own heart grew less. She had no thought of competing against this peerlessly lovely woman. It was unaccountable to her by the light of her new understanding that Lawless should have troubled to show any interest in her at all. She wondered whether, if she ever saw him again, she would find the courage to tell him the secret she had surprised...

That evening, after Julie had left her, Mrs Lawless took the portrait of Lawless from the piano, and sat with it in her hands examining it closely. She was wondering whether the woman he had gone away with now was the same woman he had wrecked his happiness for eight years ago—wondering in a quite impersonal, dulled sort of way. The thing was past remedying and altogether beyond her control. She remembered that in the past it had been the wound to her self-esteem she had felt the most bitterly. Her feelings had changed during the long years. She experienced little of the grief, the anger, the disgust that had moved her then. Her present sorrow was less a selfish emotion than sorrow for the man because of the waste he was making of life. She scarcely considered the woman outside her connection with Lawless, save, after the tragedy of the previous night, to be relieved that, since she was to influence him, she had removed him from other influences of a more actively dangerous nature. She was glad that he was out of Cape Town, otherwise she knew he would have been concerned in the affair that had cost one life and might yet cost another.

And while she sat there musing on these matters with the photograph in her hands, the door of the room opened, and to her astonishment Colonel Grey was announced. He followed quickly on his name, as though anticipating and anxious to prevent a refusal on her part to receive him, offering an apology for intruding on her as he entered.

Mrs Lawless laid the photograph face downwards on the sofa and rose to greet him. Her face expressed her surprise; his was grey and tired and haggard, and his blood-shot eyes looked like the eyes of a man who has not slept.

“I fear I have disturbed you,” he said. “I’m sorry to intrude, but I wish to see you.”

“You have disturbed me doing nothing,” she answered composedly. “I was wearied of my thoughts. Sit down and tell me what you wanted to see me for... Will you take anything?” she added, on a sudden thought, as he dropped wearily into a chair. “You look tired.”

“Thank you, no,” he answered. “I am less tired than worried. But I won’t distress you by going into that. I quite understand that the subject is painful to you, and for that reason I regret to inflict my company on you.”