FENELLA

A NOVEL

BY HENRY LONGAN STUART

Author of "Weeping Cross"

"NAY, MY MOTHER CRIED: BUT THEN THERE WAS
A STAR DID DANCE AND BENEATH IT
I WAS BORN"

Garden City
New York
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1911

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

CONTENTS

PART I

I

MORGENGABE

Like the sudden, restless motion of a sleeper, a wave, marking the tide's height, broke out of the slumberous heart of the sea, and laid its crest low along the beach. Fenella, who had been swimming to shore, rose in the foam, like that other woman in the morning of the world, and began to walk slowly, wringing the salt water from her hair, toward the bleached bathing hut that stood, by itself, under a shoulder of the dunes. The backwash of the wave swirled past her bare ankles as she walked. Beyond the strip of beach that it had covered with weed and spume, the sand was hot and loose as ashes to the soles of her feet. The noontide sun seemed to rob the earth at once of motion, of sound, of color. It grizzled the long sharp grass with which the sand hills were sparsely covered, quenched the red roofs of the little cream-walled fishing village, and turned the watered lawn, which lay at the foot of the flaunting summer hotel quarter of a mile inland, to a level smudge of dark green. All sound was stilled—all movement in suspense—all beauty, even, deferred. At such an hour, the supreme of the sun's possession of the earth, none can stand, alone and without shelter in its untempered light, and not realize that he is intercepting an elemental force as relentless as it is impersonal. Upon these barren, ragged edges of the earth, where the land casts its detritus upon the sea, and the sea casts it back, transformed, upon the land, it is felt to be what it truly is—a power that blights as well as fosters—death no less than life. All that has its roots firmly fastened in the soil—that has a purpose unfulfilled—fruit to bear—pollen to sow, feels the impulse—spreads, aspires, swells, and scatters. All that is weak or ephemeral—whose purposes are frustrated or whose uses past, turns from that light and fervor—withers—bows its head—wilts at the fiery challenge. To it the sun is a torch—the earth an oven—noontide the crisis of its agony.

At the door of the gray bathing-hut the girl turned, and, bracing herself, with her arms against her wet sides, to which her dark tight bathing-dress clung sleek and shapely as its pelt to a seal, stood for a moment looking out to sea. Her bosom rose and fell quickly, but without any distress; her heart beat high with the sense, so rare to women until of late, of physical powers put to the test. A mile out, the fishing-boat to which she had swum—whose very bulwarks she had touched—seemed to hang like some torpid bat—its claws hooked onto the line where sea and sky met. She caught her breath at sight of the distance she had ventured: nothing in her life, she felt, had been pleasanter than this—to stand with the sun on her shoulders, the warm sand over her toes, and to measure with a glance the cold, treacherous and trackless space which, stroke by stroke, she had overcome.

Suddenly, and as though she remembered, she turned and looked inland. High up on the dunes to her left a little black shadow spotted the gray, reed-streaked expanse. Fenella waved one brown arm toward it, and throwing back the wet hair from her forehead, peered anxiously under her hand for some signal in reply. Apparently it came, for her face changed. Something that had been almost austerity went out of it and was replaced by a look so full of tender concern that the long-lashed eyes and sensitive mouth seemed to brim over with it. A moment later, and amid a charming confusion which draped the pegs and benches of the hut, she was humming a waltz tune softly as she dressed. The happy, interrupted melody filled the hot silence like the song of a honey-seeking bee.

The blot upon the dunes was cast by a white sketching umbrella, lined with green, whose long handle, spiked and jointed, was driven deep into the loose soil. Near it, but somewhat away from the shadow, which the southward roll of the earth was carrying farther and farther from his shoulders, a man was sitting. He sat, with knees drawn up and with his hands clasped across them, staring out upon the colorless ocean, over which a slight haze was beginning to drift. A gaunt, large-framed man, but with a physical economy in which fat had no place. The skin upon the strong hands and lean neck was brown and loose, as though years of exposure to a sun, fiercer and more persistent than that to which he heedlessly bared his head now, had tanned it for all time. His hair, thick, crisp, and grizzling at the temples, was cropped close over a shapely head. A short beard, clipped to a point, left the shape of the chin an open question, but his moustache was brushed away, gallantly enough, from the upper lip, and showed all the lines of a repressed and unhappy mouth. The prisoner, his dungeon once accepted, sets himself to carve the record of his chagrins upon its walls; no less surely will a soul, misunderstood and checked in its purposes, grave the tale of its disappointments upon the prison-house of the flesh. On the face that confronted the ocean now, infinite sadness, infinite distaste were written plain.

He was oddly dressed, after a bizarre fashion which complexity, eager, we must suppose, for such simplifications as are within its reach, occasionally affects. A coarse canvas smock, open at the throat, such as fishermen wear, and dyed the color of their sails; corduroy trousers of brown velvet, coarse gray knitted socks, that fell in careless folds round his ankles and over the low iron-shod shoes. Under all this uncouth parade one divined rather than saw fine linen.

Suddenly that view of the ocean in which was so little present help was blotted out. From behind him two hands, cool and a little clammy from prolonged immersion in salt water, were covering his eyes. Yet for a while he did not move; possibly he felt the eclipse a grateful one. It was not until the girl who had stolen upon him so silently shook him gently and whispered in his ear that he took the hands from his eyes, and, still without turning, laid them against his lips.

He might well have turned. For Fenella, one would think, would be always worth another look. She was quite beautiful, with the precision of color and texture that makes beauty for the artist, and sometimes, be it said, obscures it for the general. She was pale, but not from any retrenchment of the vital flame which burned, clear and ardent, in her gaze—glowed in the red of her moist and tremulous mouth. Her eyes were set full and a little far apart, and fringed with lashes that were of an almost even length and thickness on the upper and lower lids. Her face, broad at the temples and cheek bones, sloped to her chin with a slight concavity of the cheeks, in which a sort of impalpable dusk, that was not shadow, for no light killed it—nor bloom, for her tint was colorless as a lily, and which was probably caused by the minute and separately invisible down of the skin, seemed immanent. Her hair, fine, abundant, and nearer black than brown, grew low and made all manner of pretty encroachments upon the fair face. There was a peak of it in the centre of her forehead, and two little tufts waved near the temples which no mode of hairdressing had ever managed to successfully include. Her neck was slight and childish—her breasts scarcely formed, but her hips were already arched, of the true heroic mould of woman, and the young torso soared from them with the grace and strength of a dryad. Beyond all, face and figure possessed the precious and indefinable quality of romance. Fenella upon the Barrière du Trône in the livid light of a February morning—long, damp curls in which a little powder lingers drooping upon her slender shoulders: Fenella in côte-hardie and wimple, gazing over moat and bittern-haunted moorland from an embrasured château window of Touraine: Fenella in robe of fine-fringed linen, her black hair crisped into spiral ringlets, couched between the hooves of some winged monster of Babylon or Tharshish, with the flame of banquet or sacrifice red upon her colorless cheek. All these were imaginable.

She sank gracefully upon her knees in the yielding sand, and, putting her hand across the man's shoulder, laid her cheek to his. The spontaneity of the action and its tacit acceptance by her lover—for he neither moved nor checked his reverie on its account—were eloquent of self-surrender, and a witness also to the truth of the observation that, in affairs of the heart, there is one who proffers love and one who endures it. But she was over-young and over-fair to know the chill of the unrequited kiss already.

"Are you still worrying, Paul?" she asked after a while, "still vexed and disturbed? You needn't answer. Your forehead was all gathers and tucks just now when I came behind you: I could feel every wrinkle. Tell me, this minute," with playful peremptoriness; "was he anxious about his young lady?"

"A little," her lover answered. "It's natural, isn't it?"

"But, dear, I swim so strongly," she pleaded. "There's no current when the tide's at flood. And, oh! Paul, it was such fun. I swam out to that fishing-boat you can just—barely—see. Look!" and she turned the listless head with her hand; "it's over there. I can tell you the exact number: B759 Boulogne. That shows I'm not fibbing, doesn't it, Mister Ingram. I hung onto the side and called out, 'Woilà!' Have you ever noticed you can't say 'V' when your mouth's full of saltiness? And the man was so scared. He crossed himself twice, poor old soul, and his pipe nearly fell into the sea. Can't you imagine what he'll say when he gets home 'Cette Anglaise!—quelle effrontée!—quelle conduite!' Now, who says I can't speak French?—Oh! Paul; why aren't you a swimmer?"

"It wasn't quite such fun watching you," said Ingram; "the sea's such a big thing. Why, your head looked no bigger than a pin's out on all that water. Things happen so easily, too."

The girl felt him shiver, and tightened her hold on his shoulder.

"And you've such an imagination to plague you; haven't you, Paul? Oh dear! Well—here's the pin sticking into you again: here's the head back, safe and sound, light and empty as ever. Isn't it hard luck for you?" And she laid it on his shoulder.

"Would you rather I didn't swim out so far again, Paul?" she asked presently, in a softened voice.

"Why should I break your spirit?" the man argued, more reasonably, perhaps, than he intended.

"Oh, but it isn't worth it if it worries you," his sweetheart said earnestly. "Nothing's worth that, when you have so much to bear besides. I've had my foolish way and now I promise you I'll paddle with you, dear old muff, in two feet of water all the rest of the holidays."

Ingram turned to her now. "Nelly, I don't want to disappoint you, but—but, there won't be any 'rest of the holidays' for us this summer."

She looked into his face; her own alarmed and pleading.

"You're not going, Paul? Oh, you promised to stay on until we all went back together."

"I know, I know," he answered, with an impatience that was none the less real because it was the expression of his reluctance to give pain. Silken bonds strain at times.

"Something has happened then, since last night? What is it, dear?"

"I had a letter this morning. It had been waiting at the 'Arrêt.'"

"A letter at last! Oh! Paul—Why didn't you tell me? Is it good news?"

"Only a straw; but then, I'm a drowning man."

"Tell me! Tell me!" the girl insisted.

"It's from Prentice; the man you saw in Soho the night before we came away. He's taken my MSS. to Althea Rees."

"You mean the woman who writes those queer books where every one talks alike."

"What does it matter? The talk's all good. Anyhow, she's 'struck.' Some one's actually struck at last. She's going to try and make her own publishers do something. But she says she must see me first, and Prentice thinks she's only passing through London."

Fenella's face clouded and was so far from expressing enthusiasm that her lover looked at her rather ruefully.

"You don't seem very glad, Nelly."

Nelly kept her eyes averted. She had already taken her head from his shoulder.

"I shouldn't care to publish anything," she declared slowly. "Not—that way."

As though he had been waiting for her words, Paul Ingram sprang to his feet. All his impatience and dissatisfaction seemed to boil over. He began to pace the dunes like a caged animal, kicking the sand from his feet and tugging fiercely at the grizzling beard that was a daily reproach to his lack of achievement.

"That way! that way!" he repeated. "But isn't even 'that way' better than no way at all? I tell you, Nelly, I'm discouraged, aghast, at this conspiracy to keep a man bottled up and away from the people for whom his message is intended. I haven't written like all these clever—clever people; after a morning's motoring, and an afternoon 'over the stubble,' isn't that the expression?—three hours every day, while the man is laying out the broadcloth and fine linen for a dinner at eight. What I did was done with as much sweat and strain as that shrimper uses down there, who's getting ready to push his net through the sand as soon as the tide turns. And when the work is done, between me and my public a soulless, brainless agency uprears itself that weighs the result by exactly the same standards as it would weigh a tooth-paste or a patent collar stud or a parlor game—as a 'quick seller.'"

He would have said more, but Fenella was at his side, trying to reach his lips with the only comfort the poor child had.

"Oh! Paul," she cried; "be patient just a little longer. Publish how you can! I wasn't blaming you, dear. I only meant that—that working as you do, it was only a question of time and you'd succeed without any one's help. I don't feel uneasy or impatient about you."

Ingram sat down again, a little ashamed of his outburst, but his face was still bitter.

"Just so," said he. "And it's precisely your limitless, superhuman patience that's doing more than anything else to kill me by inches. It would be a relief if you'd lose it sometimes, curse me—reproach me for the failure I am. After all, how do you know all these duffers aren't right? They're wonderfully unanimous."

Fenella sat silent for a few minutes, not resenting his words, but racking her brain for some comforting parallel that would ring true and not be repulsed.

"Do you remember, Paul," she said at last, "the story we read together at Christmas about Holman Hunt? How he got so sick of the unsold pictures hanging in his studio that he turned them all with their faces to the wall? And yet one of those pictures was the 'Light of the World.'"

But Ingram, even if he had an equal reverence for the work in question, which I should doubt, was not an easy man to console. He brushed the poor little crumb of comfort impatiently aside.

"There's no comparison at all," he declared. "A picture painted is a picture painted. A glance can take it in, and a glance recover for the artist all the inspiration and joy in his work that filled him when he painted it. But what inspiration is there in a bundle of dog-eared manuscript, that comes back to you with the persistence of a cur you've saved from drowning? Besides, every artist worth the name has his following, however small, who help him—flatter him perhaps—anyhow, keep him sane. There's no unwritten law against showing a canvas. But the unpublished author—the un-acted play writer—is shunned like a man with the plague. Oh! don't I know it?"

Fenella gave a weary little sigh. Amid all this glorified space, just to be alive seemed to her simple soul a thing to be deeply and reverently thankful for. Her own blood was racing and tingling in her veins, with the reaction from her long swim. She wanted to run, to sing; above all, she wanted to dance. As for books, her own idea of a book was a very concrete one, indeed. She knew that whole rooms were filled with them, bookstalls littered by them, libraries building everywhere to catch the overflow. She was familiar, for reasons that will appear in their course, with the reading-room at the British Museum. She had confronted that overwhelming fact. And yet, one book could mean so much to this man that, for its sake, the holiday she had so joyously planned had gone to pieces. The truth must be told. She had to draw a rather big draft upon her love and loyalty.

"When are you going?" she asked, in a little flat voice.

"I ought to have caught the mid-day boat from Boulogne," the man answered, with a briskness that sounded ungratefully in her ears. "But it's too late for that to-day. There's another at six or seven. They stop the Paris train for you here if you signal."

"Don't go till to-morrow, Paul," she urged patiently. "There's the eclipse to-night, you know, and you promised we should watch it together. Then we can talk things over quietly. I want—oh, I want so to help you! I have a sort of foolish plan in my own head, but I'm afraid you'll laugh at it.... And there's poor mummy, struggling over the sand with our luncheon. Run and help her, dear."

II

SHADOWS BEFORE

Mrs. Barbour was a comely, wholesome-looking body upon the descending slope of fifty. Her face, like her daughter's, was of the teint mât, and her homely English figure had what a flippant mind has described as a "middle-aged spread" in its proportions. Her large oval brooch, a cunning device in hair, proclaimed to these skilled in rebus that without a cross there was no prospect of a crown, and a black bonnet of low church tendencies, trimmed with little jet-tipped tentacles that quivered and danced when she moved her head, honorably crowned her abundant silver locks. She had declined Ingram's proffered aid with a tenacity often to be noticed in those who have given hard service all their lives, and as she drooped with weary finality upon the sand, various parcels, string-bags, and small baskets were distributed to right and left.

"Oh dear," she gasped breathlessly; "those dreadful, dreadful dunes."

"Have they tired you very much, mummy?" the girl asked concernedly, as she unfastened the lavender bonnet-strings.

"The sand is so loose to-day with the great 'eat—heat." Mrs. Barbour added the corrected version with almost lightning rapidity. One of her peculiarities, which it is sufficient to have indicated once, was a constant snatch at evasive aspirates. They can scarcely be said to have really dropped; she caught them before they fell.

"No, Nelly," the good lady went on, while Ingram unravelled the mysteries of the string-bag, and gathered driftwood for the fire. "Here we are in France, where you've always wanted to be; but, another year, if I'm consulted, Bognor or Westgate for me, my dear. Two hours' comfortable travelling"—Mrs. Barbour ticked off the advantages of home travel on her fingers one by one, and unconsciously quoted some railway placard she had seen—"no Channel crossing, no customs, and the sea at your door. And even when you've come all this way, no amusement, unless you call a horrid Casino amusing, where grown men, and women who ought to be sent home to finish dressing, make donkeys of themselves over little lead horses."

"There's very good music there in the afternoon," Paul hazarded, who was shaving a stick into kindling after the fashion of the Western plains.

"Music—yes; but nothing really tuneful. Do you remember the Elite Pierrots at Westgate, Nelly, last year, with the blue masks. That dark-haired one, my dear, who used to sigh for the silvery moon and cough so terribly in the intervals. Don't tell me he wasn't some one in disguise. No! I hold to what I've said. The French don't understand amusement."

The fire was lit, the kettle boiled, and luncheon eaten amid such conversation as a garrulous old woman and two very preoccupied people could contrive. Nelly was particularly silent, and had lost, besides, what her mother was pleased to term her "sand appetite." The talk ranged hither and thither listlessly. Paul's inability to swim, so strange in a man who had girdled the earth, was discussed in all its bearings till it could be borne no longer; the lurid history of Simone, Mrs. Barbour's strapping, smiling bonne, unmarried and unmoral, was matter for another half-hour. Followed various excursions into the obvious, and a list of "discoveries" made that morning. Mrs. Barbour collected facts like shells, and made some very pretty castles with them, too, at times.

"... and Nelly, I believe I know who the two gentlemen are that you had your adventure with yesterday."

Ingram raised his head at the two odious words very much as a horse would do if you were to explode two fog signals under his nose in succession; quickly enough, indeed, to intercept a warning and reproachful glance that the girl sent her mother. Mrs. Barbour clapped both hands playfully over her mouth. "Oh! now I have done it!" she exclaimed. Her eyes snapped with, perhaps, a shade more of malice than a kind-hearted old lady's should ever hold. Without being a scheming or a worldly woman, she resented a little, in her heart, the monopoly which this man had established over her child; a man so alien to her in thought, so sparing of speech, so remote from her ideal, which, diffuse enough in all truth, would perhaps have found it nearest realization just now in some florid, high-spirited lad, who would have brought her his socks to darn and his troubles to soothe of an evening, been "company," in a word, to the talkative, commonplace old woman. As far as she was concerned, Ingram swallowed his disappointments, and she rather suspected him of darning his own socks.

Fenella considered her mother for some time, though not as a resource to evade her lover's eye.

"What a rummy way you have of putting things, mother!" she said at last. "My 'adventure' with 'two gentlemen'!"

Paul's face was blank, like the page of a diary awaiting confidences.

Feeling herself at bay, Mrs. Barbour grew flustered and tearful.

"Well, well!" she exclaimed, waving her hands helplessly in the air. "I'm sure I'm sorry, Nelly, since you choose to make such a mystery of it. But what there is in it to make you both look as grave as judges, I can't see. I'm sure that, as your mother, I'd be the first to be offended if there was anything disrespectful."

An awkward silence followed her words, which Ingram was the first to break.

"I think, perhaps, you'd best tell now, Nelly," he said quietly.

The girl blushed and covered her eyes for a moment with her hands.

"It's so—so foolish," she said, clenching them with an impatient movement. "Oh, well, if I must, I must.... It was yesterday morning while you were both at breakfast. I ran down, you know, to catch the tide. After I had come out—oh, well, there wasn't a soul in sight—I thought they would all be at breakfast at the Grande Falaise; I was chilly, too, and there was a kind of tune in the sea. So, after I'd taken off my wet bathing-suit, I threw on my kimono and began to practise the last dance Madame de Rudder has been teaching me—you know the one, mother, where she won't let me use my feet as much as I want—out on the sand where it was hard. And then, like a little fool I am, I forgot everything, until I heard some one clapping hands and saying, 'Bravo!'—and I looked up—and there were two men on the dunes, smoking cigars—I suppose they were coming from the golf links to the hotel, and I don't know how long they'd been watching me, and—and," with sudden passion, "I just hate you, Paul, for dragging it out of me when I didn't want to tell."

And Fenella, already overwrought, hid her head in her mother's capacious lap and had her cry out.

Mrs. Barbour stroked the dark head gently, but like the wise old mother bird she was, made no attempt to check the burst of tears.

"Such a dancing girl she is," she murmured complacently, "and she does hate to have it talked about so. Do you know, Mr. Ingram, I only discovered it myself by accident, after it had been going on months and months. Do you remember, dearie, that awful day, the first time I was up after influenza, that Druce got the spot on her nose that the doctor said was erysipelas, and Twyford scalded her arm and hand making a poultice? It's the only time, I do believe, Nelly, I've ever spoken to you crossly."

A muffled voice, "You were horrid, mummy."

"Well, there, I really was, Mr. Ingram. I pushed the child out of the way and said, 'If you can't help, don't hinder. Run upstairs and play with the other ornaments!' I didn't think any more about it, with all that trouble on my hands, till about half an hour afterward, when down comes Miss Rigby with her face white—you know what a coward she is, Nelly—and in her dressing-gown, at nearly twelve! 'Do come up, Mrs. Barbour,' she says, 'I believe Rock has gone mad in the box-room and is dashing himself against the wall.' Oh dear! I ran upstairs with the poker, and what do you think it was, Mr. Ingram. My own crazy child, dancing and waving her arms about. Such a picture of fun as she looked!"

A hand was laid suddenly on her mouth, and a face, very flushed and penitent in its tumbled dark hair, emerged from between the parental knees.

"I'm a silly"—sniff—"fool"—sniff—said Fenella. "Paul, gimme my hank."

Ingram passed the handkerchief across the smouldering blaze. The girl looked at him as she blew her nose. He seemed absorbed, not angry, but queer, she thought. She had never seen his face look so wan and tired. He seemed to avoid her eyes.

"Aren't you well, Paul?" she asked at last.

Ingram seemed to shiver and then rouse himself. "I'm all right," he said; "but I think I'll go back to the chalêt. I've got letters to write. Isn't the sun grown pale? And I guess I've either caught cold or some one's walking backward and forward over my grave."

They went home together, for the women would not be left behind, taking the longer way in order to avoid the sand-hills. Along the loose, tiring beach—dried sea waifs crackling underfoot, by the douane with its toy battery and lounging sentry; up a narrow path that was half by-street and half flight of steps, near whose summit a Christ flung his saving arms wide over a yellow affiche of the Courses at Wimereux, and into a straggling village of low-browed houses, cream, pink, light-blue, and strong as castles, through whose doorways leather-faced crones and tow-headed children swarmed and tumbled. They were nearing the inn of the Toison d'Or, where the new road to the hotel turns out of the village, slowly, for Mrs. Barbour climbed with difficulty and rejected assistance, when two men in tweed jackets, flat-capped and flannel-trousered, swung round the corner. At their backs two shaggy town urchins straggled along, each with an arsenal of clubs and cleeks peeping over his shoulder. The two men raised their caps and bowed slightly, but certainly not in response to any recognition that any of the party accorded them. Fenella blushed and hung her head.

Paul turned sharply on his heel. "Are those the cads who stared at you?" he asked, in a voice which he took no pains to render inaudible.

Nelly caught his arm before she answered. "Hush, dear! Yes. You're not to be foolish," she added.

Her mother, glad of a respite, stopped and looked after them, too. She held it a legitimate source of pride that she had always had an eye for a fine man.

"Those are the two, then," she said triumphantly, with an air of sagacity justified. "Then, my dear, I can tell you who they are. The short, dark one is Mr. Dreyfus—no, Dollfus—who manages the 'Dominion' in London, and the big, handsome one with the loose hair under his cap at the back is Sir Bryan Lumsden, the millionaire, and a frightful reputation, my dear. Mrs. Lesueur told me all about him this morning when she came in to borrow Simone for ironing."

Meantime, the two men whom they had passed turned likewise, but only to whistle up their caddies, who, with an avidity for the "p'tit sou" which would seem to be sucked in with the maternal milk in French Flanders, were holding out claw-like hands to the family party and more especially to Ingram, who had already acquired an unfortunate reputation in this respect.

"What d'you make of it, Dolly?" the big man asked. "Husband?"

The Jew shook his head decisively. "No, no, my boy! She's not a marrit woman. Relations, more likely. Eh?—ah?"

"Or lovers, likelier still. It's highly respectable, anyway. They've got the old lady to come along. That looks as if he were French."

"I'd like to meet the liddle girl, alone," said Dollfus, fervently.

"Some dark night?—eh, Dolly!" remarked Sir Bryan, beginning to whip the Dominion director's stout calves and thighs with the handle of the putter he was carrying. "You're such a devil—such a devil, Dolly."

Mr. Dollfus raised a corrective hand.

"Don't mithtake my meaning, Lumpsden," he said, getting out of the sportive baronet's long reach as quickly as was consistent with dignity. "I only wanter tell her she's got a forchune in her feet and legth if she'd go in training. I oughter know something about legth, oughtn't I, old fellow. Becoth it's my bizzyness, ain't it, Lumpsden?"

"Tell the lunatic in the red shirt instead," the baronet suggested, derisively. "She's bored, anyway. See her bat her eyelid when we bowed? Oh yes, she did, Dolly. Just one little flicker—but I caught it. Hullo! there's Grogan and old Moon at the tenth hole."

And, this being a world where the incredible is always happening, it is possible that Bryan Lumsden didn't think of Fenella again that day.

III

AN ECLIPSE

Ingram took her down to the beach again that night, as he had promised, through a sparse, pungent pine wood that by day and night seemed to keep something of the peace of the primeval world in its coniferous shade, and across a trackless little wilderness of sand-hills, scooped and tortured by the earthquake storms of winter into strange, unnatural contours, over which the moon to-night spread a carpet so white, so deceptively level, that often they could only be guessed by the abrupt rise or fall of the ground beneath one's feet. Rabbits popped in and out of the earth, the sharp reeds that bind the sand barriers together bit spitefully at the girl's tender ankles, and withered branches, catching in her silk skirt, snapped dryly as her lover helped her through the hedges with which the dunes are ribbed.

Although the night was cool, she was wearing the thin dress she had put on for dinner. Over his shoulder Ingram had slung a soldier's cloak of blue-gray cloth, long and wide, that was to cover them in to-night as it had often covered them before. Fenella was already familiar with its every fold—knew exactly when the rough backing of the clasp would chafe her delicate cheek, could recall at any moment the peculiar fragrance of cigar smoke with which the heavy frieze was impregnated, and some other smell, stranger still, sweet, foreign and spicy, that she could not define, but which, evanescent as it was—the very ghost of an odor—clung obstinately to her skin and dress, and which she loved to lie awake at night and feel exhaled from her thick hair like some secret earnest of joy upon the morrow.

She slid her hand into the man's as they descended the slippery, needle-carpeted path, and turned up a face to him in the darkness of the wood that was contrite and humble as a reproved child's. She had been a bad child, in fact; had failed in sympathy—had told him in her passion that she hated him. Hated—him! When they had found the fire, still smouldering, and had blown it into a blaze, she crept silently within his arms, under the folds of the cloak, and, laying her head upon his breast, watched the flames, creeping like fern-fronds through the gnarled roots and sodden bleached faggots that Paul had heaped upon it. She began to suck her thumb too: always with Fenella the sign of a chastened spirit. The moon, serenely unconscious of the earth shadow that was creeping upon her, made a path of crinkled glory across the waters, straight toward them, and, like foam at the foot of a silver cascade, the phosphorescent surf tumbled, soft and luminous, along the shore.

"Are you warm enough?" Ingram asked presently, feeling a tremor, perhaps, in the yielding figure that rested in his arms.

Fenella nodded her head, but she might more truly have told him that she was cold and sick. For her the night was full of voices that threatened her happiness. The ripple of the cold wind along dry grass at her back, the soft thud and effervescence of the surf against the sand, were all so many whispers telling her that her lover was going—going to some other woman who could help him, and away from the weak arms that only clung and hindered. She had no confidence in herself—no belief in her own power to hold him a moment, once his will should feel an alien attraction. The very profuseness of the poor child's passion, its abandonment of one uninvaded reserve after another, had been proof of this inward unrest. Let no mistake be made. Fenella was a good girl, who could by no possibility become other than a good woman: nevertheless it is as true as it is, perhaps, disquieting that she might have remained at the same time happier and more maidenly in contact with an affection less worthy and less spiritual than that which she had encountered. For, so long as the attraction of sex for sex, beneath all modern refinements and sophistications, remains endowed with anything of the purpose for which nature instituted it—so long as its repulsions are a definite distance, to be annihilated toward a definite end, so long, if one party to the vital bargain hangs unduly back, must the other press unduly forward.

She was silent so long that Ingram put out his hand, and, touching her cheek, found it wet.

"You're crying!" he exclaimed sharply.

"I'm n-not," Fenella protested unevenly, and even as she spoke the great drops splashed down on his hand.

"Nelly, look up! Do you love me as much as you say?"

"Oh, my heart!—my heart!" she sobbed, covering his mouth with kisses, salt as the sea. And while she kissed him he was making a mental note that women were unduly robust on the emotional side.

"If you do," said he, "you'll stop crying—at once."

He spoke so sternly that the girl clenched her hands and struggled and fought with her sorrow.

"That's better," he said, when, by dint of swallowing her tears, she was, outwardly at least, a little calmer. "I'm sorry if I spoke harshly just now," he went on; "but everybody has a last straw. A woman crying seems to be mine. It—it strains my heart."

"Do you think I like it any better?" his sweetheart asked, desperately.

"I suppose," he hazarded, with a shyness that was almost grotesque, "it's because I'm going to-morrow."

"Oh yes, dear, yes," the girl told him, eagerly seeking relief in words since tears were forbidden her. "Oh, Paul! how I shall miss you! You don't know what it's meant to me to have you living in the same house—to even know you were sleeping near me. Darling, do you know I've sometimes wished you snored so I might hear you at night. Don't stop me, love!" she went on, buttoning and unbuttoning his coat with nervous fingers. "Let me confess my full shamelessness. I've even helped Simone do your room sometimes in the morning. You're not shocked—are you? Oh! you are," she cried piteously, drawing away from his arm. "You think me unmaidenly. But I can't help it, love; I can't help it. Don't you see? You are you. It's different to all the rest of the world."

Ingram's chest rose and fell unevenly beneath her cheek. She could not but perceive his distress.

"Listen, Nelly," he said huskily. "Don't cry again; but—but perhaps it's a good thing for you I am going away for a while. Things are so unsettled, and it may help you—get you used, supposing the worst happens, to the idea. There's so much in custom—in habit."

"Paul!" she cried once, and grew rigid in his arms. It was a death-cry, and he flinched. Who has struck at life and not drawn the blade away quicker because the first blow went home.

"Nelly, I'm not young."

"I don't care if you were sixty—seventy." Fenella was not crying now, but fighting for her love like the brave little girl she was.

"I'm a man without home, or country, or friends."

"I'm not a baby. I'll go with you wherever you like. We'll make them for ourselves, together."

"And I'm deadly poor."

"I'll lend you money, Paul. How much do you want? I've seventy pounds in the Post-Office."

I think if I had been Ingram and had only one more kiss to give, I would have given it her for this; but I am trying to tell the truth; and the truth is that these futile interruptions to his hateful task harassed and angered him. It is so much easier to confess to sin than to failure.

"Nelly! don't interrupt me! Let me say what I have to. I'm telling you that at thirty-seven, an age when most men have home and wife and children and see their way clear to the end, I haven't taken the first step upon a road that is haunted by tragedy and littered with the bones of those who have fallen by the way."

"I'll wait for you," said poor Fenella, but no longer with the same energy. What a gorgon head has common-sense to turn hearts of flesh to stone!

"Yes, you'll wait for me! Spend your youth waiting for me; your middle age—waiting. We'll save every cent; spend hours figuring out on just how much or how little life for two can be supported. Hundreds of people are doing that to-day who, thirty years ago, would have been setting out, full of hope and confidence, to make money. That's a by-product of industrial development. And, if we're lucky, just about the time your own daughters should be telling you their love affairs, you'll come to me and we'll crawl away together to some cottage in Cornwall, where I'll cultivate vegetables a little, rheumatically, and at night you'll sit opposite me by the kitchen fire—we'll call it our 'ingle-nook'—and listen to an old man babbling of his wrongs between spoonfuls of bread and milk, with enlightening criticisms upon the fools who succeeded where he was too clever not to fail.

"You'll think it strange, I suppose," he went on, no more interrupted now by her sobs than by the sough of the sea; "strange that I should wait until now, just when I've heard I'm to have the chance I've been whining for, to realize what a phantom I've committed myself to following. But it's not as strange as it looks. As long as there's some petty practical obstacle in the way, mercifully or unmercifully everything else is obscured by it. It's like a hill, hiding the desert you'll have to cross when you've climbed to the top. Oh, Nelly! look at the moon!"

Little by little, as the man talked and the woman paid in tears and heartscald for the reckless passion of her first love, the portent they had come out to watch was passing over their heads. At first it was but a spot—a little nibble at the silver rim of the great dead, shining orb; then a stain, that grew and spread, as though the moon were soaking up the blackness of the sky; last it took shape and form of the world's circumference, and for once man might watch his earth as, maybe, from some happier but still speculative planet his earth is watched, and idly conjecture at what precise spot upon that smooth segmental shadow any mountain or plain, roaring city or dark tumbling ocean that he has mapped and named, might lie. Two thousand years ago—a day as men have learned to count time—this man and woman, who had come out to watch the moon's eclipse for mere diversion, for an effect of light and shade, and who, in the multiplied perplexities of their own artificial life had even forgotten to watch it at all, would have been lying, prone upon their faces, wailing—praying until the ominous shadow had passed, while in the fire before them some victim of flock and herd smoked propitiation to the threatening heavens. And out of all the straining and striving toward knowledge of those two thousand years—out of all the Promethean struggle wherein learning, hot to unlearn, can but lop off one visionary beak or claw to find itself clutched more cruelly in another, not enough wisdom reached them now to comfort one simple, trustful heart, or to teach an intellect that had roamed the earth to its own undoing, the primal art of all—how to rear a roof and feed a hearth for the loving creature that clung at his breast.

No! Nelly wouldn't look at the moon. She left his arms and sat apart, bolt upright; her lithe body quivering with resolution.

"Paul Ingram," she said incisively, "I've listened patiently to you and you'll have to listen to me. You've been prophesying woe and misery, and now it's my turn. Shall I tell you what's really going to happen?"

Hope is like measles. No one is too young or too foolish to catch it from. In spite of himself the man's face brightened.

"Well, what's going to happen?"

"As soon as we get home I'm going to have Mme. de Rudder to tea, just our two selves, nice and comfy, and when she's lapped up her cream and I've stroked her down a little, I'm going to say, 'Now, Madame! For the last two years you've been buttering me up, to my face and behind my back, and showing me round, and if you've meant half you said' (and I think she does, Paul, though she's such an old pussy), 'there ought to be a living for me somewhere.' And then—oh, Paul!—I'll work and I'll work and I'll w-o-r-k-work. I'm not sure whether I'll see you"—with an adorable look askance—"perhaps once a week, if you're good. And, at the end of the year, I'll bring you a nice, newly signed contract at—oh! well, pounds a week, 'cos I've got a head, which you'll never have, poor dear. And then—don't stop me please—we'll get married, and have a little flat of our own or turn ma's lodgers out, and you'll write your mis-e-ra-ble, mis-e-ra-ble books all day," she took his head in her hands and shook it gently from side to side; "and at night you'll call for me and I'll go home with you, sir, in my own dear little taxicab, all warm and cosy from dancing—and, dear, you shall never have another money trouble or even hear the word mentioned as long as you live. Now, what does he think of that?"

She looked closely at her lover's face and suddenly shrank away, with a little cry, at what she saw there.

"Think of it?" Paul repeated, his nostrils quivering. "I'll soon tell you what I think of it. That if I didn't know your words were a mere childish fancy—if I really thought you were going to dance on the stage in London or Paris or New York or any city I've been in, I believe, Nelly"—he paused a moment—"yes, I believe I could bear to take you up in my arms, now, as you are, and carry you down to that sea and hold you under until you were dead."

Fenella moaned and covered her face with her hands. Then she jumped up. Paul caught at her silken skirt, a momentary cold fear at his heart.

"Nelly, stop! I know I shouldn't have said that."

She disengaged herself with a swift turn. "Let me go!" she cried angrily. "I'm not the sort of person that commits suicide. You can drown me afterward if you like. I'm going to dance first."

"To dance?" Ingram repeated, thunderstruck. "Out here? Sit down at once! Sit down," he pleaded in a changed voice. "Be a good child."

"I'm not a child," she cried rebelliously; "that's the mistake you're making. And I won't be forever checked and scolded by you, Paul. I will have some comfort. Oh, I knew you'd laugh and storm. I'm only a silly little thing that dances and that you pet when she's good"; her eyes flamed at him. "But it means as much to me as your books and long words do to you."

She stopped, not because she was ashamed, but because her mouth was inconveniently full of the pins which she was pulling from a rather elaborate "chevelure." She shook her head with the usual transforming result, kicked off her shoes, and, bending down, began to unfasten her long silk stockings under her skirt. Paul turned away his head, and perhaps it was as well she did not see the disgust in the averted face.

"Sing something," she commanded, throwing the long silk stockings on the sand and stretching her bare toes.

"I don't know anything," doggedly.

"Oh yes, you do! Sing the Algerian recruit song."

"It's too sad for you in your present mood of exaltation."

Fenella did not seem to resent the withering tone. She had drawn a little away from the fire and was looking upward, her hands clasped behind her neck and under her hair.

"Just to get a note," she said, dreamily.

Without quite knowing why, and in the teeth of his own shy distaste, Ingram began to sing. He had a fine baritone voice, to be exact where exactness is not called for, full of strength and feeling, that was none the less tuneful because it had only been trained to the tramp of gaitered feet along the blinding white chaussées of French Africa. The song rose and fell, haunting and melodious—

"Me voilà engagé

Pour l'amour d'une blond—e...."

The fire was between them, throwing all the beach into shadow, and, sung thus, squatted upon the sand, and his feet to the dying embers, with the old song so many memories crowded upon the man's own brain—so many visions peopled the lurid shadows around him—that he had arrived nearly at its end before he thought of regarding the swaying, tossing figure beyond with any degree of attention. But, when he did, the last words died away in his throat. This is not the place to describe Fenella Barbour's dancing. Many pens have done it justice. It has been described and overdescribed—ignorantly arraigned and disingenuously defended. Tyros of the press, anxious to win their spurs, and with a store of purple phrases to squander, have attempted, through a maze of adjectives and synonyms, to convey or reawaken its charm. She burst on the world in a time when such things were already grown a weariness to the plain man; yet never, I believe, was any success due more to the frank and spontaneous tribute of the people who sit in cheap seats to a wonderful thing wonderfully done, and less to the kid-gloved applause of stalled and jaded eclecticism in search of new sensation. And the key to it all, I believe—though mine is only one opinion among many—was to be sought in the mechanical precision with which, through all the changes and postures of arms and body above the hips, unstable and sensuous as vapor, the feet below the swirling skirts beat—beat out the measure of the dance unerringly and incisively as the percussion of a drummer's sticks upon the sheepskin. It was this that, for the man in the street at least, lifted her art out of trickery and imposture and veiled indelicacy into some region where his own criticism felt itself at home. "A clog-dancer with sophistications," she has been called; but at least it was upon honest toes and heels that Fenella danced into popular favor.

And all this the man by the fire watched with a sinking heart. Not altogether unmoved. He could not, being flesh and blood, remember that the girl dancing before him had just left his arms, and at the close of her transport would fling herself, breathless and glowing, into them again, eager for his approval, and spending upon his lips the aftermath of her excitement, without many a desire and emotion of his youth awaking and clamoring for its deferred due. But his desires had grizzled with his beard: he had analyzed the emotions and discarded them. Where the passions are concerned intellect is never impartial. It must be either oil or water—foster or extinguish. And he had chosen once for all the harder way. He was full of shyness, constraint, and the panic instinct of flight: shocked yet arrested, like some hermit of the Libyan desert watching the phantoms of his old life at Rome or Alexandria beckon him from his cave. Not only was the old dispensation void. He could imagine no ground upon which it could be renewed. His authority had been one of those gentle tyrannies of heart over heart, that are valid only so long as they are unquestioned. Having claimed her liberty, though it was but for an hour—resumed the possession of herself though it was only to dazzle his eyes—Fenella became to him from that moment a new woman, to be wooed and won afresh; and, being a wistful far more than a lustful man, in the very measure that the delayed revelation of her beauty penetrated his senses, he shrank further and further from its recapture.

It must have been a strange sight, had any been there to see it. The dying fire; the shadowed moon; the man with his head bent above his knees; and the barefooted girl, with fluttering skirts and dishevelled hair, singing and dancing on the sand before his averted face.

IV

TO INTRODUCE PAUL INGRAM

Exactly why it should be I who sit down to write of the loves and errors of Paul Ingram, his descent into hell and resurrection therefrom, is a thing that is not quite clear to me now, but which will not become clearer the more I try to justify it. It is certainly not because I was at one crisis of his life the instrument to save him, since I know how very careless Fate can be in the choice of her instruments. I am not his oldest friend, nor should I care to say—his dearest. We have done a good deal of work together—shared a good deal of opprobrium. I still bear upon my forehead the mark made by a stone that was meant for a better man, on the wild night when the Home Defence League roughs broke up our meeting at Silvertown. Yet, and notwithstanding, I am by no means sure, should the inevitable happen in my own lifetime, whether, of all the disciples who pass from the oration at the graveside to the whispers over the funeral baked meats, mine will be the pen chosen to write the life—mine the fingers authorized to untie the letters—of Paul Ingram, novelist, dreamer, and reformer.

A good deal of what I have written I was witness to myself; a good deal more I learnt from Ingram during what, with so many cleaner and pleasanter ways of leaving the world, we all hope will be his last illness of the kind; and a not considerable part has been told me by his wife, for whom it is notorious that I entertain an affection as hopeless as it is happily engrossing. Even so, when all is admitted, each part assigned to its proper source of inspiration, I am aware a good deal will remain unaccounted for. This I have no alternative but to leave to the sagacity of my readers. Even to their discretion—a little.

To begin with myself, only that I may get myself the sooner out of the way. My earlier years I have regarded from different points of view at different periods of my life. It is only comparatively lately that I have attained the true point of view and come to see that all the early portion should be regarded as a joke. For what legend can ask to be taken seriously whose sole remaining evidence is a small white towel, of the sort technically known, I believe, as "huckaback," lying folded now in a drawer of the desk at which I am writing. Two simple motions of the extensor and flexor muscles of one arm, and the proof of former greatness might lie beneath my eyes. But I will not make them. I know too well what would happen next. My fingers would not rest until the smooth bleached folds were shaken loose, nor my eyes until, written in indelible ink that successive launderings have only made blacker, the following legend appeared before them:

"J. B. Prentice.
Between-Maid—No. 8."

You see, when a man has fallen, suddenly, from a great height, he is not expected to record his impressions as the third, the second, the first floor windows flashed successively past his startled eyes. He wakes up, if he wakes at all, in a nice, cosy atmosphere of iodoform, neatly and securely packed in antiseptic dressing, with a fluffy, frilly angel at his side, who has been waiting for those tired, tired eyes to open, and who puts her finger to her lips, the moment they do, for fear her voice shan't reach the muffled ears, and says—you know what she says—

"Lie still! You're not to talk nor to agitate yourself."

So I don't propose to agitate myself, and though I've only just begun to talk, it shall be of something better worth while. Farewell, then, for the last time, great showy mansion among the Chislehurst hills, with your orchard and shrubberies, flower gardens and pergolas, your pineries and fineries, your two great cedars, inlaid in the pale enamel of the sky, and shaven lawns, across which and toward the pink-striped marquee a butler hurries with an armful of white napery and flashing silver. And to you, dear little fellow-worker—Polly or Molly or Betsy, as the case may be—who once wiped your honest, grimy phiz on No. 8, a quite especial grip of the hand, wherever you be to-day. Your reproach long since kissed away, I hope; suckling some good fellow's children; cooking some good fellow's meals. Life is so hard on the between-maid.

When I awoke it was in a Pimlico bed-sitting-room, writing literally for dear life, and for life that is growing dearer each year. I have a fatal facility for descriptive writing, and my speciality is the psychology of crowds. As old Winstanley of the Panoply would say when assigning me to anything I was to write up from the non-technical point of view, Aeroplane Meet, Palace Cup-tie, Royal Progress or what not: "Off with you, my boy! Column and a half, and a little more 'tripe' than last time. Turn 'em all loose, 'the hoarse cheer,' 'the lump in the throat,' and the 'mist over the eyes.' Don't be afraid! People have time for a little sentiment on Sundays."

I think they have. And I think I'm a witness to the price they are prepared to pay for it. Once a year, too, I write a novel whose circulation, for some occult reason, always stops short at eighteen hundred. Often when I'm reporting a football match, or anything like that, I try to count eighteen hundred, roughly, and imagine how my people would look all bunched together. A good many readers, but—what a gate!

Of all the pranks America has played upon us, I count not the least its having sent us an Ingram as a recruit to the cause of reform. The name is familiar over there, but it is quoted, I fancy, rather as a peg upon which would-be subverters of established anarchy hang their arguments than as authority for democratic ideals. Colonel Ingram, of Omaha, president of the Mid-West Chilling and Transportation Syndicate, is of the family; so is the Hon. Randolph Ingram, the great "Corporation Judge" of the Supreme Court. Jared Ingram, of Milburn, author of that contribution to Christian Unity, "A Rod for the Back of Dumb Devills," was one ancestor, and Elmer Ingram, the soldier-lawyer who helped to bait Arnold to his treason and damnation, was another. These names are not the fruit of any research on my part: I cull them from a little book which I saw at Ingram's rooms quite early in our acquaintance, and which, with a smile at my curiosity, he was good enough to lend me. It was one of those boastful little pamphlets "for private circulation," which are multiplying across the Atlantic, as a caste which has secured an undue share of material welfare becomes conscious of its origins and uneasy amid the obliterations of the democratic spirit. Of those we love, however, even the generations are dear to us, and I insist on recalling, with vicarious pride, that "Hump. Ingraham and Damaris his wyffe," who landed at South Bay from the brig Steadfast in Worcester year, and rode off, saddle and pillion, through forest paths to the clearing where their home was to be raised, were of good and gentle English stock, from Ministerley in Derbyshire. Sweet little Damaris (one almost loves her for her name) wilted and died within the year, but the task of increasing and multiplying, and getting hold of the land, was taken up by a sterner and, let us hope, stronger, Deborah, eight months later, and thence the seed has spread, through a riot of Bestgifts, Resolveds, Susannahs and Hepzibahs, broad of breast and hip, strong of limb, stout and undismayed of heart. Westward—always westward. Across Ohio and Indiana, striking its roots north and south in farm and factory, store and workshop; halting here for twenty, there for thirty, years, but always, as a new generation grows to manhood, up and away again. Over the plains in crawling wagons, too impatient to await the harnessing of the iron horse—the riveting of the strangling fetters of steel: through the lawless and auriferous canyons of Colorado and Nevada: blown along on the mad wind of the 'forties and 'fifties, until, amid the grapes and roses of the Pacific slope and upon the pearly Californian beach, a wind, warm and wasted and very old from across the great still ocean, whispered them, "Thus far!"

Paul was the last Ingram that will ever be born in the old homestead. His father he never saw; his sister died as a girl, and his mother, struck down by some obscure woman's disease, moved, within his memory, only from her bed to her chair, and from her chair to her bed again. He says he was a lazy, loafing, dreamy boy, with very little interest in anything beyond his meals; but the beautiful words in which he has enshrined that early home for us are proof how busily his brain must have been employed in those seemingly idle hours, and how keenly the spiritual significance of all that he saw came home to him from the first. Probably in the mere work of the house there was not enough to occupy strong, bony hands, such as his. Successive mortgages had nibbled the property away piecemeal, sparing only the house and yard; and even for that the last mortgage was running a race with death. He went to free school, but seems to have had few companions of his age. The village was depopulated; the house-doors opened only on old faces. He used sometimes to sit alone through a whole summer afternoon, he has told me, swinging on the garden gate and whittling wood. From the fence an old beaten track led away, through a marsh where a few ducks quacked and waddled still, up the shoulder of a little hill, and away around one of those woods of second growth that have sprung up all over the old pilgrim clearings—right into the heart of the setting sun. Often, he assures me, on looking up quickly from his whittling, he has seen an arm and hand beckoning him westward, from the edge of the trees. Set aside the stubborn mysticism that could conceive such a vision, and can still maintain its actuality—is not the picture a sufficiently haunting one? Within, the mother, waiting for death; outside, the lad, straining to be gone. And the old wattled kitchen chimney, smoking thinly, and the red glory through the sapling wood, and the drowsy quack of the ducks!

After Mrs. Ingram's death the mortgage foreclosed upon the farm and its contents with the precision and completeness of a highly organized machine. It is proof how forced a growth the modern cult of the family in America is, that it never seems to have occurred to son or mother to appeal to any of the prosperous breed whom the old house had sent forth. The land had long been earmarked for the great weighing-scale factory that has since galvanized Milburn into strenuous life, and made it a sort of industrial model, which commissions and deputations from Europe are taken to see, presumably, says Ingram, as a warning to what devilish lengths efficiency can be carried. The old homestead was torn down to make a site for the boiler-house. Nothing is left of it now except one rafter, in the lavishly endowed Museum, with what is presumably an Indian arrow-head still embedded in the wood.

I am bound to add that my indignation upon the subject never roused Paul to a corresponding heat. To his mind, already set upon first causes, no doubt it seemed very natural, a mere incident in the exploitation that dubs itself progress. He ate his last meal in the despoiled kitchen, warmed his coffee over a few sticks on the hearth that had burned away ten forests, and set off, by the path up the hill and round the corner of the wood, to wherever the arm might be beckoning him.

The lad was only fourteen when he left home, but tall and strong for his years. He tramped to Philadelphia, "jumped" the freight by night as it pulled out of the clattering, flaring yard, was shunted into a siding at Scranton, forgotten, and found there three days later starving and all but mad. From Scranton he beat his way to St. Louis; washed dishes and set up pins in a skittle alley; tired soon of the smoke and blood-warm water of the old French city; fed cattle in the stockyards of Kansas, wrestled a drunken brakeman for his life on the roof of the rocking, bumping cars halfway down the Missouri canyon, and wrestled him so well that the man begged a job for him at the journey's end. He was jacking wagons in the Union Pacific workshops at Rawlins when the White River expedition came through, and joined the force as teamster at a dollar a day. He smelt powder for the first time, lay trapped for ten days in the stinking corral at Snake River, when the water failed and the relief went wide, and "Bummer Jim" and "Flies Above," having thoughtfully strewn the carcasses of three hundred slaughtered horses to windward, serenaded the poisoned pale-faces nightly with copious obscenity, the burden of which was "come and be killed." After the relief and disbandment of the force, he stayed on in the Rockies and grew to manhood amid the silent aromatic barrenness of its mesas and arroyos. Settlers were dribbling into the old Indian reservation. He was in turn horse-jingler, range-rider, prospector, stage-driver; built fences, freighted logs, dug ditches; spotted the banks of Bear Creek and Milk Creek, with his campfires and tomato tins, and was happy, until something, indefinable as the scent that steals down wind to the hunted stag, told him that the civilization from which he had fled was hard upon his heels again. He left Colorado the year before the railroad came through, and turned his face east again.

I know I am telling the story of Ingram's early life very baldly and badly. You see, there is so little romance in it; just the instinctive repulsion that one so often notices in the history of the world's reformers toward the thing they are to do battle with in the end. As Paul used to tell it himself, leaning forward over the fire in my stuffy little sitting-room, his strong, lean hands clasped round the bowl of his pipe and the smoke drifting lazily about his moustache and beard, it was only from an occasional gleam of the deep-set eye or quiver of the thin nostril, as he talked, that one could gather how deeply every lesson of force and fraud had sunk into his soul, to bear its fruit later in unalterable resolve. I never saw him really moved from his stoicism but once. We had been walking home together from dinner through the West End streets and had been unwilling witnesses of a sordid detail of their policing. A woman, crying and screaming, was being led away, not roughly, I think, but very determinedly, by two men in blue. Her hair had come loose, and one great curl hung to her waist. Her fur stole had tumbled in the roadway, and some careless Samaritan had thrown it over her shoulders, besmearing the velvet coat with mud. We were very silent during the rest of the walk, and when we got to my rooms Ingram unbosomed himself.

It was when he was working his way back east in the shiftless and circuitous fashion that had become habitual to him. He got off the train at a small city, the seat of a state university. He wouldn't tell me the name, but I imagine it was somewhere in the Southwest. It was eight o'clock on a fall morning, the hour at which the stores are opening and the saloons being swept out. As he left the depot, his grip in his hand, on a hunt for breakfast and work, he became aware of some unusual excitement. Men were leaving their houses, collarless and in shirt-sleeves—calling to one another and running down the street. At the end, where it joined the main business avenue, a crowd had gathered—old men, young men, even children, and a few women. "And what do you think they were watching? Well, sir, there in God's blessed morning light, three women in silk dresses, with satin shoes, and bare heads and shoulders, were sweeping the filthy street with brooms and shovels and pitching the mud into a zinc handcart. Think of it, Prentice! Every one of them somebody's daughter—some mother's little girl. They were all good-lookers; but one, who might be my own child to-night, had a face like an angel—fallen if you like—with a slender neck such as the artist men we've been talking to to-night rave about, that's got those cute little blue shadows where it joins the shoulders. She was the one that had the spade. A man in the crowd told me what it all meant. They were sporting girls from a joint that had been pulled three times in the last month. The magistrates had got tired, and, instead of fining them, had worked in a state law two hundred years old that treats such women as tramps and vagrants and sets 'em to scavenging. 'And I guess,' my man adds, 'that's where they b'long all right.' He was a patriarchal old billy-goat, Prentice, with a nice long Pharisee beard, and, I'll bet, a sin for every hair. While he was pitching me his simple lay, my little girl looks up, and, either seeing I was a stranger or because mine was the only face there wasn't contempt in—or worse—gave a sort of heart-breaking smile; and just as I was trying not to see it, a lad behind me, with his hat over his eyes and a cigar sticking out of his cheek, calls out:

"'Get on to Mamie, fellows, with the mud-scoop!'

"Well, Prentice," (Paul breathes hard) "I hit him, clean and sweet, on the cheekbone, just under his damned leering swine's eye. It was very irregular: I suppose I should have given him a chance, but, by God! I couldn't wait. I've had to fight all my life, in warm blood and cold blood, but I've never hit a man as hard as that before or since. He went down like a skittle, and I thought I'd killed him; but the boy was full of gall and devil, and knew a lot besides. He fought me five minutes good before they carried him into a drug store. And how those canting woman-drivers came round! They wanted me to drink, wanted to carry my grip—asked me to name the job. But I went and sat in their depot, without breakfast and with a face like a boil, for four hours until the next train pulled out. I shook their mud off my feet pretty smart. I'd have thrown away the shoes if I'd had another pair. But I couldn't shake off what I'd seen.

"No, no, Prentice," he went on, stubbornly, as I, with my cockney worldly wisdom, tried to argue him out of what I thought an unhealthy view of a vexed question; "No, sir: you can split men up into sheep and goats, bad cases and hard cases; but women stand or fall together. Everything you do to one you do to the rest. On every woman's face—good or bad, white or black—I've seen since, down to that woman to-night, I've seen the shadow of the same wrong."

He was twenty-five years old when the desire of seeing Europe took hold on him. He had no money, and, though he was strong and handy, there was nothing he could do that any other strong man could not do as well. He had his health, however, and staked that. Wages were high in one department of the smelter at Leadville, for reasons that forced themselves on the bluntest intelligence after a few months. He worked there for a year, laying money by and fighting with the nausea that grew upon him week by week. At the end of the twelve months, reeling, half-blind, and with his teeth loose in their gums, but with more money in his pockets than he had ever owned before, he turned his face to the healing desert. An old miner turned ranchman found him at sunset lying under a rock, his face pressed to the earth, and quivering, like a landed trout, in the full grip of the deadly lead-sickness. He laid him across his pony, took him to his mud-roofed hovel close by, kept him for six months in his own blankets, gave him all the milk of his one cow, drove him to the railroad as soon as he was able to travel, and—bade him God-speed with a torrent of invective that struck even Leadville dumb. Ingram had committed the capital error of offering him pay for his hospitality, an error over which I believe he broods to-day.

By the time he was fit to work again his savings were gone. He was twenty-six, and Europe as far off as ever. This time, having damaged his health, he staked his reason, and for two years herded sheep on the Wyoming plains. Herding sheep seems at first cry a simple, pastoral task, with Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Biblical Associations. I must take Paul's word for it, then, that some special danger either to body or soul attends it, and that few men retire from it with a competence except to go into a madhouse or found a new religion. In either case, he says, they will have seen "Hell on the plains." The day before Ingram left for the sheep country he bought for a few dollars the entire stock of a misguided Englishman who was trying to sell second-hand books in Cheyenne City, loaded them into his grub-wagon and read them, slowly, one by one, in the exact order or disorder in which they were packed, and with a cold fear at his heart as the second year drew to a close, that his shepherding would outlast them. It seems absurd, but, as far as I can gather, this has been Ingram's sole literary education.

Either the wages of loneliness, or, I fancy, something else of which he has not told me, must have given Paul his heart's desire, for, two years afterward, at the recruiting office in the Rue St. Dominique, which has been many a good man's alternative to Seine water or the cold muzzle-end, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion.

Whatever his reasons for this step (and I never was told them), I think the five years that Paul spent under the iron discipline of the Legion cured what, with all due allowance made for the strange ways by which men find themselves, was becoming an incurable unrest. Among the sad middle-aged soldiers who were his comrades, many of whom had come a longer and a stranger way than he, to find a hard bed and a bloody grave at the end, something, I believe, which he had roamed the world a-seeking and which had evaded him till now, was found at last. Out of that uneasy human cauldron, into which the deserter casts his broken oath, and the roué his disillusionment, and the unloved his loneliness, and the branded their shame, and to which, as long as it or its like shall endure, from time to time the artist will turn for inspiration, the brave man for opportunity, the coward, perhaps, for the stimulus which his own quailing heart denies him, and the saint for relief of temptation, and the hungry for bread, a vision, I believe, did arise for this lonely, unlettered American which the others missed, a knowledge was gained that all the schools and universities of the world could not have taught him: the vision and the knowledge of the human heart.

He was thirty-four years old when he left the Legion—a little gaunt and worn. He had given the world twenty years' hard service, and had a worsted stripe on one arm for his earnings.

V

"SAD COMPANY"

I first met Ingram by chance at the old Café à peu près in Greek Street. The À peu près of those days was far from being the institution which, in the capable hands of Philippe, the sulky waiter, who took to himself Madame's moustached daughter plus Madame's economies, it has since become—an over-lighted, bruyant restaurant of two stories and a basement, wherein an eighteen-penny meal of six exiguous courses, served at inhospitable speed to hurried suburban playgoers, is raised to the dignity of a diner français by various red and yellow compounds which masquerade under the names of the old French provinces of the midi. Then it was nothing but a secluded back room, panelled and painted green, with an oval table in the centre, round which the little circle of which I was, if not an ornament, at least an accredited unit—free lances of the press, war correspondents stranded during lengthening periods of peace and ill-will among nations, obscure authors and unbought painters—met nightly to dine and to nurse our chilled ambitions, under Madame's supplemental smile and in the warmth of a roaring fire which, during nine months of the year, was burning under the heavy Jacobean mantel.

Strangers were not exactly resented at the À peu près, but by an elaborate unconsciousness of their presence, to which the Oxford manner of one or two of us was a great assistance, we contrived for a long time to keep the circle restricted. Thus it happened that the bronzed and bearded man who spoke French so volubly at coming and going, and who seemed so little discountenanced by our exclusive attitude—glad, indeed, to be let alone—had been an irregular visitor for some weeks before we entered upon any conversation. One night the talk had turned, as it often did, upon the strong British preference for death as a preliminary to appreciation in matters literary or artistic, and little Capel, burrowing, as the subject drooped, into the obvious for a suitable remark, repeated that well-known legend—Milton's ten pounds for "Paradise Lost." The big man at my shoulder laughed.

"Fancy," said he, "any one getting as much as that for a poem to-day."

I turned, before the guard had descended on his eyes, and saw in them an expression that I, of all men, should recognize at the first glance: the sickness of the literary hope deferred.

We had become sufficiently intimate for me to receive a call from him, at my rooms, during an attack of the gout, which is an inheritance from Chislehurst, before he mentioned his book. I grieve to-day, remembering how often he was on the point of doing so, and waited in vain for the word from me that would have made the task less irksome than, I am sure, it was at last. By what I know now isn't a coincidence, his final appearance in Pimlico with the dreadful brown-paper parcel under his arm followed upon a period of three or four months during which he had practically disappeared from my consciousness. He looked worn, I thought, and had a new trouble in his eyes. He told me his story shamefacedly, and stammering like a schoolboy.

He had written a book, a novel, and could not get it published. None of the houses to which he had offered it advanced any reason for rejection, and in the one or two cases where he had pressed for one, seemed to think his insistence a solecism. He understood I not only wrote but published. Would it be troubling me unduly.... If I wasn't too busy....

Well, it was a great worry. I was busy just then too, after my futile fashion; but somehow it didn't seem the thing to have that man stammering and blushing before a wretched little ink-slinger like myself, and I tendered the vague service that is known as one's "best." But I was unaffectedly sorry the thing had happened. It is such happenings that, in literary circles, write FINIS to many a promising friendship. Ten men will lend you a pound for one that will lend you his countenance.

It was six o'clock the next morning when my lamp suddenly flared and went out. I stretched myself—realized that the fire was out as well, that I was cold and stiff, that dawn was coming up over the roofs of the stuccoed terrace opposite, and that the reason I had forgotten light and fire and the march of time lay in a disreputable, dog-eared typed manuscript that I had begun in weariness, gone on with in half-resentful surprise, and finished in a complete oblivion of everything save the swift rush of joys and fears, sorrows and mistakes to a doom that never befell. I remember a funny swelled feeling, as though I had been crying internally.

It is late in the day to attempt a criticism or even an appreciation of "Sad Company." Even as it stands to-day, in the close stereotype of the popular reprint, it is flawed and marred to my mind with many a naïveté and rawness, with here and there one of those lapses into the banal that are an evil legacy to American literature from the days of Poe and Hawthorne. Imagine what it must have been before, fearfully and reverently, for I knew I was handling a masterpiece, I helped brush off a little of the clay that still clung to it from the pit in which it had been cast.

What I did, then and there, was to sit down, chilled and numbed as I was, in the raw morning light, and write to Ingram bidding him, on pain of perpetual displeasure, repair to me that evening, to be severely rebuked for his presumption in having, without previous apprenticeship or servitude, taken his livery and chair with the pastmasters and wardens of his craft. This letter I carried downstairs through the sleeping house, tremulous with the good consciences of my fellow-lodgers, and slipped it in the pillar box at the corner of the crescent. I remember I even chuckled as I posted it, to the evident surprise of the stolid policeman who had wished me good morning. You see, I thought I was making literary history.

I am sorry to say that my enthusiasm didn't communicate itself to Paul. Six mute and incurious publishers were sitting too heavily on his self-esteem for that. He even took their part, with a perversity I have noticed before in the misunderstood of the earth. I have a theory that books like his are posthumous children, and that the state of mind which created them dies in giving them birth. What enraged him—what baffled him, because it was contrary to every lesson his strenuous life had taught him—was, that so much effort could be all in vain. I imagine he wrote the book with difficulty and without conscious exaltation of spirit.

"If I had put as much pains," I remembered his saying, "into any other thing I've set my hand to, I should be either a famous man, or a very rich one, to-day, Prentice."

And then, returning to the old grievance, that I could see had become a prepossession—

"And yet—six men can't be all wrong."

"Of course they can," I exclaimed indignantly, "and sixty."

He shrugged his shoulders wearily. "What can a man do, then?"

"One thing you can do," I answered severely, "is to sit down opposite me for a few hours a week and alter some of your modes of expression. I've made a list of some: Listen here!

"'Brightly shone the snow on the roof of the Rio Negro County Farmers' Institute.' You mustn't say that."

"Why not?" asked Paul, simply; "it's the name."

"If you don't know why, I can't tell you. You must take it from me that such a thing, in England, will almost secure rejection of itself. Then again: we don't talk of a man's 'white linen shirt bosom.' The word is de mode for a woman, but used for a man, it's offensive. And to say that Celia 'cached the mail-bags in a wash-out,' conveys no meaning at all to us."

Paul laughed out, and suddenly looked ten years younger.

"Sit down," he said, "and 'fais feu!' Don't spare me!"

But the revision was a thankless task. Only a determination on my part that such a book shouldn't be lost supported me through it at all. Paul came to work irregularly, and in a mood that oscillated between a careless acceptance of every suggestion I made and a peremptory refusal to consider any alteration at all. But it was done at last, and I admit I waited hopefully for news from Carroll and Hugus.

After three weeks, in fact, I got a postcard asking me to call. Bonnyman was sitting in his sanctum, looking as young and as wise as on the day he came down from Balliol, and with his habitual air of finding the publishing trade a great lark.

"How's the industrious Prentice?" he cried, as soon as he saw me. "What's he been doing with himself these many moons?"

I shook hands and sat down. I profess I have never felt so jumpy when work of my own has been in question.

Bonnyman put his finger to his forehead. "What did I want to see you about, Prentice?... Oh, yes!" He touched an electric button on his desk.

"Byrne!" said he to the clerk who answered it, "bring me down 'Sad Company.' I sent it up to the packing-room the day before yesterday. It ought to be ready."

My heart sank into my boots. "Aren't you going to publish it?" I faltered.

Bonnyman shook his head.

"No go, my boy! No go at all. You've brought it to the wrong shop."

"It kept me awake a whole night," I flashed out angrily.

Bonnyman smiled and yawned. "Kept me awake too, because I'd slept in the afternoon trying to read it."

"Oh! come now, Bonnyman," I protested. "You know better than that. Take the one scene alone," I went on eagerly, "where Holt is sitting with his dead wife, and the step-daughter comes to the door and he won't open because——"

But Bonnyman went on shaking his head with the impenetrable self-confidence any man acquires in time who exercises an habitual right of veto.

"Hugo and water!" he said. "Who can't write it? No, Prentice. To tell you the honest truth we're cutting out a lot of this problem stuff lately. What we're specializing in at present is the 'light touch.' The 'light touch,'" he repeated, illustrating what the world is hungering for, delicately, with an ivory paper cutter on his blotting-pad.

"'Polly Prattlings!'" I sneered.

"And d—d good stuff, too. Bring me some one like that, Prentice, and we'll talk.—Don't get angry, old man! Who is your little friend? American, ain't he?"

I nodded gloomily.

"Why don't he get a Rhodes scholarship and learn how to write English?"

"He's thirty-five," I said; "he's been all round the world and done everything."

Bonnyman pulled a long face that sufficiently disposed of Ingram's future. The brown-paper parcel was brought in and I slunk away with it under my arm, like a man repulsed from a pawnshop.

I didn't see Ingram for a long time, and was secretly glad of it. For I had no good news to give him. Other publishers were equally emphatic, with unimportant variations of delay and discourtesy. I don't say I lost faith in the book, but I did begin to doubt whether, in the present state of things, great work was worth while. It was too much like giving grand opera on a raft in mid-Atlantic.

At last, when I'd practically exhausted the firms I knew, and was beginning to wonder whether we wouldn't have to come down to a publication "by special arrangement," or a setting up in linotype by one of the smaller provincial weeklies, an idea flashed into my head. I knew one great writer, a woman, American, too; fashionable, rich, but with a passionate reverence for all that was worthiest in letters. She had succeeded by means of a brilliance and impetuosity of style that had literally stormed the defences of dullness. In her books I had noticed an underlying mysticism that I thought might find Paul's work akin. It was a ticklish undertaking, and I hadn't done screwing up my courage to it when Ingram suddenly reappeared. His long arm pushed open the paper curtained door of the sanctum where we dined, one raw night in June. By his side was absolutely the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She wore a long purple coat, cut very smartly, and a big ribboned hat, and was swaying a little from side to side as though the lapsed rhythm of some tune she had just heard was still in her feet. She glanced round shyly but brightly and bowed with a pretty blush to Caulfield. We all gaped, and old Smeaton's pipe suddenly smelt very foul.

"Don't move!" said Ingram, as I made room for them at my side. "I haven't come for dinner. Just to ask if you've had any news, before I go away."

"No news at present," I confessed. "But I hope to have some soon."

He smiled a little grimly, and felt in his long rubber coat for a pocketbook.

"If anything turns up in the next month or so, write me here," he said, and handed me a card with an address scrawled across its face. "I'm going to France for a few weeks. Come, Nelly!" and was gone with his companion as abruptly as he had come.

"'Beauty like hers is genius,'" Capel quoted, breaking the silence with an air of saying something apposite, for once.

"Who's the pretty lady, Caulfield?" asked old Smeaton. "She bowed to you."

"She's a little person I've met at dances, and things," said Caulfield. "Goes round with the De Rudder woman. Does gavottes and pavanes and corantos and all that sort of thing. Pretty name, too,—'Fenella Barbour.'"

VI

A CHILD SPEAKS THE TRUTH

Fenella Barbour is the daughter of a clergyman of the Church of England, who remained unbeneficed to the end of his life. Younger son of a noble family, Scotch in origin but long settled in the Midlands, handsome, intellectual, and much yearned upon, the Honorable Nigel let opportunities for advantageous matrimony pass him one by one, to marry, comparatively late in his life and outside of his own class, a young parishioner with whose name the gossip of a small Cornish country town had spitefully and quite unjustifiably coupled his. To the day of her death Minnie Trevail never quite got over the surprise with which she received her pastor's offer of an honorable share in board and bed, and, whether it was gratitude or an uneasy sense that principles which do not often make for a man's happiness had played her hand for her, the fact remains, that to the end of his brief married life the Reverend Nigel Barbour continued to be a sort of married bachelor, free to come or go unquestioned, with a fine gift for silence and without obvious enthusiasms, unless it were for the girl baby who would sit for hours by his study fire, as he wrote his sermons, scolding her doll in whispers, and to whose round cheek and fine dark curls his eyes strayed oftener and oftener during the last year of his life.

Similarly circumstanced, other women by study, by observation, by an endless self-correction, have lifted themselves in time to something like a mental level with the men who have perversely chosen them. Not necessarily from a sense of her own limitations, Mrs. Barbour never tried. It is possible that she never, deliberately measuring the sacrifice which the man had made for her good name, determined the first sacrifice should be the last, but at least the unformed idea governed all her conduct. She kept the ideals, the accents—inside the house even the dress—of her class. For the spiritual companionship which she could never give she substituted the silent and tireless service of Martha. When her baby was born, she would have had the pain and peril tenfold; pain and peril so dimly comprehended by the man who smoothed her moist hair with an awkward hand, blinked his scholarly eyes at this crude and rather unseemly mystery, and, once assured the danger was past, went back to his weaving of words with a relief that even his kindness failed to conceal.

Nigel Barbour was one of the killed in the terrible Clee Level accident. He was returning from a New Year family gathering, the first he had attended since his marriage, and it is typical of their married relations that his wife never even "wondered" why she wasn't asked too. If reconciliation which should include her was on its way, his death disposed of the idea. Denied recognition during his lifetime his widow refrained, with what all her friends considered great lack of spirit, from attempting to win it after his death. He was uninsured, and, of the slender inheritance that devolved upon her, a great part consisted of house property at the "unfashionable" but expensive side of the Park. One of the houses, a great stuccoed mansion in a secluded square, happening to be empty at the time of her tragic bereavement, she assumed the tenancy, furnished it, and, reserving for herself only the basement and top floor, advertised discreetly but judiciously for lodgers.

Although the business is one that seldom shows a profit, and although in order to furnish the one house adequately she had been compelled to mortgage the freehold of the other, yet, if happiness be revenue, it is hard to see how she could have made a better investment. For the first time in her life she tasted liberty. She had her great house, her establishment, the direction of her three maids, and the intense respect of family butchers, family bakers, and family candlestick-makers in staid contiguous streets. On spring or autumn afternoons the champing and clashing of bits and hoofs outside her door, the murmurs of joyous life that floated along the hall and up the wide stairs, sounded no less sweetly in her ears because it was Miss Rigby or Lady Anne Caslon and not the Honorable Mrs. Barbour who was at home to all the fine company. The "Honorable Mrs. Barbour!" Often, in passing through the big bedrooms of the second floor, with clean pillowcases or window blinds over her arm, she would stop and look at her homely reflection in the long cheval glasses, with a little inward smile at the incongruity. And yet in her heart, so sensitive to the duties, so blind to the rights, of her equivocal position, the obligations which the barren title involved were tacitly acknowledged. If it conferred no privileges, it at least restrained her judgment upon the caste, a corner of whose ermine rested, however grudgingly, upon her own shoulder. She grew indisposed to gossip. Such of her relatives and friends as called upon her while upon "day-trips" to London found themselves cut short in their pursuit of one special branch of knowledge. They went home to Cornwall declaring that Minnie had grown "stuck-up."

But the rights which she abdicated so whole-heartedly for herself she claimed with an added fierceness for Fenella. The child was a miracle from the first. Even while it lay, a few pounds of pink flesh, in a corner of one arm and drained her breast, she was worshipping it, humbly and afar off. It is difficult to find words that adequately convey her state of mind toward her daughter without entrenching on a parallel that is sacred and therefore forbidden; but this much is certain: had the legal quibble which can prove a child to be no blood relation to its mother been propounded to Mrs. Barbour, it would have found in her a tearful and reluctant but convinced witness to its truth. For two successive nights before her baby's birth the same dream had visited her. The great house of her brother-in-law, which she had never seen, which her husband had never even thought of describing for her, had appeared to her, wrapped in flame. Pushing her way through the crowd that surrounded it and was watching it burn, after the inconsequent manner of dream people, with quiet satisfaction, she had run up tottering staircases and along choking passages, had reached a splendid room of state upon whose canopied bed a little naked infant lay, and, clasping it to her breast, had carried it out, smiling and unharmed. Fenella was no more truly her child than she was the child of the dream.

The little girl was four and still wore a black hair ribbon and a black sash over her pinafore, when one afternoon in October a big shallow barouche drove up to the door of No. 11 Suffolk Square. The springs were very high, the harness was very brightly plated, the chestnut horses, their heads held in by a torturing bearing rein, very shiny and soapy. A faded, artificial woman, with a tall osprey in her black bonnet, lolled back against the buff cloth cushions and regarded the world through a tortoise-shell lorgnette. A girl, quite young, with fair hair cut in a straight fringe across her forehead, sat up demurely at her side.

Fenella was taking tea in great state and composure on the window-seat of her nursery under the slates when the carriage drove up. A mug, on which Puss-in-Boots brushed back his bristling whiskers with one spirited paw, stood at her elbow, filled with a faintly tinted decoction of warm milk and sugar. A bun, delicately nibbled all round its lustrous circumference, was in her right hand, and a large over-dressed doll, with a vacant blue-eyed face, rested insecurely in the hollow of her left arm. From this household treasure her attention was just beginning to stray. James, the coachman, had pulled across the roadway, and was driving his fretful over-heated charges up and down along the railings of the Square. Fenella pressed her forehead against the cold window-pane.

"Gee-gees; gee-gees!" she soliloquized.

To her enter, without cue or warning, Druce the parlor-maid—also a little the nursemaid—in great excitement, and breathless after a non-stop run from the bottom of the house. The bun was snatched from the chubby fingers, Marianne saved, timely, from a headlong course to the floor, the Marquis of Carabas pushed unconstitutionally on one side, and the napkin whisked off, all in four brisk movements.

"Company for my little lady!" the excited girl exclaimed. "She is to have her pretty hair curled, and her best frock put on, and to go downstairs to see mamma's fine friends."

Nelly took the outrage with the docility that was one of her charms.

"Gee-gees, Drucie," she said, pointing over her shoulder as she was borne away. "Gee-gees in the Thquare."

The warm-hearted maid gave her a tight and quite unauthorized hug.

"Gee-gees, indeed! Well, they may trot! trot! trot! until their feet drop off, before they find anything finer than we're going to show them."

The carriage folk were in the front part of the big tastelessly furnished drawing-room, which ran the whole depth of the house, and which happened to be unlet at the time. A fire, just lit, was crackling and smoking sullenly. The elder lady sat, with a transient air, as much on the edge of a little gilt chair as is compatible with a seat at all. I am not quite certain whether vinegar can be frozen at certain temperatures or not. If so, her smile recalled the experiment. The young girl sat back in a velvet rocking chair, her slender black-stockinged legs reaching the ground from time to time as it oscillated. She had a little pale round face; her lank, whitey-gold hair was cut as straight at her waist as it was at her forehead. She had taken off her gloves, and the bony over-manicured fingers were interlocked in her lap with a sort of feeble repression. Near a table, covered with tea-things, but from which no hospitality had been dispensed, Mrs. Barbour was sitting, no less upright than her visitor. She was flushed and there was the fullness of suppressed tears round her eyelids, but there was as little sign of defeat in her face and attitude as in the other woman's unpleasant smile. The fine lady raised her lorgnette as the child was carried in. She turned languidly to her daughter.

"Your poor uncle's face. Oh, the very image!" she exclaimed, with an emphasis that extinguished any lingering idea poor Mrs. Barbour may have kept of a share in the matter.

Set upon the ground, the child beauty gravitated instantly to mother's skirts, and from this coign of vantage surveyed her visitors. Mrs. Barbour put the curls back from her forehead and stooped to her ear.

"Nelly," said she, "this is your aunt, Lady Lulford, your Aunty Hortense, come to see poor father's little girl. Won't you go and give her a kiss?"

The grasp tightened upon her skirt.

"Oh, shame!" the mother murmured, with a reproach in her voice that the glistening eyes belied. "Is this my kind little Nelly? Come over, then, with mother."

With a sidelong glance at the tea-table, Fenella was led, obliquely, across the thick new pile carpet, and received a kiss upon her forehead that was not much warmer than the window against which it had just been pressed.

"And now your cousin. Cousin——"

"Leslie," said Lady Lulford, covering a slight yawn with her golden card-case, and glancing out of the window toward her horses.

The girl's face seemed to yearn and melt as the reluctant little feet were guided to her. She pursed her pale lips and held out her thin arms. Fenella was to remember it years afterwards with a spasm of pity and indignation. But she was only a baby now, and struggled in the weak embrace. Once back at her mother's side, a violent reaction of shyness set in, and she buried her face in the maternal lap.

"Impressionable, too; like poor Nigel," the peeress remarked to her daughter in the same icy voice.

"Come," the mother coaxed, "hasn't Nelly a word to say? Her aunty"—Lady Lulford winched—"her aunty and cousin will think they've got a little dumb girl for a niece."

Fenella raised her face. "I weally——" she began, and, not finding encouragement to proceed, down went the black head again.

Mother lifts it gently.

"——was——" Nelly's finger went to her mouth. Her glance wavered, wandered tortuously along the floor, and finally and suddenly focussed the tea equipage.

"——in the middle of my tea." Louder and with sudden confidence as the full nature of the outrage was realized, "Weally was in the middle of my tea."

Lady Lulford smiled abstractedly. Leslie's lips moved. The mother drew her little girl closer.

"You shall have your tea presently, dear," she said, "but I want you to listen to me first. Now, tell me," she seemed to steady her voice, "how would you like to go into the country with your aunt and Cousin Leslie?"

Nelly's eyes grew big and round. "And mother?" added she, joining the palms of her hands, baby-wise, with stiff outspread fingers.

"No, dear. Mother must stay in London, because she has so much to do."

There was an agitation of the black curls, and from under them a most decided negative evolved itself.

"Oh, but my precious," the mother pleaded, as that other mother may have pleaded before the judgment seat of the great wise king; "just for a while; to see the green trees, and the moo-cows, and the bunnies, and, and——"

"The deer," said Lady Lulford, raising the conversation to a higher and, shall we say, ancestral level.

"Great—big—stags, baby," the cousin broke in, with her eager, unsteady voice, "great big stags with horns like this," and she made a pair with fingers that were almost as fleshless.

Fenella refused to weigh the catalogue of attractions a moment. The head shook faster and faster till the dark curls whipped first one cheek and then another.

"Not for a little while? Not for a few weeks?" Mrs. Barbour urged, almost roughly.

At this persistence in a quarter where it was so little to be looked for, two fat tears distilled themselves in Fenella's eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She opened her mouth, and I regret to say her face lost, temporarily, its attractive power. Mrs. Barbour snatched her up and sprang to her feet.

"She sha'n't be teased," she cried passionately, clasping the child to her breast. Then, turning quickly first to Lady Lulford and afterward to her daughter, "Don't you see she's too young now? She's only a baby, really. Perhaps later——"

The Viscountess turned upon her own offspring the cold ceremonial eye that on company nights lifted the ladies at Freres Lulford to their feet and up into the drawing-room.

"We must really go now, Leslie," she said, with a little explanatory wave of the card-case. "So many calls, you know. Well, Mrs. Barbour," turning to her hostess with an evident effort, "I suppose we mustn't expect you to decide such a matter in a hurry. For the present I think I may say our offer, Myles's and mine, stands open. I still think it is what poor Nigel would most have wished. And even if you should decide not to accept it now, remember, if at any time—at any time——" and in this golden air of good intentions Lady Lulford's visit ended.

"That is an ordeal well over, Leslie," she said, a few moments later, leaning back and closing her eyes slightly, as the carriage door slammed and the tall footman with a crook from the waist still in his long straight back, swung himself to his perch.

"Mother," said Leslie, nervously, pulling at her gloves, "we could hardly—could hardly——"

"Could hardly what, my dear? You are so disjointed at times."

"——expect her to give up such a pet," the girl said impulsively, with a gush of feeling that seemed to leave her colder and weaker than ever.

Her mother lifted the frozen gloved hand that seemed to blight like frost, and gave a little tinkling laugh.

"My dear, when you are my age you will not rate so highly what is a mere animal passion. True love would consider the child's material interests first. I still hope," with a little hostile back glance as the barouche rolled out of Suffolk Square, "that Nigel's daughter may not have to grow up in the basement of a lodging-house."

"The basement? Mother!"

"My dear, foolish girl, you surely don't think the room we were in to-day (atrocious taste!) is used by them. No, my dear! They live at the bottom of the area, eat and gossip with the servants; sometimes, I have no doubt, the policeman drops in to tea. The Honorable Mrs. Barbour!" And Lady Lulford gave her unpleasant laugh again.

"Mamma!" cried Leslie, really shocked now, "you don't suppose she uses that?"

"Why not, my dear? She's either very foolish or has more delicacy than I give her credit for if she doesn't. Why, she could have her house full of rich vulgar Americans all the year round. Are we at Lady Dunsmuir's already? Thank heavens, Leslie, we're not calling on the servants' hall this time."

Meanwhile, at the house they had left, an aggrieved small person sat on a cushion and comforted the ache at her heart very much after the fashion of older and presumably wiser people, with mother's rejected dainties. Stretched on a wolf-skin rug, in an attitude that had been a common one with her in days when, the Cornish sun dappling her back and making illuminating splashes on the novelettes that were her mental food, she had dreamed away whole summer afternoons thus in her father's orchard, the farmer's daughter watched the busy, sticky mouth at work, her face wholly given up to the animal affection that Lady Lulford was at that very moment reprehending.

"Why didn't you want to kiss your Aunty Hortense?" she asked presently.

No answer, but much sucking, as the sugary bottom of the cup was reached. The mother loosened the little fingers and put it aside.

"Come, Nelly," she urged; "answer mother!" Who has not coveted a child's thought at times?

This one seemed to consider.

"Be-tos," she said at last, cryptically, like some little Chinese oracle.

"Be-tos, of what? That's not any answer. And, oh, law! child, how backward you do speak for a great girl of four!"

Hard pressed, Nelly struggled to her feet. She clenched her little hands, puckered her forehead. The mother held her breath as she waited.

"Be-tos——Oh! be-tos she didn't smell nice!"

And, as the woman rolled back, shaking unrestrainedly with laughter.

"——like you do, mummy; like you do, mummy," the child cried, flinging her arms round her mother's neck and burying her flushed face in the soft shoulder.

VII

MOSTLY LADY ANNE

So the baby hands threw their dice, and as the dice fell the game was played out. Life unfolded itself amid the fog or rain or thwarted sunlight of the staid Tyburnian square, which should have had for tutelary deity some sleepy god, yawning and stretching himself in the centre of its smoky grass plot. Before the opening consciousness, like figures in an enchanted frieze, such phenomena passed as are likely to haunt area railings: The muffin man, tinkling his bell down murky streets and terraces at the uplifting hour of tea-time; the policeman with his bull's-eye lantern, waking the rails to a good-night dance along blank stuccoed walls and shuttered windows; broad hipped Welsh milkwomen in plaid shawls, with shining pails clanking from their wooden yokes; the old blind Dalmatian dog that panted at the corner of the mews and drummed the hot pavement with his tail. Once a year for one blissful month the town baby became a sand baby, building castles, scooping moats with her wooden spade for the tide to crumble (oh, Nelly! there's a tide that knows all our castles are sand); racing with bare-legged chance companions along the purring lips of the treacherous sea. Child of suppressed love and of absolute surrender, she grew up straight, strong and ardent; fair of face, light of foot, and with a pitiful, generous heart that could not wait its time to love, but before the dimpled hands could reach or turn the stiff handle of the hall door, had made to itself friends of the world's wretchedness. The old Garibaldian accordion player, with the twisted leg, learned to look for the little signorina, beautiful as the sun of Naples, which he dreamed of at night in his cellar at Saffron Hill; the ancient mariner with snow-white hair and beard (a terrible case! says the Charity Organization Society) kept a bow of quite especial condescension for Missie's penny at Number Eleven; while it was fine to see with what a sweep of his great red hand to his battered hat old Paddy Crimmin, the drunken Delhi hero, would straighten his racked body of a cold Sunday morning as the little creature, her dark face aglow with newly discovered color against the white road and snow-burdened trees, stopped at his crossing to grope with mittened fingers for the penny, nestling in her pocket next a sixpence which I am sure she begrudged the cold impersonal offertory plate later on.

She possessed her mother's life as a single flame possesses a dark room, creating its light, its color, and its motion. The slave does not always make the tyrant, and to the homely woman who tended her, kissed her limbs fragrant from the bath, twisted her curls round fingers that thrilled with love and worship—who coaxed her from forbidden ways with toys and sweets, and whose voice was never once pitched in even the gentlest accent of authority, Fenella gave her heart in return. All the fairies, it seemed, were at her christening, even to the fairy Gratitude, who, I hear, is not often asked out nowadays.

For her child's sake, and spurred on by love, Mrs. Barbour toiled and schemed incessantly. Far less mercenary of soul than the aristocratic patrons who haggled over extras, inspected cold joints with a questioning eye and wanted their rooms "kept over" while they disported themselves at Homburg or Cannes—naturally credulous in fact, and inclined to believe the best of every one, the woman effected an actual change in her nature and under all her suave manner became distrustful, peremptory, and mercenary. The terms she wrung from the butcher, baker, and grocer before mentioned, with the bait of prompt payment in one hand and the threat of the big stores at Brompton and Bayswater in the other, were, perhaps, as unprecedented as those easy-going family purveyors one and all declared them to be. In bed at night while she should have been sleeping, in church on Sunday when she should have been harkening the sermon, her brain was busy with an endless double entry sum of receipts and outgoings, the profit of which she wrote off, variously, but always under the one heading, something after this fashion: "Fenella Account. To an amber satin eiderdown quilt, same as I saw at Hampton's on Friday; to plum-colored silk stockings such as the lady at the end of No. 6 just now is making no attempt to conceal; item, to a black fox stole and toque—the silver pointed ones are cheaper, but they say the hairs come out; item, to a silver manicure set like Miss Rigby's." And the poor woman, absorbed in her fond calculations, would scribble an imaginary total with one wrinkled, black-gloved finger across the gilt cross of her Book of Common Prayer, to the scandal of her left-hand pew-neighbor, and the no small mystification of Fenella on her right, wondering what mummy was "up to now."

She kept the girl from school until she was twelve years old, making shift with whatever deposit of a church school education stayed in her own head, eked out with the ministrations of various depressing and untrained governesses, and last but not least with lessons from Lady Anne Caslon, whose only fault was that they were necessarily irregular. Lady Anne was the first of two permanent lodgers who, about Fenella's sixth year, made their home at Number Eleven, and, for a number of years, almost lifted Mrs. Barbour's precarious venture to the dignified level of a settled income. The rooms had only just been given up, by "parties" with whom money seemed to be no object, amid indignant tears on the one side and a glow of respectable resolve on the other; but Mrs. Barbour had not yet signified the vacancy through the columns of the Morning Post, while we need hardly add that no window-card ever shocked the susceptibilities of Suffolk Square. I suspect myself that the Lulford connection were anxious to confine the collateral skeleton within limits that could be controlled by them, and kept a furtively watchful eye on the room-letting branch of the family.

Lady Anne appeared on a blustering March morning: a short, middle-aged woman, none the less active because she limped from an old hunting accident, with a long, white, bony face—the face of some great mystic abbess of old days—a distinct prognathous of the lower jaw, and a high, narrow forehead, from which her colorless fair hair was tightly drawn and twisted into an absurd little knob at the nape of the neck. On every feature, movement, and accent was stamped the indefinable cachet of the governing caste. She was wearing a frieze coat and skirt, a man's collar and tie, and a green Alpine hat, carried an ash stick, and was pulling against, rather than leading, a hideous and powerful white bull-terrier, bristlingly intent upon the feline possibilities of successive areas.

She stumped through the vacant floors on her low-heeled shoes, rapped the wainscot as though she rather suspected secret passages, gave a derogatory poke of her ashplant to the feather mattresses, turned on both taps in the bathroom, and concluded her tour with a sudden descent upon the kitchen, where three maids, busy upon a noontide lunch, rose and curtsied awkwardly.

"I'll take 'em," she said abruptly, turning suddenly in the hall upon the aggrieved proprietress. "The rooms will have to be repapered of course—and a hard mattress, and I have my own pictures; oh! and you'll turn those tufty, musty armchair things with ball fringes into some other room, won't you?—like a good soul. Any children? I thought I heard——Down, Rock! Down, sir!"

The bull-terrier, tied to the hall-stand, had lain, whining unhappily, sweating, and wrinkling his pink muzzle, while his mistress roamed up and down stairs. Now he was standing, tense and rigid, growling ominously, at a tiny hand that pushed a biscuit hospitably against his clenched, bared teeth. Lady Anne struck the threatening head aside and lifted the child in her strong arms.

"So this is your little girl? This is Fenella?"

"Yes, m' lady," said Mrs. Barbour, hasty and apologetic in manner for all her secret resentment. "But she's a good, quiet little thing, and I'll see she gives no trouble."

Lady Anne did not answer. She had pushed back those rebellious curls and was brooding the flower-like face.

"Dear heart!" was all she said aloud, and the rest was murmured under her breath.

She set the child on the floor and held out the little nerveless hand, still clenched on the biscuit, toward the bull-terrier.

"You must be careful with strange dogs, baby, particularly this breed. They aren't like any other sort of dog. Take it, Rock!"

Rock crunched the biscuit wastefully between his powerful jaws.

"No crumbs, sir!"

He sniffed up about a third of the biscuit, which he had let fall on the tiled floor.

"Say 'Thank you.'"

The animal gave the small fist that was tendered him three enormous licks, and glanced at his mistress out of his savage pink eyes.

"That's right! Mustn't ever bite this one, Rock! She isn't a cat, and never going to be one either, I know."

"I hope the child will be no obstacle, m' lady," put in Mrs. Barbour, stiffly.

"Obstacle!" Lady Anne repeated. "God bless me, no. Why should she be? You must have your baby, I suppose, same as I have my dog. What's her name?"

"Fenella, m' lady."

"Very well. You be good to Rock—I'll be good to Fenella. I'll send a postcard when I've arranged things," she said. "Come on, Rock!"

"Why was the lady c'yin', mummy?" asked Fenella, whose accent still left much to be desired.

Mrs. Barbour could not enlighten her. She was wondering herself why the woman had first called her child Fenella and then asked her name. A conversation in the corner of the dining-room at the Palmyra Club half an hour later might have carried her mystification a little further.

"I don't think I'll do a matinée with you this afternoon, Brenda," Lady Anne was saying to her dearest friend. "Seeing Nigel's baby has rather upset me. I think I'll go to my room and howl for a bit."

"What's she like, Nanno?" asked the dearest, narrowing her eyes through the smoke of her cigarette.

"Nice, comfy, child-bearing sort of person. She has no airs. That was a lie of the Lulford woman."

"I believe," said Brenda Newcombe slowly, as if the opinion were the fruit of some thought and a little disillusion, "that's the sort most men like Nigel like in their hearts."

"Men like Nigel——!"

"Philosophers—I mean. Over-educated, ultra-refined. They divorce their intellect and their instincts so thoroughly that the result is——"

Lady Anne raised her shapely white hand deprecatingly.

"I know what you're going to say quite well, Brenda. You needn't finish it."

"To give one instance," went on the irrepressible Brenda; "did you never hear that Don Hinchey's wife has to wear print dresses and, oh! everything very plain when they're alone in Northumberland."

"Pshaw! Brenda; quel conte!"

"Nanno, it's gospel. She told Lady Carphilly, and Lady Carphilly told me. She wore them once to a fancy dress, and looked so well that now when Donny's bored he makes her put them on. She hates it, but he says it's the only way she can keep his love."

Lady Anne moved in as soon as the alterations that her austere soul demanded had been made; the walls hung with a paper that Mrs. Barbour compared scornfully but exactly to a dry mustard plaster, and various ebullient studies of still life removed to make way for old-wood engraved portraits and Alken sporting prints. She began the morning, violently, with a cold bath at seven; breakfasted—continentally—on dry bread and coffee at eight, and wrote nearly all the morning at a roll-topped Sheraton desk, whose drawers slid in and out on brass rails as smoothly as the oiled pistons of a machine. It was at this desk that Fenella stammered through her letters. Seated upon the highest chair the room afforded, made higher still by an Italian gilt leather cushion, the little girl spelled out the adventures of Tom and Dick, Nat and Ned, and other monosyllabic heroes of childhood. Nelly's attention wandered very easily. Her voice would die away to a murmur—her head fall lower and lower until the dark curls quite covered the heavy type and wood cuts, along which a very neatly pointed cedar pencil, held in a firm white hand, moved with such exasperating deliberation. Then she would begin to suck her thumb, and, finding no encouragement to relaxation of effort in the lowered lids and compressed mouth above her shoulder, would let her eyes wander round the room. Under the high white mantelpiece the fire burned cheerily, with little bubbles of gas and spurts of flame: above it, a silver clock set in a horseshoe ticked so quickly that the slow passage of the hands across its face was one mystery the more for the child brain to puzzle out. The room smelt like a man's, of morocco leather and boot cream, and the vague but piercing scent of naked steel in between. Under a curtain to the right of the fireplace, which did not quite reach the stained floor, Lady Anne's long boots, on high wooden trees, stood, an orderly row of eight polished toes, like booted eavesdroppers behind an arras. Over the "Melton Hunt Breakfast," between crossed hunting crops, a fox's mask still wore the grin with which it was twitching one December afternoon years and years ago when the mangled pelt smoked upon the raw Leinster air and little, ugly, hard-riding Lady Anne, in long bottle-green habit and flaxen pig-tail, was held up amid the yelping red muzzled pack and blooded to the hunt; while—most interesting and distracting of all—close to the fire, with his nose between his paws, deliciously unemployed, lay Roquelaure, blinking friendly eyes which seemed to say, in the secret language that children and animals share for a few short years—

"Oh! I say, baby, ain't lessons over yet?"

Three times a week, when her correspondence was done, and a wire basket full of square, rough envelopes with scarlet seals awaited the afternoon post, Lady Anne would go riding in the Park. She stumped through the hall in a short habit and wide-brimmed billycock hat, under whose elastic band the uses of the yellow-white knot of hair became suddenly obvious, looking more than ever like an abbess: a hunting, not a praying, abbess this time. Outside a stable lad from the mews held a tall, nervous horse by the head. Lady Anne would hold the child up to pat the hairy, quivering nose, bid her have no fear of the sliding eyes; would run her fingers down the horse's flanks and legs, maybe pick up and inspect a hoof cunningly; at last, jumping into her saddle out of the groom's hand, would straighten the sidling beast with one blow of her riding crop on his buttock, and be off, her right knee almost in line with the maned neck, and holding in the caitiff head with hands that were a proverb in the shires. Fenella always watched her out of sight, her eyes shining—the palms of her hands pressed hard together.

VIII

THE SECOND FLOOR

By this time Miss Rigby might possibly have arisen and be watching the horse and its rider through her curtains. Emilie Rigby was the second of the permanent paying guests. She was tall, languid, graceful and disorderly, of uncertain age, but with a growing opacity of skin and with darkening shadows under her short-sighted eyes to tell of the ebbing life forces within: much younger in the afternoon than in the morning, and recovering her youth hour by hour as the day aged. In her rooms on the second floor she led the spoiled, sensuous life of an odalisque or a Persian cat. She breakfasted in bed, lunched in a wrapper and with her hair coiled carelessly upon her neck, had a hot bath, with elaborations, at three, and left the house an hour later, in a cab whose destinations, despite all efforts of Druce and Kendal, remain conjectural to this day. She dined from home almost nightly, but had few correspondents, and her visitors gave Mrs. Barbour no anxiety. She had a telephone installed in her room, whose sharp summons soon became one of the habitual sounds of the dark, still house. The baffled Druce, carrying up an unascetic luncheon at one, frequently found the door locked in her face and was forced to wait until a conversation, punctuated with bursts of laughter and far too disjointed to be worth listening to through the keyhole, wore itself away. Lady Anne answered for her.

"Respectable?" she exclaimed abruptly, in response to a guarded query. "Of course Jasmine Rigby's respectable. We dined at the same house last month. Only, if I were you——" she hesitated, unwilling to spoil the perfect relief in her landlady's face, "if I were you, I wouldn't have Nelly in and out there too much, once she begins to grow up. Her clothes alone are enough to unsettle the girl."

But it is hard, with four servants and three households to control, to keep an efficient eye upon inquiring youth, whose fingers are already beginning to pluck restlessly at the many hued skirt of life; and the hardship becomes greater when you are filled with pity for a loneliness that is part of your own contriving. As long as Fenella was a very little girl, beyond coaxing her in now and then to pet as one would pet a pretty kitten, Miss Rigby took scant notice of the child. But as she grew in years and stature, and a beauty that was becoming more of the earth and less of the angels was confirmed in her, I am afraid the scented, sophisticated atmosphere of the second floor began to exercise its delayed but inevitable charm. One of those foolish intimacies began which almost every pretty young girl can remember, often with shame and impatience. There was a year when the woman, nearly forty, and the girl, not yet fourteen, were "Jasmine" and "Nelly" to each other; when little cocked-hat notes (oh, how deftly folded!) were apt to lurk under the doily mats on Fenella's dressing-table, to be answered by ignorant, misspelt letters from the blindly adoring child. The jaded woman of fashion and pleasure (no; I don't know what place she filled in her world, nor is speculation worth while) took an early opportunity of showing the little parson's daughter the beauty of her arms and shoulders—talked unreservedly before her, dressed her up in her gowns and lingerie, let her lie upon the bed and prattle while she herself sat before the mirror, waging her unwearied warfare with time—refreshed herself with the girl's homage, laughed away as much as she dared of her innocence, and finally, in a last spasm of confidence, unlocked a drawer, hesitated, and put into the girl's hands a bundle of letters, bidding her, with a flushed cheek and the ghost of a giggle, to read them over and to let her know how their literary beauties affected her. "When you've read them," said she, "maybe I'll tell you who they came from."

Fenella left the room puzzled, a little frightened, but with no instinct to tell her that possibly she was holding her damnation in her hand.

What happened next? One of those happy accidents, perhaps, that good angels know how to arrange. The packet was returned, unopened, next morning, by Lady Anne, in the course of an interview which left her fellow-lodger considerable repairs to effect before she faced the world anew. An hour later the good genius, habited for her ride, knocked timidly at the door of Mrs. Barbour's sanctum in the hitherto unvisited nether regions.

Mrs. Barbour rose to her feet when she saw who her caller was, but Lady Anne signed for her to remain seated. She seemed nervous and awkward, and put her hands to her side. They say her horse kicked her there the day she broke her ankle; oh! only a touch; no notice was taken of it at the time.

"I've come to speak about our little girl," she said, sitting down and crossing her booted legs.

Mrs. Barbour bridled a little; but youthful habits are strong. She resumed her deferential manner.

"I trust she has been giving no trouble, m'lady."

"She has perhaps exposed a meddling old woman to the worst snub of her life. I'm going to be crude, Mrs. Barbour. What on earth are you going to make of that child?"

Mrs. Barbour plaited the table cover, but seemed to have no answer ready.

"She's growing lovelier every day" (the foolish mother's eyes glistened); "she dresses like a little fashion plate; she has more silver stuff and finery in her room than any of us girls had at Castle Cullen; she hasn't a friend in the world nor an idea in her head; and we've an instance," with a glance up at the ceiling, "near enough at hand, where beauty with nothing else can bring a woman."

Mrs. Barbour's eyes began to fill. Not a single harsh truth but voiced a reproach that had been nibbling her own heart for years.

"Why don't you send her to school? Do you know that if you were a poor woman you could be fined or sent to prison?"

"Schools are so dear."

"Stuff! They're cheaper and better than they ever were. There's nothing young folk can't do now. You can go from a boarding school to the 'varsity on a string. Let's send her to school, Mrs. B.," she persisted. "You've no time to look after her, and neither have I."

"Not boarding school," the mother pleaded. "I couldn't be parted from her now."

"Who said anything about boarding schools? There are plenty of day schools. None of them are perfect, I know. But it can't be put off. All the danger isn't out of doors. Let her go and get a little honest mud on the bottom of her skirts, and come home every evening to have it brushed off."

The poor woman struggled with her trouble. "It isn't that," she said brokenly, "but—but, I can't explain it. There are things that don't brush off—ever. She is so ignorant of what the world thinks of—of people like me. They'll teach her it all at school; they'll teach her to despise her m-m-mother...."

She broke down and, burying her face in her hands, wept the unrestrained tears of her class.

"Oh, dear! oh, dear!" she moaned. "I knew it must come. She's so pretty—so pretty; such a little aristocrat. I'm only her mother by accident, really. And she'll make fine friends and be asked out, and wonder why she can't ask 'em back, and I'll have to tell her: 'Nelly, dear, it's because your mother is only a poor woman that father married to save her name, that lets lodgings to her betters for a living, and wouldn't let you go to your own people when they asked for you; and you can never have a friend of your own class as long as you live with her.'"

Lady Anne kept her arm across the broad, bowed shoulders.

"Let's try it," she said cheerily. "I'll answer for Nelly, and I think I can answer for the others. You have no conception how the world is changing. I have the very school in my eye, too. I know the principal. Sunlight and science, and knowledge that's innocent because it's thorough, and open windows upon life that blow away all the whispers in the corners, and a proper reverence for the body that, after all, is all we're sure of. As for the money—well, I'm a meddlesome old body, and you can heap coals of fire on my head by letting me be responsible. I don't blame you for spending money on her clothes: besides—Sharland College is dressy."

She wrote to her friend that night:

"Dear Louisa:

"I'm sending you a little girl who is the daughter of a dear, dead chum of mine. She's extravagantly pretty, very dull, quite poor—is being brought up as though she were an heiress and has a heart that I believe will prove a greater danger to her than her face or her poverty. For God's sake, Louisa, find out if she has any special talent that will help her to a living, and ground her and grind her until she's taken hold. I'm fond of the child, and shouldn't die happy if I thought there was any risk of her joining the one profession for which previous experience isn't essential.

"The old pain in the side has come back; the Swedish massage did it no permanent good. But I can still ride, so I don't squeal."

IX

SHARLAND COLLEGE

Fenella was nearly fourteen when she went to school. After Mrs. Barbour had seen her into the green horse-omnibus which at that date still rolled sedately westward along the Park paling the poor woman went home and, regarding with a stricken eye the untidy relics of a hurried breakfast, sat down and had a good cry. She would see her daughter again in a few hours, but her instinct told her that the parting was not one to be measured by time or distance.

At school Fenella achieved an instant success. At her lessons she remained a sad dunce, but Sharland College had the modern conception of bodily beauty as a supreme merit, and for its sake and also a little for the amiability that accompanied it, Nelly's shortcomings in algebra and geometry were forgiven and so mitigated by the assistance of plainer and cleverer girls anxious for her friendship as to be scarcely noticeable. She had become a fashion in the school before the end of her second term, and a host of extravagant, flattering nicknames attested this heady popularity. She was "Astarte" and "Principessa" in the higher forms; "Flash" in the gymnasium and swimming bath—a tribute to her bodily agility; "Zenobia" for one winter term, shortened into "Nobs" during a frenzied hockey rally and forthwith abandoned; "Greuzy" in artistic circles; while, oftenest of all and most eloquent of all—for it voiced the sense of a common possession—she was "Our Nelly." I do not know whether it is to her credit or discredit that the intimacy with Miss Rigby came to a sudden and unforced end in her first term. Poor Jasmine was forgotten or remembered only as a rather unhealthy dream. Fenella began even to refer to her flippantly as her "past"; "Ma, has my 'past' got up yet?" she would ask at midday on half-holidays when she came home to change for hockey or tennis and wanted to use the telephone.

It was upon wintry half-holidays that poor Mrs. Barbour felt her desolation most keenly. It did not seem to matter so much when she knew Nelly was working at school. There was a hungry and noisy return at half-past four to be looked forward to, and a whole golden evening during which she might knit and watch the dark head bent above the irksome home task. And in the summer she would not have had the child otherwise employed than in winning roses on lawn or river for the colorless cheeks that she was uneducated enough to think indicated a latent delicacy. But on rainy autumn afternoons, so brief and dark, with the fire burning cosily in the shabby parlor and only a prospect of forty feet of smoky grass, a leprous plaster cupid and the black wall of the mews to entertain herself with, it seemed unjust, even vaguely ominous to her peace, that her nestling preferred to beat her new-fledged wings out in the dark and cold. She never complained, but tried for a while to tempt her child to stay at home with her "favorite" books, her "favorite" armchair, a box of chocolates—poor ineffectual wiles that the short-sighted eyes of youth, set upon the quest of high-spiced pleasure abroad, passed over without seeing. There would be a hasty gobbled luncheon, taken standing, like the last meal in Egypt; a frenzied search behind old magazines that were never read and old music that was never played, for shoes and shin-guards—"Must have my new shin-guards to-day, mummy. Kilburn hack simply rotten—" a kiss, for the chocolates, given on the wing, and Fenella in red tam o' shanter and belted jacket of scarlet pilot cloth was off—through the area and up the steps.

"Expect me when you see me, mummy. I may chew with one of the girls."

She was not a religious woman, but she used to pray about this time, miserably and humbly, for her child's heart to be left to her. And, in the morning, between two mouthfuls of porridge, it was just possible that Fenella might look at her sharply, and say—

"What've you been doing to yourself, mummy? You look like a boiled owl this morning."

Who else was to notice that an old woman's eyes were red?

But there were times, also, which the mother came to look for, as sex stole inexorably upon the slangy, boyish woman-child, when the princess wearied of her kingdom, the tireless wings began to droop, and the fledgling crept under the old sheltering wing for comfort. She would come down after lunch, dressed in her house frock, sit down unexpectedly on her mother's knee, grip the broad shoulders, and held thus at arms' length, gaze at her for minutes together as though with some new knowledge in the steadfast eyes. She would cover her with tender names of disrespect—with cooing infractions of the fifth commandment. "Dear old fathead!" "Dear old stoopid!" "Silly old motherbird!" But she was strangely averse to the caresses with which her mother, always expansive, would have repaid the endearing insults.

"Don't kiss me, donkey," she would cry, breaking away. "Can't you see this is one of my touch-me-notish days? Hook me up the back and send Drucie out for some chocolates. I'm going to stop with you all the afternoon."

"Dearie," said the mother, timidly, one day, "won't the girls miss you and come looking for you?"

Fenella knit her brows, but did not look up from her book.

"Of course they know where you live, don't they, dear?"

"No—yes. Oh! I don't know. Mother, can't you see I'm reading?"

Next Saturday Fenella was "playing away." The mother, still pursuing a train of thought that had not really been interrupted during the week, was wondering whether it would not be possible, by sending Miss Rigby away (she had never cared for the woman), and by moving Lady Anne up one story, to take the whole of the first floor for herself and her child. The girl must have somewhere to bring her friends. She stuck her needles into her wool and sought pencil and paper. But the figures that foot it merrily enough when it is a matter of addition, limp wearily and stubbornly when subtraction is in question. She caught her breath at the result of her calculations. And yet—the situation was intolerable.

In the middle of her reverie a gate creaked and slammed. There was a clatter of feet on the steps—a rattle of sticks along the railings—Babel let loose in the area, and, before the woman could give a shape to the panic at her heart, into the big, shabby room, like an ill-trained chorus at a theatre, tumbled a rout of girls—short and tall—dark and fair—all dressed alike in red jackets and caps.

They were of all ages from twelve to sixteen. Some had the promise of beauty in a few years to come—some were only comely with the freshness of youth and health, but from one and all, in spite of strident voice, awkwardness of gesture, and self-consciousness of regard, there radiated that evanescent and mournful charm which is possessed by any bevy of girl comrades that touches childhood at its one extreme and womanhood at the other. With a comprehensive sweep of her arm Fenella introduced her rabble court.

"Ma—these are the girls! Girls—this is ma! Hurry up and get us something to eat. We've been playing at Blackheath, and they only gave us one biscuit each with tea. And, look here, girls," turning from her mother's dazed face upon the brawling team, "if you make a row and upset our lodgers, you'll" (impressively) "never—come—here—again!"

Fenella's popularity not only survived this shameful exposure, but followed her into the Christmas holidays. The most delightful of all missives began to lie, three and four at a time, on the breakfast table by her plate, "begging the pleasure." Mrs. Barbour, who did a considerable amount of good by stealth, had arrested a thirsty genius on a downward course from the Bond Street ateliers to Marylebone Workhouse, and, with this strange being, who wore a palpable transformation, smelt of brandy, and called her "Modder-moselle," Nelly spent many a fruitful morning, pinning, fitting, and cutting, while the machine whirred and bumped on a table near by. She tasted for the first time the delights of the waxed floor, the heavy golden air, the cadenced wind—all the witchery of dance-land. Sleek "freshers" with lacquered heads, "down for the short—" pink, alert subalterns on Christmas furlough from Chatham and Aldershot, with funny cropped moustaches like a toothbrush—delightful middies in uniform, with cracking voices, wrote her name stiffly and illegibly on their programmes or, if they were very smart, on an immaculate shirt cuff. She danced with the verve of one exercising a fine natural gift, but hated "sitting out," and acquired a distracting habit of wandering on her partner's arm, along corridors and up stairs, through palms and around screens, in search of friends similarly coupled. She called this the "visiting figure," but, oh! the despair of inflammable youth, its head full of incoherent adoration, to which darkness and solitude would have given such burning words. This little unchaperoned girl, with her perilously attractive beauty, discovered endless address and resource in keeping male fervor at a distance. The following conversation is on record, heard from palm-filled obscurity:

"Look here, Bobby! I'm sitting with you in the dark, 'cos you said the light hurt your bad eye; but if you paw you'll have two bad eyes to look after 'stead of one."

Toward the end of her third year at Sharland College Lady Anne received a letter from Miss Garrett, of which the following was part:

"... About Fenella Barbour. No. I haven't forgotten the promise I made you to let you know if the girl showed marked ability in any one direction. Strangely enough, Madame de Rudder, of Hanover Street, our dancing and calisthenic mistress, called upon me about her only yesterday. She tells me the child shows a talent for bodily movement (she calls it 'genius': poor abused word!) such as she never marked in a girl before. She is revising some old dances, Pavanes and Corantos, for private house parties, and wants Fenella to join a quartette she is making up. Remembering what you told me, I mentioned (guardedly) the expense of dresses, etc., but she would not hear of the girl's incurring any outlay. Not only this. She says that if Fenella could come, even two days a week, as assistant at Hanover Street, she could have her tuition free and, in time, be employed regularly, at very good pay: much better than we can afford our own under-mistresses, who are all graduates, as you know.

"It seems to me, dear Anne, that a métier offers here: not a very exalted one, it is true, but in the only line for which the girl has shown any talent at all. Will you, if you think fit, speak to the mother before I do anything further and ascertain her views. I have met Mrs. Barbour. She is a puzzling and, I should say, rather foolish woman, who evidently married far above her class.

"The idea, if followed out, will of course abridge Fenella's school career, or even terminate it; but, to tell you the truth, dear Anne, although I am fond of the child, I am only half sorry for this. Don't misunderstand me. The girl is as good as gold, and I know (who should judge better) has a soul like crystal. But her influence among us has been an unsettling one.

"... I picked out the much beloved 'Collywobble' in the Country-house Supplement from among the Sea grave, with dear Lady Anne 'up.' What a pretty beast it is!"

Fenella was seventeen when she left school. She thought life a great joke, she had not said a prayer for two years, and the saddest sight she had seen was a fallen sparrow (counted, but number unrecorded) on the path in Holland Walk.

X

THE WAY OF A MAID

Planche's "History of British Costume," 2 vols. 2500b, in the Library of the British Museum, is a helpful work of reference. It is replete with information, and the wood-cuts are spirited. Its size and cumbersomeness, however, are disadvantages. It is emphatically a book you would not care to read in bed. Add to this, that it is forming the summit of an unsteady pile of books with which your arms are filled—that you are handicapped further with a big black fur muff, and that your nerves are already on edge with the strangeness of the place....

Crash!!!...

One heavy morocco-bound volume lay, open and face downward, on the floor; the other was following it fast, ringleader in a tragic glissade over the smooth black fur. Fenella bit her lip and did not quite suppress a word whose most obvious rhyme is "lamb." In a terror-struck flash she saw all the results of her carelessness: attendants bearing down upon her—expostulation—disgrace and final ejectment beyond those heavy swing doors that she never, never should have passed. She was really very frightened.

A man who had been ransacking the shelves by her side, with a long arm that reached easily from top to bottom of the bookcase, turned quickly at the smothered exclamation. With a swift movement of one hand, he stayed the avalanche, and with the other picked up the fallen volume from the floor.

"Oh! thank you—thank you!" said Fenella, almost hysterically. She was looking up—a good way up—into the kindest, grayest eyes she had ever seen.... Eyes!—eyes! the little, unprotected girl encountered them everywhere. In train or 'bus, in the street, in the untempered light of the lately constructed tube railway. Hard eyes; preoccupied eyes, full of some sick trouble of their own which passed her over, unseeing; bitter, arrogant eyes that seemed to find her beauty and her pretty clothes an offence; eyes vicious and bold, the worst of all, that would not leave her, that stung her cheeks, as though the heat of the evil passions behind them were being focussed upon her through a lens, and beneath whose level, insulting conjecture her flesh crept and her hands clenched themselves in an agony of shame and helpless anger. But these eyes were different to all the others. She could look at them as steadily as at a cloudy sky: they seemed full of some tender wisdom. And of humor too. Already their twinkle mitigated what she felt to be a tragedy.

The stranger took the books from her one by one and bestowed them compactly in the hollow of his own arm.

"Have you got a seat?" he asked.

"No," said Fenella, in an agitated whisper. "Can I go anywhere I like? Are they all free?"

The man's smile broadened and showed his fine long teeth.

"We'll try and find you a free one," he said. "Come on with me." His accent was strange; not quite English, yet not foreign.

She followed her protector on tip toe, averting her eyes from the indignant glances that she was sure were being levelled at her. One lean old monk was scowling, but he was really thinking of something else. Then there was a dreadful fat negro, like Othello turned scholar, who rolled his eyes. Fenella could not help peeping at the leaves he was turning over, to confirm an unscientific conviction of her own, that the black did really come off sometimes.

Her guide stopped at an empty place, arranged her books neatly upon the flat leather-covered desk, pulled out a cane-seated chair on casters, and, bowing slightly, sat down in the next place and began to read one of a number of manuscript leaves with which it was strewn. She divested herself of gloves and furs, and commenced turning the pages of one of her books gingerly. Occasionally, she put her finger to her mouth, and then, remembering where she was, stopped with a shudder, as at danger escaped.

The man who had helped her was writing busily on a thick paper pad. When he had reached the bottom of each page, he blotted it, numbered it in the top right-hand corner, and added it carelessly to an untidy pile at his left hand. Sometimes, before tearing it off, he read it over, apparently without enthusiasm, erased words, and sometimes whole sentences, with impatient curly "twiddles" of his quill pen, wrote words in between the lines and added various cabalistic signs and letters in the margin. He was very much occupied, and Fenella, whom no book had ever absorbed, saw that she might watch him covertly and safely.

So this was the way books were written! She wondered who he was. Not Bernard Shaw—his hair was too short. Nor Rider Haggard—his face was too narrow. She could not think of any other writer with a beard. She considered him good-looking—in a strange way. She never would have, I will not say looked, but wanted to look after him in the street, still in a way she could not define, it was nice to be sitting next him. She liked his leanness and dryness. She hated fat men whose sleek hair seemed to be soaking up superabundant moisture from their bodies. Then, his beard was trimmed so closely to his cheek it was hard to say where it began, and his moustache was brushed out of the way once and for all. He didn't keep "twiddling" it. Yes; it would be quite safe to sit opposite while he ate soup.

There was a man quite like him on the very page before her.... Ah! Yes. That was what he wanted. A big ruff showing the hairy throat, and a little cloak, swung from his shoulders, and big puffy—whatever they called them—nearly to his knees, and a long rapier sticking up in the air—how awkward on staircases though—but not a silly little toque like that, stuck on one side, and not—oh, not earrings in his ears. Who was it? "Duc de Guise." What a pity she had forgotten (forgotten!) all her French. Yes; that was what was the matter with him, she decided. His good looks were simply out of fashion. She looked backward and forward from the book to his face, from his face to the book, two or three times. Suddenly she became aware he was looking straight at her.

"Oh! help!"

"Anything I can do?" asked the stranger helpfully, in a low voice that was far less obtrusive than any whisper.

"C-could you translate this little bit for me, please? I'm no good at French," Fenella stammered, pushing her book toward him.

"Which little bit?"

She indicated a paragraph at random and as far from the picture as possible. She caught her breath at her audacity. "Forward minx, I am." She hoped he wouldn't hang over her shoulder to translate, like handsome Mr. Curzon, the drawing master at Sharland, heedless, or perhaps not heedless, of the burning cheek so near his own, and the suppressed titters of "the girls."

M. de Guise drew the open book toward him, and, tearing off a slip of paper, began to write on it in a cranky but rapid hand, with an occasional glance at the foreign text.

"Here you are. I hope you will be able to read my writing."

"Thank you very much indeed," said Fenella, demurely.

"Anything else you want? Paper?"

She had dived into her muff and was splitting open various envelopes with her forefinger.

"If you wouldn't mind. But I'm giving you so much trouble."

"No trouble at all. Here are three sheets. You have a pencil?"

"M—m."

"If it's one you stole from the catalogue desk I wouldn't suck it. Those aren't the sort you suck. See! you've made a blue smudge on your lips."

Fenella dived into her muff again, and, drawing out what I believe is termed a vanity bag, examined her lips on the little mirror. She rubbed them hard.

"Is it gone now, please?"

"Quite." How red the child's lips were. He glanced right and left and put his fingers to his own. A few fretful knowledge seekers were looking toward the chatter. Their glances were hostile.

"A la besogne!" said he, beneath his breath, and turned to his work again.

Fenella shook her shoulders and settled herself in the most industrious attitude she could think of. At the end of an hour she had drawn three figures and could think of no further excuse for remaining. Most of the wisdom of the world was around her and above her, but she felt no temptation to disturb it. The man at her side had apparently forgotten her existence. She put her books away, one by one, trying to prevent her shoes squeaking, but making a great bustle, really, yet he did not look round. When she came back at last to get her furs and gloves, he was gone. She left the room with a little sinking of the heart, but not more than one feels when, say, an interesting fellow-traveller whom we hoped was coming on all the way to London, gets out at Rugby. It is true that in her preoccupation she forgot to claim her umbrella.

When she reached Oxford Street she was reminded by passing an Express Dairy that it was past five and that she would reach home late for tea. Tea, as a rite, retained all its old significance for Fenella. Some of her old school-fellows had studios or flats within easy reach, and, perhaps, six months ago she would have made for one of them. But, already, she thought she noticed a difference. The girls were growing up—acquiring individuality, and her own path was diverging more and more. They liked her to come in to tea, but preferably on a day when no men were expected. She was already learning the hard truth that life must be played with the lone hand. A good many of her triumphs lay behind her.

She turned to the dairy, and going upstairs as far as she could, took a seat in the smoking-room and ordered weak tea and a teacake. She liked muffins and crumpets and teacakes with "heaps and heaps" of butter. The tea-room, being near the Museum, was full of its habitués. She saw three or four she had noticed there, playing chess or talking together in high mincing tones interspersed with cackling laughter. She did not recognize the accent of the "illuminated." Some had lined, seamed faces, with long hair, and would have looked better with a clerical collar. Those that looked strong looked rough. How different to her "courtier." She began to think of him anew, to calculate her chances of ever running across him again. One thing was certain, she would never, never go back to that terrible place again.

The teacake was long in coming, and as she looked up impatiently she saw him standing in the middle of the room. She recognized him at once by the rather rakish felt hat that had lain on his desk. He had a long blue overcoat with a belt and a funny yellow silk handkerchief round his neck. She wanted him very much to look round, but surmised he had a favorite waitress and was looking for her. Perhaps the naïve wish reached him. He turned, and, smiling, came toward her, as straight as a partner about to claim his dance.

"Hullo! Got tired? I missed you when I came back."

"I only came to draw three pictures."

He hung his coat up and sat opposite her in a matter-of-fact way that robbed the action of significance. Still, the lady who had brought the teacake waited for his order with a sub-surface smile. She had seen so many "Museum goings-on."

"You're not often here, are you?... Yes, tea, please. No—nothing with it."

Fenella leaned forward confidently. "It's my very first visit. Don't tell, will you? I fudged a ticket."

"'Fudged'?"

"Came with another girl's—Phyllis Harmans. Do you know her?"

The gray eyes twinkled. "No. You're the only lady I ever speak to in the Museum."

"Would I get into any trouble if I was found out?"

"We'd all get into trouble if we were found out. The best way is not to attract attention. Don't drop your books again."

"Is it hard to get a ticket?"

"It's criminally easy. But I shouldn't advise you to. It's a place for old fogies like me. You look pale. Do you get plenty of outdoor exercise?"

Fenella rubbed her cheek. "That's not paleness. You're fussy, like mummy. I'm a healthy brute. And I shouldn't call you an old fogy. You're—brown. Have you travelled much?"

"Oh!—round the world and back again."

"Coming back's nice, isn't it?"

"Only when it's coming home."

"Isn't your home here? I thought you spoke—funny. Haven't you any one who looks after you? A mother—or a sister?"

"No mother, no sister, no wife." The stranger spoke incisively. "No sweetheart, even," he added, after an appreciable pause.

Fenella blushed. Of course she hadn't meant to ask that; still, it was interesting to know. The child had a strange pertinacity in constructing correct views of new acquaintances that deceived a good many people.

A sudden squall lashed the windows with rain. She looked round in affright.

"Oh!—help!" she said again, softly.

"Now what's the matter?"

"I've forgotten my 'brolly'."

"Your what?"

"My brolly: my 'mush'; ma's best gold-handled umbrella."

"I'll lend you mine."

"Oh! it isn't that. I get the 'bus at the door, and only have a step to walk at the other end. But how'm I to get it back?"

"Aren't you coming again soon?"

She shook her head. You would never have guessed the stranger felt disappointed. He felt in his pocket and pushed a card across the table.

"Write an address on that," he said, "and leave me your check. I'll have it sent to-night by a messenger boy."

Fenella considered a moment. The card lay face downward, and it was a great temptation. But her good breeding triumphed. Without turning it over she wrote her name and address, very slowly, in print letters. Meantime she soliloquized thus:

"I hate rain. It's harder on women. Your petties get wet and slop round your ankles. I wish I could always dress as a boy. It's so picture-squeak—picturesque I mean. I do sometimes. Dances, you know: in a quartette, gavottes and things. I'm a boy, 'cos you can't teach men.... There you are. I hope you can read it.... I had a ripping dress at the 'Bechway' in the spring. Blue and silver, and powdered hair, and a little diamondy sword."

"Which you could use upon occasion with great spirit, I'll wager, Monsieur le Marquis."

"Oh, rather!" rejoined Fenella. (How nicely he speaks French.) "I'm good at fencing. I was captain of the 'gym' at our school."

The man just glanced at the card and put it into his pocket absent-mindedly. He was wondering what kind the school might be that had taught this distractingly friendly child to dance and fence, but not to read French and, above all, not to be careful—with that face and figure—how she spoke to strangers.

Meantime, something in this last speech had reminded the girl of the first fine rapture of Ruritania, years ago.

"You're a novelist, aren't you?" she said.

"Of sorts," he admitted.

"I wish I was intellectual"—wistfully.

"You're better. You're cute."

"Cute—cute—! What does that mean? Clever?"

"Not exactly."

"Pretty, then?"

"Well, a kind of clever prettiness."

"You mean smart!"

"Well, smart. Let us be English at all costs."

"I don't see how you can think me smart," she said, with a rueful inflection in her voice.

"Why not?"

"Talking to a strange man as I've done."

At sight of the troubled young face, something that was not exactly suspicion, but which had guarded his manner till now, disappeared. He laughed quite freely, and it was wonderful how the sudden gaiety made him look at once younger and more foreign. He put his hand across and just touched the girl's arm.

"Dear child," said he, "talk to as many strange men as you like. The stranger the better. It's ordinary ones you must be careful about."

"Ordinary ones——?"

"Yes. Beware the Least Common Multiple. Therein lies danger to you. I prophesy it."

"I must go," said Nelly, rising as she spoke. "It isn't getting any drier."

He put his coat on and followed her to the door. She noticed he left threepence for the waitress. How extravagant, after just a cup of tea! He kept beside her across the street, holding his umbrella over her head.

"I should like to read your book when it comes out," she said, as her omnibus hove in sight. "Why do you laugh?"

He was laughing because he knew the book. "How are you to ask for it without knowing the talented author's name?"

She hesitated. "Well," she said, almost reluctantly, "what is his name?"

He noticed the effort and his manner stiffened. "It's one I needn't be ashamed to tell you, and you needn't be ashamed to hear. My name is Paul Ingram. Here's your 'bus. Good-bye. I don't ask you yours."

Fenella turned on the step and laughed at him over her muff.

"Goosey! You've got it in your waistcoat pocket."

XI

AN INTERLUDE

All this happened on a Saturday, and Paul had a full day to think it over. He went back to his work on Monday, and, for reasons he did not stop to define, not only chose the same place, but even had the weakness to try to keep the desk next it free by depositing his hat and gloves there. It would be hard to say what he expected. He had looked at the address more carefully when he was sending back the umbrella, and it confirmed the impression he had already received from the girl's clothes and casual, assured manner. She was some daughter of a good family, he felt sure, guarded and checked, and so the more inclined to kick over the traces when away from watchful home eyes. Had he been an Englishman the very perfection of her turnout might have still further puzzled him, and he might have been inclined to speculate as to how so young a girl came by all the rings she wore; far too many, though they were only pretty baubles. But Ingram came from a country where beauty does not wait on marriage for its adornment. He was even ignorant that a set has arisen there, the most artificial and utterly contemptible, surely, in the world, which has sacrificed the healthy freedom that was its birthright, to ape the social hypocrisies and superstitions that Europe is outgrowing.

Anyway, she had made him feel very old, and for the moment out of conceit with his self-imposed tasks, just as some wild, free creature of fur or feather encountered on a holiday walk in the country might distaste any one of us with his own humdrum workaday life. And he had the same further impulse that the wayfarer may have had to arrest the busy, aimless errand, close his hand on the furry flank—prison the fluttering wings, and, having made the creature share his captivity a moment, to open his fingers and let the throbbing quarry go free. A desire so innocent—so purely intellectual, that it scarcely deserves the hard name of the lust of the eye, and has nothing whatever in common with the lusts of the flesh.

It must be remembered also, to account for his unusual and dangerous mood, that just about this time he had put his manuscript into my hands. No period is so demoralizing mentally as one during which we have relaxed our own efforts, and are indulging in the vague hope of some good to come to us through other people's.

Tuesday—Wednesday passed. Paul ceased to look for the girl. Why should he? Hadn't she said she was not coming back. And what a fool he was even to desire it. She was a pretty memory; he, a writer, should know the value of such impressions, the pity of disturbing them. Suppose he met her again, was it likely the glamour of the first encounter would survive? Apart from the bizarrerie of her quaint, childish confidences, she had said really nothing that was worth remembering. On a second meeting he would be sure to find her trivial and vulgar. Even the pretty manner was probably a trick she had tried elsewhere, and found "fetching." Toward the end of the week he happened to be reading, in the course of his work, the diary of a man some of whose blood, according to family tradition, ran in his own veins: the daily journal of Cotton Mather. Skimming through the record of that dark, tortured soul, he lit upon the curious passage wherein the middle-aged widower, with the naïve self-revelation that sweetens his persecuting memory, deplores the inroads which a handsome young pupil to whom he is teaching Latin is making in his self-respect. "The Lord," groans Mather, piously, "deliver me from this ingenious child!" Paul gave such a sudden laugh that his neighbors looked at him in wonder. "Bravo, Cousin Cotton!" he said to himself. "I'm not proud of you, but I'll forgive you a lot for that." He felt immensely relieved. Who has not known such a foolish moment of light-heartedness, when something we have read or heard seems to set us right with ourselves? "The Lord deliver me from this ingenious child!"

That night after dinner he lit a cigar and strolled westward. He found Number Eleven Suffolk Square easily enough. It was a big, double-fronted house of cream-colored stucco, with wide steps and a pillared porch. It happened just then that all three floors were lit up. This illumination gave the house a festive appearance and exaggerated its opulent aspect. Against the amber colored blinds the pattern of handsome lace curtains stood out in bold silhouette. The kitchen blinds had not been lowered and Paul noted three maid-servants, two of them in black dresses and caps with long white streamers. On the other side of the area, across another lighted window, red curtains were drawn. More servants, probably—butler, coachman, and footman. He thought of his own home in far Massachusetts; the "hired help" who came to table with them; his own chapped wrists; the dying mother, rolling out pastry on the low table to which they wheeled her chair. A feeling of fierce camaraderie with the toilers, the little ones of the earth, possessed him; a hatred for luxury and the parade of wealth. He took three or four turns before the house, and went away. Before he left the square, however, he kissed his hand toward Number Eleven. "Good-bye, Fenella," he said. "You're a kind-hearted baby, but I guess the folks in that house will know how to spoil it when the time comes."

XII

RICHMOND PARK

Next morning, when he went to the reading-room, she was sitting in the old place. She still wore the long blue coat with all the buttons—the black fur, and the big plain French hat with a single parrot-green feather, but, seen a second time, custom tempered somewhat her formidable smartness. She had a big gauze veil, too, tied round her hat and falling in long ends over her shoulders. It subdued the hard childish brightness of her face, making it look both maturer and softer. She met his surprised look timidly, and, diving into her muff, held out a white card with a blue stripe down the centre. Her gesture was meekly disarming—hurriedly explanatory.

"I've joined," she said, anxiously. "I'm a member."

Ingram twirled the card between his fingers. It was early, the great room was half empty, and there was no need to whisper now.

"And what special line of research are you thinking of pursuing?" he asked, gravely.

Fenella made haste to disclaim any serious purpose. "But it's a useful place, isn't it?" she asked. "This morning I only looked in to thank you."

"To thank me——?"

"For sending my umbrella. I couldn't send a postcard; I didn't know your address."

"It was no trouble." He was still turning the little card round and round. "And so you're running away at once?"

Fenella cast her eyes down. "I can't stay," she said. "I've got a dog with me."

"A dog?"

"Tied to the rails outside near the little house. They'd only keep him 'cos I said I wouldn't be ten minutes. Do you like dogs? I'm taking him for a run."

Paul experienced a sudden zest for adventure. "Suppose we take him for a run together? It's such a glorious fall morning."

"Oh, top-hole!" said Nelly, joining her hands in the old baby fashion that had clung to her. "I mean, how nice! Where shall we ramble? The Gardens?"

"No. I hate the Gardens. Even the sparrows know they're a fraud. Let's go out to Richmond. We can walk across the Park, have lunch at Kingston, and be back in time for tea."

Outside the Museum lodge, a horrible old bull-terrier, chained to the railings, was keeping up a growling soliloquy, with occasional snaps at imaginary flies, suggested possibly by the late autumn sunshine. He was very thick and scarred and carried his head to one side.

"This is Rock," announced Fenella, as, with a bewildering smile at the liveried keeper, she began to drag the veteran to his feet and along the pavement. "He's an awful old dog; I don't know how old, but he was a puppy when I was a baby. Isn't it funny? Now he's all lumpy and stiff, and I'm still growing. Ma says it's because their hearts beat faster. Heckle—that's a medical boy I know—says he's the oldest bull-terrier he ever knew, and that what he's asking for when he growls is a dose of pussy's acid in a dog-biscuit. What's pussy's acid?[1] Rock is short for Roquelaure, but some of the girls say he smells, and call him Roquefort. He's not my dog: he's Lady Anne's. She's hunting somewhere, and I promised her I'd take him out regularly. Oh, I want to telephone from here. Will you hold him—please? He won't bite. No, don't shut the doors, I shall stifle.... B-r-r-r! One! B-r-r-r! Two. I have put the pennies in; didn't you hear them? 2309 Pad. Yes, I mean Paddington. You say Pad yourself. Hello! Are you there? Is this Miss Rigby? Oh, good morning, Jas. Jas, be an angel and tell mummy I shan't be home to lunch. I'm going to have it at Richmond, with a man. What d'you say? Oh, fie! Oh, tut!... Naughty puss! Six feet one, a long tawny, silky moustache, and cold, steel-blue eyes.... What?... I don't know ... I may. Good-bye, Jas. You're an angel."

In the train Ingram took the seat opposite her, and, while she kept up an incessant chatter, watched her with a kind of ache at his heart for her beauty. It was more than prettiness: he saw that now. Those long heavy lashed eyes, whose full lids she had a trick of pulling—the plaintive, tremulous mouth, too red; the two little tufts at her temples which even the draught from the closed window blew across her cheekbone, so fine and dry was her hair; the delicate and rather salient nose that bespoke impulsiveness. Like all visionaries, crusaders and other impractical persons, he had at the same time an intense perception of bodily beauty and an intense jealousy for the coarse uses to which life puts it. To have retained one's ideals and to have lost one's illusions—is not this to be subject to all the tortures that sex can inflict?

They left the station and walked through the defaced streets of the old Royal Borough, its noble Georgian houses half hidden by plate-glass shop fronts: they climbed the long ascent to the Park, and stood for a moment on the terrace to admire the river, an isle-set loop of silver, at the bottom of a steep glen filled with rusty verdure. Once inside the wide ciphered gates, they left the gravelled path and by a soft mouldy foot-track struck into the recesses of the old hunting pleasaunce. The air was mild and balmy; not a breeze stirred the crisp, sapless trees that stood waiting to surrender their ruined pomp of summer to the first wind that required it of them. Fenella gave her escort her muff and stole. She called Rock to her in a high, clear voice and, with shrill, chirping whistles, with cracks of her dog-whip, fluttering of her skirts, with endless enticements and provocations, lured that much-tried old pensioner on to efforts he had really outlived. Paul, as he watched her, ignorant no doubt of the exquisite old Mabinogion simile, thought that her motions resembled nothing so much as the swooping flight of the swallow before rain. Her limbs seemed to have the pliancy of whalebone.

Rock wheezed and panted gallantly after his mistress, his paws drumming stiffly on the ground—his poor old scarred neck held more on one side than ever. But his heart was not in the chase. He was forever slinking back to heel. He looked up wistfully at this new, sober-paced friend. "Here are we," his dim old eyes, with their hardened cornea, seemed to be saying, "old fellows, both of us, who've taken sharp bites and hard knocks enough, and it's a bit late in the day to be asking us to show off our paces, isn't it? Can't we sneak away somewhere together? This girl will play the very devil with us both if we let her."

"Rock! Rock! Rock!" the clear voice would ring out. "Come here, sir! Come here thissminnit! Lazy—lazy dog!"

And with a despairing throe of his knotted tail, off poor Rock must pump again.

When they had nearly crossed the Park, they sat down on a worn seat, hacked nearly away with amorous knife blades, close to a pond into which some long-legged wading birds were digging their bills. Around them and behind them the noble demesne outstretched itself, in long tree vistas and seemingly illimitable glades, with nothing to scale them to insignificance. Now and then a motor car rolled softly along the road to White Lodge, only accentuating their loneliness by its speed and detachment, or a ghostly little troop of fallow deer passed slowly and securely to some favored feeding ground. Rock sniffed the air at them, growled and wrinkled his nose. "We both remember a time we couldn't have stood this—don't we?" the decayed old sportsman was no doubt grumbling to himself.

Seeing the girl quiet at his side, Paul began to try and tell her something of his life, working back, as is the manner of men, from the things that are nearest their experience and yet are slipping from their memory, into the never forgotten far past.... The night marches across the silent desert, spellbound by the silver witchery of the moon, and through mehallahs, that are like a fruitful land smitten by an evil charm—its houses turned into boulders and brushwood made of its standing corn: the caravans one may meet with a grave bearded sheikh riding in front, and the bubbling dromedaries behind him, laden with great wicker "D-raths" full of squalling, naked children and silk-swathed women, who peep through the osiers and crook their fingers at the dusty legionaries tramping by in a cloud of their own dust: the sand pillars that march upon your flank, step and step, like jealous genii shepherding doomed strangers into their desert: the joy of the camp at the well, with the day's march done: the incredible lightness of the sweat-soaked body when the knapsack is lifted off.

... Or that other camp—so far away it is hard to believe it all one life. Crackling cedar wood and the good smell of coffee on the sharp light mountain air, and the jinglers riding in the squealing cavvy with a pother of dust about their unshod feet, all rosy and glorious like a halo in the cherry-red morning sun: and the long lariats held wedgewise, and the scamper and scurry as the bronchos are trapped: and the peering through a fog of sweat and dust for your own brand on shoulder or buttock, and the whirling ropes, and the laughter and horseplay as the ponies are blanketed and bitted for the dawn-to-dusk round-up.

I don't know whether Paul made a poor Othello, but I do know he had a very indifferent Desdemona. Fenella was forever interrupting the narrative on one frivolous pretext or another: to throw stick or stone for poor sleepy Rock to retrieve ("Guffetchit-Rock! Guffetchit—lazy dog!"); to gather a bunch of scarlet berries afar off, whose color had taken her eye and which were hardly redder than her lips; to run down for a minute to the pond to see what "those rummy birds" were digging for so industriously. She had all the nil admirari of the modern mind: its heedlessness of anything that lies outside its own experience; its sedulous curiosity for all that lies within. It was better when they got to Ingram's early life. She could imagine a country road along which burdocks and hemlock and other green fleshy things grow as high as young trees, and little gray frame houses tucked away behind silver birches. She was genuinely and even tenderly interested in the crippled mother, and at the story of the sister who died, blew her nose and said she had caught cold in the train. She clapped her hands at the quilting bees and candy-pulls and sleigh rides and sugar boiling camps and wished plaintively that she had been born a little American girl, to have had her share in so rapturous an adolescence. But even this part of the story was checked with immaterial, trivial questions such as on children's lips weary the maternal patience. "What happened the gray mare in the end that wouldn't pass the new letter-box? How many boys went to the sugar camp? And how many girls? Did they ever flirt?"

They had luncheon in an upper room of an old inn at Kingston, that had a curved iron balcony looking down upon the market place. The panelling was hidden by paper of an iridescent red, covered with a sprawling pattern of tarnished leaves and flowers. To right and left of the fireplace two dark pictures of bottle-necked ladies with untidy hair, brought here from God knows what household dispersion, looked disdainfully out of the canvas in opposite directions. Some fair or market was going on in the square below; the misty afternoon air was full of the bleat of sheep, the lowing of cattle, raucous cries of costermongers, and the crack of saloon rifles. They were waited on by a depressed Teuton, upon whose broad white face Paul raised a wintry smile by addressing him in his own guttural tongue. Fenella, the palms of her long kid gloves twisted round her bangles, fared delicately. She gave most of her meat to Rock—eschewed watery sprouts and fluffily mashed potatoes—and "filled up," as she would and even did express it, upon plum tart with unlimited cream and sugar. She would not drink wine or coffee, but ate all the dessert and sent out for more cob-nuts. She had all sorts of pretty, restless, bad manners: crumbled bread while she chattered—scored the cloth with a pink nail while she listened—counted her plum stones three times and made it "never"—dabbled in her tumbler for lack of a finger bowl—and upon its rim made, with one wet finger-tip, the hum of innumerable blue bottles, at which poor Rock barked and snapped under her chair.

It was late when they sat down to lunch, and they had dawdled besides. The sun was gone and twilight closing in as they recrossed the Park toward Richmond. She was so silent that Paul asked her, half peering into the veiled face, whether she had felt the afternoon dull. She said not; but her negative went no further than a little shake of the head. She had a trick of looking back every now and then and of measuring the way they had come, as if to insure a clear recollection of it, and she allowed Rock—who, rested, fed, and with his head pointed, though obliquely, for home, was in spirits that contrasted with his depressed morning mood—to roam at his will. They had just reached the avenue of trees that looks over Ham House when a furious barking made them turn their heads. The dog, bristling, and with sidelong leaps that left his nose in the one direction, was pointing at something in the long grass. Fenella cracked the whip she had been trailing along the path.

"Rock! Rock! Come here, sir! Oh, Mr. Ingram, go quick and stop him!" She covered her eyes. "He's got some poor little rabbit or bird."

Paul ran and collared the animal. A brown mottled bird with a wide yellow beak was fluttering away clumsily, with wings half spread. Fenella caught it from him as his hand was closing on it.

"Give it to me! Oh, darling! are you hurt?" She looked on her gloves for blood. "Had he bitten it, Mr. Ingram?... There, there—you're quite safe now. I tink oor more f'itened dan hurt, dear! Is he one of the birds that fly away in the winter, Mr. Ingram? I'm going to take him home and put him in the conservatory till spring.... Ah! you wicked—bad—cruel—fierce dog! It's a good job I gave him so much meat, isn't it Mr. Ingram?—or you'd be gobbled up, dee-ar!... That's right; put him on the chain. Oh, yes he does, Mr. Ingram; he eats birds, at least he scrunches them," stroking the smooth brown back with her lips. "Can we get a cage in Richmond, do you think?"

Paul looked at his watch. "I think we'd better get a train in Richmond," he said. "We've been out quite a while, and you only said 'luncheon' over the 'phone. Are you going to bring the bird along?"

"Why—of course I am."

"Well, put him in your muff and let us hustle."

Fenella quickened her pace resolutely, but every now and then would stop to be sure the creature was alive, breaking into a run afterward to overtake her escort.

"I'm sorry," she said at last, penitently, as she saw him waiting for her. "I tell you what I'll do. I'll put my finger in every now and then and, if he pecks, I'll know he's alive. Why does he peck me when I saved him? Birds have no brain. Cookie had a canary once that flew into a fly-paper; it took ever so long to unstick his wings. I hope this isn't one of the sort that won't sing unless its eyes are put out."

In the train the bird still absorbed her. They had a compartment to themselves, and Paul watched her curiously through his cigar smoke. He was wondering whether he had been bored or amused. A little of both he concluded. She was a good girl, but quite immature, and utterly—oh! utterly trivial. There was probably some babbling old mother at home whom she took after, for a warning and example. She was lovely, oh, yes—lovely enough to make the most careless heart ache—the rashest "gazer wipe his eye." But for a man like himself that was not an entire explanation. Wherein lay her charm? For charm there was; one, too, that survived the long day spent in her company. There was no use denying it; walks in Richmond Park, alone, would be sad affairs from now on. Alone, because, of course, this one must never be repeated. Butterflies are pretty things to watch, once in a way; but, since to clutch remains a human instinct, and since no man who thinks in his heart ever wants to see that sort of down upon his clumsy fingers, it would be better if—be better if——What were the clanging, ringing wheels saying now? Hark!

"Be its beauty its sole duty:

Be its beauty its sole duty...."

Ah! yes. That was what he has been trying to think of all day. And yet people could be found to called Browning "obscure."

"Be its beauty its sole duty!"

"Oh, Mr. Ingram! Look! It's stopped pecking and is beginning to look round."

He leaned across the carriage. He may have meant to do no more than touch the enfolding hands that lay so near his lips. But her own mouth was nearer still, and he kissed that.

XIII

FIND SOUL—FIND SORROW

In the middle of the night that followed his whole holiday Paul woke and cursed himself, at length and with conviction. Years ago, in the good old days when punishment was punishment, with no nonsense talked about reformatory intent, among the toiling groups that tilled the earth, made the road or lightered the harbored vessel, here and there a man was noticed who dragged his left leg a little as he walked. He was not crippled, nor deformed; he was likely, indeed, to be strong and formidable beyond his fellows; he did his day's work and earned his day's wage with the best. But the leg dragged—always would drag. And the reason passed in whispers: this was an old galley slave—a man who had worked at the bagnio. His leg, from force of habit, still paused for the effort that once dragged ball and chain behind it.

I had not known Ingram long before I guessed that, at one period of his life or another, women had meant a great deal for him, but that they had never meant happiness. In what did the impression reside? I can't say. In a regard perhaps—an inflection of voice—an over quickness to catch sorrowful meanings—in what he did not say quite as much as in what he did. But I was as sure of it then when I knew nothing as now when I know everything. He could not always have loved in vain. Partings there had been, tearful, emotional, reluctant, but always partings. Letters reached him even now through changes and redirections, letters filled with bright, helpful gossip, of the new friends—the unimagined husband—the children that might so easily have been his; with only here and there between the lines, for his eye to see and no other, the tenderness that women keep for the man who could win their regard but not their persons. And if Ingram felt sure of anything, I knew he felt sure of this: that the chapter of his life from which they were a legacy was closed and dead—a great stone rolled to the door of its tomb, sealed and mortised, and guarded by a whole cohort of wise intentions. And now, in a week, he had fallen—fallen as precipitately as the greenest of "rash and inconsiderate youth." Relying on his experience and disillusionment, he had broken the covenant of the old, wise king, and, into some unsuspected vacuum of his heart, a pretty face, a plaintive regard, a few surface tricks of dress and manner had rushed and were not to be extricated without endless pain and trouble. Again and again, as he turned from side to side in the night watches, he went over the images of his fall, for so, in all seriousness, this strange man regarded it. He felt the thrill of the young throat stretched to meet him, caught the fragrance, so faint—so faint that he had not noticed it till then—of the orris root in which her clothes had lain folded; heard the little fluttering sigh as his fervor stopped her breath. It had been the first kiss of passion that had ever touched her lips; he knew because——oh! never mind how he knew. What, exactly, he wondered, and was not the first to wonder, did such a kiss signify to a good woman? Board and bed, he surmised dimly, at some future date; home and home circle, taxes and life insurance, doctor's bills, children clapping their hands round Christmas trees. And this from him! He laughed out in the darkness—so loud that the glass shade of the lamp by which he had read himself to sleep vibrated with the sound. From him, a mere embodied intelligence, driven by loneliness and mental suffering to self-expression, doomed now, while life should last, to breed and bear the calamitous offspring of the brain.

He had given her his address because that much seemed called for in decency, but he did not expect a letter for a while. Yet when, after a few more feverish and wakeful hours and the immense solace of a cold tub, he passed into the sitting-room in his bath robe, a letter lay on the breakfast tray that he knew could be from no one else; a square pale mauve envelope, with an ingenious flap, addressed in a straggling schoolgirl hand.

"Dear Mr. Ingram,

"I hope you got home safe and had no haresbreath escapes from motors. I was nearly run over the other day, I only got on the pavement in the knick of time.

"I have put the bird in the conservatery and given him a lot of seed, he throws it about with his beek, but hasn't eaten any. I haven't given him a name because I don't know yet if he is going to live. Ma was crazy, but I smouthed her down.

"No one ever kissed me before, but some one did hold my hand once quite a long time. I couldn't riggle it away.

"Rock is ill, he has eaten a plumb stone I think and will have (to) have some caster oil. If it was one of mine that makes it this year not never. How exciting!

"I shall be at 14, Hanover Place to-morrow till 4.15. P'raps you would be near there if you are not writing.

"I remain,

"Your loving friend,
"Fenella."

Paul read the strange letter over and over again, from its prim apostrophe to the shy little breath of sentiment at its close. The ink just there was a lighter color than the rest. It was evident that she had let the letter go dry while wondering how to sign herself.

"Ho! ho!" he said aloud. "So Providence has given you a loving friend, has it? Now what's a man like yourself, Paul Ingram, to do with a loving friend and a conscience at one and the same time?"

"Scrap the conscience!" said counsellor the first. "The girl's pretty and sweet."

"Pull out before any more harm's done!" said another. "She's quite innocent."

"Give time a chance," said the third—the one that outruns the hounds but never quite catches up with the hare. "You've got to hurt either her pride or her heart by making an end of it now, and there's always a chance her whim will wear out if you wait."

"That's what I'll do," said Ingram at last. "I'll tell her bit by bit what I am, and hint at what I'm likely to become. She'll see reason. There's often a lot of hard hog-sense at the bottom of these butterfly women."

And, by way of starting well, he took her out to tea that afternoon, and was so genial and natural that the last shadow of self-reproach vanished from the poor child's heart. And before he left her he had promised to call for her at her home. He knew by now that she did not belong to his natural enemies, and the knowledge made it harder to "pull out" than ever.

I have spent a good deal of time upon this idyll, without, I am afraid, leaving a very just or a very pleasant impression of Paul Ingram upon the reader's mind. But there are many excuses to be made for him. In the first place, he was very poor—poorer than any of us guessed. He had that profuse careless way with money which is quite as often a consequence of never having had it as of having had it always. The commonest, and perhaps the safest, investment of a little money is to make present life bearable with it while it lasts. But the future is quite another matter. A great golfer told me once that for days after he had won a momentous handicap he was obsessed and haunted by the stealthy patter of the feet that had followed him from hole to hole. And I have no doubt that many a night, while the child sat upon his knee and retailed her day's gossip, sweet and unsubstantial as the sugary étrennes in a Paris confectioner's window, he was listening less to her than to the stealthy wolf-feet of poverty that he knew were creeping up behind him.

And then he was, both constitutionally and through circumstances, an unhappy man. There are souls so designated and set apart for sorrow that it may be said of them, almost without paradox, that they are only at ease when bearing it. They grow to recognize in mischance the environment that suits them best. In such a mind an isolated reason for happiness cannot exist. It pines away for lack of company. Nothing convinces the heart of its sorrow so surely as a sudden discrepancy in its ill-luck—a belated and unassisted piece of good fortune. Fate has these freaks with those upon whose unhappiness she has determined. It is not so much her concern that they should have nothing as that they should always have a little less than might make them happy.

I think he would have been a better lover for what, I if may be permitted a moment's plain speaking, I would call a little sane and healthy lust. But he was of the said race of literary lovers, the race of Swift, of Shelley, of Flaubert, who are as fatal to a woman's heart as they are harmless to her virtue.

Last of all, I expect the girl, in her ignorance, was exacting, and had no notion how the smoothest curb can gall. I know for a fact that she insisted on his writing to her any evening on which he was not able to see her, and I can imagine no torture more refined for such a man than to have been forced to sit down, at the end of a long day of disappointment and mental drudgery, and answer some foolish, fond letter in language she could understand, and into which no trace of the weltschmerz should creep that was devouring his heart and killing hope and ambition by inches. Some of his letters which I have seen show that he took refuge in an irony and fantasy which make them something of literary curiosities. He addressed her by all sorts of strange names—"Crazy kid," "Dear Pierrette," "Maddest of March Hares." One letter is written in Quaker dialect.

"Sweet Friend,

"As arranged betwixt thee and me I called for thee yestereve at the house of thy worldly acquaintance, but hearkening timely the laughter of fools from an upper chamber, which is like to thorns crackling under a pot, refrained, and did not venture. I pray thee walk soberly, and so farewell."

Some, written, I fancy, in the illiterate and misspelt jargon of the cowboy of the plains, are, to me at least, unintelligible. At last it became easier to call than to write at any time, and he appeared an ardent lover for the very reasons that made him a laggard one.

He put off the first call as long as he could, but a day came when it could be put off no longer. One foggy evening he found himself outside the railings at Number Eleven, and Fenella asked him if he was not coming in to show himself.

"I can't stay out late, you know, until you have," she said, with a little reproach in her voice. It was the first time she had spoken sadly to him.

Mrs. Barbour rose, a little flustered, as he came into the room, and thrust some family mending behind the cushion of her basket chair. Paul saw at once that she was of his own caste, and you never would have guessed how his heart went out to her. The heart was under disgrace just then, and a strict embargo laid upon its impulses.

"I am so pleased to meet you at last," said Mrs. Barbour, when the first civilities were over, "and so interested to hear you are a literary man. My husband wrote a good deal during his life."

Fenella was revolving, slowly, on the hearthrug before the mirror.

"Paul doesn't want to hear about books, mother," she said; "he's been reading stodge all day."

But Mrs. Barbour was already searching the shabby book-shelves, packed tight with tattered exercise-books, coverless magazines, broken cardboard boxes, and a host of other things for which book-shelves were never intended.

"My husband had a very fine library at one time," the widow went on, as she rummaged, "but most of the best books are upstairs."

"With our lodgers," Fenella further explained. "We're very proud of our 'paying jests'; aren't we, mummy. We've had them for years—and years—and years." She let her voice die away, and stretched out her arms slowly, indicating, indeed, a considerable time vista. "What an actress!" thought Paul, watching her.

"Here's one," said her mother at last, dusting a slim volume in a brown cloth binding. "Where can all your father's books have got to, Nelly?"

Ingram took the book from her hand. Its pages had never been cut, and it exhaled the forlorn odor of the presentation copy. Its strange title attracted him—

"Climatic Influences Upon the Reformation. A lecture delivered at Wells before the United Diocesan Congress, 18—. By the Honble. and Revd. Nigel Kedo Barbour, M. A."

There was a boastful engraved book-plate inside the cover—all plumes and scrolls and quarterings.

"Has my new hat come, mummy?" asked Fenella, suddenly, in the changed voice she kept for the serious affairs of life.

"I bade Druce take it up to your room," answered mother. "Have you had tea yet, dear?"

"No," said Fenella, incisively. "Ring for some while I go upstairs," and disappeared forthwith.

Paul kept his eyes upon the mottled page, but knew he was undergoing a scrutiny at once legitimate and disquieting. Mrs. Barbour spoke at last:

"I hope you don't think my little girl forward, Mr. Ingram."

Paul raised his eyes, closing the book upon his forefinger.

"I think her entirely charming."

"I know she's impulsive," the mother went on. "Yes—she is. It makes me anxious."

"You don't expect me to quarrel with her latest impulse," Ingram said, with one of his rare smiles.

Mrs. Barbour shook her head, secure in her own worldly wisdom and code of conduct.

"But men make mistakes. Don't they? You know they do."

"Of course they do. I've made hundreds, but never the sort I think you mean."

"You see," explained the clergyman's relict, "Fenella leads a strange life. Yes"—she repeated the phrase, as though she found it vaguely comforting—"a strange life. She's very bright and talented, and receives a great deal of attention; but for reasons that—well, for reasons, she can't see much of her friends here. I assure you, you are the first gentleman acquaintance she has ever asked in. You ought to feel very much flattered, Mr. Ingram."

"To an extent that verges on embarrassment, Mrs. Barbour."

"And then," the mother went on, in the heedless fashion that recalled her daughter, "she has a great number of fine relations who would be glad to show her attention if she'd make the first move. But Nelly won't be 'taken up'—that's what she calls it—taken up, by any one."

"Bravo!" said Paul. "Let us be fellow-conspirators, Mrs. Barbour, and confine her bounty to the laborious and deserving class."

"Oh my!" exclaimed Mrs. Barbour, with sudden helplessness. "You do talk like my husband! It's quite uncanny."

Fenella interrupted them, entering with noisy suddenness. The new hat, very large, very smart, was on her head. She looked quickly from one to the other.

"What've you two been yapping about?" she asked. "Mother"—in an aggrieved voice—"this beastly hat is an inch too big all round. I told Clarice so, but you and she would talk me down. You never take my part with dressmakers and people. It'll have to be altered. Hats are getting smaller. Have you rung for tea?"

"The maids are upstairs, dear. I'll go and get it myself."

As soon as she had left the room the girl seated herself on Ingram's knee and kissed him.

"What were you and mummy talking about?" she said, rubbing her lips after the kiss. "The hat's a bit in the way isn't it? I hate things in the way, don't you?"

"Not when I perceive them in time."

"Oh, but we aren't going to have any, are we, Paul? No difficulties—no quarrels—nothing horrid."

Ingram didn't answer her. Perhaps he was listening to those feet creeping, creeping up behind his shoulder.

So the months passed. When it was too late, Ingram tried to tell her what he should have told her at first. But Nelly would admit nothing—listen to nothing. She turned all the clouds inside out and bade him confine his attention to the silver lining. Upon the subject of her dancing ambitions she entered an unaccountable and fatal reserve, but there was nothing else in her life she did not share with him. Through whatever fringe of whatever society she happened to be adorning at the moment she dragged her lover gallantly. Fenella led captive was Fenella less dangerous, and the old popularity revived at the news of her attachment. Men liked Ingram, and he was thought "distinguished," "unusual," even in circles that called him "Crabbed Age" and "The Satyr" behind his back. (Besides, when were satyrs ever unpopular?) A few mothers held up shuddering hands, but the daughters, being of the new generation, only seized the occasion to preach the new evangel, and, generally, to cleanse and sterilize the imagination of eld. Speculation, in fact, having spent itself, accepted the situation; and by the time the long-planned foreign holiday arrived, her mother thought her "improved," "more thoughtful, and more womanly."

XIV

ALTHEA REES

One airless July morning, a good many years ago, now, old Winstanley came bustling into the sporting editor's room, where I sat on a desk, swinging my legs and talking "bulldog" with Stedall. He had a typewritten slip of paper in his hand.

"Probate and Admiralty for you this morning, my boy!" he said, addressing me. "Here's the cause list. There's two cases down. M—m—m! 'Vacuum Recovery Co. v. Owners of Dacia. Assessment for Salvage.' That's a friendly case; it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours. Here's something spicier: 'Hepworth v. Hepworth: no parties named.' It's a defended case. Special jury. Hepworth is old Lord Hallamshire's grandson, younger son of a younger son, but that's good enough for a 'Society Divorce,' lead and about a column and a half. If the turtle doves come on to-day, keep your eyes and ears open, Prentice! There's some dashed mystery about the case; secret marriage and that sort of thing. Mrs. Hep's a Yankee. There appears to have been a separation three years ago, and now the respondent wants the kid. Blackmail, no doubt."

And off bustled Winstanley, fretting and bawling.

If secret there were, no one seemed to have winded it but Winstanley. There were not more than the average knot of idlers in the public gallery. But the body of the court was filled with a bevy of smartly dressed women, and the five seniors who were briefed were all well-known leaders. The Salvage case was called first, but the Trinity Masters were not ready, and so the conjugal knot was attacked forthwith.

Hart-Milner, the well-known silk and wit, opened with an appeal to the press. The case, said he, raised no point of any public importance, but its detail was of the most painful nature with which that court could be called upon to deal. How far such evidence as they were about to hear should ever be reported in the public sheets was, he thought, a vexed question. The entire position of the press in such matters might, at some future date, have to be revised, and he believed that the final decision would depend a great deal upon the restraint and decency with which the privilege had previously been handled. The position of the parties, moreover—at least of the party to whom his interest was confined—made a further and personal claim for indulgence upon a body whose association with literature was growing closer each year. The name which appeared upon the cause list—the name which he could well believe had grown to be to his client the intolerable symbol of all she sought relief from to-day—was, it is true, as obscure as it was besmirched. But it was far different with the petitioner's maiden name. That name, a name which, in accordance with a line of defence he left his friend on the other side to justify if he could, it seemed was to be imported into this sordid case, it would be only necessary to mention, in order at once to strike a responsive chord in the breasts of all who had the interest of literature at heart. (A pause, and "Oh! you are strong," from Nicholls, leading for respondent.) In her capacity of authoress, petitioner was well known to the reading public as "Althea Rees."

My! what a buzz and hum and craning of necks! And how the people who were in congratulated themselves on being in, and of having refused to be frightened away by the possible technicalities of Vacuum Salvage, and how they determined that no luncheon interval should tempt them away from the precincts of the court.

"I say, 'imported into the case,'" goes on Hart-Milner, when order had been restored, "because I believe I am divulging no secret when I say that the other side intend to plead condonation, and to take the unprecedented course of deducing it, not only from letters that passed between the parties subsequent to the alleged offences, but from passages in the published work of the petitioner bearing upon the position of the sexes—passages which, I make no doubt, my learned friend will know not only how to select, but——"

Nicholls was on his feet. "M'lud! I protest most strongly against the line my learned friend is seeing fit to take. My learned friend can have no knowledge whatever of what is in my brief."

"I think, Sir Frederick, I should let it alone at the present stage," the president suggests pacifically. "If it's there, we'll come to it in time."

"Very well, m'lud! Then I'll open my case. The petitioner—Althea Clara Hepworth, born Althea Clara Rees—only daughter of Mr. Lyman Rees, president of the Anglo-Occidental Bank, an American gentleman resident in London, and who has been for years a prominent figure ..." and so on, and so on, and so on.

I think I see the scene now. The dim court, packed with its restless, seated occupants; the long shafts of light from the Gothic window over the judge's seat, all alive with dust motes; the bearded president, with chin on hand; the intent, puzzled faces of the special jurymen; and Hart-Milner on his feet, relating, in a voice low but distinct, and vibrating with the multiplex humanity that made him the darling of Bar and Commons, the devilish tale of physical and spiritual brutality in which a man had sought revenge for the inferiority that daily self-comparison with a woman high-spirited, witty, and admired enforced upon his own base soul.

At the close of the opening speech the petitioner went into the box. She was a pathetic figure; all the more so, I thought, because she was so beautifully gowned. I remember her dress well. It was of brown silk, with the wide velvet sleeves that no one thought hideous in eighteen hundred and—never mind. She had a flower hat covered with pale blue violets, and a bunch of the same flowers at her breast. She kept her veil down as much as possible, and answered in low monosyllables, or in little, faltering sentences that one could hardly catch, and that often had to be repeated for the benefit of the jury. The questions were frightful. Even Hart-Milner could not do much with them.

Nicholls, with his long, mottled face, and jaw as of a dishonest horse-chaunter, jumped up to cross-examine—loathing his task, but all the more truculent for that.

"Look at these letters, please!"

A bundle of letters, on a woman's fanciful note-paper, sewn into a stiff paper cover, was taken across by the gowned usher.

"They are yours?"

"Yes."

"Some are dated, some aren't. May we take it the undated ones were written within two or three months of those that are?"

"Yes, I think so."

"During your husband's absence in Norway?"

"Yes."

"Written two years after the court has been told that your happiness and peace of mind and health had been wrecked, your faith in human nature destroyed, and written to the man who was responsible for all these things?"

No answer.

"Come! Let's read one or two."

He read them one by one. Foolish, flippant, loving letters. The letters of a poor little girl-wife, hungering for love and kisses, and—yes, why not?—for cuddling (the very word was in one of them); and, in her longing, turning for it to the dishonored, tainted source whence alone she could ask it now. The poor soul broke down and cried as the merciless, rasping voice read on and on.

"Now I ask you, and I ask the jury, is this condonation? And if it isn't, what is?"

Althea threw her arms out with a little stiff, appealing gesture that she checked immediately.

"Oh!" she sobbed, "what could I do? I was only a girl. I believed what he told me. He said all men were the same."

The case had not concluded when the court rose. I sprinted back to the office. The compositor was waiting for me, but I pushed by him and opened the door of Winstanley's sanctum.

"Hello!" said he, scarcely turning round; "you're late. What have you brought?"

"Half a column."

"Was it a dry case?"

"It's one that shouldn't be reported at all."

He spun round in his chair and regarded me savagely.

"That means it's d——d good! What's your game, Prentice?"

"Look here, Winstanley," I said nervously, "there are things, you know——"

"I don't know it at all. People who go into the courts are public property. If they don't like it, they can stay outside."

"And besides——"

"Besides what?"

"She's my Mrs. Hepworth."

"Your Mrs. Hepworth?"

"Althea Rees, the authoress."

He jumped up, and began to pace the floor savagely. "That's so like you. I suspect something; I send you down because you can gush, and, instead of sending your stuff out early and getting the scoop, you turn up late, with ten lines for the public and a lot of tripe about 'a woman's heart' for me."

Well, like Fenella, I 'smouthed' him down. He wasn't a bad little beast, when you knew him—Winstanley. It wasn't his fault if his veins were full of printer's ink. I told him the Herald and the Courier were doing the same as me. He sat grumbling.

"Turn in your stuff, then, and come back here. I'll send down Chaffers to-morrow, and you can do old Astbury at the City Carlton. You don't deserve anything better."

But Chaffers, and a good many other people, had their trouble for nothing. Next morning Nicholls arose in a packed court and announced that, after consultation, his client had decided to withdraw his defence, and would take a verdict by consent; each party to pay their own costs, and neither custody of nor access to the child of the marriage to be sought. Which decision Sir William Vieille, the president, commended in a little speech that left no doubt which way his direction would have gone. And I, hearing the result at midday, sent Althea the biggest bunch of pale violets I could find in St. Swithin's Lane. The price of violets in July, was, I admit, an eye-opener.

You will have guessed it was not on principle alone that I took all this trouble and risk. I had interviewed Althea a year before on some shop-assistants' movement or other (she was a woman of varied activities); and something in the name upon the card I had sent in seemed to strike her. When the interview was over she asked me to wait, and, having left the room for a few moments, came back with her father. Mr. Rees was a big, old-time, orating and banqueting type of American citizen, with a clean-shaven, ivory-white face and thick silver hair. He carried a great expanse of starched shirt-front, wore a narrow black tie, and I rather fancied I detected Wellington boots under his broadcloth trousers. He had my card in his hand.

"Your name is Hyacinth Prentice?"

"Yes, sir."

"You must be some relative of Hyacinth Prentice of Prentice and Morales?"

I said I was his son.

"Give me your hand, my boy!" said the old gentleman, impulsively. It was the last time I was to be called a boy; but I suppose I seemed young to him, and, indeed, a permanent immaturity of aspect is one of my disadvantages.

"I knew your father well," goes on old Lyman Rees. "He was one of the first friends I made when I came to London in sixty—sixty——? Oh, very well, my dear," for Althea had laid her hand gently upon his mouth. "We lost sight of one another before the trouble. I wrote him, though. I said: 'Don't try to reconstruct! Don't show the bad trading! Buy off the debenture holders! Give them twice the value in ordinary shares if they insist, and raise another hundred thousand in debenture on the Chili property.' But your father was an ill man to advise. Ah, well; it's an old tale to-day. Althea, we mustn't lose sight of Hy Prentice's son. When we are dining by ourselves?"

Althea gave a date that was significantly far ahead.

"But I'm always at home on Sundays," she added, smiling a good-bye. "Come in whenever the English Sunday becomes unendurable, Mr. Prentice."

My floral offering must have been only one of many she received, for all manner of fine friends rallied to her in her trouble; but, perhaps, coming from a poor devil of a working journalist, the tribute struck her imagination. A few days afterward I got a little note chiding me for never having taken advantage of the old invitation, and bidding me to dinner at the end of the week.

I am not a sentimentalist, whatever Winstanley may pretend he believes, but I confess that in the course of a friendship which dated from this dinner Althea became a sort of a heroine with me. Poor woman! the veil had been so roughly snatched from all the tender privacies of her life that I think I had the same satisfaction in bringing her my sympathy and consideration as a knight-errant may have felt, covering with his own cloak the naked, shamefaced captive whom his sword had cut loose in the forest. In fact, we became so far friends that one night, more than six months after her decree had been confirmed, she bade me, in saying good-night, congratulate her on a very serious step she was taking on the morrow. I thought she was going to be married, and I admit my heart sank a little. But it was nothing of the sort, as she explained hastily. She was on the eve of reception into the Roman Catholic Church.

XV

HISTORY OF A CONVERSION

She first came into contact with Catholicism—I mean close personal contact, for, during her residence upon the Continent, such things had passed her like a painted show—during a stay she made in late autumn with the Mawhoods (pronounce "Maud," please!) in Norfolk. Harberhall, Sir Cuthbert Mawhood's seat, famous for its tapestries and formal gardens, is one of the great houses of England. It was also, for nigh upon two hundred years, while the Howards were tacking and trimming, the only important stronghold of the prescribed faith in East Anglia. It has been beset for weeks together by spies and pursuivants; its gray flint Tudor walls are honeycombed with secret stairways, sliding panels and "conveyances." Father Fitzsimon or Hopwell, the seventeenth-century Abelard, lay concealed there for six months during the Oates mystification, and a strip of sea-beach almost under the park walls, called Paces to-day, is said to preserve in its name the tradition of his restless night walks. Set upon a steep hill that overlooks the fowl-haunted levels of the Wash, there is everything in the position and associations of Harberhall to arouse a romantic enthusiasm, and to turn that enthusiasm toward the great central fact which has lifted a commonplace county family to the heights of heroism and self-sacrifice.

The chapel of the Mawhoods is a modern Gothic building of the elder Pugin, whose windows are filled with stained glass from a French abbey demolished in the Revolution, and is connected with the hall only by a long wing of palm-houses and vineries. It is also the parish church of the village below the hill. During the last hundred years a small congregation of the faith has grown up there, dependents and old servants' children's children. The Mawhoods have married much abroad, and little trace remains of the Jansenism with which so many of the old Catholic families were once tainted. On a hunt morning, which also happened to be a feast of the Church, Sir Cuthbert and his two tall sons in pink approached the sacred altar among their servants and laborers. The Confiteor was recited by the surpliced server—the tabernacle unveiled. Above each head the chaplain, a tall, curly haired young doctor, himself a scion of an old West of England cavalier family, and predestined to the purple, bent reverently and murmured some formula that Althea could not catch. All returned to their places with downcast eyes and clasped hands, but with the easiness of long habit as well. Mass went on with many genuflections—many salutations from the altar steps, with tinkling of crystal vessels against the gold chalice rim, and one ecstatic minute in which the bowed congregation seemed to hold its breath, while a bell trilled sharply six times. During the mass the pupils of a convent school outside the village, directed by a community of French refugee nuns, many of them cousins and kinsfolk to the hall, sang English hymns in sweet quavering voices—vapid, unmetrical compositions of the veiled cloister, though not without a certain sentimental charm of their own:

"O Sacred Heart: behold thy children kneeling...."

or

"Oh, turn to Jesus, Mother turn!

And call Him by His tenderest names...."

This blessed eau sucré brought tears to Althea's eyes. Harkening it, she seemed somehow to recover her own hapless, "ill-adventured youth." The spell of the old, wise religion, so guileless and yet so subtle, which never seeks to explain the inexplicable, and which is as tender to those who have lost their happiness as it is merciless to those who are seeking it, fell over her. The end was never in doubt.

I should like to have been near Althea while she was "under instruction." I don't mean on account of anything she would have said, for, like most original thinkers, she was capable of infinite docility; but just to have watched her face while the Catholic doctrine, say as to the relation between physical and moral evil, was explained for her benefit. For she was a child of revolt, if ever there was one; far more akin to Bruno than to Augustine, to Leopardi than to Newman. Innately sceptical, a scoffer in the grain, I suppose she discovered that beyond all negation a doubt persists, and decided to give God and the creed that speaks most confidently for Him the benefit of it. Even after her conversion she liked to play at heresy—to be enfant terrible—to have grave monsignori wag their fingers half reprovingly at her. Her religion remained intensely personal, and she was never impressed, as some worthy converts have been, by the spectacle of the Church as a "great going concern." Its dogma oppressed her: she was not strong enough physically or nervously to endure its elaborate ritual, and would often leave her seat in church, suffocating, in the very middle of high mass. What she liked best was to creep away at dusk, when the world is busied with shopping and tea, and, before some dimly lit side altar in Farm Street or Brompton, to set herself adrift upon an ocean of sentiment that, with a little more conviction and a little less self-consciousness, might almost have become ecstasy.

Her new interest was immediately made apparent in her books, for her characters henceforth began to talk theology in season and out of season. At an earlier stage of her career, I submit, this would have missed her her public. But her reputation was by now secure: her annual novel was eagerly awaited by the "passionate few" whose suffrage alone fine writing can win. Besides, it was noticeable her asceticism never strayed far from the purlieus and issues of Mayfair. One got up from her books feeling that one had been in very fine company indeed. She had that affinity to the highly placed which is less snobbery, I believe, than a kind of perverse idealism. And, beneath all the pomp and circumstance, sorrow always worked regardless of earthly shows, and kept the balance true.

Such, as far as the world has any right to know her, was Althea Rees at the date I tried to make her Paul Ingram's earthly providence. I pleaded his cause, not perhaps as strongly as I might, because I wanted the man and his work to complete the impression for themselves. That they might do more—that in trying to work good I might be working mischief—was a thought that, I protest, never once occurred to me.

XVI

HOA-HAKA-NANA-IA

It doesn't much matter how early in the autumn we come back to London; upon our return we always find the season has stolen a march upon us. Paul arrived in town on a dark, rainy afternoon. The impatient, scowling skies were already beginning the ruin of the short-lived English summer. Beyond the railway terminus the streets, with their stream of jostling umbrellas, their straining horses and shiny-coated drivers, were both bewildering and disheartening. Victoria was full of belated holiday makers setting an anxious face seaward. And on all sides, from the railway announcements with which the walls of the vestibule were placarded, from the covers of the summer magazines that still heaped the book-stalls, from advertisements of soap and jam and pickles and liquors, girl faces simpered and ogled. Girls in punts, dabbling their hands in lilied water: sunburnt girls in orchards, carrying baskets filled with apples: languid girls in hammocks, with shapely ankles peeping discreetly from their frilled skirts: girls smiling from carriage windows, or standing with hounds in leash on windy moors—but always girls, always women. In some of these journals there might be food for thought or fruit of experience: here and there—though rarely—an author's name seemed earnest of this; but in every case, for the written word as for bottled mineral water or patent cereal, the lure was the same—some pretty, foolish face; something to excite and feed for a moment the idle desire of the eye. Paul, as he viewed these things biliously, wondered whether it were true after all, as his French captain had declared to him once with cursing and swearing, that the Anglo-Saxon was the most woman-ridden race in the world; and, alas! remembering how he himself had been employed during the last fortnight, a spasm of self-contempt contracted and hardened his heart. He felt degraded, commonplace, banal; caught in the toils of the delusion that has deposed woman from her proper place as man's helpmeet and propounds her, tricked and adorned and set on a pedestal, as his reward.

He put his baggage in the cloak-room, and made first of all for my lodgings in Pimlico. This was particularly unfortunate, as Mrs. McNaughten, deceived by the morning's fair promise, had driven me forth betimes, bidding me, under pain of her displeasure, which is no light threat, not to return till night, the while my room should be swept and scoured, "before the murk days comes, and a body canna tell dir-rt frae darkness." Scribbling a message in the narrow hall, while his umbrella made a pool upon its shabby oilcloth and Dulcinea, with pail and broom, ascended laboriously to her attack upon matter in the wrong place, Paul had an opportunity for contemplating the rewards of literature, the sort that does get into print. It cannot have been inspiriting.

His own rooms were in Cowley Street, Westminster. He approached them, through Broad Sanctuary, with the sense of expectancy that every one feels after even a short absence who nears the spot upon which the activities of his life converge. He had not left his French address—and so much can happen in a fortnight!

There was only one letter and a packet: the harvest of two weeks! The package contained his bank pass-book. He glanced at it hastily and tossed it aside. The letter was from America, from the lawyers who managed a slender inheritance that had devolved upon him some years ago, as a tardy act of justice, years after the foreclosure upon his mother's farm. As he read it, the blood left his cheeks under their superficial sunburn. He pocketed it, and made a hasty calculation upon his fingers—counting months perhaps—or even weeks. He looked round his sitting-room with hunted eyes. They were particularly pleasant quarters, these rooms of Ingram's, in a charming old early Georgian house behind the Abbey. Their windows had deep seats and looked across the cloistral calm of Cowley Street to similar quaint windows, curtained with art fabrics and with a hint of pottery and brass beyond. Actresses of the serious sort, journalists, an artist or two, one junior Cabinet Minister, were his neighbors. He was proud and fond of the old-world parlor—of its panelled walls, the slight list of its floor, its grotesque fire-back and grate. It had been his home now for two years; even the dust and stillness that lay on it after a fortnight's absence seemed consecrated—seemed his. All the books and most of the furniture was his own. It is marvellous how much wandering and uprooting the instinct of a home-making race will survive. As, give a couple of beavers in an exhibition tank a few logs, and watch the poor beasts start building!

He had a hasty lunch and went to the Museum. He read hard: he was too disturbed to write. In its untroubled atmosphere little by little his agitation left him. A pleasant sense of comradeship reached him from silent neighbors, many of whom had grown gray in the same thankless task. He felt he would always be able to breathe freely here. There was a respite after all, and projects would suggest themselves once his mind was at rest. Once it was at rest! For certain distractions must be put out of his way once and for all. He was sorry, truly sorry, for the girl who used to sit quietly beside him reading "Who's Who" or turning the leaves of some illustrated book—there, in the seat where the mad poet was mowing and scribbling this afternoon, but he was sorry for her only in the same impersonal sense that he was sorry for the woes with which the musty volume before him was filled:

"Old unhappy, far-off things

And battles long ago."

After all, self-preservation was the first law, and one could not accept a real responsibility for anything that was as inevitable as this. He was quite cheerful when I met him for dinner at the À-peu-près, and even pleasantly ironic at the expense of a white shirt-front and black tie which I was weak enough to think an evening call upon a lady in Portland Place demanded.

Althea received us in her own sanctum upon the second floor: a long, beautiful Adams room with creamy white walls hung sparsely with Carpacciesque Italian drawings in red chalk, a few water-colors of the old English school, and one great painting of the mad Venetian master, all splash and impasto, which, seen close at hand, was like a lichen stain on an old red wall, but, at a little distance, teemed with form and color. A bookcase of dark carved wood ran breast-high round the walls. Along its deep shelf were ranged bronzes, old Nankin jars, fragmental majolica figures—with an occasional faded embroidery or red morocco missal clasped with hammered silver. The carpet was of thick, dead-leaf-colored pile, and a brass railed fender with a wide leather seat ran across the low marble mantelpiece. Althea's room always struck me, personally, as the last word in that austere taste which roams the world, seeking and rejecting, in its quest of the beautiful.

She rose to meet us, and Paul had the impression of a woman, still young, in a loose pale satin gown, rather clumsy of figure but graceful of movement, with chestnut hair dressed low on her forehead, gray eyes under thick dark brows, a heavy jaw and just a hint of sensuality in the mouth. Her arms and hands were white and perfectly shaped; her ears finely modelled, and set as close to the head as though they had been carved from it in low relief.

As long as I was there we only talked commonplace, and I left them early, pleading the editorial discipline. I thought I had done my part in bringing them together, and walked back to Pimlico "on eggshells." But no sooner was I gone, (so I have heard since,) than she recrossed the room and, seating herself upon the fender, gazed at Ingram in silence for a long while. Try to imagine what balm to the misunderstood, thwarted spirit that level, frankly admiring regard must have been.

"Tell me all about it!" she said at last, abruptly and impulsively.

Paul smiled back into the intense gray eyes.

"All about what?"

"How you ever came to write such a story."

She reached to the mantel-shelf, and, taking down a square silver cigarette-box, scrawled all over its top and sides with well-known women's names, handed it across to him. She lit one herself and arranged her satin draperies.

"You speak as though I had 'arrived!'"

"Oh! success will come," she said confidently. "It's the beginnings that are most fascinating. I want to be taken behind the scenes. Come, wizard!" she pleaded "let me be inquisitorial and curious while I'm under your spell. To-morrow you'll be my rival. Who knows but that I may hate you then?"

Ingram considered a moment, and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.

"There's not much to tell," he said slowly. "You may have heard or guessed that I'm a poor man's son. We have our decayed families in Massachusetts, though I suppose we haven't quite so far back to decay. I didn't learn much more at free school than to read and write and figure, but you know with what care and reverence the first steps are guarded in our country. Nothing so trivial and hopeless as the average English taste in letters could leave even our primaries. I may say 'our country,' 'our primaries,' may I not?"

She flashed her sympathy.

"Afterward I led a very lonely life for years. I don't mean comparative loneliness, or even such loneliness as a man may achieve for himself in any big city. I mean weeks, months, with never a human face. And during that time I think"—he laughed—"I think I read every book in the world."

"No writing? No early efforts?"

"I was twenty-eight before I tried. When I wrote my first essay I'd almost forgotten how to hold a pen. Please," he urged quickly, "you must try and believe it."

"I am believing every word you say."

"I was a soldier in the French army. Oh! no glory—just drudgery. Very good society though: I still believe my corporal was an Austrian bishop. We were on detachment in the desert, and of course English books weren't to be had. Besides, some of the lads from Alsace were eager to learn, and it seemed a chance before I forgot it myself. I had met all sorts of strange characters, and began to try and set them down as I remembered them. Then it was only a step to putting them in new situations and figuring out how they'd make good. And then—and then—it seemed to me I made a discovery."

He stopped, a little agitated, filled his lungs with smoke, and emptied them before he spoke again. Althea sat quite still.

"Go on, please," she said in a low voice.

"In all the stories I had read the character seemed to start, full-fledged, on the first page. All the action of the book develops it and shows it up. Now that might be literature, but it wasn't life. What was the reason? Not a mistake; because the best men do it. No. But I think unconsciously they are following the line of least resistance. They start the first chapter under a disadvantage: with the last one in their heads. And they even get praise for preserving the unities—the unities!—of life! What a lot of guessing it would save! I ended by believing there's no such thing as a consistent character at all. There's something we hang our convictions on as we hang clothes on pegs, but all the rest is just things happening—things happening—things happening. And in the intervals"—he laughed again, "as much character as you like to indulge in: as much as you feel you can stand yourself. Am I tiring you?"

"Oh, no!"

"Take my book. You've read it through?"

"And through again."

"What's Patty Holt? Only a ranch-woman who broils, and bakes, and washes, and irons, and has wandering loves. What's her husband? An Indian trader, who holds up trains and has views on the revision of Hamilton's masterpiece, the Constitution of the United States. Neither of them know either how good or how bad they are. Conviction for him would come with the rope round his neck, and for her when the Ashplant Vigilance Committee gave her twenty-four hours to bisect the state boundary line at right angles."

"She'll be compared with Madame Bovary, you know."

"Very unfairly, then. Emma Bovary is a romantic-minded woman set amid prosaic surroundings, and Holt's wife is a commonplace woman set in romantic ones. What's wanting to romance? Her lovers ride and kill. I suppose if they rode—what's the word—destriers instead of cow-ponies, and carried two-handed swords instead of thirty-thirties, they'd be legitimate subjects for the most full-blooded cap and sword romance. And there was—I mean there is—violent and horrid death at hand any time the Ute bucks lift a demijohn of fifty overproof Peach Bloom Rye going up to a mining camp. No, what weighs them both down is just the sordidness of the transplanted civilization around them, and when the crash comes all they have to turn to is the little meeting-house God of their youth, which the woman has outgrown unconsciously during her emotional experiences."

"But surely——What about Mr. Ffoulkes? You don't think that he——?"

Paul jumped to his feet and thrust his hands into his pockets with an impatient movement.

"Everard Ffoulkes! The cowboy bishop! Isn't it funny how unerringly even good criticism puts his finger on the one true thing, and declares 'That couldn't happen.' Why he's 'vécu'—'erlebt,' every word and action of him. I've ridden with him, camped with him, bunked with him, and even prayed with him."

Althea regarded him awhile, through the smoke haze, with eyes narrowed to slits.

"Mr. Ingram," she said, flinging her cigarette away, "I'm going to help you publish your book, but I'm going to hurt you first. Now—are you ready?"

"Go right ahead."

"You'll have to modify it. Oh! don't bristle and scold. I know I've touched a nerve. But on your own confession you've lived away from the world a long time, and you have no conception of"—she paused for a strong enough word—"the impregnable determination of our race that certain things shall not be—I won't say discussed, but even postulated. It's too strong for the strongest of us. The Inquisition and the Index are indulgent beside it. It's begun to hurt social progress; but even social progress has to mark time and wait its pleasure. Right in the midst of our civilization, Mr. Ingram, a great, rough-hewn granite god uprears his bulk. I always imagine him something like the Easter Island deity you have to pass on your right going into the Museum—no forehead, cavernous eye-sockets, vast nostrils and mouth—Hoa-haka-nana-ia: the god of things as they must be supposed to be. And his thighs and stomach are simply larded with the smoke of intellectual sacrifice. There is a legend, you know, that no great literary work, once carried through, has failed to somehow or another reach the world. I fancy Hoa could throw some light on that tale. Shall we go on the balcony? It's rather warm in here."

She put her hand to her forehead as he followed her down the room. Outside the rain had ceased, and the September night was clear and fresh. Across the nobly planned street, the broadest and most effective prospect in London, the windows of the great stuccoed mansions were dark and shuttered, with only here and there a pale glow in fanlight or upper window, but the many storied Langham Hotel, filled with trans-Atlantic birds of passage, closed the vista cheerily, and a broad flare of light round the corner showed where Regent Street and the shops and restaurants began.

"Do you know French well?" she asked, presently.

"Only everyday French and a few curiosities I'm trying to forget."

"It is a pity. You could have turned your book into a French novel, and then translated it."

Paul shook his head. "I wouldn't do that. It's here or nowhere. The very houses, the very self-satisfied faces, are a challenge."

"Isn't it wonderful?" Althea mused, leaning on the rail and regarding the houses opposite. "And this is only one street. There are hundreds like it. House after house, wealth upon wealth, millions running to milliards till the brain reels. And in hardly one a single misgiving, a single suspicion that the same fate which measures can re-measure. Only pleasure, food, fine raiment, and the stealthy rapture of possession. But it can't go on forever." She shook her head. "No, here in the cradle of the race the racial revolution will come about. These sober, policed streets will be the theatre of the completest subversion the world has ever known. It's one of the charms of living in London, where things will happen. I have my visions. Westminster Cathedral full of little beds is one—I don't know why—and nurses and doctors with their sleeves rolled up.... What made you call your book 'Sad Company,' Mr. Ingram?" she asked, with a sudden inconsequence. "Did you know it was a quotation?"

"I don't think so. I may have seen it somewhere and forgotten."

"It wasn't this, was it?—

"'Go from me! I am one of those that fall.

What! has no cold wind swept your heart at all

In my sad company?...'

"—Let us go in. It's not as warm as I thought. I'll ring for coffee, and introduce you to my father. I've let him dip into your manuscript. You don't mind? He's one of the proprietors of the Parthenon, so be very pleasant and alert. He's been in Colorado, too, and thinks a lot of your scenery passages." She turned and, smiling, held up a finger impressively. "Mind! I say your scenery."

XVII

THE CONTINENTAL EXPRESS

I heard nothing from Paul for days, and was beginning to think reproachfully of his conduct, when, on the morning of the third day, a note was brought by hand to the Panoply office. It was short and rather cryptic. He was evidently in some trouble, the exact nature of which he didn't disclose. He wanted me to come to him at once, and to keep the afternoon open.

I hurried down after lunch. Mrs. Gribble's face as she opened his hall door expressed relief. Paul has always been rather yearned upon by his landladies.

"Oh! I'm that glad you've come, Mr. Prentice," the good woman said, as she ushered me up the wide, shallow stair. "I don't think Mr. Ingram oughter be alone. He's bin talkin' to hisself dreadful all night. Me nor my 'usband couldn't get no sleep for harkening at 'im."

I entered the room with that air of boisterous incredulity which men keep for a stricken brother.

"On your back, Ingram? Nothing much wrong, I hope."

Paul was lying on the bed, half clad and in his dressing-gown. His pipe was in his mouth, and through the drift of tobacco smoke, with which the dark, oddly shaped little room was filled, I thought his face looked drawn. He motioned me to a chair with a wet pipe stem.

"Sit down and help yourself to tobacco," he said, and smoked on in silence.

"Prentice!" he broke out all of a sudden, so abruptly that I let the match I was striking fall; "did you ever break a woman's heart?"

I gaped at him.

"Oh, I'm not joking. I really am collecting evidence on the subject. I've been studying it hard now for two days and a night. There's not much help, is there," pointing out the open window, "in three chimney-pots and a demolition? If you hadn't come, I was prepared to take Mrs. Gribble's opinion. Come, Prentice—man to man—have you ever——?"

"No," I answered, rather shortly. "I've been too busy all my life."

"But it can be done?"

"My dear Ingram, you know 'women' is not a subject I've specialized on."

"But still, you keep your eyes open?"

"Well, then; I can't say I think it often happens: nothing like as often as the other way round; and yet——"

"And yet——I know. It may. And some people are doomed to knock their heads against exceptions all their lives."

He twisted himself to one side with the weak and peevish movement of a man seeking relief on the rack.

"Is the woman you're—er—writing about young, or only still young?"

"She's very, very young," he answered, with a curious sort of smile—bitter and yet tender at the same time.

"Good!" I commented cheerfully. "That's tremendously in her favor."

Paul smoked on. "I really didn't bring you here to talk generalities, Prentice," he said after a while. "Can you meet some people for me on the 3.45 Continental train at Charing Cross?"

I told him my afternoon was at his disposal.

"You're a sure good friend," he said simply, and I took the little phrase in full payment. Paul was seldom American in idiom but when he was touched or excited. "There's a mother and daughter—Mrs. and Miss Barbour. Let's see now; how will you spot them?"

"Did the daughter by any chance come with you to the À-peu-près, three weeks ago?"

"That's so, Prentice; I had forgotten."

"I think I shall know her again," I said, smiling a little behind my cigarette. Poor, unworldly Paul! "What am I to tell them?"

"I'm just figuring it out."

"What is really the matter, old man?"

"Mental vertigo, from thinking too long in a circle, really."

"I think I understand. A sort of moral fatigue."

"That's a splendid name for it."

"But will she—will they, be satisfied with that? Shall I be asked questions?"

"Say I'm run down."

"Run down and no visitors. Have I got it right?"

"And that I'm writing. Don't forget that part. How's time?"

I went to the window and looked at my watch. "Just time to do it comfortably."

"Good-bye, then, and thank you, Prentice, from my heart. You're doing me a big favor. Oh! by the way," calling me back from the door. "About Mrs. Hepworth."

"Yes?"

"She's written, making an appointment for to-night. The book, you know. More mutilation. I can't go as I am."

"Very well—I'll 'phone her."

I paused with my finger on the doorknob. "I can say 'moral fatigue' to her, I suppose."

Ingram seemed to think a moment. I wondered whether I had sounded impertinent.

"Yes," he said, slowly. "I think you can say it to her."

I reached Charing Cross with nearly ten minutes in hand. The 3.45 Continental, having probably thrown every local and slow train on the line half an hour out of its reckoning, was signalled "on time." A long line of porters was strung out along the curved platform. Motor-cars and carriages awaited the great ones of the earth, and a score of people paced the flagstones. Among them a couple of press men nodded absently to me. Punctually to time and quietly, as the expected always happens, the Folkestone express pushed its smoky old nose into the station. Porters shouted and jumped on the step, doors flew open, and the platform was covered in a trice with a jostling crowd of veiled women and ulstered men, the awkwardness of the long journey still in their cramped limbs. My trained eye searched the crowd rapidly but thoroughly for the girl I was to meet, and presently I saw her, beautiful, happily anxious, becomingly disordered from travel, and with perhaps a warmer pallor in her cheeks than when I had seen her last. She did not know me, of course, and it was the strangest, saddest thing in the world to feel myself scanned unconcernedly and passed over by the expectant eyes I had come to cloud, and maybe fill with tears. I reached her side and lifted my hat.

"Miss Barbour, I think."

She looked at me with a slight stiffening of the figure.

"My name is Prentice. I am a friend of Paul Ingram's."

"Of Paul's? Is he here?"

"Miss Barbour, pray do not be alarmed or anxious. Ingram is not quite well enough to meet the train and has asked me——"

Her eyes filled with terror. "Where is he? At his rooms? Oh! we will go at once, mother!"

I had never thought it would be easy; I saw now that it was not going to be as easy even as I had thought.

"Miss Barbour," I said, venturing to lay a hand on her coat-sleeve. "Pray attend to me for one moment. Ingram is to see no one to-night. There is no need for alarm, but——"

"——Mother, mother!"

A stout, comely old lady was making her way toward us. By her side a gnarled and grizzled railway servant walked, soothing her agitation with a patiently reassuring manner that, had he been a doctor and not a porter, concerned with chests, in fact, instead of with trunks, might have won him riches and a title.

"Yes, marm, I understand you puffeckly. Two gladstings, you said—large tin trunk, and a 'at-box. No, marm, I aint a-leavin' you. I'm agoin' to git you a four-w'eeler. You stand 'ere until I comes back. Your two gladstings, your large tin trunk, and your 'at-box is all numbered the same, and will be put together on this 'ere counter. 'Ave your keys in your 'and in case they wants one opened. As soon as that there man 'as marked them with chork I shall come back and put 'em on my barrer; then I shall take 'em to your four-w'eeler. No marm; I'm your porter, and no one else sha'n't 'ire me. No marm; nor no one else sha'n't take your four-w'eeler."

"Mother, Paul is ill, and I'm not to see him. This is Mr. Prentice, a friend of his."

"There," said Mrs. Barbour, jingling her keys sharply. "What did I say, Nelly. Those drains at Palèze. Is it something infectious, mister—mister——? Is there any temperature yet?"

I caught at the "infection" and lied, as I had foreseen I would. People were jostling and bumping against us. The girl had to catch my arm once.

"Please, please set your minds at rest," I said. "I am confident it is nothing but a little overwork and worry that will be all right to-morrow. But, in the meantime, Paul is, as no doubt you know, rather nervous and scrupulous. To-morrow we shall know for certain what it is. He is writing, and you may take my word for it, it will be good news. And now, madam, please let me pass your luggage through the customs, see you safely into a cab, and take a good report back before Paul settles for the night." I had not been asked to do this, but nothing fits so easily and naturally into one lie as another lie.

The mother was tractable and not greatly concerned. I could see she was one of those ministering women upon whom sickness acts as a challenge, and who can look forward to a long spell of nursing, untroubled by misgivings as to the ultimate result. But the girl's white face and questioning eyes tortured me. I could feel the question in them even when my back was turned to her. I would not judge Paul hardly: would not judge him at all. I knew enough of life to know that a man may without a moment's warning find himself faced by some terrifying, insoluble problem, out of which there is no gentle, no easy, no honorable way. But his strange manner—his phrase, stranger still, about the "exceptions" it had been his lot to encounter, filled me with misgiving. I even wondered if mayhap I was the last man that should ever see perfect happiness in that perfect face.

I had put them into their cab, and was leaving the terminus, when, passing before a telephone box, I remembered my other message. I rang through to Portland Place, and, for the first time since I had known her, heard Althea's level voice along the wire, not only without pleasurable emotion, but even with a sudden inexplicable distaste. I was surprised, too, at the concern in it when I had delivered my message. She pressed me for a true account, and, tired of mystification, I gave her Paul's own words. At her next sentence I nearly dropped the receiver.

"My dear lady—think! Oh! you can't."

"I'll risk it," Althea said, with a stubborn little laugh that I could fancy a flushed cheek accompanied. "I'm not conventional, as you know. Besides, you say the creature isn't in bed. Oh! you clever male duffers, with your insight and analysis, and not enough wit to know after months what a woman sees in the first five minutes—that a fellow-creature is perishing before your eyes of sheer intellectual starvation."

What could I do? Ring off. Sigh and make a further mental note as to the insane quality in a woman's courage. For what Althea proposed was nothing more nor less than to call at Ingram's rooms the next day in her car, if fine, and discuss alterations and revisions with him in the course of a long motor ride. As for me, with that child's white face and panic-stricken eyes before me, and a pleasant sense of being responsible for more than I could control, it was only left to pray for foul weather. Which, believe me or not, I heartily did.

XVIII

AMENDE HONORABLE

Meantime, with many jolts and halts, and to the accompaniment of a good deal of mercifully muffled blasphemy from the box, the cab drew out of the station yard and rolled heavily toward Suffolk Square. The blighting autumn rain drummed pitilessly on its roof and lashed the closed window-panes. So dark had the afternoon turned that Mrs. Barbour could only see her daughter's face as a white blur against the black velvet cushion, and was forced to guess at its expression. A good deal of new-born hope mingled with her own concern. I am a poor actor, and know now that after the first Mrs. Barbour had been undeceived by my message. She had suspected a "quarrel" on the last day at La Palèze, and though she had not been a witness to any further manifestations of it, did not believe, perhaps because she did not wish to believe, that it had even been made up. She had never approved her daughter's choice in her heart—had thought it but a poor fulfilment of so many fond imaginings. She had the relish for change often to be found in easy-going, hospitable natures. She was not callous nor indifferent to the girl's probable suffering, but she had lived through a good deal herself and had the robust scepticism of middle age in affairs of the heart. Beyond inevitable storms and fevers, beyond a few tearful days and sleepless nights, what rosy vistas might not be opening! With Ingram out of the way, she became seized again of all her old air-castles. It is a strange fact that the dark homeward drive, which was one long torture for the daughter, should have been invested for the being who loved her best with the subdued cheerfulness of an executor returning from a funeral.

A year ago she would have been profuse of tenderness and sympathy; but during that year her child's heart had grown away from her, exhausted by a passion it was too immature to bear, and shrank too perceptibly from the ministrations of any other love. For the present she judged an elaborate heedlessness to be at once the easiest and the safest course.

The promise of better days, of a clearer horizon, persisted in the clean, stately house that welcomed the wanderers home, in its high-ceiled rooms, so strangely wide and light after the dark, cramped little cottage in which she had been living under protest, and in the open kindly English faces of Druce and Kendal, who had not so much grown gray as they had toughened and flattened in faithful service. Her lodgers would not be back for a couple of weeks, and she could roam from room to room and indulge her sense of proprietorship undisturbed, finding everything brighter, fresher, better for her absence. One would have said that Number Eleven, too, had taken a trip to the seaside for change of air. She unpacked her trunk, found her knitting, and was humming a little brisk air when she returned to the sitting-room.

What she saw struck the song from her lips and the happiness from her heart. Fenella sat forward in an armchair over the cold, empty grate. Her poor face seemed tense, strangely unyouthful and set like a stone. She returned her mother's startled gaze with stricken, inexpressive eyes. Mrs. Barbour was on her knees at her side in a moment.

"Nelly, darling! Are you ill, child?"

The girl shook her head slowly, and looked away again at the black-leaded grate.

"Have you been sitting here ever since we came in? Oh, my pet! And I roaming over the house and never thinking." She drew the gloves off her daughter's limp hands. "Dear! your poor hands are like ice. Shall I have a fire lit while tea's making ready?"

Nelly shivered. "I'm chilled," she said, "and—and a little dizzy. It's the crossing, perhaps. And the house does seem cold and strange, doesn't it, mummy, after our little chalêt?"

Mrs. Barbour rang for tea and ordered a fire to be lit. Her fingers trembled as she cut thin bread and butter.

"It's her eyes," she kept saying to herself, in that frightened soliloquy we use to temper a vague dread. "It's her eyes that frighten me. If I could only get them to look natural, I shouldn't mind so greatly. She knows something I don't. What did that devil say to her before he left?"

She wheeled the sofa before the fire—that was an inspiriting thing in itself on this rainy September evening—tucked a shawl over the child's shoulders and put furred slippers on the numbed, slender feet. Nelly sipped her tea, nibbled her toast with the docility of the broken in spirit. Later she pretended to read, but, happily ignorant how much of real sorrow may be entombed in the printed page, found no comfort there in time of present trouble. She was one of those for whom reading is a last resource, literature the thinnest of veils that can be interposed between them and the withering breath of reality. The book is yet to write that will not be laid down at a postman's knock or an infant's cry.

It was at a postman's knock now that the novel whose pages she had been listlessly turning slipped from her lap and fell, face downward, on the hearth-rug. She could not rise, so great was her agitation, and the fulness of time seemed to gather in every second that tick-tocked from the clock in the corner before her mother was in the room again. She was holding a letter before her spectacles, a letter with a deep black border, at whose superscription her brows were knitted. Back from failing limbs and reeling brain the blood flowed to Fenella's heart. But she did not faint. There is always enough life left us to learn the extent of our sorrow.

"The letter's for you, dear!"

"Read it, mummy," she said, simply. "I can't."

Mrs. Barbour ripped open the envelope. As she glanced over the unfamiliar writing, her faced glowed with pleased excitement.

"What is it? Oh! what is it?" the puzzled and tortured girl asked her, seeing her lips move.

Mrs. Barbour looked up. "Darling, what's the matter? It's good news. I mean—God forgive me!—not very bad. Only your Aunt Hortense dead. You never knew her."

Fenella, as she took her suspense back into her breast, knew its name was Hope. Her eyes filled as from some inward sweat of anguish—some wound felt only when the sword is withdrawn.

"Why do they write to me?"

"It's from your cousin Leslie. Listen! Shall I read to you?" She did not wait for an answer, but read on breathlessly:

"Dear Cousin Fenella,

"Do you remember—have you ever been told, of the girl who came to see you fifteen years ago, and whom you would not kiss? Fifteen years ago! and now she is bringing herself to your notice again. Do you feel it an insult after so long? You should not, dear cousin. For there are things that are so hard to write, but that sound so natural when they are spoken. And even though you resent it, be patient for the sake of the sad reason that occasions her writing now. Poor mother was buried on Friday. One can remain loyal and still admit that she was a woman hard to understand—impossible to divert from a prejudice once conceived. Even now, although I have thought of you unnumbered times, sought news of you, even kissed the picture we have of you as a child, that seemed to me to hold the promise of a sweet friendship to come in its baby face, I could not write to you as I am doing did I think that my impulse still crossed the will of the dead. You will not understand this until you have seen one you love die by inches under your eyes, while you stood by, powerless to save, and all but powerless to soothe. But toward the end of her illness mother spoke of you. Her heart was changed, and in what I am doing now I am carrying out the wishes of the dead no less than gratifying what has always been a secret desire."

Mrs. Barbour paused for breath. "Doesn't she write beautifully, dear?"

"I think it's gush," said Fenella. "Is there much more?"

"Oh! fie, dear. Listen!"

"Dear Cousin, we are to come to town for the autumn. May I call upon you—see you often—make amends for all the wasted years that might have made us friends? You are our kin, and, in trouble, blood calls to blood. We will return to Freres Lulford for Christmas, and we want you to spend it with us, among your own people. It will be a sad and quiet one for all, but by then I trust you will have grown so near to us that we need not grudge you a share in our grief. Write me when you get this. The earlier your answer reaches me the easier I shall forgive myself for what, by one cold word, you can turn to the deepest humiliation I have ever suffered. Think me impulsive, think me indiscreet, think me even impertinent; but, believe me, oh! so ready to write myself

"Your loving cousin,
"Leslie Barbour."

Mrs. Barbour wiped her spectacles. They were so dim that she did not notice her daughter's vacant gaze.

"Mother, are people often taken ill so suddenly?"

"My dear, your cousin says it was a long illness."

Fenella gave the low moan of the misunderstood. "Mother! I don't mean—that. I mean Paul."

The woman could not check a movement of almost passionate impatience.

"Mr. Ingram? I don't believe he's ill at all. Men who write are always up or down. They're worse than women. It's the unhealthy life they lead."

"I wonder—I wonder!" said Nelly under her breath. She was realizing, with a sick dismay, that this was the last evening delivery and that to-morrow would be Sunday, a day during which, for those at least who live in London and wait upon the post for comfort, the operations of Providence are entirely suspended. Two nights and a day to be lived through—somehow!

Her mother took out the letter again, and fingered it caressingly.

"It's what I've been longing for all my life," she said. "When are you going to answer it, dear?"

"To-morrow, mummy, to-morrow," wailed poor Fenella, and fled from the room.

She climbed the stairs weakly, feeling the empty house's atmosphere no longer chill, but stifling and oppressive. By the time she had reached her room the impulse to fling herself upon her knees, to bury her face in the coverlet and weep and weep, had passed. Instead she lit both candles of her dressing-table and, sitting down, gazed long and earnestly at her reflection in the tilted mirror. To study herself thus was rather a habit of hers. The woman who has beauty and does not know it is a graceful conception, but lacks reality. All the world is a conspiracy, pleasant or otherwise, to convince her. Fenella was not vain, but, with all encountered comeliness compared to it, her body had not ceased to be a rapture to a curiously impersonal love of beauty, innate in her as in all sorts of people, but which, in her case, by a bounteous accident of nature, could be fed most delicately upon its own outward substance. Nor was she ignorant that, in the quarter to which she had devoted it, she was, to use the world's chosen language, and in a sense far beyond its choice meaning, "throwing her good looks away." She knew it—she gloried in it. No whisper that reached her from jealous or puzzled friends could add to her own conviction of it—no secret recess of her being but responded and thrilled to the call of self-sacrifice. At a certain height of passion woman becomes strangely sufficient to herself—is priestess and host in one, with an ecstasy in the immolation that men can only guess at. For all the lack of curiosity as to her lover's past life which was so unaccountable a thing to her mother, the girl guessed that it had been hard and sad, so sad and hard that the full strangeness of the destiny that brought him to lips and arms like hers could only be dimly comprehended by him. His blindness forced self-valuation upon her. She flung her beauty, the freshness of her youth, the tribute of other men's burning eyes and stammering tongues, into the scale against it. She asked only love. Let him but love, she would teach him appreciation in time. She had her own white conscience in such matters, too, even though the obtuseness of her lover's senses tempted her to lengths that innocence does not often venture. It was not three weeks ago since, sitting upon the dunes, at the end of an afternoon during which the grizzled head had been her plaything, she had asked Paul abruptly whether he did not in his heart sometimes think her a shameless woman. And the undisguised astonishment of the gray eyes at her question had been at once a reproach and the sweetest, completest assurance that it was possible to have. And then and there, drawing from his arms, and while the loose sand trickled through her fingers, she had made the poor little apologia of her love, haltingly and timidly, and told him that should it ever happen—inconceivable surely on this day of sunshine and sweet airs as that sky and sea should change places—that he should go one way in life, she another, she had such a store of shameful memories as would press her to the earth all the rest of her days.

Yet it was this possibility, scarce to be imagined a fortnight ago, which she was facing to-night; now, as she combed and plaited her black hair, so fine and loose that the comb ran through its length at a single stroke; now as, unfastening the corset that had chafed and rayed the tender flesh at her waist, she put on her long white robe and stood before the mirror, a trembling penitent, about to make amends through a whole racked night for the follies of her undisciplined heart. Buoyant and hopeful by nature, and really knowing nothing yet for certain, she was aghast at the urgency with which defeat claimed acceptance, and at the weakness and intermittence that her imagination, pressed into loyalty's service, showed in working toward her lover's justification. She felt herself sentenced, a culprit, a prey to the illogical anger of some power which she had failed to propitiate only because she had not known of its existence. The chill of abandonment was already at her heart. As for the letter which she had just heard read to her, she hardly gave it a thought, although a wish of her own heart, unavowed, but very intimate, was realized in it. To-night any comfort save the one for which her whole being ached was a traitor—an accomplice in the conspiracy of silence, of shrugged shoulders, of amused wonder that had surrounded her poor little love-story from the first. No one had meddled, she remembered; no one had interfered or seemed anxious. With smarting eyes as she laid her head on her pillow she paid her tribute to the wisdom of the world.

The morrow with its suspended bustle—its clanging church bells and the awkward voices of milkwomen and paper-boys ringing upon the silence of the streets and squares, was a torture not to be borne. As soon as her mother had gone to church she dressed herself and left the house. The morning was fine but close. In the park the moisture of a whole week's rain, sucked out of the stale earth by the sun, surcharged the air almost to the level of the tree-tops with a palm-house atmosphere that weighed alike upon flesh and spirit. Although it was September, the parks as she crossed them were full of smartly dressed people—mothers and young daughters—sturdy children with dawdling lawn-clad nurses—ivory-faced old ladies in ample creased robes of silk—an occasional earnest young man, professionally silk-hatted, striding along with a chattering girl at his side, who bravely but jerkily maintained the pace of his long legs. They all seemed to be coming in opposite directions. She was on one of those unhappy errands when we feel we are making head alone against a contrary current of joyous contentment.

The bell from the great Parliament tower was tolling twelve as she passed into Dean's Yard. The old gravelly square was deserted, except for a statuesque policeman and one little blue-coated messenger boy, with his round cap cocked over his ear, who from pure lightness of heart was waking its staid echoes with a shrill medley of popular airs. She had set out with no precise intention, drawn as by a magnet to the spot where the treasure of her heart was kept from her, but, though she did not reason, with every step her insensate impulse hardened. She would test the tottering fabric of her happiness now, though, at a touch, it should topple into ruins about her head.

Cowley Street was empty, and pigeons were feeding in the roadway. She was leaning against the railings—fighting, reasoning with a heart that the mere sight of his windows had driven into tumult, when the stillness was invaded by the blast of a motor-horn. The doves took flight above the sunlit roofs. A big touring car, coming from the river, swept into the street, and drew up, with a creaking of its brakes, outside the door that she was praying for strength to approach. A woman alighted, glanced at the number upon the red door, and plied the knocker briskly. Her hat was veiled and a light dust-cloak covered her dress, but one moment's application of that intuitive knowledge which women possess told the girl that she was probably handsome and undeniably rich. The whirr and clutter of the cylinders ceased unaccountably just as the door was opened. Cowley Street on Sunday is more than still. She heard his name clearly, the very accent in which it was uttered somehow confirming her first impression; then the door closed. With a single jaunty glance at the remaining feminine interest, the green-coated chauffeur swung himself out of his seat and busied himself with some recalcitrant machinery or other under the bonnet of the car.

Have you ever, on a railway journey, or in a packed public meeting, from which there was no escape without unwelcome comment, fought against deadly faintness? How the landscape crawled past the spinning, flashing, wheels! How the sermon, the address pelted on, a meaningless torrent of vocables, against the brain that was tense and taut for one thing only—that thing deliverance! In such a mood Fenella hurried through the streets and parks toward her home. She had forgotten her purse at setting out, and the cheapest, slowest amelioration of her journey was denied her. Another woman! Another woman! No defeat could have been more complete. Everything had been imaginable but this. Against every aspect that the annihilation of her suspense could have shown her she would have done battle—save only this. Women are taught by their whole life's training to seek concrete motives for action and, when found, to respect them. To principle they concede little, and they expect as little from it. If they fight selfishly, at least they fight bravely, naked and unambushed—warrior, weapon and reward in one. Auguring nothing from past treacheries, so the treachery be not to them, betrayal always finds them unprepared, as, once shattered, nothing really rebuilds their faith. Could it be otherwise? What value to them in a love or a devotion whose incentive lies outside of them and beyond them?

She reached home at last. Her mother had been watching for her from the window and ran to open the door. She had a letter in her hand. Where had the girl been? How ill she looked! There was news for her, brought by a boy messenger half an hour ago. The poor child could only shake her head and, taking her letter, seek refuge once more in her own room. During her absence her trunk had been unpacked; all the silver vanities were ranged, with snowy doylies beneath them, on the woman's altar of her dressing-table. The bed on which she had tossed and moaned all night was spread white and cool and smooth. A little breeze was rising, and fluttered the curtains at the open windows.

After what she had seen no letter could matter much; but she read it through dutifully, with a little sigh as each page fluttered from her hands to the floor. It was long and kind and tender; the letter of a man who would select his language at the very judgment seat of God; a fair copy, without blot or erasure, product of a night no less sleepless than her own. If the balance lay all at one side of the account, at least he had ruled the ledger straight. The old arguments were reiterated, the old impossibilities pressed home. The dilemma, evaded once before, had confronted Ingram again, harder, crueller for the delay, as is the manner of evaded dilemmas. He had had to choose again between wounding her pride or wounding her heart—to death this time—and with the anxiety such a man will always have to preserve a woman's good opinion at all costs, which is half fine feeling and half vanity, he had chosen the second. Wisely? Who shall say? At least his end was gained. He was loved at the last. She pressed the sheet which bore his signature madly, unrestrainedly against her mouth, blurring the ink with her moist lips. She would have kissed his hand so—holding the knife at her throat.

And with the kiss her childhood ended. Then and there the thorn-plaited crown of her womanhood was proffered her. She put it on bravely and unflinchingly. She did not despair of life nor of life's end. Flowers, laurels, she felt might crown her yet, but under blossom or bay leaf she would always know where to look for the old scars. And, finding them, she would bless them for his sake.

An hour later Mrs. Barbour, trembling a little at her own temerity, knocked at the door, and, getting no answer, opened it. Nelly was sitting on the bed, dry-eyed, sucking her thumb. The pages of her lover's last letter were littered over the quilt and on the floor.

The mother asked no question. She closed the sash softly, drew down the blind, and, going to her daughter without a word, held her close—held her for two long hours, while the Sabbath baked meats went to grease and the gong roared unheeded below; held her through a tempest so deep at life's sources that she trembled and prayed as the frail body shook against her breast. But the green tree bears the hurricane because it is green. The storm was passing away in sobs that grew fainter and fainter, the stained cheek was beginning to move restlessly upon her drenched shoulder, when she spoke:

"Was it bad news?—from him?" she asked, and compressed her lips.

"Mother," said the girl, with a fresh outburst of tears that was only the leaves shaking off the rain, "don't blame him! It's not quite his fault. He's so unhappy. We shall never see Paul again. And oh, mummy, I've been a bad, undutiful, careless child to you—but I'll be better now."

"You've been my dearest child, always," Mrs. Barbour answered. "It will be the old times over again for both of us. I ask nothing more."

Fenella was calm enough now to smile wanly at her mother's words. But even she could not guess how unlike any old times the new ones were to be.

PART II

I

FINANCIAL INTELLIGENCE

Four years ago—no very long time, even to those who must count it by the ruins and ghosts it has made—the light-hearted wayfarer amid financial pitfalls—vacuus coram latrone viator—not more a snob than an antiquary with a wistful regard for survivals need confess himself, spared a glance, as he passed along Throgmorton Avenue, for a big brass plate on the door of the corner building which overlooks the crouched statue and smoky fig-trees of the "Draper's Garden." For him the legend it bore called up a vision, unique amid the alien and masqueradingly Semitic names with which the dreary canyon is plastered, of other and very different days, fiercer perhaps but at least less meanly cruel; of hard knocks given and taken in a selfless quarrel; of blows upon helmet and corselet, thrusts that the buff coat haply turned; of a fight that raged one whole September afternoon through the streets of the "ever faithful city."[2]

"Bryan Lumsden, Calvert & Co.,
Stock and Share Brokers."

A stranger to the ephemeral record of London society—if such a one can be imagined in this day of "open letters" and the ubiquitous lens—who met the genial head of the firm upon the lawn at Cowes, or among his yearlings at Stanmore, at the pigeon butts of Pau and Cannes, or in the thrice-guarded sanctuary of the Turf Club writing-room, or who, as is likelier far, merely passed him in Austin Friars, silk hat cocked rakishly, one hand holding the lapel of his coat and the other laid lightly and characteristically upon the shoulder of some olive-skinned lord of the market, would probably have carried away a totally false impression of the man and of his history. Official text-books—the one, for instance, in which poor Fenella discovered a romance so enthralling, would not greatly have helped him. He would have learned from them that Sir Bryan Lumsden was twelfth baronet of either a very old or a very short-lived dynasty; that he was the son of Denzil Lumsden, of Coffers Castle, Kincardineshire; that he had served his country in the Scots Guards, been an aide-de-camp during the Tirah Campaign (medal and clasps), and had left the service at twenty-five. No less than three residences housed all this greatness: the castle aforesaid, "The Chase," Stanmore, and 369 Mount Street. "Clubs: the Turf, Marlboro, and Royal Yacht. Unmarried." And from the silence concerning the sphere in which three parts of his life were spent, and upon whose harvest, presumably, these glories were supported, he would have conjectured that here was a case common enough in latter-day life: the scion of an old house, bought in to finance by family money and connection, gradually acquiring sufficient zest for the game to justify a predominant interest, and, with position assured, returning blithely to the life of his younger days, while, under the griffin wings that hatch so many a clutch of golden eggs, Calvert, imaginable as a rather vulgar but discreet person, buttoning a black coat high on his chest and redressing the senior partner's ebullience by Apollinaris and bulb-culture at Sutton, watched the processes that, by a law of growth as simple as that which sows the pollen on the wind, make the rich man daily and hourly richer.

They would have been quite wrong. No titled food-adulterer or gutter journalist—no drab figure in all the broadclothed gallery with which Dr. Smiles seeks to fire the imagination of youth—was more literally the architect of his own fortunes. Twelve years ago, when he was an attaché at Vienna, with a long night of ruinous play behind him and a scented but heartless letter under his elbow, Bryan Lumsden had spun a coin to decide whether he should continue the battle elsewhere and under less tangled conditions or pass to the completer simplification which was all his pagan soul conceived of death. He had tossed the double thaler into the air simply, with no consciousness of pose, and since it fell for life, had played the game out that way. Returning to London, he had sent in his papers, paid his debts with what was left of an attenuated property, and asked for "desk-room" in the office of the broker through whom the final transactions were conducted—a dark, secretive man, little susceptible to the appeal of the incongruous or to the glamour of a barren title.

At the end of a year, upon the quarter per cent. margin allowed to those outside the house for business they introduce, he was earning an income in excess of many sworn members of repute, who struggle on from settlement to settlement with the hammer suspended over their heads like a sword of Damocles. In three years he was a member of the house and a partner. Business flowed to him. His gay, casual manners, his cheery voice, melted the senile heart of Mammon. The baffling blue eye, behind which a purpose quick and strong as steel was kept bright, pierced its pompous parade from the outset, and, holding his adversary at a deflated value, he was never tempted to take himself any the more seriously for his success. To the last the moves for which the market watched would be made between a chat with his trainer and a chaffing and recondite conversation over the telephone with the Tower mess. History is always repeating itself in unlooked for fashions. A hundred and sixty years ago the great Marshal Saxe, forming his squadrons for the charge that was to give Lauffeld to the French, ordered aside their black-avised brigadier and picked on a subaltern, careless and rosy, whom he espied laughing in his saddle, to lead the human avalanche. And in the meaner struggle that seems to have displaced war indefinitely, it will still happen that a light heart with a constitutional cheerfulness in taking risks finds all manner of blind forces following headlong at its heels.

His great chance came when he was just over thirty. For two hours of a sunny afternoon, and to the clouding of a fair brow at Ranelagh, a gaunt, hungry-eyed Western American, referred to him in despair by a friend whose time the stranger had daily and pertinaciously returned to waste, sat in his private office. The man's story was a fantastic one. Of a tunnel which he had been excavating under subvention, for years, and timbering furlong by furlong, sometimes more, sometimes less, as the rusty ore with which the mountain teemed assayed well or ill; of a suspicion, dawning on him little by little as he proceeded, that a wild miner's tale of the district—the legend of the lost lode of Troublesome Gulch—might not, after all, be a myth; the sudden discovery of free gold in the rarest and most precious of ores, "running up through the rock, sir, like a fern"; the theft of the samples that would have justified him; the sudden withdrawal of his subvention, and the decision of the railroad to build its connecting line at a lower level and at an easier gradient; the offers that had been made him for his property, in all of which his fevered mind saw only a threat and evidence of conspiracy. The man was no smooth-tongued exploiter: he spoke roughly, uncouthly, chewing to rags the first dry cigar he had ever smoked, in an evident sweat of fear lest somehow or other his secret should be torn from him—straining to be back and on guard again. His eyes blazed as he talked and his hand shook. He had been nursing his dreams on aerated bread and coffee.

Lumsden kept his visitor by him—wired to Ranelagh—telephoned to various quarters. That night in a private room at the Carlton the company was (unofficially) formed. Within a week from their issue "Gulches" were the sensation of the market. They started well at parity, dropped to fifteen shillings and twelve and a half on an attack of nerves and a truculent attitude on the part of the railroad; recovered, rose to thirty, soared to forty, to four, to six pounds. Fresh shares were issued; the public, almost kept out of the first issue, responded greedily, and the opportunity was seized to unload more of the old debentures than certain cool heads approved. It might be another Camp Bird; it might be the most colossal swindle since Kaffir days; in either case, its proportions inspired respect. There was a shuffle on the financial checker-board. West Hampstead moved to Mayfair, Porchester Gate to Park Lane, and was, so to speak, crowned there, with power to move either way for the future, in a bull or bear direction, capturing meaner uncrowned pieces en route. Stanwood went back to Sleepy Cat Mountain with the light of victory in his eye.

Before the snow had melted round the feet of the burros which were bringing down his six-dollar quartz to the smelter he was a ruined man. It was everybody's fault and nobody's fault. The necessary delays had not been discounted; holders were pressed in other directions; finally a discovery that Lumsden, to fill an order for a thousand shares, was buying outside and privately at three-fifteen, stampeded the market. The collapse was complete enough to become a joke. Clerks asked one another: "Will you take it in half-crowns or in Gulch debentures?"

In the summer Lumsden went out to the States. He found Stanwood, a baffled but not a beaten man, and his son, a strong silent lad with steady eyes, "batching" in a log shanty with an earthen roof. Tin kettles and saucepans were hung on pegs all around the outside walls. Behind the hut, among whortle bushes, an ice-cold spring bubbled out of the ground, and all manner of wild mountain flowers—rabbit-ears, puccoons, and thimble-berries—grew to the threshold. They were seven thousand feet above sea-level; all around was space and silence—an air like sparkling wine: his feet, as he ascended the track, crushed sweet harsh odors out of the barren earth.

In long but not aimless rambles over the boulder-strewn slopes; in elk hunts up in the timber reserve; in naked male talk by the cedar fire under the star-bewildered dome of night, the two men grew to learn, to esteem, and to trust one another. There was cheering news, even before Lumsden returned East, for the worn woman who was keeping an Omaha boarding-house for brawling Swedish clerks. He travelled slowly, by way of Denver, New York, Washington, and Paris, seeing a good many people in business hours, and, it must be admitted, amusing himself pretty strenuously out of them. He was back in London by October, and the rest is financial history. People said: "Oh! but what about the original shareholders?" Yet it was amazing how few ever came forward. Lumsden and Lumsden's friends seemed to have gobbled them all up.

There is only one thing more which, in this place, it becomes necessary to record of Bryan Lumsden. Once a month or so, sometimes oftener, sometimes less, at the busiest hour of the afternoon, a big closed motor-car made its way, with many grunts and turns, to the big corner building in Throgmorton Avenue. Sir Bryan would issue from the swing doors, throwing instructions over his shoulder as he passed through the office, sometimes would even dictate a letter to the clerk at his elbow, with one foot on the step of the coupé. After a single word to the chauffeur, which the man acknowledged by touching his peaked cap, he would fling himself back against the cushions of the limousine and busy himself with a pile of papers which he had brought under his arm. Occasionally, at some stoppage or temporary eclipse of light, he would look up from them. It was noticeable then that his face had lost its pleasant quality, was even hard and cruel.

The car rolled on, slowly and softly, through the congested city streets, noisily insistent amid heavy van traffic in Clerkenwell, quickened its speed as it turned into Bloomsbury's drab squares. Presently Regents Park flashed green or ghostly gray outside the windows; long brown garden walls and shabby stucco of St. John's Wood reeled past; the car breasted the hill to Frognal, along a steep avenue of widely spaced, fantastic red-brick houses, set amid shrubs and old timber, and with an occasional glimpse, in lichened roof or clustered chimneys, of an older suburb.

It stopped outside a low wide house which overlooked the heath and was separated from the road by a clipped hedge. Generally, warned by the tumult of the car's approach, the door would fly open before he could reach it from the garden gate; if not, he pulled the wrought iron bell-handle. If the summons remained unanswered beyond a few seconds, he felt impatiently in his pocket for a key and admitted himself. Inside, he looked round the low, wide hall, with the hard air of proprietorship which a man keeps for the place that is his house but not his home. He summoned the laggard servants, spoke sharply to them (in French), pushed open the door of the drawing-room, and waited, biting his moustache restlessly, and looking out of the window over the wide heath. A novel, face downward, or a wisp of embroidery generally decorated the cushions of the window seat.

Presently the door would open behind his back, and a soft rustle of silk and chink of jewelled ornaments cease of a sudden as a woman stood at gaze, watching the broad back or clear profile, silhouetted against the diamond panes of the bow window. With the same undisguised air of ownership, unutterably hideous now when a human creature endured it, Lumsden turned and looked—looked at a slave whom his money had bought and of whom he had tired.

Either one of two things might happen then: She might be peevish, perverse, and bitter, answering his perfunctory questions as shortly, with many shrugs of her shoulders and deprecatory motions of her bare arms; striving with all the advantage her native tongue, the language of cruel inflection and bitter meanings, could give her, to plant her own chagrins, like poisoned arrows, in his breast. Or else, abandoning herself upon his shoulder in an attitude for which everything about her—her dress, the very fashion of her hair—seemed calculated, she would force him to a seat, fling her arms around his neck, recall old tendernesses, never forgetting to mingle her kisses with complaints of her servants—so insolent; her tradesmen—so pressing; the view over the heath—so triste in winter. Her eyes would be dilated, their pupils at a point. Looking down, Lumsden could see little black dots all over the large white arms. He bore kisses and reproaches with exactly the same stoicism, still waiting, still keeping his eyes upon the door.

Suddenly their expression changed. There would be a shrill chatter of women in the hall—every one in this house seemed to speak and scold in French—cries of "Prenez garde! M. Cyrille!" "Une marche de plus!" "Voilà!"—a child's voice asking for "papa! papa!" Led by a French bonne, though he appeared full five years old, and struggling in her grasp, a little boy would enter the room with eager precipitancy. He walked sturdily but somehow clumsily too, holding his free arm out before him and tossing the fair curls from his forehead with a curious baffled gesture. Reaching Lumsden's knee or outstretched hand, he would give a shrill, glad cry, break once for all from the woman who had guided him, and next moment be clasped and gathered into his father's long powerful arms.

Fate has a fine unseemliness, now and then, in her dispensations. It was in a house leased for the service of shame, among brazen foreign women whose hard black eyes belied the respect of their voices, that Lumsden was forced from time to time to plumb the depth of tenderness that lurked in his own heart. He loved his little son as he loved nothing else in the world. And the boy was stone blind from birth.

II

TWO TELEGRAMS

Sir Bryan sat in his study at Mount Street one dark Saturday afternoon late in December, sucking happily upon a calcined briar, but with a watchful eye on the clock, for it was nearly time he began to dress. He was by now a man of thirty-seven or thirty-eight, with a beautiful but rather battered face, strikingly like certain portraits of Marshal Blucher. He had heavy shoulders, straight legs, and lean flanks. His enemies and men who boxed with him said his arms were disproportionate even to his height. His hair was fair and longer than most men wear it to-day: it was thinning over his forehead, and his wavy moustache was streaked with gray. There are people, like buildings, who, for all their size and show, we suspect of being hurriedly and cheaply put together. The paucity or poverty of material shows somewhere: in a mouth that doesn't quite shut, in ears that protrude—hair badly planted on the scalp. No better description of Lumsden could be ventured than that he seemed to have been built slowly and with a good deal of thought. He was expensive in grain, like the pipe he was smoking or the tie he was wearing.

He had been golfing all the afternoon, and was dressed, with happy slouchiness, in a brown flannel suit and a limp shirt-collar. His soft white waistcoat was a little soiled and lacked a button. The room he sat in was clear and light, but simply furnished, a refuge in fact from other splendors. Estampes galantes of Fragonard and the younger Morean decorated its walls sparsely. There was only one photograph, of a woman, which stood by itself in a narrow gilt frame on a side table. It was a large modern chiaroscuro affair. One noted frail emergent shoulders, a head turned aside, delicate lines of neck and chin, and a cloud of hair.

A dark, discreet man-servant knocked and showed his face in the doorway.

"Gentleman to see you, sir."

"Who is it, Becket?"

"Mr. Dollfus, sir."

"Oh! show him up!" But with the precipitancy of his race Mr. Dollfus had shown himself up, and entered hard upon the man's heels.

The baronet hailed him after his cheery wont.

"Hello, Dolly! Another five minutes and I'd have been shaving. Sit down and make yourself a whiskey and soda. Cigars are over there. How are the girls kicking?"

"They're kicking too much," said Mr. Dollfus; "on the stage and off too."

"Rotten notices the Motor Girl got," said Lumsden, reaching for a crumpled paper.

"That's all right," answered Dollfus with easy confidence. "We'll pull it rount. Got a new College Song from America. Came too late to put in. With a chorus, my boy, a chorus! 'Cher want to hear it?"

"Go ahead!"

"Back oar—back roar—back waller—back nigger and bantabaloo."

"Sounds useful."

"Eh! ah! Cantcher hear it on the organs? And—I say, Lumpsden?"

"What is it?"

"Remember a little girl we saw at La Palèze in the summer?"

Lumsden's face altered ever so little.

"Can't say I do very clearly. We saw so many."

"Went rount wit' a kind of fisherman. Artist feller. Eh? ah? Danced, too. Remember now?"

"Oh yes! I do, now. You were professional on the subject of her legs."

"That's the one. Well, she's come to me, my boy."

"Come to you? What the deuce for?"

"What do they all come for?" the Jew asked with sub-acidity. "Money. A lead. A 'shance.'"

"And what did you say, Dolly? Took her on your knee—played uncle—told her that if she was good to her mother you might give her a place in the back row some day if you thought of it."

Dollfus looked at him keenly for a moment. He had a theory that Lumsden remembered the girl better than he pretended; that he had, in fact, spoken to her at La Palèze and been rebuffed.

"Yer on the wrong track, Lumpsden," he said; "she's quite respectable. Madame de Rudder brought her—voman that useter teach the princesses. She's vell connected, too."

"What's her name?"

"Fenella Barbour."

Sir Bryan started a little at the name, and his sudden movement did not escape the Dominion manager.

"I say, Lumpsden," he went on casually; "aintcher a relation of the Lady Lulford that died this year?"

"A little. Why do you ask?"

"That's who she is, my boy. They were talking about all being together at Christmas."

"Who were talking?"

"Voman she called her cousin Leslie, that came wit' 'em too. At their country house. The name's gone outer my head."

Sir Bryan yawned, stretched himself, and gave a meaning look at the clock.

"Sorry I can't keep you any longer, Dolly. I'm dining out. What is it exactly you want?"

"Vell, I believe the girl's a find, Lumpsden. And natcherally I can't do anything at the Dominion—wit'out—wit'out——You understand?"

"I understand. You've seen her dance, I suppose? Is it any good? You know how much of this humbug there's been lately. Is hers something quite special?"

"Quite," said Mr. Dollfus, briefly. He seemed to weigh his opinion once more. "Oh quite!" he said again.

"You see a furore, in fact?"

"Maybe a riot," said Joe.

The financial support smiled. "You've made it such a family matter, Joe, that you won't mind my telling you I don't particularly want riots about relations of mine."

The manager shrugged his shoulders, but did not revise his opinion. Lumsden held out his hand.

"I'll telephone you to-morrow, and fix a night after Christmas when we can talk this over. Meantime, of course, you'll be discreet. Ta-ta, Dolly. I like your song."

An hour later he re-entered the room and flung a fur coat and crush hat on a lounge. He was dressed for dinner, was polishing his nails and appeared thoughtful. Sitting down before a big knee-hole desk, that was tucked away in a corner underneath a telephone, he switched on a light, drew a letter-pad toward him and wrote:

"Dear Leslie:

"May I usurp your sex's privilege and change my mind about coming to Freres Lulford for Christmas. I was going to Ponty's, as you know, but somehow, this year, don't feel keyed up to the light-hearted crowd they get together at Capelant. I want somewhere to hide my unrevered head until the Spirit of Christmas is gone out of the land, and I should like a look at Saleratus. The alternative is to go to Scotland and turn myself into a sort of Dana Gibson picture of the sorrows of the rich. You know the sort of thing: 'Where Get-there Lumsden really got to.'

"To tell you the truth, dear Leslie, I should never have refused your invitation if you hadn't frightened me with our mysterious newly discovered relative. Even, now, when I've decided to take the risk, I'll feel nervous. You say 'brilliant.' Suppose it turns out to be some dreadful little artist or writer person who'll want to paint me, or use me as 'a type.'..."

When he had got so far he re-read the letter, tore it up, and wrote out two telegrams. One was addressed to Lady Pontardawe, Capelant, Flintshire, and its contents are no affair of ours. The other said—

"Changed my mind. Motoring down, if fine, Wednesday."

His tickled sense of expectancy supported him through a dull dinner—possessed him, in fact, to the extent of making him rather a distrait companion. Once he laughed out unaccountably. Expectation was as rare with him as regret. He probably regarded them as equivalent weaknesses, but there was no doubt which was the pleasanter to indulge. Not quite a satyr, he was still less a saint. Men who knew him well, contented themselves by saying that Bryan "stayed it well," and the secret of his power to last was probably that, for him, the life that began when he was called in the morning ended when he switched the light off from above his pillow. He was not an imaginative man, but if he had been, his morning bath might justly have been conceived by him as a wide cool river, reflecting a gray morning sky, that flowed between him and all follies and fevers of the night. He took no heed what phantoms waved to him from the other shore, nor what urgency and significance might be in their gestures.

He got back before twelve, changed his coat for a wadded Indian silk smoking-jacket, and finished a long black cigar before he turned in. He felt tranquil, and, for reasons possibly connected with his telegram to Wales, even virtuous. Lulford, with its cloister terrace, its gray walled fruit-gardens beneath the "Prior's oriel," and its lilied carp-wood, girt with bastion and towers of clipped yew, had always been a favorite house with him, far beyond the wind-tortured barrack in Scotland that was the cradle of his own grim race, and which all his money could not make bloom afresh. The glamour of his youth still invested it. He had spent many a long holiday there, the while his mother, widowed but no ways desolate, was seeking her own distractions at Wiesbaden or Lausanne, and to the end of his school days (not particularly pleasant ones, for he had been in an unfashionable house and perpetually short of pocket-money) whatever sentiment of eclogue or pastoral survived the drudgery of construe, always had for its stage and background the remembered pleasantness of Lulford. Wonderful, not how little had survived, but how much!

And to-night something else haunted it, something that was real, that rather appealed to imagination than was evoked by it. Youth, flushed, timorously daring, beckoned and eluded him down those alleys and groves. (Eternal illusion, making your own summer wherever your feet choose to pass!) He was of the age when a man is looking for the heralds of middle life, and his empressement struck him as one rather ominous sign. The growing simplification of life was another. The match-makers were giving Bryan up at last. He remembered a time when it would not have been so easy to sneak away for two weeks in the hunting season.

Dollfus had, after all, not been so far astray in his surmise. There had been an encounter at La Palèze—one of those secrets which the most transparent of women never seem to feel the need of telling. She had not appeared frightened nor very much surprised—had let him walk by her side across the dunes and through the pine woods, even chatted a little, lightly. But then neither had she made any attempt to keep the appointment he had so subtly forced upon her for the morrow. He had never seen her alone again.

Ill at ease among abstractions, his mind turned with relief to the case in point. Condensed slightly, his reflections ran something after this fashion:

"I wonder what Leslie's game is. Of course she's stark mad, but it's funny the others making a mystery about it too. Are they just giving a hard-worked little relation a holiday, or do they mean to take her up and bring her out next year. If they do, I'll wager she marries a title or is ruined inside the year. I know what I'm talking about. All my sweethearts do well. Things ain't like what they used to be. There's a sight too much young blood about, and the cubs will be in everywhere. A girl that can play 'em can land 'em. Good lord! Look at Bewdley! look at the Colfax good boy! With the Nampore rubies round her blasted neck! This one's clever, but I don't think she's that kind. But if she isn't, what the devil was she doing at Palèze? Funny, Dollfus coming to me! And I believe I'd rather see her on the stage after all, as long as it's decent. What did he mean by 'a riot'?"

He got up, yawned, and threw his cigar butt into the fire. As he did so his reflection confronted him, a little flattered by the red-shaded globe. He pushed his face closer.

"Not much youth there, old man!" he said, referring to the eyes; "but how many of the young 'uns will be where you are in fifteen years' time? Money! Money! Gad! I can't spend it if I try."

He frowned at the fire and turned impatiently away. "I'm a fool," he said. "None of 'em live up to their faces. Besides, you can never corner that market. A lot is not knowing when to pull out, and idleness and over-feeding, and seeing too many new faces. Heigho! I wonder what Stanwood will be doing in the spring."

He yawned again, and, an hour later, was fast asleep.

III

IN THE FIRELIGHT

Snow had been drifting again, softly, thickly, and persistently, since dawn. The angles of the window sills were filled with it, every square and diamond in the leaded gallery windows was rimmed with the crystalline fur. The coats of the deer in the home park glowed a rich rusty red against its intense and sparkling purity; half of every trunk and branch at the edge of the wood was erased by it like a crayon drawing by the india rubber of some impatient drawing-room master. Fenella had spent the short winter afternoon roaming through galleries and chambers of state, or watching the flakes that tumbled giddily from the shrouded sky turn blue and green and red as they passed the painted blazons in the great oriel window—coats fessed and barrelled and ermined, of Alfords, and Corbets, and Danseys, and Maddocks, whose hale and temperate blood ran in her own veins.

She was alone for the first time in the home of her forefathers. Her uncle was away in the old capital of Powysland on some political business or another; her cousins had driven down to the church an hour ago, in a governess-cart heaped with ropes and garlands of holly and fir. There were wreaths and crosses, too, for the woman who was spending her first Christmas beneath the frozen earth, and Fenella had shrunk from sharing the pious duty in which her heart could have so little part. She was glad to be alone, and to muse undisturbed in the ghostly protracted twilight. After the tempest of her grief something of weakness and passivity lingered still; her heart felt the languor of convalescence. Her movements were slower, her poises more consciously graceful; with the restlessness of childhood the last of its angles had gone. So imperative is nature, that she can make even a broken heart subsidiary to her purpose. She had prayed to die, and was three pounds heavier.

When the twilight glimmer in the long gallery was too ghostly to be borne she descended to the dining-hall. Under its hooded fireplace the roaring grate was heaped with blocks of ligneous coal almost as large as boulders. Freres Lulford is in that borderland 'twixt the old England and the new where, for a ten-mile walk, one may make choice between coal-shafts and rolling mills, or ancient timbered hamlets and the "forest fleece" of Wenlock Edge. She called Perseus, the house-dog, to her, an eerie, feathery creature with a mouth like a shark, and, holding his head in her lap with one hand, rested her round cheek, dusky red from the fire into which she gazed, upon the other. The flames, as they rose and fell, tossed a distorted shadow of her head and shoulders, now low along the faded Persian carpets that covered the polished oak boards, now high up on the diapered wall, across helmet and cuirass, fringed silken banner, or antlered head, until, reaching the straddled legs or flowered petticoat of some high-hung ancestor, it sank again to the carpeted floor. She was dressed in a high-waisted frock of some soft white material, with short sleeves that left most of her arms bare, and with a high net collar kept pointed to the ears with little whalebones, after a senseless momentary fashion that forced her to carry her chin in the air. It was a very pretty chin, however; and wherefore does fashion change at all if not to call attention, through successive exaggerations, to the varied prettinesses of woman.

Was she beginning to taste content again? Was she even resigned? She could not tell. A broken heart is such a relative term, one so justly discredited by those who have not the patience or the knowledge to follow its deadly sequelae that, except as the loosest of illustration, it is grown to be a useless one as well. But without flattering her own constancy in the least, Fenella could well perceive that, but for a providence so despised at the time, it might have gone very hard with her. Never, she owned it humbly and thankfully, could power to endure so timely have followed the blow, ministering angels the draining of the chalice. The worth or tenacity of a love that death or something else violently disrupts is not to be measured in an instant. At first, while the soul is nothing save a shocked protesting mass of severed nerve and impulse, all comfort is welcome, no matter whence it comes. It is not until the pain has abated that a perverse relish for it becomes possible, and that its ameliorations can seem a treachery done to love. So she had judged her own once, with the indignation of youth for wise restraining laws that will let no passion, by taking thought, grow beyond a certain stature. She was wiser now as well as humbler—could bless the diversion even for the poor perished love's sake. It had saved her from the meaner vexations that, for the woman, follow the breaking of an engagement, the unwelcome sympathy and the meaning glance, the loneliness of the long empty hours, and the perpetual challenge to memory of familiar scenes and faces. New skies, as the poet sings, may not change the heart, but this much is certain—nowhere is disappointment borne so hardly as among those who have been witness to the illusion. She went from her lover's arms discredited, soiled even, but, at least, to those who were ignorant of her history, and could not compare her with the Fenella of old. Meantime, her sorrow lurked somewhere, to wake, she felt instinctively, the day another man should ask her for love.

Her cousins were kind and natural, so natural that, after three months, she seemed to have known them all her life. Leslie Barbour was tall, thin and melancholy, mildly mad, and with the good looks that were the only unentailed heritage in the Barbour family marred in her case by ill-health and emaciation. She spoke little, and regarded her new-found cousin with a purblind stare that it took Fenella a long time to get used to, but which she was content now to accept as a tribute of adoring affection. She loved white, waxy flowers with heavy odors, and was psychically inquisitive.

Nelly was rather afraid of her uncle, a bruyant peer with a past of which the late Lady Lulford had been a very small part. He had a fine head and heavy, fleshy face, opulently bearded, that Holbein would have loved to paint, the face of one of the terrible new lords of the English Renaissance who hung the abbots and gobbled up the abbeys. In the country he affected knickerbockers and velvet coats, and was sophisticated rather than intellectual, with a sophistication that he had placed a whole life long at the service of his pleasures. His pursuits being apt to clash with his eldest son's, Basil was at present in Damaraland shooting big game; but Jack Barbour, the younger son, a cheery and casual young lancer, fell unreservedly in love with his pretty cousin, with a fine quality of hopeless adoration in his homage (he has since married money and freckles) that the girl was used to by now, and could deal with competently. The two became great chums. Jack liked to have his well-turned-out little kinswoman for brisk walks across the Park, or for a saunter down Bond Street at the hours of resort. He did not mind how many of his comrades-in-arms caught him in company that did him so much credit. "Where did you find the pretty lady you were with in Burlington Street, Suds?" "Don't be an ass, Bogey," Suds would make reply. "She's a little cousin of ours. I'll introduce you in the spring when we start goin' round again." Fenella, wearing her own sad colors in her heart, looked forward to the promised gaieties almost with dismay. Life had become such a serious thing. She worked hard at her dancing, teaching, and learning while she taught, and making strides that carried her rapidly beyond Mme. de Rudder's power to appreciate justly. On the morning of her interview with Joe Dollfus she thought it well to take her eccentric cousin into her confidence. The look of hopeless adoration only intensified in the vacant, troubled face. Leslie put out her hand and touched the girl's black hair timidly.

"Blame you, child?" she repeated. "Does one blame the butterfly for seeking the sun? Will you forget me, darling, in your success—for I see success written on your brow? Will you be only one other sad memory in my breast—one pearl white head the more along the long rosary of my regrets?" She sighed luxuriously. "I shall recall you best," she decided after a moment's consideration, "when I see a creamy-white rose, half-blown."

Fenella wriggled uneasily. She did not want to be any one else's regret. Brows and breasts, moreover, had a mortuary flavor. Foreheads and chests were much cheerfuller everyday matters. They were at lunch, and she caught her cousin's hand under the table-cloth.

"Don't be gloomy, Les," she pleaded; "you make me feel all squiggly when you talk that way. Of course I sha'n't forget you. I want you to come with me and madame this afternoon."

We know now what Mr. Dollfus thought; but his outward recognition of his opportunity had been temperate, and the three women discussed his attitude rather ruefully over their tea. Leslie looked at the girl's flushed, chagrined face a long while in silence.

"Don't be afraid, Cousin Nelly," she said at last. "It's going to be all right. That man is wild to have you."

Fenella turned on her breathlessly. "Oh, Les! do you mean it? How can you know?"

Leslie narrowed her pale eyes and shook her head slowly.

"Never mind how I know," she said cryptically. "These things aren't withheld from me. They wouldn't be from you if you could empty your mind of self for even a moment."

No reinforcement to hope is really insignificant. Nelly had glowed at the eerie assurance. She was recalling it now, and smiling over poor Les's unearthly manner, when the hairy head under her hand moved convulsively. Perseus uttered a wild, strangling bark. A man was standing on the opposite side of the fireplace, looking at the pretty group of girl and animal—the dog asleep, the girl dreaming.

"Hello!" he said cheerfully.

IV

AN AFFAIR OF OUTPOSTS

He was a big man, and in his long hairy coat he looked a giant. After the first glance the girl's first wild fear vanished. Burglars and murderers don't wear fur coats in business hours, nor hold goggles in their hand. Perseus, too, having given the alarm, had gone over to the stranger, and was sniffing at him in a way that suggested recognition. The unknown slapped his lean flank.

"Hello, Perse! You don't get any fatter, old man."

As he unwound a great woollen scarf from his neck, a fair, pleasant face, rather damp and weather beaten, emerged. She recognized her chatty friend of La Palèze immediately.

"I'm sorry if I startled you," he said, "but they told me Miss Barbour was in the hall, so I walked in. Were they pleasant dreams?"

Even in the red firelight the color on the girl's cheeks deepened perceptibly. "How can I slip past him?" she said to herself and then aloud: "If you don't mind waiting, I'll go and see whether my cousins are back. My uncle is at Shrewsbury."