LOVE AND HATRED

MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES

COPYRIGHT, 1917,

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PART ONE

LOVE AND HATRED

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

OH, but this is terrible——"

Laura Pavely did not raise her voice, but there was trembling pain, as well as an almost incredulous surprise, in the way she uttered the five words which may mean so much—or so little.

The man whose sudden, bare avowal of love had drawn from her that low, protesting cry, was standing just within the door of the little summer-house, and he was looking away from her, straight over the beautiful autumnal view of wood and water spread out before him.

He was telling himself that five minutes ago—nay, was it as long as five minutes?—they had been so happy! And yet, stop—he had not been happy. Even so he cursed himself for having shattered the fragile, to him the already long perished, fabric, of what she no doubt called their "friendship."

It was she—it always is the woman—who, quite unwittingly, had provoked the words which now could never be unsaid. She had not been thinking at all of him when she did so—she had spoken out of her heart, the heart which some secret, sure instinct bade him believe capable of depths of feeling, which he hoped, with a fierce hope, no man had yet plumbed....

What had provoked his avowal had been the most innocent, in a sense the most beautiful, feeling of which a woman is capable—love for her child.

"The doctor says Alice ought to have a change, that she ought to go to the sea, for a little while. I asked Godfrey if I might take her, but he said he didn't think it necessary." She had added musingly, "It's odd, for he really is devoted to the child."

They had been walking slowly, sauntering side by side, very close to one another, for the path was only a narrow track among the trees, towards the summerhouse where they were now—she sitting and he standing.

He had answered in what, if she had been less absorbed in herself and her own concerns, she might have realised was a dangerously still voice: "I think I can persuade Godfrey to let her go. Apart from the child altogether, you ought to have a change." And then—then she had said, rather listlessly, not at all bitterly, "Oh, it doesn't matter about me!"

Such a simple phrase, embodying an obvious truth, yet they had forced from him the words: "I think it does matter about you, Laura. At least I know it matters a good deal to me, for, as of course you know by now, I love you."

And if his voice had remained quite low and steady, she had seen the blazing, supplicating eyes....

But he had looked away, at once, when he had uttered those irrevocable words; and after a few moments, which had seemed to him an eternity, had come that low, heart-felt cry, "Oh, but this is terrible——"

"Terrible? Why, Laura?" He crossed his arms, and turning, gazed straight down at her bowed figure.

Again there came a long, unnatural pause.

And then she lifted up her face, and under the shadow cast by her wide-brimmed garden hat he saw that even her forehead was flushed. There was an anguished look in the large, deeply blue eyes, which were to him the most exquisite and revealing feature of her delicately drawn face.

"Perhaps I ought not to have said 'terrible,'" she said at last in a low voice, "but—but degrading, ignoble, hateful, Oliver." She added, her false calm giving way, "And to me such a bitter, bitter disappointment!"

"Why?" he asked harshly. "Why a disappointment, Laura? Most women, nay, all wise human beings, value love—any kind of love offered by even the most unworthy—as the most precious thing in the world!"

His face had become expressionless, and the measured, carefully chosen words made her feel suddenly ashamed, but with a shame merged in an eager hope that she had cruelly misunderstood her—friend.

She stood up and took a step towards him. "Oliver," she said diffidently; "forgive me! I was stupid not to understand. Of course we love one another," she was on firm ground now. "All friends love one another, and you've been such a good friend to me, and more, far more, than a good friend to my poor brother—to Gillie."

He withdrew his gaze from her beseeching eyes, and looked away once more. Now was his chance to play the hypocrite, to eat the words which had given her so much offence....

Hardly knowing that he spoke aloud, he muttered hoarsely, "I can't!" And then he turned to her: "Listen, Laura. I owe you the truth. I have loved you, yes, and in the sense you think so ignoble and so degrading, almost from the first day we met. As time went on, I thought it impossible that you did not know that."

"I did not know it! I trusted you absolutely! I thought that we were all three, friends,—you and I and Godfrey! It was the very first time that Godfrey and I had ever had a friend in common, and it made me so happy."

"Did it indeed?" His words cut like a whip.

"But it's true that you are Godfrey's friend?" she spoke a little wildly. "I've never known him as fond of any man as he is now of you, Oliver."

"His fondness is not returned."

"Then it ought to be!" she cried. "For you've made him like you, Oliver."

She hardly knew what she was saying, distressed, humiliated, wounded as she was in her pride and sense of personal dignity. But what was he saying—this challenging, wrathful stranger who, but a few moments ago, had been her dear, dear friend?

"I would rather, Laura, that you did not bring your husband into this matter."

"But I must bring him in!" She became suddenly aware that here ready to her hand was a weapon with which she could hurt and punish this man who was looking at her with so inscrutable a look—was it a look of love or of hatred?

"I'm sorry now," she went on rapidly, "bitterly, bitterly sorry and ashamed that I ever said a word to you of Godfrey and his—his rather tiresome ways. I ought not to have done it. It was disloyal. I've never spoken of Godfrey to any other man—but somehow I thought you were different from other men."

"Different?" he interjected. "How so, Laura? What right had you to think me different from other men?"

"Because I trusted you," she said inconsequently. "Because somehow you seemed really to care for me—" her voice broke, but she forced herself to go on: "You're not the first man, Oliver, who's made love to me since I married—" she covered her face with her hands.

It seemed to her that some other woman was being driven to make these intimate confidences—not the fastidious, refined, reserved Laura Pavely, who had an almost morbid dislike of the betrayal of any violent or unseemly emotion. But this other woman, who spoke through her lips, had been, was being, wantonly insulted....

Hanging her head as a child might have done, she said defiantly: "I suppose you're surprised?"

"No, I'm not surprised. Why should I be? Go on—" He clenched his hands together. What was it she was going to tell him?

Speaking in short, broken sentences, she obeyed him:

"It was when we used to go about much more than we do now—in the first two or three years after our marriage. I suppose that every woman—who isn't quite happy with her husband—is exposed to that kind of thing. I used to loathe it when I saw it coming. I used to try and fend it off. Sometimes I succeeded—more often I failed. But I never, never expected anything of the sort to happen with you, Oliver. We were such friends—such good, happy friends—you and I and my little Alice," and then she burst into a passion of weeping.

And at that what self-control Oliver Tropenell had retained departed. A flood of burning, passionate words burst from his lips—of endearment, of self-abasement, and promises which he intended, come what might, should be kept.

And she listened shrinkingly, with averted face, absorbed in her own bewildered pain and disappointment.

"I must go back to the house," she said at last. "The doctor will be here in half an hour." And she forced herself to add: "Perhaps you'll be coming over this afternoon?" (How often she had said these words in the last three months—but in how different a tone!).

"I think not. My mother said something about wishing me to stay in to-day—Lord St. Amant may be coming over." As she made no comment, he concluded quietly, "Well, I suppose I had better be going now. Good-bye, Laura."

"Good-bye," she said. And without taking her hand he left her.

She watched his tall figure making its way quickly down through the rough ground to the wood where, ultimately, he would find a path which would lead him to his mother's house.

It was late in the afternoon of the same day. From where she was sitting, under a great cedar tree, Mrs. Tropenell at last saw her son Oliver and Godfrey Pavely come out of Freshley Manor.

Though the glory and warmth of the summer were now over, Mrs. Tropenell still spent many hours of each day in her garden. She had always been an out-of-door woman from the days when she was an eager, impetuous, high-spirited girl, till now, when youth had gone, though something of the eager impetuosity of youth remained with her concealed from strangers by a manner marked by a strong sense of personal dignity.

The two men began walking, slowly, down the grass path leading to the beech avenue which was the glory of Freshley Manor, as well as a short cut to Lawford Chase, Godfrey Pavely's larger property.

It was more than an hour since a servant had come out to say that Mr. Pavely was waiting to see Mr. Tropenell in the library. The man had added that Mr. Pavely had had tea before leaving the Bank, and only wanted to see Mr. Tropenell for a few minutes on his way home. And Oliver, with "I don't think he'll keep me long, mother; I suppose you'll still be here when I come back?" had stridden off with a certain reluctance towards the house.

It had always been his mother's joy, but now for many years past her infrequent joy, to fall in with even the least reasonable of her son's wishes, and so she had gone on sitting out there, waiting for him to come back, long after the tea-things had been taken away. There was a book on the low garden table by her side—such a book as she loved, telling of great adventure by one of the adventurers—but she left it where it was.

Mrs. Tropenell felt a vague, exasperating sense of restlessness and unease. At the back of her heart—that heart which, if no longer that of a young woman, could still thrill with many varied emotions and a very passion of maternal love—was the dull ache of a secret, unacknowledged sense of fear and pain.

She had every reason to be happy to-day—not only happy in her son's company, but in the coming back, after a long absence on the Continent, of her old friend, Lord St. Amant. To him she could, perhaps, bring herself to say something of what was touching her so deeply, and he, she knew, would reassure her and make light of her fears. St. Amant was what is called in ordinary parlance a man of the world—the last man, that is, to be horrified, still less frightened, by a tale of illicit love, especially when, as the mother honestly believed, it was a love likely to remain unrequited.

Yes, she would tell her one trusted friend of these besetting fears, of her more than suspicion that her son Oliver was deep in love with Laura Pavely, and St. Amant would laugh at her, persuade her maybe to laugh with him.

And yet? Yet, even so, she asked herself again and again during that long time of waiting, what these two men who, if of life-long acquaintanceship and now at any rate nominally intimate friends, were so unlike the one to the other, could have to talk about, indoors, for over an hour? Godfrey Pavely and Oliver Tropenell met very often—too often to her thinking—so why should Godfrey have pursued Oliver home to-day, just when Oliver had had an hour to spare for his mother?

It was now Thursday, and her son had already dined with the Pavelys twice this week. To-morrow night Godfrey Pavely was to be in London, and it had been arranged that his wife, Laura, should spend the evening here. But that, or so Mrs. Tropenell had quickly reminded herself, had been Laura's usual custom, long before Oliver had come home from Mexico for the holiday which had now already lasted nearly four months. In her long life Mrs. Tropenell had only had one beloved woman friend, and that friend, that more than sister, had been Laura's mother.

Even now Godfrey Pavely did not seem eager to go home. The two men were close to the furthest edge of the wide lawn, but they were still talking earnestly.

Mrs. Tropenell gazed across, with a painful scrutiny, at her son's visitor.

Godfrey Pavely was a neatly made, neatly dressed, neatly mannered man—in a way not ill-looking. His reddish-brown hair toned in oddly with his light, ginger-coloured eyes. He had become rather particular about his health of late, and went to some trouble to keep himself fit, and in good condition. Yet he looked more like a townsman than like the countryman he certainly was. For if the fortunate inheritor of a successful county banking business, which so far he had managed with such skill as to save it from any thought of amalgamation, he was also the owner of a fine old property.

Lawford Chase had belonged to Mrs. Tropenell's ancestors for centuries—for almost as many centuries as the years in which he, Godfrey, had owned it. But her father had been careless and extravagant during his long, happy life, so the owner of Pavely's Bank had bought up the mortgages on Lawford Chase, and finally foreclosed.

All this was ancient history now, and Mrs. Tropenell felt no bitterness on that account. Indeed, she had rejoiced, with a sense of real joy, when her friend's daughter had become mistress of her own old home.

The two men whom she was watching went on talking for what seemed to the onlooker a very long time; but, at last, Godfrey Pavely, turning on his heel, walked on, to be at once engulfed by the dark green arch formed by the high beech trees. Then Mrs. Tropenell saw her son, all her heart welcoming him, come striding towards her across the long stretch of short, green turf.

Once more she asked herself what possible link there could be between men so utterly unlike. Her Oliver—more hers now, she felt, than ever before, and that though for the first time he was making her secretly, miserably jealous—was a creature of light and air, of open spaces, if need be of great waters. He was built, like herself, on a big and powerful plan; and yet so tall, so spare, so sinewy, that though he was broad he looked slim, and though four-and-thirty years of age he might have been taken, even at this small distance from where she sat, for a long-limbed youth. His life for the last twelve years had been one that often ages a man—but it had not aged him. His vigour was unbroken, his vitality—the vitality which had made him so successful, and which attracted men and women of such very different types—unimpaired.

Mrs. Tropenell had been touched, perhaps in her secret heart little surprised, at the pleasure—one might almost have said the enthusiasm—with which her neighbours for miles round had welcomed Oliver home again, after what had been so long an absence from England. The fact that he had come back a very wealthy man, and that during those years of eclipse he had managed to do some of them good turns, of course counted in his popularity, and she was too open-eyed a woman not to be well aware of that.

The mother knew that her son was not the downright, rather transparent, good-natured fellow that he was now taken to be. No man she had ever known—and she had ever been one of those women of whom men make a confidant—could keep his own or another's secrets more closely than could Oliver. He had once written to her the words: "You are the only human being, mother, to whom I ever tell anything," and she had instinctively known this to be true.

Yet their relationship was more like that of two friends than of mother and son. She knew all there was to know of his thoughts, and of his doubts, concerning many of the great things which trouble and disturb most thinking modern men. Of the outward life he led in the Mexican stretch of country of which he had become the administrator and practical ruler, she also knew a great deal, indeed surprisingly much, for he wrote by each mail long, full letters; and the romance of his great business had become an ever continuous source of interest, of amusement, and of pride to the mother who now only lived for him.

But of those secret things which had moved his heart, warred with his passions, perchance seared his conscience, he had never told her anything. Only once had the impenetrable mist of reserve been lightened, as it were pierced for a moment—and that was now a long time ago, on his second visit home five years before. He had then come to England meaning to stay a month. But at the end of ten days he had received a telegram—what he called, in the American fashion, a cable—and within an hour he had gone, saying as he kissed his mother good-bye, "A friend of mine—a woman who has been ill a long time—is now dying. I must go, even if I'm not in time to see her alive."

In the letters which had followed his return to Mexico, there had been no word more—nothing even implying sorrow, or a sense of loss—only a graver note, of which the mother might have remained unaware but for that clue he had left to sink deep in her mother-heart.

He was now close to her, looking down out of his dark, compelling eyes—eyes which were so like her own, save that now hers shone with a softer light.

"Pavely stayed a long time," he said abruptly. "Are you tired? D'you want to go in yet, mother?"

She shook her head. "I'd rather stay out here till it's time to dress."

As she spoke she lifted her face to his, and he told himself what a beautiful, and noble face it was, though each delicate, aquiline feature had thickened, and the broad low forehead was now partially concealed by thick bands of whitening hair. It was a lined, even a ravaged face—the face of a woman who had lived, had loved, had suffered. But of that Oliver was only dimly conscious, for his mother's nature if impetuous and passionate was almost as reserved and secretive as was his own.

It may be doubted, even, if Oliver Tropenell knew how much his mother loved him, for it may be doubted if any son ever knows how much his mother—even if she appear placid or careless—loves him. One thing Oliver did know, or confidently believed he knew, and that was that his mother loved him more than she had ever loved anything in the world. There he was quite content to leave it.

"Pavely wants me to become trustee to Laura's marriage settlement, in succession to old Mr. Blackmore."

When with Godfrey Pavely, Oliver Tropenell always called the other man by his Christian name, but behind his back he always spoke of him as "Pavely."

As his mother remained silent, he went on, a little hurriedly: "The powers vested in the trustee are very wide, and it seems that money which was later added to the trust—a matter of seventeen thousand pounds or so—is invested in some queer form of security."

They both smiled—he a little drily, she with a kind of good-humoured contempt.

"He's cautious and successful—in spite of that odd, gambling propensity," she spoke a little defensively. Then, "I suppose you've consented to act?"

She waited anxiously for his answer; and at last it came, uttered in a tone of elaborate unconcern: "I said I'd think it over. But I think I'll take it on, mother. Pavely made rather a personal favour of it—after all, there's some kind of relationship."

"Yes," agreed Mrs. Tropenell, "yes, there is certainly a connection, hardly a relationship, between ourselves and Laura."

Her son sat down. He began poking about an invisible stone, lying in among the grass, with his stick.

"You cared for Laura's mother as if she had been your sister—didn't you, mother? And yet I can't imagine you with a great woman friend, I mean, of course, a friend of your own age."

She turned and looked at him. "Ah, my dear,—those are the friends that count!" and she nearly added, "Don't you find it so?" But, instead, she went on quickly, "Yes, I loved Laura's mother dearly, dearly—and it was for her sake that I asked you to be good to her son, to Gillie."

"Laura's extraordinarily fond of Gillie——" There always came a curious change over Oliver Tropenell's voice when he uttered the name "Laura." It became as it were softer, infused with feeling—or so his mother thought.

She waited a moment; then answered slowly, "Women generally are fond of their only brothers."

"Oh, but it's more than that!"

As she remained silent, he went on musingly: "And Gillie, in his queer way, is very fond of Laura—though I don't believe he writes to her once in three months!"

"I suppose Gillie still hates Godfrey?" she said hesitatingly. "Godfrey behaved so—so—well, not so much badly perhaps, as meanly and even stupidly—about that unfortunate affair." It was almost as if Mrs. Tropenell were speaking to herself. Her son turned and looked at her squarely.

"Yes! Gillie still hates Pavely. And yet, mother, since I came home this time I've wondered sometimes if Pavely was so very unreasonable about it after all. You see, Gillie must have been about the most troublesome and—well, the most dangerous brother-in-law an unlucky country banker could well have had!"

"And but for you he'd be so still," she said quietly. "From something Godfrey said the other day I gather that he's really grateful to you, Oliver?"

Oliver Tropenell got up. "Yes," he said shortly, "he's certainly grateful. In fact, he seems to think I've limitless power of getting people out of scrapes——" there was an undercurrent of triumph in his deep, even tones.

"I suppose the real reason he came to-day was that he's afraid to let a stranger be Laura's trustee?" There was only the slightest touch of interrogation in Mrs. Tropenell's voice, and she went on: "Perhaps he'd be kinder to poor Gillie now—" a curious smile played round her mouth. It was a full-lipped, generous mouth, but it was the least refined feature of her face.

"No, no. It's not as bad as that! But well, yes, Pavely has used this portion of Laura's fortune in a way he had no business to do, knowing it was trust money."

"And you——?"

"Oh, I'm going to buy out her interest in the concern."

"Will that cost you seventeen thousand pounds?"

"Yes, it will. But I don't mind—it's quite a likely gamble. Have you ever heard of Greville Howard?"

"You mean the great money-lender?"

"He's retired now. But Pavely and he seem to be in a kind of secret partnership—queer isn't it? Pavely's a clever chap about money, but oh, mother! he's such an insufferable cad!"

Mrs. Tropenell felt a sudden tremor of fear sweep over her. She had lately come to what she now realised was a quite wrong conclusion—she had believed, that is, that Oliver, in a queer, contemptuous way, had grown fond of Godfrey, as Godfrey had certainly grown fond of Oliver. But now, all at once, her son had opened a dark window into his soul—or was it into his heart? There was an under-current of hatred, as well as of the contempt to which she was accustomed, in the way Oliver had just spoken of his "friend"—of the man, at once fortunate and unfortunate, who was Laura Pavely's husband.

She stood up, and put her hand through her son's arm. "It's getting very cold," she said, and shivered.

He turned on her with quick concern: "I left you too long! I ought to have sent him away before—but he was such a long time getting it out—" under his breath he muttered "Damn him!"

CHAPTER II

MOTHER and son dined alone together, and then, rather early, Mrs. Tropenell went upstairs.

For a while, perhaps as long as an hour, she sat up in bed, reading. At last, however, she turned off the switch of her electric reading lamp, and, lying back in her old-fashioned four-post bed, she shut her eyes for a few moments. Then she opened them, widely, on to her moonlit room.

Opposite to where she lay the crescent-shaped bow-window was still open to the night air and the star-powdered sky. On that side of Freshley Manor the wide lawn sloped down to a belt of water meadows, and beyond the meadows there rose steeply a high, flat-topped ridge.

Along this ridge Oliver Tropenell was now walking up and down smoking. Now and again his mother saw the shadow-like figure move across the line of her vision.

At one moment, last winter, she had feared that he would not be able to come back this year, as troubles had arisen among his cattle-men. But, as was Oliver's way, he had kept his promise. That he had been able to so do was in no small measure owing to his partner, Gilbert Baynton.

Gilbert Baynton—Laura Pavely's brother? Of that ne'er-do-weel Oliver had made from a failure a success; from a waster—his brother-in-law, Godfrey Pavely, would have called him by a harsher name—an acute and a singularly successful man of business.

Lying there, her brain working quickly in the darkness, Oliver's mother told herself that the Pavelys, both Godfrey and Laura, had indeed reason to be grateful, not only to Oliver, but to her, Oliver's mother! It was to please her, not them, that Oliver, long years ago, had accepted the dubious gift of Gilbert Baynton, and the small sum Gilbert's brother-in-law had reluctantly provided to rid himself of an intolerable incubus and a potential source of disgrace. Godfrey Pavely was certainly grateful, and never backward in expressing it. And Laura? Laura was one of your silent, inarticulate women, but without doubt Laura must be grateful too.

At last Oliver left the ridge, and Mrs. Tropenell went on gazing at the vast expanse of luminous sky which merged into the uplands stretching away for miles beyond the boundaries of her garden.

She lay, listening intently, and very soon she heard the cadence of his firm footfalls on the stone path below the window. Then came the quiet unlatching of the garden door. Now he was coming upstairs.

Her whole heart leapt out to him—and perchance it was this strong shaft of wordless longing that caused Oliver Tropenell's feet to linger as he was going past his mother's door.

Following a sudden impulse, she, who had trained herself to do so few things on impulse, called out, "Is that you, my darling?"

The door opened. "Yes, mother. Here I am. May I come in?"

He turned and shut out the bright electric light on the landing, and walked, a little slowly and uncertainly in the darkness, towards where he knew the bed to be. For a moment she wondered whether she should turn on the lamp which was at her elbow, then some sure, secret instinct made her refrain.

She put out her hand, and pulled him down to her, and he, so chary of caress, put his left arm round her.

"Mother?" he said softly. "This dear old room! It's years since I've been in this room—and yet from what I can see, it's exactly the same as it always was!"

And, as if answering an unspoken question, she spoke in very low tones, "Hardly altered at all since the day you were born here, my dearest, on the happiest day of my life."

His strong arm tightened about her a little, and, still looking straight before her, but leaning perhaps a little closer into the shelter of his arm, she said tremulously, inconsequently it might have seemed: "Oliver? Are you going to accept Lord St. Amant's invitation?"

With a sharp shoot of hidden pain she felt his movement of recoil, but all he said was, very quietly, "I've not quite made up my mind, mother."

"It would give me pleasure if you were to do so. He has been a very good and loyal friend to me for a long, long time, my dear."

"I know that."

She waited a moment, then forced herself to go on: "You were never quite fair to St. Amant, Oliver."

"I—I feared him, mother."

And then, as she uttered an inarticulate murmur of pain and of protest, he went on quickly, "The fear didn't last very long—perhaps for two or three years. You see I was so horribly afraid that you were going to marry him." In the darkness he was saying something he had never meant, never thought to say.

And she answered, "It was a baseless fear."

"Was it? I wonder if it was! Oh, of course I know you are telling me the truth as you see it now—but, but surely, mother?"

"Surely no, Oliver. It is true that St. Amant wished, after his wife's death, that I should marry him, but he soon saw that I did not wish it, that nothing was further from my wish—then."

"Then?" he cried. "What do you mean, mother? Lady St. Amant only died when I was fifteen!"

"I would like to tell you what I mean. And after I have told you, I wish never to speak of this subject to you again. But I owe it to myself as well as to you, to tell you the truth, Oliver. Where is your hand?" she said, "let me hold it while I tell you."

And then slowly and with difficulty she began speaking, with a hesitation, a choosing of her words, which were in sharp contrast to her usual swift decision.

"I want to begin by telling you," her voice was very low, "that according to his lights—the lights of a man of the world and of, well yes, of an English gentleman—St. Amant behaved very well as far as I was concerned. I want you to understand that, Oliver, to understand it thoroughly, because it's the whole point of my story. If St. Amant had behaved less well, I should have nothing to tell—you."

She divined the quiver of half-shamed relief which went through her son. It made what she wished to say at once easier and more difficult.

"As I think you know, I first met St. Amant when I was very young, in fact before I was 'out,' and he was the first really clever, really attractive, and, in a sense, really noted man I had ever met. And then"—she hesitated painfully.

"And then, mother?" Oliver's voice was hard and matter-of-fact. He was not making it easy for her.

"Well, my dear, very very soon, he made of me his friend, and I was of course greatly flattered, but at that time, in the ordinary sense of the word, St. Amant never made love to me." She went on more firmly. "Of course I soon came to know that he cared for me in a way he did not care for the other women with whom his name was associated. I knew very soon too, deep in my heart, that if his wife—his frivolous, mean-natured, tiresome wife—died, he certainly would wish to marry me, and for years, Oliver, for something like six years, I daily committed murder in my heart."

And then something happened which troubled and greatly startled the woman who was making this painful confession. Her son gave a kind of cry—a stifled cry which was almost a groan. "God! How well I understand that!" he said.

"Do you, Oliver—do you? And yet I, looking back, cannot understand it! All that was best, indeed the only good that was in St. Amant to give I had then, and later, after I became a widow, I had it again."

"I suppose he was much the same then as later, or—or was he different then, mother?"

She knew what he meant. "He was the same then," she said quietly, "but somehow I didn't care! Girls were kept so ignorant in those days. But of course the whole world knew he was a man of pleasure, and in time I grew to know it too. But still it wasn't that which made me unhappy, for I did not realise what the phrase meant, still less what was implied by it. But even so, as time went on I was very unhappy. Mine was a false position—a position which hurt my pride, and, looking back, I suppose that there must have soon been a certain amount of muffled talk. If I was not jealous, other women were certainly jealous of me."

She waited for a few moments; the stirring of these long-dead embers was hurting her more than she would have thought possible.

At last she went on: "Sometimes months would pass by without our meeting, but he wrote to me constantly, and on his letters—such amusing, clever, and yes, tender letters—I lived. My aunt, my father, both singularly blind to the state of things, were surprised and annoyed that I didn't marry, and, as for me, I grew more and more unhappy."

"Poor mother!" muttered Oliver. And she sighed a sigh of rather piteous relief. She had not thought he would understand.

"I don't know what I should have done but for two people, your father, who of course was living here then, our nearest neighbour, and, what meant very much more to me just then, Laura's mother, Alice Tropenell. Though she was only a very distant relation, she was like a daughter in this house. Alice was my one friend. She knew everything about me. She was—well, Oliver, I could never tell you what she was to me then!"

"I suppose," he said slowly, "that Laura is like her?"

"Laura?" Mrs. Tropenell could not keep the surprise out of her low voice. "Oh no, my dear, Laura is not in the least like her mother. But Laura's child is very like Alice—even now."

"Laura's child?" Oliver Tropenell visioned the bright, high-spirited, merry little girl, who somehow, he could not have told her why, seemed often to be a barrier between himself and Laura.

"Alice—my friend Alice—was full of buoyancy, of sympathy for every living thing. She possessed what I so much lacked in those days, and still alas! lack—sound common-sense. And yet she, too, had her ideals, ideals which did not lead her into a very happy path, for Robert Baynton, high-minded though he may have been, was absorbed in himself—there was no room for any one else." Had she been telling her story to any one but her son, Mrs. Tropenell would have added, "Laura is very like him."

Instead, she continued, "No one but Alice would have made Robert Baynton happy, or have made as good a thing of the marriage as she did—for happy they were. I think it was the sight of their happiness that made me at last long for something different, for something more normal in my life than that strange, unreal tie with St. Amant. So at last, when I was four-and-twenty, I married your father." Oliver remained silent, and she said a little tremulously, "He was very, very good to me. He made me a happy woman. He gave me you."

There was a long, long pause. Mrs. Tropenell had now come to what was the really difficult part of the task she had set herself.

"You are thinking, my boy, of afterwards." And as she felt him move restlessly, she went on pleadingly, "As to that, I ask you to remember that I was very lonely after your father died. Still, if you wish to know the real truth"—she would be very honest now—"that friendship which you so much disliked stood more in the way of your having a stepfather than anything else could have done."

"I see that now," he said sombrely, "but I did not see it then, mother."

"Even if Lady St. Amant had not lived on, as she did, all those years, I should not have married St. Amant—I think I can say that in all sincerity. So you see, Oliver, you need not have been afraid, when at last he became free."

She sighed a long, unconscious sigh of relief.

"I gather you still see him very often when he's at Knowlton Abbey?"

"Yes, it's become a very comfortable friendship, Oliver. But for St. Amant I should often feel very lonely, my dear."

She longed to go on—to tell Oliver how hard it had been for her to build up her life afresh—after he had finally decided to stay on in Mexico. But she doubted if he would understand....

Suddenly he turned and kissed her.

"Good-night," he said. "I'm grateful to you for having told me all—all that you have told me, mother."

Oliver Tropenell hurried up the silent house. By his own wish the large garret to which he had removed all his own treasures and boyish belongings after a delicate childhood spent in a room close to his mother's, was still in his room, and it had been very little altered.

It was reached by a queer, narrow, turning staircase across which at a certain point a beam jutted out too low. Tropenell never forgot to duck his head at that point—indeed he generally remembered as he did so how proud he had been the first time he had found himself to be too tall to pass under it straightly! But, strange to say, to-night he did forget—and for a moment he saw stars.... Fool! Fool that he was to allow his wits to go wool-gathering in this fashion!

With eyes still smarting, he leapt up the last few steps to the little landing which he shared with no one else. Opening the door he turned the switch of the lamp on the writing-table which stood at a right angle to the deep-eaved window.

Then he shut the door and locked it, and, after a moment of indecision, walked across to the book-case which filled up the space between the fireplace and the inner wall of the long, rafted room.

He did not feel in the mood to go to bed, and idly he let his eyes run over the long rows of books which he had read, in the long ago, again and again, for like most lonely boys he had been a great reader. They were a good selection, partly his mother's, partly his own, partly Lord St. Amant's. He knew well enough—he had always known, albeit the knowledge gave him no pleasure, that he had owed a great deal, as boy and man, to his mother's old friend. Lord St. Amant had really fine taste. It was he who had made Oliver read Keats, Blake, Byron, Poe, among poets; he who had actually given him Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, The Three Musketeers, Ali Baba of Ispahan. There they were all together.

He had not taken his books with him when he had first gone to Mexico, for he had not meant to stay there. But at last he had written home to a great London bookseller and ordered fresh copies of all his old books at home. The bookseller had naturally chosen good editions, in some cases rare first editions. But those volumes had never been read, as some of these had been read, over and over and over again.

But now, to-night, he did not feel as if he could commune with any comfort even with one of these comfortable, unexacting friends. He felt too restless, too vividly alive. So suddenly he turned away from the bookcase, and looked about him. A large French box-bed had taken the place of the narrow, old-fashioned bedstead of his youth; and his mother had had moved up to this room a narrow writing-table from the study on the ground floor which no one ever used.

He walked over to that writing-table now, and sat down. On it, close to his left hand, stood a large despatch-box. He opened and took out of it a square sheet of paper on which was embossed his Mexican address. Drawing two lines across that address, and putting in the present date, September 19th, he waited, his pen poised in his hand for a full minute.

Then he began writing rather quickly, and this is what he wrote:—

"My dear Laura,—Godfrey suggests that I should act as your trustee, in succession to Mr. Blackmore. Am I to understand that this suggestion has your approval? If yes, I will of course consent to act. But please do not think I shall be offended if you decide otherwise. You may prefer some woman of your acquaintance. Women, whatever Godfrey may tell you, make excellent men of business. They are, if anything, over-prudent, over-cautious where money is concerned; but that is a very good fault in a trustee."

His handwriting was small and clear, but he had left large spaces between the lines, and now he was at the end of the sheet of paper. There was just room for another sentence and his signature. He waited, hesitating and of two minds, till the ink was dry, and then he began again, close to the bottom of the sheet:—

"Before we meet again I wish to say one further thing."

He put this first sheet aside, and took another of the same size from the box by his side:—

"You said something to-day which affected me painfully. You spoke as if what I have done for your brother caused you to carry a weight of almost intolerable gratitude. So far as any such feeling should exist between us, the gratitude should be on my side. In sober truth Gillie has been invaluable to me.

"I remain,

"Yours sincerely,"

Then very rapidly Oliver Tropenell made an "O" and a "T," putting the T across the O so that any one not familiar with his signature would be hard put to it to know what the two initials were.

He read over the words he had just written. They seemed poor, inadequate, and he felt strongly tempted to write the letter again, and word it differently. Then he shook his head—no, let it stand!

Slowly he put the second sheet of the letter aside, and placed the first one, on which the ink was dry, before him. Then he looked round, with a queer, furtive look, and, getting up, made sure the door was locked.

Coming back to the writing-table, he took out of the despatch-box lying there a small, square, crystal-topped flagon of the kind that fits into an old-fashioned dressing-case. The liquid in it was slightly, very slightly, coloured, and looked like some delicate scent.

From the despatch-box also he now brought out a crystal penholder with a gold nib. He dipped it in the flagon, and began to write in between the lines of the letter he had just written. As the liquid dried, the slight marks made by the pen on the paper vanished, for Oliver Tropenell was writing in invisible ink.

"The decks are cleared between us, Laura, for you know now that I love you. You said, 'Oh, but this is terrible!' Yes, Laura, love is terrible. It is not only cleansing, inspiring, and noble, it is terrible also. Why is it that you so misunderstand, misjudge, the one priceless gift, the only bit of Heaven which God or Nature—I care not which—has given to man and woman? What you, judging by your words to-day, take to be love is as little like that passion as a deep draught of pure cold water to a man dying of thirst, is like the last glass of drugged beer imbibed by some poor sot already drunk."

Oliver Tropenell waited awhile. There were still two spaces, before the bottom of the page of notepaper was reached, and again he dipped the pen into the strange volatile liquid.

"God bless you, my dear love," he wrote, "and grant you the peace which seems the only thing for which you crave."

He waited till the words had quite vanished, and then he took up the two sheets of paper, folded them in half, and put them in a large envelope which fitted the paper when so folded. He wrote on the outside, "Mrs. Pavely, Lawford Chase."

And then, turning out the light with a quick, nervous gesture, he got up and went over to the long, low, garret window.

For a few moments he saw nothing but darkness, then the familiar scene unrolled below him and took dim shape in the starlit night.

Instinctively his sombre eyes sought the place where, far away to the right, was a dark patch of wood. It was there, set amidst a grove of high trees, that stood Lawford Chase, the noble old house which had been his mother's early home, and which now contained Laura Pavely, the woman to whom he had just written two such different letters, and who for nearly three months had never been out of his waking thoughts.

As his eyes grew more and more accustomed to the luminous darkness, he saw the group of elms under which this very day a word had unsealed the depths of his heart, and where he had had the agony of seeing Laura shrink, shudder, wilt as does a flower in a breath of hot, fœtid air, under his avowal of love.

Violently he put that memory from him, and staring out into the splendour of this early autumn night, he tried to recapture the mixture of feelings with which he had regarded Laura Pavely the first time they had met since her marriage—the first time indeed since she had been a shy, quiet little girl, and he an eager, highly vitalised youth, five years older than herself.

Looking back now he realised that what had predominated in his mind on that hot, languorous June afternoon was astonishment at her utter unlikeness to her brother, his partner, Gillie Baynton. It was an astonishment which warred with the beckoning, almost uncanny, fascination which her gentle, abstracted, aloof manner effortlessly exercised over him. And yet she had been (he knew it now, he had not known it then) amazingly forthcoming—for her! As Mrs. Tropenell's son he would have had a right to Laura Pavely's regard, but he knew now that what had set ajar the portals of her at once desolate and burdened heart had been his kindness to, even his business relationship with, her brother.

Gillie Baynton? Yes, it was to that disconcerting and discordant human chord that their two natures—his and Laura's—had perforce vibrated and mingled. Remembering this, Oliver Tropenell reproved himself for his past discontent with the partner who, whatever his failings, had always shown him both gratitude and a measure of such real affection as a man seldom shows another in a business relationship. In spite of Gillie's faults—nay, vices—he, Tropenell, now often found himself favourably comparing Laura's brother with Laura's husband.

Oliver Tropenell was acutely, intolerably, jealous of Godfrey Pavely—jealous in the burning, scorching sense which is so often the terrible concomitant of such a passion as that which now possessed him. Godfrey Pavely's presence in his own house, his slightly tyrannical, often possessive attitude to Laura, the perpetual reminder that he was, after all, the father of the child Laura had borne, and who seemed to fill her heart to the exclusion of all else—all this was for this man who loved her an ever-recurring ordeal which might well have satisfied the sternest moralist.

That night Oliver Tropenell dreamt of Laura. He thought that he was pursuing her through a maze of flowering shrubs and trees. She was fleeing from him, yet now and again she would turn, and beckon....

His first waking thought was that they would meet to-night—here, in his mother's house. But before that happened a long day would have to be lived through, for he had made up his mind not to go to The Chase till Laura again asked him to do so.

CHAPTER III

THE door of Mrs. Tropenell's long low drawing-room opened very quietly, and Laura Pavely came through into the room.

She had left a brightly lighted hall for a room of which the only present illumination radiated from a shaded reading lamp standing on a little table behind which sat her hostess. Thus, for perhaps as long as half a minute, Laura thought herself alone.

During that half minute Mrs. Tropenell, with eyes well accustomed to the shaded light, gazed at her visitor with an eager, searching look, the look of one who wishes to see more, and to see further, than she has ever seen before.

But what she saw—all she saw—was the Laura she knew with a knowledge that was at once so superficially close, and so little intimate. A woman whose stillness of manner—a manner which at times made her appear almost inanimate—covered, as Mrs. Tropenell had secret reason to know, an extraordinary force of negative will power. It was a force which had even pierced Godfrey Pavely's complacency, and shattered his firm belief in all the rights that English law bestows on the man who has the good or ill fortune to be a husband.

As Laura advanced into the room her hostess saw that her visitor's beautifully shaped head, set proudly and freely on the slender shoulders, was thrown back in a characteristic gesture of attention, and, with a touch of reluctance, she admired afresh the masses of fair, cendré hair drawn back from the forehead in a way which to most women would have been trying, yet which to this woman lent an air of eighteenth-century charm and distinction.

There was no colour in Laura Pavely's face, but her eyes, heavy-lidded, and fringed with eyelashes darker than her hair, were deeply blue.

To-night she was wearing a very simple evening dress, a white chiffon tea-gown with a long black lace coat. The under dress was almost high to the throat, but beneath the black lace the wearer's arms, soft, dimpled, and rounded, were bare to the shoulder, and gleamed palely, revealingly.

Mrs. Tropenell wondered whether Laura knew that her arms were unusually lovely; then, for she was a very honest woman, her conscience rebuked her. Laura's faults with regard to men were faults of omission, not of commission. Of course she was aware—she could not help being aware—that she was a singularly attractive and distinguished-looking creature. But she had always taken her own beauty, her own distinction, just as she did the rare, distinctive features of her garden, and the perhaps over-studied charm of her house—as something to be tended and kept beautiful, but also to be guarded from alien indifferent eyes.

Perhaps because in these days every intelligent woman claims to be picturesque and witty—beauty, sheer beauty, is somewhat under the weather. Laura Pavely, to use the current jargon of her day, was not a "success." She was thought to be affected, "deep," prudish, whereas she was simply indifferent to the more commonplace human elements about her.

Her marriage had withdrawn her from the circle of the old friends and neighbours among whom she had been brought up, in a measure because none of them could "do," excepting in a very casual and cursory sense, with Godfrey Pavely. The world of his youth, the little world in and about the country town of Pewsbury, to which he had introduced her as a bride with such exultant complacency, found her not only disagreeably superior, but also dull. Besides, during the early days of her marriage she had been too bewildered by the conditions of her new life, and of her relationship with her husband, to trouble about making new friends, or even new acquaintances.

And so it was that in any intimate sense Mrs. Tropenell was still Laura's only close friend, but the younger woman was rather pathetically aware of how little she really possessed of the older woman's heart, how constantly she was compared, and ever to her detriment, to her dead mother, even how unconscious a rival in the older woman's favour was Laura's own child—merry, cheerful, loving little Alice.

"Aunt Letty? I didn't see you were there."

Laura Pavely had a delightful voice—low, clear, vibrating. It was a voice which sometimes seemed to promise more depth of feeling than its owner ever chose to betray.

As she stooped to kiss Mrs. Tropenell, Laura let herself slide down on to the floor. She knelt there for a moment, and the light gleamed on her fair hair and upturned face. "Alice sent you her love," she said softly, "heaps of love. She's better to-night, though not quite well yet!" And then, as there came a sound of quick footsteps across the hall, she rose, and drew herself up to her full height, with the grace of movement and the absence of flurry which were both so characteristic of her.

Mrs. Tropenell looked up quickly. Had Laura flushed, as she sometimes did flush, with a deep, unbecoming reddening of her pale face, when moved or startled? No, she seemed, if anything, paler, more impassive than usual, and Oliver's mother asked herself, yet again, what of late she had so often asked herself—if Laura was capable of any feeling, any passion, save a feeling of horror, a passion of repugnance, for aught which seemed to smirch her own fastidious physical and spiritual entity.

That she loved her child, the high-spirited, happy-natured little girl, whose presence alone made life sweet and normal at Lawford Chase, Mrs. Tropenell could not doubt—she had had proof of how deeply Laura loved her child on the only occasion danger had come near to Alice—during a bout of some childish ailment, when for a few hours the little creature had been in danger of death. She, the older woman, had been frightened, awed, by Laura's terrible, dry-eyed agony....

Oliver Tropenell opened the door, and as he walked across the room, his mother's heart quivered with jealous pain, and even with a feeling of secret, impotent anger, as she saw the eager, rapt look which lighted up his dark face.

Laura held out her ringless right hand, but he only just touched it. "I'm sorry I'm late!" he exclaimed. "As a matter of fact I was reading a letter just come, by the second post, from Gillie."

"I've written to Gillie to-day," Laura said quietly. It seemed such a long, long time since yesterday morning. She felt as if the extraordinary thing which had happened then had been blotted out.

"Have you sent your letter off?"

"No, not yet," she was surprised at the question.

And then there fell a curious silence on those three people, till at last the door opened, and dinner was announced.

"Oliver! Take in Laura," said Mrs. Tropenell.

On the last occasion when the three had dined alone together there had been a little smiling discussion as to the order in which they should go into the dining-room. But that had been many weeks ago. They were not in such a light mood to-night, and yet—and yet, why should they not be? The hostess knew of no reason.

The two paired off together, and Oliver's mother asked herself, for perhaps the thousandth time in the last three months, why she had allowed this—this friendship between her son and Laura Pavely to come about? It would have been so easy to arrange that she and her son should spend the summer abroad! When he had first come home there had been a talk of their going away together to Italy, or to France—France, which they had both loved when he was a clever, ardent, headstrong boy, with a strength of brain and originality of mind too big for his boyish boots.

But the harm, what harm there was—sometimes she hoped it was not so very much harm after all—had been done quickly. By the end of that first month at home, Oliver had lost all wish to leave Freshley.

In those early days—or was it that already he was being unconsciously hypocritical as men are wont to be when in such case as that in which he now found himself?—he had seemed to have formed an even closer friendship with Godfrey Pavely than with Godfrey Pavely's wife. They had even made a joint business expedition to town together, Godfrey as Oliver's guest, staying in one of those luxurious hotels which seem equally attractive to the millionaire and the adventurer. But Oliver had at last thrown off, when alone with his mother, any pretence of liking, far less of respecting, Godfrey Pavely. Yet when with the other man he still kept up the sinister fiction. She knew that.

The three sat down in the pretty, octagon-shaped dining-room, and the mother and son talked, Laura saying very little, and never giving, always accepting—in that sense, perhaps, an elemental woman after all! Even so, she showed, when she did rouse herself to express an opinion, that there was a good deal of thought and of intelligence in her small, beautiful head.

Mrs. Tropenell, sitting at the top of the oval table, told herself that in a primeval sense such a woman as Laura might well be the complement of such a man as was Oliver. He had strength, passion, idealism, enough to furnish forth half a dozen ordinary human beings. And he had patience too—patience which is but another name for that self-control in the secret things of passion which often brings men's desires to fruition. It was patience and self-control which had been so lacking in Godfrey Pavely during those early days when Laura had at least desired to fulfil her duty as a wife.

And yet again and again during that uncomfortable half-hour Mrs. Tropenell caught herself wishing that Godfrey Pavely was there, sitting on her right hand. Godfrey always had plenty to say for himself, especially in that house, and when he felt secure of the discretion of those about him, he would often tell much that he ought, in his character of banker, to have left unsaid. He knew the private business of every one, gentle or simple, for miles round, and took an easy, unaffected interest in it all. It was only when he touched on wider matters, especially on politics, that he grew unbearably tedious and prosy. But then the only person whom Mrs. Tropenell ever listened to with pleasure on such subjects was her old friend, Lord St. Amant, who always knew what he was talking about, and always salted what he knew with happy flashes of wit and humour.

Oliver accompanied the two ladies back into the drawing-room, and his mother did not know whether to be glad or sorry that she had not had a few minutes alone with the younger woman. Sometimes it seemed as if she and Laura never were alone together now. Was it possible that of late Laura was deliberately avoiding her? As this half suspicion came into Mrs. Tropenell's mind she looked up and saw her son's eyes fixed on her face.

There was something imperious, imploring, commanding, in the look he bent on her. She saw that he was willing her to go away—to leave him, alone, with Laura....

Under the spell of that look she got up. "I must go upstairs for my work," she said quietly. "And I have a letter to write too. I shan't be very long."

It was as if Oliver made but one swift step to the door, and, as he held it open, his mother turned her head away, lest he should see that tears had come into her eyes—tears of pain, and yes, of fear.

How was all this to end?

After walking slowly forward into the square brightly lighted hall she suddenly stayed her steps, and clasped her hands together.

A terrible temptation—terrible, almost unbelievable to such a woman as was Letitia Tropenell—held her in its grip. She longed with a fearful, gasping longing, to go back and listen at the door which had just closed behind her.

So strong was this temptation that she actually visualised herself walking across to a certain corner, turning down the electric light switch, then, in the darkness, creeping to the drawing-room door, and there gently, gently—pushing it open, say half an inch, in order to hear what those two were now saying, the one to the other....

At last, thrusting the temptation from her, she again began walking across the brightly lighted hall, and so, slowly, made her way up the staircase which led to her bedroom.

What Mrs. Tropenell would have heard, had she yielded to that ignoble temptation, would not have told her anything of what she had so longed to know.

After he had shut the door on his mother, Oliver Tropenell walked back to the place where he had stood a moment ago. But he did not come any nearer than he had been before to his guest, and his manner remained exactly what it had been when they had been three, instead of being, as they were now, two, in that dimly lighted room.

Still, both he and Laura, in their secret, hidden selves, were profoundly conscious that Mrs. Tropenell's absence made a great, if an intangible, difference. It was the first time they had been alone that day, for it was the first day for many weeks past that Oliver had not walked over to The Chase, either in the morning or in the afternoon or, as was almost always the case, both after breakfast and about teatime.

At last, when the silence had become almost oppressive, he spoke, with a certain hard directness in his voice.

"In the letter I received from Gillie to-day he tells me that he can easily be spared for a few weeks, and I've already telephoned a cable telling him to start at once. I've said that if he thinks it advisable I myself will leave for Mexico as soon as I hear from him."

"Oh, but I don't want you to do that!" Laura Pavely looked up at him dismayed. "I thought you meant to stay in England right up to Christmas?"

"Yes, so I did, and I feel almost certain that he won't think it necessary for me to go back. But the important thing is Gillie's and your holiday. Why shouldn't he take you and Alice to France or Italy for a month?"

He saw her face, the face in which there had been a certain rigid, suffering gravity, light up, soften, and then become overcast again. Moving a little nearer to the low chair on which she was sitting—"Yes?" he asked, looking down at her. "What is it you wish to say, Laura?"

"Only that Godfrey would never let me go away with Gillie." She spoke in a sad, low voice, but she felt far more at her ease than she had yet felt this evening.

The last time she and Oliver had been alone, they had parted as enemies, but now there was nothing to show that he remembered their interchange of bitter, passionate words.

He answered quietly,

"I wonder why you feel so sure of that? I believe that if it were put to Godfrey in a reasonable way, he could not possibly object to your going abroad with your brother. It's time they made up that foolish old quarrel."

"Ah, if only I could get away with Gillie and my little Alice!"

Laura looked up as she spoke, and Oliver Tropenell was moved, almost unbearably so, by the look which came over her face. Was it the mention of her child, of her brother, or the thought of getting away from Godfrey for a while, which so illumined her lovely, shadowed eyes?

He went on, still speaking in the quiet, measured tones which made her feel as if the scene of yesterday had been an evil dream. "I've even thought of suggesting that Godfrey should come out with me to Mexico, while your little jaunt with Gillie takes place. We could all be back here by Christmas!"

She shook her head. "I'm afraid Godfrey would never go away except in what he considers his regular holiday time."

"Not even if I made it worth his while?"

She looked up, perplexed. And then a wave of hot colour flamed up in her face. Her conscience, in some ways a very delicate and scrupulous conscience, smote her.

Was it her fault that Oliver Tropenell had come so to despise Godfrey?

But he went on, speaking more naturally, that is quickly, eagerly—more like his pre-yesterday self, "No, I'm not joking! I think I can put Godfrey in the way of doing some really good business out there. We've spoken of it more than once—only yesterday afternoon we spoke of it."

"You don't mean with Gillie there?" There was a note of incredulity in Laura's voice.

"No." They were on dangerous ground now. "Not exactly with Gillie there—though it seems to me, Laura, that Godfrey ought to make it up with Gillie."

Slowly, musingly, as if speaking to herself, she said, "If Godfrey ever goes to Mexico I think he would want me to come too—he always does." And this was true, for Godfrey Pavely in some ways was curiously uxorious. Little as they were to one another, Laura's husband never allowed her to go away by herself, or even with her child, for more than a very few days.

"You come too—to Mexico?" There was surprise, doubt, in Oliver Tropenell's voice, and suddenly Laura did a strange thing, imprudent, uncalled-for in the circumstances in which she found herself with this man; yet she did it with no trace of what is ordinarily called coquetry. Lifting up her head, she said rather plaintively, "Surely you wouldn't mind my coming too, Oliver?"

"Does that mean that you've forgiven me?" he asked.

She got up from the low chair where she had been sitting, and, facing him, exclaimed impulsively, "I want us both to forget what happened yesterday! I was wrong, very wrong, in saying what I did about Godfrey," her voice faltered, and slowly she added, "But with you, who seemed to somehow understand everything without being told, I felt, I felt——"

He raised a warning hand, for his ears had caught the sound of light footfalls in the hall. "Mother's coming back," he said abruptly. "Don't say anything to her of my cable to Gillie." And at once, without any change in his voice, he went on: "There's a great deal that would interest you, quite as much as Godfrey, out there——"

The door opened, and he turned round quickly. "I'm trying to persuade Laura to come out to Mexico," he exclaimed. "Godfrey has practically promised to pay me a visit, and I don't see why she shouldn't come too!"

Mrs. Tropenell made no answer. She knew, and she believed that both the people standing there knew as well as she did, that such an expedition could never take place so long as Gilbert Baynton was Oliver's partner. Baynton and Pavely were bitter enemies. There had never been even the semblance of a reconciliation between them.

But as her son bent his eyes on her as if demanding an answer, she forced herself to say lightly: "I expect they both will, some day, and while they are away I can have my dear little Alice!"

When, a little later, Mrs. Tropenell accompanied Laura out into the hall, she said, "Do come in to-morrow or Sunday, my dear. I seem to see so little of you now."

"I will—I will!" and as she kissed the older woman, Laura murmured, "You're so good to me, Aunty Letty—you've always been so very, very good to me!"

Oliver opened wide the door giving into the garden. He was now obviously impatient to get Laura once more alone to himself....

After she went back to her drawing-room, Mrs. Tropenell walked straight across to a window, and there, holding back the heavy curtain, she watched the two figures moving in the bright moonlight across the lawn, towards the beech avenue which would presently engulf them.

What were their real relations the one to the other? Was Laura as blind to the truth as she seemed to be, or was she shamming—as women, God or the devil helping them—so often sham?

Slowly, feeling as if she had suddenly become very, very old, Mrs. Tropenell dropped the curtain, and walking back to her usual place, her usual chair, took up her knitting.

CHAPTER IV

LAURA and Oliver Tropenell walked across the grass in silence, and still in silence they passed through under the great dark arch formed by the beech trees.

Laura was extraordinarily moved and excited. Her brother, her dear, dear Gillie, coming home? She had taken the surprising news very quietly, but it had stirred her to the depths of her nature. Without even telling her of what he was going to do, the man now walking by her side had brought about the thing that for years she had longed should come to pass.

In her husband Laura had become accustomed to a man who was cautious and deliberate to a fault, and who, as so often happens, carried this peculiarity even more into the affairs of his daily life than into his business. Often weeks would go by before Godfrey would make up his mind to carry out some small, necessary improvement connected with the estate.

Yet here was Oliver, who, without saying a word to her about it, had decided that Gillie should come to England just to see the sister he had not seen for seven years! Laura began to think it possible that after all Godfrey would make it up with her brother. Oliver Tropenell had an extraordinary influence over Godfrey Pavely; again and again, as regarded small matters, he had, as it were, made Godfrey's mind up for him.

A feeling of deep gratitude welled up in her heart for the silent man by her side. She longed for him to speak now, as he had spoken to her, kindly, conciliatingly, but a few minutes ago, in the drawing-room.

But Oliver stalked along dumbly in the intense darkness.

And then suddenly she remembered, with a miserable feeling of discomfort, and yes, of shame, that she could hardly expect him to be as usual. And so it was she who, making a great effort, at last broke the unnatural silence.

"I've never thanked you for your letter," she said nervously. "But I'm very much obliged to you, Oliver, for consenting to be my trustee. And I know that Godfrey will be! I hope it won't give you much trouble—the trusteeship, I mean. I know that Mr. Blackmore, for years past, left it all to Godfrey."

He answered slowly, meditatively, and to her intense relief, quite in his old way. "Yes, I think Godfrey will be pleased. To tell you the truth, Laura, I thought I would take advantage of his pleasure to suggest that plan about Gillie—I mean that you and Gillie and Alice should all go abroad together."

"If only you can persuade Godfrey to let me have Gillie here for a while, I shall be more than content!" She spoke with a rather piteous eagerness.

They were walking very, very slowly. Oliver had now turned on his electric torch, and it threw a bright patch of light on the path immediately before them, making all the darkness about them the blacker and the more intense.

In a hard voice he exclaimed: "Of course Gillie must come here, and stay here! His being anywhere else would be preposterous——" And then, once more, he fell into that strange, disconcerting silence.

The last time they two had walked down under the beeches at night had been some three weeks ago. Laura and Godfrey had dined with the Tropenells, and then Godfrey had said that he had to go home and do some work, leaving her to stay on, for nearly an hour, with the mother and son.

Oliver's torch had gone out that evening, and he had suggested, a little diffidently, that Laura should take his arm; smiling, she had laid the tips of her fingers lightly on his sleeve. She had felt so happy then, so happy, and absolutely at her ease, with her companion....

Tears welled up in her eyes. She was grateful for the darkness, but her trembling voice betrayed her as she exclaimed, "Oliver? I do again ask you to forget what happened yesterday, and to forgive me for the things I said. I'm very sorry that I spoke as I did."

He stopped walking, and put out his torch. "Don't be sorry," he said, in a low, constrained voice. "It's far better that I should know exactly how you feel. Of course I was surprised, for I'd always had a notion that women regarded love from a more ideal standpoint than men seem able to do. But I see now that I was mistaken." Some of the bitterness with which his heart was still full and overflowing crept into his measured voice. "I think you will believe me when I say that I did not mean to insult you——"

He was going on, but she interrupted him.

"—I'm sorry—sorry and ashamed too, Oliver, of what I said. Please—please forget what happened——"

He turned on her amid the dark shadows.

"If I forget, will you?" he asked sombrely.

And she answered, "Yes, yes—indeed I will! But before we put what happened yesterday behind us forever, do let me tell you, Oliver, that I am grateful, deeply grateful, for your——" she hesitated painfully, and then murmured "your affection."

But Oliver Tropenell did not meet her half-way, as she had perhaps thought he would. He was torn by conflicting feelings, cursing himself for having lost his self-control the day before, and yet, even so, deep in his subtle, storm-tossed mind, not altogether sorry for what had happened.

And so it was she who went on, speaking slowly and with difficulty: "I know that I have been to blame! I know that I ought never to have spoken of Godfrey as I have sometimes allowed myself to do to you. According to his lights, he is a good husband, and I know that I have been—that I am—a bitter disappointment to him."

He muttered something—she did not hear what it was, and she hurried on: "What I have wanted—and oh, Oliver, I have wanted it so much—is a friend," almost he heard the unspoken words, "not a lover."

She put out her hand in the darkness and laid it, for a moment, on his arm. And then, suddenly, in that moment of, to him, exquisite, unhoped-for contact, Oliver Tropenell swore to himself most solemnly that he would rest satisfied with what she would, and could, grant him. And so—

"I know that," he said in measured, restrained tones. "And I have made up my mind to be that friend, Laura. We will both forget what happened yesterday. If you are ashamed, I am a hundred times more so! And do believe me when I tell you that what you said about Godfrey—why, I've forgotten it already—had nothing to do with my outburst. I'm a lonely man, my dear, and somehow, without in the least meaning it, I know, you crept into my heart and filled it all. But already, since yesterday, I've come to a more reasonable frame of mind."

He waited a moment, despising himself for uttering such lying words, and then he went on, this time honestly meaning what he said: "Henceforth, Laura, I swear that I'll never again say a word to you that all the world might not hear. I never did, till yesterday——"

"I know, I know," she said hurriedly. "And that was why I was so surprised."

"Let's put it all behind us and go back to 'as we were'!" He was speaking now with a sort of gruff, good-humoured decision, and Laura sighed, relieved, and yet—so unreasonable a being is woman—unsatisfied.

The light from his torch flashed again, and they walked on, under the dark arch of leaves and branches, till they were close to the open road.

And there Laura said, "I wish you would leave me here, Oliver. I feel sure that Aunt Letty is waiting up for you."

He answered her at once. "It won't make more than five minutes' difference. I'll only walk as far as the lodge. It's a lonely little stretch of road."

"Lonely?" she repeated. "Why, there isn't a bit of it that isn't within hail of Rosedean!"

And then, determined to go back to their old easy companionship, that companionship which had lately become so easy and so intimate that when with him she had often spoken a passing thought aloud, "Katty came home to-day. I must try and see her to-morrow. She's a plucky creature, Oliver! I wish that Aunt Letty liked her better than she does."

He answered idly, "There's nothing much either to like or dislike in Mrs. Winslow—at least so it always seems to me."

But she answered quickly, defensively, "There's a great deal to like in her—when I think of Katty Winslow I feel ashamed of myself. I've known her do such kind things! And then she's so good about Godfrey—I don't know what Godfrey would do without her. They knew each other as children. It's as if she was his sister. All that little Pewsbury world which bores me so, is full of interest to them both. I'm always glad when she's at Rosedean. I only wish she didn't go away so often—Godfrey does miss her so!"

"Yes, I know he does," he said drily.

They walked on in silence till they were close to the low lodge.

Laura Pavely held out her hand, and Oliver Tropenell took it in his cool, firm grasp for a moment.

"Good-night," he said. "I suppose we shall meet some time to-morrow?"

She answered eagerly. "Yes, do come in, any time! Alice and I shall be gardening before lunch. Godfrey won't be back till late, for he's sure to go straight to the Bank from the station. He'll be so much obliged to you about that trusteeship, Oliver. It's really very good of you to take so much trouble."

Oliver Tropenell answered slowly, "Yes, I think Godfrey will be pleased; and as I've already told you, I'll certainly take advantage of his pleasure, Laura, to suggest the plan about Gillie."

Once more she exclaimed: "If only you can persuade Godfrey to let me have Gillie at The Chase for a while, I shall be more than content!"

There was a thrill of excitement, of longing, in her low voice, as, without waiting for an answer, she walked away, leaving him looking after her. The patch of whiteness formed by the hem of her gown moved swiftly along—against the moonlit background of grass, trees, and sky. He stood and watched the moving, fluttering bit of whiteness till it vanished in the grey silvery haze. Then, slowly, he turned on his heel and made his way back home.

It was nearly a quarter of a mile from the lodge to The Chase, as the house was always called, but there was a rather shorter way across the grass, through trees; and Laura, when she came to where she knew the little path to be, left the carriage way, and stepped up on to the grass.

She felt oppressed, her soul filled with a piteous lassitude and weariness of life, in spite of the coming return home of her only brother. She had been moved and excited, as well as made acutely unhappy, by what had happened yesterday morning. Mrs. Tropenell, as almost always happens in such a case, was not fair to Laura Pavely. Laura had been overwhelmed with surprise—a surprise in which humiliation and self-rebuke were intolerably mingled—and yes, a certain proud anger.

The words Oliver had said, and alas! that it should be so, the bitter, scornful words she had uttered in reply, had, she felt, degraded them both—she far, far more than him. At the time she had been too deeply hurt, too instinctively anxious to punish him, to measure her words. And now she told herself that she had spoken yesterday in a way no man would ever forget, and few, very few men would ever forgive. Though he had been kind to-night—very, very kind—his manner had altered, all the happy ease had gone.

Tears came into Laura Pavely's eyes; they rolled down her cheeks. Suddenly she found herself sobbing bitterly.

She stopped walking, and covered her face with her hands. With a depth of pain, unplumbed till now, she told herself that she would never, never be able to make Oliver understand why she had said those cruel stinging words. Without a disloyalty to Godfrey of which she was incapable, she could not hope to make him understand why she had so profound a distaste, ay, and contempt, for that which, if he had spoken truly yesterday, he thought the greatest thing in the world. With sad, leaden-weighted conviction she realised that there must always be between a man and a woman, however great their friendship and mutual confidence, certain barriers that nothing can force or clear.

She had believed, though as a matter of fact she had not thought very much about it, that Oliver Tropenell, in some mysterious way, was unlike ordinary men. As far as she knew, he had never "fallen in love." Women, who, as she could not help knowing, had always played so great a part in her brother Gillie's life, seemed not to exist—so far as Oliver Tropenell was concerned. He had never even seemed attracted, as almost every man was, by pretty Katty Winslow, the innocent divorcée now living at his very gates. So she, Laura, had allowed herself to slip into a close, intimate relationship which, all unknowingly to her, had proved most dangerous to him....

Still crying bitterly, she told herself that she had been too happy all this summer. Godfrey had been kinder, less, less—she shrank from putting it into words—but yes, less ill-tempered, mean, and tiresome than usual. Oliver had had such a good effect on Godfrey, and she had honestly believed that the two were friends.

But how could they be friends if—if it was true that Oliver loved her? Laura Pavely knew nothing of the well-worn byways of our poor human nature.

Suddenly she threw her head back and saw the starlit sky above her. Somehow that wonderful ever-recurring miracle of impersonal, unearthly beauty calmed and comforted her. Drying her eyes, she told herself that something after all had survived out of yesterday's wreck. Her friend might be a man—a man as other men were; but he was noble, and singularly selfless, for all that. On the evening of the very day on which she had grievously offended and wounded him, he had written her a kindly letter, offering to be her trustee.

There had been moments to-day when she had thought of writing Mrs. Tropenell a note to say she did not feel well—and that she would not dine at Freshley that night. But oh, how glad she was now that a mixture of pride and feminine delicacy had prompted her to behave just as if nothing had happened, as if words which could never be forgotten had not been uttered between herself and Oliver! She had thought he would punish her this evening by being sulky and disagreeable—that was her husband's invariable method of showing displeasure. But with the exception of a word or two uttered very quietly, and more as if she, rather than he, had something to forgive, he had behaved as if yesterday had never been. He had heaped coals of fire upon her head, making it plain that even now he was only thinking of her—of her and of Gillie, of how he could pleasure them both by securing her a holiday with her only brother.

Every word of that restrained, not very natural, conversation held just now under the beech trees re-echoed in her ears. She seemed to hear again the slowly uttered, measured words, "I am going to be your friend, Laura"....

And then there came over Laura Pavely an extraordinary sensation of moral and mental disturbance. Once more everything which had happened to-day was blotted out, and she went back to yesterday morning. Again she lived through those moments during which Oliver Tropenell had offered her what was to him the greatest thing man has it in him to bestow—love, even if illicit, unsanctified. And she had rejected the gift with a passion of scorn, spurning it as she would have done a base and unclean thing.

Years and years ago, in her quiet, shadowed youth, she too had believed love to be the most precious, beautiful thing in life. Then, with marriage to Godfrey Pavely had come the conviction that love was not beautiful, but very, very ugly—at its best one of those dubious gifts to man by which old Dame Nature works out certain cunning designs of her own. And yet, when something of what she believed to be the truth had been uttered by her during that terrible tense exchange of words, she had seen how she, in her turn, had shocked, and even repelled, Oliver Tropenell.

Once more sobs welled up from her throat, once more she covered her face with her hands....

At last, feeling worn out with the violence of an emotion which, unknown to her, vivified her whole being, she walked on till the fine Tudor front of the old house which was at once so little and so much her home, rose before her. It was an infinite comfort to know that Godfrey would not be there waiting for her, and that she would be able to make her way up alone through the sleeping house to the room which opened into her child's nursery.

CHAPTER V

MRS. TROPENELL, waiting for Oliver to come back, lost count of time, and yet not much more than half an hour had gone by before she heard the sound of a glazed door, which opened on to the garden from a distant part of the house, burst open.

In that sound she seemed to hear all the impatience, all the pain, all the frustrated longing she divined in her son.

She got up from her chair and stood listening. Would he go straight upstairs—as she, in her stormy, passionate youth, would have done in his place?

But no—with a feeling of rushing, unreasoning joy she heard him coming across the hall. A moment later he walked through into the room and came and stood before her.

"Mother," he said, "it's a beautiful night. Would you care to come into the garden for a few minutes?"

As soon as they had stepped out of the French window into the darkness, she took his arm.

"You don't feel it cold?" he asked solicitously.

"Oh no," she said, surprised. "I'm so little cold, Oliver, that I shouldn't at all mind going over to the blue bench, and sitting down."

They went across the grass, to a curious painted Italian bench which had been a gift of the woman who was so much in both their thoughts.

And there, "I want to ask you a question," he said slowly. "What led to the marriage of Laura Baynton and Godfrey Pavely? From something she once said to me, I gather she thinks that you approved of it."

She felt as if his eyes were burning her in the darkness, and as she hesitated, hardly knowing what to say, he went on, and in his voice there was something terribly accusing.

"Did you make the marriage, mother? Did you really advise her to take that fellow?"

The questions stung her. "No," she answered coldly. "I did nothing of the kind, Oliver. If you wish to know the truth, the person who was most to blame was your friend Gillie, Laura's brother. Laura adored her brother. There was nothing in the world she wouldn't have done for him, and she married Godfrey—it seems a strange thing to look back on now—to please Gillie."

"But she met Pavely here?"

"Yes, of course she did. As you know, she very often stayed with me after her father died, and when Gillie Baynton, instead of making a home for her, was getting into scrape after scrape, spending her money as well as his own."

He muttered, "Gillie knew she was to have money later."

She went on: "And then Godfrey Pavely in love is a very different person from Godfrey Pavely—well, out of love. He was set on marrying Laura, and that over years. He first asked her when she was seventeen, and they married when she was twenty-one. In the interval he had done Gillie many good turns. In fact Godfrey bought Laura from Gillie. That, Oliver, is the simple truth."

She waited for him to make some kind of comment, but he said nothing, and she went on, a tinge of deep, yearning sadness in her voice, "Don't let your friends, or rather their incompatibility of temper—" she hesitated, and then rather solemnly ended her sentence with the words, "affect our relations, my son."

"I'm sorry, mother." Tropenell's voice altered, softened. "Forgive me for the way I spoke just now! I had got it into my head—I didn't know quite exactly why—that you had promoted the marriage. I see now that you really had nothing to do with it."

"I won't say that! It's difficult to remember exactly what did happen. Godfrey never wearied in his slow, inexorable pursuit of Laura. I think that at last she was touched by his constancy. She knew nothing then of human nature—she knows nothing of it now."

He muttered, "Poor girl! Poor unfortunate girl!" and his way of uttering the commonplace words hurt his mother shrewdly.

Suddenly she made up her mind to say at least one true thing to him. It was a thing she knew well no one but herself would ever say to Oliver.

"I am in a position to know," she said, "and I want you to believe it when I tell you, that if Laura is to be as much pitied as you believe her to be—so too, I tell you, Oliver, is Godfrey! If I had known before the marriage, even an hour before the actual wedding, what I learnt afterwards—I mean as to their amazingly different ideals of life—I would have done anything to stop it!"

"What d'you mean exactly, mother, by different ideals of life?"

As he asked the question he moved away from her a little, but he turned round and bent his eyes on to her face—dimly, whitely, apparent in the starlit, moonlit night.

She did not speak at once. It seemed to her that the question answered itself, and yet she felt that he was quivering with impatience for her answer.

"The French," she said in a low voice, "have a very good phrase to describe the kind of man Godfrey is. Godfrey Pavely is a le moyen homme sensuel—the typical man of his kind and class, Oliver—the self-satisfied, stolid, unimaginative upper middle-class. Such men feel that the world, their English world at any rate, has been made for them, built up by the all-powerful entity they call God in their personal interest. They know scarcely anything of what is going on, either above or below them, and what is more, they do not really care, as long as they and their like prosper."

Oliver nodded impatiently. He knew all that well enough!

His mother went on: "Godfrey Pavely ought to have married some rather clever, rather vulgar-natured, rather pretty girl, belonging to his own little world of Pewsbury. Then, instead of being what he now is, an uncomfortable, not over contented man, he would have been, well—what his worthy father was before him. That odd interest in queer, speculative money dealings, is the unfortunate fellow's only outlet, Oliver, for what romance is in him."

"I wonder if you're right, mother?"

"I'm sure I am."

There came a long silence between them.

Mrs. Tropenell could see her son in outline, as it were, his well-shaped head, and long, lean, finely proportioned body. He was sitting at the further end of the bench, and he was now staring right before him. She found it easier—far easier—to speak of Godfrey than of Laura. And so, musingly, she went on:

"Looking back a dozen years, I can think of several young women whom Godfrey would have done well to consider——"

"I can certainly think of one, mother," he said, and in the darkness there came a bitter little smile over his face.

"You mean Katty Winslow? Yes—I think you're right, my dear. When Godfrey turned from Katty to Laura, he made a terrible mistake. Katty, in the old days, had very much the same ambitions, and the same social aspirations, as himself. She was really fond of him too! She would have become—what's the odious word?—'smart.' And Godfrey would have been proud of her. By now he would have stood for Parliament, and then, in due course, would have come a baronetcy. Yes, if the gods had been kind, Godfrey Pavely would have married poor little Katty—he didn't behave over well to her, you know!"

"It seems to me that Mrs. Winslow has made quite a good thing of her life, mother."

"Do you really think that, Oliver?"

"Yes, I do. She managed very cleverly, so I'm told, to get rid of that worthless husband of hers, and now she's got that pretty little house, and that charming little garden, and as much of Godfrey as she seems to want." He spoke with a kind of hard indifference.

"Katty's not the sort of woman to be really satisfied with a pretty little house, a charming little garden, and a platonic share in another woman's husband."

"Then she'll marry again. People seem to think her very attractive."

There was a long pause.

"Mother?"

"Yes, my dearest."

"To return to Laura—what should have been her fate had the gods been kind?"

She left his question without an answer so dangerously long as to create a strange feeling of excitement and strain between them. Then, reluctantly, she answered it. "Laura might have been happiest in not marrying at all, and in any case she should have married late. As to what kind of man would have made her happy, of course I have a theory."

"What is your theory?" He leant towards her, breathing rather quickly.

"I think," she said hesitatingly, "that Laura might have been happy with a man of the world, older than herself, who would have regarded his wife as a rare and beautiful possession. Such a man would have understood the measure of what she was willing and able to give—and to withhold. I can also imagine Laura married to a young idealist, the kind of man whose attitude to his wife is one of worship, whose demands, if indeed they can be called demands, are few, infrequent——"

Mrs. Tropenell stopped abruptly. What she had just said led to a path she did not mean to follow. But she soon realised with dismay that she had said too much, or too little.

"Do you mean," said Oliver hoarsely, "that Pavely—that Pavely——" he left his question unfinished, but she knew he meant to exact an answer and she did not keep him waiting long for it. Still she chose her words very carefully.

"I think that Godfrey Pavely, in the matter of his relations to his wife, is a very unfortunate, and, some would say, a very ill-used man, Oliver."

Oliver Tropenell suddenly diminished the distance between his mother and himself. The carefully chosen, vague words she had just uttered had been like balm poured into a festering and intolerably painful wound.

"Poor devil!" he said contemptuously, and there was a rather terrible tone of triumph, as well as of contempt, in the muttered exclamation.

Mrs. Tropenell was startled and, what she seldom was, frightened. She felt she was face to face with an elemental force—the force of hate.

She repeated his last words, but in how different a spirit, in how different a tone! "Poor devil? Yes, Oliver, Godfrey is really to be pitied, and I ask you to believe me, my son, when I say that he does do his duty by Laura according to his lights."

"Mother?" He put out his hand in the darkness and just touched hers. "Why is it that Laura is so much fonder of you than you are of Laura? You don't respect—or even like—Godfrey?"

She protested eagerly. "But I am fond of Laura—very, very fond, Oliver! But though, as you say, I neither really like nor respect Godfrey, I can't help being sorry for him. He once said to me—it's a long time ago—'I thought I was marrying a woman, but I've married a marble statue. I'm married to something like that'—and he pointed to 'The Wingless Victory' your father brought me, years ago, from Italy. Godfrey is an unhappy man, Oliver—come, admit that you know that?"

"I think she's far, far more unhappy than he is! No man with so thoroughly good an opinion of himself is ever really unhappy. Still, it's a frightful tangle."

He stopped short for a moment, then in a very low voice, he asked her, "Is there no way of cutting it through, mother?" Suddenly he answered his own question in a curiously musing, detached tone. "I suppose the only way in which such a situation is ever terminated is by death."

"Yes," she said slowly, "but it's not a usual termination. Still, I have known it happen." More lightly she went on: "If Laura died, Godfrey wouldn't escape Katty a second time. And one must admit that she would make him an almost perfect wife."

"And if Godfrey died, mother?"

Mrs. Tropenell felt a little tremor of fear shoot through her burdened heart. This secret, intimate conversation held in the starry night was drifting into strange, sinister, uncharted channels. But her son was waiting for an answer.

"I don't know how far Laura's life would alter for the better if Godfrey died. I suppose she would go on much as she does now. And, Oliver——"

"Yes, mother."

"I should pity and—rather despise the man who would waste his life in an unrequited devotion."

He made an impatient movement. "Then do you regard response as essential in every relationship between a man and a woman?"

"I have never yet known a man who did not regard it as essential," she said quietly, "and that, however he might consciously or unconsciously pretend to be satisfied with—nothing."

"I once knew a man," he said, in a low, tense voice, "who for years loved a woman who seemed unresponsive, who forced him to be content with the merest crumbs of—well, she called it friendship. And yet, mother, that man was happy in his love. And towards the end of her life the woman gave all that he had longed for, all he had schooled himself to believe it was not in her to give—but it had been there all the time! She had suffered, poor angel, more than he—" his voice broke, and his mother, turning towards him, laid for a moment her hand on his, as she whispered, "Was that woman at all like Laura, my darling?"

"Yes—as far as a Spaniard, and a Roman Catholic, can be like Laura, she was like Laura."

Even as he spoke he had risen to his feet, and during their short walk, from the bench where they had been sitting through the trees and across the lawn, neither spoke to the other. But, as he opened the house door, he said, "Good-night. I'm not coming in now; I'm going for a walk. I haven't walked all day." He hesitated a moment: "Don't be worried—I won't say don't be frightened, for I don't believe, mother, that anything could ever frighten you—if you hear me coming in rather late. I've got to think out a rather difficult problem—something connected with my business."

"I hope Gillie hasn't been getting into any scrape since you've come home?"

But she only spoke by way of falling in with his humour. Nothing mattered to her, or to him, just now, except—Laura.

He said hastily, "Oh no, things have been going very well out there. You must remember, mother, that Baynton's scrapes never affect his work."

He spoke absently, and she realised that he wanted to be away, by himself, to think over some of the things she had said to him, and so she turned and went slowly up the staircase, and passed through into her own bedroom without turning up the light.

Walking over to her window, she gazed down into the moonlit space beneath. But she could see no moving shadow, hear no sound. Oliver had padded away across the grass, making for the lonely downs which encircled, on three sides, the house.

Before turning away from her window, Mrs. Tropenell covered her face with her hands; she was fearfully moved, shaken to the depths of her heart. For the first time Oliver had bared his soul before her. She thrilled with pride in the passionate, wayward, in a measure nobly selfless and generous human being whom she had created.

How strange, how amazing that Laura made no response to that ardent, exalted passion! But if amazing, then also, from what ought to be every point of view, how fortunate! And yet, unreasonable though it was, Mrs. Tropenell felt sharply angered with Laura, irritated by that enigmatic, self-absorbed, coldness of hers. What a poor maimed creature, to be so blind, so imperceptive, to the greatest thing in the world! Dislike, a physical distaste for the unlucky Godfrey which seemed sometimes to amount to horror, were this beautiful woman's nearest approach to passion.

CHAPTER VI

AT Rosedean, the small, mid-Victorian house which every one going to and fro between Freshley Manor and Lawford Chase was bound to pass by, Mrs. Winslow sat in her drawing-room waiting for Godfrey Pavely.

He was coming in to see her on his way home from Pewsbury, where, at the Bank, he spent each day at least six of his waking hours.

All the summer, up to to-day, Mrs. Winslow had always had tea in the garden, but there was now a freshness in the air, and she thought they would find it more comfortable indoors than out. Still, she had opened wide the long French window, and the wind blew in, laden with pungent autumnal scents.

Katty—the old childish name still clung to her—was a very clever woman. She possessed the power of getting the utmost out of the people round her, whether they were friends, acquaintances, or servants. Her little garden was exquisitely kept, and there was no month of the year when it did not look charming. Her little house, so far as was possible on very limited means, was perfectly ordered.

Perhaps one secret of her success lay in the fact that she was able to do everything herself that she asked others to do for her. Katty was a good gardener, an excellent cook, and an exceptionally clever dressmaker. Yet she was the last woman to make the mistake so many clever people make—of keeping a dog and doing the barking oneself. Katty was willing to show those she employed exactly how she wanted a thing done, but she expected them to learn how to do it quickly and intelligently. She had no use for the idle or the stupid.

Katty Winslow was thirty-one, but she looked much younger. She was an exceedingly pretty woman, with brown eyes, a delicately clear, white and pink complexion, and curling chestnut hair. She took great pains with her appearance, and with her health. Thus she ate and drank to rule, and almost walked to rule.

Early this last summer a bit of cruel bad luck had befallen Mrs. Winslow. She had caught scarlet fever while on a visit, and for some days had been very ill. But, perhaps as a result of the long, dull convalescence, she now looked even prettier, and yes, younger, than she had done before.

The only daughter of a well-connected but exceedingly poor half-pay officer, Katherine Fenton, during a girlhood which lasted till she was four-and-twenty, had been undisputed belle of Pewsbury, and of a country-side stretching far beyond the confines of that fine old county town. Like all beauties, she had had her triumphs and her disappointments; and then, rather suddenly, she had made what had seemed the irretrievable mistake of an unhappy marriage.

Bob Winslow had been weak, vain, ill-tempered, and, to a certain extent, vicious. Thus his relations had welcomed his marriage to a clever, capable young woman, who it was supposed would make, and keep, him straight. The fact that she had no fortune had been regarded as unimportant—indeed, Bob Winslow had made on his bride what was regarded in the Pewsbury world as the splendid marriage settlement of twelve thousand pounds.

Four and a half per cent, on that sum was now Mrs. Winslow's only income, and out of that income there were still being paid off heavy divorce costs, for Bob Winslow, when it had come to the point, had put up a great fight for his Katty. Not only had he defended the case, but he had brought on his side vague counter-charges. The Judge, rather unkindly, had observed that the petitioner had been "somewhat imprudent," but even so Katty had come out of the painful ordeal very well—so much was universally allowed, even by the few people in Pewsbury who had always disliked her, and who did not think she had treated her husband well.

Godfrey and Laura Pavely had both been very kind to Katty over the matter of the divorce—indeed, Mrs. Winslow had actually stayed at Lawford Chase for many weeks during that troubled time, and Laura's countenance had been of great value to her. This was now three years ago, and, though they had nothing in common, the two women remained good friends, as well as what is sometimes less usual, good neighbours.

In nothing had Katty shown herself cleverer than in her management of Laura. In Laura Pavely's imagination Katty Winslow had her fixed place as a friend of Godfrey's childhood, and that though he was nine years older. Mrs. Pavely regarded Mrs. Winslow much as she would have done a pleasant-natured sister-in-law, and she had been glad to do all that she could for her. When some one had suggested that Katty should become Godfrey Pavely's tenant at Rosedean, Laura had thought it an excellent idea.

It was the fashion to call Rosedean ugly. The house had been built in the 'sixties, by a retired butcher and grazier, and was of red brick with white facings. But it was well built, and had far more real distinction of appearance than the Queen Anne villas which now surrounded Pewsbury. Also, Rosedean had been built on the site of an old farmhouse, and Katty's lawn was fringed with some fine old trees, while a grand old holly hedge concealed a well-stocked kitchen garden. On the other side of the house were stabling for two horses, a coach-house, and a paddock.

Katty had devoted a great deal of successful thought to the arrangement of her dwelling. She knew she could neither compete with the stately beauty of Laura's Tudor mansion, nor with the old-fashioned eighteenth-century charm of Mrs. Tropenell's house, so she wisely made up her mind that her surroundings should be simply bright, pretty and cosy. Her drawing-room was in its way a delightful room, and those walking through into it, from the rather dark, early Victorian hall, gained an instant impression of coolness in summer, of warmth in winter, of cheerfulness and comfort at all times.

No one but Katty herself knew the trouble to which she had been to get the exact pattern of calendered chintz which she had made up her mind to obtain. Katty also kept to herself the amount which she had spent, out of her small reserve, on the thoroughly good, comfortable easy-chairs, of varying shape, height, and depth, which played such an important, if unobtrusive, part in the comfort of her visitors.

Every chair in Katty's sitting-room was an easy chair, with the exception of two gilt ones which were of their kind good, and which she had bought at a sale. They, however, were never moved away from the places where they stood, flanking a quaint, old-fashioned cabinet now filled with some beautiful old china which had come to Katty from a grandmother.

Yet another peculiarity of Katty's sitting-room was the absence of pictures. Their place was taken by mirrors. Above the mantelpiece on which stood six delicately charming Dresden china figures was a looking-glass of curious octagonal shape, framed in rosewood. Opposite the French window which opened into the garden was fixed a long, narrow mirror with a finely carved gilt wood frame. This mirror gave an air of distinction to the room which would otherwise have been lacking, and it also enabled Katty to see at any moment how she was looking, whether her burnished chestnut-brown hair was quite tidy, and her gown fresh-looking and neat.

There had been a time in her life when Katty Winslow had been passionately fond of beautiful clothes, and able to indulge her taste. Now, all she could hope to attain was freshness and neatness. That she achieved these was to her credit, for they too cost, if not money, then a good deal of thought and time, on the part of their possessor.

Godfrey Pavely had walked out from Pewsbury. From the Bank in the High Street to Rosedean was rather over two miles, and he had gone along at a steady, jog-trot pace till he had come in sight of the little house. Then he quickened his footsteps, and a feeling of pleasurable anticipation came over him.

The banker was very, very fond of his old friend and sometime sweetheart. He believed it to be a straightforward, honest affection, though he could not but be aware, deep in his heart, that "to it" was just that little touch of sentiment which adds salt and savour to most of the close friendships formed between a man and a woman.

As a matter of fact, Godfrey Pavely was now happier in Katty Winslow's company than he was in that of any one else. Not only did she ply him with a good deal of delicate flattery, which caused him always to feel better pleased with himself when at Rosedean than when he was at The Chase, but a great and real bond between them was their mutual interest in all the local happenings and local gossip of the neighbourhood.

Laura was frankly indifferent to all that concerned the town of Pewsbury and the affairs of those whom Mrs. Tropenell called the Pewsburyites. She was not disagreeable about it; she simply didn't care. Katty, in spite of her frequent absences, for she was a popular visitor with a large circle of acquaintances, always came home full of an eager wish to learn all that had happened while she had been away.

Little by little, imperceptibly as regarded himself, the banker had fallen into the way of telling this woman, who had so oddly slipped back into his life, everything which concerned and interested himself, every detail of his business, and even, which he had no right to do, the secrets of his clients.

But to this entire confidence there was one outstanding exception. Godfrey Pavely never discussed with Katty Winslow his relations with his wife. Laura's attitude to himself caused him, even now, sharp, almost intolerable, humiliation. Only to Mrs. Tropenell did he ever say a word of his resentment and soreness—and that only because she had been the unwilling confidant of both husband and wife during that early time in their married life when the struggle between Godfrey and Laura had been, if almost wordless, at its sharpest and bitterest.

On one occasion, and on one only, when with Katty Winslow, had Pavely broken his guarded silence. He had been talking, in a way which at once fascinated and tantalised Katty, of his growing wealth, and suddenly he had said something as to his having no son to inherit his fortune. "It's odd to think that some day there will come along a man, a stranger to me, who will benefit by everything I now do——" and as she had looked up at him, at a loss for his meaning, he had gone on, slowly, "I mean the man whom Mrs. Tropenell and Laura between them will select for my girl's husband."

Katty, looking at him very straight out of her bright brown eyes, had exclaimed, "You may have a son yet, Godfrey!"

She had been startled by the look of pain, of rage, and of humiliation that had come into his sulky, obstinate-looking face, as he answered shortly, "I think that's very unlikely."

Had Godfrey Pavely been a more imaginative man, he would probably by now have come to regret, with a deep, voiceless regret, that he had not married Katty instead of Laura—but being the manner of man he was, he had, so far, done nothing of the sort. And yet? And yet, at one time, say fifteen years ago, he had very nearly married Katty. It was a fact which even now he would have denied, but which she never forgot.

In those days Godfrey Pavely had been a priggish, self-important young man of twenty-six, with perhaps not so good an opinion of women as he had now, for a man's opinion of women always alters, one way or another, as he grows older.

Katty, at eighteen, had enjoyed playing on the cautious, judgematical Godfrey's emotions. So well had she succeeded that at one time he could hardly let a day go by without trying to see and to be with her alone. But, though strongly attracted by her instinctive, girlish wiles, he was also, quite unknowingly to her, repelled by those same wiles.

Poor Katty had made herself, in those days that now seemed to both of them so very, very long ago, a little too cheap. Her admirer, to use a good old word, knew that her appeal was to a side of his nature which it behooved him to keep in check, if he was not "to make a fool of himself." And so, just when their little world—kindly, malicious, censorious, as the case might be—was expecting to hear of their engagement, Godfrey Pavely suddenly left Pewsbury to spend a year in a great Paris discount house.

The now staid country banker did not look back with any pride or pleasure to that year in France; he had worked, but he had also ignobly played, spending, rather joylessly, a great deal of money in the process. Then, having secretly sown his wild oats, he had come home and settled down to a further time of banking apprenticeship in London, before taking over the sound family business.

Almost at once, on his return to England, he had made up his mind to marry the beautiful, reserved, the then pathetically young Laura Baynton, who was so constantly with Mrs. Tropenell at Freshley Manor.

Time went on, and Laura held out; but little by little, perhaps because he saw her so seldom, he broke down her resistance. His father had bought the Lawford Chase estate as a great bargain, many years before, and had been content to let it on a long lease. Godfrey, on becoming his own master at thirty, determined to live there, and his marriage to Laura followed a year later.

During their honeymoon in Paris—a honeymoon which was curiously and painfully unlike what Godfrey had supposed his honeymoon would and must be—he saw in a paper a notice of Katty Fenton's engagement. Though not given to impulsively generous actions, he went out and bought for Katty, in the Rue de la Paix, a jewelled pendant Laura had just refused to allow him to buy for her. In return he had received what had seemed at the time a delightful letter of thanks, to which was the following postscript, "There's no harm in my saying now, that you, dear Godfrey, were my first love! I've always wanted you to know that. I've always been afraid that you only thought me a sad little flirt."

The confession, and the shrewd thrust, which was so much truer than he thought Katty knew, moved him, and he had told himself sorely that Katty's husband at any rate would be a very lucky fellow.

Then once more he had forgotten Katty till one day, years later, "Mrs. Winslow" had suddenly been shown into his private room at the Bank.

Looking, as he had at once become aware, even prettier and more attractive than when he had last seen her, she had said quietly, "I'm in great trouble, Godfrey, and I've come down from London to consult you about it. Your father and mine were friends" (a rather exaggerated statement that—but Pavely was in no mood to cavil), "and I don't know who else to go to."

Shortly and simply she had described the dreadful existence she had led since her marriage—then, suddenly, she had rolled up her right sleeve and shown the livid bruises made by Bob Winslow the night before, in a fit of drunken anger, on the slender, soft, white arm.

Unwontedly moved, the more so that this now unfamiliar Katty seemed to make no excessive demand either on his pity or on his emotions, Godfrey Pavely had thrown himself into the complicated, unsavoury business, and very soon his old-new friend had brought him to advise her in the sense she wished. But it was Laura who had suggested that poor Mrs. Winslow should come and stay with them during the divorce proceedings, and while she had been at Lawford Chase, Katty had avoided, rather than sought out, the master of the house.

In the matter of Rosedean the banker had behaved in what he himself considered a very handsome manner. Not only had he let the house to Katty for about a third of what he could have got for it in the open market, but he had allowed her a hundred pounds for "doing it up." He believed himself to have also suggested the arrangement by which she obtained the free services, for a certain number of half-days each week, of a very intelligent Scotch under-gardener who was in his employ.

He had never had reason to regret his kindness. On the contrary, he and Katty had become, as time went on, closer and closer friends, and more and more had he come to miss her during her frequent absences from home.

Some months ago he had even ventured to tell her that he thought she gadded about a bit too much! Why couldn't she be content to stay quietly at Rosedean? "Look at me and Laura," he had exclaimed. "We hardly ever go away for a holiday, and we very seldom pay a visit!" Katty had shaken her pretty head playfully: "Ah, but you don't know how lonely I am sometimes! Laura is most dear and kind to me, but you know, Godfrey, I don't see her often——"

He had not liked to remind her that he very often did.

Then something happened which quite curiously quickened Godfrey Pavely's unavowed feeling for Katty. Oliver Tropenell, a virtual stranger to them all, came home from Mexico to spend the summer in England with his mother. And three times, during Oliver's first fortnight in England, Godfrey arrived at Rosedean to find the then stranger there. On these three occasions each man had tried to sit the other out, and finally they had left the house together. As a result of these meetings Godfrey soon caught himself wondering with a mixture of feelings he did not care to analyse, whether Tropenell could possibly be thinking of marrying Katty?

He found the notion intolerable.

Then came a strange turn to the situation. Katty had gone away, on one of those tiresome little visits she was so fond of paying, and Providence, which means women, especially any woman placed in an ambiguous position, to stay quietly at home, had caught her out! She had fallen ill, when on a visit, of scarlet fever, and she had been compelled to stay away six weeks. During those weeks he, Godfrey Pavely, and Oliver Tropenell had become friends—on more intimate terms of friendship than Pavely had ever expected to find himself with any man. This was, of course, partly owing to the fortunate fact that Laura liked Oliver too, and didn't seem to mind how often he came and went to The Chase.

But Godfrey Pavely had a tenacious memory. He did not forget that for a little while, at any rate, Oliver had seemed to enjoy being in Katty's company. And when Laura, more than once since Mrs. Winslow's return to Rosedean, had suggested asking Katty in to dinner to meet Oliver, her husband coldly vetoed the proposal.

CHAPTER VII

ONLY Harber, the woman who, after having been maid to Katty during her troubled married life, had stayed on with her as house-parlourmaid and general factotum, was aware of how very often Mr. Pavely called at Rosedean on his daily walk home from Pewsbury. To-day he had hardly pressed the bell-knob before the front door opened. It was almost as if Harber had been waiting for him in the hall.

As he put down his hat and stick he was conscious of feeling very glad that he was going to see Katty. Mrs. Winslow had again been away, was it for four days, or five? It's true that for part of that time he himself had been to London, and very busy, but even so the time had seemed long. He told himself that he had a hundred things to say to her, and he even felt a little thrill of excitement as he followed the servant through the hall.

And Katty? Katty, who the moment she had heard the front-door bell had quietly begun making the tea—she always made tea herself, with the help of a pretty spirit lamp—Katty also felt a queer little thrill, but for a very different reason. Since they had last met she had come to a certain resolution with regard to Godfrey Pavely, and though she did not mean to say anything to-day even remotely bearing on it, still it affected her, made her regard him with rather different eyes.

It is a great mistake to think that coldness and calculation always go together. Katty Winslow was calculating, but she was not cold. For once she had been quite honest when writing that odd little postscript to her letter of thanks for Godfrey Pavely's wedding present. Godfrey had, in very truth, been her first love, and she had suffered acutely in her heart, as well as in her pride, when he had run away. Even now, she felt as if there were a strong, secret, passionate link between them, and there was no day when she did not tell herself that she would have made the banker a perfect, and yes—a very happy wife.

Godfrey came into the drawing-room with a pleased, eager look on his face. He took his hostess's hand in his, and held it for perhaps a thought longer than he would have held, say, Mrs. Tropenell's hand. But the hand he now held was a soft, malleable little hand, not thin and firm, like that of Oliver's mother.

Katty was smiling at him, such a bright, friendly, pretty smile. "Sit down," she said softly. "And before we begin talking, take a cup of tea. You look very tired—and you're late, too, Godfrey. I was beginning to think that you weren't coming at all!"

And then he said something which surprised her, but which somehow chimed in quite surprisingly with what had been filling her busy, active brain of late.

"Jim Beath has been with me most of the afternoon," he spoke wearily, complainingly. "I had to ask him to lunch at the Club, and he stayed on and on."

Now the Beaths were by way of being intimate friends of Katty Winslow, and Jim Beath was a client of Godfrey Pavely.

"Oh, but that's very interesting!" she cried. "I've been wondering so much how that affair is going on—I do so hope it will be all right!"

And then, as she saw a shocked look come over her visitor's narrow, rather fleshy face, she said in a low voice, "You know how I feel about the divorce laws, Godfrey. I can't help it. They're horribly unfair—so—so ridiculous, in fact!"

As he remained silent, she went on, insisting on her own point of view far more than was her usual way when talking to her self-opinionated friend: "Don't you realise how hard it is that two people utterly unsuited to one another should have to go through that sort of horrid farce just in order to get free?"

He looked at her uncomfortably. Sometimes, even now, Katty startled him by the things she said. But how pretty she looked to-day, bending over the tea-things! Her burnished hair was dressed in thick soft coils, her white, well-manicured hand busily engaged in pouring him out just the cup of tea he liked, with the exact proportions of milk, cream, and sugar that were right—and which Laura never remembered.

So it was mildly that he answered: "I don't think the Beaths ought to want to get what you call 'free.' Divorce was not instituted to meet a case like theirs—" he hesitated, and then with a certain effort he went on: "Divorce was instituted to meet a case like yours, Katty."

Godfrey Pavely was weary of the Beaths and of their divorce plot—for so he called it to himself. There were other things he wanted to talk to Katty about. Besides, he did not think that that sort of affair was a nice subject of discussion between a man and a woman, however intimate. In some ways Godfrey Pavely was very old-fashioned.

But she wouldn't let it alone. "Divorce ought to meet a case like theirs," she went on obstinately.

"My dear Katty! What would happen to the country if all the married people who didn't get on with one another were to separate?"

And then, looking at her defiant face, a most extraordinary and disagreeable suspicion darted into Godfrey Pavely's mind. Was it possible, conceivable, that Katty was thinking of Jim Beath as a second husband for herself? The thought shook him with anger and with repugnance. He felt he must have that out—here and now.

"Do you like Jim Beath?" he asked slowly; "I know you've been seeing a great deal of them this last year. In fact, he mentioned you to-day."

She could read him like a book, and she remained silent long enough to make him feel increasingly suspicious and uncomfortable.

But to-day Katty was not in the mood for a cat-and-mouse game, so she answered deliberately: "No, Godfrey, I can't say that I do like Jim Beath! I've tried to like him. But—well, I do thoroughly understand Nita's feeling towards him. He's so sarcastic—so hard and unsympathetic!" She waited a moment, then added significantly: "Still, I think he's behaving awfully well now. He'd have been quite willing to go on—he told me that himself. But when he saw that Nita was really unhappy, and that she was getting fond of another man, he made up his mind that he would do all he could to make her free."

Katty was playing rather nervously with the edge of the pretty tea-cloth, and Pavely wondered whether she was telling him the whole truth. She was flushed, and she looked unwontedly moved.

"It's a very odd thing for a man to do," he said coldly. "I mean a man being willing to give up his wife to another man."

"Why shouldn't he? When he doesn't love her, and when she positively dislikes him! Nita never understood Jim Beath—she was always afraid of him, and of his sharp, clever tongue. Of course it's sad about their little boy. But they've made a very good arrangement—they're going to share him. Jim will have the child half the year, and Nita the other half, till he goes to school—when they will have him for alternate holidays."

"You talk as if it was all settled!" Katty's visitor exclaimed crossly. "If they say as much to other people as they seem to do to you, they will never get their divorce—the King's Proctor is sure to intervene!"

Katty gave a quick, curious look at her visitor. Godfrey went too far—sometimes.

The thought flashed through her mind that she was wasting her life, her few remaining years of youth, on a man who would never be more to her than he was now, unless—unless, that is, she could bring him to the point of putting himself imaginatively, emotionally into Jim Beath's shoes. Then everything might be changed. But was there any hope of such a thing coming to pass?

But all she said, in a constrained tone, was, "Of course I ought not to have said anything of the matter to you at all. But I'm afraid, Godfrey, that I often do tell you things I ought to keep to myself. You must try and forget what I said."

He was surprised, bewildered, by the sudden steely coldness of her tone. "Of course you can say anything you like to say to me. Why, Katty, I tell you all my secrets!"

"Do you?" She glanced over at him rather sharply. "I don't think you tell me all your secrets, Godfrey."

He looked at her puzzled. "You know that I do," he said in a low voice. "Come, Katty, you're not being fair! It's because I have such a high regard for you, that I feel sorry when you talk as you've been talking just now—as if, after all, the marriage bond didn't matter."

But even as he said these words, Godfrey Pavely felt a wild impulse to throw over the pretty little gimcrack tea-table, take Katty in his arms, and kiss her, kiss her, kiss her! He came back, with an inward start, to hear her exclaim,

"I don't consider the peculiar relations which exist between Nita and Jim Beath a marriage at all! They have nothing in common the one with the other. What interests him doesn't interest her——"

She waited a moment, saw that he was reddening uncomfortably, and then hurried on, driven by some sudden instinct that she was at last playing on the hidden chord she had so often longed to find and strike in Godfrey Pavely's sore heart: "Nita can't bear Jim to touch her—she will hardly shake hands with him! Do you call that a marriage?"

As he remained silent, she suddenly said in a voice so low as to be almost a whisper, "Forgive me, Godfrey. I—I ought not have said that to you."

He answered loudly, discordantly, "I don't know what you mean, Katty! Why shouldn't you say anything you like about these people? They are nothing, and less than nothing to me, and I don't suppose they're very much to you."

Even as he spoke he had got up out of the easy chair into which he had sunk with such happy content a few minutes before. "I must be going now," he said heavily, "Oliver Tropenell's coming in for a game of tennis at six."

She made no effort to keep him, though she longed to say to him: "Oliver Tropenell's been in your house, and in your garden, all afternoon. Both he and Laura would be only too pleased if you stayed on here till dinner-time."

But instead of saying that, she got up, and silently accompanied him to the front door.

There poor Godfrey did linger regretfully. He felt like a child who has been baulked of some promised treat—not by his own fault, but by the fault of those about him. "Will you be in to-morrow?" he asked abruptly. "I think I might come in a little earlier to-morrow, Katty."

"Yes, do come to-morrow! I seem to have a hundred things to say to you. I'm sorry we wasted the little time we had to-day in talking over those tiresome people and their matrimonial affairs."

There was also a look of regret in her face, and suddenly he told himself that he might have been mistaken just now, and that she had meant nothing—nothing in the least personal or—or probing, in what she had said. "Look here!" he said awkwardly. "If there's anything you really want to say—you said you had a hundred things to tell me—would you like me to come back for a few minutes? There's no great hurry, you know—I mean about Tropenell and his game."

She shook her head, and to his moved surprise, the tears came into her pretty brown eyes. "No, not now. I'm tired, Godfrey. It's rather absurd, but I haven't really got over my journey yet; I think I shall have to take your advice, and stay at home rather more."

For a long moment they advanced towards one another as if something outside themselves was drawing them together. Then Godfrey Pavely put out his hand, and grasped hers firmly. It was almost as if he was holding her back—at arm's length.

Katty laughed nervously. She shook her hand free of his, opened the door wide, and exclaimed: "Well! Good-bye till to-morrow then. My love to Laura."

He nodded, and was gone.

She shut the door behind him, and, turning, went slowly upstairs. She felt tired, weak, upset—and, what she did not often feel, restless and unhappy as well. It irritated her—nay, it did more than irritate, it hurt her shrewdly—to think of those three people who were about to spend a pleasant couple of hours together. She could so easily, so safely, have made a fourth at their constant meetings.

If only Laura Pavely were a little less absorbed in herself, a little more what ordinary people called good-natured! It would have been so natural for Laura, when she knew that Oliver Tropenell was coming to dinner, to send across to Rosedean, and ask her, Katty, to make a fourth. It was not as if Laura was at all jealous. She was as little jealous of Godfrey and of Katty—and at that thought Katty gave a queer, bitter little laugh which startled her, for she had laughed aloud—as was Godfrey of Laura and Oliver! With as little or as much reason? Katty would have given a great deal to be able to answer her own question. She thought she knew half the answer—but it was, alas! by far the less important half.

She opened the door of her bedroom, went through into it, and without troubling to take off her pretty blouse and freshly ironed linen skirt, walked deliberately to her bed, lay down, and shut her eyes—not to sleep but to think.

What had been forced upon Katty Winslow's notice during the last few weeks had created a revolution in her mind and in her plans.

For a while, after her return from that dreary period of convalescence in a seaside home, she, who was generally so positive, had doubted the evidence of her own eyes and senses. But gradually that which she would have deemed the last thing likely to happen had emerged, startlingly clear. Oliver Tropenell, to use Katty's own expression, had fallen madly in love with Laura Pavely. No woman could doubt that who saw them together. When Katty had left Rosedean, there had been the beginnings of—well, not exactly a flirtation, but a very pleasant friendship between Tropenell and herself. Now he hardly seemed to know that she existed.

But if it was only too plain to see how matters stood with Oliver, this was far from being the case as regarded Laura. Katty owned herself quite ignorant of Laura's real nature, and, as is so often the case with those who know nothing, she was inclined to believe that there was nothing to know.

Perhaps, after all, it was only because this man was the son of her friend that Laura allowed him to be always with her. They were always together—not always alone, for Oliver seemed to be at The Chase quite as much when Godfrey was at home, as at other times. But with Katty, she being the manner of woman she was, it was the other times which impressed her imagination. In the six short weeks she, Katty, had been away, Oliver Tropenell had evidently become a component part of Laura Pavely's life.

She knew, vaguely, how the two spent their time, and the knowledge irked her—the more that it suggested nothing of their real relations. Thus gardening was one of Laura's favourite occupations and few pleasures; and Oliver, who could never have gardened before—what gardening could there be to do in Mexico?—now spent hours out of doors with Laura, carrying out her behests, behaving just as an under-gardener would behave, when working under his mistress's directions.

And Godfrey, instead of objecting to this extraordinary state of things, seemed quite pleased. Oliver, so much was clear, had become Godfrey Pavely's friend almost as much as he was Laura's.

As she lay there, straight out on her bed, Katty told herself with terrible bitterness that it was indeed an amazing state of things to which she had come back—one which altered her own life in a strange degree. She had not realised, till these last few weeks, how much Godfrey Pavely was to her, and how jealous she could become even of such an affection as his cordial liking of Oliver Tropenell.

Yet when Godfrey was actually with her, she retained all her old ascendency over him; in certain ways it had perhaps even increased. It was as if his unsuspecting proximity to another man's strong, secret passion warmed his sluggish, cautious nature.

But that curious fact had not made his friend Katty's part any the more easy of late. Far from it! There was no pleasing Godfrey in these days. He was hurt if she was cold; shocked, made uneasy in his conscience, if she responded in ever so slight a way to the little excursions in sentiment he sometimes half-ashamedly permitted himself.

Tears came into her eyes, and rolled slowly down her cheeks, as she recalled what had happened a few moments ago in the hall. He had been aching to take her in his arms and kiss her—kiss her as he had been wont to do, in the old days, in the shabby little lodging where she lived with her father. Poor little motherless girl, who had thought herself so clever. At that time she had believed herself to be as good as engaged to "young Mr. Pavely," as the Pewsbury folk called him. Even now she could remember, as if it had happened yesterday, the bitter humiliation, as well as the pain which had shaken her, when she had learnt, casually, of his sudden disappearance from Pewsbury.

What hypocrites men were! The fact that often they were unconscious hypocrites afforded Katty little consolation.

It was plain that Godfrey was quite unaware of Oliver's growing absorption in Laura, but that surely was not to his credit. A man of his age, and with his experience of life, ought to have known, ought to have guessed, ought to have seen—by now! Instead, he remained absorbed in himself, in the tiresome little business interests of his prosperous life, in his new friendship for Oliver Tropenell, and—in that ambiguous, tantalising friendship with herself.

Again she told herself that she was wasting what remained to her of youth and of vitality over a thoroughly unsatisfactory state of things, and painfully she determined that, if what she had gradually come to plan since her return home did not come to pass, she would leave Rosedean, and make another life for herself elsewhere.

The things Katty toiled and schemed for had a way of coming to pass. She had planned her divorce long before it had actually taken place, at a time indeed when it seemed impossible to believe that it ever could take place. Bob Winslow had been adoringly, slavishly devoted to her for more than two-thirds of their married life, and it had taken her trouble and time to drive him into the courses it was necessary he should pursue to procure her freedom.

She had no doubt—there could be no doubt—that were Godfrey free he would turn to her instinctively at once. She was well aware of her power over him, and till lately she had been virtuously proud of what she imagined to be her loyalty to Laura. Also she had had no wish to make her own position at Rosedean untenable.

Even as it was, Godfrey came far too often to see her. Had she lived nearer to Pewsbury, even a mile nearer, his frequent calls on her would have meant a flood of ill-natured gossip in the little town.

Yes, the situation, from Katty's point of view, was thoroughly unsatisfactory, and, as far as she was concerned, it was time it was ended or mended. And then, once more, for the hundredth time, her restless, excited mind swung back to what was to her just now the real mystery, the all-important problem—the relations between Oliver Tropenell and Laura Pavely.

Of course it was possible—though Katty thought not likely—that Tropenell was still unaware of his passion for Laura. Perhaps he still disguised it under the name of "friendship." But even if that were so, such a state of things could not endure for very long. Any day some trifling happening might open his eyes, and, yes—why not?—Godfrey's.

CHAPTER VIII

GODFREY PAVELY was standing in his private room at Pavely's Bank. It was only a little after ten, and he had not been in the room many minutes, yet already he had got up from his writing-table and moved over to the middle one of the three windows overlooking the prim, exquisitely kept walled garden, which even nowadays reminded him of his early childhood. He had gazed out of the window for a few moments, but now he stood with his back to the window, staring unseeingly before him, a piece of note paper crushed up in his hand.

For close on a hundred years his well-to-do careful-living forbears had passed their pleasant, uneventful lives in this spacious Georgian house, set in the centre of the wide High Street of the prosperous market town of Pewsbury.

What was now known as "Mr. Pavely's own room" had been the dining-room of his grandparents. He himself had always known it as part of the Bank, but it still had some of the characteristics of a private living-room. Thus, on the dark green walls hung a number of quaint family portraits, his great-grandfather, his grandfather and grandmother, two uncles who had died in youth, and a presentation portrait of his own father. These were arranged about and above the mantelpiece, opposite the place where stood his wide, leather-topped writing-table.

Taking up most of the wall opposite the windows was a bookcase of really distinguished beauty. Godfrey Pavely had been gratified to learn, some five or six years ago, that this piece of furniture was of very considerable value, owing to the fact that it was supposed to have been, in a special sense, the work and design of Chippendale himself. But just now, at this moment, he felt as if he hated the substantial old house and everything in it.

He had come into this room, twenty minutes ago, to find the usual pile of open letters on the table. On the top of the pile was an unopened envelope marked Private, and it was the contents of that envelope that he now held crushed up—not torn up—in his hand.

And as he stood there, staring before him unseeingly at the bookcase, there suddenly flashed into his mind a vision of the first time he had brought Laura here, to his own room at the Bank. They had only just became engaged, and he was still feeling an almost oppressive joy of having compassed that which he had so steadfastly desired.

He could see her graceful figure walking through the mahogany door, he could almost hear her exclaim, "What a charming room, Godfrey! I can't help wishing that we were going to live here, in Pewsbury!"

She had gone over and stood exactly where he was standing now, and then she had turned and gazed into the walled garden, at that time brilliant with tulips and wallflowers. Coming round behind her, he had put his arm, a little awkwardly, round her shoulders. At once she had slipped from beneath his grasp, but not unkindly—only with a gentle word that at any moment some one might come in, and he, poor fool that he had been, had admired her maidenly delicacy....

He glanced down at the piece of notepaper he held in his hand, and, smoothing it out, he read it through for the tenth or twelfth time. Then, as there came a knock at the door, he hastily thrust it into his pocket.

"Come in!" he cried impatiently; and his head clerk came into the room.

Mr. Privet had a delicate, refined, thoughtful face. He was very much respected in the town, and regarded as an important, integral part of Pavely's Bank. He was one of the very few people in the world who were really attached to Godfrey Pavely, and he perceived at once that there was something wrong.

"We promised to send over to Mr. Johnson to say when you would be ready to see him, sir. Shall I send over now?"

"Yes—no. Tell him I'll be ready in half an hour. And, Privet?"

"Yes, sir."

"I've a rather important letter to write. Will you see that I'm not disturbed till I ring?"

The old man shut the door quietly, and Godfrey Pavely drew irresolutely towards his writing-table, the table where he did so much hard, good, and profitable work each day.

But he did not sit down at once; instead, he took the letter he had been so nearly caught reading out of his pocket, and once more he read it through—

"This is to warn you that there is a great deal of talk going on in Pewsbury and the surrounding neighbourhood about your wife and a certain gentleman who is a near neighbour of yours. It is well not to be jealous, but confidence may be carried too far. Try going home when you are not expected, and you will surely find them together.

"A Well-Wisher to the

"Pavely Family."

The words had been written, or rather printed, in ink, on a very common sheet of notepaper—the kind of notepaper which is sold in penny packets in every village and small sweetstuff shop in the kingdom.

Now in theory there is nothing easier than to despise and disregard an anonymous letter. But in practice such a missive as Godfrey Pavely had just received, however vulgar, and even, as in this case, obviously written by a malicious person, invariably produces a horrible sensation of discomfort and acute uneasiness. For one thing, the fact that some unknown human being has devoted so much unwonted thought and spiteful interest to one's private affairs is in itself an ugly revelation.

In theory again, most people, if asked what they would do if they received an anonymous letter, would reply (1) that they would put it straight in the fire, or (2) go straight with it to the police. But in practice an anonymous letter, unless the recipient at once guesses with certainty the identity of the writer, is the only clue to what may contain the germ of some ugly plot, or conspiracy to harm or injure the innocent. So it is surely foolish to destroy what may become evidence. As for going to the police, that is, for obvious reasons, the last thing any man would care to do if the anonymous communication deals with the character of a woman near and dear to him. Indeed, the thought of going to the police did not even enter Godfrey Pavely's mind, though it was probably the advice he would have given to any one else who had come to consult him about such a matter.

As he looked at the letter closely, turning it this way and that, he suddenly told himself that it did not read like the work of an illiterate person. Godfrey, and Laura too, were in their different ways very good employers; besides, they had not dismissed any one lately. No, no—it was far more likely to be some one living in Pewsbury, probably with whom he was scarcely acquainted. There were, as the banker could not but be aware, a good many people in the little town who had reason to dislike him—not personally perhaps, but as the one money-dealer of the place.

At last he sat down at his writing-table and drew an envelope towards him. On it he wrote, "To be destroyed, unopened, in case of my death," and then he placed the poisonous little sheet of common notepaper in the envelope, and, fastening it down, put it in one of his inner pockets.

He intended to dismiss the whole thing from his mind, at any rate during this morning, but he found it very difficult, not to say impossible, to do that.

Laura and Oliver Tropenell? His thin lips curled at the thought.

Why, Oliver liked him, Godfrey, far better than he did Laura! He regarded that as certain. And Laura? He could have laughed aloud at the absurd suggestion. Laura was not only the coldest, she was also the most upright, of women.

Early in their married life, when they had gone about together far more than they had done recently, he, Godfrey, had never felt even a twinge of jealousy with regard to her. And yet—and yet in those days Laura had certainly excited a good deal of admiration. There are men who passionately admire that kind of proud, passionless beauty in a woman. Pavely himself had once been such a man. So he knew.

He looked up from the letter he was writing, and all at once, to his own surprise, his thoughts took quite another turn. He told himself suddenly that Tropenell's rather exceptional intimacy with them both might, after all, excite remark, in such a damned censorious, gossiping place as was Pewsbury. He, Godfrey Pavely, was well aware of what a nest of gossip a country town could be, and often is. He had experienced something of it years ago, when there had been all that foolish talk concerning the then Katty Fenton and himself. Once or twice he had felt slightly uneasy lest his present friendship with Katty should be misunderstood. Indeed, he had felt this so strongly to give her what he had thought to be a delicate hint—a hint that she had at once taken—as to the inadvisability of her coming, when in Pewsbury, to see him in his private room at the Bank. She had done that rather often at one time, when she was first his tenant at Rosedean. But now she never came to the Bank. She did not even keep her account at Pavely's, though it would have been a convenience to her to do so.

Mr. Johnson's call, which at any other time would have been a tiresome infliction, was welcome, for it enabled the banker to dismiss this odd, queer, unpleasant business of the anonymous letter from his mind for a while.

But after Mr. Johnson had gone, the trouble came back, and the morning—what was left of it—seemed very long.

He asked himself whether, after all, it might not be wisest to speak of that absurd letter to some one. Should he say anything to Mrs. Tropenell, or well, yes—to Laura? But impatiently he shook his head at the thought. Not only would such a thing shock and disgust his wife, but, what was of far more consequence to him, it might make her turn against Tropenell! Godfrey Pavely had been pleased and surprised at the way in which Laura had tolerated the other man being so much about the house. In Pavely's imagination Tropenell was his friend—not Laura's.

He was glad when he heard a quarter to one chime out from the Parish Church tower, for it meant that he could now get up and go across to the Club for luncheon. He put on his hat and went out into the square hall of the Bank.

As he did so, his head clerk came down the broad staircase.

Mr. Privet's room was only a little smaller, and a little less lacking in dignity, than that of Mr. Pavely himself—indeed, some people thought it a pleasanter room, for it looked out on to the High Street, and was on the first floor.

"If you'd been a minute earlier, sir," said the old man, smiling, "you'd have seen Mrs. Pavely go by! I think she must have been in Mrs. Tropenell's motor, for Mr. Tropenell was driving her himself."

Godfrey Pavely felt a queer little pang of annoyance and surprise.

"I daresay they're still in the town," he said quickly. "I thought it quite possible that they might come in this morning."

But he had thought nothing of the kind.

Mr. Privet shook his head. "Oh no, sir! They were going home sure enough—and rather quickly, too. I thought the car had caught that youngest Sherlock boy, but Mr. Tropenell's a skilful driver, and he missed the child, but only by a few inches, as far as I could judge!"

Godfrey Pavely nodded, walked on, and so out and across the High Street. He could not help feeling a little vexed that Oliver and Laura should have driven into Pewsbury—this morning, of all mornings. He wondered if they often did so. It was fortunate that nothing had happened to that stupid child. It would have been very unpleasant for his wife to be compelled to give evidence at an inquest....

He did not enjoy his luncheon as much as he was wont to do. In a sense he was king of the old-fashioned County Club; every member of it was either on good terms with the prosperous banker, or desired to be so. But try as he might he could not get that odious, absurd, anonymous letter out of his mind! He told himself again and again that it was thoughtless and—and yes, unbecoming—of Laura, to drive in and out of Pewsbury with Oliver Tropenell. Somehow it was the sort of thing he would never have thought his wife was likely to do. Again he wondered if she did it often. If yes, such conduct would of course provide ample reason for low, vulgar gossip.

When, at last, Godfrey Pavely walked back across to the Bank, he had come to the point of asking himself whether after all it might not be best to say just a word of caution to Laura. It need not be more than a word—he knew her well enough to know that! She was the kind of woman to shrink with fastidious disgust from the thought of her name being connected, in any vulgar silly way, with that of a man.

But his mind swung backwards and forwards, like a pendulum. The possibility of his agreeable, cordial relations with Oliver Tropenell being in any way jarred or disturbed so upset him that, finally, he made up his mind to say nothing to Laura.

At three o'clock the banker walked up to his head clerk's room. "I think I'll go home early to-day, Privet," he said.

The old man got up from his chair. He was not only fond, he was proud too, of his employer. Mr. Pavely was a model banker, a model worker. He never went home before four, and often stayed on working till five.

"Very good, sir. It's a fine afternoon. I often wonder you stay as long as you do," he said, with that queer touch of affection in his voice which Godfrey Pavely valued perhaps more than he knew.

The walk home seemed much longer than usual. Two miles and a bit? He was proud of the fact that he could do it with ease in five minutes over the half-hour. To-day, as a matter of fact, he walked so quickly that he did it in twenty-seven minutes, but he was not aware of that.

For the first time for months, he passed by Rosedean without as much as giving Katty a thought, and he took a short cut into The Chase instead of going on, up through the great park gates, as he was wont to do. And then, as he went along one of the paths in the walled kitchen garden, he suddenly heard his wife's voice.

"I think that it would be best to have a mass of red and purple just here. Last year we had blues."

He felt a queer, rather unreasoning, shock of relief, of satisfaction. Laura was evidently speaking to one of the gardeners.

Then, as he came round the corner, he saw that the person to whom Laura was speaking was not a gardener, but Oliver Tropenell himself—Oliver, with a spud in his hand, kneeling before Laura, a basket of bulbs by his side. He was looking up eagerly—a jealous onlooker might have said ardently—into her face. In fact, Tropenell looked, so Godfrey Pavely told himself with some heat, "damned absurd." But before Godfrey came right upon the three of them—for little Alice was flitting about behind her mother—Oliver stood up, with the words, "Then I'd better go and get those other bulbs, hadn't I? Will you come too, Alice?"

Godfrey called out "Hullo! Doing some planting?" But his voice sounded odd to himself. Not so, however, to the others. Laura was honestly unaware that Godfrey was very much earlier than his wont, or, if aware, she did not attach any importance to the fact. Still, she felt afraid that Godfrey would interfere with her gardening scheme, and so she shook her head.

As for Oliver Tropenell, no one looking at his dark, set face could have guessed his thoughts. As a matter of fact, he had heard Pavely's footsteps some moments before Pavely spoke. And he had wondered, with quick irritation, why he had come back from Pewsbury—or Rosedean—so much earlier than usual.

Alice, dark-haired, rosy-cheeked, quite curiously unlike either her father or her mother, was the only one of the four who was still happily at ease. She ran up to her father: "Come and see my garden, father!" she cried. "I'm growing some mustard and cress specially for you. You can take it to the Bank in an envelope and have some for your tea!"

The little girl was aware, deep in her sensitive, affectionate heart, that her father and mother were not quite like other fathers and mothers. They were not cosily loving together, as were the father and mother of the two little girls with whom she sometimes went to tea in Pewsbury, neither were they on the happy terms of easy comradeship which even Alice knew was usual with other children's parents.

But she loved her mother with a passionate, unswerving, admiring love, and her father with a stout, proprietary affection. For his sake, and his sake only, she would have liked to be a boy, for then, so she argued secretly within herself, she could be his office boy at the Bank. Up to now she had felt for Oliver Tropenell the easy, unquestioning liking children give to one who comes and goes. But lately she had become dimly aware that occasionally her mother and Mr. Tropenell were too busy talking together to take much heed of her, and this threw a little shadow across her heart.

For Godfrey Pavely there followed days full of discomfort, unease, and rising annoyance. The whole course of his life was changed. As he came and went about the quiet streets of his native town, as he granted business interviews to the townspeople, he was perpetually asking himself if the person he was speaking to was concerned with this odious matter, whether he or she was among those who took his beautiful wife's name lightly.

His object each afternoon was now to get home early, and see for himself what was going on there, and how far Laura was giving cause for low, vulgar gossip.

Laura was not a child! She must know, if she ever brought herself to think of such a thing, that if a married woman allows a man to hang about her, day after day, in the absence of her husband, there is sure to be talk. Pavely regarded Tropenell's share in the matter with a strange toleration—it was his wife whom he blamed with an increasing severity as the minutes, the hours, and the days went by.

He still went to see Katty Winslow, but no longer as often as he had been wont to do. And when in her company he was distrait, uncomfortable, longing to ask if she thought Oliver's constant presence in his house odd or—or peculiar. But he kept a prudent guard over his tongue. One day Katty said something which would have made it easy for him to speak, and which, as a matter of fact, very nearly did cause him to unburden his heart to her. It was a little word, and said quite pleasantly, with, he felt sure, no ulterior motive of any kind.

"It's odd," she said musingly, "to see what good friends Laura has become with Oliver Tropenell! Who would have thought that she would ever like any man as much as she seems to like him? I suppose it's really owing to the fact that he's in partnership with her brother——"

She waited, and as he said nothing, she went on, with a smile, "But then, for the matter of that, you're just as fond of him as she is, aren't you? I can't see the attraction myself, but I admit that it must be there, for two people as unlike you and Laura are to each other both to like him so much."

"Yes, I do like Tropenell," Godfrey spoke very decidedly. "But I can't make out why he gets on so well with Gilbert Baynton. Gillie couldn't run straight if he tried."

"So I've always understood——"

Katty looked at him curiously. She had never been told the real story of the quarrel between the brothers-in-law, but she was clever enough to have reached a very shrewd notion of the truth. Baynton, so much was clear, had done something which Pavely could neither tolerate nor forgive. In the old days, as a girl, Katty had met Gillie Baynton several times, and he had struck her as a very amusing, agreeable sort of young man.

Godfrey had let slip this opportunity of saying anything, and afterwards, as is usually the case, he was glad that he had kept silence. Clever and sympathetic as she was, Katty could do nothing to help him in this horrid, rather degrading business.

And then, walking into his room at the Bank one morning, he saw on the top of the pile of his letters another common-looking envelope marked Private. He took it up with a sick feeling of half eager, half shrinking, expectancy—

"A sincere well-wisher wishes once more to inform Mr. Pavely that all Pewsbury is discussing him and his private affairs. The lady and gentleman in question are more together than ever they were. The other day some one who met them walking together on the downs took them for an engaged couple."

This second anonymous letter greatly added to Godfrey Pavely's wretchedness and discomfort, all the more that it was so moderately worded. It seemed to confirm, to make certain, the fact of growing gossip and scandal.

At last something happened which to a small extent relieved the tension. Laura quietly informed him one evening that she much wished to go away for three days to see a friend of her childhood, who had written and begged her to come, and to bring little Alice with her.

She was surprised at the eagerness with which Godfrey assented to her wish. In certain ways Godfrey Pavely, from the modern point of view, was a tyrannical husband. He very much disliked Laura's paying visits by herself, and she had long ago given up even suggesting that she should do so. Also, she on her side much disliked asking him the smallest favour.

The day his wife left The Chase was the first happy day Godfrey had had for three weeks. He spent a pleasant hour with Katty; and on his arrival home his feeling of satisfaction was increased by a note from Mrs. Tropenell inviting him to come and spend at Freshley Manor the three nights Laura was to be away. He wrote accepting with more cordiality of phrase than was his wont, even with so old a friend as was Oliver's mother.

Surely he and Oliver Tropenell, at last alone together, could combine to put an end to this foolish, vulgar gossip? It would be so much easier to speak to and consult with Oliver in Laura's absence.

Once he had made up his mind to speak to the other man, Pavely was able, almost, to forget the whole hateful business. Still, he said nothing till the second morning of his visit. Then, at breakfast, he made a proposal.

"I feel as if I'd like to take this afternoon off. Would you care for a good long walk, eh? We might start about half-past two, have tea in Witanbury, and be back here for dinner."

Oliver nodded. He was at once glad and sorry that Godfrey was so entirely unaware of the growing tide of dislike, nay of hatred, that he felt for him. Secretive as he was by nature, and by the life he had now led for so long, Oliver Tropenell was yet no hypocrite. He loathed the part fate had forced on him, that of pretending a cordial friendship for this man whom he so utterly despised. His mother had invited Godfrey Pavely to stay with them for three nights without first telling Oliver that she was thinking of doing so; and then, when she had realised, too late, his annoyance, she could only explain that Godfrey had always stayed with her on the very rare occasions when Laura had been away.

Mother and son were together when Godfrey started off on his daily walk into Pewsbury.

"I wonder what he's going to talk to you about?" said Mrs. Tropenell a little nervously. The thought of the coming afternoon expedition made her vaguely uneasy.

"He's never at a loss for a word, though he very seldom says anything worth hearing."

Oliver was looking with unhappy, frowning eyes after the other man's trim, rather jaunty figure.

All that morning Mrs. Tropenell watched her son with anxious fear. He wandered restlessly in and out of the house, and though he never mentioned Laura, his mother knew that he was missing her with an almost agonised sense of loss.

Oliver was fighting a losing battle with himself—a battle in which no help from outside could be of any avail. He no longer spoke of going away; instead, he had told his mother of his scheme for bringing Gillie to Europe, and of sending Laura and her brother off to Italy, for a happy little holiday. She ventured to say that she thought that plan to be quite out of the question. Godfrey would never allow it—he had not forgiven Gillie, in spite of the fact that Gillie had now "made good."

It was nearer three than half-past two, when the two men started out, and they had been walking for a full hour, with snatches of talk, and such comfortable intervals of silence as is possible only between intimates, when suddenly Godfrey Pavely stopped walking.

Surprised, Tropenell also came to a stand. They were on a stretch of lonely upland, with nothing save a couple of birds in sight.

"Look here, Oliver, there's something I want to say to you! I hope you won't be offended. But we're such good friends, you and I, that I think you'll understand."

The colour rushed into Oliver Tropenell's face. He turned and faced the other squarely, but he felt tense with excitement, and a sense of challenge. He knew, instinctively, that Pavely was going to say something about Laura—Laura, and perhaps Gillie, her brother.

"Yes," he said quietly. "Yes, Godfrey? What is it? I can't imagine your saying anything to me that would offend me."

"I want you to read what's inside that," said Godfrey in a low voice, and he handed Oliver an envelope.

Oliver was relieved, but he looked down at the envelope suspiciously.

"But this isn't to be opened till you're dead!" he exclaimed.

"Open it now," said Godfrey roughly, "I only put that in case I met with an accident—you'll see why I did it, in a moment."

With a queer feeling of misgiving Oliver Tropenell drew the common little sheet of notepaper out of the envelope, and in silence read over what was written there in those deceitful, printed characters.

He read it once, twice—thrice. Then he handed the sheet of paper back, with a look of disgust and contempt on his dark face, to the man standing by his side.

"Well!" he exclaimed. "I don't know what you expect me to say? If you'd had as many anonymous letters as I've had in my time—they rain in Mexico—you wouldn't give much thought to this kind of garbage!"

Holding out the letter as if it were something dirty, he handed it back to the other man.

"I haven't given much thought to it——" and then Godfrey stopped short. He felt as if some other man, and not his sober self, were uttering the lie.

"No," said Oliver quickly, "I don't suppose you have. But still, I can't help being rather sorry you kept it, and—and that you showed it to me. There's nothing to be done! I suppose it's the work of some clerk whom you've dismissed in the last few weeks?"

"I've dismissed no one," said Pavely shortly. Somehow Tropenell was not taking this disagreeable business quite as he had meant him to take it.

In a rather different voice Oliver went on: "Show me the letter again. I want to see if there's a date to it."

"It arrived exactly three weeks ago to-day," said Pavely slowly, "and it was posted in Pewsbury."

Light broke in on Tropenell. This, then, was why Godfrey had taken to coming home at such odd hours, and why he had telephoned several times from the Bank, sending messages to Laura, and, on at least one occasion, a message to Tropenell himself!

He set his lips tightly together, and a flood of bitter wrath welled up from his heart.

"Then in my place you would do nothing?" asked Godfrey uncertainly.

More and more he was disappointed in the other's attitude. He had thought Oliver would suggest something which might be useful, or at any rate laugh the matter off.

But Oliver only looked grim—grim and angry.

"I don't see that you can do anything. It isn't the sort of thing about which you would care to go to the local police, and even if you knew who wrote that infamous scrawl I don't see how you could take action. We can't have Laura's name dragged into this kind of business."

Then he asked in a lower voice, "Have you said anything to her?"

The other shook his head. "I've no intention of saying anything to Laura. It would distress and disgust her very much."

He was glad to see that Oliver, hearing these words, looked very much relieved.

They walked on a few paces, and then Godfrey exclaimed, "There's one thing I do think, Oliver—and I hope you won't be angry with me for saying it! It must be admitted that you've been a great deal at The Chase alone with Laura, and also, unfortunately, that that sort of thing always does make talk in a country town."

Tropenell turned on him sternly: "What sort of thing?" he asked. "I swear before God that there has never been anything in my attitude to Laura which should give the slightest rise to comment, or afford the basest scandalmonger excuse for a word."

And he believed every word of what he said.

"I know that—I know that, my dear fellow!" Godfrey put his hand out, and for a moment it lay heavily on his friend's shoulder.

But quickly, silently, Tropenell shook himself free of the other's touch. "If you know that," he was breathing hard now, not trying to disguise his anger, "then why did you allude just now to the fact that I am a good deal in your house? Does that mean you wish that I should give up coming to The Chase?"

"No, of course I don't mean that! You're the one real friend I've made—well, since I got to man's estate," said Pavely ruefully.

Everything was going wrong. The conversation was taking a turn he had never thought of or conceived as possible. "What I mean is that Laura——"

Tropenell stopped him with a passionate gesture: "Cannot we keep Laura's name out of our discussion?"

Godfrey stared at him, genuinely astonished.

"How can we keep Laura's name out of our discussion? The whole thing centres about Laura! This letter mentions Laura—ay, and I've had another letter, which I hadn't meant to show you, but which on second thoughts I should like you to see."

He began fumbling in another pocket.

"I don't want to see it!" cried Oliver. "I'd rather not see it!"

"But I'd rather you saw it," said Godfrey obstinately.

Tropenell read the second anonymous letter through, and then handed it back, without comment.

Silently they both turned about, and walked quickly, in almost complete silence, back to Freshley. "We've come home to tea, after all, mother," said Oliver shortly, "we are neither of us in condition for a fifteen-mile walk."

Neither man referred again to the matter which when they were together filled both their minds, and on the day of Laura's return to The Chase, Oliver Tropenell went up to town, without having seen her. Four days later his mother received a rather cryptic telegram: "Arriving to-night with a friend."

A friend? Some sure, sombre instinct told Mrs. Tropenell that this would be Gillie Baynton.

CHAPTER IX

"GODFREY can't eat me! Besides, he'll have to see me some time. Not that I want to see anything of the fellow—I always hated him! Still, as things are, it's far better I should take him by surprise, in Laura's house, than go cap in hand, and ask his leave to see my sister."

It was Gilbert Baynton who was speaking, standing with his legs a little apart, his fair head thrown back, his hands in his pockets, early in the afternoon of the day he and Oliver had arrived from London.

Mother and son were both in the room, but it was really with Mrs. Tropenell that Baynton was having this rather unpleasant argument. He and Tropenell had had this all out before. Oliver had wanted Gillie to write to his sister, but he was set on taking her by surprise, and on stealing a march on Godfrey Pavely.

Mrs. Tropenell looked up at the man standing before her. Gillie was two years older than her Oliver, and she had been the first woman who had ever seen him, for it was to her that his mother's doctor had handed the lusty, already screaming baby. His mother had passionately loved him—loved him and spoilt him, and so had his rather lackadaisical father. Physically he was a queer mixture of the two. Gillie Baynton had his father's fair hair, grace of limb and movement, and plainness of feature, coupled with his mother's abounding vitality, and her charm of manner—that charm, that coming-on-ness, which his beautiful sister, born so many years later, had always lacked.

Gillie had early begun to get into various ugly scrapes, but as a youth he had always somehow managed to shuffle out of them, for he was popular, and "had a way with him," as country people say. Also he had never been lacking in courage of a sort, and courage carries even a rascal a long way.

Still, Gillie Baynton had been pretty well done for, as far as his own country was concerned, when he had been sent out, as a kind of forlorn hope, to Mexico and Oliver Tropenell....

Gillie began speaking again: "I think I know my worthy brother-in-law quite as well as you do, Mrs. Tropenell. It's much better to take a man like that by surprise, and not to give him time to think! After all, he's got to let bygones be bygones."

And now Oliver interposed, for the first time. "Yes, mother, as things are, I think Gillie had perhaps better try and see Laura now, at once, before Godfrey Pavely knows he's in England."

"I'll go there right now."

Occasionally, not very often, Gilbert Baynton made use of some little phrase showing that he lived on the other side of the Atlantic. He had changed somehow, Mrs. Tropenell could hardly have told you how, for he had always had a very assured manner. But now Gillie looked what he was—a very prosperous man of business, though scarcely an English man of business. The long sojourn in Mexico had not altered her Oliver at all—not, that is, as far as she could see, but it had altered Gillie Baynton surprisingly. It had roughened him, and increased his natural self-assurance.

"Perhaps Laura and little Alice will come back with you to tea? Godfrey, too, if he seems in the humour for it," she said.

And he nodded. "Thank you, Mrs. Tropenell. That would be very pleasant."

He smiled, a good-humoured, triumphant smile, and was gone.

The other two looked at each other rather doubtfully. And then Oliver, as if answering her thought, exclaimed, "I don't think he'll stay on at The Chase till Pavely comes out from Pewsbury! Apart from everything else, Gillie's a restless creature. We may see him again within a very short time from now."

"But supposing he and Godfrey do meet?" asked Mrs. Tropenell anxiously.

"Well, if they do meet, I think it's quite on the cards there'll be a furious row. But that, after all, would clear the air. As Gillie said just now, Godfrey Pavely will have to put the past behind him. Perhaps, once they've had it out, they'll be better friends. There's a good deal to be said for a row sometimes, mother."

"Yes," she said uncomfortably. "I agree, there is."

Laura was sitting in what was still known as "the boudoir," by the household of Lawford Chase. It was a beautiful and stately room, furnished some ninety years ago, at the time of the marriage of Mrs. Tropenell's grandmother. The late Mr. Pavely's tenants had not cared to use it, for it was away from the other living-rooms of the house, and so nothing in the boudoir had been disturbed or renewed when The Chase had been prepared for the occupation of the strangers who had lived there for fourteen years.

The room suited Laura, and Laura suited the room. To-day she had had a fire lit, for it was beginning to be chilly. Alice had gone off into Pewsbury to spend the afternoon with two little friends, and now the mistress of this lovely, old-world room was trying to read a book; but soon she let the book rest open on her lap, and she stared mournfully, hopelessly, into the fire.

Things were not going well with Laura Pavely. They had begun going ill about a month ago, just after that—that unfortunate outburst on Oliver's part. Yet she had felt so sure, after the talk that she and he had had together, that they would slip back into their old, easy relationship! And for a while, perhaps for as long as a week, it had seemed as if they were going to do so.

But then there had come a change. Godfrey had fallen into the way of coming home early. In old days, both before the coming to England of Oliver Tropenell, and during the months that followed, Godfrey had generally stayed at the Bank rather late, and then, as often as not, he had gone in and had a chat with Katty on his way home. Now he always came back before five, and after his return home he and Oliver would engage in interminable singles on the big tennis court which had been Godfrey Pavely's one contribution to the otherwise beautiful gardens of The Chase.

Sometimes, and especially had this been true these last few days, Laura told herself that perhaps after all, the world, the cynical shrewd world of which she knew so little, was right, and that a close and confidential friendship between a man and a woman is an impossible ideal.

To-day, staring into the fire with dry, unseeing eyes, she felt miserably unhappy—too troubled and uneasy to occupy herself in any of her usual ways. More than had ever been the case before, life seemed to stretch before her in a terrible, dreary, unending monotony.

Something else had come to pass during the last week, the week during which Oliver Tropenell had been away in London, which she scarcely liked to think of, or to make more real by dwelling on. Godfrey had altered in his manner to her, he had become kinder, and yes, more loverlike than he had been for years. He hung about her, when he was at home, indoors and out of doors. In an awkward, clumsy way he actually tried to make himself pleasant! He had even suggested that she should ask one or two people to stay at The Chase. But she had protested that she much preferred being alone, and with a shrug of the shoulders he had given in. After all, he didn't really care for strangers more than she did.

Several times during the last dreary week, he had astonished her by talking to her of Oliver in a rather fretful, complaining way, as if he thought it odd that the other man was staying on in England with his mother, instead of going back to Mexico. He had said that he thought it strange that such a big business as he understood Oliver Tropenell to have built up, could run by itself. She had answered coldly, "You forget that my brother is there." And to that he had made no reply.

Gillie? A pang of pain thrilled through Laura's lonely heart. Oliver had said nothing more concerning Gillie's visit to Europe. Everything which had happened, up to, and including, the evening when she and Oliver had had that curious, intimate conversation when he had promised so solemnly to be her friend, seemed now like a bright, happy dream compared with the drab reality of to-day.

And now, in a few minutes, Godfrey would be coming in, and she would have to rouse herself to listen and to answer, while they had tea together in the cedar drawing-room, for Godfrey did not care for the boudoir.

Suddenly she heard uttered in the corridor, outside the door, the eager words, "Is Mrs. Pavely there? You're sure? All right—I'll go straight in!" And before she could gather her mind together, the door opened, and her brother—the brother she had not seen for years, but of whom she had just been thinking—walked forward into the room, exclaiming heartily, resonantly: "Well, Laura? Well, little girl? Here I am again!"

She started up, and with a cry of welcoming, wondering delight, threw herself into his arms, half laughing, half crying, "Oh, Gillie—Gillie—Gillie! How glad I am to see you! Somehow I thought we were never going to meet again! Have you only just come? Has Oliver Tropenell seen you? Why didn't you wire?"

Gillie was as touched and flattered as it was in him to be, for he remembered his sister as having been always quiet and restrained. And when they had parted, just before he had gone out to Mexico, she had seemed almost inanimate with—had it been vicarious?—shame and pain.

"I thought I'd take you by surprise." He looked round him with a pleased, measuring look. "Nothing altered!" he exclaimed, "and you've got a fire? That's good! I feel it awfully cold here, I mean in England. They haven't started fires yet, over at Freshley."

He repeated, "Nothing's altered—you least of all, Laura. Why, you don't look a day older!"

She sighed. "I feel," she said, "a lifetime older."

"I don't!" he cried briskly, "I feel younger. And Godfrey?" His voice altered, becoming just a little graver. "Time stood still with Godfrey too, eh?"

"I don't think Godfrey's altered much——" She was hesitating. And then, very carefully, she added the words, "Godfrey's quite good to me, you know, Gillie."

"Oh, well—of course he always liked you the best!" And then he laughed, but to them both his laughter sounded just a little hollow. "I gather that he and Tropenell don't quite hit it off?"

She turned on him quickly, and he was puzzled at the look of extreme astonishment which came over her face. "What makes you think that?" she exclaimed. "They're the greatest friends! Godfrey likes Oliver Tropenell better than I thought he'd ever like anybody."

And then, before Gillie Baynton could answer this, to him, surprising statement, the door opened, and the man of whom they were speaking stood gazing into the room as if he could not believe in the reality of the sight before him.

The brother and sister moved apart, and Gilbert Baynton held out his hand.

"Well, Godfrey," he exclaimed, "here I am again! I expect Tropenell told you that I was thinking of coming to Europe? But I can't be more than a month in the old country—if as long—unless Tropenell goes back leaving me behind for a bit. He did make some such suggestion, but I think we're more likely to go back together."

As he spoke on, he let his hand slowly drop to his side, for the man he was addressing had made no answering movement of welcome, or even of greeting.

Such a flood of wrath had mounted up into Godfrey Pavely's brain when he saw Gilbert Baynton standing there, with his arm round Laura's shoulder, that he was fearful the words he meant to utter would never get themselves said. He had never felt so angry before, and the sensation had a curious physical effect on him. He felt, as country folk so vividly put it, "all of a tremble."

A curious, ominous, sinister silence fell on the room. Laura, unconsciously, drew a little nearer to her brother; and Godfrey, who was staring straight at her, saw the movement, and it intensified the passion of anger which was working in his brain as wine does in the body.

"I must ask you to leave my house at once," he said in a low voice. "I have had no reason to change my mind as to what I said when you were last in this house, Gilbert Baynton."

"Godfrey!" There was a passionate protest and revolt in the way Laura uttered her husband's name.

But her brother put up his hand. "Hush, Laura," he said. "It's much better I should tackle this business alone. In fact, if you don't mind, you'd better leave the room."

She shook her head. "No, I mean to stay."

He shrugged his shoulders, and looked straight at Godfrey Pavely. "Look here!" he exclaimed, "isn't all this rather—well, highfaluting rot? It's quite true that when I left here I didn't mean ever to darken your doors again. But everything's altered now! I've paid you back every cent of that money—it wasn't even your money, it was my own sister's money. She didn't mind my having it—I heard her tell you so myself."

"You forged my signature to obtain it," said Godfrey. He spoke in a very low voice, almost in a whisper. He was the sort of man who always suspects servants of listening at the door.

"Yes, I own I was a damned fool to do that—though as a matter of fact you goaded me to it! However, it's a long time ago, and I suggest that we'd better let bygones be bygones. If I don't marry, and I'm not a marrying man, your child will be my heiress. Laura's my only sister, the only thing in the world I really care for——"

Laura put her hand through his arm when she heard him say that.

And then Godfrey spoke again, his voice a little raised: "That makes no difference," he said—"I mean your having paid the money back makes no difference. I won't have you in my house, and if Laura considers my wishes she won't see you again while you're in England."

Laura said at once: "I shall not consider your wishes, Godfrey. Of course I shall see my brother as often as I can."

But Godfrey went on, still directly addressing Gilbert Baynton, "I can't prevent Laura seeing you, if she insists upon it. She's a grown-up woman, and I can't turn the key on her. But she shan't see you in my house. And, as far as I'm concerned, this is the last time I'll ever set eyes on your face."

"Don't you be so sure of that!" Gillie muttered the words between his teeth. His fair face had turned a deep red-brick colour, his blue eyes were blazing.

Again there fell on the three of them that strange, ominous, sinister silence.

Then Gilbert Baynton turned to his sister. He actually laughed out loud. But even Pavely noticed, with bitter satisfaction, that the laughter sounded very forced.

"Ha! ha! ha! Godfrey's not a bit changed. He's just the same old narrow-minded, sanctimonious prig he always was!"

He took Laura in his arms, and kissed her two or three times very warmly. "Never mind, little girl," he said. "I shan't make trouble between you and Godfrey for long! I shan't be in England for more than a few days. I'm off to Paris next week."

He disengaged himself gently from Laura's clinging arms, went to the door, opened it, then shut it very quietly behind him.

Laura turned away, and stared into the fire.

Godfrey began, awkwardly, conciliatingly, "Now, my dear Laura——"

She put up her hand. "Don't speak to me," she said, in what he felt to be a dreadful voice of aversion and of pain. "I shall never, never forgive you for this!"

He shrugged his shoulders, and went out of the room, into the long corridor. And then he walked quickly through it and so to the hall of the fine old house, of which, try as he might, he never felt himself, in any intimate sense, the master.

The hall was empty. Quietly he opened the front door. Yes, Gillie had kept his word this time! He really had gone. Pavely could see the alert, still young-looking figure of the man whom in his mind he always called "that scoundrel" hurrying down the carriage road which led to the great gates of The Chase.

CHAPTER X

KATTY WINSLOW stood by her open gate. She had wandered out there feeling restless and excited, though she hardly knew why. During the last fortnight she had spent many lonely hours, more lonely hours than usual, for Godfrey Pavely came much less often to see her than he had done in the old, easygoing days.

And yet, though restless, Katty was on the whole satisfied. She thought that things were going very much as she wished them to go. It was of course annoying to know so little, but she was able to guess a good deal, and she felt quite sure that the leaven was working.

But the suspense and the uncertainty had got on her nerves, and she had made up her mind to leave Rosedean perhaps for as long as a fortnight. Two days ago she had written to various friends who were always glad to see her. That was why, as she stood at the gate, she was able to tell herself that she was waiting for the postman.

She thought it very probable that Godfrey Pavely would be walking past her house about this time. A couple of days ago he had come in for about half an hour, but he had been dull and ill at ease, his mind evidently full of something he was unwilling or ashamed to tell. And she had watched him with an amused, sympathetic curiosity, wondering how long his cautious reticence would endure. If she had put her mind to it, perhaps Katty could have made him speak of that which filled his sore heart, but she felt that the time was not yet ripe for words between herself and Godfrey. She was afraid of jarring him, of making him say something to her which both of them afterwards might regret. No, not any words of love to herself—of that she was not afraid—but some dogmatic pronouncement on divorce, and perchance on re-marriage.

And then, as she stood there, glancing up and down the lonely country road, she suddenly saw a man walking quickly towards her—not from Pewsbury, but from the opposite direction, which led only from The Chase.

Katty's bright brown eyes were very good eyes, and long before the stranger could see her she had, as it were, taken stock of him. Somehow his clothes were not English-looking, and he wore a kind of grey Homburg hat.

He was walking at a great pace, and as he came nearer, some vague feeling of curiosity made Katty step out of the gate, and look straight up the road towards him. All at once she made up her mind that he was American—a well-to-do and, according to his lights, a well-dressed American.

Now Katty Winslow looked very charming, as she stood out there, in her heather-mixture tweed skirt, and pale blue flannel blouse—charming, and also young. And the stranger—to her he seemed entirely a stranger—when he was quite close up to her, suddenly took off his hat and exclaimed, "Why, Miss Fenton! It is Miss Fenton, isn't it?"

He was now smiling broadly into her face, his bold, rather challenging eyes—the blue eyes which were the best feature of his face, and the only feature which recalled his beautiful sister—full of cordial admiration.

"You don't remember me?" he went on. "Well, that's quite natural, for of course you made a much deeper impression on me than I did on you!"

And then all at once it flashed across Katty who this pleasant, bright-eyed wayfarer must be. It must be, it could only be, Gilbert Baynton—the peccant Gillie!

"Mr. Baynton?" she said questioningly, and she also threw a great note of welcome and cordiality into her voice.

"Yes," he said. "Gilbert Baynton—very much at your service——?"

"—Mrs. Winslow," she said hurriedly. "I'm Mrs. Winslow now." She saw that the name conveyed nothing to him. "Do come in," she went on pleasantly, "if only for a moment, Mr. Baynton. Though it's early for tea, perhaps you'll stay and have a cup with me? I had no idea you were in England! I suppose you're staying with Laura, at The Chase?"

He shook his head, the smile faded from his face, and Katty, who was observant, saw that her question was ill-timed.

"It's delightful—seeing an old friend again, and I was feeling so bored—all by myself!"

As he followed her into the house, Gillie told himself that this was distinctly amusing—quite good fun! It would take the horrible taste of his interview with that—that brute—out of his mouth.

He looked round the little hall with quick interest and curiosity. There was no sign of a man about, only a lady's slender walking-stick and a bright red parasol, in the umbrella-stand. Was pretty little Katty a widow? Somehow she did not look like a widow!

She opened a door which gave out of the hall on the left, and called out, "Harber? I should like tea in about five minutes."

Then she shut the door, and led the way down the little hall, and through into her sitting-room.

Gillie again glanced about him with eager appreciation. This was the sort of room he liked—cosy, comfortable, bright and smiling like its attractive mistress.

"Sit down," she exclaimed, "and tell me everything that's happened to you since we last met! Why, it must be, let me see, quite twelve years ago?"

She took up a china box: "Have a cigarette—I'll have one too."

He waved the box aside, took out his own case, and held it out to her. "I think you'll like these," he said. Then he struck a match, and as their fingers touched, the lighting of her cigarette took quite a little while.

"This is jolly!" He sank back into one of Katty's well-cushioned easy chairs. "You've the prettiest room I've been in since I came to England, Mrs. Winslow."

"Oh, then you haven't been into Laura's boudoir?"

"Yes, I've just come from there." Again his face altered as he spoke, and this time there came a look of frowning anger over it. Then, almost as if he read the unspoken question in her mind, he said slowly, "Look here, Mrs. Winslow, as you seem to know my sister so well, I may as well tell you the truth. I've just been ordered out of her house by my brother-in-law, Godfrey Pavely. I suppose you know that he and I had a row years ago?" He was looking at her rather hard as he spoke, and she nodded her head.

"Yes," she said frankly, "I do know that, though I don't know what it was about."

He breathed a little more freely. "It was about money," he said bitterly. "Just what one would expect it to be with a man like Godfrey. He was furious because I got Laura to lend me some money. It was to pay a debt of honour, for I was a gambler in those days. But I'm a good boy now!"

"Yes," she said, and smiled. "I know you are! You're Oliver Tropenell's partner, aren't you, Mr. Baynton? He talks awfully nicely of you."

Gillie—his face was fair, his skin very clear, almost like a girl's—looked pleased. "Good old Tropenell!" he exclaimed. "Yes, he and I are tremendous pals. He's been the best friend to me man ever had."

"I am so sorry for Laura," said Katty gently.

She was playing with the edge of a piece of Italian embroidery which covered a small table close to her elbow, and she was thinking—hard.

At that moment the drawing-room door opened, and the tea appeared. While the table was being drawn up in front of her, the tray placed on to it, and a taper put to the spirit lamp, Katty's mind went on working busily. And by the time the maid was leaving the room, she had come to a decision. Even to her it was a momentous decision—how momentous to others she was destined never to know.

Again she said slowly, impressively, "Yes, Mr. Baynton, I am sorry indeed for poor Laura."

"I'm sorry too. Not that it much matters! I didn't want to stay at The Chase. I always thought it a gloomy place in the old days, when I was a child—I mean when it still belonged to Mrs. Tropenell's people. Of course I shall see Laura again—Godfrey can't prevent that! In fact he admitted that he couldn't."

There was a little pause. And then Katty, her eyes bent downwards, said, "I didn't quite mean that, Mr. Baynton. Of course I'm very sorry about your new row with Mr. Pavely, for it must be so hateful to Laura to feel she can't have her own brother in her own house. But—well——" She threw her head back, and gazed straight across at him. "Can you keep a secret?" she asked.

"Yes, of course I can!" He looked at her amused.

"I want you to keep what I'm going to say absolutely to yourself. I don't want you ever to hint a word of it to Laura—still less to Oliver Tropenell."

"Of course I won't!" He looked at her with growing curiosity. What was it she was going to tell him?

"I wonder if I ought to tell you," she murmured.

He laughed outright. "Well, I can't make you tell me!"

She felt piqued at his indifference. "Yes, I will tell you, though it isn't my secret!" she exclaimed. "But I feel that you ought to know it—being Laura's brother. Laura," her voice dropped, she spoke in a very low voice, "Laura is in love with Oliver Tropenell, Mr. Baynton. And Oliver is in love with Laura—a thousand times more in love with her than she is in love with him!"

She gave him a swift glance across the tea-table. Yes! Her shot had told indeed. He looked extraordinarily moved and excited. So excited that he got up from his chair.

"Good God!" he exclaimed incredulously. "Laura?" And then, "Tropenell? Are you sure of this, Mrs. Winslow?"

"Yes," she answered in a quiet, composed voice that carried conviction. "I am quite sure. They are both very, very unhappy, for they are good, high-minded people. They wouldn't do anything wrong for the world."

As he looked at her a little oddly, and with a queer little smile all over his face, she exclaimed, "I know Laura wouldn't." And he nodded, a little ashamed of that queer little smile.

Gilbert Baynton's face stiffened into deep gravity. His eyes were shining, and he was staring down at the little table, his half-finished cup of tea forgotten.

He sat down again. "Has Laura told you this?" he asked abruptly. "Are you her confidante?"

Katty hesitated. "No," she said at last. "I don't suppose Laura has spoken of the matter to any living soul. But if you promise absolutely not to give me away—I can tell you how you can assure yourself of the truth. Ask Mrs. Tropenell. She knows. I won't say any more."

"And Pavely?" he asked. "What part does my fine brother-in-law play? Does proper Godfrey know? Is priggish Godfrey jealous?"

She answered slowly: "I think that Mr. Pavely suspects. He and Oliver Tropenell were great friends till quite lately. But there's a coldness now. I don't know what happened. But something happened."

"I see now why Tropenell has stayed here so long. I thought it must be a woman! I thought some prudish, dull, English girl had got hold of him——" He waited a moment.

"Well, I'm eternally grateful to you, Mrs. Winslow, for giving me this hint! You see, I'm very fond of Tropenell. It's a peculiar kind of feeling—there's nothing in the world I wouldn't do for him. Good God! I only wish that he and Laura——"

He was going to say "would have the pluck to bolt together!" but Katty supplied a very different ending to his sentence.

"Ah," she exclaimed, "I only wish that Laura and Oliver could marry. They're made for one another. You can't see them together without seeing that!" She went on feelingly, "Laura was dreadfully unhappy with Godfrey Pavely even before Oliver Tropenell came into her life. She and Mr. Pavely are quite unsuited to one another."

There was a queer bitterness in her voice.

And then Gillie Baynton suddenly remembered—remembered the flood of gossip there had been at one time concerning those two—pretty Katty Fenton, as she had been then, and Godfrey Pavely, the man who later became his own brother-in-law.

He gave her a queer, shrewd glance, and Mrs. Winslow went on, rather quickly and breathlessly,

"You mustn't think that I dislike Godfrey Pavely! He's been very good to me—as good as Laura. I'm what they call an innocent divorcée, Mr. Baynton, and they both helped me through the trouble. It was pretty bad at the time, I can tell you. But of course I can't help seeing—no one could help seeing—that Godfrey and Laura aren't suited to one another, and that they would each be much, much happier apart."

At the back of her clever, astute mind was the knowledge that it was quite on the cards that Oliver, or Oliver's mother, would say something to Gilbert Baynton concerning herself and her intimacy with Godfrey Pavely. She must guard against that, and guard against it now.

So she went on, pensively, "I don't know, to tell you the truth, for which of them I'm the more sorry—Laura, Godfrey, or Oliver! They're all three awfully to be pitied. Of course, if they lived in America it would be quite simple; Laura and Godfrey would be divorced by mutual consent, and then Laura would be able to be happy with Mr. Tropenell."

"And is nothing of that sort possible here?" asked Gillie Baynton curiously. "This old England has stood still!"

Katty shook her head regretfully. "No, there's nothing of the sort possible here. Of course there are ways and means——"

The other fixed his eyes on her. "Yes?" he said interrogatively.

"I fear that they are not ways and means that Godfrey or Laura would ever lend themselves to."

"Then there's no cutting the Gordian knot?"

But that wasn't quite what Katty meant to imply. "I don't know," she said hesitatingly. "Godfrey would do almost anything to avoid any kind of scandal. But then you see one comes up against Laura——"

He nodded quickly. "Yes, I quite understand that Laura would never do anything she thought wrong—queer, isn't it?"

Gilbert Baynton stayed on at Rosedean for quite another half-hour, but nothing more was said on the subject which was filling his mind and that of his hostess. They walked about the pretty, miniature garden, talking in a desultory way over old times, and about some of the people they had both known years ago.

And then, at last, she took him to the gate. They looked at one another like two augurs, and he said under his breath, "Well, it's a pretty kettle of fish I've come home to, eh? I thought there was some sort of mystery. I'm very much obliged to you for having put me on the track to solve the riddle."

"Ah," she said, "but the riddle isn't solved yet, Mr. Baynton, is it?"

He answered, gravely for him, "No, those sorts of riddles are very hard to solve." He hesitated, then exclaimed in a meaning tone, "Still, they are solved sometimes, Mrs. Winslow."

It was late the same night, a warm, St. Martin's summer night, and Mrs. Tropenell, sitting alone after dinner, made an excuse of a telephone message to join her son and Gillie Baynton out of doors.

After Baynton's return from The Chase the two men had gone off for a long walk together over the downs, and they had come home so late that dinner had had to be put off for half an hour. Instead of joining her later, they had gone out again, but this time only into the garden.

Noiselessly she moved across the grass, and then, just as she was going to step under the still leaf-draped pergola, she heard her son's voice—a voice so charged with emotion and pain that, mastered by her anxiety, she stopped just behind one of the brick arches, and listened.

"You'll oblige me, Baynton, by keeping your sister's name out of this."

"Oh, very well! I thought you'd be glad to know what that woman said to me—I mean Mrs. Winslow."

"I'm not glad. I'm sorry. Mrs. Winslow is mistaken."

The short sentence came out with laboured breath as if with difficulty, and the one who overheard them, the anguished eavesdropper, felt her heart stirred with bitter impotence.

How Oliver cared—how much Oliver cared!

"Why are you so sure of that?" Again she heard Baynton's full, caressing voice. "Laura's a very reserved woman! I'd rather believe her best friend—apparently Katty is her best friend—about such a thing as this. You've admitted that you love her."

And as the other made no answer, Gillie went on, speaking in a very low voice, but with every word clearly audible from the place where Mrs. Tropenell stood listening: "Of course I won't mention Laura—as it upsets you so much! But after all, my hatred for Pavely and my love for my sister are the two strongest things in my life. Surely you know that well enough, Tropenell? I can't bar Laura out!"

And then came the answer, muttered between the speaker's teeth: "I understand that, Baynton."

"I'm sorry I repeated Mrs. Winslow's tale. But of course it did impress me—it did influence me. I'd like to believe it, Tropenell."

The secret listener was surprised at the feeling which Gillie's vibrant voice betrayed.

Oliver muttered something—was it, "I'd give my soul to know it true"?

Then, in a lighter tone, Gillie exclaimed, "As to that other matter, I'd rather keep you out of the business altogether if I could! But I can't—quite."

What was it that Oliver answered then? The two men were now walking slowly away towards the further end of the pergola. Mrs. Tropenell strained her ears to hear her son's answer:

"I don't want to keep out of it." Was that what he said, in a very low, tense voice?

Gilbert Baynton was speaking again: "It is my idea, my scheme, and I mean to carry it through! I shan't want much help—only quite a little help from you."

And then she heard her son's voice again, and he was speaking more naturally this time. "Of course we'll go shares, Gillie! What d'you take me for? Am I to have all the profit, and you all the risk?"

Mrs. Tropenell breathed more freely. They were off from Laura now, and on some business affair. She heard Gillie Baynton laugh aloud. "I'm quite looking forward to it—but it will be a longish job!"

Oliver answered, "I'm not looking forward to it. You feel quite sure about this thing, Baynton? There's time to draw back—now."

"Sure? Of course I'm sure!" There was triumph, a challenge to fate, in the other's tone. "I've always liked playing for high stakes—you know that, eh?"

"Ay, I know that——"

"And I've never looked back. I've never regretted anything I've done in my life——" there was a ring of boastful assurance in Gilbert Baynton's tone.

"I can't say that of myself—I wish I could."

"You? Why, you've a milk-white record, compared to mine!"

Mrs. Tropenell moved away swiftly over the grass, till she stood at the end of the dark, arched walk. Then, "Oliver!" she called out, "there's a message from Lord St. Amant. He wants to know if you can go over to the Abbey next week, from Saturday till Tuesday. He says there'll be some shooting. I told him you'd ring up before going to bed—I hope that was right."

"Yes, mother. Of course I'll ring up. I'll go in and do it now, if you like. Gillie and I have been having a long business talk."

And then she heard Gilbert Baynton: "I'll stay out here a bit longer, Mrs. Tropenell. I'm getting quite used to the cold and damp of the old country. I don't mind it as much as I did a week ago."

Mother and son walked across the lawn to the house.

When they were indoors, he broke silence first: "Gillie had a bad row with Pavely this afternoon. I don't think it's any use his staying on here. Pavely won't allow Laura to see him again at The Chase."

Mrs. Tropenell uttered an exclamation of dismay.

"Yes, it's unfortunate, I admit. And I don't think it was Gillie's fault! He's described the scene to me in great detail. He was quite willing to go as far as I think he could be expected to go in the way of apology and contrition. But Pavely simply didn't give him a chance. Pavely's a narrow-minded brute, mother."

"Is Gillie very upset? Is he much disappointed?" she asked in a low voice.

"Yes, I think Gillie is upset—more upset than I should have expected him to be! He's disappointed, too, at not having seen little Alice. He's really fond of children, and, as he truly says, Alice is bound to be his heiress—unless of course he should marry, which is very unlikely."

Oliver was speaking in a preoccupied, absent voice, as if he was hardly thinking of what he was saying. "We're thinking, he and I, of going to the Continent next week. We've got business to do in Paris—rather important business, too. Of course I'll try and come back here before leaving for Mexico."

Mrs. Tropenell felt as if the walls of the room were falling about her. Oliver had always spoken of late as if he meant to stay on in England till after Christmas.

"How long d'you expect to be in France?"

"I can't tell yet, mother. I might be there a fortnight, or I might be there six weeks—it all depends on the business we're going to do. No dates are settled yet."

He waited a few moments, then said slowly, "I've been wondering whether you would mind going up with Laura to London for a few days? Somehow I think Pavely is more likely to let her go if you offer to go too."

There swept over her a feeling of recoil, but she let her son see nothing of that. "Very well," she said quietly. "I quite understand—I'll do my best. I agree that Laura ought to see her brother again. And what are you thinking of doing, my dear?"

"Oh, I thought of going up to town, too." He spoke with a detached air. "You and I could stay in that nice little hotel where we stayed years ago, mother. Of course I'm only thinking of a few days in town, before Gillie and I go off to Paris."

As they came through into the house, she was startled by the expression on her son's face. He looked as if he had had a shock; he was very pale, it was as if all the healthy colour had been drained out of his tan cheeks.

"Oliver?" she exclaimed. "Do you feel ill, my darling? When you came in before dinner you looked as if you had caught a chill."

"It was rather cold on the downs, but I feel very much as usual, thank you, mother. A talk with Gillie always tires me. I think he's got a rather——" he hesitated for a word, then found it—"obstreperous vitality."

CHAPTER XI

WHEN Godfrey Pavely arrived at the Bank next morning it seemed to him that days, instead of hours, had gone by, since that hateful and degrading scene had taken place between himself and his wife's brother.

Laura had not spoken to him again, except to utter the few sentences which were necessary to keep up the pretence that they two were on their usual terms, before the servants, and, what had been more difficult, before their little daughter.

After Alice had gone to bed, they had eaten their dinner in silence, and, in silence also, they had spent the evening reading up to eleven o'clock. At last Godfrey, getting up, had said in a nervous, conciliatory tone, "Well, good-night, Laura." But she had not answered him, for by that time the servants were gone to bed, and there was no longer any reason for hypocrisy.

Laura had always been an exceptionally silent woman, but this was the first time, in the long armed neutrality of their married life, that she had actually refused to answer when he spoke to her. Feeling acutely uncomfortable, because curiously helpless, Godfrey Pavely now wondered how long this state of things was to endure.

He asked himself whether he had said anything yesterday which could really justify Laura in this extraordinary attitude. Now and again there seemed to sound in his ears the voice in which she had uttered the last words which she had spoken to him of her own free will. "Don't speak to me," she had exclaimed passionately. "I shall never, never forgive you for this!"

Women were so unreasonable—ridiculously, absurdly unreasonable. Laura knew exactly what Gillie was like, for he, Godfrey, had gone to special pains to make Laura fully understand the mean, despicable and dangerous way in which her brother had behaved over the forged cheque—for forgery it was, though it had been difficult to persuade Laura of the fact. He remembered now, how, at last, after he had forced his wife to understand, she had abased herself, imploring him to save her brother from the consequences of his wicked action.

Godfrey also remembered sorely how grateful Laura had seemed to be after everything had been arranged, and Gillie had finally gone off to Mexico, a ruined and discredited man. He felt a glow of virtuous satisfaction when he recalled how she had thanked him—her kind, generous husband—for what he had done! True, the loan then advanced had been paid back, and Gillie—to use the stupid expression which seems to be creeping into the British language—had "made good." But that was no reason why he should come back and thrust himself into his, Godfrey's, home, and make friends with Godfrey's only child—after he had actually given an undertaking, in his own, melodramatic words, "never to darken Godfrey's door again."

Yet in his innermost heart Godfrey Pavely was sorry now that he had behaved as he had done yesterday. He had allowed his temper to get the better of him, always a silly thing for a sensible man to do. By behaving as he had done he had put a weapon into Laura's hands....

At one moment he considered the advisability of going into Freshley Manor on his way home to-day, to consult Mrs. Tropenell. And then he had suddenly remembered that his brother-in-law was actually her guest! That fact alone made a most disagreeable complication.

As he looked over his letters, and dictated some of the answers to them, he tried without success to put the matter out of his mind. It had taken there the place occupied by the unpleasantness connected with those absurd anonymous letters. For the first time, this morning he forgot them.

There came a knock at the door. "A letter, sir, has just been brought by Mrs. Tropenell's man. He said there was an answer, so he's waiting."

With quickened pulse, Godfrey Pavely opened the letter. He had long been familiar with Mrs. Tropenell's clear, flowing handwriting, and he wondered what she could have to say to him which she preferred to write, rather than telephone.

The banker was attached to Mrs. Tropenell. Always she had acted towards him in a high-minded, straightforward way, and on two occasions he had had reason to be specially grateful to her, for on each of these occasions she had intervened, successfully, between Laura and himself, and made Laura see reason. But she never alluded to the past, even in the remotest way, and he had come of late years to think and hope she had forgotten those now distant, painful, active misunderstandings.

If Mrs. Tropenell was now pleading with him for a reconciliation with Gilbert Baynton, then he knew that it would be very difficult for him to say "no" to a woman to whom he owed so much. It would also be a graceful way of getting out of the difficulty in which he had involved himself....

But the contents of the letter disagreeably surprised him, for they were quite other than what he had expected them to be—

"Dear Godfrey:—Oliver and Gilbert Baynton have to go to the Continent on business. I think they will be away for some time, and Gilbert speaks of going straight back to Mexico from France.

"I write to know if you will allow Laura to come up to town with me for a few days? It would enable her to see something of her brother, before a separation which may last, as did their past separation, for years.

"I hope, dear Godfrey, you will see your way to granting this request of mine. It is in very truth my request—not Laura's.

"Your affectionate old friend,

"Lettice Tropenell."

The unfortunate man—for he was in the full meaning of the words an unfortunate man—stared down at the letter.

He felt moved and perplexed by the way it was worded. "Your affectionate old friend"—what a strange way to sign herself! Mrs. Tropenell had never signed herself so before. And what exactly did she mean by saying that it was her request, not Laura's? In spite of those words, he felt convinced that Laura, too proud to ask this favour of him after the shameful way she had behaved yesterday, had persuaded Mrs. Tropenell to ask it for her.

He sat down and drew a piece of notepaper towards him. He was glad of the opportunity of showing them all how magnanimous he was—how much of a man. Laura should go to London with his full permission. Of course he knew quite well, at the back of his mind, that if he refused it she would probably go just the same. But in all the circumstances it would be just as well to heap coals of fire on her head. She should go—but not taking their child with her. His little Alice must not be contaminated.

When his daughter was old enough, he, Godfrey, would tell her the truth about her mother's brother. He did not hold with concealing this sort of thing from young people. In his family, thank God, there had never been anything to hide. All had always been honest and above-board. Besides, if anything happened to him, Alice would be a very wealthy woman, and Gillie would almost certainly try and get hold of her and of her money. He, Godfrey, knew that well enough.

"My dear Mrs. Tropenell:—Certainly it shall be as you ask——" He could not help adding, "though Laura knows that in doing this she is disregarding my formal wishes. Still, I admit that, Gillie being her brother, it is, I suppose, natural that she should wish to see him again before he leaves England."

Then he hesitated—indeed, he kept the messenger for whom he had already rung waiting for quite a long time. But at last he signed himself: "Your affectionate, and always grateful, Godfrey Pavely."

When the banker reached home rather early that afternoon—for he felt too much upset to go in and spend his usual pleasant hour with Katty at Rosedean—little Alice met him with the news that "Mummy" had gone to London, and that she, Alice, was going to be allowed to sit up to dinner to bear him company.

It was characteristic of the man that, if relieved, he was also sharply annoyed. He had hoped to extract from his wife some word of reluctant thanks for his magnanimity. But no, she had not even left a note telling him what day she would return!

Things had not fallen out at The Chase that morning as Godfrey Pavely had supposed. After breakfast Laura, still in a kind of stupor of pain and indignation, had gone into the garden. She had not been there a quarter of an hour when Mrs. Tropenell, who so seldom came to The Chase, had suddenly appeared, walking with stately, leisurely steps over the grass, to tell her of Oliver's and Gillie's coming departure for the Continent.

It was Mrs. Tropenell who had proposed sending that note to Godfrey, but Godfrey, who so little understood his wife, either for good or evil, was right in his belief that she would not have allowed her plans to be affected by his answer. At once Laura had determined to go to London, whether Godfrey gave his consent or no. Yet she was relieved when there came to her from Freshley the news that her husband's answer to Mrs. Tropenell's request was in the affirmative.

The message was given to her over the telephone by Oliver Tropenell, and in giving it he used the allusive form of words which come naturally when a man knows that what he says may be overheard: "Mother has just had a note saying that it is quite all right. So we propose to call for you in time to get the five minutes to one from Langford Junction. Does that give you enough time?" And she had exclaimed, "Oh, yes, yes! I'm quite ready now."

To that he had made no answer, and she had felt a little chill at the heart. Oliver's voice had sounded curiously cold—but then the telephone does sometimes alter voices strangely.

Those eight days in London! Laura was often to live through each of those long days during the dull weeks which followed her return home. Yet, when she did look back on that time, she had to admit that she had not been really happy, though the first hours had been filled with a sort of excited triumph and sense of victory. It was such a relief, too, to be away from Godfrey, and spared, even if only for a few days, the constant, painful irritation of his presence.

But her brother, for whose sake, after all, she was in London, jarred on her perpetually. For one thing, Gillie was in extravagant, almost unnaturally high spirits, set on what he called "having a good time," and his idea of a good time was, as Oliver once grimly remarked, slightly monotonous.

Gillie's good time consisted in an eager round of business interviews, culminating each evening in a rich dinner at one of the smart grill-rooms which were then the fashion, followed by three hours of a musical comedy, and finally supper at some restaurant, the more expensive the better.

To his sister, each evening so spent seemed a dreary waste of precious time. For in the daytime the two ladies, who had taken rooms in an old-fashioned hotel in a small street off Piccadilly, saw very little of Gillie and Oliver. Gillie had insisted that Oliver and he should go and stay at what he considered the smartest and most modern hotel in London, and though the strangely assorted quartette always lunched together, the two partners had a good deal to do each morning and most afternoons.

To Mrs. Tropenell's surprise Oliver apparently had no wish to be with Laura alone. Was it because he was afraid of giving himself away to his coarse-minded, jovial partner? Oliver looked stern, abstracted, and, when at the play, bored.

She admitted another possible reason for his almost scrupulous avoidance of Laura. With regard to the bitter feud between the brothers-in-law, Oliver had spoken to his mother with curious apathy. Perhaps he was honestly desirous of not taking sides. But on the whole Mrs. Tropenell swung more often to her first theory, and this view was curiously confirmed on the one Sunday spent by them in town.

Gillie, grumbling, a good deal at the dulness of the English Sunday, had motored off early to the country to spend the day with some people whom he had known in Mexico. And late that morning Oliver suddenly suggested that Laura and he should go out for a turn in the Green Park—only a stone's-throw from the rooms the two ladies were sharing.

And that hour, which was perhaps fraught with bigger circumstance than any one, save Oliver himself, was ever to know, did remain in Laura Pavely's memory as a strange and, in a sense, a delicious oasis, in her long, arid stay in London. For, as the two walked and talked intimately together in a solitude all the greater because peopled by the indifferent and unknown, they seemed to come nearer to one another—and to meet, for the first time, in an atmosphere of clarity and truth. Laura, perhaps because she had felt, during these last few days, so desperately lonely in a spiritual sense, talked more freely, albeit in a more detached way, to her devoted, considerate, and selfless friend, than she had ever been able to bring herself to do to any other human being.

For a while, after they had turned and begun pacing together under the now yellowing plane trees, neither of them spoke. Then Oliver said abruptly, "So all our schemes have vanished into air—I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry too," she said. "I always knew that Godfrey would never allow me to go away with Gillie, but I never, never thought that even he could behave as he did to my brother the other day——"

There was a sound of suppressed passion and revolt in her voice that he had never heard there before. It touched a chord in his own heart, but all he said, slowly, was, "I suppose Gillie irritated him."

"No, I don't think so. There wasn't time for Gillie to do anything, for Godfrey at once refused to shake hands with him. That's how it began."

"Gillie ought to have written first. My mother begged him not to take Godfrey by surprise——"

"Your mother is always right," she said in a low voice. "I've never known her wrong yet, though her advice isn't always easy to follow, Oliver."

"I'm afraid she was right this time, anyhow."

"I know she was."

There fell between them a long, pregnant silence. And then Oliver said, in a low, moved voice, "I'm afraid that this last business has made you very unhappy, Laura?"

She answered, "Yes—foolishly so. I ought not to have been surprised, for by this time I know Godfrey so well." And she believed herself to be speaking the truth.

"It's not his fault," she went on painfully, "that he has nothing in common with me and with my brother, different as we, too, are the one from the other. Gillie and I might have been born on different planets from Godfrey."

Laura had not meant to speak of Godfrey to Oliver. Indeed, she had formed the resolution never to do so again. But somehow, to-day, she felt as if she might break that salutary rule.

His next words seemed to prove to her that she could trust him to understand, for, "Yes," he said quietly, "you're right there, Laura. You and Godfrey have nothing in common between you, and that being so, I suppose there's nothing to be done?"

"No, there's nothing to be done," she repeated hopelessly. And then once more she broke her wise resolution: "If it hadn't been for Alice, I should, even now, be tempted to do what I so nearly did at the time that Godfrey and Gillie"—she hesitated—"had their first misunderstanding."

"What you nearly did then, Laura?" There came an eager, questioning thrill in her companion's strained voice.

"Yes—" Why shouldn't she unburden her heart for once? "Yes, at the time of that first quarrel between my brother and my husband, I nearly left Godfrey. But for your mother, I should have done so. Alice was a tiny baby then, and I didn't realise, as I realise now, what an awful responsibility a woman takes on herself in breaking up a child's happy home. Only your mother stopped my doing it, and the fact"—she looked at him with a soundless depth of sadness in her face—"the fact that Gillie didn't really want me to go and live with him. Of course it was long before the question of his going to Mexico was raised."

"And have you never regretted that you did not carry out that purpose?"

Oliver Tropenell was looking straight before him as he asked the dangerous question. They were walking, slowly, slowly, along the broad path which runs just within the railings along the park side of Piccadilly. Between twelve and one on an autumn Sunday morning this path is generally deserted.

She did not answer at once, and he said quickly, "Forgive me! I ought not to have asked you that."

"Yes," she said again, "you can ask me anything you like, Oliver. But it's very difficult to answer such a question truthfully."

And again there fell between them one of those long silences which played a curious part in a conversation neither ever forgot.

At last Laura did answer Oliver's dangerous question. "I have always known in my heart that your mother was right in making me do what she did—I mean in persuading me that for my little girl's sake I must go on. Alice loves her father, though I think, perhaps foolishly, that of the two she cares for me best——"

"Of course she does!" he exclaimed.

"But whether that be so or not, I know what a terrible thing it would have been for Alice if Godfrey and I had lived apart. I've never doubted that—I don't doubt it now. But for that I could not go on—after what happened the other day."

"Then if, as is of course possible, you and I don't meet again for years and years, am I to think of you as always going on in exactly the same way?" he asked.

Some cruel devil outside himself had seemed to force him to utter the hopeless question which he had already made up his mind should be, must be, answered by Fate in the negative.

They had stopped their slow pacing side by side, and he was now looking down into her sad, desolate eyes. He saw the word—the one word "Yes," form itself on her quivering lips.

"Do you really mean that, Laura? Answer me truly."

And then suddenly there came over Laura Pavely an extraordinary sensation. It was as if this man, whose burning eyes were fixed on her face, were willing her to say aloud something which, however true, were better left unsaid. "There will never come any change," she answered, feeling as if the words were being forced out of her, "till, as the Marriage Service says, 'death us do part.'"

"Do you ever think of that possibility?"

He put the probing question in a singularly detached, almost a light, tone of inquiry.

But she answered very solemnly, again as if impelled to tell him the truth—a truth she had never thought to tell to any human being:

"There was a time before Alice was born when I was so unhappy, largely, as I can see now, through my own fault, when I felt I could not bear it any longer, and——" Her voice dropped, and he bent down so that he might catch the almost whispered words, "I was strongly tempted to—to kill myself," she said. "I used to go and walk up and down that little path across the head of the lake, and plan out how I would do it. Even now I do not think that any one, except perhaps your mother, would ever have suspected. It would have been so easy to make it appear an absolute accident."

He remained silent, and she went on, more composedly:

"I had got into a selfish, morbid state, Oliver, and yet the temptation was not wholly selfish, for I knew that Godfrey was miserable too, and my sense told me that if anything happened to me he would very soon marry again—some woman who would appreciate his good qualities, who would be happy with him, who would not be, as I knew I was, a bitter disappointment."

Once more her voice had become nearly inaudible, and once more Oliver bent his dark, convulsed face down to hear what she said.

Tears were rolling down Laura's face. But suddenly she made an immense effort over herself, and went on, calmly:

"It was your mother who helped me over that bad, foolish time. I don't know what I should have done but for Aunt Letty. I think she's the only person in the world to whom Godfrey ever listens—who can ever make any impression on him. It's strange in a way, for I know she doesn't really like either of us."

As he uttered a violent expression of dissent, she went on: "It's quite true, Oliver, and what is more, of the two she likes Godfrey the best. Why shouldn't she? She thinks I've behaved very unkindly to Godfrey. The only excuse she can make for me—she told me so once, long ago—is that I'm inhuman. I suppose in a way I am inhuman?" She looked at him plaintively, a strange, piteous expression in her beautiful, shadowed eyes.

And Oliver Tropenell caught his breath. God—how he loved her! Her inhumanity—to use that cruelly misleading term which she had just used herself—only made his passion burn with a purer, whiter flame. The one thing in the world that mattered to him now was this woman's deliverance from the awful death-in-life to which her sensitive conscience, and her moving love for her child, alone condemned her. Yes, Laura's deliverance was the only thing worth compassing—and that even if the deliverer were wrecked, soul as well as body, body as well as soul, in the process.

They began walking again, slowly, slowly, once more enwrapped in a silence which said so much more than words could have said, even to Laura's still numb, unawakened heart.

It was she who at last broke the kind of spell which lay on them both. They had come almost to the end of the broad path. Opposite to where they were standing, on the other side of the road, was a huge white and green building, handsome and showy, looking strangely un-English and out of place in the famous old London way.

"They pulled down such a wonderful, delightful house just there," she said regretfully. "I was once taken to it by my father, when I was quite a little girl. It was like going right back a hundred years—not only to another London, but to another England. It's a shame that any one should have been allowed to pull down such a bit of old London as that."

And Oliver agreed, absently.

So, talking of indifferent things, they walked back to the hotel where Mrs. Tropenell was awaiting them, and the three afterwards spent the rest of the day peacefully together. But the next day there began again for them all the same dreary round—that odd, artificial life of "having a good time," as Gillie jovially put it.

Somehow Laura did not mind it so much now as she had done before. Her talk with Oliver had shifted her burden a little, and made her feel as if he and she had gone back to their old, happy, simple friendship. It had also deadened her feeling of acute, unreasoning anger with Godfrey.

At last came the morning when Oliver and Gillie were to go to Paris. And at the last moment, standing on the platform at Charing Cross, there took place a rather pathetic, ridiculous little scene.

Gillie had bought for his sister a beautiful old jewel, and he thrust it—with a merry little word as to this being the first really nice present he had ever given her—into her hand. When she opened the case and saw the emerald and pearl heart, her eyes brimmed over with tears.

Even Gillie was moved. "There, there!" he exclaimed. "Nothing to cry about—'Nuff said,' Laura. Perhaps we'll meet again sooner than you think, my friends the Americans say."

And she tried to smile.

Then Gillie turned to Mrs. Tropenell, speaking with much greater sincerity of feeling than he was wont to do. "I'll never forget your kindness—in the past and in the present—to my sister and to me, Mrs. Tropenell. I'm not such a careless brute as I seem to be—I never forget a kindness—or an injury. Now then, Oliver!"

Laura felt her hand seized, closed on in a vice-like pressure which hurt, then dropped. "Good-bye, Laura," said Oliver in an almost inaudible tone. "Good-bye, till we meet again."

CHAPTER XII

AS so often happens after hours or days of crises, and even of quarrel, things went better for a while after Laura's return to The Chase.

True, life was now, even more than before, dull, sad, and difficult. She missed Oliver Tropenell's constant companionship and stimulating talk, more than she was willing to acknowledge even to her innermost self. And yet, when Godfrey spoke of the other man's absence from Freshley with regret, his words jarred on her, and made her feel vaguely ashamed. Yet surely, surely she had nothing to reproach herself with in the matter of Oliver Tropenell? She would so gladly have kept him as Godfrey's friend as well as her own.

They had made it up, those two ill-matched people—made it up, that is, after a fashion. They were now much where they had been six months ago, just before Oliver Tropenell with his strong, masterful personality had come into their joint lives.

And Godfrey? Godfrey Pavely was happier, more complacent than usual, during those late autumn days. He also was ashamed—though not unreasonably so—of the absurd importance he had attached to those two vulgar anonymous letters! He was sorry now that he had spoken of the matter to Oliver Tropenell, for that odd, rather awkward talk of theirs on the matter had been perhaps a contributory cause of the other man's sudden departure. If Oliver came home for Christmas, he, Godfrey, would "make it all right."

The banker had yet another reason for feeling life pleasanter than usual just now. He was engaged in a rather big bit of financial business of a kind his soul loved, for it was secret, immediately profitable, and with a gambling risk attached to it. The only person to whom he had said a word concerning the affair was Katty Winslow, and even to her, for he was a very prudent man, he had been quite vague.

With Katty he was becoming daily more intimate. Laura's cold aloofness made him seek, instinctively, a kinder, warmer, and yes, occasionally, a tenderer feminine presence. For the first time, lately, Godfrey had begun to tell himself that Katty would have made an almost perfect wife.... And Katty could have told you almost the exact moment when that thought had first flashed upon Godfrey Pavely's brain. But she also knew that so far he was content, most irritatingly content, with the status quo. Not so she——And one evening Katty tried an experiment which was on the whole remarkably successful, though its effects were strangely different from what she had expected.

While dining alone with Godfrey and Laura at The Chase, she startled her host and hostess by throwing out a careless word as to the possibility of her leaving Rosedean—of letting the house furnished, for a year....

Laura was astonished to see how much this casual remark of Katty's upset Godfrey. He uttered an exclamation of deep surprise and annoyance, and his wife told herself bitterly how strange it was that Godfrey, feeling so strongly about Katty, should not understand how she, Laura, felt about Gillie. After all, Gillie was her own brother, and Katty was not Godfrey's sister—only an old playmate and friend!

Godfrey was, in very truth, much more than upset at those few careless words of his old friend—playmate, in the sense that Laura meant, she had never been. So disturbed and taken aback indeed that he lay awake much of that night.

The next morning he broke his walk into Pewsbury by going into Rosedean, this being the very first time he had ever done such a thing.

He was kept waiting a few moments—as a matter of fact only a very few moments—in the familiar little drawing-room, before Katty, wearing a charming, pale blue dressing-gown, edged with swansdown, joined him.

As was her way, she began speaking at once. "Why, what's the matter?" she exclaimed. "Has anything gone wrong, Godfrey?"

He answered irritably, "No, not that I know of. But I've something to say to you." He pulled out his big, old-fashioned gold repeater. "It's twenty to ten—I thought I'd find you down!"

"I always breakfast upstairs in my own room. But I didn't keep you waiting long——"

She was still a little breathless, for she had come down very quickly.

And then he began, with no preamble: "I want to know if you really meant what you said last night about letting this house furnished for a year? I'm by no means sure if the terms of your lease allow for your doing that; I shall have to look into it after I get to the Bank. Still, I thought I'd better come and see you first."

Katty grew very pink. "Oh, Godfrey!" she exclaimed. "Surely you wouldn't be so unkind——?"

There came over her pretty face that curious, obstinate look which he had already seen there often enough to dread. Also she made him feel ashamed of himself. But how attractive she looked—how fresh and dainty—like a newly opened rose! Katty had twisted up her hair anyhow, but that only made her look younger, and more natural.

"Let's come out into the garden," she said coaxingly. "Surely you can stay for a few minutes? This is the very first time you've ever been to see me in the morning! Why not telephone through and say you've been delayed,—that you can't be at the Bank till eleven?" She was edging him as she spoke towards the corner where, behind a screen, there stood the telephone instrument.

As if compelled to obey, he took up the receiver, and uttered the familiar words, "Pewsbury 4." And at once there came an answer.

"Is that you, Privet? What a comfort it is to know that I can always rely on your being there, whoever else isn't! This is only to say that I have been delayed, and that I don't expect to be at the Bank till eleven."

Then came the calming, comforting answer, "Very good. That'll be all right, sir. There's nothing much doing this morning, from what I could make out when I was looking over your letters just now."

So Godfrey Pavely, feeling rather as if he was being driven along by a pleasant fate, hung the receiver up, and followed the blue-garbed figure out of doors, into a little pleasance now filled with exquisite autumnal colouring, and pungent, searching scents.

In the furthest corner of the walled garden, which was so much older than the house itself, was a tiny lawn surrounded by high hedges. There they could talk without any fear of being overlooked or overheard; and, before her visitor could stop her, Katty had dragged two cane-seated easy chairs out of her little summer-house.

They both sat down, but this time Katty warily remained silent. She was waiting for her companion to begin.

"You weren't serious, were you?" he said at last, and she felt the underlying pain and surprise in his voice. "You don't really mean that you want to go away, Katty? Where would you go to? What would you do? Have the Standens asked you to go abroad again—not for a whole year, surely?"