IDOLS

Two men once issued from the darkness and broke into a house. They came for robbery, but, finding an old man asleep in a chair, they murdered him. Then terrified at their deed, they fled, almost empty-handed, and so vanished into the night. Long afterwards they were overtaken by justice, confessed their crime and paid the penalty. Their sordid story is set down in the newspapers of the time. Otherwise they have passed into oblivion, and no man concerns himself with the dismal working of their souls. Their existence would not have found a mention here, were it not that the blow they dealt was the cause of convulsions in other lives.

For under the outer seeming of harmonious days and gentle living, often lies a smouldering train of devastating forces—stifled passions of greed and lust and jealousy, splendid heroisms and enthusiasms that burn white. In the common way of life no match is set; which forms a trite moral for the elegist.

But now and then the way of life is lit with lurid suddenness and the mine is sprung.

Beneath the surface of four gentle lives such a train was smouldering. The vulgar crime of the two nameless abjects set it ablaze. And they, issuing from the darkness for one ghastly moment, were but blind, almost impersonal instruments of Destiny, so far as they concerned these four.

CHAPTER I

It was Irene Merriam’s hour of greatest content when she looked into her heart for a fugitive desire and smiled at finding none. And this was a source of all the more comfort, because she was a woman who gave unsparingly of herself to life, and made large claims upon life in return. She sat in a leathern armchair by the fireplace, listening to the talk of her two companions, who were sitting by the dinner table over their coffee. Now and then she interposed a remark, but lazily, preferring to watch the play of expression on their faces, to dream dreams about them, and to realise her own happiness. This after-dinner scene was a familiar one; familiarity had made it dearer. She had grown to regard it as an essential in her scheme of life, like sleep and food and raiment.

Of the two men, one was her husband, Gerard Merriam; the other, his life-long, intimate friend. They had chummed together at school, at the University; had joined the same Inn of Court, and had been called to the bar together; and in spite of wide divergence of taste and character, had remained in close relationship to the present day.

It was on the homeward voyage, after a Long Vacation trip to India, that they had met Irene, a lonely girl returning from the grave of a father whose deathbed she had gone out too late to witness. Both men fell in love with her. The rivalry becoming mutually obvious, each gave the other a fair field. The wooing continued in London till success fell upon Gerard. On his meeting with Irene after her marriage, the other, Hugh Colman, bowed low over her hand, kissed it and put a loyal friendship at her service. A proud bearing, emphasised by steel-blue eyes and a supercilious up-sweep of a heavy auburn moustache, gave distinction to the action. He had rather a courtly way of doing things. The tears started to her eyes. She had been greatly drawn to him before, and pitied him out of her girlish heart for having lost in his rivalry; but from that moment she loved him with a pure friendship, and made it a dear object of her life to intensify the brotherly affection between the two men. In fact she had raised her conception of this Orestes and Pylades relationship to a kind of cult, of which she herself was the devoted and impassioned priestess. During the six years of her married life Hugh had dined with them at least once a week. Lately he had taken a flat in their immediate neighbourhood, and his visits had grown more frequent. Gerard, being a man of few words, had not said much to evince his gratification, but Irene had sounded the note of welcome loud enough for the two.

As she lay back in her chair watching them, a spice of admiration flavoured her thoughts. Both were men of fine physique. Gerard was six feet two, of huge frame, with deep, sloping shoulders indicative of great strength. Hugh, of somewhat slighter build, better proportioned, holding his head erect on square shoulders; finer, too, of face than Gerard, who had heavy features, eyes of uncertain blue and a reddish moustache cut short at the ends. The one face gave the impression of a man proudly scornful, quick in quarrel, with a Celtic strain of sensitiveness; the other that of a man slow in method, determined of purpose, shy of demonstration—one suggesting rather than revealing strength—a dangerous face to trust. Of the two, Hugh was pre-eminently the man more likely, on first sight, to win a woman’s heart in a joint contest. Even Gerard himself had wondered at his success. When he questioned his wife, she answered, lifting glorious eyes of faith, “Because you are you.” And that was an end of the matter. But perhaps it was the suggestion of reserved strength in the man that had influenced her from the first in his favour, and an intuition, such as so many women have trusted like a divine revelation, that in a great crisis of life the one would be living rock and the other shifting sand.

A pause in the talk gradually lingered into silence. Gerard, at the head of the table, near Irene, manipulated his pipe, which had become choked and would not draw. Hugh, at the side, half turning towards the fire, leaned back in his chair, and, with hands clasped behind his head, stared at the ceiling. Irene suddenly spoke:

“How are the Harts?”

Hugh started into a more normal posture.

“The Harts? They flourish. Have you ever heard of a Jew money-lender who didn’t?”

There was an unwonted touch of acerbity in his tone that brought a quick glance from Irene.

“They are not both money-lenders,” she remarked.

“Oh, Minna—she is right enough.”

“I’m sorry for the poor girl,” said Irene. “I wish she would let me be a friend to her, but she won’t. I wonder why.”

“What do you want to worry about her for?” asked her husband, between the whiffs of his newly regulated pipe.

“I pity her so.”

“Some people don’t like being pitied. I don’t.”

“But you are not a pretty girl cut by society,” insisted Irene.

“She’s proud, you know,” said Hugh. He might have adduced a reason much nearer home. As it was, he gave a hint of it.

“The moon, Irene, pales as a matter of course before the sun; but it’s an open question whether the moon likes it.”

“You are talking rubbish,” said Irene, calmly.

Gerard broke into a laugh.

“Anyway, I’m glad she hasn’t cottoned to you. I don’t like Jews about the place. To your tents, O Israel!”

Irene flashed up. “You can’t object to the poor girl just because she is a Jewess!”

“Of course not, my dear,” replied her husband, with a curious change of tone. “I was only joking.”

Irene came behind his chair and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Forgive me, dear,” she said.

He nodded, and patted the back of her hand magnanimously; then pushed his chair away from the table and rose to his feet, stretching himself after the manner of burly men.

“I’m off to the smoking-room to make up some trout casts. You two can come when you’ve finished the discussion.”

When he had gone Irene took his vacated seat. “The girl seems so lonely. That’s why I take an interest in her.”

Hugh lit a cigarette and replied vaguely. Irene noticed a lack of enthusiasm, and attributed it to a lack of interest. There was a short silence.

“Is anything the matter?” she said at last.

“Why should there be?”

“You are not yourself to-night. You have been working too hard and want a change. Why not go down to Weston’s to-morrow with Gerard to fish?”

“Gerard hasn’t asked me.”

“As if that were necessary. I’ll tell him at once you are going.”

“Oh, no,” he laughed. “I’m not to be regulated in that fashion. I’m not overworked. I’m as strong as a horse. If you want to know what I was thinking about, I’ll tell you—more or less. I remembered it was just six years ago to-day when I first saw you after your marriage.”

She looked meditatively towards the fire, a smile upon her lips.

“And I had just been thinking how happy these six years had been and how peaceful and sweet these evenings were, the three of us together. Perhaps I have been selfish.”

He caught the implication, and broke into protest.

“You know very well they are the happiest times of my life,” he said. “Where else could I get what I have here?”

“I sometimes think it would be better for you if you could find a nice woman to give you something better,” she said, somewhat timorously.

“Oh, don’t talk like that, Renie,” he cried, impetuously, throwing his cigarette into the fire. “The more I see of other women, the more I despair. I see a lot of them. I’ve been married to a half a dozen already, by popular rumour. I suppose I shall end one of these days by marrying one in grim earnest. I’m a fool, Renie, I know. But que veux-tu? My temperament is not that of an anchorite. I know how it will be. A whirl of the senses—and after that the deluge. And then I’ll come back here and sit in this room and wonder how the devil I could have thought of another woman. You’ve spoiled me for the common run of women. I haven’t met one yet that is fit to black your shoes. The man that worships the sun doesn’t give his allegiance to a bonfire.”

“But he can warm himself by the bonfire,” replied Irene, laughing.

“Until the thing goes out. Then he’s got to light another. But the sun is eternal.”

She was accustomed to his hyperbole. The woman in her loved the praise. It supplemented Gerard’s rarer tributes to her worth, effectually prevented her from feeling a lack in her husband’s lesser demonstrativeness. Again, she was enlightened enough to allow relief to overburdened feelings. A man of his type could not love her to-day and cast her out of his heart to-morrow. She never had a moment’s doubt that she was throned there as the love of his life. But a magnanimous scorn of thoughts of disloyalty on his part triumphed supremely over a false position.

In Hugh’s present outburst, however, she detected some special determining cause.

“I’m a very limited being, my dear Hugh,” she said quickly, “whatever exaggerations I let you use. But you know how deep my interest in your welfare is, and life could not go wrong with you without causing me—and Gerard—pain and anxiety. That was why I spoke. Whatever it is, I am sorry.”

Sympathy could not have been more delicately conveyed than it was by her tone and look. But there are times when sympathy stings. He remained silent for a moment, then shifted his position, threw back his head and twirled his great moustache.

“You are everything that is sweet, Renie,” said he. “But I was telling you general truths—not posing as un homme manqué. I hate the kind of fellows that are forever mewing about for women’s sympathy. It’s despicable!”

He rose, and, with two arms held out, took her hands and raised her from her chair.

“There. Don’t be hurt. Everything’s going on swimmingly, I assure you. The world at my feet, and heaven at my finger tips. Let us go to Gerard.” The smoking-room was a nondescript apartment, half library, half gun-room, suggestive more of the country squire than the London barrister. Gerard, with a glass of water on a little table by his side, was engaged upon his casts, screwing up his eyes, so as both to avoid the smoke of his pipe and to see the delicate involutions of his knots. He looked up, with a nod, when his wife and friend entered. Irene turned to a desk to scribble a note. The men’s talk turned upon fishing. Weston had killed a two-pound trout the day before. They discussed the chances of a similar prize for Gerard. Then came the question of flies. Gerard waxed learned. Irene, having written her note and finding herself out of the conversation, took up a book. Gerard’s love of sport she indulgently allowed, but in her heart she could not sympathise with it. The wilful infliction of pain passed her comprehension. There was so much of it in the world already.

She was glad when she became aware of a change of topic, and drew her chair nearer the fire. But Hugh, looking at his watch, rose to depart. Irene protested.

“So early? It is not ten o’clock yet.”

There was a touch of dismay in her tone. Gerard, too, bade him sit down again. But he pleaded work. He had been briefed in a hurry, had not a notion yet of the case which was coming on immediately.

They had to let him go, and when he had gone, fell to discussing him as they had done a thousand times before. Irene idealised and worshipped her husband, but her feelings towards Hugh were composed of conflicting and of somewhat delicate elements. The man’s history, mode of life and diversity of character, appealed by turns to her sense of romance, of trust, of protection. He had squandered a pretty patrimony in his early days. A diamond brooch still glittered before the footlights on an oblivious bosom. He had lived open-handedly, benefiting more by his vices than many of the austere do by their virtues. Even now, with modest income at the criminal bar, small thrift was incomprehensible to him, in spite of Irene’s periodical expositions. On such occasions she looked serenely down upon him from immeasurable heights. But in this man of so many simplicities, seemed to lie a baffling fund of reserve, which both compelled her respect and kept her intellectual interest in him upon the alert. The paradox fascinated her especially in its extension to achievement. For with a habit of glowing speech he combined a severe literary taste. A reputation of some standing had been made and was upheld by poems wrought with crystalline coldness. On the other hand, a recent and sudden opening at the bar was chiefly due to tempestuous advocacy.

“You seem to be worrying your head over everybody to-night,” said Gerard at last. “First it was Israel Hart’s daughter and now it’s Hugh. Whence this violent attack of altruism?”

“I have everything that life can give me, and I should like others to have the same. Now, there’s something wrong with Hugh.”

“There always is. A man can’t have the temperament of an Ajax and expect to go through life smoothly.”

“His friends can help him,” said Irene.

“My dear, good Renie,” said Gerard, slipping the last cast into his fly-book, which he strapped deliberately, “if there is one cry bitterer than another that goes up to heaven it is ‘Save us from our friends!’”

CHAPTER II

The Merriams lived in a comfortable detached house on Sunnington Heath, most convenient and pleasant of London suburbs. A year or so before they had persuaded Hugh Colman to leave his somewhat dismal chambers in the Temple and take a flat in a block of red-brick mansions that had just arisen to glorify the end of the High Street of Sunnington proper. Irene, with a woman’s eye to economy, had picked out for him a commodious little set on the fourth floor. But Hugh put aside her choice and rented a sumptuous flat lower down, which he furnished in expensive style. When Irene reproved him he laughed, with a grand-signorial wave of the hand. His pigsty and husk days were over. He was going to take advantage of the fatted calves and other resources of rehabilitated prodigals. Was not his income going up by leaps and bounds? Besides, there was his uncle, Geoffrey Colman, of Brantfield Park. He had more than expectations. Irene lectured him on the vanity of human expectations.

“Your uncle may marry again and have a family,” she said, sagely.

Hugh snapped his fingers. It would be indecent. Geoffrey Colman had ever been the correctest of livers. He dressed for his solitary dinner every night of his life, on account of his butler. His marriage would convulse a whole neighbourhood. He would just as soon think of throwing a nitro-glycerine bomb into the parish church.

Irene yielded with a pitying shrug of the shoulders. She had not lived six and twenty years for nothing. She knew that in every man lurks something of Voltaire’s droll of a Habbakuk. About eighteen months later her prognostications were fulfilled. Geoffrey Colman showed himself capable of anything by marrying a young wife. Quite recent rumours hinted at the probable arrival of an heir. All Hugh’s expectations came to a ghastly end. Irene sympathised with him, made elaborate calculations as to means for reducing his expenditure. He listened with pathetic admiration—she had a regal way of taking impossible things for granted—acquiesced silently in her schemes and then went out and cursed himself.

To-night, after leaving the Merriams, he walked along in the same self-reproaching temper. The March wind, coming keenly across the heath, blew a small drizzle into his face, causing him to pull up his coat collar and step out briskly. He swung his stick with an irritation which, however, had nothing to do with the weather. If only the past had been different—if only Irene had loved him instead of Gerard! He would have husbanded his life, instead of playing ducks and drakes with it as he was doing. What business had he along this road? Had he not better retrace his steps past the Merriams’ house and go to his own study fire and his imaginary brief? Suddenly he uttered an exclamation of impatience, drew himself up and called himself a fool. A familiar recklessness of mood gained gradual hold upon him. He laughed, gratified at the possession of a sense of humour that could look mockingly upon the portentous seriousness of this ridiculous world.

He turned his thoughts to the cases he had in hand, went off at a tangent to the points he had made in an emotional address to the jury the day before. The success was sweet—sweeter because he was conscious that the secret of it lay within himself. He had the gift of eloquent speech—pathos, persuasion, invective. It had brought him suddenly, when his chance came, from the obscurest ranks of the junior bar, into public light. A pittance had leaped into a competence, which in its turn might rise to the dignity of an income. His temperament had done for him, a young and struggling man, what legal learning and acumen had not done for hundreds many years his senior. When he realised this, he felt grateful to his temperament, and granted it indulgence for the many scurvy tricks it had played him.

Accordingly, he was fairly satisfied with himself when, after a quarter of an hour’s walk, he opened the garden gate of a large house standing in its own grounds. He walked up the drive humming an air. He rang, was admitted, conducted across a luxuriously carpeted hall, up a broad staircase, into the drawing-room.

“Mr. Colman, miss.”

The servant withdrew and shut the door. A girl rose from a low chair by the fire and advanced with quick steps to meet him.

“Oh, how late you are—no, you couldn’t help it. You told me. But the evening has been so long—waiting for you.”

“I got away as soon as I could. You see, I had promised. If your note had come yesterday, instead of this morning——-”

“I only knew last night that father was going out of town. It seemed too good a chance of having you all to myself. Oh, I am so glad you’ve come. It was good of you.”

“By no means,” he said, with a mock bow. “Don’t you think it’s a pleasure I’ve been looking forward to all day long?”

“I don’t—if you express yourself in that sarcastic way,” she answered, reseating herself.

Her voice was deep and rich, and she affected a lazy utterance—half aware that it might warm the blood of the man she was addressing. It did. He had been irritably conscious of its seductiveness in Irene’s dining-room; of the seductiveness, too, of her sensuous grace that had first caught his imagination. “You are a witch, Minna,” he said, admiringly.

The echo in his ear of the threadbare commonplace sounded an ironical note. It pleased the girl, however.

“I have been longing for a little compliment for a week.”

“Why, I saw you the day before yesterday.”

“Cela n’empeche pas.”

“Did I behave badly to you?”

“No—but I might just as well have been selling you postage-stamps behind a counter.”

“Forgive me. But, you see, we met in the street.”

“You were ashamed of being seen with me, I suppose.”

“Minna!” he exclaimed, flushing into quick earnest.

She laughed softly. “I thought I should get something genuine out of you—you walked into the trap beautifully. Do you like my new tea-gown? I had it made because you admired one something like it in a shop window.”

She rose and stood before him. She was undeniably beautiful, with warm, southern beauty. From her mother, long since dead, whom chance had brought from Smyrna to the tender keeping of Israel Hart and the fogs of London, she inherited the languor of expression that was her charm. Yet her features, more mutinous than regular, bore little or no trace of the Jewess—none, save that almost imperceptible, strange contour of flesh beneath the eyes, from cheekbone to cheekbone, which is the eternal mark of her race. The soft crepon of the garment clung to her figure, showing its young and supple curves. Its pale yellow shade heightened the richness of her colouring.

Hugh expressed unreserved admiration. He had the power of a nice extravagance in praise. The glow deepened on the girl’s face and her eyes lit with gratification. After a quick glance at herself in the mirror of the over-mantel, she sat down again. Her heart had thirsted for his homage, and had drunk it in greedily.

“Now tell me all that you have seen and done lately,” she said.

An easy task. He had seen no one lovelier than herself. He had sketched her portrait on brief-paper to bring a breath of sweetness into the evil-smelling court. He had the scrap in his letter case. Minna took possession of it, burst into roulades of delighted thanks. He laughed. Compared her murmurings to the low notes of the nightingale. The matter threshed out, Minna reverted to her original demand. He complied, touched on the gossip of the day, spoke lightly of his forthcoming volume of poems. Would he write a poem to her? He tried to explain the severity of his style. Not flesh and blood. Perhaps on the tea-gown. Thus the talk was brought round again to the bewitching garment.

“And this—creation—was really to please me?” he asked.

“It’s a godsend to have someone to think of pleasing,” she cried, with sudden petulance. “Whom have I else? Papa and papa’s friends? They never look at me unless I put on something barbaric—gold and silver and precious stones. Then they can reckon me up in pounds, shillings and pence. One grows weary of dressing for one’s own pleasure. Life gets on one’s nerves like a chapter out of the Book of Ecclesiastes—I don’t suppose you ever feel like that—because you’re a man.”

“I wish I could make life less lonely for you,” he said, kindly.

“I wish you could.”

“Why do you keep Mrs. Merriam so at arm’s length? She would do a great deal for you, if you would let her.”

“I can’t,” said the girl. “I don’t know why. Why do you think so much of her?”

“Because she is the finest woman I know.”

“Or simply because——” she checked herself—“No, I didn’t mean that—but——”

“But what?”

“Oh, can’t you guess? I want you to estimate me a little, by myself—not measure me by a standard—as you do—there!”

She leant forward, with one hand drooping over her knee, and looked up at him with moist eyes, and behind the moisture burned the longing folly of a woman.

“I don’t want anybody else to please. You are enough for me. All the world.”

Hugh had come prepared. Her sensuous charm had long woven itself around him. He had long known that a touch from him could awaken slumbering volcanoes; that in a moment of madness he would one day give that touch. Even now his pulses beat fast. He was flesh and blood, though his verse was marble. Yet he kept a curb upon himself. He reached out his hand and took her fingers.

“You mustn’t look at me like that. I am not a bad man. But you will make me say things both of us may be sorry for.”

“I don’t care,” she whispered. “Say anything.” The moment had come. In a fraction of a second he could have her youth throbbing in his arms. With an effort of will he threw back her hand and started to his feet. She shrank away frightened.

“Listen, Minna, before we make fools of ourselves. Where is this going to end? Have you thought of it? Use your intelligence instead of your passions. I am speaking brutally to you. I know it. It’s our only chance of salvation. You are throwing yourself away—into perdition perhaps. Do you know that?”

He stood, regarding her sternly; resolved to set her upon his own intellectual plane; to put before her serious issues; at the least, to throw open the floodgates for her pride. Her face paled slightly, and she asked, with quivering lip: “Don’t you care for me—a little?”

He swung his arm in earnest gesture. “Care for you? Of course I care for you. Do you suppose I should be here to-night if I didn’t—not being a scoundrel?”

“Then why are you so unkind?”

“Because, though I love you in one way—there is only one woman whom I could love in all ways, and the woman isn’t you. Simply that. If we let this go on, you would be giving all; I, a part. This can’t be news to you. I love you because your beauty and charm fire my blood. It’s Oriental in its simplicity. Have you thought of what the end of it might possibly be?”

The higher man suddenly had revolted against the readiness to seize the too willing prey, and had grown reckless in use of devastating weapons. He expected to see her facile southern nature rise in passionate anger—or her womanliness shrink in tears of disgust from the insult. He would have acted a brute part. But in either case he would have laid her love dead at her feet. He waited. The unexpected happened. She looked at him doggedly out of hardened eyes from which all the languor had faded. And then she said, in her deep voice:

“I would sooner have a part of any kind of love from you than all the best love of any other man.” He remained for a moment amazed at her strength. Had he conceived an insultingly wrong impression of her?

“Do you mean that you love me, in spite of the words I have just used?”

“Yes, I do,” she replied.

“I humbly beg your forgiveness,” he said in a low voice.

There was a long silence, broken only by the ticking of the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece. The apparent vastness of the great drawing-room, stiffly furnished with its cold Louis XV. furniture, increased the impression of stillness. Hugh glanced at Minna from time to time, hesitating to speak. She had changed utterly from the glowing girl who had stood up before him an hour ago to coax his admiration for her finery. Her face was set with lines of determination and stubborn character. The riddle of the woman lay open to him who could read it. The false light of the eternal, unutterably tragic missolution dawned upon the man.

“I have made a horrible mistake,” he said at last.

“You have—in misjudging me.”

“I meant that I have used cruel words. My justification was my intention. I wish I could make you some reparation.”

“That is easy,” she murmured.

“Name it.”

“Ask me to marry you.”

Marriage! At last he was brought brutally face to face with the problem that he had hitherto left, unconsidered, to fortuity. Indeed he grew conscious that marriage had been but vaguely contemplated. He had persuaded himself into a belief in his own honour. The rottenness of the belief stared at him hideously. The nakedness of his desire appeared before him, stripped of its glamour.

He despised himself, put her on moral heights beyond his reach. To ask her in marriage would be an added insult. And her money! A queen’s dowry. The very temptation to retrieve his fortunes therewith was an ugly and abhorrent thing. He ran the gauntlet of all these thoughts. Emerged with rebellion in his soul; seized angrily at the first unhonoured standard to his hand. Marriage—with the daughter of Israel Hart, the Jew money-lender. It was impossible.

Half divining this last mood, she came to where he sat, knelt down and placed her clasped hands on his knee. Her eyes dwelt upon him, softening adorably. Andrea del Sarto might have painted her.

“Why don’t you speak? I have offended you? Asked for too much? Indeed, I didn’t expect it. I am a Jewess and your people will despise me—and my father’s a money-lender—it would be a disgrace to you. I was willing—ready—only——”

The standard fell from the man’s hand. He yielded, utterly disarmed. The woman conquered as she surrendered to his embrace.

“If I took your love and the gift of yourself,” he said, “and did not marry you—just because you were Israel Hart’s daughter—I should loathe myself. My child, I thought you a toy—I find you a woman—worthy to be any man’s wife.”

“It would be sweet to be only yours,” she murmured. He kissed her again, then released her gently.

“If I asked you to marry me now, I should be committing a base action—for other reasons. Try to understand them. I am very badly off for money. You are an heiress. And I owe your father £5,000 on a reversion, which no longer exists. I scrape together the interest. It is not heavy—your father has treated me as a friend and not as a client. But he has been reproaching me with the rottenness of the security. Until I am clear of him, at least, I can’t ask you to marry me.”

Minna broke into happy laughter.

“You foolish fellow! Don’t you see the obvious way of settling it? If you married me, the debt would be dissolved—in its own juice, so to speak.” His pride revolted. Impossible! It was mere trickery. Any honest man would cry out upon him.

She could not see the point of honour. Her training had not sensitised her perceptions in such things.

“What is to be done then?” she asked. “You won’t take me without making me your wife—and you won’t make me your wife on account of my money. I don’t believe you want me at all.”

After what had passed there was but one answer to be given. At the end she smiled up at him and whispered: “That was very sweet; but it doesn’t tell us what is to be done.”

He glanced at the clock. “The thing to be done is to say ‘Good-night’—and for you to go to sleep happy. I will find some way out of it. And I will bind myself to you forever, by this kiss. There.”

So they parted; and he walked home with the softness of her young lips upon his, wondering what the devil was going to happen next. On the whole, happy. Quite unconscious that he had been fooled to the top of his bent by the instinctive wiles of a woman, herself merely carried away by an unregulated, headlong passion.

CHAPTER III

Meanwhile a problem of some complexity remained to be solved. Hugh devoted the morning’s clear-headedness to vain attempts at solution. From the position in which he found himself there was no issue without a loss of honour. The prospect chafed him like a hair-shirt. If he had erred, in times past, far from the paths of the homely virtuous, he had at least despised the crooked ways of the smugly vicious. He had been the thief of no woman’s virtue. Such remnants of it as had come into his possession he had paid for right royally. There is a difference between sinning en prince and sinning en voyou, in spite of the moralist. Hugh was an honourable man. At least, he desperately clung to such a conception of himself. Three courses lay open. To abandon Minna altogether, to make her his mistress, to make her his wife. By adopting any one of these, he would find himself forsworn.

He journeyed up to his chambers in a denunciatory attitude of mind. Subjects for anathema were plentiful. His own folly in borrowing the £5,000 from Israel Hart; his greater folly in incurring the debts towards the payment of which that sum had been mainly devoted; his uncle for having played this April fool’s trick upon him, and, lastly, the fate that had robbed him of Irene—a clause that invariably terminated his commination. Three solid, middle-aged city men were travelling in his compartment. They appealed to his fancy as potential Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. If he had lifted up his voice like Job, they would obviously have told him that it served him right. The parallel put him into a good humour.

Shortly after his arrival, a telegram came from Minna. Could she see him for a minute to-day? And if so, where? She could meet him at any place and at any hour. It was only to see that he was not vexed with her. She had passed a wretched night and was depressed. It was a long, impulsive message, regardless of the principles of condensation, and couched in German, so as not to become the common property of the young ladies at the Sunnington telegraph office. Hugh despatched an answer, making an appointment at three o’clock, in his chambers. At a quarter past, Minna appeared, blushing, introduced by the clerk. Her pretty apologetic air compelled reassuring endearments. Of course she was dearly welcome. The whole of the dingy room was lit up with her charms. The very wig-block was beaming at her. She laughed happily, turned towards the object indicated, and seized the wig. Would he put it on for her to see? She would fix it herself. No, she didn’t like him in it. He looked too wise.

They had a lover’s hour, vowed they would conjure light out of darkness and be each other’s before long. A formal demand in marriage was out of the question. Israel Hart would not give his daughter to a penniless barrister and starveling poet, who owed him money. And Hugh’s soul sickened at the thought of asking him. Besides he had expressed his desire that Minna should marry a friend of his, appropriately named Goldberg, who kept an extensive bucket-shop in Gracechurch Street. To inform her father would put an end to everything. He would carry her off and shut her up like Danaë in a brazen tower, into which Goldberg would Zeus-wise insinuate himself—this time at Aczisius’s invitation. Hugh proposed a two years’ private engagement, during which period he would bestir himself strenuously to make his fortune. Minna acquiesced, but only with the outside of her lips. She was not accustomed to wait for what she desired. And, for the matter of that, neither was Hugh. At any rate, things were moved a stage further during the visit. Before she departed, she desired of him perfect secrecy. He was to keep it from everybody—and Mrs. Merriam. He agreed.

“I shall certainly not tell Mrs. Merriam,” he replied, dryly.

She cast him a quick, suspicious glance out of otherwise glowing eyes. Then she bade him farewell, and tripped through the door that he held open for her.

The following day was Sunday. Although the season was the end of March, there had been a sudden cold snap. In the night the temperature had fallen and the wind risen. The morning gave the spectacle of a blizzard, driving sleet and snow. Hugh laid down the rough pencilled scraps of the verses he had been polishing, and went to look disconsolately out of the window. The prospect was uninviting; scarcely anything visible through the vibrating screen of swift, horizontal grey lines. He had agreed to meet Minna at noon, weather permitting, in the little patch of wood that stretched behind The Lindens, her father’s house, to more or less open country. The weather was hardly in a permissive mood. He felt that he could annul the engagement with a free conscience. It would be madness of Minna to expect its fulfilment. But knowing that a woman in love is capable of many madnesses, he resolved to keep his tryst on the chance of being able to despatch her summarily home again. He started out, with ulster collar drawn up to his ears, and thick gloves, and strode fast through the gale along the deserted pavements. At the appointed spot in the wood he waited for a quarter of an hour. Minna did not come. He congratulated her on her common sense, greater than his own, and retraced his steps. As he emerged from the branch lane leading from the wood on to the heath road, and meeting the latter at a point somewhat nearer the Merriams’ house than The Lindens, he was passed by a hansom cab, the window of which was down. After a few yards, the trap door in the roof was pushed open and the cabman drew up. Hugh approached, and perceived through the side glass Irene’s expectant face. On the window being pulled up, he saw her sitting in the chilliness of an indoor silk blouse, while by her side, huddled up in her sealskin jacket, was a dirty, emaciated, shivering little girl.

“What a lucky chance to have passed you!” cried Irene; “will you do something real kind for me?”

“Anything in the world. I suppose I’m to fetch a doctor,” he replied, with an eye on her new protégée.

“No. I’ll send Jane, if necessary. Go round to this little creature’s home and tell them she is ill and that I’ll take care of her for to-day, and if they like I’ll find a decent place for her. She lives with an uncle and aunt, who beat her. Fancy sending out a child, with nothing on, to sell violets on a day like this!”

“Where do they live?”

“At 24 George Street—in the slums at the back of the station. Their name is Jackson. Come back and tell me. I’ll give you some lunch.”

Hugh nodded, stepped back, gave the word to the driver and the cab started off. He trudged along in its wake, amused and touched by the little scene. He could imagine Irene first catching sight of the child, her indignant whipping off of her sealskin, putting the child into the cab, arranging everything off-hand, in her undoubting, imperial fashion. He smiled, too, at her unhesitating anticipation of his immediate acceptance of his mission. It was well that there was a woman like Irene in the world. As he passed by the house, he saw her figure flit quickly across an upper window. He pictured her stirring up the maids, getting a hot bath ready, and kneeling before the fire with a roll of flannel in her hands—the light playing in her fair hair and illuminating her face. He dwelt upon the picture until he had reached his destination.

He found Mrs. Jackson. Her husband was not in. If one judged from his home, he was certainly at that moment hugging the lee-side of a public-house doorway, waiting for opening time. The room was filthy. Mrs. Jackson, if possible, filthier. Her habitual speech, as Hugh shortly discovered, was filthy in the superlative degree. She was also perceptibly drunk. There was an apology for a bed in the room; but in a corner lay some sacking and a bundle of rags, evidently the child’s sleeping place. Hugh explained his mission; to his surprise, met with instant success. Mrs. Jackson did not see why she should support a child that was nothing to her. She was expecting a sanguinary one of her own shortly. If anyone else cared to support her, they were welcome.

For all she cared, they could take her to a much warmer place than Irene’s fireside.

“It’s all right,” he said to Irene, when she came down to the hall to meet him.

“Good,” she said. “Come upstairs for a moment.”

She turned abruptly and he followed. He knew the signs of Irene’s indignation.

Snugly in bed, in the room that former tenants had fitted as a nursery—but unused now for that purpose, to Irene’s wistful regret—her one sadness—lay the little girl. Irene went up to her, drew back the bedclothes and tenderly exposed her shoulders and bosom.

“Look,” she said.

He bent over; the flesh was livid with bruises.

“I should like to go among them with a flaming sword,” she cried, “and sweep them off the face of the earth.”

“I wish you could, before the child they are expecting is born to them,” he said, grimly.

He sketched his visit. Irene gave but half heed. His first remark had struck a strongly vibrating chord.

“Let us pray to God that it is never born alive,” she said. “To think that such brute-beasts can have a child and—oh, why are they allowed to bring them into the world, and given the most glorious privilege of humanity?”

“The next best privilege is to be able to do what you’re doing now,” said Hugh, consolingly.

“But what is it, after all? It is like trying to stop an avalanche and just getting hold of a handful of snow.”

“Well, you’ve got your handful.”

“Poor little thing,” said Irene.

She tucked the clothes around her, and, after a few nurse-like touches to the arrangements of the room, took Hugh downstairs. Lunch was ready. They sat down together. Gerard was absent on his fishing visit. They imagined him glowering at the weather through Weston’s dining-room windows.

“What will he say to our little friend upstairs?” asked Hugh, helping himself to claret.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you can’t settle her comfortably for life at a moment’s notice.”

Irene opened her eyes wide.

“Do you mean that he won’t be pleased to have her here? My dear Hugh!”

He smiled inwardly, but prudently changed the topic; enquired as to her discovery of the child. “Why was she herself out in such awful weather?”

“I was taking some trifles to a girl who is ill,” she answered. The rest of her explanation agreed with Hugh’s conjecture. Driving back, she had seen a woman trying to get the child on its feet. She had stopped the cab and swooped off with her prize.

“But you needn’t have risked your own life by taking off your sealskin and coming home in that flimsy thing,” he said, with a smile. “Even St. Martin didn’t do that.”

“Do you know,” she replied, with a charming viciousness, and leaning over the table, “I consider St. Martin one of the meanest characters in history!”

Some time after lunch, the servant came into the smoking-room and announced that Mr. Jackson had called.

“He’s a very horrid-looking man, ma’am,” she remarked.

“I’ll go and settle him,” said Hugh, rising.

“No. Let me. I shall enjoy it,” replied Irene.

And she departed, with the light of battle in her eyes. She met the man in the hall. He began to bluster. Hugh, by a turn of the passage, stood an unobserved spectator.

“You’re not going to have the child back,” said Irene.

“Then I’ll have compensation,” said the man.

“I’m not going to give up my wife’s flesh and blood for nothing. ’Tain’t likely—we’re poor folks and the kid earns a little.”

“More shame for you—a great hulking brute like you.”

“I don’t mind taking five pounds.”

“You won’t get a half-penny.”

“Then out I goes to fetch a policeman.”

He moved towards the door. Irene took a step forward.

“You dare threaten me!” she cried. “You! Get out of my house and never let me hear of you again, or, as there’s a Lord in heaven, I’ll put the Children’s Protection Society on your tracks and you’ll see the inside of a gaol.”

Whether it was the threat or Irene’s shining eyes that cowed the man, Hugh could not tell. He slunk away with muffled maledictions and banged the street door after him. Hugh ran to meet her, his heart aglow with her. It was the eternal combat of Mithra and Ahriman. He broke into boyish eulogies. She laughed a little excitedly and wiped her lips with her handkerchief.

“Let us go back to the smoking-room. The foul beast! The whole air tastes of him.”

“You have a delicious way of setting the law of England at defiance,” he said, laughing.

“Bad laws ought to be defied,” she retorted, full of the flush of victory. Which exquisitely feminine conviction he had not the heart to disturb.

A little later she claimed his assistance in another matter.

“It’s the extension of premises for the Institution,” she said. “The plans came in yesterday and I can’t make head or tail of them.”

She produced the roll of plans from a corner, and spread the sheets on the desk. They bent over them together, and for a long time were deep in architectural discussion.

“It will take such a long time,” she said at last. “I wish I could have it all built to-morrow.”

“I have no doubt you could, if you really tried,” said Hugh. “You can bring most things to pass.”

The Institution was Irene’s pet philanthropic interest—a charitable organisation of which she was the founder and guiding principle. At first Gerard had scouted the scheme as entirely impracticable; but Irene had succeeded, and, devoting to it her impetuous energy, had lifted those around her to equal enthusiasm. Both Gerard and Hugh were members of the committee, and attended meetings with praiseworthy regularity.

Irene rolled up the plans and replaced them in their corner.

“How little we can do to alleviate the misery in the world!” she said, with a sigh.

Hugh smiled. “If you could only get a lever long enough and a fulcrum you would move the universe, like Archimedes. But you will have to get to heaven first.”

“That’s just the appalling part of the idea of heaven,” she answered. “As soon as you get there you are useless, utterly and besottedly useless. It’s the only terrible aspect of death, that whether there is an hereafter or not, you are cut off forever from doing a hand’s turn for your fellow creatures. Everything has to be done in the little sphere of your life—when lever and fulcrum are unattainable. I wonder sometimes that I can be happy. And yet I am—blessedly happy. Can you explain it?”

He replied vaguely, so as to hide betrayal of a little pang; for he knew her thoughts were with Gerard. Association brought his own to Minna for the first time almost since he had caught sight of Irene in the cab. Dismaying comparisons forced themselves on his mind.

“Why are you frowning like that?” she asked, lightly.

“I was thinking of all the happiness you deserve.”

She laughed, with a little air of mockery.

“Does it distress you so much?”

“I suppose it does,” he said. “Now it is your turn to explain.”

But Irene, like a wise woman, dropped the subject.

CHAPTER IV

Minna Hart was an only child. She had lost her mother early in life, and had been left to the casual care of a series of governesses, with none of whom, save one, had she contracted a warmer bond than that of mutual indifference. For this exceptional one she had conceived a girlish passion; but as the young lady had disappeared one night, carrying with her some of her pupil’s most valuable jewellery, Minna’s love had been turned to hatred, which vented itself afterwards upon all succeeding governesses. As soon as it was practicable she declared her education to be finished, and herself to have done with instructors forever. Whereupon her father, who had as vague a notion of rearing a daughter as of fighting a line-of-battle ship, brought into the house, as duenna, his only sister, an elderly, stout, rubicund, black-haired Jewess of the most orthodox faith. As Minna had never been accustomed to pay regard to Judaic observances, and only went to synagogue now and then, in order to show off her new dresses, her Aunt Leah’s interfering piety maddened her past endurance. Moreover, the good lady, in the streets, with blowsy face, red roses, gold chain, and a brooch the size of a dessert-plate, was a sight for gods and men, with which Minna shrank from being associated. So when Aunt Leah died suddenly, Minna was inexpressibly relieved. She issued forthwith another domestic manifesto, in which she announced her intention of leading thenceforward a perfectly untrammelled and independent life.

Accordingly, she reigned supreme in her father’s house, obeying all her caprices, bending her servants to her will, or summarily dismissing the recalcitrant, surrounding herself with all the bodily luxuries that money can buy—and eating out her young heart in loneliness. Beyond the strong Hebrew sense of parentage, Israel Hart had little sympathy with his daughter. She despised his race and loathed his profession.

He felt it instinctively. Her company was an embarrassment. He could not talk of gowns and laces, of music, picture-galleries and light literature. The engrossing pursuit of money-making interested her not in the least. Outside relatives, whose foibles and disagreeablenesses form so harmonious a household bond, there were not. By the wives and daughters of his city co-religionist friends his daughter passed with a sniff of her delicate nose. She would have none of them. Israel shrugged his shoulders, and beyond insisting on her co-operating with him in the interchange of a few formal courtesies—ordeals worse than Sabbath observances under Aunt Leah’s dispensation—left her entirely to her own devices. In the house, they rarely met, except at dinner. Afterwards, if the humour seized her, she would play to him for half an hour in the drawing-room, and then he would go down to his study. Her comings and goings were of little concern to him. He would have given her a staff of lady companions, had she desired it; but as she refused to be interfered with, Israel, with many wonderings as to the strange and hidden ways of womankind, sagaciously refrained from interference. On one point, however, he stood firm: when the question of her marriage came up for discussion, his voice should have considerable weight. But Minna scoffed at the idea of marriage with such hooked noses and shiny crowns and puffed cheeks as ventured to come a-wooing, and sat instead at her window and sighed, poor child, for the prince that never could come. She lived an aimless, lonely life, wasting her young and splendid womanhood in a vicious circle of unsatisfied longings. The society of her own folk she would not. The alien society that she craved would not her. She was a social leper—the Jew money-lender’s daughter. Yet, on looking inward, she knew that the leprosy of her wealth was in her heart’s blood. She could not cleanse herself from it, bathe in the Jordan of renunciation, go forth into the world and work out her freedom. She had the Syrian repugnances of Naaman.

Sometimes the palatial loneliness of her home weighed too awfully upon her spirit. The torture of unsatisfied cravings set all her nerves jangling. Then she would fly from town, without her maid, and visit at Brighton her old Syrian nurse, Anna Cassaba, who gave up to her the best rooms in her house, petted and soothed her, and uttered comfortable prophecies concerning the prince. Perhaps Anna was the only creature in the world she cared for. The old woman worshipped her with an Oriental passion of devotion.

At Brighton, in the intoxication of her liberty and the vainglory of her beauty, the girl sought adventures, played recklessly with fire. She learned the languorous witchery of her voice, and it became a wild pastime to exercise it upon the chance met man. Once a young guardsman fell in with her upon the Parade, carried her off to dinner. At the end, she insisted upon paying half the bill. He demurred. She rose and declared she would walk straight out of the place if he did not accept with good grace. He yielded the point. They went to the theatre together, and then for a long moonlight drive along the roast. It was audacious bliss. She arrived home at two o’clock in the morning. Anna was sleepless with terror, in spite of a warning telegram. Minna explained lightly. The old woman lifted up her young cheeks with tremulous fingers.

“Oh, God, my child—you have come to no harm?”

Minna broke into merry laughter. Only when the prince came would there be that danger. She would know him in a moment. And she cut the young guardsman dead in the street the next day, having wiped off his kisses forever.

But at last came Hugh.

Oddly enough, she met him first in the Merriams’ drawing-room, whither she had gone with her father in anything but an adventurous spirit.

Some shrewd remark of Hugh’s had caught Israel’s fancy. With the parting handshake he ventured to express the pleasure it would give him to see Mr. Colman at The Lindens. The young man sought for a non-committal phrase of courtesy; but a glance from swimming eyes, half-proud, half-appealing, brought a quick acceptance to his lips. And that was the beginning of things.

That Minna Hart and herself came to be on visiting terms was, of course, Irene’s doing. Her revolt at social cruelties had been fired by the scant courtesy paid to the Jew financier’s daughter at a large political garden-party, and her impulsive scorn of convention led her to walk the next day to The Lindens and call upon the innocent pariah. It was like many other of Irene’s impetuous deeds of knight-errantry. Gerard had expostulated, veiling profound distaste under tones of pleasantry. Men who lent money at the God of Jacob alone knew how much per cent, were not welcome in a society belonging virtually, if not actually, to the race of borrowers. It was putting the leopard to lie down with the kid; setting the calf and the lion and the fatling together, without any reasonable hope of millennial advantages. But the dawning dismay in Irene’s eyes and the quiver of protest about her lips had checked further expression of cynicism. He had given way, even assumed a magnanimous air of enthusiasm; and with his approbation for lance and his visiting card for buckler, Irene, a modern Britomart, had set forth on her quest. It was on Minna and Israel’s return visit that Hugh had first met them.

At the outset Minna had received Irene’s offer of friendship with unfeigned gladness. It was the opening to her of that charmed circle of Gentile society at whose bounds she had stood so long disconsolate. Indeed, if she had given to Irene a breath of the warmth of her southern nature, Irene would have taken her to her heart, championed her triumphantly through the ordeal of prejudice, and the girl’s own beauty would have done the rest. But to Minna she was indefinite discomfort. A recrudescence of Jewish pride gained strength from vague, instinctive feminine jealousies. And then came Hugh. His coming disarranged her universe. Amongst other phenomena, it froze up whatever kindly feelings she entertained towards Irene.

This time it was no wilful playing with fire. She flung herself like a mad moth into the flame. She wrote wild letters to old Anna Cassaba. “The prince has come. I knew him at a glance. My heart is full of glowing happiness. I must tell you, to prevent myself crying it aloud. I cannot sleep. Oh, soon I will bring my prince to you.” The old woman’s eyes grew dim as she read, as only old eyes can, that look backward and inward upon tumultuous passion of long ago. But in her wisdom she burned these letters. It might not be the true prince, after all, she thought.

But Minna doubted not. She had gained her victory; gained it, it is true, at a price—but her ungoverned passion did not pause now to consider it. She saw Hugh nearly every day, sometimes at his chambers, sometimes in quiet meeting-places in the West End, now and then at The Lindens. She was happy. Her daily hour of sweetness gave retrospective and anticipatory joy to the other three and twenty. The elaboration of a distinctive attire for each interview was in itself an absorbing occupation. The undecided aspect of their relations afforded her, also, tremulous amusement.

“It is rather sweet, this pretending, isn’t it?” she once remarked to him.

“What pretending?” he asked, somewhat taken aback.

“This long engagement. As if you are going to make your fortune in two years! It is quite enchanting. And at the end, I suppose orange-blossoms and rice, and all things nice. Eh?”

She raised her eyes to his in lazy mockery—they were walking through the courts of the Temple—and slid her hand through his arm.

“What would you have?” said Hugh.

With a sigh she brought his ear down to her lips, and whispered:

“You—and I’m not going to wait two years for you—but we’ll go on pretending a little longer.”

“But I am in grim earnest, my Vivien.”

“So am I,” she replied, with a smile.

After this he realised the impracticability of his scheme. Minna was not one of those sweet future housewives for whom a man works and waits.

There was too much “contagion of the blood” in the matter. Yet he swore to himself that there should be no irregular union between them, and that he would not marry her until he had freed himself from her father’s clutches. But how to raise the money was beyond his power of scheming. At this stage of embarrassment came the announcement that a son and heir had been born to his uncle. As far as the value of security went, the bond in Israel Hart’s possession was so much waste-paper.

A post or two brought a comforting letter from his sisters, two maiden ladies many years his senior, who lived a gentle life in a little Hertfordshire townlet. They sympathised with him over this final theft of his inheritance (the good ladies considered it nothing less), but assured him that his Uncle Geoffrey would leave him something when he died. He had hinted as much, some months before, when “apologising to them for his senile folly.” It was the very least he could do under the circumstances. Whilst reading this letter Hugh was suddenly startled by an inspired flash. His difficulties melted. He rose from his breakfast and walked about the room, settling the details of the scheme. He would borrow the £5,000 from his sisters on the security of the reversion, such as it was worth, pay off Hart forthwith, reduce the rate of interest he was paying—a natural thing, for his sisters would not accept usurer’s interest—devote as much of his yearly income as he could spare to a reserve fund, in the event of the legacy not covering the debt, and marry Minna forthwith. In the event of his own death, he would leave Minna directions to pay his sisters, so that only in this contingency would Israel be virtually repaid out of his own pocket. In any case, his sisters would not be losers. The brilliancy of the prospect blinded him to at least one fallacy and two unsound premises.

The following afternoon he was at Selwood. His sisters Alicia and Dora, warned by telegram of his coming, met him at the station and walked with him, one on either side, through the town. The broad, quiet street, its breadth oddly exaggerated by the lowness of the straggling rows of old-fashioned houses, terminated at a common, on the further side of which stood the church. Amidst a clump of trees near the rectory glowed the red brick of the house where the two sisters lived. It was a peaceful and gentle spot, and it seemed to harmonise with their faces, which bore no marks of greater stress and strain than those occasioned by their disappointment in a housemaid, and their mild, vague regrets for the fuller, wedded life that had not come to them.

Hugh looked around, drew in great draughts of the sweet air, and then glanced affectionately at his sisters. They walked beside him proudly, holding their heads high. They had gentle but enlarged ideas of the importance of their family, and Hugh, in their eyes, was the incarnation of its distinction. The town was not honoured by such a man every day in the week. They felt the admiring and respectful eyes of Selwood upon them.

“We were just going to write to you when your telegram came,” said Dora.

“We had better wait until we get indoors,” said Alicia, reprovingly. As she was five years older than Dora (who herself was ten years older than Hugh), she considered her sister’s experience of the world somewhat immature. Hugh laughed, being familiar with Alicia’s habits. They were, doubtless, about to ask his advice concerning the finances of the village goose-club, or some such solemn matter which could not be discussed save with closed doors.

It was only after he had allowed them to refresh him with tea in their comfortable drawing-room, that he alluded to the tabooed subject. He lit a cigarette—he could have lit the Queen’s Pipe had he so chosen, for they indulged him greatly—and enquired in what way he could serve them. They looked puzzled for a moment. Then Dora’s countenance cleared.

“Oh—the letter we were going to write to you! No. It wasn’t to ask you for anything. It——”

She looked across at Alicia, who glanced back at her with an air of intelligence and readiness.

“The fact is, dear Hugh,” said the elder, “we have rather unfortunate news to give you. Your Uncle Geoffrey is not very well.”

Though he expressed his sorrow, he smiled at the anti-climax. The dear, fussy sisters!

“In fact, his heart is seriously affected,” continued Alicia, gravely, “and he can’t possibly live very long.”

“The deuce he can’t,” said Hugh, who began to lose sight of the humourous aspect of things. “How do you know?”

“We received a long letter from him this morning, in which he refers to other things besides.”

“You had better let me see it,” said Hugh.

“Would you get it, Dora?” said Alicia, and then, while the younger sister was fetching the document from a secretaire by the window: “I don’t bear malice. I am grieved to hear of Geoffrey Colman’s affliction, and I hope he is prepared to meet his end like a Christian and a gentleman, but I consider his conduct towards you has been simply shameful.”

Hugh took the letter from Dora’s hand and read it through.

“I can get on without his money, my dears,” he said, bravely.

“Of course you can,” said Alicia, proudly. “A Colman need not be beholden to any man. But that does not condone anything in your uncle’s behaviour.”

He rose with a laugh, curled his moustache to a fiercer angle, and put his arm round Dora’s shoulder, who was standing, and addressed Alicia.

“What does it matter? Don’t trouble your dear kind heads about it. I’m sorry for the poor old chap. He was kind to me when a boy—has done more for me than I ever did for him. I came to see how you two were getting on, and to comfort my heart with a bottle of grandfather’s old Madeira. So let us be happy.”

“What a dear, noble fellow you are, to take it like that,” said Dora, kissing him.

“My dear child,” he replied, with a laugh, “how often am I to tell you that I am not a graven image?”

He did not feel at all noble. On the contrary, very ignominiously disappointed. His iridescent scheme had vanished like a soap-bubble. Geoffrey Colman had intimated, in his letter, with much deprecatory circumlocution, that, on looking lately into his affairs, he found them by no means as prosperous as he had imagined; there were depreciations in lands, unlucky investments, mortgages; in fine, much as he had desired it, he would be able to do nothing at all for Hugh. And then he was practically moribund.

Hugh shrugged off the disappointment. To ask his sisters for a loan out of their comparatively small fortune, upon no security more tangible than the promise of his brotherly efforts to repay them, was absolutely impossible. One comfort remained, for which he thanked the god of chance: the opportune arrival of the letter had effectually precluded his proposal.

He returned to London, where a sudden stress of work awaited him. But the briefs of a criminal advocate, chiefly engaged in small cases, are not marked very high. Moreover, ill-luck attended him. After three of his clients were convicted, he made desperate efforts to secure a favourable verdict for a fourth, and his failure roused his exasperation. His book of poems came out just at this time, to be less glowingly received by literary journals than the two previous ones. They complained of tenuity of thought, over-elaboration; advised, finally, a robuster view, a franker acceptance of the emotional facts of life. He threw his press-cuttings angrily into the waste-paper basket. What did the fools know about it? It was the only sphere in which he could divest himself of his accursed emotionality. He turned to Irene. Yet even her tribute fell short of its customary wholeness. She noticed a tendency towards the symbolism of the modern French school in his new volume. She quoted a line, said it suggested Stéphane Mallarmé. Hugh broke out tempestuously.

“Why don’t you call me a Decadent at once—an artificer of phrase—an exhausted idealist? That’s what your criticism comes to. You feel that I’m on the down grade, and you don’t like to tell me.”

“Oh, no, Hugh!” she expostulated. “Much of it is as exquisite as ever. But I love all your work to be exquisite. It’s only here and there that the meaning is not quite clear and the language appears forced.”

She exerted herself to heal his wounded susceptibilities. But her criticism had sunk deep. It was true. He was on the down grade, in every sphere. Hampered with debt, losing his hold on the sympathies of juries, his poetical vein worked out, he saw exaggerated ruin staring him in the face. He had sowed the wind, was about to reap the inevitable harvest. The high-spirited man, half ashamed of his life, often loses sense of proportion. A Gewitter—or concentration of bad weathers—as the Germans appropriately name a storm, had temporarily gathered about him, and he mistook it for the destroying whirlwind. Meanwhile Minna came to his chambers, wove her Morganesque spells about his senses, provoking, seductive, tempting, sympathetic, instinctively bringing him to the brink of the false depths in her nature, cunningly clinking her money-bags in his ear.

One afternoon he met Gerard at the club in St. James’s Street, to which both belonged. They were to dine together, later, with some friends. The talk had turned to domestic affairs. Irene, not being able as yet to find a suitable home for her rescued waif, was keeping her in the house; in fact was growing attached to the child.

“That’s the devil of it,” said Gerard, “when once Irene attaches herself to a thing, nothing can make her let go.”

“Why should she?” asked Hugh, shortly.

Gerard lay back in his chair and watched the blue wreaths rising from his pipe. Then he said, slowly:

“There are occasions when it’s awkward. Sometimes I wish Irene were not so strenuous.”

“Confound it, man!” cried Hugh. “How can you, of all men, disparage her?”

Irene’s husband looked at him queerly out of the corner of his eye.

“Irene didn’t quite step ready-made out of heaven.

“It’s a precious good thing she didn’t. Otherwise she would not have looked upon you and me.”

“You’re a poet, my friend, and I’m a philosopher.”

“You’re a married man, I suppose you mean, and I am a damned fool. You ought to be separated from Irene for a year or two. Then you would appreciate her.”

“There is no necessity, I assure you,” retorted Gerard, coolly. “And as for you’re being a damned fool—well, I have known you too long not to have my own ideas about it. Anyhow, you are growing gunpowdery—not yourself. What’s wrong?”

“My liver’s out of order,” said Hugh.

An acquaintance came up, and they discussed other matters. But it was only afterwards that Hugh recognised how near to a quarrel he had come with his best friend. A less equable temper than Gerard’s might have flared up in resentment at his angry speeches.

As it was, Gerard seemed to forget the incident, but it aided Hugh to realise his own irritability.

Shortly before Whitsuntide Minna went to Brighton. Her excuse to Hugh was the prospect of a colossal male dinner party, given to half the Hebrew bucket-shop keepers in London. If she remained in town she would have to play Herodias’ daughter at this orgie. As the only condition on which she would consent to do this—that she should receive Goldberg’s head on a charger—was incapable of fulfilment, she was withdrawing from the scene altogether. But she did not go without Hugh’s promise to join her during the Whitsuntide recess.

As soon as the courts rose, he went down. It was lovely weather. Minna looked radiant with youth and happiness. On the evening of his arrival she sat with him on the same seat on the Parade as had witnessed the beginning of her escapade with the young guardsman. She thought thrillingly of the difference between the two experiences. The dusk of the warm evening was closing round them. From the head of the pier came the faint, languorous strains of a waltz. She edged nearer to him, laid her hand on his knee.

“Are you happy that you are here?” The touch and the voice, the perfume of her hair so close to his face, the distant music, the charm of the evening, produced their intoxication.

“Minna!” he whispered.

“Yes?”

The girl’s heart throbbed tumultuously. She had waited weeks and weeks in patience for that note of passion. She hung breathlessly on his lips for their next utterance.

“I give up the waiting. I might strive till Doomsday. I don’t care. Anything you wish. Only, soon.”

“Yes, very soon,” she murmured, with an adorable catch in her voice. “At a registrar’s—almost at once.”

“I’ll give notice to-morrow—Tuesday will be the day.”

He had yielded. There was only one Irene in the world. She was beyond his reach. The only other woman he desired lay ready to his arms. And she had money, money, money—the only talisman for happiness in this world. Yet it was a hateful thought.

Even at this moment he cursed the temptation, fiercely fooled himself into the conviction that it did not enter into his plans. He loved her. It was a love match, pure and simple.

“Would you be willing, Minna,” he asked, in a low voice, “to let the marriage be a secret, until I can put my affairs in order?”

This bramble seemed to catch his honour on its slippery path down hill. He made the proposal, however, diffidently, lest it might hurt the sensitive susceptibilities of race and social station. But she broke into deep, cooing laughter.

“You dear, wise stupid,” she said. “That’s the very plan I have been dreaming over, night and day, for weeks. And I wouldn’t tell you until I felt you would agree. I have worked out every little detail.”

“Expound them all to me.”

She brushed his ear quickly with her lips.

“On Tuesday,” she whispered.

Then she rose quickly from the seat and turned gaily, facing him.

“Let us walk about and be proud of ourselves.”

CHAPTER V

As Minna had taken care to have completed the fifteen days’ residence required of one of the parties for a marriage by license, it was she who, accompanied by Hugh, gave the necessary notice the next day. On the Tuesday in Whitsun week they were married, taking with them, as one witness, Anna Cassaba, whose Jewish conscience Minna had wheedled into complicity. The old woman, bent and thin, her swarthy face wrinkled with a myriad lines, fastened eyes upon them that still glowed with unquenched fires. Her darling’s prince had come. A handsome prince, indeed, for which she pardoned him his Gentile birth. But it took all her love for Minna to reconcile her to the non-religious ceremony. Its bareness shocked her.

The Registrar was an old man in a skull cap, with long, white beard and lack-lustre eyes. He took but indifferent interest in the pair. A wearied resignation showed itself in his manner, as he administered the customary declarations, and pointed with shrivelled finger to the spaces wherein they should sign their names. He reminded one of an old scholar serving out trumpery fiction to the subscribers of a circulating library. A sorry book he was delivering up to them. A trivial pair were they for desiring it. He wished them good luck in a mechanical, far off tone. If they had put the fees in the slot of an automatic machine and drawn out a marriage certificate, the business could not have been more impersonally concluded.

Out in the street again they parted from the old woman, who stood for some time watching them as they went in the direction of the new lodgings that Hugh had engaged on the Parade. She would dearly have loved to shelter them like love-birds in her own nest. But prudence forbade Minna to reveal her secret to Anna’s servants. She sighed as soon as they had disappeared, and turning her slow steps homewards, thought in her old woman’s way of the beautiful children that would be.

The newly wedded pair walked on for a long while in silence. Minna pressed her husband’s arm tightly, waiting for him to speak, half afraid of breaking in upon his thoughts, which she instinctively felt must be deeper than her own. Besides, the bareness of the ceremony had left her with a vague depression. It was a cold, grim episode in the heart of her romance. The walk grew hateful. She longed for the shelter of four walls and the dearer, warming shelter of his arms. Until they were about her, life was a limbo where nothing was defined. She glanced up at him timidly, to see him looking straight before him, his shoulders square, his head thrown back defiantly. Now that she had won him, she faltered over her victory. A sudden dismay depressed her further. His present attitude was an impenetrable wall closing round the inner man. What did she know of him? For a sickening moment her brain was confused by the illusion that he was a total stranger whom some nightmare freak had made master of her destiny. It vanished quickly, but an after-sensation of fear remained. It was so different from the joyous glow that she had anticipated. She felt herself upon the verge of tears. Resentment against him, as if to justify her depression, began to spread like a dull pain around her heart. It was cruel of him to walk as he was doing, in other spheres, apart from her whom he had just made his wife. She withdrew her hand from his arm. He started, caught her hand and replaced it, pressed it closely to him and looked down upon the trouble of her face.

“Poor child,” he said, “you are shaken. Thank goodness it is over.”

The tears began to gather in her eyes. “It was horrid,” she said.

“Well, it will never happen again, sweetheart. Let us forget the dismal old man and think of what lies before us. You must be bright and happy on your wedding day.”

“If you would let me,” said Minna.

“I, dearest?” he exclaimed, with some prickings of self-reproach.

“Yes. Why have you walked all this time without speaking a word to me?”

A tear fell. It roused the man’s tenderness, melted the cold weight of misgiving that had held him silent. He felt that he had behaved brutally to her. She was his wife; nothing could alter it. Cruelly vain now were searchings of heart and conscience. He had caused her unhappiness already. In the revulsion of feeling he broke into passionate speech, bending as he walked, to whisper in her ear. He spoke foolish words of comfort, chided her loverwise for vain fancies, explained his previous mood of seriousness. It was a solemn step they had taken. He was trying to realise that he held her happiness in his hands for the rest of her life. Minna began to brighten.

“It is foolish to cry,” she said, “but I was hungering for a word.”

He laughed gaily, to cheer her. She must laugh, too, like a happy bride, to please her lord. He demanded to see the wedding ring. She held up her gloveless left hand. Her heart grew warm again, as the symbol of their union gleamed before the eyes of both. A little later, she was nestling in his arms, murmuring her content in low dove notes that stole sweetly over his senses.

Thus began their married life. In moments of intoxication they touched some of the lower stars. In sober hours they trod upon indubitable earth, which each pretended to call the floor of paradise. When the Trinity law sittings commenced, Hugh was forced to return to London. On the evening before his departure, they were sitting together on the pier, somewhat silent. Minna sighed her regret. The end of the honeymoon already. Although it was not the poor tragedy:—“Déjà!—Enfin!”—yet Hugh’s responsive, “Yes, already,” was somewhat lacking in spontaneity. Minna marked it, with a little pang of mortification, but she said, indulgently:

“I believe you want to get back to your horrid briefs.”

He did not deny the fact. “I must lose no chances now, dear. Energy is doubly necessary.”

“There ought to be no work in the world,” she answered, in her slow, plaintive way. “I wish we could live just as we have been doing.”

Hugh protested. His blindest flatterer could not call him a fanatical Carlylean in his views of the nobility of toil, but purposeful joining in the great struggle for existence was a condition of moral health. He apologised for the platitude. Minna laughed, dubbed it an old wives’ fable to be ranked with the proverbial but fallacious advantages of early rising. She wanted nothing in life but love. It was its own purpose. It was the heart of life.

“But the heart cannot exist by itself,” he answered, earnestly. “It must have its clothing of flesh, its supply of blood. And the stronger and more vigorous these outer walls of life are, the truer does it beat.”

“I think you only look upon love as one of the outer graces of life and not the heart at all,” she said, pensively. “For you, the heart is something quite different.”

“If it isn’t you, dear, can you tell me what it is?” he asked, tenderly.

She yielded herself to the arm he had slipped behind her.

“I suppose it is I, after all,” she said, with a half sigh. “I hope so. If not I shall be throbbing, quite bare, without my wall of flesh. You will always go on loving me, Hugh? It would kill me now if you didn’t.”

He answered as millions of men have done since the world began: honestly, according to his lights, willing to love her loyally for her soul’s sake, not for her beauty’s. Yet the consciousness of an effort of volition in the matter was disquieting. As usual, he took refuge in impetuous speech.

“I shall love you blindly and passionately till the hour of my death.”

The first morning in London he missed her. His bachelor rooms seemed cold and informal with vague discomfort. His breakfast, served by the porter’s wife, who attended to his domestic needs, was singularly unappetising. The morning paper supported in front of him by the tea-pot proved an inadequate substitute for Minna’s pretty face and sweet, lazy talk. He convinced himself that he loved her truly. But when he reached his chambers he found a brief awaiting him that demanded all his faculties. In half an hour he had forgotten her. When he went out for lunch, it was with a glow of satisfaction at work accomplished. At the restaurant, he met brother barristers, fellow-frequenters of the place, and found unprecedented zest in the keen, masculine talk. In the afternoon at his club, he dropped into a vacant armchair by the side of the editor of a great review, who cast over all who approached him the charm of his culture and the spell of his genius. By the afternoon post came two letters, one from Minna, who had addressed him at the club according to arrangement, the other from Irene. He opened his wife’s first, read it with genuine tenderness. Everything, she wrote, was plunged into utter darkness. She was yearning for to-morrow when she would see her dear love again. A passionate letter with an untrained girl’s lack of reserve. He went to a writing-table, finished a half-written letter of his own and dropped it into the club letter-box. Then he read Irene’s communication. It was a request that he would attend a committee meeting of her Institution at half-past eight. Gerard was engaged and could not come. She reproached him for his absence, was anxious for a talk with him, had addressed him at the club on the chance of catching him.

Long custom had caused him to regard such requests as commands. To please her he would have broken many engagements. At half-past eight he found himself in the committee room, and seated at the table by the side of Irene who had reserved a place for him. The business concluded, they went back to Sunnington together by the District Railway.

“What have you been doing with yourself all this time?” she said, as soon as they were settled comfortably in the train.

“Oh, lotus-eating, generally,” he replied.

“I thought so.”

“Why?”

“It is said to impair the memory. You seem to have forgotten all about us.”

“I accept the rebuke,” he answered, meekly. “Now tell me all that I have been oblivious of.”

She gave him her little budget of news, aware that he would give no further information as to his own doings. She spoke of the waif she had rescued.

“You have no idea how strong and bonny she looks. I have been canvassing for votes for the St. Katherine schools. The election is next week. I think she’ll get in.”

“But I had an idea you were going to keep her,” said Hugh.

“So had I. I shall miss her dreadfully. It would be so nice to adopt a child. But Gerard thought this would be better for her—and he’s so wise, you know.”

The idea of her husband’s goodness and wisdom brought tenderness into her eyes, changing her expression to one of wonderful simplicity. Hugh made no reply, but leaned back and watched her across the compartment which they alone occupied. The central light, that fell full upon her, showed nothing, in her face, of the practical, capable woman of affairs, only the soft charm of girlhood, that lingered still in her eight and twenty years. Presently she bent forward.

“Why do you look at me like that?” she asked, smiling.

“I was dipping into the poem of your face, and reading my favourite bits,” he replied, half seriously.

“What are they?”

“Oh, I am not going to talk Shakespearian comedy to you,” he answered, laughing. “So you needn’t expect it.”

The jest put her into a mood of light frivolity. They discussed faces. Some were sermons, some were Hymns, Ancient and Modern, some were comic operas, some were post-office directories, whilst others were the collected works of minor poets. She wondered what her own was. Hugh suggested an ode. The comparison pleased her and she thanked him prettily. Really, she had been a most ugly child. Just as if she had been at a feast of features and stolen the scraps. The foolish chat took them to Sunnington. He walked with her as far as the gate of her house.

“When are you coming to dinner?”

“The day after to-morrow,” he said, after a moment’s reflection.

He shook hands with her and turned homeward with a buoyant step. He felt happy, exhilarated, a different man from the bereaved and depressed bridegroom who had set out in the morning. The day had opened with a wretched sense of loss; it closed with a glad consciousness of gain. He wondered at the change. The fact was that the small but varied incidents of the day, bringing him into close touch with the external world of work, action, thought and sympathy, had stimulated a somewhat flagging moral energy. He was conscious of this as he dwelt upon them. Yes, these were the things that made life worth the living. These together formed the heart of life. Without them he would perish of inanition. Love, even sweet, wedded love a fortnight old, was but the fringe, the grace, the colour, the what you will of adornment of life; but its heart—ah, no! He was honest and dishonest with himself at once. The conviction that he had spent his first day of absence from his wife, in whole-hearted enjoyment of the outer world, was too absolute for him to accept it otherwise than frankly. But deep down in his soul were warning glimmerings of a truth to which he defiantly blinded his eyes—glimmerings that duskly revealed a love that might be the heart of life, rich, throbbing, vitalising, such as his feelings for Minna were not.

He drew her letter from his pocket and read it through again. His heart smote him sorely for not feeling more miserable. Instinctively he conjured up the hours of sweet intoxication and caught at their lingering glamour.

“Poor little girl,” he said aloud, rising to his feet. “How wretched she must be at this moment.”

He sat down at his writing-table.

“Sweet little wife,” he began, “I would that you were with me now.” And, for the hour, he was quite sincere.

CHAPTER VI

“I HAVE something serious to say to you, my daughter.”

The speaker was Israel Hart. The place, his study, a commodious apartment overlooking the front drive, of which the most striking features were a great library table and a solid iron safe. The time was a mid-autumn Sunday afternoon. A cheerful fire showed up the warmth of a Turkey carpet, and cast flickering gleams upon the varnished surfaces of the three oil pictures on the walls. The money-lender was sitting at the table, with some correspondence in front of him, when he greeted Minna, who had come in obedience to a summons, with this announcement. He was a man of over sixty, stout and loose-featured, with grizzling hair and beard. His race was clearly written on his countenance, which bore, too, that stamp of his calling which can best be suggested negatively as an absence of spirituality. The absorbing pursuit of money hardens the eyes and leaves the lower part of the face undetermined. One meets a thousand such, morning and evening, in suburban trains. Yet the face of Israel Hart was not without marks of integrity and even of a certain benevolence.

Minna crossed the room slowly to the fireplace and rested one small shoe on the fender.

“Yes, papa?”

“I have here a formal letter from my good friend, Simeon Goldberg, which I wish you to read.”

“About marrying me?”

“Yes. It deals exclusively with the subject.”

“What is the use of my reading the letter?” she said, without shifting her attitude, and ignoring the letter which her father had wheeled round in his chair in order to offer her. “I can guess what’s in it. Oh, dear! Why does he worry?”

“I desire you to read it, Minna,” said her father. She moved, took it from him, read it nonchalantly, with a contemptuous smile, and threw it, with a woman’s charming awkwardness in throwing, upon the table.

“I might be shares in a new company he was asking you for. Do I look like a scrip or a bond? I won’t have him, of course, but when you write to him, tell him that that’s not the way to win a woman with blood in her veins.”

“You’re a foolish girl, Minna. If you have any kind of regard for my wishes you will give this matter further consideration. Where will you, Minna Hart, find a better match?”

“Oh, in a penny box!” she cried, flippantly.

“At least it would have some latent fire at the end of it!”

“You will regret it,” said her father.

“It will be something to do, then. Tell him I’ll try. It may soothe his vanity.”

“Come here, my daughter,” said the old man.

She moved obediently to his side and put her hand in his that was held open.

“You and I have managed to drift quite apart, but I am your father and must think for you. What are you going to do, when I am gone, if you don’t get some good man to take care of you?”

She looked at him rather pityingly. It was such a futile question. Her undeveloped sympathies saw only its ludicrous, not its pathetic side.

“Oh, I shall marry some day,” she said, lightly. “You need have no fear of that.”

“Ay. But whom?”

She shrugged her shoulders and tapped her toe on the carpet with a shade of irritation. It was ridiculous to stand there like a tableau vivant, holding her father’s hand.

“Think of Simeon Goldberg, a good friend, a man not so careless in observance of the Law as we—but still of the Reformed faith—and worth”—his voice grew unconsciously reverential—“five hundred thousand pounds, if he’s worth a penny.”

The girl’s eyes flashed for a second, then grew again contemptuous.

“It’s an absolute impossibility. You must let this drop, papa. We don’t live in the Middle Ages when you could put me on bread and water and lock me up until I consented; or in patriarchal times, when you could curse me for disobeying you—so why discuss the matter further? I shall marry in my own good time. I am not the sort that old maids are made of.”

He released her hand and turned towards the table. “Very well,” he said, taking up a pen, “I will not force you. But remember that your choice among our people is limited.”

“I might choose outside them,” she said, pausing in her lazy walk towards the door.

Israel Hart started round in the chair and bent his brows upon her. She tried saucily to meet his eyes, but hers sank abashed.

“My daughter,” he said, sternly. “Let me never hear you say such a thing again, even in jest. Remember you are a Jewess.”

She stood for a moment or two twitching her fingers, longing to retort. But she did not dare. It was only when she found herself outside his door that she gave vent to the passionate outburst:

“Would to God the accursed race had perished with the other ten tribes!”

She went upstairs to her bedroom with anger and foreboding at her heart, and put on hat and jacket, casting mere mechanical glances at the mirror, for the sake of adjustment. Six months before, her dressing to meet Hugh had been a matter of sweet and import and coquetry. She looked, however, very pretty in her dark-blue costume, with dainty ruffle at her throat when she met him three-quarters of an hour later in Kensington Gardens. He was walking moodily up and down the broad walk, near their appointed meeting place; but when he caught sight of her he quickened his step.

“I am sorry I’m late,” she said, with some petulance; “but when you will make me take these long journeys——”

“It is not my fault, dear,” he said, casually. “I told you I was lunching at Lancaster Gate and was going to put in a call near by before dinner. It was my only hour.”

“Oh, well, never mind. I’m here now. It was papa who kept me. I’ve been discussing matrimony with him.”

“In the abstract, or——”

“Both. It began with the all too concrete Goldberg. Refusing him, I’m to marry an abstract Jew or the curse of Abraham will fall upon me.”

“Be more precise, if you don’t mind,” he said seriously.

She gave him a detailed account of the conversation, picturesquely satiric. Hugh listened sombrely, holding his stick with both hands behind his back, as they strolled slowly down among the fallen leaves.

“So he’ll never consent,” she concluded. “I suppose we’ll have to wait until—well—the ordinary way of nature. He’s an old man.”

“We mustn’t think of that, my child,” said Hugh, with some gentleness.

“I don’t see why not. It will solve all our difficulties.”

“What a mixture of flint and flesh you are, Minna,” he said, regarding her curiously.

“I never pretend to love where I don’t,” she replied. “And when people thwart me I begin to dislike.”

They walked on a little in silence, turned and retraced their steps. The dusk began to gather round them and the autumn mist to hang upon the thinning branches. Minna shivered a little and took his arm.

“Why don’t you say something kind to me, Hugh dear?” she said, plaintively.

He stooped and kissed her, and they went on their way less far apart than before. Presently she asked him where he was going to dine.

“At the Merriams.”

“I wish to goodness you wouldn’t!” she exclaimed, petulantly.

“My dear girl, because I am secretly married to you, I am not going to give up my dearest and oldest friends.”

“I hate them. You know I do.”

“It’s a pity, my dear, but it can’t be helped. And haven’t we discussed this rather too often lately?”

“You do very little to please me,” she said.

“I would do anything in reason.”

“If you loved me, you would not think of reason.”

“Look here, Minna,” said Hugh, losing patience, “what do you want? Of course I love you. But as things are, I must lead my own life. If you were always with me, there would be modifications—naturally. I am getting as tired of this half and half state as you are. I was going soon to approach your father on the subject. But what you have told me this afternoon has somewhat disturbed my plans. We must wait a little longer. But in the meantime——”

“I don’t mind waiting at all,” she interrupted. “It isn’t that.”

“Well, what is it, dear, that I can do for you?”

“I see so little of you—and you don’t seem to care. If you go on like this, I feel I shall grow to dislike you—and you are my husband—and oh, darling, I want you so sometimes!”

All the seductive richness in her voice toned the last appeal. Hugh’s conscience pricked him. He had of late felt himself drifting far from her and had made no efforts to reapproach. Now, however, the pathetic and languorous appeal caused him to bend his head very tenderly.

“Tell me what to do, sweetheart.”

“Ah! you know,” she murmured.

“The window?”

She pressed his arm tightly. “I shall go to sleep so happy.”

So he promised and the girl’s face brightened. Soon afterwards they parted. Minna drove homewards in a cab, kissing her hand to him as it moved off, and Hugh walked along towards Lancaster Gate, deep in troubled thought. It was an ill-starred marriage, already he regretted his folly and his weakness. If they had shared the same home, living a common life, he felt that he could have maintained a constantly tender attitude towards her, by means of a passive acceptance of his lot. But in the present circumstances, the nature of things demanded of him active demonstration. The necessary intriguing was repugnant to him. To visit his wife like a thief in the night was an act from which he shrank as from something mean and degrading. A passionate love would have swept away pettier feelings. It is only such a love that laughs at locksmiths; a waning passion be-bestows on them irritable curses. The prospect of entering The Lindens, late at night, by a window which Minna secretly unlatched, and creeping thief-wise up the stairs to her apartments, had lost its edge of romance. He had promised, however, and it became a disagreeable duty.

It damped his spirits for the evening. Even Irene could not cheer him. Conversation degenerated into futile bar gossip between Gerard and himself, which they protracted sleepily till a late hour. When at last he found himself with Minna, who had taken infinite pains to make her beauty as attractive as possible, she reopened, with feminine inconsistency, the chapter of the Merriams and sent him away, after a little, angry and disheartened.

His unqualified refusal to allow his regard for her to affect his relations with his friends gradually magnified itself, through the girl’s jealousy, into a great wrong. Once at the turn of a road she met him with them face to face. The after-glow of laughter was in Irene’s eyes. Minna acknowledged their salute with sullen stiffness, and when Hugh fell back a pace and turned to her with outstretched hand, she dismissed him angrily. Her face wore the hardened expression he had seen on it once before. Then he had attributed it to strength. But now it seemed to reveal only sulky ill-breeding. A phrase defining her flashed through his mind. She looked common.

“What a peculiarly disagreeable young woman,” said Gerard, as he rejoined his friends.

Hugh winced. Although not ill pleased to see that Gerard had no suspicions of the relations between himself and Minna, the outspoken judgment on his wife was anything but gratifying.

He struggled, however, to atone by gentleness for his grievous fault in marrying her. But it was a futile task to try to convince a jealous, untrained girl, who reasoned from her appetites and argued from her passions. At last he gave it up with a helpless gesture of impatience.

“It seems beyond your nature to comprehend the bond between the Merriams and myself,” he said, one day.

She laughed scornfully. “It would appeal to the meanest understanding. ‘A man and his wife and the Tertium Quid.’”

It was the first time she had made such an insinuation. A second passed before he could quite realise the scope of her words. Then the anger blazed in his eyes and the girl shrank back frightened.

“If you ever say such a silly and wicked thing again,” he said, “I will not speak to you again as long as I live.”

He left her there and then, in the middle of the road, and returned homewards with angry strides. The first available post brought him a repentant letter. A semblance of harmony was re-established. Thenceforward Minna kept silence concerning Irene, but she none the less harboured a bitter resentment against her husband. The habit of brooding over grievances grew into a disastrous occupation. They rarely spent a non-recriminative hour. The issue of dispute, no longer Irene, became in turns his work, his social engagements his neglect, his aloofness, even his Gentile birth and inherited instincts.

And so the dreary months wore on. At last certain horrible fears that had been vaguely haunting the girl’s ignorance developed into certainties. The prospect of maternity was inexpressibly repugnant to her idle, sensuous nature. The thought became a nightmare. So bitterly did she resent Hugh’s attitude towards her, that she shrank from telling him. At last she made up her mind, wrote to him asking for an interview at his chambers. He replied that he would be engaged in court at the time she mentioned, and regretted that he could not see her until the next day. Quite an affectionate and courteous letter from a busy and unsuspecting man. But it sent her into an unreasoning passion of anger. She tore the letter into tiny fragments, ordered her boxes to be packed and went off forthwith to Brighton.

It was only a fortnight afterwards that Hugh received a letter from Anna Cassaba telling of an accident, illness and a premature end of troubles. In consternation he took the first train down. Minna refused to see him. Old Anna was in great distress. Hugh’s handsome face and proud bearing had won her heart. To act the stern janitress taxed all her love for her darling. She sought to alleviate his disappointment, suggested that women often had strange, unaccountable fancies and aversions. Better to leave the poor child alone for the present. When she recovered she would be her own gay self again—forget the irrational dislike she had conceived for him, love him with all her old love and there would yet be a bonny babe of theirs for old Anna to dandle on her knees before she died.

The man’s pity and tenderness were wonderfully quickened. If she had willed, he would have folded her in his arms and made her sick bed sweet. He scribbled a hasty line.

“Darling—I am grieved to the heart. Your husband loves you, dear, with a fresher love. Let me tell you so—and tell you to get well, when all things will be different and dear again.”

The old woman took the note to Minna. He crept up to the bedroom door, listened, heard the faint rustle of the paper in her hands, and then came her voice, irritable and peevish:

“Tell him to go away and let me be.”

So Hugh returned to London heavy-hearted, with a gnawing sense of having ruined the girl’s life. The weeks went past. Early in the New Year Minna returned to her father’s house, looking ill and worn. Israel noticed the change, grew solicitous as to her well-being. Why had she not told him she had been poorly at Brighton? He would have given her all the care and nursing that money could provide. His kind words caused her a faint stirring of emotion—an adumbration of a tenderness that might have been; and as the loneliness and aimlessness of her life grew more oppressive, an instinct of self-preservation drew her nearer to his side. The horror of her illness still clung to her. It was a kind of Maccabre dance over her dead passion. Yet she was conscious of wrong done to Hugh, and received him kindly when he came to see her one afternoon shortly after her return. He was anxious to make reparation.

“We are bound together for the rest of our lives, dear,” he said. “Perhaps it was a mistake to begin with—and certainly the secrecy has been a terrible blunder. Let us brave it all out now and be done with it, and start life afresh.”

“Do you think we can ever be happy again together?”

“My dear little girl, I have wronged you—but I will try to make amends. I have a certain position in society—even if you don’t love me, your life will be brighter than it is now.”

She leaned back in one of her indolent attitudes. “Perhaps. Not now. I am afraid of my father. He might curse me—and that would be annoying.” Hugh paused, somewhat baffled at this new idea. “They will be merely words of anger,” he replied. “It will not be long lived.”

But she shook her head. It was better to wait. Perhaps she might gradually influence him—and then all would be smooth sailing. Hugh saw an element of reason in her proposal, and for a time returned to his briefs. For his own sake, he was not loth to postpone the announcement. The debt to Israel weighed heavily upon his conscience. But as long as his marriage remained a secret, and as long as his uncle lived, he could spare himself the galling reproach of trickery. Meanwhile his practice was showing signs of improvement. A brilliant cast might land him at a bound into affluence, and then he could raise the money, cry quits with the urbane and gentle mannered Shylock on the score of his ducats, and brave his reproaches on the score of his daughter. Thus doth hope spring eternal in the human breast.

But unforeseen action on the part of old Anna Cassaba suddenly hastened events. She let her house in Brighton for an indefinite period, and announced her return to Smyrna. A lawsuit had arisen over some property which Minna’s Syrian mother had bequeathed to the old nurse, and which formed the chief source of her comfortable income. Anna was summoned to look after her interests. The nostalgia of her native East, which she had not visited for over twenty years, grew strong upon her. She could not tell how long she might be absent from England.

Minna contemplated her departure with sinking heart. Anna was the saving spar to which she clung. Sheltering her, temporarily, in her own dressing-room at The Lindens, Minna wept in her arms and implored a speedy return. The old nurse cried, too, and spoke of death, as old folks will, and comforted her in such wise that at last the girl grew desperate in her anticipated desolation. The result was a sudden determination that Hugh should speak.

“I have come to the end of my tether,” she said to him. “Anything would be better than this. I’ll get papa to ask you to dinner. He likes you, and has been enquiring why you come so seldom now.”

In the course of a day or two he received and accepted an invitation for the following Monday. He felt happier. The die was cast. If Hart called him a scamp for thus tricking him out of five thousand pounds, he would bear it as an atoning humiliation for Minna’s sake. He prepared to go through the ordeal with an air of disdain. But in his category of scorn he himself was included.

CHAPTER VII

“H E saved Gerard’s life? What nonsense! If he had, I should have heard about it.”

Irene spoke warmly. The person she addressed was Harroway, an elderly solicitor, an intimate friend of Hugh and the Merriams. His wife Selina, who had brought him to pay an afternoon call on Irene, watched with amused serenity the discomfiture on his broad and benevolent face.

“It isn’t nonsense,” he protested. “I’m not in the habit of talking nonsense, I assure you. Am I, Selina?”

“A wife’s testimony isn’t evidence,” replied Mrs. Harroway.

“But what do you mean?” asked Irene, growing serious.

“Literally what I said. Have you never heard?”

“No.”

“It was in Switzerland, years ago. Chevasse, who was on the trip with them, told me. The two were roped together, suddenly fell and dangled over a precipice, Colman lowest. The guide on top couldn’t hold them up. The rope was slipping. So Colman whipped out his knife and cut himself off.”

“And then?”

“Oh, then the guide hauled Gerard up safe and sound.”

“But Hugh?”

“When they looked over to identify the spot where his pulp was lying, they saw him half way down, miraculously caught on a jag of rock. You might try the game twenty million times without it succeeding. I’ve had the place pointed out to me. And there he remained some hours clinging on between heaven and earth.”

Irene closed her eyes with a shiver.

“Don’t,” she said. “You make me sick.”

“Funny that Gerard never told you of it, for a clearer case of saving life at the obvious sacrifice of one’s own, I have never heard of.”

Irene’s hand trembled a little as she poured out the tea. Mrs. Harroway, unobserved, shook her head reproachfully at her husband, who, interpreting her action rightly, plunged into irrelevant observations. But at that moment Gerard entered the room. Irene turned to him at once impulsively.

“Oh, Gerard, Mr. Harroway has been telling me a horrible story of Hugh saving your life in Switzerland. Is it true?”

A shade of annoyance passed over his face.

“Yes,” he replied. “I remember his doing something of the kind.”

“Oh, do let us talk of something cheerful,” said Mrs. Harroway; and she led the conversation to ordinary topics until the end of the visit.

When the Harroways had gone, Irene sat on the arm of Gerard’s chair.

“Why did you never tell me?”

He grew red, fidgeted awhile with his hands. At last, looking up, and seeing her luminous eyes fixed upon him, he said, gravely:

“There are certain things that a man keeps in his own heart.”

The solemnity of the saying somewhat awed her. “And Hugh never spoke either.”

“Of course not,” said Gerard.

“What an unpayable debt we owe him.”

“We’ll pay it all right when the time comes.”

“What little things women are when compared with men,” said Irene. “We could never have kept a fact like that locked up in our souls.”

Gerard accepted the tribute with his usual reserve. As his wife knew, he was not a man to waste words over sentiment. She uttered what she felt were his thoughts.

“I didn’t understand your not telling me. But now I do. Those things, when unspoken of, knit two men more firmly together.”

She was silent for a moment; then changing her tone and grasping Gerard’s arm:

“We won’t speak of it again, either,” she said. “It is horrible to think of. And what should I have done without you?”

The servant entering to remove the tea things was a signal for Irene to dress for dinner. She left the room, and then Gerard rose, and, walking to the window, took out his pocket handkerchief and wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

The result of her knowledge of this fact in the lives of Hugh and Gerard was an added tenderness of gratitude in her feelings towards the former. During the past few months he had been slipping somewhat apart from her. He had lost his old buoyancy of manner, and it was easy for her feminine intuition to perceive that the change had some radical cause. Now she blamed herself for not having taken the initiative, and offered him more openly the aid of her friendship. The chance of doing so occurred on the following Sunday, when, in response to an urgent little note, Hugh came to lunch. Gerard was absent. Business had summoned him to Edinburgh, where he was likely to remain some time. The two sat down to table alone together, and, while the servant was in the room, talked of divers matters: the waif who had been admitted into St. Katherine’s school, the Institution which was flourishing, and extending its sphere of benevolence. At last she touched upon literary matters.

“When are we to see a new volume?”

He lifted his shoulders slightly, and fingered the stem of his old German wine glass.

“When I have regained my lost youth,” he said, ironically. “One must have enthusiasm even for that kind of rubbish. Don’t look so concerned,” he added, with a laugh; “I’m not hypochondriac yet. My view of life is only growing a little more materialistic, that is all. I share Peter Bell’s conception of the primrose.”

He quoted the lines jestingly, and, the meal being over, drew out his cigarette case and began to smoke.

“You are talking for the sake of talking,” said Irene. “I wish you wouldn’t. Hugh,” she continued, with a certain shy softness that had its charm, “don’t be vexed with me. Tell me what is changing you. You know that I owe to you the existence of all that is dearest to me in the world, and I long so to pay you back a little in the help that friendship can give.”

“You can’t do it now, Renie,” he said, abruptly. “Afterwards you may. That is, if you and Gerard don’t think me a pitiful scamp. You won’t have long to wait.”

The sudden realisation that this was perhaps the last of the brotherly meals he should have with her, dismayed him. In a few days he would be either the acknowledged betrothed or the acknowledged husband of another woman—her bitterest enemy. The old dear order had changed. Hitherto he had held a unique and delicate position in her thoughts, that of the loyal friend and honourable lover. Henceforward he would be another woman’s husband, which would make an immeasurable difference. He looked round the familiar walls of the cosy dining-room, and then with unconscious wistfulness upon her face in profile. To him there was none more beautiful in all the world. The broad forehead; the delicate, sensitive nose; the strong, pointed chin; the mobile, faintly coloured lips; the eyes capable of great passion, yet showing habitually a grave and luminous kindness; the noble up sweep of her hair from the temple contours, giving an impression of queenliness; the soft, fair gold of her hair itself, crowning her head too lightly to be a crown and too individually to be a halo; the head poised with tender dignity upon a broad, full throat—all the conflicting features combined harmoniously together to form in a lover’s eyes a face telling of a great and tender womanhood. And the picture of that other rose before him, beautiful, too, in its sensuous duskiness, yet stamped forever with his own condemnation of commonness. His glance grew troubled as it met Irene’s.

“There is nothing in the wide world that we would not do for you, Hugh,” she said.

“Doing is one thing,” he replied. “Letting things go on is another, I’m afraid you’ll come to look upon me as a blackguard, and that must make some difference.”

“Nothing will make any difference in our love for you. So long as Gerard and I sit opposite here, there will be your place always between us. Besides, the idea of your being a blackguard is simply silly!”

He laughed in spite of his depression. Her tone was emphatic.

“I believe you’d champion me through a grand jury list of iniquities. I wish you could have split yourself into two in the years past, Renie. You would have kept me out of mischief.”

It was Irene’s turn to look troubled.

“Do you know, Hugh,” she said in a low voice, “that lately I have feared I may have spoiled your life.”

“Ah, my dear child,” he cried, regaining in a flash all his old vehemence, “it is not the missing of the angel’s touch that spoils a man’s life. He is singularly fortunate to come within the beat of her wings.”

“Thank you,” she said, blushing very prettily. “That is like your old, extravagant self.”

For a long time afterwards the colour remained in her face. Thousands of women have been called angels, and have thought little of it. But not one has felt otherwise than tremulously abashed when the similitude has come from a man’s worshipping sincerity.

But that was the end of the conversation. Irene had said her say, and no more was to be gained by dwelling on the topic.

When he had gone, she settled down to her correspondence. But for a long while she sat biting the end of her quill pen.

“I wonder who she can be,” she said, musingly. Of course it was a woman. She passed in review all their common acquaintance; then shook her head with a smile. This disturbing element in Hugh’s life lay outside the circle. The image of Minna Hart never presented itself before her thoughts. For Irene had large ideas, and pictured the woman as one of commanding intelligence and brilliant personality. How else to account for the folly of so vigorous a manhood as Hugh’s? A noble man, a noble choice. Foolish—but sublimely so. She knew little of the ways of men, judged them according to her own ideals. For her life had been spent singularly apart from men. Her mother, a delicate woman, unable to bear the Indian climate, had brought her up in quiet seclusion. She had been a choice spirit, a weaver of dreams, one whose presence is felt like the moonlight through Gothic tracery, a writer of flower-like fairy tales for children, an ethereal being whom it was Irene’s impassioned mission to shelter from the rough winds. Her father, once a soldier with a V. C. in the Mutiny, afterwards a commissioner of a great Indian province, had appeared to her in brief spells of leave, invested with a halo of glory. On her mother’s death, she had gone out heartbroken to join him, but only to learn, on arrival at Bombay, that she was fatherless. And then, for the first time, men, Gerard and Hugh, had come into her life—and she saw them as gods walking. The years had mellowed into a strong, homogeneous character her inherited qualities—the mother’s delicate womanliness, the father’s daring and power of leadership—and busy contact with the world had developed the acuteness of her judgment; but the ideals of the girl survived, unprofaned by vulgar touch. The two men to whom she had given her love and friendship still remained as gods, above the baser passions and meaner follies of mankind.

Suddenly a face flashed before her, as that, possibly, of the mysterious woman who was involved in Hugh’s life. She had never seen it in the flesh; only a photograph of it some years ago, in Hugh’s rooms, when she was lunching there with Gerard. She had taken a book from the shelves and the portrait had fallen out. It represented a woman, tall, resplendent, haughty, cruelly beautiful. The eyes, even in the photograph, glittered coldly and dangerously. Irene had uttered a little cry of surprise and admiration. Hugh had taken it from her hands.

“A great beauty,” she had remarked.

“Yes. La Belle Dame sans merci.”

“Her eyes are cruel.”

“They are ophidian. I don’t like you to look at them,” he had replied, throwing the photograph into a drawer. And then he had said, with a smile: “They belong to ‘old unhappy far-off things, and battles long ago.’”

Did they? That was the question she now put to herself, and vainly tried to answer. It is permitted even to the most confiding of women to entertain occasional doubts as to the ingenuousness of bachelor friends.

At last she drew a sheet of note-paper from the stationery case in front of her and inscribed the date. But she paused, and gazed absently at the wall, her mind full of Hugh’s dilemma. She felt an unaccountable dislike for the woman with the ophidian eyes. Presently she broke into a little laugh.

“I do believe I am jealous! I must tell Gerard.”

CHAPTER VIII

An anxious face met Hugh as he was shown into the drawing-room. Minna had grown into a woman since her illness, and had hardened considerably during the process. Instead of the lazy uplifting of silky lashes, veiling swimming eyes, with which she had been wont to greet him, she met him with a glance as keen as his own. The racial spirit of bargain revealed itself in her expression. Once more he was struck by the latent power of strength and hardness. She wore a dark red dinner dress and heavy gold bracelets, and a diamond star shone in the dark clusters of her hair.

“I am glad you have come early,” she said, receiving his kiss mechanically. “I wanted to have a word with you before papa comes down.”

They walked slowly to the fireplace and stood turned towards each other, leaning against the mantelpiece.

“Well?” he said.

“When are you going to tell papa?”

“After dinner—‘over the walnuts and the wine.’”

“Don’t. Wait until you have said good-bye to me.”

“How shall I let you know the result? You will be anxious.”

“Do you mind coming to me afterwards—the old way?”

“Not at all. But I shall have to wait outside until the house is quiet.”

“There will be a nice fire upstairs to warm you.”

“And my wife’s heart?”

“That depends,” she replied, with a curious smile. “Shall you be perishing for it?”

“We must try to win back to each other again, Minna,” he said, stretching out his hand so as to touch lightly her cheek. “It will not be hard, for circumstances will be more favourable than they have been. I am afraid I haven’t played a very noble part, my dear—and when a man is conscious of that, he vents his spleen upon others. That’s not very noble either, but it’s miserable human nature. Do you understand?”

“I am glad you see that you have treated me badly,” she said. “At any rate it’s a hopeful beginning.”

The thought of her failure to grasp his meaning was dancing irritatingly in his mind as he stepped forward to greet Israel Hart, who at that moment entered the room.

“Very pleased to see you, Mr. Colman. Sorry I’m late. Kept in the city. Cold, isn’t it?”

He rubbed his soft palms together and held them out to the blaze of the fire.

“How’s business? Been letting loose lots of lucky gaol-birds lately?”

“Oh, we always believe firmly in our clients’ innocence,” retorted Hugh with a laugh.

“That’s more than I do in mine,” said the moneylender.

The young man returned a light answer, but curled his moustache, and drew himself up with unconscious haughtiness. The touch of vulgarity jarred upon him. When one has to humble one’s pride before a man, one is apt to become supersensitive of such things. Unfortunately for Hugh, Israel evinced a more genial and familiar mood than usual, and, during the elaborate meal that followed, allowed himself privileges of allusion that a finer taste would have restrained. Aware of the senselessness of feeling chafed at what, on other occasions, he would have let pass almost unnoticed, Hugh conversed with a great outward show of good-humour. But once or twice he caught Minna’s eyes fixed on him in a malicious smile, which irritated him still further. The courses seemed infinite. His host referred to each, now praising the merits of his cook, now estimating its money value. As he grew more genial, the more did he throw off the cloak of breeding that at times he well assumed, and display the inevitable, impregnating colour of his mind. To the man of artistic temperament money had no intrinsic value. It merely represented power over the beauty and charm of life. To the Jew financier, the making of it was an absorbing pursuit. Its possession was an end in itself. He had his being in an atmosphere of money; could scarcely conceive different environment—just as the average gamekeeper cannot realise a life in which rabbits and partridges play no part. As the bookmaker talks inevitable turf, so Israel talked inevitable money.

“Has my daughter ever shown you those bracelets, Mr. Colman? They’re almost historical. Been in a great nobleman’s family for centuries. Take one off and show it to Mr. Colman. The present countess came to grief horse-racing—applied to me for money. Those were part of the security. The same lady tried to do me with some paste diamonds, but I was down too sharp. Solid things, aren’t they?”

“I come in for a lot of the plunder, don’t I, papa?” said Minna, gaily.

Hugh winced. Hitherto she had always expressed the profoundest distaste for her father’s profession. Was this speech genuine, was it pure malice, or was its intention that of keeping a stern parent in good-humour? To save the situation he handed it back to Minna with a little courtly bow.

“It has never adorned a fairer arm,” he said.

Minna’s quicker ear caught an ironical note, and she bit her lip. But Israel was delighted.

“I like to hear a young man pay a pretty compliment,” he said, rolling back in his chair. “The art is dying out.”

When Minna rose, Hugh held the door open for her. On passing him she whispered:

“You are making a wonderful impression; keep it up.”

He bowed, closed the door upon her and came round to the fire, hating the part so bluntly defined by his wife. To have to cajole this somewhat vulgar old Jew of shady profession, his actual father-in-law! It was trailing his pride in the mud. But he had been doing so ever since the disastrous day of his marriage. A little extra soiling, he reflected cynically, would make but faintly appreciable difference.

The grave butler entered with coffee and cigars. Hugh declined the latter.

“Better have one,” said Israel, carefully selecting. “Don’t get this sort of thing every day. I give seven pound ten a hundred for them.”

“I am a cigarette smoker,” said Hugh, “but still——”

He accepted a cigar courteously. For he knew that a man is apt to be ruffled when you refuse an eighteen-penny havana, and he had good reasons for not wishing to ruffle his host. Presently they went upstairs. Minna moved to the piano. Usually she played with taste and correctness. To-night she strummed abominably.

“We are not quite in the mood for Chopin,” said Hugh, who was turning over her leaves. She stopped dead.

“No. This is more suitable to one’s irritation,” and she plunged into Stephen Heller’s Tarantella. The old man, dozing in his chair, did not notice the change.

“Don’t give it away at once,” she said in a low voice, as she played. “Begin with a formal demand in marriage and see how he takes it.”

“I shall do whatever seems to me judicious,” he answered, curtly.

“Remember I am an interested party,” she retorted. “There is such a thing as money to be considered, however much you may despise it.”

“You may trust to my not forgetting,” he replied.

The evening was over at last. He bade Minna good-bye.

“I should like to say a few words to you, Mr. Hart, before I go,” he remarked on his way downstairs. His host, cordiality itself, showed him into his study, poked the fire and lighted a cigar.

“Business?”

“Yes.”

“About the loan. I was wanting to discuss it. Best now, when we’re comfortable. Wait a moment—allow me. What is the chance of your being left a small legacy?”

“None whatever, I fear,” replied Hugh.

“It is devilish hard lines on me, Colman, you know. When I advanced you that money, I thought your inheritance was as safe as a mortgage. You are aware it is not my usual way of doing business. This is not an actual reversion; it’s only a convenient term. But I liked you, and somehow it’s pleasant now and then to do a friend a good turn.”

“I am deeply aware of all that,” said Hugh.

“And, as I mentioned, I considered the security safe.”

“So did I. You can scarcely blame me.”

“I believe you,” said the old man, cordially. “You meant to play square, I know. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, would you? But, all the same, if your uncle were to die to-morrow, I should be done out of £5,000. I don’t pretend to say that £5,000 would break me. Thank God I can run to six figures with something bigger than a ‘1’ in front any day, when all is called in. But money is money. Now, as a gentleman, would you feel morally justified in abiding by your legal rights?”

“No,” said Hugh, “I wouldn’t. But circumstances——”

“I know,” interrupted the money-lender, with upraised hand. “They aren’t quite yet what they ought to be. But you are going to be a successful man. They will alter. Now I have a friendly proposal to make to you.”

“And I am coming with one to you, Mr. Hart,” said Hugh, with a smile. “And I think you had better hear mine first. You consider me an honest man?”

“I do.”

“And you don’t disapprove of me personally?”

“On the contrary, I’m very pleased and proud to call you a friend of mine. You wouldn’t have had my money otherwise.”

“Then, Mr. Hart, you make easier what I have to say. It concerns your daughter, Miss Hart.”

“What? Minna—my daughter?” said the old man, with a sharp change of tone.

“I have the honour to ask you for her hand in marriage.”

“You!”

An indescribable change came over the old man’s face. Instantly it lost the sleek and coarse materialism of the money-getter, the half-sensual content of the easy-going man who has well dined, the patronising geniality of the prosperous host. A fire glowed in his eyes. His Jewish features seemed to grow more prominent. The grey beard framed a strange, patriarchal dignity. The Jew, proud and unconquered through centuries of oppression, overwhelming all other accidents of life in the eternal arrogance of race, was regarding, with angry and incredulous scorn, the Gentile, the hybrid child of yesterday.

“You!” he repeated, almost insultingly.

The young man’s quick blood flamed in his cheeks. He started to his feet.

“Yes, I. Why shouldn’t I?” he cried in a loud voice.

At that moment the door opened, and the butler entered, bearing a tray with spirit-case and glasses. Hugh turned quickly, and bent towards the fire with a spill, to light a cigarette. The butler set his trayload on the great library table, secured the windows of the room and drew the curtains, which had remained looped back.

“You need not sit up, Samuels,” said Israel. “I will let Mr. Colman out and lock up.”

With discreet thanks the butler withdrew. Hugh threw his cigarette into the grate, put his hands into his pockets and faced his host once more.

“I consider my proposal is quite justifiable, Mr. Hart.”

“Are you aware what you are asking?”

“Yes. I am a poor man. She is rich. I owe you money. But still——”

“Money? What has money to do with it?” interrupted the Jew, grandly. “If you had the rent-roll of the Grosvenors it would make no difference.”

“If it’s a question of religion—I always thought your views were latitudinarian.”

“I suppose Minna knows of this?” said Israel, apparently disregarding the remark.

“Certainly.”

“Mr. Colman, I have no wish to wound your feelings. But I would sooner have my daughter dead at my feet than see her married to a Christian.”

“Then it is useless to ask for your consent?”

“Quite useless.”

“In that case I fear we shall have to do without it. I am exceedingly sorry to cause you pain—but the marriage will take place.”

Israel rose from his chair and poured some whiskey into the glasses, and made a courteous motion with his hand towards the siphon of soda-water.

“We stand on opposite sides of a great gulf. I am a Jew. You are a Gentile. We need not discuss the question. I can’t restrain my daughter from carrying out her wishes. But I can solemnly curse her after the manner of my people, and cut her adrift from me for ever. I shall warn her. The wrath of the Almighty will be on her head. She will also be disinherited.”

“That will ease my mind of a great burden,” said Hugh.

“To show you that it is no animosity towards you personally that influences me,” continued Israel, with great dignity, inconceivable of the man of an hour before, “I will let you see a copy of my will made some time ago when the thought of you as a suitor never crossed my mind.”

He drew a bunch of keys from his pocket and opened the great safe. From a locked compartment he drew forth a document, and, folding it so that only the particular paragraph should be visible, he showed it to Hugh. Nothing could be more explicit. In the event of Minna marrying a Gentile all the estate would pass from her and be devoted to specified Jewish charities.

“I hope Minna will be able to persuade you to a more favourable view of the case,” said Hugh.

“My daughter can do many things, but not that. She despises her people, I know. But she shall marry among them or be cut off from our congregation for ever.”

“There seems nothing more to be said, Mr. Hart,” said Hugh.

“You quite realise that when my daughter leaves this house, the clothes that cover her will be her sole possession?”

“I have told you—I am immensely relieved. As to our business relations——”

“They can be discussed on a future occasion.”

Proud as he was of his birth and breeding, Hugh could not but be abashed before this pride of race that transformed the vulgar usurer into a gentleman of fine feeling. Israel’s words and attitude had not conveyed the slightest reproach on the score of fortune-hunting. He had cast neither his poverty nor his debt in his teeth. A great feeling of respect for the old man rose in his heart.

“Believe me,” he said after a turn across the room; “if fate would allow it, I would give up the idea for your sake.”

“We all make our destiny,” replied the old man, bitterly. “I have made mine.”

A few moments later Hugh took his leave. Israel accompanied him to the front door, shook hands with him, and, turning out the light in the hall, went back to his study. Then he remembered that he had forgotten to secure the door.

“I will do it afterwards,” he said to himself.

He picked up the will, glanced through it and replaced it in the safe. For half an hour he sat in deep thought; then rose, went upstairs and returned, bringing with him a small padlocked ledger. He sat down in his writing-chair by the table, but remained in deep thought, tapping the unopened book with his fingers.

“My own daughter—Sara’s child—married, to a Christian.”

Long he sat in an awful loneliness, his eyes dull and weary, looking at the spectres of the past. At length he took from a drawer at his side a double sheet of blue foolscap, and dipped a pen very slowly in the ink.

“I, Israel Hart, will and bequeath——”

“No,” he said. “Not now—I must think it out again. Ask God for guidance.”

He rose, put the paper in the fire, and sank into the great armchair close by. And there he sat, thinking, thinking. At last his eyelids closed and he slept.

Hugh went out into a night of utter blackness and icy sleet. Great splashes of half-melted snow fell against his face and oozed down in liquid. He made his way along the drive and out of the front gate. Dimly through the darkness the sound reached him of the Sunnington clock striking the half hour. Halfpast eleven. He would wait till twelve before keeping his appointment with Minna. A mile up the Heath Road and a mile back would fill up the time. He walked on through the darkness, splashing through the mud and drawing his head down into the collar of his ulster so as to keep the frozen rain from his neck. Not a soul was visible. On his return he saw a bull’s-eye lantern flash within the grounds of a house. It was a policeman examining the fastenings. Hugh hurried on, turned down the lane that led from the Heath Road to the wood and waste lands behind The Lindens. At last he came to the brick wall enclosing the property. A key in his possession opened a small side door leading into a garden which Minna’s caprice had made so exclusively her own, that entrance to it was not practicable from any portion of the grounds. On the right were green-houses, closing off egress from the back-while, following the line of the side of the house, a thick box hedge ran to meet the front wall, and thus separated the little pleasance from the front lawn, through which curved the carriage drive.

The house was in total darkness, scarcely discernible against the pitch-black sky. Hugh crossed the turf, walking warily so as to avoid the shrubs with which it was thickly planted, ever and anon thrusting his hand through the icy, dripping foliage.

“Thank Heaven this is the last time,” he muttered to himself.

He came to the house, to whose walls stretched the carpet of turf. A low verandah, reached by a flight of steps, and communicating with the interior by means of French windows, now closely barred, extended not quite the breadth of the building. Masking its end rose a tall clipped yew. Behind this he crept, and a low window, whose sash he lifted, thanks to Minna’s previous unbarring, admitted him into the house. It was a tiny chamber, used by Minna as a dark-room during an intermittent photographic fever.

Outside this was a heavily carpeted staircase, up which Hugh stole noiselessly.

The handle turned smoothly beneath his grasp, and he found himself at last in his wife’s presence. The large room was lit only by the leaping flames of the fire, that threw quick flashes on the richly curtained bed and the luxurious appointments of a wealthy woman’s bedchamber. In a long chair before the fire, the tips of fur-lined slippers thrust on bare feet, resting on the fender, lay Minna. She wore a rich dressing-gown, with lace at throat and wrists. Her dark hair clustered about her shoulders. A delicate odour of toilette-washes and powder hung on the warmth of the room. Hugh stopped for a moment on the threshold, with a little catch at his breath. The subtle charm of the woman’s shrine stole gratefully over him. After all, it was sweet to have the right of such intimacy. He took off his dripping ulster and laid it aside before coming forward. Then he stooped and kissed her.

“Oh! how wet you are!” she cried, with a little grimace, rubbing her cheek with her handkerchief. “Do come and dry yourself. You will find your slippers in the secret drawer, as usual.”

She handed him a key which she took from her dressing-gown pocket, and while he was changing his wet boots:

“Well?” she said. “What news?”

“Bad. Your father will not consent, because I am a Christian. We shall have to elope.”

“Then you haven’t told him all?”

“No. I thought it wiser. There seemed no necessity. It will be better for us to get married again—publicly.”

He drew up an armchair by her side, close to the fire, and, leaning forward, warmed himself appreciatively.

“It’s an infernal night. You don’t know how sweet and cosy it is here.”

“It was kind of you to come,” she said, with cold politeness.

Her tone chilled the reviving glow of his imagination, which already was beginning to picture gentle possibilities of their married life. He remained silent for some time. When he spoke again, it was in less genial accents.

“I am afraid, Minna, that in marrying me you have unwittingly made a tremendous sacrifice.”

“Not more than most women, I suppose.”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

With much tact and delicacy he put her in possession of all the details of his recent interview. She said not a word until he had finished, but clenched her fingers on the arms of her chair and looked rigidly into the fire.

“I had an awful horror of this,” she said, in a toneless voice.

“It will make an enormous difference to you. God knows I realise it. But, after all, we shall not starve.”

She darted a quick, sidelong glance at him, then, with a shudder, put her hands before her face.

“I knew it would be woe and misery,” she said, “whilst we were walking away from that horrible registrar’s office. Oh, God! I wish it had never been!”

“It need not be misery. It shan’t be misery, if I can help it.”

“You? You have robbed me of my birthright!”

“Perhaps your taunt is just, Minna,” he replied, a scornful generosity forgetting that with her had lain considerable initiative in the matter of the marriage.

“But it scarcely can mend our happiness.”

“Happiness!” she echoed, contemptuously. “A poky little house, and rechauffés dinners, and a cheap gown once a year. The gingerbread would have been pretty enough ten months ago. Now the gilt is off.”

With great patience, knowing that on him, the man, the stronger, the more rational, the less in love of the two, rested the responsibility of the disaster, he strove to reassure her, to paint their coming life together in the most cheerful colours. Grand style of living he could not offer her. But comfort, a certain social position, clever and bright society—all that was within his reach. He had done her a wrong in marrying her, would repair it by devoting the rest of his life to her happiness. He pleaded to a hardened heart. She either listened stonily or broke into petulant recriminations. The talk grew spasmodic, interrupted by long gaps of silence. Imperceptibly the night wore on. Once he noticed that she had fallen info a weary doze. He watched for a long time her face, lit up by the flickering flames. How hard and common and sullen it had grown! He read in it the history of the last few months—of her previous life—of her soul. A revulsion of feeling turned his heart against her and against himself. The man with ambitions and wide interests in the world of action revolted against the slavery to such a woman.

There was little use in staying longer. He rose to go. His movement startled her, and she opened her eyes.

“Don’t go yet. I am not asleep. I have been thinking.”

He sat down again, watched her as she looked into the fire with eyes that in the fantastic light seemed haggard, and waited for her to speak.

“I cannot forfeit my money,” she said. “It would kill me. Even if I loved you I couldn’t do it. And you have made me hate you. Our living together as you propose would be a ghastly mockery. I could not share the same room with you any more,” she continued, hurriedly, “not for millions!”

“I should not desire it,” he replied, coldly.

“Then why should we not keep our secret—as we have kept it—and part now, for ever and ever?”

She turned eager, imploring eyes upon him, yet hard as agates.

“I don’t quite understand,” he said.

“It is not difficult. You have told no one of our marriage?”

“Not a soul.”

“Is it likely that it will ever be made public from the registrar’s office?”

“Practically impossible.”

“Don’t you see, then? the only interested witness, is as faithful as a dog—the other witness and the registrar have forgotten our existence—don’t you see that for all practical purposes the fact of our marriage lies buried in a book in Brighton that no one will ever look at? that, if we give ourselves out as unmarried to the end of our lives no one will be a bit the wiser? We will never see each other again, except accidentally in the streets. We will wipe each other clean out of our lives and start afresh. Isn’t that possible?”

“Yes,” he replied, “it is perfectly feasible.”

“I shall keep my money—spend it as I like—go where I like. You shall be free to do whatever you want—marry, if you choose—why shouldn’t you?”

“It happens to be a felony,” said Hugh.

“That would be your own look out. I should never take any steps to prosecute, you may be quite sure. Will you give me the same freedom?”

“You must let me think before I answer,” he said.

“Take your time,” she replied, and lay back again in her chair, covering her eyes with her hands. For the second time Hugh replenished the fire. From outside came still the confused soughing of the wind, and strange creakings filled the sleeping house. The wing that Minna occupied was far apart from the other bedrooms. Only Anna, who was sleeping close by in Minna’s dressing-room, was within earshot. At any time they could talk in moderate tones and be secure from discovery; on this blustering night scarcely any caution was necessary. Absorbed in this final settlement of their lives, neither of them noted the passing of the hours. After a long interval of deep consideration, Hugh agreed to the main of her proposal, and there followed a full and anxious debate upon points of detail.

“What do you propose do to—to get through your life?” he asked at length.

“I shall go abroad—to gay places. I shall procure a companion to suit me—money can do most things. I may first go with Anna to Smyrna and hunt up my mother’s people. They may prove interesting. I can’t live on any longer here.”

“I thought not. It was to escape this that you were willing to live with me, had your father consented.”

“Exactly.”

Another long pause. Hugh viewed the new position in all its aspects. Humanly speaking, the secret of their marriage was exclusively their own. Anything like a reconciliation was out of the question. If he had spoiled her life by marrying her, he could make reparation by this irregular divorce. Yet he felt bound to give her old love one more chance.

“Are you certain, Minna, that you care for me no longer—in no way?”

“Oh, don’t re-open that,” she said. “All that was killed for ever—at Brighton—in December. And even if it wasn’t, do you think I could willingly give up two hundred thousand pounds for you?” She laughed scornfully. “You indeed set a high value upon yourself. Do you know,” she added with a sudden firmness, to which the deep tones of her voice gave a savage intensity, “I would commit any crime rather than give up that money? All such talk is useless. Let me have your final answer and be done with it.”

“Very well,” he replied, decisively. “I will grant you your absolute freedom on one condition: that this compact between us is irrevocable.”

“It shall be. Will you swear to it, on your side—a solemn, binding oath?”

“I give you my word of honour.”

“I don’t much believe in a man’s honour,” she said, contemptuously. “An oath is different.”

“I will do as you like,” he replied.

She rose, vanished for a moment among the shadows of the room, and returned with an Old Testament.

“I swear on this, by the God of my fathers, that in no circumstances whatever will I reveal the fact of my marriage with you. I renounce you for ever as my husband. I renounce all claims upon your support, sympathy, and consideration. I swear never to interfere in any shape or form with your actions, leaving you free to marry again without any previous notification to me. So help me God.”

She stood deadly pale, her teeth chattering, worn out by the stiffness and exhaustion of her long vigil, and handed him the book that she held in shaking fingers.

“Since you desire a formal oath,” he said, “I will take it in the form you have prescribed.”

And there he renounced her eternally as she had just before renounced him.

He looked at his watch. To his utter astonishment it was past six o’clock. With an exclamation of dismay, he set about preparing for departure.

How the night had passed so quickly he could not tell. “There is no need for you to keep these any longer,” he said, holding up the slippers. She herself had worked them for him in a fit of adoring industry.

“No. Nor the other things.”

She took a small bundle neatly wrapped up in brown paper and handed it to him. He thrust it beneath his arm.

“Good-bye, Minna,” he said, holding out his hand. “We did not swear to be enemies. May your new life be happier than the old.”

“It could not well be more miserable,” she answered. But she gave him her hand, cold and nerveless. “Poor child,” he said, “God help you.”

He turned, left the room, and then the house by the way by which he had entered. A fine snow was falling through the not yet lifting darkness. He hurried homewards blindly, thinking of nothing but the strange chapter of the night, his heart relieved already of enormous burdens, but his temples throbbing with the strain of casting them off.

He met not a soul until he had passed the Merriams’ house. Then, as he neared the town, dark, straggling figures of workmen passed him, trudging on sleepily through the snow and darkness.

The hall porter was just opening the great outer door of the mansion when he arrived. “Cold morning, sir,” said the porter. “Bitter,” he replied, mechanically, and he sprang up the stone stairs.

CHAPTER IX

He threw off his dress clothes with the repulsion that every man feels for such garments after an all-night sitting. He was tired out, capable only of attending to the trivial and personal things that immediately concerned him; thanked God, with the fervour which the average man expresses for none but the trifling mercies of Providence, that no case compelled his attendance in court at ten o’clock; stretched himself, yawned, stumbled shiveringly into bed, where, drawing the bedclothes tightly around him, he sank at once into the heavy sleep of the weary man. A confused sound broke upon his slumbers. In a waking dream it seemed to him that Minna was battering with a hammer at some formless material object which his mind identified as marriage. He awoke to find the noise that of knocking at his door. In reality, he had slept some hours, but he was conscious of only a few minutes’ repose. He called out angrily to be left alone. The knocking continued. He called out again. Then a strange voice was heard “Can I see you for a minute, sir?”

Exasperated, he jumped out of bed and opened the door.

“What the devil is it?”

He recoiled in some astonishment at the sight of Israel Hart’s butler, Samuels. The man looked greasy, unkempt, agitated. Behind him flashed the retreating figure of Mrs. Parsons, the porter’s wife.

“Come in, if you want to speak to me,” said Hugh, for the cold draught was sweeping down the passage through the open flat-door. Samuels obeyed.

“An awful thing, sir. I think you had better come round at once. My master was murdered during the night.”

If he had suddenly received a blow from a life-preserver, Hugh could not have been, for the moment, more stunned and dazed.

“Murdered—your master—last night?”

He stared at the man. It was inconceivable. The incredible horror of it was that he had passed the night, keenly awake, in the house. Israel Hart murdered, a few yards away from him, without uttering a cry, giving out a sound in the death-struggle—it passed realisation.

“Yes, sir, in his study,” said the butler with tears in his eyes and with quivering lips. “The housemaid found him at a quarter to seven this morning.”

“How did it happen?”

“Someone hit him with something heavy—just over here.”

The man passed his hand upwards from his temple to his skull.

“It has been terrible work this morning,” he added, with a shiver.

The first shock over, Hugh recovered his balance.

“I will come with you at once. Tell me the details while I dress.”

And while he hurried into his clothes and afterwards ate a crust of bread and drank a cup of coffee, Samuels told his story. In brief, what had occurred was this. The housemaid, coming to lay the study fire, had discovered her master lying huddled together on the hearth-rug. As she approached with her candle, a glance had showed her a streak of blood in his grey hair. She had screamed, rushed up to Samuels and given the alarm. He had come down, seen the body, recognised that life was extinct, had sent out at once for a doctor and a policeman. Pending their arrival, he had caused Miss Hart to be roused by her maid, and had remained in the study to prevent any of the servants disturbing the arrangements of the room. Miss Hart had come downstairs, wild with terror, and had fainted away, so that she had to be carried up to bed again. The policeman had come in the course of a few minutes, followed soon afterwards by the doctor, who was a near neighbour. Then the Inspector had arrived, and later a Scotland Yard official, and they were at present engaged in investigations. There did not seem to be the slightest clue. It was an awful mystery.

“And Miss Hart—how was she when you left?” asked Hugh, as they went down the steps of the mansion.

“It seems she came to very soon, sir,” answered Samuels, “and then she would dress and come down, and now she’s bearing up wonderfully. It was she and the Inspector that agreed you were to be fetched, as you were the last person—except the other—that saw him alive.”

“Yes,” said Hugh, “I remember him telling you to go to bed.”

“Oh, I saw him again after that, sir, when he went upstairs.”

“Then how could I be the last? Besides I thought he was found in the study—I don’t follow you.”

“He went upstairs to get something from his bedroom safe—and then went down again. I was seeing to the fire in his room—and he told me again to go to bed. I thought you were still there, sir.”

“What time was that?” Hugh asked, sharply.

“That was five minutes to twelve.”

“Oh, I left him at half-past eleven,” said Hugh.

They arrived at The Lindens. A knot of idlers were standing at the gates discussing the straws of information that floated among them. A policeman on duty marched slowly round the drive, his footprints indistinguishable from countless others that had broken up the thin and melting coat of snow. On the steps stood an Inspector in talk with a couple of pressmen, who were taking notes with red, cold fingers.

The Inspector touched his cap as Hugh came up.

“A shocking affair, sir. If you will go in I will see you in a moment.”

Hugh entered, went up to the fireplace in the hall and warmed his hands, wondering at the force of routine which had caused this fire to be lit on a morning of such upheaval. The slight sound of an opening door made him turn, and then he saw Minna’s pale and haggard face. She beckoned to him hurriedly and disappeared into the dining-room. He followed her, shutting the door behind him. The sight of the room brought a fresh shock of associations. Was there ever such a ghastly morrow to a feast?

Minna stood by the table, one hand behind her resting upon it, her eyes meeting his in dull defiance. She checked brusquely his first half-articulated exclamation of sympathy.

“Yes. I know all that you can tell me. We can’t waste time over it. Have you spoken to the Inspector?”

“Not yet.”

“Thank God I’ve seen you first. This does not interfere with our compact. You won’t say a word about seeing me last night?”

“Certainly not,” he replied, turning away from her with a feeling of repugnance. “As far as your father is concerned, I left this house at half-past eleven.” She closed her eyes with a sigh of relief.

“I was afraid you might betray me—not wilfully—but indiscreetly.”

“Has this been your dominant emotion all the time?” he said, harshly. “I am glad our ways lie separate.”

“I have my interests to protect,” she said.

He shrugged his shoulders, walked past her to the fireplace and leant his broad shoulders against the black marble mantelpiece. Her selfishness dumbfounded him. Her eyes bore no trace of tears, her attitude not a suggestion of grief. Ill and worn she looked; but from shock and strain and anxiety—not from sorrow. Had she no human feeling? And yet she was the same woman whose heart had throbbed with wild tumult against his; whose eyes had glowed with a burning passion in their slumberous depths; whose voice had melted into murmurings like the deep notes of the mating dove. Once he had compared her in his mind to a volcano. The aptness of the similitude occurred to him now. She had passed through her period of eruption. Now the molten fire of her nature was cold and unlovely lava.

She moved suddenly from the table with the dragging step of exhaustion, and flung herself into a chair and lay with her head bowed upon her arm.

“I know how you judge me,” she said, hoarsely. “You have always judged me, and that is one of the things that made me hate you. You think I ought to be in floods of tears. So I should have been, if it had not been for last night. But I must protect myself now or never. No one can do it for me. How was I to know that you would be discreet? I had ruin staring me in the face. I have strained every nerve to keep my wits till you came. You can’t tell the agony of the strain. How could you? And this awful horror overwhelming me. Oh, God—don’t you think I feel the horror of it?”

She did not raise her face, but remained with it buried on her arm in an attitude of profound prostration. Soon a shudder ran through her frame. She began to moan and sob. An impulse of pity brought him to her side.

“If I can be of any help to you, Minna, you only have to command me.”

But she did not heed him, only waved him away with her free hand.

“Go—leave me,” she said, scarce audibly.

“If you want me, send for me and I will come,” he said. He left her, went into the hall, where he found the Inspector. To the latter’s questions he gave what formal answers lay in his power. A news agency representative joined them soon afterwards. Gradually Hugh acquainted himself with all the meagre facts in the possession of the police. Mr. Hart had been killed outright by one blow of a blunt, heavy instrument. Death must have occurred during the small hours. The safe in the study was found open. The only article apparently missing from it was a black deed-box, which Mr. Hart’s confidential clerk, who had been summoned immediately, stated to have contained bonds. There were no other signs of robbery. A thorough inspection of the premises had discovered no traces of burglarious entry, the only possibility of which was by means of a window that had been left unsecured. Footprints there were none, owing to the slight fall of snow. For the present the police were entirely at a loss.

“Do you know if Mr. Hart had any enemies?” asked the Inspector.

“A man in his profession comes into intimate relations with many people whom he could not call his friends,” replied Hugh. “But I am not acquainted with any of his clients. As a private friend I always found him kind and generous.”

“Could you supply me with any details concerning his private life?” asked the pressman.

“I am scarcely in a position to do so,” replied Hugh, in a manner that precluded importunity.

He felt sick at heart, unhinged, and longed to be free from the sordid horror of the house. His own hidden yet intimate connection with the tragedy of the night oppressed him like an incubus. It was he who had started the poor old man upon a train of thought and emotion that had kept him from his bed, where the murderer, if safe-robbery had been his only aim, might not have sought him. It was he who was responsible for the unguarded window by which the murderer had entered. And, then, the fact that he had been beneath the same roof discussing with the daughter her inheritance, while the father was being done to death downstairs, loomed grotesquely hideous before his eyes. It was like a situation in some vulgar melodrama where simultaneous action is represented in two separate and adjacent interiors.

At last he escaped police officials and reporters and found himself in the Heath Road, glad to breathe the outer air again, grey and misty as it was, covering the heath like a pall. Outside the Merriams, he paused, seized with a sudden desire for the comfort of Irene’s voice and the sympathy of her clear eyes. Mere intimacy, too, required that he should inform her of the catastrophe. He entered with the latch-key which he possessed by virtue of his intimacy, and knocked at the door of the smoking-room, where Irene always worked in the mornings. As soon as he appeared on the threshold, she rose quickly from her writing-table.

“You have come to tell me—I know it. The whole of Sunnington knows it—a dreadful thing—that poor little girl!”

“I have just come from the house,” he said, gravely. “I had a short interview with her. It is a terrible shock, of course, but she is bearing it pretty well—better than I should have expected. You know I was dining there yesterday, so I was nearly the last person who saw him alive. For that reason they came to fetch me this morning.”

“Tell me what you know about it,” she said, drawing a chair towards him. He sat down and put her in possession of the facts, as far as they were known to the police. She listened intently, sitting by her writing-table, supporting her chin on her hand.

“And have they no clue at all?”

“None. The poor old fellow found murdered. A deed-box gone from the safe. A window left unsecured. Practically speaking, that is all they can go upon.”

“Do you know, Hugh,” said Irene, “I am convinced it was no common burglar. It was some desperate man who had borrowed money on some securities which he knew lay in that box, and he committed this crime to get them back. He was hiding in the house all the evening, possibly somewhere in the study—-and he opened that window to escape by the back lane.”

He smiled in spite of himself at her feminine certainty. “I wish they would put you in charge of the investigations, Renie,” he said.

“But don’t you think my theory is quite plausible?” she asked, accepting his remark with a humble knitting of her brows. He admitted that it was, observed that he had spoken not in satire but in admiration. The police were standing about there, not knowing where to turn next.

“Well, the first thing,” said Irene, “would be to list the securities in the deed-box—there must be a record of them somewhere—and then to investigate the actions last night of each of the clients to whom the securities belonged.”

“I never thought of that,” he exclaimed, sharply. “Yes, they’ll do that, undoubtedly.”

Irene went on to speak of Minna; of the girl’s friendless isolation; of the help that she herself might have offered, had Minna not so resolutely repelled her advances. She would be even willing now to risk a breach of good taste if she could befriend her. She asked his advice. Her great-heartedness drew him very near to her—so near that it required a moment’s struggle to stifle the craving to tell her all the miserable history of his marriage, and his own connection with the night’s tragedy. How could he advise her in the matter, knowing, as he did, Minna’s inveterate jealousy and dislike?

“I think she will have some of her own people with her,” he remarked, mendaciously. “She said something about it this morning.”

He rose to bid her good-bye. As she took his hand she scanned his face earnestly.

“You are looking so ill and worn,” she said, affectionately. “Much more so than when you came in. It has been all this discussion.”

“I’m afraid it is the want of my breakfast,” he said, forcing a laugh.

All Irene’s protective instincts were aroused.

“No breakfast—and you were going away without asking for anything to eat! Sit down at once and let me get something for you.”

She ran out of the room in her impulsive way, leaving him standing on the hearth-rug.

“Good God,” he said, throwing his hat and gloves onto the chair, “I never thought of it.” And he remained staring blankly at a picture in front of him until Irene returned.

CHAPTER X

From that moment Hugh walked on the edge of a volcano. To keep his thoughts from dizzy hoverings over the abyss, he chained them down, with desperate will, to the work he had on hand. In a week’s time would begin the February sittings of the Central Criminal Court. Good fortune had given him more than his usual share of briefs. One, a blackmailing case, made intricate by medical complications. His client, the defendant, a man in good position.

“If you can pull it off, Colman,” said old Harroway, the solicitor, who had known Hugh from boyhood, “you’ll go up like a released balloon.”

He toiled at it night and day and held aloof from his kind. The publicity of his connection with the murder sickened him. He took cabs to and from his chambers lest his ears should be irritated by railway-carriage discussions. Minna he saw once, at the inquest, dressed in black, closely veiled, attended by the old Syrian woman. For appearance sake he had conducted her to her brougham. Had asked her one question on the way thither: Was she staying at The Lindens? She replied in the affirmative. She had hitherto refused offers of friendly asylums. Anna’s sympathy and protection sufficed her. What might happen later she did not know. Perhaps she would accompany Anna to Smyrna. The inquest resulted in a verdict of wilful murder against some person unknown. The next day he attended the funeral, walked, a haughty and tortured Gentile, amid a host of serene and money-lending Jews. The papers naturally reported the fact.

He did not go to the Merriams. Gerard’s arrival in town was the occasion of a peremptory command to dinner from Irene. He declined, alleging press of work. Gerard, sent by Irene for tidings of the absentee, burst in upon him at ten o’clock that night and found him sitting with dishevelled hair on the edge of a tumultuous sea of brief papers. The genuineness of his excuse was obvious.

He forced, however, his visitor into a chair, handed the tobacco jar and poured out whiskeys and sodas. Gerard eyed the quantum of spirits in Hugh’s glass; also noticed the corkscrew in the cork of the three parts emptied whiskey bottle.

“I say, you’re going it pretty strong, aren’t you?” he remarked, with a significant nod. “What is the matter—work—worry?”

“Both,” said Hugh, putting down his tumbler and sweeping his moist moustache in his fierce way.

“The work to get over the worry, and the whiskey to get over the work.”

“What’s the worry—this Hart affair?”

“I suppose so. It has got on my nerves.”

“I can’t see why the devil it should,” said Gerard, with a little contemptuous laugh. He was of that kind of men who deny the existence of nerves.

“By the way,” he added, after awhile, “they were damned slack at that inquest—I was just saying so to Renie—with the safe open and ledgers and things lying about the table when the old man was found, had I been the coroner, I should have wanted to know the subject of your last conversation with the deceased.”

To his surprise, Hugh sprang to his feet in a great excitement.

“For heaven’s sake, old man, don’t talk about it in that cold-blooded way. I am in a devil of a mess. I don’t mind telling you now—but keep it dark from Renie—I owed Hart £5,000 on my expectations from the Brantfield property. He’s had the bond—of course. I believe it was in that stolen deed-box—I was the last person in the house—no one saw me leave. Has Renie told you her theory of the murder?” Gerard looked at him and whistled.

“That’s how you staved off the bankruptcy, was it? I often wondered.”

“Yes, that was how,” said Hugh, laconically.

Gerard reflected, pulling at his pipe.

“I don’t see anything to be nervous about. Unless you’re keeping something back from me—human nature asserting itself—are you?”

“I tell you I’m in a devil of a mess,” said Hugh. “I didn’t mean to say anything about it. But I’ve told you so much. If you could help me, I would let you. The best thing is to go home to Renie—not just yet—and forget everything about it.”

Gerard drew his eyelids together and peered at his friend, then rose and walked straight up to him.

“Do you mean to hint that you accidentally killed that old man?”

Hugh looked at him incredulously for a moment and then broke into a derisive laugh.

“You fool!” he said.

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” laughed Gerard, returning to his whiskey and soda. Hugh seated himself again in his swivel-working library chair, and ran his fingers through his wavy hair impatiently.

“For heaven’s sake let us talk of something else,” he said. “What have you been doing with yourself in Edinburgh?”

Gerard prolonged his visit for a quarter of an hour, and then went home, leaving Hugh to his blackmailer’s interests.

“You are back early,” said Irene.

“Yes. He is in the midst of his briefs. He is a lucky beggar. I wish I had half as many as he.”

“Why, you inconsequent dear,” said Irene. “Only the other day you were saying you were tired of practice—wanted to give it up and travel. Surely ‘semper mutabile’ ought to refer to men——”

“Well, why shouldn’t a man get sick of work?” Irene could find no reply, but laid her hand in his. Whatever Gerard said was right.

“How is poor Hugh?” she asked.

Gerard laughed with masculine ungraciousness and withdrew his fingers from her clasp, so as to press down the tobacco in his pipe.

“You always talk of Hugh as if he were a lad instead of a middle-aged man. He’s all right. But he has some silly idea that he’s in danger of arrest over this Hart affair.”

“No!” cried Irene, quickly, looking at him with sudden scare in her eyes.

“It seems he was mixed up in money matters with Israel, and he was the last person with the old man.”

“That is wrong. Hugh left at 11.30, and the butler saw Mr. Hart at twelve.”

“I don’t know,” said Gerard. “It is all rubbish. There’s something behind it that he wouldn’t tell me. I know nothing of Hugh’s private life. If he’s in a mess, he’ll get out of it this time as he has done before.”

But Irene did not treat the matter so lightly. The face that met Gerard’s somewhat shifty blue eyes was anxious and troubled. Suddenly, however, came the illumination of her smile.

“Of course you are right, dear love. It is all rubbish.”

But far from rubbish proved Hugh’s forebodings when he came home from chambers the following afternoon. Parsons, the hall porter, desired to speak to him, accompanied him up the stairs to his flat. He was an honest fellow, grateful to Hugh for countless careless generosities, and at the same time regarding him with respectful awe on account of his somewhat imperious manner. The seriousness of the communication he was about to make agitated him. With many hesitations he stumbled through his story. The police had been making enquiries, had learned the hour of his return on Tuesday morning, had cross-questioned Mrs. Parsons as to the condition of his clothes, as to his general habits; had enquired whether he was carrying a box or parcel.

“I was obliged to tell them that you were, sir,” said the porter, greatly distressed. “Though I would sooner cut my tongue out than do you any harm, sir.”

“Thank you, Parsons,” said Hugh. “I am greatly obliged to you for telling me. I need not say that you can give the police any information concerning me with a clear conscience. You can’t possibly do me any harm.”

The porter went away relieved. Hugh, left alone, went to his spirit-case on the sideboard and poured himself out a stiff glass of whisky. “It may be the last,” he said to himself, grimly. He drank it off and lit a cigarette with fingers that trembled just a little.

“And now for Minna,” he said, striding out of the room.

The expected blow had fallen. Arrest was certain. Unless he could account for his night, release was impossible. The circumstantial evidence which he knew could be brought against him was enough to imperil his life. And no one could be more acutely aware than he, a criminal advocate, of the possibility of a chain of specious links, unsuspected by him now, that might bring him powerless to the gallows. Now, the gallows is a gruesome thing, which an innocent man, full of the lust of life, cannot contemplate with equanimity.

The marriage could be concealed no longer. It was a matter of life or death. Then all would be well. Provided only he reached The Lindens before a hand was laid on his shoulder. Through the gathering darkness of the dreary February evening he hurried on the accursedly familiar road. It had never seemed so long. As he neared the vague form of the constable advancing on his beat, his heart throbbed violently. Then he laughed scornfully at his fears. As if a policeman on duty would arrest him! Without a doubt he was being shadowed at this very moment, and when the time was ripe, a civil spoken officer in plain clothes would take him quietly and discreetly into custody. But he felt glad when the front door of The Lindens closed upon him and he found himself in the warm security of the hall.

Samuels, the butler, came down the stairs.

“Miss Hart is very sorry, but she cannot receive you to-day, sir.”

“Is she in bed?”

“No, sir.”

“Where is she?”

“In the drawing-room.”

“Thank you, Samuels; I must see her.”

And brushing past the rather bewildered butler, he mounted the stairs and entered the drawing-room unceremoniously. Minna rose angrily from her chair, keeping her thumb between the pages of the novel she was reading. Dressed in a loose dressing-gown, with her hair pinned up untidily, she was all the more incensed at his interruption.

“I told Samuels—” she began, with a petulant stamp of the foot.

“Yes, I know,” he interrupted. “I disregarded him. This is not a time for politeness. The police are after me. I may be arrested at any moment. They know that I did not reach home till the morning. I am caught in a trap. I must account for my actions between half-past eleven and seven.”

She turned as white as a sheet. The novel slipped from her fingers to the carpet.

“Impossible,” she said.

“What’s impossible?”

“That they should arrest you. They have no evidence. Oh! it is absurd.”

“Absurd or not, they will.”

Rapidly he sketched his position. She listened motionless, and with quivering lips.

“What do you wish me to do?” she asked in a voice scarcely audible.

“It’s obvious. You must release me from my promise. I must be able to account for my night—prove my statement.”

“Forfeit my money!” she cried, terror raising her voice. “Do you know what that would mean, to me? This wealth that my father got together is flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood. I can’t give it up. It would kill me!”

“It would be your life for mine,” he said, ironically.

“You have sworn,” she said.

“If I had given my simple promise it would have been sufficient.”

“Are you going to keep it?”

He drew himself up. “We will not discuss that,” he said.

“Would they let you go if you told them?”

“Most probably.”

“And if they did not?”

“There would be a very weak case against me.”

“But a wife’s evidence is invalid,” she cried, eagerly seeking the loophole.

“There is Anna.”

“But it would be against you to confess you were in the house at that time.”

“Anna could swear to my entrance at twelve by the window.”

“It might lead to my being arrested, too, as an accomplice.”

“I scarcely think so,” he replied, coldly. The interview was growing hateful. “We could have Anna as a witness to our conjugal relations. She could swear to entering our room at six to wake us—if the worst came to the worst, she might swear she found us asleep. Morality has its limits when it’s life or death.”

Minna sank into a chair and crouched there in a shaking terror.

“I can’t—I can’t—I can’t lose my money.”

“Very well,” he said, “you may keep it. I shall take my chance.”

“It would be the same,” she said, hoarsely, “if you said I was your mistress only. Goldberg is an executor under my father’s will. He hates me—you know why. The clause in the will would put him on the scent. He would go to Somerset House and discover it all....”

“If I am arrested and brought before the magistrate, can you expect Anna to be equally reticent?”

“Anna is an Oriental. Besides, she starts for Smyrna to-morrow morning.”

“In the face of what I have just told you, will you let her go?” he asked, sternly.

“Oh, God!” she cried, leaping to her feet with sudden wild passion. “Don’t torture me any more. You have caused enough misery in my life. Why should I sacrifice my heart’s blood for you—on the first fanciful alarm of danger! Have you ever made one sacrifice for me? Even when you said you loved me, did you give up one hour’s philandering with that other woman? You looked upon me at first as a toy to your hand—you told me so in this very room—to gratify your passions. You married me for my money. You condemned me to that life of scheming and falsehood. You were afraid to face my father like a man. You ruined my life—and now that I am about to build it up again—you come—I don’t believe it—it is another lie—for some purpose of your own.” Hugh looked steadily at her for some moments, and, without condescending to reply, turned on his heel and stalked towards the door. His hand was on the knob, when she rushed forward, caught him by the coat sleeve, and fell at his feet.

“Forgive me, Hugh. Forgive me—I did not know what I was saying—all this is driving me mad—forgive me—pity me—you once loved me Hugh—I can’t lose my money—keep our secret for God’s sake.”

She sobbed out her incoherent and imploring words in hoarse, frightened tones. A wave of supreme scorn swept through him. Even an hour ago this craven agony of fear and avarice would have been inconceivable. But he raised her gently to her feet, and drew her a short way from the door. She stood trembling and shrinking before him.

“I have already told you, Minna,” he said, in a low voice, “you can keep your money, if you value it more than my life.”

In another moment he was gone. Minna staggered to a couch and lay there, her hands clutching at the loosened coils of her dark hair, in death grapple with the devils that had taken possession of her.

But none the less she parted from old Anna Cassaba the following morning without breathing to her a word concerning Hugh’s danger.

“You will come very soon, dearie, and let me show you your dear mother’s beautiful country?” said the old woman, amid the final adieux.

“Very soon,” sobbed Minna, clinging round her neck. “And then we’ll begin a new life and forget all this horror. I want to forget it all—forget I was ever married—forget his existence—and everything!”

Later in the day she accepted the urgently offered hospitality of Aaron Bebro, one of her father’s oldest city friends, whose motherly wife, forgetful of past disdain and derision, gave her warm-hearted welcome. She took the girl to her capacious bosom and cried over her a little; and Minna was miserable and frightened enough to feel grateful.

During dinner that evening a servant entered and whispered into Mr. Bebro’s ear. He rose hurriedly and left the room. Presently he returned looking greatly agitated. To his wife’s enquiries he replied that it had been a business message. But Minna was seized with a horrible foreboding and sat through the remainder of the meal sick and dumb, while her kind hosts pressed upon her food and drink. She dared not ask, though she knew what the answer would be.

Dinner over, he signed to his wife and grown-up daughter to leave him alone with their guest.

“I have some very serious news for you, my dear young lady. A messenger from Scotland Yard came just now.”

“Have they—arrested anyone?”

“The last person in the world one would have guessed. Prepare yourself for a great shock.”

She writhed under these kindly futilities; the more so because she knew that some expression of horrified astonishment was naturally expected from her. A ghastly farce.

“It is Mr. Hugh Colman. It seems impossible, but the officer told me there is a great deal against him.”

She could express no surprise, but sat paralysed, dreading lest her apparent phlegm should give away her secret.

“There must be some mistake,” she said, at last, hoarsely. “He was our friend—dining with us that night. And he went to the funeral.”

“I remember seeing him there,” said Aaron Bebro.

“Will he be brought before the magistrates in the morning?”

“Of course.”

“Shall I have to go—to give evidence?”

“Not to-morrow, I am glad to say; but perhaps afterwards.”

Minna rose from her chair.

“This is a dreadful shock,” she said, in steadier tones, “and it has upset me. I think I shall go to my room. You will make my apologies to Mrs. Bebro—and thank you for your kindness.”

She looked him full in the face and held out her hand, which he pressed warmly.

“You are a brave girl,” he said. But once in her own room, her nerve gave way. She stood before the mirror and laughed hysterically.

“Yes,” she cried, “I am a brave girl.”

CHAPTER XI

He was remanded for a week: a week of feverish public excitement and of great suspense for those that loved him. His name was dragged through the mire of the roadways, then held up to execration. He had feasted at an old man’s table, and, before the generous glow of the host’s wine had had time to cool, had foully murdered him for money. Imagination boggled at the conception of a meaner miscreant. Thus the man in the street, who is seldom guided by the abstract principle of British justice. The press began to spread abroad a horrible fame. A poet, a brilliant advocate, a man in the public eye; they extolled his achievements. Those to whom his name had been hitherto unknown forgot their ignorance and feigned long acquaintance. His poems were read by self-conscious hundreds. Stories of forensic triumphs recapitulated by half-penny evening newspapers, with sensational exaggeration, brought his fame as an advocate whither no poetry ever penetrated. His friends stood by sickened and helpless.

“If he gets off, there’ll be a boom in Colmans,” said a cynical clubman to a friend. “He’ll be the darling of the boudoir and the champion of the thieves’ kitchen. He always was a lucky beggar.”

“Hush, there’s Merriam at your elbow,” whispered the other.

But Gerard had overheard. He gave the speaker an inscrutable look and passed on.

Habitually taciturn, Gerard spoke very little of his feelings in the matter. His acquaintances who knew of the close friendship refrained from allusion. At home he smoked in silence. Irene, measuring his anxiety by her ideal of the love between Hugh and himself, respected his reserve. But her own pain burned within her and shone from her eyes in a strange light. She waited anxiously with him for a promised visit from Harroway, the solicitor, after his first interview with the prisoner. Harroway was shown into the smoking-room, sat on a straight-backed chair away from the fireplace, and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. He was a short, stout, florid man, and had walked fast from the police station; trouble and perplexity had also disturbed legal coolness.

“It’s like trying to ride through a brick wall,” he said. “He won’t open his mouth. Same story to me as to the magistrate. Can’t bring a single witness to prove his whereabouts.”

“That’s absurd,” said Gerard. “A man can’t exist a whole night in London in Stygian solitude.”

“That’s what I told him. A cabman, a servant, a barman, a coffee-stall keeper—anyone would do. Somebody must have seen him. He says: ‘I left The Lindens at eleven-thirty and I got home at six-thirty. Assume that I have lost my memory completely for those seven hours and do what you can for me.’”

“But can he have lost his memory?” said Irene. “Such things have happened.”

Harroway shook his head significantly. “Not he. It’s pure suicidal obstinacy. You know the kind of man. I’m sure I don’t know what to do. There’s enough against him already—that confounded security of his was in the missing deed-box. God knows what more the police have up their sleeve. An alibi is the only thing. I told him. Replies that there is no question of proving an alibi. You know he might almost as well plead guilty at once. What is one to do, Merriam?”

“Cherchez, la femme,” replied Gerard.

“Well, can either of you give me any idea? You, Mrs. Merriam——?”

“There is someone he is fond of in a way,” said Irene. “But who can it be? It is someone I don’t know. But surely, if it is a woman, she will come forward.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” said Gerard.

“I asked him point-blank,” continued Harroway, “Is the woman——? But before I could get any further, he turns upon me with one of his Paladin airs, and tells me he never suggested that a woman was involved.”

“That settles it,” said Gerard. “Either that or guilt.”

“Heaven knows,” sighed Harroway. “And that’s the man I had set my heart upon making the biggest criminal advocate of the day.”

“Oh, you must go and use all your influence over him, Gerard,” said Irene, anxiously.

“Do you think I have ever stopped him from doing a pig-headed action, all the years I have known him?”

“But he loves you above everybody. He must listen to you.”

“Why not yourself?” asked Gerard, in a curious tone that caused the solicitor to glance sharply at him. “We will both go, Gerard—together.”

“Not a bit of good,” said Harroway, rising to depart. “He sent many kind messages—says he’ll write at length. But won’t see you. Won’t see a soul but me. He’s as proud, in that cell, as Lucifer. But what the dickens he’s got to be proud about in getting himself into this ghastly mess is more than I can imagine.”

The solicitor gone, Irene turned to Gerard.

“Harroway thinks it will go ill with Hugh.”

“So do I—if he keeps up this attitude.”

“There is something beneath,” said Irene, moving to the stool by the fire, near his feet, and putting her hand on his knee. “We had a talk on the day before. I wrote to you at Edinburgh about it. He was on the point of committing some folly—hoped we would not think him a scoundrel. What does it mean?”

Gerard stretched out his arms and clasped his hands behind his head.

“I’m sure I don’t know. The man was always like that. One never could tell his next escapade. What’s the matter? You’re shivering.”

“Oh, I am frightened, Gerard, dear. I have a foreboding that ill will come of it—for all of us.”

“What the dickens has it got to do with you and me?” said Gerard.

She sat silent for awhile, looking into the flaming abysses and fantastic crags of the fire. Then suddenly she turned, excited, clasped his knees and looked passionately into his face.

“We must move heaven and earth, Gerard. He is your second self. If he should—if anything should happen to him—he would be with us always, reproaching us with his dead eyes for not saving him. I owe him your life, my beloved—and mine—for without you I should die—Gerard, dear.”

She was a little excited, spoke a trifle shrilly. Gerard unclasped his hands and bent forward. Interpreting the gesture according to her heart, she knelt and swiftly closed his arms around her, and nestled close to him.

“You may be sure I shall do all I can,” he said.

She closed her eyes. The man’s calm strength of voice, the hidden strength of his frame reassured her fears.

“Forgive me for doubting while you are here to save him,” she murmured, in her blind faith.

A few moments later some domestic duty summoned her away. Gerard rose, and stretched himself and yawned.

“Oh, damn!” he said, irritably.

Then, lighting his pipe, he strode out the house, and tramped along the Heath Road, with the air of a man who is justifying to himself a series of expletives.

The week expired. Hugh was again brought before the magistrates and committed for trial.

The key turned in the cell-door in Holloway Gaol, and he was left alone for the night. In a state of semi-sanity he abandoned himself to the ghastly panorama of the day, as it passed and repassed in incoherent fragments before his eyes. He was prostrate with fatigue and strain, utterly brain-weary, incapable of lucid arrangement of ideas, almost of calculating the weight of the evidence against him.

Fresh facts had been brought to light. The butler had heard him speak in angry tones when he had entered the room with the spirit-tray. The entry in Israel’s private ledger assigning the stolen deed-box as the depository of the £5,000 security had been confirmed by the confidential clerk. Moreover, the empty box had been discovered, broken open, in the trunk of a hollow tree in the wood behind The Lindens. The prisoner had returned with a mysterious parcel of which he could give no account. On searching his rooms after arrest, the police had found the grate full of scrupulously reduced paper-ash. The inference was that this ash represented the stolen bond. It was another instance of the irony that marked this extraordinary freak of circumstances. Even his careful destruction of Minna’s letters and all memorials of her was turned into evidence against him. Medical testimony placed one o’clock and five as the extreme limits between which the murder could possibly have been committed. Probabilities pointed to three o’clock.

In his sleepless and disordered, fancy, the witnesses jostled each other in the box, giving inconsequent scraps of evidence. But clearest before his mind rose the picture of Minna, his wife, the sole person in the universe that could be absolutely certain of his innocence. There she stood, appalling in the wreckage of her beauty, a thin, black, pinched figure, hollow-eyed, drawn-lipped, telling the half truth that was more damnable than a lie. She had parted from Mr. Colman at eleven, had gone up to her room. Had heard no sound in the house till she was awakened in the morning to learn the horrible news. The relations between Mr. Colman and her father had always been most cordial. He had dined with them that evening, her father in the best of spirits. Mr. Hart had never mentioned that Mr. Colman was a client. Clients were not visiting acquaintances. That was all. She had not met his eyes, scarcely those of the Crown prosecutor or the magistrate when they questioned her. Had replied doggedly, in the deep, hard voice he had grown so familiar with of late. But one year ago it had stirred all the fibres in his body. To-day not a vestige of its richness remained.

She floated fantastic in his memories. Once during the night he fell into a brief half-sleep. She gave him again the brown-paper parcel—but loose this time, so that the paper slipped away, and revealed a halter. He woke sweating with the nightmare. Anything approaching sleep was thenceforth impossible. The dim, perpetual, inextinguishable light in his cell grew to a maddening irritation. He yearned for the soothing comfort of darkness. He wrapped his head in his bedclothes to shut out the light—but with the ill success familiar to all who have tried it. So, until the dawn, he remained staringly awake, and the phantasmagoria of his trial swept endlessly on.

Faces of friends, anxious, incredulous, seen in the crowded little court, rose up before him. Gerard’s and Irene’s most continuously. She wore a tight-fitting dark-blue jacket and a little toque to match, set amid the fair waves of her hair. He remembered vividly every detail—the white stitching of her black gloves. He strove to keep her image before him—the sweetness of her smile, the trust in her grey eyes. But Minna, hard and sullen, came and blotted out the more gracious fantasy. Again he recalled Irene—the last scene, before he was led away to the prison van, when friends crowded round the dock; Gerard among the first.

“It’s bound to come right, Hugh. We’ll do our best.”

Irene had struggled forward and the others had fallen back. And she had put up both hands, which he, leaning over, had taken in his; and he had seen the great pain burning beneath her eyes.

“Oh, Hugh, if our love for you can do anything—use it—God bless you!”

A hurried speech, uttered in the swiftness of the hand-clasp. He tried to keep it with him as a charm against the bugbears of the night. But until the warder came at half-past six to wake him, they swam before him in a whirling, reiterative circle, recurring almost rhythmically like the separate monstrosities of horses in an infernal merry-go-round.

Day came, and with it clearness of mind and logical sense of proportion. When Harroway, the solicitor, arrived, he discussed the situation with practised acuteness. His defence was clear. The stealing of the security was too ludicrous an expedient for a man of his intelligence. Besides, its legal value was that of a blank sheet of foolscap. Of this Hart’s confidential clerk had full knowledge. Would a jury believe a man to be so idiotic as to commit a murder in order to steal that which he knew to be worthless? Was it likely that a man who had committed a murder at three o’clock would deliberately postpone his return home—a quarter of an hour’s walk—until an hour when his arrival would be certain to attract attention? But Harroway shook his head dolefully.

“Of course we’ll put all that forward. But the self-incriminating stupidity of criminals is a by-word. If the attorney or solicitor-general is prosecuting and takes his privilege of answering Gardiner, he will convince the jury of this little fact. It would be much more to the point if you would tell us how to prove an alibi. That’s the infernal part of it. No one is such a damned fool as to believe that you were lying drunk and invisible in a gutter all night. You can prove an alibi if you like, can’t you?”

“Certainly,” replied Hugh, with a baffling twirl of his moustache. “But I am going to do no such thing. Please consider that final. If you and Gardiner can’t get me off without it—well, I’ll hang. Jouir, mourir et ne rien dire! And that’s the end of it.”

He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders magnificently. The stout solicitor rose with irritation.

Idols

IDOLS

By William J. Locke

John Lane: The Bodley Head London And New York

1898

TO

J. S.

IN MEMORIAM

M. S.

IDOLS

PROEM

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI